While unfortunate, Caltech had years to let the current glassblowr train a replacement - it's not like this was an unforeseeable event.
While it's unfortunate that it's a struggle to find a replacement now - and from the outside I don't know what went on leading up to this - I can't help but think if they'd set the budget for it a decade ago, they wouldn't be in this situation.
Now we need a massive governmental program to encourage children to become scientific glass blowers and promote tons of glass blowing courses on Udacity.
I suspect that when basic income is implemented and people largely don't have vocational fufillment, many people will make functional artisitc works by learning about glass blowing on coursera and other places and mastering such a craft for its own sake.
I have no reason why you are being downvoted; you're making a valid point. One of the reasons I strive to become financially independent of any one company is exactly so I have the freedom to do things like this.
Thanks. I consider myself a capitalist. I have heard SA say[0]; and find myself to agree with how I perceived those remarks, that capitalism is the best paradigm we have to structure the world out of the current choices of organization. That said, there are inherent problems with markets and we can correct for some of those externalities with other things (many outside the scope of this response) but one of which is to equalize for health, food and shelter with a basic income.
As indicated in a recent post on HN there is already a company working on creating an autonomous pizza truck that will prepare hot food in route to a location serving it hot at arrival. Coupled with autonomous vehicle technology, we will soon see the evaportion of labor jobs MUCH quicker than many expect. As we use our resources better, I find that elevating the bottom is important, while still allowing for capitalism and free markets to keep the top uncapped.
Artistic pursuits; as well as things machines can certainly do as well or better than humans, is not only anthropologically important but certainly skills we would want to retain if there were ever to be a failure of mechanization.
given that they have to craft a design for an apparatus based in part on a knowledge of chemistry so they understand the experiment, thermodynamics, as well as material science, etc, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more complex then knifemaking.
Not to belabor the point, but Knifemaking _can_ involve exposure to high temperature molten salt baths (Sodium and Nitrate salts), liquid nitrogen, precise timing, temperature control, and varieties of chemical etchants.
It seems that they probably have similar risks, though glassblowing for the lab might require a broader domain knowledge.
You're talking about knife-making, I'm talking about knife-using. While it may be the case that a knife-maker works with high temperatures and toxic substances, it is not the case for a knife-user. Users of laboratory glassware, on the other hand, are constantly risking exposure to this stuff. They depend on high quality glassware to keep them safe.
The consequences for using a poorly-made Erlenmeyer flask are potentially devastating on a far larger scale than for a poorly-made knife.
Naw, its not really a hobby level thing. It is relatively straightforward to take a glassblowing class and make some hobby level glassware... This is a much different level of commitment and skill.
on the contrary more and more usable glass art is being blown in mexico or southeast asia, due to cheaper labor, lax oversight and economics.
the equipment is not expensive enough to prevent most apprentices in US/EU/CA to just go out on their own after a while. where as in lower income countries the apprentice is easier to keep for a much longer timeline.
It's like that parable of the monastery that used a main support pillar made from a very massive 80 year old tree. They planted another tree like it on the grounds of the monastery for when it needed to be replaced. A century later, the central pillar is in bad shape, so they cut down the tree and carve a new pillar. ... and never replace the tree they just cut down.
I disagree. The real problem is that no one wants to pay for it. The tools are certainly there to capture knowledge, but everyone's trying to cut costs so much in a desire to optimize for the present.
Sounds like you actually agree, and have identified an underlying problem.
The technical ability to capture knowledge, particularly for craft trades like glassblowing, has existed for as long as humans have been organized into societies - it's usually a question of dedicating resources to support it.
We need to get away from the dogma that everyone must and will get a college degree. Apprenticeships are as good, if not better, for many fields... especially in the world of software.
Eh, it's going to be hard to replace a proper algorithms or computability class with an apprenticeship. I'd like to see a combined approach, classes in between an apprenticeship-style arrangement.
I don't think all programmers need a proper algorithms class.
Think about construction. There are manual laborers with no domain knowledge that can do basic grunt work for pennies on the dollar, some with domain expertise to guide the grunts, and people that coordinate the entire construction project.
