Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

Those who had spent their lives in the nineteenth century had worked with forces large enough to give them a sense for the first time in history that they were in possession of power sufficient to profoundly change the conditions of life. But the forces were never sufficiently developed to fulfill the promise they gave. The two great influences at

There is another point to be made about “they,” about those who work in the bureaucratic situation. It has to do with the fact that a bureau, whether a great public agency, a department in a university, or a large corporation, tends to become a world for those inside it. With its special duties, its nice categories, its ordered set of rules, its ri

One of the things you can learn from history is that men have lived with machinery at least as well as, and probably a good deal better than, they have yet learned to live with one another.

The interesting question seems to be whether man, having succeeded after all these years in bringing so much of the natural environment under his control, can now manage the imposing system he has created for the specific purpose of enabling him to manage his natural environment.

It is possible, for instance, that in any very strict sense there is no such thing as an inventor or an invention. To put it another and slightly more persuasive way, the act of invention may simply be making conscious, explicit, and regular what has been done for a considerable time unconsciously or by accident. Bessemer changed his society by dis

The task, or one of the tasks, will be, more specifically, to build machinery that will not just do work, but machinery that will continue to work within the field of natural human responses and sympathy.

Paper may in their eyes become more important than what is written on it.

My study of invention in the nineteenth century leads me to conclude that such expulsion was often one of the most important parts of the formal education of the men who did great things in the technology of that marvelous period. And if it wasn’t school that got them into trouble, it was often enough money, or alcohol, or women, or their own troub

The particular solutions of engineers are on the whole local, limited by time and place and singularity.