Making is so central to what makes us human that the term Homo faber was coined to describe what sets us apart from other animals. Latin for “man the maker,” Homo faber goes back to the writings of a Roman politician who lived around 300 BCE, Appius Claudius Caecus. He oversaw the building of the Appian Way, essentially the first long-distance highway, and the Aqua Appia, the first water supply system for Rome. The term Homo faber reminds us that humans both transform materials into tools and transform the world using those tools. This makes us who we are: makers.
Caecus’s concept of Homo faber was one of many ideas rediscovered from Greek and Roman antiquity during the Italian Renaissance. At that point, “man the maker” acquired the further meaning of “man the creator.” The act of creation was essentially a divine power. With the ability to do ourselves what the gods could do, we derived a sense of mastery of the world. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo represented a new, creative spirit that transcended limits and transformed the world. With the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg, and a scientific revolution spurred by Galileo, the Renaissance was a golden age of art and innovation, a time when tradition was challenged and new ideas flourished.
While humans are not alone in using tools, no other animal makes them. Novelist Bruce Sterling, in the first issue of Make: magazine, wrote a column called “Make the Tools That Made You” on the subject of flint knapping—shaping stone tools. “Before modern humans came along, our Stone Age ancestors spent 1.8 million years making tools out of rocks,” writes Sterling, adding, “It follows that you, a modern human, have evolved superb eyes and hands for that job … [and in fact can] make better Stone Age tools than our Stone Age ancestors.” Although making stone tools by hand is hard work, flint knapping continues today as a hobby.
Making is in our bones, in our blood, in our DNA. We are born makers, with an innate ability to make with our hands, which allowed our ancestors to adapt and survive. We learned to make from each other, even across generations, by using that other uniquely human skill: language. As Adam Savage, cohost of the popular television series Mythbusters, said at Bay Area Maker Faire: “What distinguishes us as humans is our ability to make tools and tell stories.” Making and talking shaped our brains and our social lives over centuries.
In modern times, humans were classified as Homo sapiens, initially used to distinguish us from apes. We might think of Homo sapiens as “making knowledge,” a creative or productive act in itself. We can also see our ability to make tools and to make knowledge as entirely compatible. The historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade wrote that the maker is the knower. It isn’t just what you know, but what you could do with your knowledge. Writing about his theory of multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner notes that one form of intelligence is “the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings.”1 There’s an intelligence that expresses itself not as IQ or as test scores or rankings, but in the quality of problems solved, or the products that we produce. We see that kind of intelligence in the work of artists, inventors, and innovators.
In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari claims that tool-making is not what makes Homo sapiens different from other human ancestors.2 Instead, he describes a cognitive revolution—an information revolution thanks to language—that took place just over one hundred thousand years ago. Language evolved as a way of sharing information about each other, and much of it took the form of gossip to keep tabs on what others were doing. Sharing information helped us develop techniques for cooperation—working together to solve problems. Harari emphasizes that language was used not just to describe reality, but also to talk about a world that could be imagined, by telling stories and painting pictures.
If sapiens is reasoning and faber is making, writes Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens, then there is a “third function … just as important as thinking and making—namely, playing.”3 I read Huizinga after college and was struck by his focus on something that seemed so core to human experience. I hadn’t encountered anything like what Huizinga expressed about play, and I haven’t since. (Perhaps it did not seem a subject for serious study to others.) Huizinga writes that “the fun of playing resists all analysis, all logical interpretation,”4 which is why he set out to study “the play-element in culture.”
Play is special, somehow outside ordinary life, beyond the necessity of work or meeting our basic needs. It is a voluntary activity. We choose to play, and we really cannot be forced to do it. “Child and animal play because they enjoy playing, and therein precisely lies their freedom.… The first main characteristic of play is that it is free: is in fact freedom.”5 And yet, he writes, it “means something.” Play can be seen as a celebration of what we value. The celebration itself binds people together, and is therefore central to the formation of our culture. “Civilization arises and unfolds in and as play,”6 writes Huizinga.
