does technology drive history? from the New Yorker
Prescott Joule, whose findings led to the first law of thermodynamics, spent his honeymoon jury-rigging a thermometer to take a reading at the top and bottom of a waterfall where a lesser man might merely have canoodled. Joseph Henry shredded his wife’s silk petticoat to make insulation for the coil of wire he needed to wrap around an electromagnet.
Thomas Edison didn’t wash, and was convinced that changing his clothes would alter his body’s chemistry, and not in a good way. Nikola Tesla, who developed the first motor for alternating current, had to do everything in multiples of three: twenty-seven laps in the pool, twelve hundred electric lamps for the city of Strasbourg. He was also afraid of earrings, peaches, touching people’s hair, dropping tiny square slips of paper into bowls of liquid, and eating food whose cubic footage he had not been able to estimate at a glance.
The foibles of the eccentric inventor, so often trotted out, have long been cold comfort to the kind of person so mechanically inept and lacking in engineering ingenuity as to suffer countless failures before finally perfecting a method for removing the shrink-wrap on the package from Amazon without destroying the book. (Patent pending, so I can say only this: you might think, as I did before my breakthrough, that it requires the use of your teeth. It does not.) The book is Maury Klein’s “The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America” (Bloomsbury; $29.95), a history of the harnessing and selling of power. The steam engine. The electric motor. The light bulb.
To Klein, the quirkiness of the men who invented modern America, even their shabbiness (Edison called his first two children Dot and Dash, and treated them, on days when he noticed them at all, like pets), is a badge of their genius and the price of our prosperity. Their machines, the engines of our abundance, make us who we are. Klein’s book reads like a fairy tale: one thing is always leading to the next, inevitably, and changing everything, overnight, with the wave of a wand. Edison “conquered the world of electricity,” Klein declares of the day, in September of 1882, when the man known as the Wizard of Menlo Park illuminated the first four hundred electric lights installed in New York City, including twenty-seven in the editorial rooms of the New York Times. Edison flipped the switch himself, from a circuit at the offices of his backer, Drexel, Morgan & Co., at 23 Wall Street, ushering in, as Klein argues, “a new era of technology, and with it changes in lifestyle that separated themselves from the past.” When contemporaries disagree, when technological change looks less than revolutionary to people living through it, as it can, Klein is puzzled and impatient. “In every way satisfactory,” a reporter for the Times ho-hummed, in a column on page 8 of the next day’s paper, expressing appreciation that, although the new electric lamps looked just like the old gas ones, they were brighter, didn’t flicker, and didn’t stink. “The newspapers gave the event surprisingly thin coverage,” Klein complains, “and never fully grasped its significance.” Klein himself rarely fails to reach for the full significance of events. (“Every material achievement that would characterize civilization during the next two centuries began with the possibilities opened by the steam engine,” he writes of James Watt’s invention.) “The Power Makers” is at once grandiloquent and granular. At technical descriptions, Klein excels. In explaining a disadvantage of Edison’s direct current—the greater the current, the bigger the wire needed to conduct it—he offers this nifty illustration: “to light Fifth Avenue from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street, the conductors would have to be as large as a man’s leg.”
If you haven’t given Boyle’s law much thought since the Reagan revolution, reading Klein will reward you with an excellent course in heat, electricity, and magnetism, at very little cost to your composure. That a long-standing tradition argues against the inescapability of our machine destiny is to Klein of very little interest.
