Real Men Doing Real Work

I too sought out a trade instead of college, while engaging in many educational pursuits on my own. Pursuing a trade allowed me to earn a very comfortable living while having the time to educate myself.
I am comfortable discussing just about any subject with anyone from pre-schoolers, high-school dropouts, to those with advanced degrees and PhDs.
In fact, I have had PhDs remark positively about how truly educated I am despite lacking a college degree. There has been some negative criticism from insecure college types about my alternative learning of various subjects, to these misguided individuals who resent my extensive knowledge and lifelong love for learning, despite not possessing a college degree.
In my younger years, it used to bother me, but no more. It’s THEIR problem, not mine.
Opening one’s mind does not require a college degree. In fact, there are those who made great strides in technology despite not having a college degree.
One prime example of this is the story of Stanford Ovshinsky. A machinist by trade, he came up with the idea of amorphous semiconductors. Traditional semiconductors are fabricated from crystalline structures, by complicated, expensive processes, which are then doped with various impurities to gives them unique electrical characteristics. Ovshinsky’s method utilized non-crystalline methods which could be simply sprayed on a surface, while possessing these unique electrical characteristics, much less expensive to produce. He took his ideas to local universities, whose professors all told him that his ideas would not work. He still pursued his line of thinking outside the box and was extremely successful. Multinational corporations such as Sony and Sharp have licensed his patented technology. These same universities, who initially rejected him, in later years, have invited him as a peer and have finally embraced his unconventional methods who they initially said wouldn’t work. Thinking outside the box can be a lonely pursuit, but is quite often necessary to advance the technology. Mr. Ovshinsky himself, admitted that if he had received a traditional college education, he would not have come up with his unconventional ideas.
A university education, while valuable, is not the only way progress is made.

In a previous lifetime I ran a large timber window manufacturing facility, with several dozen apprenticed joiners, along with hundreds of assistants, who would generally be of the skill shown, or greater. It was good to see them work. But they were not true masters of the craft.

Amongst all those joiners were a few, perhaps six, true masters, who were simply extraordinary. They each had at least 50 years experience working timber by hand, and loved doing it to the extent they refused to retire.

They could make enormous complex curve windows/ alcoves/ etc. precisely, by hand, to high engineering tolerances, for high value architecturally designed projects (ie mansions). The speed and accuracy of their work was simply astonishing.

And when they were gone, that was the end of their era, as none of the other joiners could approach their skill, nor could modern companies afford to provide the time and training required to get them to that level of skill. Those masters trained under other masters creating individual masterpieces for decades before they were able to create on their own.

These masters often worked with open spindle shapers – the single most dangerous task I have ever managed, though I would never attempt it myself. The spindle comprised a cutter of several hundred teeth spinning at 20,000 RPM, unguarded. They fed complex curved pieces of timber many yards long through these shapers, where any flaw in the timber could result in catastrophe. None of these masters had all of their fingers, and many of their associates had lost limbs over the decades (another reason this died out – modern safety laws forbid most of that type work).

I suppose today giant CNC routers might be able to accomplish the tasks, but I am no longer up to speed in window manufacturing. Those masters were extraordinary. Their loss is to be lamented.