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495 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1934
Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it. A generalized time-consciousness accompanied the wider use of clocks: dissociating time from organic sequences, it became easier for the men of the Renascence to indulge the fantasy of reviving the classic past or of reliving the splendors of antique Roman civilization: the cult of history, appearing first in daily ritual, finally abstracted itself as a special discipline. 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.
The specific triumph of the technical imagination rested on the ability to dissociate lifting power from the arm and create a crane: to dissociate work from the action of men and animals and create the water-mill: to dissociate light from the cumbustion of wood and oil and create the electric lamp. For thousands of years animism had stood in the way of this development; for it had concealed the entire face of nature behind a scrawl of human forms: even the stars were grouped together in the living figures of Castor and Pollux or the Bull on the faintest points of resemblance. Life, not content with its own province, had flowed incontinently into stones, rivers, stars, and all the natural elements: the external environment, because it was so immediately part of man, remained capricious, mischievous, a reflection of his own disordered urges and fears.
a succession of military leaders came from the religious orders, while the leader of the order that exemplified the ideals of the Counter-Reformation began his life as a soldier. One of the first experimenta scientists, Roger Bacon, was a monk; so, again, was Michael Stifel, who in 1544 widened the use of symbols in algebraic equations; the monks stood high in the roll of mechanics and inventors. 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 unlike the similar discipline of the Buddhists, that of the Western monks gave rise to more fertile and complex kinds of machinery than prayer wheels.
Certainly the part played by toys and non-utilitarian instruments in fostering important inventions cannot be lightly ignored. The first "use" of the steam engine, as suggested by Hero, was to create magical effects in the temple to awe the populace: and steam appears as an agent of work in the tenth century, when used by Sylvester II to operate an organ. The helicopter was invented as a toy in 1796. Not merely did moving images first appear as a toy in the phenakistoscope, but the magic lantern, which was utilized in the eventual production of these images, was a seventeenth century toy attributed to Athanasius Kircher. The gyroscope existed as a toy before it was used seriously as a stabilization device; and the success of toy airplanes in the seventies helped renew interest in the possibilities of flight. The origin of the telephone and the phonograph is to be found in playful automata; while the most powerful engines of the seventeenth cen-tury, the water-wheels at Marly, were constructed to pump water into the great fountains at Versailles. Even the desire for speed in travel first appeared in a playful form before it was embodied in the rail-road and the motor car: the proménade aérienne our present scenic railway-appeared before either of the utilitarian devices.
The economic gain due to water transport has been calculated for us by Adam Smith: "A broad-wheeled wagon," he observes in The Wealth of Nations, "at-tended by two men and drawn by eight horses, in about six weeks' time carries and brings back between London and Edinburgh near four ton weight of goods. In about the same time a ship navigated by six or eight men, and sailing between the ports of London and Leith, frequently carries and brings back two hundred ton weight of goods. Six or eight men, therefore, by the help of water carriage, can carry and bring back in the same time the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh, as 50 broad-wheeled waggons, attended by a hundred men, and drawn by 400 horses."
In the name of progress, the limited but balanced economy of the Hindu village, with its local potter, its local spinners and weavers, its local smith, was overthrown for the sake of providing a market for the potteries of the Five Towns and the textiles of Ma chester and the superfluous hardware of Birmingham. The rest was impoverished villages in India, hideous and destitute towns England, and a great wastage in tonnage and man-power in plyin the oceans between: but at all events a victory for progress.
Life was judged by the extent to which it ministered to progress, progress was not judged by the extent to which it ministered to life. The last possibility would have been fatal to admit: it would have transported the problem from the cosmic plane to a human one. What paleotect dared ask himself whether labor-saving, money-grubbing, power-acquiring, space-annihilating, thing-producing de-vices were in fact producing an equivalent expansion and enrichment of life? That question would have been the ultimate heresy. The men who asked it, the Ruskins, the Nietzsches, the Melvilles, were in fact treated as heretics and cast out of this society: in more than one case, they were condemned to an exacerbating solitude that reached the limit of madness.
bellicose, money-centred, life-curbing, we con-tinue to worship the twin deities, Mammon and Moloch, to say noth-ing of more abysmally savage tribal gods
The paleotechnic period, we have noted, was marked by the reckless waste of resources. Hot in the pursuit of immediate profits, the new exploiters gave no heed to the environment around them, nor to the further consequences of their actions on the morrow. "What had posterity done for them?" In their haste, they over-reached themselves: they threw money into the rivers, let it escape in smoke in the air, handicapped themselves with their own litter and filth, pre-maturely exhausted the agricultural lands upon which they depended for food and fabrics.
Against all these wastes the neotechnic phase, with its richer chemical and biological knowledge, sets its face. It tends to replace the reckless mining habits of the earlier period with a thrifty and conservative use of the natural environment. Concretely, the conservation and utilization of scrap-metals and scrap-rubber and slag mean a tidying up of the landscape: the end of the paleotechnic middens. Electricity itself aids in this transformation. The smoke pall of paleotechnic industry begins to lift: with electricity the clear sky and the clean waters of the eotechnic phase come back again: the water that runs through the immaculate disks of the turbine, unlike the water filled with the washings of the coal seams or the refuse ofthe old chemical factories, is just as pure when it emerges. Hydro electricity, moreover, gives rise to geotechnics: forest cover prote tion, stream control, the building of reservoirs and power dams.
Vacuum pumps driven by electric motors are forced into American households for the purpose of cleaning an obsolete form of floor covering, the carpet or the rug, whose appropriateness for use in interiors, if it did not disappear with the caravans where it originated, certainly passed out of existence with rubber heels and steam-heated houses. To count such pathetic examples of waste to the credit of the machine is like counting the rise in the number of constipation remedies a proof of the benefits of leisure.