In my day at Ducati, the factory air was dark and thick with greasy fumes, the tooling was basic, and the workers didn’t need any qualification because each one was trained to endlessly duplicate the same operation. Everything was smeared with grease, from the workbenches to the floor. It was like being at a factory at the dawn of industrialization, as Charles Dickens described it in his books—and quality control was contemporary to Charles Dickens’ time too.