Maintenance of Everything: Part One

This is Part One of a planned multi-volume nonfiction series by Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The book examines maintenance as a civilizational imperative, arguing that keeping things going is both necessary and dangerously easy to defer. Brand proposes expanding the term beyond preventive upkeep to encompass monitoring, routine care, repair, and eventual replacement. The book ranges across sailboats, motorcycles, automobiles, weapons, corrosion science, and military logistics.

Brand opens with the 1968 Golden Globe Race, a solo, nonstop, around-the-world sailboat race sponsored by London's Sunday Times. Nine competitors set out on a 30,000-mile voyage through the Southern Ocean's violent storms, navigating by sextant, forbidden from going ashore, and entirely responsible for their own repairs. Brand focuses on three sailors whose approaches to maintenance determined their fates.

Robin Knox-Johnston, a 29-year-old former Merchant Navy officer, sailed his 32-foot wood ketch (a two-masted sailboat) Suhaili with a principle of "Make do and mend." He packed tools and spare parts for every contingency. When he discovered a hull leak, he sealed it from underwater, one breath at a time. A violent knockdown nearly tore his cabin loose; he spent days reinforcing it. When his radio transmitter failed, he harvested solder from navigation lightbulbs. When his battery charger broke, he improvised a feeler gauge, a thin tool for measuring gaps, from logbook pages. Despite constant punishment, Knox-Johnston reported enjoying himself and wrote that doing maintenance cures depression.

Donald Crowhurst, a 35-year-old electronics specialist who desperately needed prize money, built a novel trimaran (a three-hulled sailboat) but departed unready. Wires led nowhere, the anti-capsize system was inoperable, and repair materials were left on the dock. Hatches leaked, bilge pumps failed, and a split opened in a hull float. Realizing the boat could not survive the Southern Ocean, Crowhurst began a fraudulent logbook with fictional positions while secretly remaining in the Atlantic. After months, he became certain he would be exposed. Adrift in the Sargasso Sea, he wrote a delusional treatise culminating in the entry "It is finished / IT IS THE MERCY" (22) before going overboard. Brand argues that poor preparation led to the cheat, and the cheat led to his death.

Bernard Moitessier, the most experienced competitor at 46, represented the most advanced maintenance philosophy. His 39-foot steel ketch Joshua was built for radical simplicity, with mast steps (footholds on the mast) for weekly inspections and heavily reinforced sails. He stripped out the engine, dinghy, anchors, surplus supplies, and radio equipment, shedding a full ton of weight. When a knockdown broke his wind vane, replacing it took 30 seconds; he carried seven spares. Despite leaving England two months after Knox-Johnston, Moitessier sailed faster and was poised to win both awards. But approaching England, he dreaded the fame awaiting him and slingshot a message onto a passing tanker, declaring he would continue to the Pacific Islands because he was "happy at sea" (28).

Knox-Johnston won both the Golden Globe and the £5,000 prize, which he gave to Crowhurst's bereaved family; he was later knighted and continued sailing Suhaili decades later. Moitessier docked in Tahiti after 37,455 miles, still considered the longest recorded nonstop solo sailing voyage. Brand distills three maintenance styles: Knox-Johnston's "Whatever comes, deal with it"; Crowhurst's "Hope for the best," which killed him; and Moitessier's "Prepare for the worst," which freed him.

The book's second major section turns to vehicles and weapons. Brand examines two philosopher-authored books about motorcycle repair: Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Crawford, a political philosopher who ran a vintage motorcycle shop, emphasizes that diagnosis precedes repair. Pirsig, a former philosophy student and technical writer, identifies "gumption traps," situations that destroy the enthusiasm needed to push through frustration. Both argue that mastering maintenance requires understanding how a machine works and how it is made.

Brand traces three competing design philosophies at the dawn of the automobile industry. Electric cars arrived first in the 1890s, offering simplicity and easy upkeep but limited range. Rolls-Royce represented bespoke craftsmanship, with each Silver Ghost handcrafted to run reliably for decades. Henry Ford took the opposite approach with the Model T, using mass production and truly interchangeable parts. The Model T had only 100 standardized parts across all 16.5 million units produced and was designed so anyone could repair and customize it. Brand argues that the power to maintain is the power to improve. A digression traces how interchangeable parts became possible, from English ironmaster John Wilkinson's cannon-boring method in 1774 through decades of government-funded weapons standardization at American armories, a program known as armory practice. These techniques spread to private industry before Ford industrialized precision at unprecedented scale.

Brand surveys the three most popular cars in history, the Model T, Volkswagen Beetle, and Russian Lada, noting they share cheapness, design continuity, and owner repairability. YouTube, he argues, has revolutionized repair; technology futurist Kevin Kelly describes "YouTube plus Amazon" as having "revolutionized repair for the average person" (128-129).

A digression compares the M16 and AK-47 assault rifles as a case study in design for maintenance. During the Vietnam War, the M16 routinely jammed; a congressional investigation found it had been marketed as "self-cleaning" and issued without cleaning kits or appropriate ammunition. The AK-47, designed by wounded Soviet tank veteran Mikhail Kalashnikov, used loose tolerances that let debris clear during firing and disassembled to just six large components. Brand also examines corrosion, estimated to cost $2.5 trillion per year globally. The Statue of Liberty illustrates the consequences of deferral: A century of neglect concealed galvanic corrosion, in which dissimilar metals in contact accelerate each other's decay, until a 1981 investigation found half the iron frame corroded, requiring a $277 million restoration.

The book's longest digression explores how maintenance determines military outcomes. In the 1973 October War, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. Egypt's canal crossing was brilliantly planned, but its forces floundered when they moved beyond the script. Israeli tank crews recovered and repaired half their damaged tanks; Egyptian forces, hampered by a culture discouraging initiative, saw 80 percent of their tanks break down within 10 days. Brand introduces the US Army's concept of "sustainment," the provision of all support necessary to maintain operations until mission completion, and the related "mission command" philosophy, which empowers subordinates to act on a commander's intent without waiting for orders. He traces mission command from Napoleon's Corps system of semi-independent army formations through the Prussian doctrine of Auftragstaktik, or mission-type tactics.

In the 2022 Ukraine war, Russia's invasion stalled partly because of systemic maintenance neglect. Ukraine, transformed since its 2014 defeat, had adopted NATO-style mission command and created noncommissioned officer (NCO) training centers. Ukrainian soldiers learned to operate and repair dozens of foreign weapons systems rapidly, aided by encrypted "telemaintenance" chats with American experts. Ukraine captured over 544 Russian tanks and converted obsolete ones into recovery vehicles. Brand identifies the core lesson: Maintainers are realists, and maintenance prowess is the foundation of adaptivity.

The final major section describes Tesla's disruption of the automobile industry. The all-electric Model S, introduced in 2012, required dramatically less maintenance than combustion vehicles: no oil changes, far fewer moving parts, and 90 to 95 percent energy efficiency versus 30 to 35 percent. Tesla cars improve through overnight software updates. Brand draws on Walter Isaacson's biography to describe Tesla CEO Elon Musk's manufacturing philosophy, which demands questioning every requirement and deleting every dispensable part.

Brand closes with two postscripts. The first traces how Britain's automotive industry collapsed from chronic unreliability, with all major brands eventually purchased by foreign companies and recovering under new ownership. The second reflects on the horse, humanity's primary vehicle for 6,000 years, noting that maintaining a living thing constitutes a relationship with another sentience. Brand wonders whether a future vehicle might one day care back.