Jewelry

The Oldest Fine Technology

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The craft of making jewelry in metals is probably the oldest "fine technology." In it we see the birth and the continuous tradition from early antiquity of the small-scale precision metalworking skills which ultimately enabled modern science. It is certainly the only fine technological field with a single continuous history from the birth of metalworking to the present. Other fields of "high tech" metalworking were interrupted and reborn. The making of bronze weapons, for example, died with the introduction of hardened and tempered iron. But a bronze-age personal ornaments are just as valid as items of jewelry today, and the methods of making them are just as current today, as they were five thousand years ago.

But you won't find much in my Notebooks here. For the most part, this is just a place for me to put scans of older material that I've run across in the support of my wife's jewelry business.

Note: Retail jewelers sold watches, and watch casemaking and dialmaking are arguably within the jeweler's art. The material here will include illustrations of watches when they appear in jeweler's catalogues. For actual technical horology, see the CircuitousRoot Horology Notebooks.

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Jewelry Catalogs

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