It is possible, if one sets aside the long-run social benefits, to look upon invention as a hostile act—a dislocation of existing schemes, a way of disturbing the comfortable bourgeois routines and calculations, a means of discharging the restlessness with arrangements and standards that arbitrarily limit.

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

What these officers were saying was that the Wampanoag was a destructive energy in their society. Setting the extraordinary force of her engines against the weight of their way of life, they had a sudden insight into the nature of machinery. They perceived that a machine, any machine, if left to itself, tends to establish its own conditions, to

But our mechanical triumph may have produced a mechanical atmosphere we can’t stand. So we may have reached a point where the design of our technology must take into greater account our interior needs.

The basic elements, the gun, gear, and sight, were put in the environment by other men, men interested in designing machinery to serve different purposes or simply interested in the instruments themselves.

All our economic and social arrangements—how we feel about what we do, which is all that culture is—are founded upon the way our industrial energy is organized.

But, beginning with the nineteenth century, the situation had change. “His capacity is no longer so limited; man has now learned to manufacture power and with the manufacture of power a new epoch began.”

Societies have not been very successful in reforming themselves, accommodating to change, without pain and conflict.

First stage: At first, there was no response.