'Tool guys'
nails us.
Bob Bishop and his father — in front of his mother's childhood home, Jackson, Michigan, 1956
"What you make has to keep working after you stop. That's the whole test."
My great-grandfather Sebastian Langley was a carpenter born in Maybee, Michigan in 1865. He built the houses the people of the industrial revolution lived in, then moved to Jackson. His father Joseph came from Germany in the 1800s — the original name was Langle. I still have two of Sebastian's hand tools.
Sebastian's daughter Margaret married into the Bishop family. Her husband — my grandfather — was an Army Air Corps mechanic, then ran the floor at one of Jackson's great auto makers. My dad was president of a global GM service tool supplier — the operation that made tools for the people who built vehicles and refrigeration systems.
I made tools for surgery. Instruments, imaging systems, ways of sequencing a team so a complex operation runs without chaos. Not as a surgeon — as the person who builds what surgeons use. That's my version of the tool shop.
Six generations. Each one took what the person before them knew, used it, changed it, and passed it on. None of us invented the physics. We just kept the knowledge moving.
That is what tool guys means. We are in the business of making things that keep working after we stop.