Men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines to express their new bent and interest; and the will-to-order had appeared once more in the monastery and the army and the counting-house before it finally manifested itself in the factory.
Behind all the great material inventions of the last century and a half was not merely a long internal development of technics: there was also a change of mind. Before the new industrial processes could take hold on a great scale, a reorientation of wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary.
All the critical instruments of modern technology—the clock, the printing press, the water-mill, the magnetic compass, the loom, the lathe, gunpowder, paper, to say nothing of mathematics and chemistry and mechanics— existed in other cultures. The Chinese, the Arabs, the Greeks, long before the Northern European, had taken most of the first steps toward the machine. And although the great engineering works of the Cretans, the Egyptians, and the Romans were carried out mainly on an empirical basis, these peoples plainly had an abundance of technical skill at their command. They had machines; but they did not develop "the machine."
Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and moment-to-moment decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles;
he who does not see choice in the development of the machine merely betrays his incapacity to observe cumulative effects until they are bunched together so closely that they seem completely external and impersonal.
The machine itself, however, is a product of human ingenuity and effort: hence to understand the machine is not merely a first step toward re-orienting our civilization: it is also a means toward understanding society and toward knowing ourselves.
The difference between tools and machines lies primarily in the degree of automatism they have reached: the skilled tool-user becomes more accurate and more automatic, in short, more mechanical,
in the seventh century, by a bull of Pope Sabinianus, it was decreed that the bells of the monastery be rung seven times in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as the canonical hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition became necessary.
the legend, as so often happens, is accurate in its implications if not in its facts.
the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.
The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose "product" is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences:
As with the motor car and the airplane, the richer classes first took over the new mechanism and popularized it: partly because they alone could afford it, partly because the new bourgeoisie were the first to discover that, as Franklin later put it, "time is money." To become "as regular as clockwork" was the bourgeois ideal, and to own a watch was for long a definite symbol of success. The increasing tempo of civilization led to a demand for greater power: and in turn power quickened the tempo.
To keep time was once a peculiar attribute of music: it gave industrial value to the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantey of the sailors tugging at a rope.
When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter's night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments.
In the seventeenth century journalism and periodic literature made their appearance: even in dress, following the lead of Venice as fashion-center, people altered styles every year rather than every generation.
no two cultures live conceptually in the same kind of time and space. Space and time, like language itself, are works of art, and like language they help condition and direct practical action.
Because of this separation of time and space, things could appear and disappear suddenly, unaccountably: the dropping of a ship below the horizon no more needed an explanation than the dropping of a demon down the chimney. There was no mystery about the past from which they had emerged, no speculation as to the future toward which they were bound: objects swam into vision and sank out of it with something of the same mystery in which the coming and going of adults affects the experience of young children,
In this symbolic world of space and time everything was either a mystery or a miracle. The connecting link between events was the cosmic and religious order: the true order of space was Heaven, even as the true order of time was Eternity.
Space as a hierarchy of values was replaced by space as a system of magnitudes.
By laying down the invisible lines of latitude and longitude, the cartographers paved the way for later explorers, like Columbus: as with the later scientific method, the abstract system gave rational expectations, even if on the basis of inaccurate knowledge. No longer was it necessary for the navigator to hug the shore line: he could launch out into the unknown, set his course toward an arbitrary point, and return approximately to the place of departure.
as early as 880 Abu 1-Qasim had attempted flight, and in 1065 Oliver of Malmesbury had killed himself in an attempt to soar from a high place: but from the fifteenth century on the desire to conquer the air became a recurrent preoccupation of inventive minds; and it was close enough to popular thought to make the report of a flight from Portugal to Vienna serve as a news hoax in 1709.
the "romanticism of numbers" grew naturally out of this interest. In time-keeping, in trading, in fighting men counted numbers; and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers counted.
Whereas the procedures of science were not refined and codified until after Galileo and Newton, finance had emerged in its present-day dress at the very beginning of the machine age: Jacob Fugger and J. Pierpont Morgan could understand each other's methods and point of view and temperament far better than Paracelsus and Einstein.
