By Andrew Kornuta — 28 Dec 2025

Industrialist Papers No. 1

The Tower of Babel Problem

Babel is a story from Genesis about a project that looks strong and still fails at the handoff. The failure is not brick or scaffolding, it is shared meaning. The build stalls the moment language stops matching intent.

American manufacturing has been drifting toward the same failure mode as complexity piles up across CAD, CNC, inspection, and procurement. We add capability at the machine and we lose context at the interface.

A buyer sends a drawing, a STEP file, a note block, and a tolerance stack, and believes they sent “the part.” A shop opens the package and sees a dozen unanswered questions hiding behind a datum, a surface finish symbol, and a thread callout. The job fails long before the first chip, because two competent teams read the same geometry through different dialects of manufacturing language.

That mismatch is old. It predates CAD, ERP, and the internet. It began the moment production scaled beyond one foreman, one bench, one lathe, and one set of habits.

From craft benches to gauges

The Industrial Revolution replaced the craft bench with the factory floor, and replaced a single artisan’s judgment with repeatable measurement. The textile mill, the water frame, the interchangeable musket part, and the machine tool all forced the same requirement: a part had to fit a mating part made by somebody else, on another day, by another worker, on another machine. That requirement created the first translation problem. A drawing became a contract, and a gauge became the enforcement tool.

Once the armory system and early mass production took hold, “fit” stopped being a local agreement and became a portable promise. That portability demanded reference artifacts: master gauges, limit gauges, and later gauge blocks. Gauge blocks mattered because they turned length into something you could carry between shops, fixtures, and inspection rooms, and they reduced interpretation around a micrometer reading. Precision manufacturing took a step away from tribal measurement and toward shared metrology.

Standards solved one layer, then exposed the next

As soon as parts moved between companies, threaded fasteners became a national argument. Whitworth’s screw thread standardization work is a clean example: a thread form becomes a protocol, and the protocol turns chaos into interchangeability across lathes, taps, and dies. It worked because it pinned down geometry that otherwise lived in a fitter’s personal lore.

Thread standards did not end translation, they moved it. Once the thread form became legible, the argument shifted to tolerances, surface texture, inspection method, and drawing interpretation. A shop could agree on a 1/4-20 thread and still disagree on a surface finish callout, an edge break note, or a positional tolerance tied to a datum scheme.

That pattern repeats across the entire stack of manufacturing language. Every time industry nails down one layer, complexity climbs into the next layer up.

The drawing became software, then dialects multiplied

The twentieth century formalized more of the drawing grammar: geometric tolerancing, datum systems, and inspection conventions became codified across industries and supply chains. In parallel, the CAD model became a second source of truth, often shipped alongside the drawing, and sometimes treated as controlling geometry. ISO’s GPS framework and standards like ISO 1101 show how deep the grammar goes, with explicit definitions for tolerances of form, orientation, location, and runout, all tied back to datums and associated features.

Those standards improved legibility, but they also created multiple legitimate “languages” for the same manufacturing intent. ISO GPS and ASME-style GD&T live close together, yet shops still see enough differences in conventions, default rules, and training to create real divergence in inspection planning, CMM programs, and how a datum reference frame is operationalized on a fixture.

Now add the practical reality: many RFQ packages contain a PDF drawing exported from a CAD system, a STEP file exported with a particular schema, and a note block written for the buyer’s internal traveler (work packet). The shop has to decide what controls, then build a probe strategy, a fixture strategy, and a quoting risk model based on that decision.

Numerical control sped up divergence

Numerical control and CNC made capability more flexible and more specialized at the same time. A programmer with a post processor, a tool library, and a probing cycle can make complex geometry repeatable on a machining center, but the process knowledge that makes it “safe” lives inside local conventions: workholding habits, toolpath templates, inspection defaults, and what the shop considers an acceptable assumption when a drawing is silent.

Modern CNC traces back to early numerical control work in the early 1950s, tied to punched-tape control concepts and aerospace-driven funding and research. That origin matters because it shaped the culture: rapid iteration in machine tools, constant evolution in controls, and a long tail of shop-specific practice around CAM, post processors, and setup sheets.

So CNC raised the ceiling and widened the spread. Two shops can both own a 5-axis machine, and still quote the same part as “easy” versus “high risk” because their fixture inventory, probe routines, inspection capacity, and tolerance interpretation differ.