Humans are tool-makers, inventors and innovators, storytellers, tinkerers, and role-players. We are makers who are free to imagine, free to play, and free to make.
In 1961 a short industrial film, created by Chevrolet, opened in American theaters. Its opening shot is of the Pacific Ocean. A close-up scans a large rock outcropping to reveal behind it the beach where two boys are making a sand castle in the distance. The title appears to great fanfare: American Maker. The narration begins, following close-ups of the boys building the elaborate sand castle:
Of all things Americans are, we are makers. With our strengths of minds and spirit, we gather, we form, and we fashion. Makers, shapers, put-it-together-ers. We start young, finding out early in life what it’s like for something to grow and take shape beneath our hands. We start young and stay young, modeling with careful pride the things we expect to endure for ourselves and for others. We build for use and we build in fun, joining eyes and hands and brains.7
It was still commonplace for Americans to think of themselves as makers. Making was a source of pride, personally and for the country—and not just in the United States. After a talk I gave in Rome, a man came up to me and excitedly said, “We don’t have the word maker in Italian, but we are makers.” He wanted me to know that making defined Italians as a people and as a country. It spoke to their Roman past of roads and aqueducts, as well as their commercial reputation in design represented in cars, furniture, and clothing.
I used the opening of American Maker in a TED Talk I gave at the Fox Theatre in Detroit in 2009. As I prepared that talk, I realized that I could easily say that some people are makers. I knew from people I met through the magazine and Maker Faire that some people clearly identified as makers from the time they were born, even if that wasn’t the name they called themselves. Yet, I wondered if I could say that not just some of us were makers, but all of us were makers. To be honest, I didn’t know if it was true, but I believed it to be true by this logic: if making was core to what makes us human, then all of us makers. I acted on my belief, and I felt the talk I gave in Detroit, seen online by many others since, was inspired. This idea, this belief, still resonates with us, that seeing ourselves as makers is what it means to be human.
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Popular Science magazine started in 1872 and faced a number of struggles finding an audience for science journalism, but it eventually lived up to its name and became a popular magazine read by millions. The magazine said it was for “the home craftsman and hobbyist who wanted to know something about the world of science.” One issue said it covered inventions, mechanics, money-making ideas, and home-workshop plans and tips. The covers of the magazine often featured futuristic flying machines—the flying car has been its most popular image, and was repeated regularly. What became Popular Science wasn’t about science; it was about you. It was about what you could do or would be able to do. The future was waiting for you to figure out how to get there.
I have found old copies of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics at a flea market. A copy of Popular Mechanics with “What to Make” on the cover, dated 1944, cost fifty cents. When I flipped through these often moldy copies, some of which dated back to the early twentieth century, I was struck by the practical nature of the stories, and yet how they covered a wide range of projects, some of which might be considered whimsical or eccentric. A story on the construction of a two-car garage out of masonry might begin, “Building your own freestanding garage might seem like a challenge too big and taking too long to be practical. Yet I did it, and I’d like to tell you how you can do it too.” Several pages later would be a story about building a fancy three-story birdhouse for martins, and then a wind-powered ice-sailing boat for frozen Midwestern lakes. These stories were accompanied by terrific black-and-white illustrations, which were often clearer than the photographs. More than anything, I loved that anyone who was willing could do these projects. The majority of articles were submitted by readers and conveyed their own pride in sharing what they had accomplished. I was impressed by the “can-do” attitude. I realized that many of the projects in those magazines would be fun to do today.
In these magazines, making things was ordinary and normal, not unusual. There were plenty of good reasons to do projects, including saving money and enjoying a hobby or improving your home. These articles were not only read by adults; they inspired young people to experiment and do things.
Robert Noyce, a cofounder of Intel in Silicon Valley, was born in 1927 in Grinnell, Iowa. The author Tom Wolfe interviewed him and wrote an article in 1983 in Esquire titled “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley.” Wolfe wanted to understand why so many of the giants of the Information Age came from small cities in the Midwest rather than from large cities. Wolfe describes Grinnell as the essence of the Midwest: “It was one of the last towns in America that people back East would have figured to become the starting point of a bolt into the future that would create the very substructure, the electronic grid, of life in the year 2000 and beyond.”
