One of the great inventions of all time was a device to tie a knot in a piece of twine and thus replace 2 men passing a wire thru a hay bale or several men picking up and tieing grain bundles. with some of the grain stalks. Here is a short video on how it happens in a baler. Now from personal experience I know what happens if the sequence isn't perfect. A bale with 1 string is useless and if the timing is off and the fingers that carry the twine are bent, you have a very expensive object of art on your lawn. I don't expect anyone to build a replacement in their basement, but I do expect you to have some little respect for what our forefathers did and that are now obsolete tech. Yes we would be back to rakes and tieing the bundles with string if tech crashes as something as simple as a knotter, to say nothing of a radio tube, require a vast knowledge of many other fields for both materials and the ways to shape them. Think of the knowledge it takes to mske a pressure cooker, or a good pair of shears or a sewing machine. We do truly live in a world msade by men standing on the shoulders of giants.
I remember when I purchased a used New Holland baler and took it out the first day. Every other bale had a string that did not tie. After reading the manual a few minutes, I found out that there were different types of "knotters". I drove to town and purchased some sissel twine ( I had been using plastic twine}, installed it in the baler and finished baling the field without a miss.