Then there's an entirely separate group of people actually working on architecture... designing the building, ensuring the structure can hold load, meets customer and legal requirements, and can be delivered on a schedule.
At my company, a good SDE1 hire is someone that's at the architecture-level... they might not be able to design a skyscraper but they can design a house. Yet 90%+ of their time will be spent putting up walls and installing plumbing.
They might get the thing done, but they'll do a worse job than someone who also knows about algorithmic complexity, CPU architecture, and other things that benefit from classroom instruction. We're not installing plumbing, we're doing mental work, where context matters. And I can't recommend that anyone aim for less than excellence.
plumbers and electricians, during their apprenticeships spend a LOT of time in classroom environments. they are even required to spend X hours per year to keep their skills up as well.
so i would say they two are in fact very similar. classroom mixed with real world use of that knowledge is better then just sitting in class the entire time with no chance to get real world usage, help and walk-throughs, until after the fact. in which case apprenticeship might be better then a degree.
That's more a disaster of our tooling - that we have menial work still, even though it was regarded bad and avoidable in 1970s with C! (not to mention smalltalk, lisp, etc.).
That doesn't disagree with the GPs comment at all. Whether it's for budgetary reasons or technological ones, the effectiveness of knowledge capture is still a huge problem.
Curious, how would one capture the knowledge of a good glassblower?
As far as I can tell, automation changed manual skills two ways - by capturing and automating simple actions, it decreased the skills needed for a number of jobs but by freeing up resources up resources, it allowed some people to develop skills to a far greater depth than previously for specialized purposes such as science or art.
But capturing the skills of these remaining highly skilled individuals seems like a tough task especially since there's no incentive to build a machine to duplicate their activities - the total value of the product they isn't that high.
On the other hand, if someone figures out a way to 3d print high quality glassware, the whole field would go out the window.
What makes cases like these extra hard is that the only place we know that is kind of knowledge can be stored in is human brains.
If you want a cobol programmer (aside: iOS autocorrects that to cool programmer), get a decent programmer, give him a language reference and half a year of time, and presto! There's your cobol programmer. After all, programming is programming.
If you want a good glassblower, there's no reservoir of people with experience in similar stuff.
Having said that, there is at least one school that educates instrument makers of all kinds; Kamerlingh Onnes started one in Leiden because he needed instrument makers in his cryogenics lab.
It's easy to blame things on "professional administrators", but Caltech, like many research universities, is led by accomplished academics who have spent their time in the trenches:
Then perhaps the problem is exactly the opposite: academia should be led by professional administrators who specialize in higher education? The same way an accomplished & esteemed software engineer may not make a brilliant CEO.
Perhaps nobody actually needs university glass blowers, and the administration made the correct choice? Many of the components that needed to be hand made in the 1960s, can be found scientific catalogs.
You are probably right. The bulk can be bought cheaply. The challenge lies in how to get the special cases covered. The capability for the special cases used to be covered by master craftsmen at the top of a pyramid who leveraged the infrastructure and also educational system of a large workshop. The bulk is gone. The local cross subsidy is gone. And now the local capability is dying off.
In theory modern CAD etc. can help to design. In theory money saved on the bulk can be used to order in a specialized shop.
But it is a difference having a master locally advising mechanically challenged chemistry Ph.D. on the same science team vs.a paid consultant remotely playing for another financial team. And I doubt the saved money will be available for the Ph.D. students.
Only if you know the limits of the physical manufacturing process - otherwise you are going to design the perfect bizarre piece that your experiment needs, only to find later that glass blowing can't produce it.
Chemist here. Glassblowers are essential for certain chemists - like organic chemists - mostly for the purposes of fixing essential (and expensive) glassware like vacuum manifolds that often break during the course of daily use. It's less essential for several other fields that fall under the umbrella of chemistry, like theoretical/computational chemistry. The issue is whether it's in the department's interest to subsidize glassblower use for everyone in the department, or have labs outsource glassblowing to a third party. MIT decided to get rid of its glassblowing shop and machine shop about 10 years ago. We were lucky enough to be in Cambridge where a glassblower would come by the lab every thursday and pick up / return items we needed him to fix / make. Given the constant stream of glassware that is being broken, and the cost of replacement of certain items being >$1000 trust me when I say that university glassblowers are extremely busy people.