Noyce was one of four sons of a minister. He was a good student who showed an aptitude for athletics and science. He did odd jobs and was a Boy Scout. Yet the story that Wolfe tells is of a thirteen-year-old Noyce and his brothers building a box kite that supposedly could lift a human off the ground. They got the idea and the plans from the Popular Science. Bob Noyce and his brother Gaylord built the kite and then tried to fly it. Running through a field was not enough to get the kite to lift off the ground, so they took it up on the roof of the barn. “Bob sat in the seat and Gaylord ran across the roof, pulling the kite. Bob was lucky he didn’t break his neck when he and the thing hit the ground. So then they tied it to the rear bumper of a neighbor’s car. With the neighbor at the wheel, Bob rode the kite and managed to get about twelve feet off the ground.”8
This is what you did in small towns in America. You learned to see what you could do with what you had. Wolfe asked Noyce directly why he thought that small towns produced so many good engineers. “In a small town,” Noyce liked to say, “when something breaks down, you don’t wait around for a new part, because it’s not coming. You make it yourself.” People had no choice but to fix things and figure out creative ways to meet their needs. They were resourceful. Whether you worked on a farm or a factory, lived in a city or a suburb, the ability to tinker and make things better was something you practiced.
Many people still fondly remember the Heathkit catalog. The Heath Company, based in Benton Harbor, Michigan, sold kits to make electronic products like radios and amplifiers. According to an excerpt from the original Heathkit catalog, “anyone, regardless of technical knowledge or skills, could assemble a kit himself, and save up to fifty percent over comparable factory-built models. All that would be required were a few simple hand tools and some spare time.”
For the article “The Soul of an Old Heathkit,”9 I interviewed Howard Nurse, who not only grew up on Heathkits; his father became president of the company. He told me that electronics were not readily accessible in 1950s. The only place he could see electronic components was at a local TV repair shop, which he hung around. The Heathkit catalog opened a door to the new world of hi-fi components, electrical test equipment, ham radios, and later, television sets. He recalls the joy of opening up the box. “First, you’d see the Heathkit manual, which was the heart of the kit.” Then you’d find the capacitors and resistors in brown envelopes. A transformer came wrapped in spongy paper, a predecessor of bubble wrap. “Before you did anything, you had to go through the errata that came with the kit.” Then he would do an inventory of the parts, using a muffin tin to sort them. Additionally, he’d use corrugated cardboard to arrange the small capacitors and resistors in rows. “After all this waiting and preparation, you’d begin to assemble the parts,” he said. “You started by attaching a few components, and then you got to solder, which was really fun … flux10 was an aphrodisiac.”
When you finished the assembly of a Heathkit and tried it, often it didn’t work. This too was part of the process of understanding electronics and learning to fix problems. Nurse built his first computer from a Heathkit, the H8 digital computer. It’s ironic that the Heathkit computer, released in the 1970s, was the culmination of DIY electronics, but the rise of ready-made computers killed it off—and eventually killed the Heath Company too.
The era from the late 1940s through the 1970s, when Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Heathkits were in their heyday, might be considered a golden age of tinkering in America. It was a middle-class virtue that enabled the people to have things and do things that they needed or wanted but couldn’t afford, like expanding the house for a new family member, sewing clothes, or repairing the car because they couldn’t afford a new one. What you could do for yourself and your family was a source of pride.
Do Americans still see ourselves as makers? Consider the 2008 short film Brighter. It opens with a shot of the elevators inside an upscale department store against the soundtrack of plaintive guitar strumming. “We are a nation of consumers,” begins the soothing narration, “and there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there …” The film was brought to us by Discover Card.
In the course of a few decades, America evolved from a nation of makers into a nation of consumers. Americans worked more hours and had fewer hours available to tinker. We chose to pay professionals to transform the garage into an in-law suite rather than do it ourselves. We became detached from the questions of how our food, cars, electronics, toys, shampoo, and so on were made, where they came from, and who produced them. The production and distribution of goods and products became less and less visible to us as factories were outsourced to places like Mexico, Bangladesh, and China, eliminating American working-class jobs. Advertising, which really took off with television in the 1950s and 1960s, persuaded us that the more stuff we bought, the happier we’d be. Ads could create demand for more and more products, which we might call manufacturing desire.
