Learning Curve

It’s literally a graph that is, um, curve shaped. And it reflects progress made in learning.

For example, it’s about the learning of a little company in 1868 with a new-fangled waffle press style of making 8 horseshoes at a time in a mold, rather than stamping them out manually with a hammer, one by one.

The old way had a marginal cost of 60 cents a shoe to make; the new way was more like a dime or so. But the learning curves were vastly different. In the first case, the old school way of making shoes, the process had few moving parts. There was an anvil. A hammer. And a bunch of hot coals keeping the metal all soft and bendy.

Pounding happened. And the shoe was made.

So the learning curve was steep. It took a worker maybe a week to be able to work at, say, 90% of the efficiency they’d be at in 5 years, when they’d be at 98% efficiency, stamping out 10 shoes a day, or something like that.

Roll the clock forward to The Waffle Shoer. The learning curve is massive. Not only does there need to be a whole system for bringing in 40 times the wood as in the one-shoe shop, but there is all kinds of mechanical circuitry needed, like the creation of the clay and iron mold for the shoes themselves, then the non-melting, pouring mechanism, then literally gallons of molten steel, and finally, powder for the mold so that the steel shoes can be removed easily without chisels and, well, pain.

So in the early days of The Waffle Shoer, the company probably didn’t produce any usable shoes for a week. Then it had maybe 2 days a week it worked, and then produced a decent load of dozens and dozens. Then, after say 6 months, it was at 70% of its maximum capacity as it learned.

And all was good until the smithy put wet wood into the furnace and forgot to clean up the dry hay on the ground. Well, wet wood boils the water inside the fiber, which then explodes, sending out sparks. And, yeah. Bad things happened.

So more learning had to happen, and then, 3 years from inception, The Waffle Shoer was further along the learning curve, cranking out 800 shoes an hour. And now, rather than the old, manual shoer being the best in town...the horseshoe is on the other hoof.