Karl Marx well summed up this new process of transmutation: "Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, whether a commodity or not, is convertible into gold.
In time, men were more at home with abstractions than they were with the goods they represented.
The typical operations of finance were the acquisition or the exchange of magnitudes. "Even the day- dreams of the pecuniary day-dreamer," as Veblen observed, "take shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard units of an impersonal magnitude."
"In the Middle Ages," as Emile Male said, "the idea of a thing which a man formed for himself was always more real than the actual thing itself, and we see why these mystical centuries had no conception of what men now call science. The study of things for their own sake held no meaning for the thoughtful man.
The discovery of nature as a whole was the most important part of that era of discovery
Technics perhaps temporarily profited by this exclusion; but in the long run the result was to prove unfortunate. In attempting to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what comes to almost the same thing, to eliminate every part of himself except that which was bent on seizing power.
as soon as the procedure of exploration was definitely outlined in the philosophy and mechanics of the seventeenth centuiy man himself was excluded from the picture. Technics perhaps temporarily profited by this exclusion; but in the long run the result was to prove unfortunate. In attempting to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what comes to almost the same thing, to eliminate every part of himself except that which was bent on seizing power.
Doubtless the notion of the wheel came originally from observing that rolling a log was easier than shoving it: but trees existed for untold years and the trimming of trees had gone on for many thousands, in all likelihood, before some neolithic inventor performed the stunning act of dissociation that made possible the cart.
technics remembers Vaucanson for his loom, rather than for his life-like mechanical duck, which not merely ate food but went through the routine of digestion and excretion.
as for the discipline of the personality it was essentially, during the Middle Ages, the province of the Church, and it had gone farthest, of course, not among the peasants and nobles, still clinging to essentially pagan ways of thought, with which the Church had expediently compromised:
God had created an orderly world, and his Law prevailed in it. His acts were perhaps inscrutable; but they were not capricious: the whole burden of the religious life was to create an attitude of humility toward the ways of God and the world he had created,
It was by reason of the Church's belief in an orderly independent world, as Wliitehead has shown in Science and the Modern World, that the work of science could go on so confidently.
The next step in development, partly made by Descartes himself, was the transfer of order from God to the Machine. For God became in the eighteenth century the Eternal Clockmaker who, having conceived and created and wound up the clock of the universe, had no further responsibility until the machine ultimately broke up—or,
The method of science and technology, in their developed forms, implies a sterilization of the self, an elimination, as far as possible, of the human bias and preference, including the human pleasure in man's own image and the instinctive belief in the immediate presentations of his fantasies. What better preparation could a whole culture have for such an effort than the spread of the monastic system and the multiplication of a host of separate communities, dedicated to the living of a humble and self-abnegating life, under a strict rule?
Here, in the monastery, was a relatively non-animistic, non-organic world: the temptations of the body were minimized in theory and, despite strain and irregularity, often minimized in practice—more often, at all events, than in secular life. The effort to exalt the individual self was suspended in the collective routine.
The spiritual routine of the monastery, if it did not positively favor the machine, at least nullified many of the influences that worked against it. And
The spiritual routine of the monastery, if it did not positively favor the machine, at least nullified many of the influences that worked against it.
those who were truly holy neglected to bathe the body; they chafed their skin in hair shirts, they whipped themselves, they turned their eyes with charitable interest upon the sore and leprous and deformed. Hating the body, the orthodox minds of the Middle Ages were prepared to do it violence. Instead of resenting the machines that could counterfeit this or that action of the body, they could welcome them.
when the dream strides too far ahead of fact, it tends to short-circuit action: the anticipatory subjective pleasure serves as a surrogate for the thought and contrivance and action that might give it a foothold in reality.
Waste of time became for protestant religious preachers, like Richard Baxter, one of the most heinous sins. To spend time in mere sociability, or even in sleep, was reprehensible.