Industrial production and consumerism meant trade-offs that were usually about getting the smallest number of people and the lowest costs involved in the process to give those industries the maximum benefit. Industrial producers made—have been making—a bunch of choices that we have had no ability to influence and with which we might not agree. At the same time, a message has been broadcast to us, every hour of every day, about our personal freedom equating to the wide range of choices we have in the aisles of stores. Becoming a “smart consumer” meant being able to navigate all these choices and make the best decisions. Benjamin Barber, a professor and political theorist, wrote in his book Consumed: “We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes, the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what’s on the menu.”11
There are more things available to us than ever. The selection is endless on Amazon or in Walmart. In Sapiens, Harari cites the scarcity of artifacts in the life of hunter-gatherers compared to their modern descendants. “A typical member of a modern affluent society will own several million artifacts—from cars to houses to disposable nappies and milk cartons.” He adds: “There’s hardly an activity, a belief, or even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own devising.”12
Yet, in fact, “our own devising”—making—and our consuming are mostly walled off from each other. It is the difference between eating a meal that you’ve cooked and eating fast food, having little involvement or knowledge about the ingredients, processes, or people involved in the preparation of the food. We overeat and are still not satisfied. Just being consumers does not seem to satisfy us. We might feel empty, disconnected, even helpless. Mostly we are bored.
Can creative acts such as making things make us feel more alive? And if we surround ourselves with objects that have a true connection to us and to our efforts, might we feel more fully alive?
As consumerism became dominant, making went underground and over the next fifty years emerged mostly in subcultures. One example was punk rock, which subverted the corporate production of music by bringing music back to its roots—the garage band. It didn’t really matter how good you were musically. What was important was that you made your own music your own way. Punk bands recorded, produced, distributed, and performed their music themselves without mainstream music labels or corporate sponsors. They were really the earliest adopters of the do-it-yourself, or DIY, ethic.
Fashion could be punk too: in practice safety pins, Doc Martens boots, and black everything, but philosophically individualistic and transgressive, often defying gender norms. Legendary musician Patti Smith, sometimes called the godmother of punk, said, “To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It’s freedom.”13
This subversive notion of DIY could describe people deciding to become self-sustaining by growing their own food, to learn how to repair their own Volkswagens, and to sew and repair their clothes rather than buying new ones. They were nonconformists exploring alternatives, seeking freedom by not accepting what was easily available.
Another subculture that was finding its own way was grounded in hacking. The book Hackers by Steven Levy opens with the story of Peter Samson and the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the early 1960s. Levy writes that Samson and his friends “had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?”14 They were tinkerers.
Levy identifies this as the “Hands-On Imperative,” one of the tenets of the Hacker Ethic. The Tech Model Railroad Club consisted of students who, it might be said, never grew up. They continued to be fascinated by toy trains; one group worked on the landscape and train layout, while Samson’s group specialized in the switches that controlled the model trains. Out of this latter group emerged the first hackers who were fascinated by how computers work. They recognized the potential of computers as tools for their own purposes. They wanted to get their hands on the computers; they needed the time to explore; they didn’t want to go through a centralized bureaucracy to have computing services performed for them. “Hands-on” was synonymous with access to learning directly how to do things yourself. They began forming a set of ideas that computers should be open and accessible systems, and the information about how they worked should be shared freely.
From its earliest beginnings, hacking was about the freedom to personalize technology. It didn’t matter whether the technology was designed to do what they wanted it to do. What mattered was whether the system was open and flexible enough to do what they wanted. It’s not a surprise that the free software movement comes out of MIT, derived in part from the people and experiences of the Tech Model Railroad Club.
