My aim through these photographs is to pay tribute to manual work, in its various forms: from unskilled manufacturing to refined craftsmanship, with a range of levels of skills and training in between. The end product of this work might be moving or storing materials, or an exquisitely decorated artefact. All this is achieved by using the right machinery or tools; as an integral part of many forms of manual work, they inevitably feature in several images here. Mechanization is a result of the industrial era. Far from taking away job opportunities, it helped raise the quality of work; it was the product of the intellectual work of engineers. All these photographs represent the era that preceded the advent of Information Technology. They describe how the world managed to get by without the help of computers.