Speaking of: Mechanical Things

There are certain purely mechanical inventions — vinyl records, multi-gear bikes, film cameras, analog radios, to name a few — that will forever amaze me in how cleverly engineered they are. I entirely acknowledge the computer I'm typing this on is a machine orders of magnitude more complex and impressive. But in an era where seemingly every minute task on any device or appliance is accomplished with a computer chip, it's sometimes astonishing to take a simple device like a film camera and marvel at how someone wrangled the laws of physics in such a way that made the invention possible before anyone knew what a microprocessor was.