“It’s important to take the time to color inside the lines.”

“12 x 12 = 144″

“The Treaties of Westphalia heralded the era of the nation state in Europe.”

“An adverb describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.”

“Do your best; nobody can ask for more than that.”

“The First Law of Thermodynamics is you do not talk about Thermodynamics.”

Think about it: there was a specific point in time when you learned each of these things. (I double checked all but the last one, but it sounds right.) We learned these things, and we did it through the persistence and patience of great teachers, at home or in the classroom.

Whether your formal education is ongoing — hey, young readers! — or ended 50 years ago, there is never a bad time to reflect on the people who chose teaching for their career. It is a demanding and often thankless job, and we at MakerBot want teachers to know they are always on our minds.

If you are a MakerBot owner, you have the chance to give the teachers in your life a special gift. It could be a customized nameplate, a desk organizer, or the old standby, an apple.

I made an apple yesterday on my Replicator and brought it around to some of the people here at MakerBot. These are people in our company who come from lots of different backgrounds, and I was personally curious to know which teachers inspired them and got them here. Here are their answers.

Adam, Co-Founder and CTO
Is there one teacher you remember fondly?
Mrs. Wolff, physics teacher.

What was one thing that person taught you that stuck?
That there’s no luminiferous ether.

What would you say to that teacher if you had a chance?
Why the hell wasn’t that part of the basic curriculum?

Read the rest of this entry »

Since we started the chess set design challenge with Tinkercad, I have been so interested in the history of chess pieces. Why do we use the pieces we use and how did they get their shapes? Wikipedia provided a quick and easy overview. Essentially, the Rooks (castles), Knights (horsies), Bishops (the other one), and pawns derive from an earlier set of pieces that represented four divisions of a military force. Fair enough.

This caught my eye, though:

The practice of playing chess for money became so widespread during the 13th century that Louis IX of France issued an ordinance against gambling in 1254.

Whoa! Chess gambling was such a problem that Saint Louis himself, the Louis of the Louis(es)¹ to outlaw it altogether? Holy Romans were such nerds! But this begs the question, how exactly did they gamble on it? What if you had a draw?

To the GoogleBooks! This 1860 gem from Duncan Forbes – and I’m not kidding, it is an absolute delight to read – gives some fun context.

Cool! But also, what?! This is all meaningless to me, especially since the reference point, the farthing, has disappeared. Back to the Internet! This is what I found out about British coin denominations:

The shilling was subdivided into twelve (12) pennies.

The penny was further sub-divided into two halfpennies or four farthings (quarter pennies).

2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpence = 1 penny (1d)
3 pence = 1 thruppence (3d)
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a ‘tanner’) (6d)
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) (1s)
2 shillings = 1 florin ( a ‘two bob bit’) (2s)
2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown (2s 6d)
5 shillings = 1 Crown (5s)

I say with all due respect to our friends in the Isles that some empires were simply destined to fail. Let me distill the information above.

A penny and “pence” are the same thing for our purposes. A sixpence is worth six times as much as a penny, and a penny is worth four times as much as a farthing. A sixpence is therefore 24 farthings. Since a shilling was itself only one twentieth of a pound sterling, a farthing was only 1/960^th of a pound.

All of this got me thinking. How much did it actually cost to buy a chess set in Ancient Persia? If we know how much they traded pieces for, that’s probably a great indicator of how much a whole set cost.

But wait just one more tick. How much is a chess piece worth if you print it on a MakerBot? I have a sneaking suspicion these guys were spending way too much on their chess sets. So I set out to prove it.

The info above gets us nowhere. In order to determine how much these pieces were really worth, I needed to know how the value of a pound has changed over time. Sources tell me an 1860 pound sterling was worth 91 times more than a 2012 GBP.

Throw in today’s exchange rate of 1.594 USD to 1.0 GBP, here’s what we get.

• One 1860 farthing is worth 14 cents in 2012 USD.
• One 1860 penny is 56 cents in 2012 USD
• One 1860 sixpence is $3.36 in 2012

Going back to the passage above, we can now show the current values of these pieces.

King — Priceless. Step off.
Rook — one dinar, or sixpence, or $3.36 (in 2012)
Knight — four dangs, or four pennies, or $2.24
Queen — two dangs and three tasu, or two pennies and three farthings, or $1.54
Bishop — one dang and three tasu, or one penny and three farthings, or $.98
Pawn — one dang, or one penny, or $.56

This means the total cost of an ancient Persian chess set was something like $38.36, plus whatever value was assigned to the kings.

Now. We printed this set in ABS, which we sell for $48/kilogram. That’s 4.8 cents per gram. As an aside, we also recently proved you can print 392 chess pieces from one spool of plastic. Whoa. I wanted to get more precise, so I weighed each piece and came up with the following:

King — 6.0 grams = $.29
Queen — 4.8 g = $.23
Knight — 3.4 g = $.16
Rook — 3.0 g = $.14
Bishop — 1.8 g = $.09
Pawn — 1.4 g = $.07

This brings a grand total of $3.72. That’s a tenth of the Persian price.

After this research, I’ve unilaterally decided on a new tagline for our company. You heard it here first:

MakerBot Industries, 90 percent discounts on chess sets, since the Tenth Century.

1. performed by the surprisingly aptly named Kingsman [↩]

MakerBot TV is back in action and better than ever!

As cool as the last of CreativeTools‘ featured projects was, they’ve really upped their game with his one.  It’s a high-res laser scan of  a bit of high tech from the bronze age — a shield.  No, not a lolshield or gameshield, a literal shield.  It might look basic to us today, but to a bronze-age Scandinavian soldier, this was state of the art.

In all seriousness, we all know that digital fabrication and 3d printing are the future — but they’re also key to providing access to the past.  Want a Venus di Milo (Ἀφροδίτη τῆς Μήλου to those in the know) or maybe a Laocoön and His Sons?  Well, print your own…one day.  After all, these treasures should be freely available to all — they’re certainly not copyrighted.

I hope to see more antiquities on Thingiverse — until then, hats off to CreativeTools for getting the ball rolling.

Untitled by CreativeTools

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