In the book’s prologue, he tells the story of a character he has made up, a nine-year-old boy named Ned, who visits the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and marvels at the enormous steam engine on display in Machinery Hall (“He felt so tiny standing before it, yet it seemed not the least threatening”); in the middle of the book, Ned, now twenty-six, travels to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, where he watches electricity at work (“Ned stared wide-eyed at machines washing, wringing, drying, and ironing clothes, baking bread, washing dishes, heating rooms and even whole houses”); and Klein ends his book with Ned, a seventy-two-year-old grandfather, taking his first subway ride, to the World’s Fair in Queens in 1939, and visiting the City of Light (“where night never comes”), a scale model of an electrified, illuminated New York with a twenty-two-foot-high Empire State Building. This device, a Ned’s-eye view of the world, has a gee-whiz, corny charm. It also has crippling limits. Of the war beginning in Europe, in 1939, of the disastrous state of the American economy, “Ned didn’t know what to think.” In Klein’s history—which begins before the American Revolution and ends on the eve of the Second World War—nothing really bad ever happens: no strikes, no Civil War. “Building the World of Tomorrow” was the motto of the 1939 World’s Fair, and it’s Klein’s motto, too. (Unlike Ned, E. B. White, who reported on what he called the fair’s “murky bath of canned reverence,” did have a few thoughts in his head, along with a cold: “When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”)
You can learn a lot about how the magnetic telegraph works in “The Power Makers,” but not that Samuel F. B. Morse was a Northern apologist for slavery who ran for Congress in New York, in 1854, on a platform which held that abolitionism was a foreign Catholic conspiracy aimed at destroying the United States, and who, when the war came, regretted that Lincoln had the advantage of the telegraph against the less well-wired Southern states. (Nine days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had all the telegraph wires connecting Washington to points south severed.) In Klein’s account, Morse enjoys unrivalled success with the telegraph in 1844; finds domestic happiness four years later, when he marries his young, poor, deaf cousin; makes a valedictory trip to Europe to visit Hans Christian Oersted’s laboratory in 1856; gains “both fortune and fame at home and abroad”; and dies “rich and revered in April 1872.”
This stuff might be appealing. But when the sun goes down and the power goes out there’s fairy dust all over the place, glittering in the dark. “To a larger degree than most people care to admit,” Klein writes, “we have become what our technologies made us.” This argument, like Ned’s pre-atomic, wide-eyed wonder at technology and Klein’s celebration of the ingenious and endearingly eccentric “men who invented modern America,” has its own history—a history that, Lewis Mumford once argued, needs to be recovered “if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanized culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations.” The idea that our machines make us who we are can be traced to the eighteenth century. “Man is a toolmaking animal,” Benjamin Franklin said, by way of classifying the species. Enlightenment philosophers believed in a rational universe that operated by deducible laws—a universe that worked like a clock—and thought that new and better ways of making and doing things would lead, one day, to the best of all possible worlds.
The eighteenth century’s magnificent inventions, especially Watt’s steam engine (1769) and Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1793), seemed to bear them out. What was once done by hand could now be done by extraordinary machines, machines that would liberate mankind from toil, machines that words could scarcely describe. In 1829, Jacob Bigelow, Harvard’s Rumford Professor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, published a widely read treatise titled “Elements of Technology,” which popularized the term “technology” in something like its current sense. In 1861, the year that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, telegraph wires reached across the continent. (“May the Union be Perpetual” was the heartbreaking sentiment from California, on the eve of four years of devastating civil war.) The following year, Congress authorized construction of the transcontinental railroad. (The golden spike linking the Eastern and the Western lines was driven into the ground in Utah, in 1869.) When Bigelow delivered an address at M.I.T., in 1865, he marvelled at how the world had changed in the three decades since he had published his “Elements of Technology.” War had torn the United States apart, but trains and telegraphs promised to tie it together again: everywhere, technology was changing everything for the better, saving the Union, making us who we are. To Bigelow’s generation, technology seemed to be driving, and even redeeming, the course of human events. His M.I.T. address reveals something more, too: the close alignment between nineteenth-century Americans’ sense of their manifest destiny to settle the continent and their faith in their machines’ ability to help them do it.
Jacob Bigelow’s faith was not clockwork Deism but mechanical millenarianism. “Next to the influence of Christianity on our moral nature,” he said, technology “has had a leading sway in promoting the progress and happiness of our race.” Awestruck wonder at machine-driven, millennial progress animated the nineteenth century the way the obsession with innovation animates American culture today. It’s what Perry Miller called the “technological sublime.” In prints and paintings, “Progress” was pictured as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Inventors and the people who operated their inventions abounded. (The occupation “engineer” first appeared in the U.S. Census in 1850.) “Men of Progress,” they were called, and “Conquerors of Nature.” The genius of Eli Whitney was said to rival that of Shakespeare. More usually, the triumph of the sciences over the arts was figured as the defeat of the ancients by the moderns: the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamship “a mightier epic” than the Iliad, and any fool could see that James Watt had a thing or two on Cicero. Surely the eccentricities of genius were to be smiled upon. (Klein, who writes of these men with much the same fervor as the head of the Patent Office, practically sighs with relief when their needy wives and children get out of the way of progress: John Fitch, an inventor of the steamboat, marries a woman who “nagged him constantly until Fitch, unaware that his wife was again pregnant, carried out his threat to leave”; Joseph Henry is lucky to find a “quiet, supportive wife who made his home a safe haven.”)
