Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. ~Thomas CarlyleEarly electric motors, 1885-90.
Amachine is a tool consisting of one or more parts that is constructed to achieve a particular goal. Machines are powered devices, usually mechanically, chemically, thermally or electrically powered, and are frequently motorized. Historically, a device required moving parts to classify as a machine; however, the advent of electronics technology has led to the development of devices without moving parts that are considered machines.
Soonsilence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
Jean Arp; As cited in: Carol Dingle (2000)Memorable Quotations: French Writers of the Past. p. 8.
If you believe thatyou are not amachine, but thatI am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book".
Thefactory of the future will have only two employees, aman and adog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
Warren G. Bennis; As cited in: Mark Fisher (1991)The millionaire's book of quotations. p. 151.
It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine forlabor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which canrebel at times.
Pearl S. Buck; As cited in: Rosalie Maggio (1996)The New Beacon book of quotations by women. p. 424.
Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not anHeroical,Devotional,Philosophical, orMoral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is theAge of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the livingartisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.
When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or agovernment.
Alexander Chase (1966)Perspectives. Cited in: Anna Hart (1988)Expert systems: an introduction for managers. p. 111.
Ablacksmith,Thomas Newcomen, in collaboration with a plumber,John Calley, produced the first commercially successful machine for "raisingwater byfire." Newcomen could not have based his design on prevailing scientific theory,White argued, because his engine relied on the dissolution ofair in steam, and "scientists in his day were not aware that air dissolves inwater." Evidently "the mastery ofsteam power" was a product of empirical science and was "not influenced byGalilean science."
Clifford D. Conner,A People's History of Science (2005) quoting from Lynn White, Jr., "Pumps and Pendula: Galileo and Technology," inGalileo Reappraised ed. Carlo Luigi Golino (1966).
Leaving aside genetic surgery applied humans, I foresee that the coming century will place in our hands two other forms ofbiological technology which are less dangerous but still revolutionary enough to transform the conditions of ourexistence. I count these new technologies as powerful allies in the attack on Bernal's three enemies. I give them the names “biological engineering” and “self-reproducing machinery.” Biological engineering means the artificial synthesis oflivingorganisms designed to fulfil human purposes. Self-reproducing machinery means the imitation of the function and reproduction of a living organism with non-living materials, acomputer-program imitating the function ofDNA and a miniature factory imitating the functions of protein molecules. After we have attained a complete understanding of the principles of organization and development of a simple multicellular organism, both of these avenues of technological exploitation should be open to us.
Freeman Dyson, from 3rd J.D. Bernal Lecture, Birkbeck College London (16 May 1972), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1972), 6. Collected in The Scientist as Rebel (2006), 292. (The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul is the title of a book by J. D Bernal, a scientist who pioneered X-ray crystallography.)
Although it is not, abstractedly speaking, of importance to know who first made a most valuable experiment, or to what individual the community is indebted for theinvention of the most useful machine, yet the sense of mankind has in this, as in several other things, been in direct opposition to frigid reasoning; and we are pleased with a recollection of benefits, and with rendering honour to the memory of those who bestowed them. Were public benefactors to be allowed to pass away like hewers ofwood and drawers of water, without commemoration,genius andenterprise would be deprived of their most coveted distinction, and after-times would lose incentives to that emulation which urges us to cherish and practise what has been worthy of commendation or imitation in our forefathers; and to make their works, which may have served for a light and been useful to the age in which they lived, a guide and a spur to ourselves
Henry Englefield Cited in:Bennet Woodcroft.Brief Biographies of Inventors of Machines for the Manufacture of Textile ... (1863) p. xiv.
It is a medium ofentertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
T.S. Eliot, aboutradio; Cited in: Robert Andrews (1987)The Routledge dictionary of quotations. p. 262.
The greatest task beforecivilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
Another scientific development that we find difficult to absorb into our traditional value system is the new science ofcybernetics: machines that may soon equal or surpass man in original thinking and problem-solving. [...] In the hands of the present establishment there is no doubt that the machine could be used – is being used – to intensify the apparatus of repression and to increase established power. But again, as in the issue ofpopulation control,misuse of science has often obscured the value of science itself. In this case, though perhaps the response may not be quite so hysterical and evasive, we still often have the same unimaginative concentration on theevils of the machine itself, rather than a recognition of its revolutionary significance.
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxuriousleisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfullylobby againstwealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasinginequality. -Stephen Hawking, 2015
We are becoming theservants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us.
Once upon a time we were just plainpeople. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
Ellen Goodman (1978) "The Human Factor,"The Washington Post, January 1987.
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxuriousleisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfullylobby againstwealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasinginequality.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinaryman.
Elbert Hubbard,The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923.
We must ask whether our machine technology makes us proof against all those destructive forces which plaguedRoman society and ultimately wreckedRoman civilization.
Robert Strausz-Hupe,Philadelphia Inquirer (1978).
Lucca: Machines aren't capable ofevil. Humans make them that way.
Mark Kennedy as cited in: Stuart Kantor (2004)Beer, Boxers, Batteries, And Bodily Noises. p. 39.
I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the worldrevolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-orientedsociety to a person-oriented society. When machines andcomputers,profit motives andproperty rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
It is questionable if all the mechanicalinventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of anyhuman being.
John Stuart Mill (1848); As cited in: Colin Renfrew (1972)The Emergence of Civilisation. p. 499.
