U.S. Flag Day and Material Handling
By Alex Batty, MHI Marketing Communications Coordinator |@mhi_alex
Good morning everyone! It’s Flag Day, the holiday I totally forget until my phone reminds me that it’s an official thing.
Because we take every opportunity to tie material handling into your everyday lives here at MHI, we (I) thought I’d take a whack at Flag Day. It may not happen again next year.
Of course, the first thing I think about when trying to tie material handling to anything is ‘where do they get the stuff to make the stuff?’ So I turned to trusty Google and it led me to How’s It’s Made – Flags.
(Side note: I LOVE HOW IT’S MADE! I’m super into knowing how everything works, so this is like the best show ever. But my dad hates the background music, so I had to be… strategic as to when I watched it growing up. I’m a nerd. This should be obvious by now.)
You can watch the clip, but for those of us who like to skim the transcript, basically what happens is they take a special translucent but super-strong polyester and screen print it. It’s translucent so the design can be seen from both sides. There’s a lot more steps (seriously, watch the video), but then they sew the edges and put a rod in it so it can fly.
The tie-in to material handling? A) Shipping the fabric and dyes and finished products in and out of the factory and B) machinery – you know they’re using forklifts or cranes or any other number of material handling machines to move all that stuff. No body just carries stuff around anymore – it’s not efficient.
As much as we love Betsy Ross’ hand-stitched flag, machinery speeds up the process so that many people can get flags faster. (Also, Betsy Ross seems like a bit of a spitfire if you read the account of the Founding Fathers setting up the contract with her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_Ross_flag. It also sadly brings up debates of the legitimacy of the Ross story, but I’ve had too many American dreams shattered lately, I’m going to hold onto this one until they pull it out of my cold, dead hands.)
But wherever you’re getting your flag, remember, as with all things, material handling got them the goods to make your thing, and then material handling got your thing to you. Let’s put that on a t-shirt.