There was another group on the West Coast playing with technology, specifically trying to design and build computers themselves. This was the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California, which started in 1975. Lee Felsenstein, who created the Osborne Computer, opened meetings by saying “Welcome to Homebrew Computer Club, which doesn’t exist.” Their offbeat humor was one of the things that united them. Unlike computer “user groups” that would come later, these hobbyists got together to swap parts and share information about building their own computers. Club members Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs met in high school and, according to Wozniak, they had “two things in common: electronics and pranks.”15
Woz said of his time there: “I just loved going down to the Homebrew Computer Club, showing off my ideas and designing neat computers. I was willing to do that for free for the rest of my life.”16 That enthusiasm and motivation, being driven only by the desire to “scratch their own itch,” as Eric S. Raymond described it in his book The Cathedral and The Bazaar, became another hallmark of the hacker community.17
On a weekend in April 1977, the first West Coast Computer Faire opened to unexpected success. Its founder, Jim Warren, called it “a mob scene” with over twelve thousand people attending. The goal of the Faire was to bring together hobbyists who were making homebrew computers. Warren said that the West Coast Computer Faire was like one of the “happenings” in San Francisco in the 1960s: “Back then it was power to the people; now it’s computing power to the people.”18 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were there, showing off the computer they built in a garage. The Apple Computer exhibit displayed the new Apple II. Mike Markkula, then vice president of marketing at Apple, said of the Faire: “I’m not exactly sure why so many people are here. A lot of them are just curious about what’s going on.”19
There’s one more story to add, of two young geeks named Bill Gates and Paul Allen. After reading an article in Popular Electronics in 1975 about the Altair computer, Allen persuaded Gates to drop out of Harvard. They went to New Mexico to meet Ed Roberts and began writing BASIC, the first programming language for a personal computer, and later developed an operating system, DOS. Despite having no formal training, they spent unlimited time learning what this technology was all about, and ultimately understood that they were creating a new world of personal computing.
Today, nearly everyone has a computer, but back in the 1980s, as the first personal computers emerged, not many people had a good understanding of why they would want one. Many people thought that computers were fancy calculators or glorified typewriters. Computers for data processing were needed in corporations but not at home. The personal computer needed a killer application, and it turned out that it was not about computers as number crunchers, although they could certainly do that.
In 1985, Apple came out with the first LaserWriter, a laser printer. Coupled with page design software, Macintosh computers could be used to design a document and then print it. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page layout programs were the first of a series of computing applications with broad appeal that allowed people to see the computer as a creative tool. It enabled them to do something that was either hard to do manually or required special expertise. The combination of software and hardware created a desktop publishing revolution, where anyone could design and print typeset-quality brochures, newsletters, and books. Designers and architects began to use computers to do what they did manually on a drafting table. Computer-aided design (CAD) was born. Those who learned to design for laser printers soon began designing for digital media, first for video games and multimedia CD-ROMs and then the Web. A new set of creative industries was born.
Desktop publishing is an early example of the democratization of technology, as the typesetting and printing business was disrupted and amateurs could now do what only trained professionals formerly could. It didn’t necessarily mean that what they produced was good, but many learned to use the tools and get better at them, motivated by the amount of control they had.
Riding the punk aesthetic into the world of the printed word and literature, boosted by the availability of desktop publishing, came the birth of zines: small-batch, homemade, low-budget underground magazines created by and for geeks with unusual interests outside the status quo. The design of zines was often purposely sloppy to emphasize their oppositional stance to mainstream media. Vibrant communities often formed around them. When the Internet became mainstream, a lot of the energy of zines and their communities transferred online, to bulletin board systems and then blogs.
All of these developments rested on the newfound ability to create and distribute content without any oversight or middleman—the printing press 2.0. A personal computer could now act as a recording studio, a publishing house, a TV production unit, or the doorway to a globally active bulletin board system. Making—more and more in digital forms such as music, publications, and interactive content—was about engaging communities of enthusiasts, freedom of expression, and personal choices.