The chemistry of 30 years ago was different - much more work was done rigorously air-free or under high vacuum. Today there's a much greater focus on the life sciences. Indeed, one supplier changed its name from Chemglass to Chemglass-Lifesciences some ten years back.
That said, access to a glassblower is an infrastructure problem. When you need to consult with one about design of a piece of equipment there's no alternative, and when the guy is in-house turnaround is faster and friction is lower. The difference is: thirty years ago more people in the chemistry department had use for the glassblower, the cost would be spread wider, the budget item would be easier to justify.
Someone mentioned secretaries in this thread. Every faculty member used to employ one for typing, travel arrangements &c. Nowadays everyone types their own manuscripts and books their own travel, so it's difficult to make the case for an assistant. But when a conference comes up and the task to make arrangements for ten speakers falls on one member of faculty you really see why personal assistants are vital infrastructure.
Another funny thing: the majority of labglass factories is located in New Jersey because of the pharma cluster in that state. Pharma has moved out, and likely we'll see closings in the decade ahead.
The article mentions that other universities order from outside suppliers, who presumably can also do custom orders. It sounds like an incredulous claim to say that nobody in the universities that are listed in the article as not having their own glassblower any more does anything new at all.
An on-site glassblower sounds like (although this is the first time I've heard of such a thing, it's probably specific to chemistry) a perk that is (very) nice to have, but just doesn't fit in today's cost structures. 50 years ago, it was normal for every 'professional' to have a secretary, who would plan meetings, send letters, make coffee etc. Today, how many non-CxO level people have personal secretaries? Having all these support jobs on-site was how it was done but today most places don't even have local IT support (with IT being what replaced most of these support jobs in the first place).
The article mentions there are 50-ish ppl a year graduating the one institute in the whole of the US that teaches glass blowing. That means the demand just isn't there. I mean, there is probably 'demand' in the sense that there is plenty of 'demand' for Ferrari's at $10k / piece, but there is no real demand at proper prices. In other words, if people lament the loss of such jobs but don't want to pay what it costs to replace them, is there really 'demand' or just nostalgia?
> An on-site glassblower sounds like (although this is the first time I've heard of such a thing, it's probably specific to chemistry) a perk that is (very) nice to have, but just doesn't fit in today's cost structures.
Generally, doing new things doesn't fit in today's cost structures. If you're doing stuff that's actually pushing the frontiers of anything, your cost structures will also look different to everyone else's. But there are lots of benefits to have such specialists in-house, primary being that they a) know your specific needs, and b) might actually be invested in your overall goals - as opposed to third parties that often couldn't care less.
> 50 years ago, it was normal for every 'professional' to have a secretary, who would plan meetings, send letters, make coffee etc. Today, how many non-CxO level people have personal secretaries? Having all these support jobs on-site was how it was done but today most places don't even have local IT support (with IT being what replaced most of these support jobs in the first place).
I think secretaries were replaced by computers. I don't know of many professors with personal secretaries, but I also haven't heard of anyone outsourcing these kind of duties to a specialized "secretary-consulting" company. As for IT support, the IT infrastructure in universities generally sucks and tends to go downhill - but that's a longer discussion, and I generally would attribute this to infrastructure being something that has easy-to-count costs and harder-to-count benefits, which makes it an obvious target for various beancounters.
> That means the demand just isn't there.
That's probably true. One university doing novel research does not by itself a market demand make. That's why they should have spent the time and money to have the guy train his replacement on-site.
> If you're doing stuff that's actually pushing the frontiers of anything, your cost structures will also look different to everyone else's.
One of the great failures of modern management theory is the failure to recognize that activities involving new things, things that either haven't been tried before, or doing something old in a new way, is itself an unrepeatable process.
Testing airplanes is a very different activity to manufacturing airplanes, and yet I'm forced to attend innumerable training courses on how Lean/Six Sigma methods can improve my work. There's some merit in this material, but because my employer is forced to be ISO-9001 compliant, it's all forced down my throat without thought given to its appropriateness.
