HOW TOOLS WERE CREATED

We are already surrounded by a lot of tools. In the morning, we are awakened from bed and go to the kitchen and pull out chairs to eat breakfast on a table. Then we use a fork , spoon, knife, and plate to actually eat our breakfast. We might then start our day by writing a plan with a pencil on a notepad. Everything seems already to be provided by others who have designed and manufactured these tools.

While we may take these tools for granted, if we think back, we may be able to imagine a time when these tools were unavailable; there was a first moment when someone recognized the need for spoons, forks, chairs, or tables and then had to imagine and create such items. At first, human-beings faced some problems, which they then resolved through imaginative thinking and thoughtful planning;

they often used their hands to ultimately create useful tools. Notably, they used their hands to first create these tools and then afterward to control their use of these tools.

THINK- HANDS – CREATE- TOOLS – HANDS- CREATE – THINK–

I tried to visualize this process in a few steps.

In the beginning stages, people could very well have found their ideas for tools from things in their natural contexts. I imagine that they may have seen some quality in a part of nature that captured their imagination, which they then in turn applied to their conceptualization and creation of a new tool.

 

PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE FIRST SEEN A straight LINE FROM VIEWING THE HORIZON. THEN PERHAPS THEY HAD LEARNED THAT IT HAS A FUNCTION TO STAND WEIGHT.

After first seeing diagonal lines from the outlines of mountains, hills, and trees, they might have developed an understanding that diagonal lines or planes could serve physically different functions than straight lines or planes could. For instance, they may have realized that a diagonally angled surface could shelter them by blocking out the wind, that a thing moving down it would accelerate, or even more simply that it provides a nice place to lean something against.

Also, when they looked at the sky, they could have seen the perfect circles of the sun and moon, relating them to similarly round, small pebbles. Then through experimentation perhaps they could have acquired knowledge about how circle shapes facilitate rolling actions in objects.

We could also imagine that ancient people used items in their immediate natural contexts and experimented with how they could use sharp branches to poke objects, perhaps even some meat.

AND DURING THE IRON AGE, THE FORM OF ‘CURVES’ HAD COME INTO WIDE USE IN WEAPONS AND FARMING TOOLS. It is quite possible that the idea for these long tools originally came from the shape of these branch

AND THEN, PEOPLE STARTED TO USE THE FORM OF ‘CURVES’ IN THEIR FISHING TOOLS: HOOKS.

written and thought by HYE YOON, MIN