It's very tempting to think of people in the past as dumber or less capable than us in "modernity". But the reality is that they were just as smart and motivated as anybody today, they just happened to live slightly lower up the mountain made up of giant's shoulders.

The lived in a world even more described by constraints and limitations rather than capabilities. The average engineer working on a fairly run-of-the-mill problem encountered and had to consider complexity that would make the average software developer's hair curl.

This is beautiful work, genius work. It existed before Alan Turing graduated university and when Alonzo Church was teaching at Princeton. It relied on bleeding edge new technology, and an understanding of physics, photography, lithography, electromagnetism, printing, and several other complex disciplines that anybody today would have difficulty following. Some of the technologies in this process were as new then as the internet is now.

Early plastic was the state of the art for material science.

Imagine doing this work where your access to information required you to drive perhaps several miles to an academic library and spend hours finding a single book to see if it even contained the information you thought it might. If you happened to found some fractional piece of the puzzle in a paper, journal, or book...if you weren't allowed to remove it from the library, you had to write down the information.

The copy machine didn't even exist.

This invention exists somewhere between carrying water to war in animal bladders and the nuclear age.

Beautiful.