Specifically, I think they were replaced by good asynchronous communication mediums. That medium used to be paper, which is slow; the fast alternative was synchronous phone calls. (Interestingly, telegraphs were generally asynchronous.) Then the fax and answering machines came and made it a little better. Then computers came, and now I don't need a secretary to call someone else's secretary to make an appointment, I just send a request in Outlook after finding a clear spot on their calendar.
Plasma physics too, for making vacuum vessels with various types of electrodes and coils embedded.
> 50 years ago, it was normal for every 'professional' to have a secretary
I've been wondering what change happened that could motivate this. I mean, if it was rational to have a secretary then, and it is rational not to have one now, some circumstance must have changed. Are planning meetings, sending letters, and making coffee that much easier now that they motivate it?
Or a are we making a mistake by not hiring secretaries now? Or was it a mistake to have them?
-- Typing and distributing paper reports used to be a big part of the workday. You needed someone who could not only type an error-free 70+ words per minute, but also who knew how to format documents properly (headers, footers, page numbers, envelopes, etc), and who could take care of the reproduction, packaging and mailing.
-- Setting up meetings would require phoning around to other people, or more likely, their secretaries.
-- Travel arrangements would need to be taken care of manually by calling a travel agent, collecting paper tickets in advance, etc.
-- From the "supply" side, institutionalized gender discrimination meant that there was a steady supply of cheap labor that didn't have a lot of other alternatives, career-wise.
Computers killed the typing pool. The WWW and email killed the need for dedicated support staff for all but the highest-value employees. (Greater) equality in the workplace means that women have other career options, putting upward pressure on compensation for executive assistants.
The other answers missed the rather obvious supply demand shift.
50 years ago there was still a tradition of wartime economy work as hard as possible. Also there was a booming economy so the limited number of grads were in demand and their time was valuable. So even a (then well paid) English Lit prof had minimum wage level tasks to accomplish and the most financially sensible way to get all that work done, especially those lower level tasks, was to hire a secretary for that prof.
Now we overproduce grads such that most grads end up working jobs not requiring any degree, there's 100 applicants for every academic position because there is no booming economy anymore. No more tenure track for anyone who asks, its adjunct prof making less than minimum wage for the lucky tiny fraction of the grads. If the adjunct prof is officially only part time they've got plenty of time for menial work (making coffee etc) and if they are paid adjunct wages it would be hard to justify hiring a secretary who would likely be higher paid than the adjunct! Being a grinder who works hard for endless hours without rocking any boats is how the adjunct got hired to begin with. If the adjunct doesn't like doing menial work, that's OK, there are 99 applicants stuck at Starbucks that would love that academic position. Its a pro sports model where all the rewards go to the very top pro players and everyone else barely survives. Pro sports athletes will be treated extravagantly, but the average athlete is not going to be well treated.
I think the cost difference might be an important factor. Secretaries were generally paid a lot less than managers. This was also tied into status. Outside of the military, typing was often seen as women's work, and below the status of a manager.
There was also a much bigger need for typists back then, as much more correspondence was done through the mail. For example, you might write a draft on a typewriter, add hand-written notes with corrections, then retype to get the corrected version to send to your customer. Computers reduce that overhead.
One of the organizers of a scientific meeting I regularly attend says it's harder now to organize the meeting than when he started. It used to be that a company included a general service component to one's job, which could be used to help organize a conference, or review papers. Now, the organizer said, companies want employees to be more focused on the bottom line.
But at best those are hints. They don't answer your questions.
50 years ago, professionals couldn't be bothered to learn how to reach 60 WPM on a typewriter, e-mail didn't exist, and searching for information was a manual process.
Yes if your doing cutting edge R&D you relay on having very good shops - who can both build the experiment and come up with solutions and make sure you accidentally don't design a rig that will self destruct.
My first job was on campus at Cranfield Uni and we had our, own wood, mech and electroincs shops and thats not counting access to the universities labs and shops.
shop
While it's unfortunate that it's a struggle to find a replacement now - and from the outside I don't know what went on leading up to this - I can't help but think if they'd set the budget for it a decade ago, they wouldn't be in this situation.