My company just gained our BS13485 accreditation… and there was much rejoicing. There is a reason I mention this but it isn’t, in all honesty, a very good one.

It occurred to me, as one of my colleagues was appointed to make sure that our calipers were always properly calibrated, that we have come an awfully long way from the first moment that man invented tools. I’m not even criticising it: we work in medical device design, so the traceability and rigour of these sorts of standards is actually fairly self-evidently important.

It’s more the surreality of the whole thing, I suppose. A few thousand years ago: man with a bit of stick. Today: calibrated calipers. I can’t imagine that the first human users of tools could ever have imagined the kind of crazy explosion that they were initiating.

And of course, I know they weren’t ‘initiating’ anything, because while we look at history in a narrative fashion and evolution as something being done by an entire species, that’s just not accurate. It’s more like an aggregated collection of the behaviours of individual animals, but it’s sort of funny to look back on it as if we had some sort of collective plan.

“If I just get this right, within the blink of a geological eye my grandsons and granddaughters will know the unparalled privilege of performing their work with the aid of some finely and carefully calibrated calipers.”

Dave Bartholomew – The Monkey Speaks His Mind