Guest column: Decoding a mystery

Tinkering with stuff is fun. As a kid, I used to garbage-pick old stereos and other electronic gear on the way home from school, just to tear them apart and see how they all fit together.

You would take some flathead and Phillips screwdrivers and some pliers, maybe a Barlow knife, and unscrew and tear into stuff to see what’s inside and how it works, like decoding a mystery.

Take a look sometime at a mechanical typewriter, and you’ll be amazed. All those fitted, fashioned, fine-tuned metal parts – it’s a symphony of precision metalworking. I’ve got a fantastic mechanical typewriter, a heavy-duty Underwood 5, that clatters like a bejesus. I’ve got another one as a parts backup. Do I use it? No, but it’s lovable.

If you want even more cool “analogue” stuff, take a look at a linotype machine if you can. The St. Bede Abbey Press used to have one. A linotype machine does what your personal computer can do. It can put your words in type and line them up to whatever size you want.

The amazing thing to me is that it actually makes its own type – casting them, right then and there – spitting out small bits of hot metal letters – and washes the type bits together into words and sentences. It’s just amazing when it gets going. It rains physical pieces of type.

I wear a watch, usually a mechanical one. Flip it over, and you see parts move. There’s a mainspring powering the hands, and the hands are stepped down to the right regulation by a series of cogs. An automatic watch will continually power itself by an internal disk rotor that winds whenever your hand and arm move, a kind of perpetual motion device itself.

There’s a powerful inventiveness in this. Henry Ford, as a farm boy, was an adept mechanic, and he would work on people’s watches. I used to fiddle with fixing alarm clocks. I loved that soft ticking sound when going to sleep.

There’s a limit to what the internet can do and a limit to just how enjoyable it can be. People generally prefer books to handheld readers. Books have the practical advantage of being cheap and convenient, easy to hold, easy to read, easy to pick up and set down.

It turns out, scientists say, that you retain more of what you’ve read when you read it in a book rather than from a screen.

The more electronic and online stuff I have, the more impressed I am with the mechanical world. And the more time I spend with computers and cellphones and social media, the more I love getting outdoors for a long quiet hike in the woods. Breathe the air. See the trees. See the creeks. Follow deer paths.

Todd Volker lives in Ottawa with his wife and son, and they enjoy reading, kayaking, hiking, tennis and camping. He’s a lifelong learner with books in his hands.