Today, the word hacker has both positive and negative meaning. The media often paints the hacker as a miscreant, someone who breaks into computers and steals data. But along the way, the term also made a leap into the broader cultural meme pool. Sometime in the 1990s, people began talking about “hacking” outside of computing: there were food hackers and financial hackers; people were sharing “hacks” on how to book airline travel, how to become more productive, or how to parent. In the self-service economy of the Web, life hacking was becoming a valued skill. Hacking was how you got what you wanted.
At O’Reilly Media, I paid attention to what hackers were doing from the time I began to write Unix manuals in the 1980s. I didn’t see hackers as a personality type or a lifestyle. I saw them as people who came up with clever or non-obvious solutions to interesting problems. I realized that what hackers were doing was important on a number of levels. They represented a fundamental shift in the way we think about how things are made, and how people work together.
Starting in 2003, I began publishing a series of books on hacks: Google Hacks, Excel Hacks, even Mind Hacks. One of the books we did in the Hacks series was TiVo Hacks. It wasn’t a best-seller in the series, but the fact that people wanted to hack a consumer electronics product made me think that something was happening. If people were hacking TiVos without permission of the manufacturer, what was next? Would they start hacking their cars? Shouldn’t every car have a “Preferences” menu? Should you be able to change the sound of your car horn? Shouldn’t you be able to hack the doorbell in your home and in effect replace its ringtone? Why not look at things in the physical environment as if they were open to hacking?
How we started interacting with our computers was going to influence how we interacted in the physical world. We would develop the expectation that the physical environment should respond to us, change as a result of interaction with us, and in short be as adaptive as our software environments. Hacking wasn’t limited to computers but was extending to cars, toys, watches, bikes, homes—almost anything you can think of. Hackers were hacking hardware, not just software. The physical world itself was becoming a play space, not just the rectangular LCD screen. We could hack the world around us.
I started Make: magazine in 2005 based on these observations. I originally intended to call the magazine Hack, but when I told my children about it, they didn’t get it. I tried to explain that hacking was a clever way to solve a problem, but they weren’t buying it. Instead, I decided to call the magazine Make:,20 which was a word that could be understood by anyone.
I presented the idea to Tim O’Reilly in the back of a cab on the way to the OSCON (O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention) in Portland, Oregon. I explained that this new magazine was “Martha Stewart for Geeks.” It would be a magazine with “recipes” for projects that you could do, with new technology on the ingredients list. Tim found the idea interesting and encouraged me to pursue it, for which I am grateful.
I put a team together to create the magazine. For editor-in-chief I tapped Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing, which had started as a countercultural zine. He had worked as an editor for Wired in its early days. He’s an avid DIYer himself. Mark understood on many levels what we were trying to do, mixing technology and DIY. He brought his own unique sensibility, as did our designer, David Albertson, who gave the magazine a clean, fresh design unlike a lot of technical magazines.
Before Make: there wasn’t a contemporary magazine that reflected the DIY mindset around technology. Existing technology magazines viewed it in a narrow business-driven sense. They mostly covered the release of new products, but they didn’t suggest satisfying projects for readers to do. I wanted the magazine and the projects in Make: to include all the technologies in our lives, not simply the newest: the old ones for cooking and woodworking alongside the new ones like 3-D printing and laser-cutting. Before Make:, there were DIY magazines for cooks and woodworkers but not for hackers. I set out to create a magazine for people engaged in personalizing, modifying, hacking, and creating, in the broadest possible sense. Make: is a bridge between the new world of hackers and the older world of traditional craftspeople, tinkerers, and hobbyists alongside the punks, crafters and DIYers. All these individuals share a DIY mindset, a determination to remake the world and adapt it to their own ideas, with the unstated assumption that this will make the world a better place. The magazine gave them a new name: makers.
I wrote in my opening welcome to the first issue: “More than mere consumers of technology, we are makers, adapting technology to our needs and integrating it into our lives. Some of us are born makers, and others like me, become makers, almost without realizing it.”
All of this activity—self-organized, collaborative, and widely distributed—is the Maker Movement, an agent of social change that includes all kinds of making and all kinds of makers, connecting to the past as well as changing how we look at the future. The Maker Movement is a renewal of some deeply held values, a recognition rooted in our biology, our history, and our culture, that making defines who we are.