Protestantism rested firmly on the abstractions of print and money. Religion was to be found, not simply in the fellowship of religious spirits, connected historically through the Church and communicating with God through an elaborate ritual: it was to be found in the word itself: the word without its communal background.
Life, in all its sensuous variety and warm delight, was drained out of the Protestant's world of thought: the organic disappeared. Time was real: keep it! Labor was real: exert it! Money was real: save it! Space was real: conquer it! Matter was real: measure it! These were the realities and the imperatives of the middle class philosophy.
is just at the moment of cultural and social dissolution that the mind often works with a freedom and intensity that is not possible when the social pattern is stable and life as a whole is more satisfactory: but the idolum itself had become empty.
is just at the moment of cultural and social dissolution that the mind often works with a freedom and intensity that is not possible when the social pattern is stable and life as a whole is more satisfactory:
By his consistent metaphysical principles and his factual method of research, the physical scientist denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his back upon real experience: he substituted for the body and blood of reality a skeleton of effective abstractions which he could manipulate with appropriate wires and pulleys.
The unwillingness to accept the natural environment as a fixed and final condition of man's existence had always contributed both to his art and his technics: but from the seventeenth century, the attitude became compulsive, and it was to technics that he turned for fulfillment.
invention had become a duty, and the desire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child's delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided by critical discernment: people agreed that inventions were good, whether or not they actually provided benefits,
From the beginning, the practical value of science was uppermost in the minds of its exponents, even in those who single-mindedly pursued abstract truth, and who were as indifferent to its popularization as Gauss and Weber, the scientists who invented the telegraph for their private communication.
the hammer itself had reached its present refinement of shape by the late neolithic period.
the rewards of mining may be sudden, and they may bear little relation, particularly in the early stages of the industry, either to the technical ability of the miner or the amount of labor he has expended. One assiduous prospector may wear out his heart for years without finding a rich seam; a newcomer in the same district may strike luck in the first morning he goes to work. While certain mines, like the salt mines of the Salz-kammergut, have been in existence for centuries, the occupation in general is an unstable one.
Mining was not regarded as a humane art: it was a form of punishment: it combined the terrors of the dungeon with the physical exacerbation of the galley. The actual work of mining, precisely because it was meant to be burdensome, was not improved during the whole of antiquity,
not merely may one say that free labor did not enter the mines until the late Middle Ages; one must also remember that serfdom remained here, in the mines of Scotland for example, a considerable time after it had been abolished in agriculture.
the ores and metals are recalcitrant materials: they evade discovery and they resist treatment.
In the underground passages and galleries of the mine there is nothing to distract the miner: no pretty wench is passing in the field with a basket on her head, whose proud breasts and flanks remind him of his manhood:
The matter is not susceptible to proof: but the logical relations, if not the historical facts, are plain.
in northern mythology, of the gnomes and the hrownies: the cunning little people who know how to use the bellows, the forge, the hammer and the anvil. They, too, live in the depths of the mountains, and there is something a little inhuman about them: they tend to be spiteful and tricky. Shall we set this characterization down to the fear and mistrust of neolithic peoples for those who had mastered the art of working in metals? Perhaps: at all events one notes that in Hindu and Greek mythology the same general judgment prevails as in the North. While Prometheus, who stole the fire from heaven, is a hero, Hephaestus, the blacksmith, is lame and he is the sport and butt of the other gods despite his usefulness.
Sombart calculates that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries German mining earned as much in ten years as trade in the old style was able to accomplish in a hundred.
Though Leonardo wasted much of his valuable time in serving warlike princes and in devising ingenious military weapons, he was still sufficiently under the restraint of humane ideals to draw the line somewhere. He suppressed the invention of the submarine boat because he felt, as he explained in his notebook, it was too satanic to be placed in the hands of unregenerate men.
