Thursday, April 23, 2020
More Elgin
Continuing the Elgin kick. I first found an ad for the observatory in Googlebooks, with an illegible picture. Started looking among the antique ad listings in Ebay, and found a much better picture. Ebay also yielded the Personal Equation Machine ad, plus one extra from the same period. I could have simply pasted the images seen on Ebay, but I'm strict about paying for labor, so I bought the actual paper ads (about $8 each) and scanned them. Now I feel more comfy about using them.
The observatory:
The PEQ machine:
Clockmaker's company:
The third one is interesting as a specimen of Guild thinking, now extinct. Corporations and unions formerly respected the SKILLS of their workers and tried to protect and preserve them against foreign and domestic invasion. Now they do the exact opposite.
There's a conflict between the art and text. The ad was from 1921, the Harding era, a time of conflict between the Gilded Age and the Fordists. Elgin watches were fairly expensive, not exclusive luxury items but well above working class. Buick, not Ford. The artist seems to be with Harding and the Fordists, enjoying the downfall of the effete aristocrats who were buying foreign products. The writer seems to be with the aristocrats: "Despite these high-handed methods, he advanced the art of timekeeping." Despite always means because, but the writer couldn't bring himself to say it.
The PEQ machine:
Clockmaker's company:
The third one is interesting as a specimen of Guild thinking, now extinct. Corporations and unions formerly respected the SKILLS of their workers and tried to protect and preserve them against foreign and domestic invasion. Now they do the exact opposite.
There's a conflict between the art and text. The ad was from 1921, the Harding era, a time of conflict between the Gilded Age and the Fordists. Elgin watches were fairly expensive, not exclusive luxury items but well above working class. Buick, not Ford. The artist seems to be with Harding and the Fordists, enjoying the downfall of the effete aristocrats who were buying foreign products. The writer seems to be with the aristocrats: "Despite these high-handed methods, he advanced the art of timekeeping." Despite always means because, but the writer couldn't bring himself to say it.Labels: Equipoise, Metrology, skill-estate
¶ 9:17 AM
