Touching history
Since I grew up in a tool and metalwork environment (heating manufacturer that turned into a hardwarestore on one side of the family and a lamp manufacturer on the other) I’m used to seeing metal badges of all sorts and on all sorts of products. But opening up the TOS milling machine to service the coolant pump gave me a sudden feeling of touching history. This pump probably hasn’t been out in daylight since it was picked up by a Czechoslovakian worker back in 1962 and placed in the sump of the TOS. In a society so utterly different from the one we’re living in now. The milling machine gave the country some much needed hard cash back then, and the export papers says that it’s for export only and that it was to be shown on a Scandinavian trade show the next year. The feeling of beeing close to history is quite like the one I got when we visited the Berlin Wall museum (not the one on Checkpoint Charlie, the other one) earlier this summer. A fantastic museum that captured through architecture and visual clips (video and images) the meaningless divide between east and west.