Gustavus Adolphus had done likewise in Sweden, and in Russia, as early as
"The technique of interchangeable part manufacture," as Usher observes, "was thus established in general outline before the invention of the sewing machine or the harvesting machinery. The new technique was a fundamental condition of the great achievements realized by inventors and manufacturers in those fields."
Each soldier must have the same clothes, the same hat, the same equipment, as every other member of his company: drill made them act as one, discipline made them respond as one, the uniform made them look as one.
With an army of 100,000 soldiers, such as Louis XIV had, the need for uniforms made no small demand upon industry: it ivas in fact the first large-scale demand for absolutely standardized goods. Individual taste, individual judgment, individual needs, other than the dimensions of the body, played no part in this new department of production: the conditions for complete mechanization were present.
An army is a body of pure consumers. As the army grew in size it threw a heavier and heavier burden upon productive enterprise: for the army must be fed and housed and equipped, and it does not, like the other trades, supply any service in return except that of "protection" in times of war.
Mechanized warfare, which contributed so much to every aspect of standardized mass-production, is in fact its great justification.
Fortunately for mankind, the army has usually been the refuge of third-rate minds:
If the soldier's mind went into action as intensely as his body, and if his intellectual discipline were as unremitting as his drill, civilization might easily have been annihilated long ago. Hence the paradox in technics: war stimulates invention, but the army resists it!
the soldier has again and again become the chief victim of his own simplification and short-cuts: in achieving machine-like precision and regularity, he has lost the capacity for intelligent response and adaptation. No wonder that in English to soldier means to withhold efficiency in work.
In the effort to put on a front, the use of adulterations and substitutes became common. Marble was imitated in plaster, gold in gilt, handwork in moulded ornament, glass was used instead of precious stones. The reproduction for mass consumption of substitutes, as in the jewelry of Birmingham, took the place of the slow original creation of genuine handicraft: the systematic cheapening through mass production and inferior materials for the sake of achieving an effect beyond one's means, occurred in ornament long before it was applied to objects of use.
the child's naive interest in moving wheels remains in only faint disguises as a large part of the adult interest in machines: "engines are buckets and shovels dressed up for adults."
In the past, even in Western Europe, men had worked to obtain the standard of living traditional to their place and class: the notion of acquiring money in order to move out of one's class was in fact foreign to the earlier feudal and corporate ideology. When their living became easy, people did not go in for abstract acquisition: they worked less.
when Nature abetted them, they often remained in the idyllic state of the Polynesians or the Homeric Greeks, giving to art, ritual, and sex the best of their energies.
justified by hypocritical promises of plenty to the masses who paid the fiddler without calling the tune.
the machine came into our civilization, not to save man from the servitude to ignoble forms of work, but to make more
it uses inventions, patterns, ideas, in the way that the Gothic builders in England used the occa- sional stones or tiles of the Roman villa in combination with the native flint and in the entirely different forms of a later architecture. If the villa had still been standing and occupied, it could not have been conveniently quarried. It is the death of the original form, or rather, the remaining life in the ruins, that permits the free working over and integration of the elements of other cultures.
neither wind nor water-power could be effectually monopolized—despite many efforts from the thirteenth century on to prohibit small mills and querns, and to establish the custom of grinding at the lord's mill—the source of energy itself was free: once built, the mill added nothing to the cost of production.
eotechnic works. Even in medicine glass has its triumph: the first
eotechnic works. Even in medicine glass has its triumph: the
While the detailed perfection of inventions was, more often than not, the work of skilled workers in the trade, the decisive idea was frequently the work of amateurs. Mechanical inventions broke the caste-lines of industry, even as they were later to threaten the caste-lines of society itself.
Since invention is almost never the sole work of a single inventor, however great a genius he may be, and since it is the product of the successive labors of innumerable men, working at various times and often toward various purposes, it is merely a figure of speech to attribute an invention to a single person: this is a convenient falsehood fostered by a spurious sense of patriotism and by the device of patent monopolies—a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.
As society became more closely co-ordinated on a basis of time, the interruption in its schedules through the irregularity of wind and water was a further defect: the wind-mill was finally defeated in Holland because it could not conform easily to labor regulations.
