Simple machines

In the 17th century, steam engines began appearing throughout Eu-rope and Asia, ushered into existence by any number of different inventors.

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More recently, multiple inventors conceived and cooked up the atomic bomb, the jet engine, and the solid-body electric guitar. Virtually every race of Homo sapiens has invented the bow and arrow, and people on at least three different continents invented the crossbow, all by themselves. Every culture with dairy resources has come up with cheese of some sort; every culture with a written language has created things that anyone could identify as books, and almost every culture has created potable alcohol. (The most sophisticated of these have also created drinking games.)

And here’s my favorite: Every culture that has created wheeled or water-going vehicles has come up with something very like a tiller, for use in steering them. And as those inventors became more mechanically sophisticated, and as they saw the need to alter the steering control’s range of motion and mechanism’s ratio between input and output forces, they added intermediate gears or pulleys—which likely influenced those inventors to use wheels rather than levers as steering controls: first as ship’s wheels, then as steering wheels for automobiles. Literally all automobiles.

Good ways of doing things—one could go as far as to say the right ways of doing things—are irrepressible: They make themselves known1 and they endure. This is true in the vast majority of human endeavors.

But it isn’t true in the world of hi-fi, which by comparison looks like a weed-choked lawn full of old toilets and abandoned washing machines. From its acoustical beginnings, when two incompatible forms of physical media—Edison’s cylinders and Berliner’s flat discs—slugged it out for primacy, domestic audio has attracted an almost incalculable number of iconoclasts, heretics, mavericks, nonconformists, lone wolves, enfants terrible, and hidebound kooks.