A light switch older than me
Something Frank Shattuk said in a YouTube video about a decade ago has stuck with me. In the series Rawcraft Frank tells Anthony Bourdain
It’s old world stuff, from a day when you did things the best possible way, because it was just the way things were done… Maybe the customer doesn’t even get it, maybe they don’t know everything that went into creating this but you always know
— Rawcraft By Anthony Bourdain S01E021
Quality and Accountability in the modern world are for the privileged. Quite often even they get ripped off in the pursuit of quality. Maybe nobody today knows what quality means anymore.
There was a day, the old world that Frank refers to, where quality as a term probably did not exist. Only craftspersonship. A person whose primary pursuit was to perfect and improve their craft, maybe only secondary or less to make money from it. To some extent I think a craftsperson wants to believe that their pursuit will pique the interest of others, who can admire the work, effort and history that’s gone into a craft. A Rawcraft. One that was painstakingly created with as many raw materials as possible to satisfy the craftsperson’s need to ensure something has been made the best possible way. They may only use another existing product if they admired another craftsperson who made it. Makes sense, probably why in the old world a craft was really many others crafts put together.
What’s this got to do with a light switch? Probably nothing much. Maybe nothing more than making me think about all this. But the fact is, when a craft is perfected it manages to stand out. Like frank says not many might see it but it has something fundamentally different that others don’t.
This is a spare switch I found in the home my grandparents had built maybe a decade before I was born. It has the most satisfying tactile click I have ever felt. You can ever hear it. Very satisfying.
The resistance intuitively gives you a sense of the amount of metal inside. The people who built it didn’t put the bare minimum to pass a legal requirement, no. They put enough metal in it to outlast their own lives and you can feel it with every click.
Next the construction, it has no joints, no loose parts, nothing in it feels like it could break. It’s still plastic but feels like you can throw a brick on it and it might get damaged but would still function. Not many will realize that as a craftsperson you decide to permanently seal it like this, how much trust you should have on it’s reliability. Planned obsolescence was not a thing then, they sealed it because they knew for a fact it would just work.
The branding, when was the last time you saw a brand on a light switch? But does it feel out of place? No. This switch though labelled for a tube, will work for anything else too but think for a moment how long it takes us these days to learn what a switch does. To this day there are places where I could the switch location to switch on something. Could labels have helped, I don’t know but they would make it easier. Also it’s not print. It’s etched, you can really feel it. Someone visually impaired could easily feel the word.
Lisha the brand still exists today. I would be surprised if there were more than a few people who recognize this brand today.
But one of the reasons I sit here writing this is because of what I saw on their website. A confirmation of everything I deduced about them from the switch. Being a craftsperson before being a business. A love for the work they do and appreciation for the years of knowledge that they carry, that they treasure.
I might be wrong. Maybe all the guarantees and words on their website is modern marketing. But it felt good. Satisfied the need to rekindle a belief that a craft survives and transcends the people who perfected it. That a craft is somehow living.
Or I may just be a fool intoxicated by what was and what could be. Amused by a false feeling of writing something asif the written word was my craft.