Nor did the eotechnic period lack time any more than it lacked energy: far from moiling day and night to achieve as much as it did, it enjoyed in Catholic countries about a hundred complete holidays a year.
horticulture in Holland: when food is scarce one does not grow flowers
Since the eotechnic regime had scarcely taken root in England, there was less resistance there to new methods and new processes: the break with the past came more easily, perhaps, because there wan less to break with. England's original backwardness helped to establish her leadership in the paleotechnic phase.
between 1775 and 1875 there was technological backwardness in the most advanced part of technology. If iron was cheap and if power was plentiful, why should the engineer waste his talents attempting to use less of either? By any paleotechnic standard, there was no answer to this question. Much of the iron that the period boasted was dead weight.
the notion of democracy nevertlieless served as a psychological rationalization for machine industry: for the mass production of cheap goods merely carried the principle of democracy on to the material plane,
Religion ceased in large groups to be the opiate of the poor: indeed the mines and the textile mills often lacked even the barest elements of the older Christian culture: and it would be more nearly true to say that opiates became the religion of the poor.
the goal of the struggle was control of the labor market: he sought for power as a bargainer, obtaining a slightly larger share of the costs of production, or, if you will, the profits of sale. But he did not, in general, seek responsible participation as a worker in the business of production: he was not ready to be an autonomous partner in the new collective mechanism,
Under the first system the worker was on his way to being a journeyman; the journeyman, broadened by travel to other centers, and inducted into the mysteries of his craft, was capable, not merely of bargaining with his employer, but of taking his place.
The invention of the necessary devices to ensure regularity and safety, from the air-brake and the vestibule car to the automatic switch and automatic signal system, and the perfection of the system for routing goods and traffic at varying rates of speed and under varying weather conditions from point to point, was one of the superb technical and administrative achievements of the nineteenth century. That there were various curbs on the efficiency of the system as a whole goes without saying: financial piracy, lack of rational planning of industries and cities, failure to achieve unified operation of continental trunk lines. But within the social limitations of the period, the railroad was both the most characteristic and the most efficient form of technics.
Coketown's spoiled and adulterated foods, its shoddy clothes,
William Morris characterized the new steamships, with true insight, as the Cathedrals of the Industrial Age.
The gains in technics are never registered automatically in society: they require equally adroit inventions and adaptations in politics;
one cannot say confidently that a single region, much less our Western Civilization as a whole, has entirely embraced the neotechnic complex: for the necessary social institutions and the explicit social purposes requisite even for complete technological fulfillment are lacking. The gains in technics are never registered automatically in society: they require equally adroit inventions and adaptations in politics;
in the visible chaos of Victorian society Newlands' original formulation of the periodic table as the Law of Octaves was rejected, not because it was insufficient, but because Nature was deemed unlikely to arrange the elements in such a regular horizontal and vertical pattern.
In the neotechnic phase, the main initiative comes, not from the ingenious inventor, but from the scientist who establishes the general law: the invention is a derivative product. It was Henry who in essentials invented the telegraph, not Morse; it was Faraday who invented the dynamo, not Siemens; it was Oersted who invented the electric motor, not Jacobi; it was Clerk-Maxwell and Hertz who invented the radio telegraph, not Marconi and De Forest.
Out of this habit grew a new phenomenon: deliberate and systematic invention. Here was a new material: problem—find a new use for it.
Out of this habit grew a new phenomenon: deliberate and systematic invention. Here was a new material: problem—find a new use for it. Or here was a necessary utility: problem—find the theoretic formula which would permit it to be produced.