Digital file formats became another translation layer

Once the drawing and model became digital, manufacturing added a new kind of dialect: data exchange. IGES and STEP exist because a CAD file is rarely a universal object; it is a container full of assumptions about geometry, metadata, and sometimes PMI. NIST’s work on product data exchange highlights the core problem: a standard format alone does not guarantee interoperability, because STEP relies on application protocols, and those protocols still require consistent interpretation across tools and workflows.

A buyer thinks they sent “a STEP.” A supplier opens it and discovers missing features, broken assemblies, lost metadata, or a coordinate system mismatch that changes how a fixture gets built. Even when geometry survives, downstream intent often does not: datum schemes, inspection criticality, and special process requirements can arrive as scattered notes in a PDF, separate from the model used for CAM.

That gap creates the everyday Babel moment: the estimator reads the drawing, the programmer reads the model, the quality manager reads the note block, and each person sees a different contract.

Babel is visible in the smallest symbols

The Tower of Babel problem shows up in small marks that carry large consequences:

A surface finish symbol that drives a completely different process plan, tooling choice, and inspection method.
A datum reference frame that looks obvious on a drawing and still yields two incompatible fixturing strategies.
A thread callout that is “standard” inside one region’s tribal defaults and ambiguous elsewhere.
A profile tolerance that seems generous until a CMM program ties it to a datum scheme the shop did not expect.

Each of those symbols forces translation work. Translation consumes engineering time during quoting, then consumes more time during setup, then consumes even more time during inspection and NCR triage.

Why the nation feels slower than the machines

This is the practical paradox on the shop floor: spindle technology and CAM can be world-class, while quoting and sourcing still run through email chains, PDF markups, and phone calls. The machines got faster. The translation layer did not.

Distance plays a smaller role than people assume. UPS and air freight already proved that a part can cross the country quickly once it is scheduled, programmed, and released with a clean traveler. The enemy is ambiguity at the drawing and RFQ stage, because ambiguity forces delay, clarification, and defensive quoting.

So the Tower of Babel is not an argument for local sourcing. It is an argument for translation infrastructure that can carry a work package between companies the way gauge blocks carried length between inspection rooms.

Why one universal standard will not rescue the drawing

A universal standard sounds tempting because it promises a clean drawing, a clean model, a clean RFQ, and a clean quote. In practice, the manufacturing ecosystem already contains multiple standards for legitimate reasons: regulated industries, legacy programs, supplier toolchains, and inspection regimes built around specific conventions. A protocol only sticks when it reduces work for the estimator, the programmer, and the quality manager at the same time.

A single enforced format also fails on a simpler point: the real world keeps shipping messy packages. Buyers send scans, redlines, mixed revisions, and hybrid CAD exports because programs move fast and engineering is imperfect. A coordination layer has to survive that reality and still produce a quote-ready work package with explicit assumptions, flagged risks, and a path to clarification.

Translation is the root cause beneath the pain

The Tower of Babel problem sits underneath most of the operational failures people blame on “capacity”:

RFQs that die in triage because the package forces too much interpretation.
Quotes that arrive late because the estimator had to reverse-engineer intent from a note block.
Quality escapes that begin as a misread datum or a misapplied tolerance.
Supplier qualification resets that happen because trust cannot travel with the drawing.

A shop can own the machine and still lose the job, because the job lives or dies in the translation step.

A simple diagram of the mess

Here is the work package most buyers believe they sent, versus what the shop actually receives in practice:

Buyer intent → drawing + model + note block → quote → traveler → chips

What arrives at the supplier often looks like this:

PDF drawing (symbols) + STEP model (geometry) + email (assumptions) + cert requirements (spreadsheet) + delivery constraint (phone call) → estimator translation → programmer translation → quality translation → quote risk

Every arrow in that chain touches a fixture, a probe routine, a CMM program, or a traveler, and each touch introduces variance when the dialects differ.

Implications

The core failure mode is translation across drawings, models, note blocks, and inspection plans, and it scales with complexity and supplier diversity.
Standards matter, yet the winning move is translation between standards and tribal defaults, because real RFQ packages stay messy.
CNC and CAD raised capability while multiplying dialects inside post processors, tool libraries, probe cycles, and CMM routines.
Coordination at national scale requires a representation of the work package that is explicit about datums, tolerances, material certs, and acceptable assumptions, because routing depends on what can be computed and tested.

Next: Paper 2, Manufacturing is a network of signals, and visibility governs where the work actually goes.