The preparation for the machine that took place between the tenth and the eighteenthcentury gave it a broad foundation and assured its speedy and universal conquest throughout Western Civilization. But in back of this lay the long development of technics itself: the original exploration of the raw environment, the utilization of objects shaped by nature--shells and stones and animal gut- for tools and utensils: the development of fundamental industrial processes, digging, chipping, hammering, scraping, spinning, drying: the deliberate shaping of specific tools as necessities pressed and as skill increased.
Lewis Mumford,Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. II "Agents of Mechanization," p. 60
The machine itself ... is a human product, and its very abstractions make it more definitely human in one sense than those human arts which on occasion realistically counterfit nature.
Lewis Mumford,Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. 7 "Assimilation of the Machine." p.325
The machine is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression of our desires: it is merely a series of instruments, which we will use in so far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail where they infringe upon it or exist purely to support theadventitious structure of capitalism.
Lewis Mumford,Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. 8 "Orientation," p.365
Looking back over the last thousand years, one can divide the development of the machine and the machine civilization into three successive but over-lapping and interpenetrating phases: eotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic … Speaking in terms of power and characteristic materials, the eotechnic phase is a water-and-wood complex: the paleotechnic phase is a coal-and-wood complex… The dawn-age of our modern technics stretches roughly from the year 1000 to 1750. It did not, of course, come suddenly to an end in the middle of the eighteenth century. A new movement appeared in industrial society which had been gathering headway almost unnoticed from the fifteenth century on: after 1750 industry passed into a new phase, with a different source of power, different materials, different objectives.
Lewis Mumford,Technics and Civilisation (1934), 109.
Ms. Hanley: I believe it was a brilliant piece ofpropaganda, that theSovietsbankrupted themselves pouring resources intorockets and other useless machines...
Cooper: You know, one of those useless machines they used to make was called anMRI, and if we had one of those left thedoctors would have been able to find thecyst in my wife'sbrain, before she died instead of afterwards, and then she would've been the one sitting here, listening to this instead of me. Which would've been a good thing because she was always the ... calmer one.
I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuineleisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.
The realproblem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B.F. Skinner,Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969.
A machine, receiving at distant times and from many hands new combinations andimprovements, and becoming at last of signal benefit to mankind, may be compared to a rivulet, swelled in its course by tributary streams until it rolls along a majestic river, enriching in its progress provinces and kingdoms. In retracing the current, too, from where it mingles with theocean, the pretensions of even ample subsidiary streams are merged in our admiration of the master-flood. But, as we continue to ascend, those waters which, nearer the sea, would have been disregarded as unimportant, begin to rival in magnitude, and divide our attention with, the parent stream; until, at length, on our approaching the fountains of theriver, it appears trickling from the rock, or oozing from among the flowers of the valley. So, also, in developing the rise of a machine, a coarse instrument or a toy may be recognized as the germ of that production of mechanical genius whose power and usefulness have stimulated our curiosity to mark its changes and to trace its origin. The same feelings of reverential gratitude which attached holiness to the spots whence mighty rivers sprung, also clothed with divinity, and raised altars in honor of the saw, the plough, the potter's wheel, and the loom.
Robert Stuart (1829)Historical and descriptive anecdotes of steam-engines, and of their inventors and improvers, Volume 1. Wightman and Cramp. p. 3-4.: As cited inRobert Henry Thurston "The Growth of the Steam-Engine I" inPopular Science Monthly Volume 12, November 1877. p. 15.
It’s possible to imagine a machine that could scoop up material –rocks from theMoon orrocks from asteroids – process them inside and produce just about any product:washing machines or teacups or automobiles or starships. Once such a machine exists it could gather sunlight and materials that it’s sitting on, and produce on call whatever product anybody wants to name, as long as somebody knows how to make it and those instructions can be given to the machine.
Theodore Taylor (1978) as quoted in Nigel Calder, Spaceships of the Mind, Viking Press, New York, 1978; quoted in Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, Landes Bioscience, Georgetown, TX, 2004
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of theuniverse. This idea is not novel. Men have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason; it has been expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old and new. We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians and in many hints and statements of thinkers of the present time. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic — and this we know it is, for certain — then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.
Nikola Tesla "Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency" (February 1892)
The particular ‘desire’ of the Eregion Elves—an ‘allegory’ if you like of a love of machinery, and technical devices—is also symbolised by their specialfriendship with the Dwarves of Moria.
John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R.) Tolkien, from Letter draft to Peter Hastings (manager of a Catholic bookshop in Oxford, who wrote about his enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings) (Sep 1954). In Humphrey Carpenter (ed.) assisted by Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995, 2014), 190, Letter No. 153
Themechanical philosophy is a case of being victimized by metaphor. I chooseDescartes andNewton as excellent examples of metaphysicians of mechanismmalgré eux, that is to say, as unconscious victims of the metaphor ofthe great machine. Together they have founded a church, more powerful than that founded byPeter andPaul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to reallocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy.
Machines do not run in order to enable men tolive, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines.
Simone Weil,Oppression and Liberty (1955), translated by A. Willis and J. Petrie (Routledge: 1958), p. 105
... the construction of machines, the functioning of which he can foresee, constitutes the most spectacular accomplishment of thephysicist. In these machines, thephysicist creates a situation in which all the relevant coordinates are known so that the behavior of the machine can be predicted.Radars andnuclear reactors are examples of such machines.
Never before have people been so infantilized, made so dependent on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massivedivision of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth.
John Zerzan,Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)