Louis Pasteur, was stirred to bacteriological research by the predicament of the vintners, brewers, and silkworm growers, the fact was that a liberated scientific curiosity might at any moment prove as valuable as the most factual pragmatic research.
this freedom, this remoteness, this contemplative isolation, so foreign to the push of practical success and the lure of immediate applications, began to fill up a general reservoir of ideas, which flowed over, as if by gravity, into practical affairs.
though science had been impelled, from the beginning, by practical needs and by the desire for magical controls. quite as much perhaps as by the will-to-order, it came during the nineteenth century to act as a counterweight to the passionate desire to reduce all existence to terms of immediate profit and success.
The scientists of the first order, a Faraday, a Clerk-Maxwell, a Gibbs, were untouched by pragmatic sanctions: for them science existed, as the arts exist, not simply as a means of exploiting nature, but as a mode of life: good for the states of mind they produce as well as for the external conditions they change.
In the interpretation and application of science a new group of men appeared, or rather, an old profession took on new importance. Intermediate between the industrialist, the common workman, and the scientific investigator came the engineer.
The establishment of the class of engineers in its proper characteristics is the more important because this class will, without doubt, constitute the direct and necessary instrument of coalition between men of science and industrialists by which alone the new social order can commence."
the pattern of the transportation lines remained what it had been in the past. All the mistakes that had been made in the railroad building period were made again with this new type of locomotive. Main highways cut through the center of towns, despite the congestion, the friction, the noise, and the dangers that attended this old paleotechnic practice. Treating the motor car solely as a mechanical object, its introducers made no attempt to introduce appropriate utilities which would realize its potential benefits.
Cheapness and quantity production, combined with the extravagant re-building of old-fashioned highway systems—^with here and there honorable exceptions, as in New Jersey, Michigan and Westchester County, New York—have only increased the inefficiency of motor cars in use. The losses from congestion, both in the crowded and hopelessly entangled metropolises, and along the roads by means of which people attempt to escape the cities on holidays, are incalculably large in countries which, like the United States and England, have taken over the motor car most heedlessly and complacently.
the breadth and too-frequent repetition of personal intercourse may be socially inefficient is already plain through the abuse of the telephone: a dozen five minute conversations can frequently be reduced in essentials to a dozen notes whose reading, writing, and answering takes less time and effort and nervous energy than the more personal calls. With the telephone the flow of interest and attention, instead of being self-directed, is at the mercy of any strange person who seeks to divert it to his own purposes.
The lifting of restrictions upon close human intercourse has
thus the introduction of anesthetics increased fatalities from superfluous operations. The lifting of restrictions upon close human intercourse has been, in its first stages, as dangerous as the flow of populations into new lands: it has increased the areas of friction. Similarly, it has mobilized and hastened mass-reactions, like those which occur on the eve of a war, and it has increased the dangers of international conflict.
Perhaps the greatest social effect of radio-communication, so far, has been a political one: the restoration of direct contact between the leader and the group. Plato defined the limits of the size of a city as the number of people who could hear the voice of a single orator: today those limits do not define a city but a civilization.
At the present moment, as with so many other neotechnic benefits, the dangers of the radio and the talking picture seem greater than the benefits. As with all instruments of multiplication the critical question is as to the function and quality of the object one is multiplying.
The photograph, to begin with, served as an independent objective check upon observation. The value of a scientific experiment lies partly in the fact that it is repeatable and thus verifiable by independent observers: but in the case of astronomical observations, for example, the slowness and fallibility of the eye can be supplemented by the camera, and the photograph gives the effect of repetition to what was, perhaps, a unique event, never to be observed again.
the camera gives an almost instantaneous cross-section of history—arresting images in their flight through time. In the case of architecture this mechanical copying on paper led to unfortunately similar artifices in actual buildings,
history is non-repeatable, and the only thing that can be rescued from history is the note that one takes and preserves at some moment of its evolution. To divorce an object from its integral time-sequence is to rob it of its complete meaning, although it makes it possible to grasp spatial relations which may otherwise defy observation.
In a world of flux and change, the camera gave a means of combating the ordinary processes of deterioration and decay, not by "restoration" or "reproduction" but by holding in convenient form the lean image of men, places, buildings, landscapes: thus serving as an extension of the collective memory.