There are so many things we don’t notice about society but are really quite important. For example, we never think much about the sewer systems we use or the pipes than run through our homes but that doesn’t mean they aren’t every bit as important as all of the other more traditionally important inventions in our lives. Think about how complicated the sewers in your town or city are, how extensive they are and how much maintenance they require. That there is a worker who has to constantly check on them, make they are up to code and work with everything, all the homes and buildings, that connect to them. Sewers also catch a large amount of rainwater and runoff as well and all of this water is typically brought to a water treatment plant where it can be cleaned up. And that’s just the sewers themselves that are put in by municipal sanitation workers. The sewers themselves, whether made out of steel, concrete or whatever material, have to be specially manufactured by corporations that are utilized through government contracts with specific stipulations. They also have to be inspected several times a year by outside agencies that specialize in public health and recommendations for improvement. Add all this up and you realize that every part of society requires a huge amount of care and effort to maintain. It’s not all about one thing or the other. Street lights, for example, have to be cared for by electricians but the wiring that goes into streetlights has to pass through tunnels adjacent to, and sometimes passing through, the sewer tunnels themselves. That means careful coordination between the various governing bodies that keep these different facets of public utility and constant communication. If a streetlight goes down to a flash flood in a sewer and that causes a car accident, that’s on the system to ensure that that does not happen again. But we can take this idea one step farther if we just go a little farther afield.
Metal and the Moving World
There are plenty of other facets of building and maintaining society that we don’t think about either. Streetlights, light poles, telephone wires, aircraft carriers, all of these things require specific parts and machines to build and maintain. Many of these devices are constructed of metal that is heated and shaped in an induction furnace or a used induction furnace. A metal melting furnace, or an induction melting furnace, has a lot of different uses most people don’t even think about. The induction furnace can be used to construct many different many kinds of metal for many different kinds of machines and, in this way, it makes it an integral part of maintaining society and keeping it safe while still being a relatively unknown invention. We don’t think too often about the sheer scale of public and private manufacturing that goes into supporting our modern high tech way of living but the cost and the effort are both immense.
Looking at the Future
This is the present, of course, and we already have all of these machines to help us. The beams that support the basement in your house were likely built by a factory that specializes in support structures for buildings, itself just an offshoot of a larger corporation that likely does work for other large businesses and the government. It is even possible that these steel beams, or whatever type of beams they are, were built using recycled metal from an induction furnace. This recycled metal came from another building or construct that was torn down for unknown reasons and hauled to a recycling facility where it could be purposed again and purchased by a large corporation or an entity wishing to use it for their own legitimate construction and architecture ends. This is a long process but it’s important for how little thought it is given. Think about it. There are likely dozens if not hundreds of other human beings involved, each trained and educated to keep the process running. All in all, society is a delicate and finely tuned machine, much like the induction furnace itself, and it needs to be cared for far into the foreseeable future.