alt Hacker NewsI'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
"The day they replaced the previous beam."
Replies
There's a better version of this sort of story that I first heard also set at Oxford.
The stone steps in front of one of the college buildings have been worn down by centuries of people walking up them. The college decides to replace it, but it turns out that the stone used comes from a specific quarry in Wales that in the hundreds of year that have elapsed has been finished when it comes to this sort of rock.
Nobody is sure what to do. They want matching stone but the only other source is in South Africa and it would cost a fortune to ship the stone from there.
A young architect suddenly has a brilliant idea. "We could just extract the stone, turn it over and get a brand new edge". Everyone is very excited, and contractors and tools arrive to carry out the simultaneously tricky yet simple procedure.
It was at that point they discovered this had already been done.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood
Can't wait to see this story used on some growth hacker / seeking new opportunities LinkedIn post talking about planning for success.
There's a youtube channel shadiversity that I haven't watched in awhile. It is mostly about fantasy media and swords but also spends a lot of time on medieval building techniques and clothing. One of the more interesting videos I watched talked about how before and even after saw mills could process and produce different sized boards people would 'grow' them instead by trimming trees to produce long straight narrow branches. There was even a still living example in some English village that some trimmed 100 years ago before the process was completely stopped.
This also reminds me of those Japanese temples where in order to preserve the institutional knowledge of how to rebuild the temple in case of disaster the monks tear it down and rebuild it from scratch every 30-40 years assuring the next generation has experience.
This reminds me of the US Navy's Oak forest for ship building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Live_Oaks_Reservation
Although this story was debunked, many Universities own Timberland in their portfolios. They’re a good inflation hedge for schools with long time horizon. (Real estate and paper investments were historically very correlated to university costs)
https://blog.realestate.cornell.edu/2018/04/20/harvards-natu...
Funnily, my country has a similar story but with the opposite moral.
Scattered around my country you will see plantations of huge oak trees, all the same age. What gives? Well, in 1801 and 1807, my countrys navy suffered terrible defeats by the Brits as part of the Napoleonic wars. The fleet was eventually rebuilt, but that took cutting down many old oaks. Fearing that oaks are a rare resource that must be replenished, the king ordered the plantning of new ones, so that future generations could still build powerful battleships. Those oaks matured in the 1960s.
The moral of the story is that you can't actually plan 150 years into the future.
Fantastic!
This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox....
> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.