No nineteenth-century inventor was more prolific than Thomas Edison, no career more epic. (Klein assures us that Edison, after the premature death of an unhappy first wife who “found solace in eating,” married a nineteen-year-old girl who dutifully undertook “the difficult task of learning the role of wife to a famous man.”) Edison filed his first patent, for an automatic vote-recording machine, in 1868. When he set up his laboratory at Menlo Park, in 1876, he promised “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” He kept that promise, averaging an almost inconceivable forty patents a year—one every nine days—for a lifetime total of more than a thousand. He filed his patent for the incandescent light bulb in 1879, but 1882, the year he lit up New York, marked his personal best of a hundred and seven. Given the pace and scale of technological change, and the enthusiasm for it, it’s no wonder that, in Edison’s age, the past, the present, and the future seemed to be linked together by an unending chain of machines.
“There is no end to machinery,” the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle wrote in his 1829 essay “Signs of the Times.” Carlyle dubbed those times “the Age of Machinery,” about which he was less than sanguine. The world begins to look like one great machine, “the Machine of Society,” he observed. “Considered merely as a metaphor, all this is well enough,” he went on. “But here, as in so many other cases, the ‘foam hardens itself into a shell,’ and the shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding.” The worship of the mechanical was, to Carlyle, something akin to religious delusion (“our true Deity is Mechanism”), one he compared to seventeenth-century New Englanders’ belief in witchcraft. “Practically considered, our creed is Fatalism; and, free in hand and foot, we are shackled in heart and soul.” We may be blind to those shackles, blinded, as he put it, by a fog as thick as London’s, but we are just as surely “fettered by chains of our own forging.” In 1831, in an essay in the North American Review, an Ohio lawyer named Timothy Walker offered one of many rebuttals to “Signs of the Times.”
Machines not only define us and drive progress, Walker argued; by liberating the ordinary man from drudgery, they make a different kind of living possible. In that sense, they drive democracy. As the century progressed and the speed of change only increased, nearly everyone—critics and boosters, dystopians and utopians, on both sides of the Atlantic—seemed to agree that machines were driving history. “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us,” Thoreau wrote from Walden Pond. The question was no longer whether machines were driving the course of human events but where. Any answer to that question, of course, involved as much prophecy as history. In 1848, John Stuart Mill found it “impossible not to look forward to a vast multiplication and long succession of contrivances for economizing labor and increasing its produce; and to an ever wider diffusion of the use and benefit of those contrivances.” If the coercion of labor was brutal and unrelenting, if the era’s economic development was uneven and unstable—there were several major depressions in the United States between 1819 and 1929—these things, too, seemed only further consequences of technology.
In 1867, Karl Marx argued, “It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made
since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” That was the gloomy version. To Edward Bellamy, the future looked brighter. In “Looking Backward,” Bellamy wrote about a man who fell asleep in May, 1887, and woke up in September, 2000, to find a socialist utopia in which the “labor problem” had been cured “as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise.” By the end of the nineteenth century, machines had become the yardstick by which Americans and Europeans measured the rest of the world, on a scale beginning with barbarity and ending with civilization. If machines make us who we are, the lack of our machines makes other people different from us and, usually, lower down on the scale. Consider James Mill’s “History of British India” (1817). Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) believed that there was no better “index of the degree in which the benefits of civilization are any where enjoyed, than the state of the [society’s] tools and machinery.” The more machines, the higher the degree of civilization. The fact that Mill had never been to India proved no obstacle to his demonstrating, in six volumes, that Indians were stalled near the lowest stage of development, just past barbarism—something that was easily measured by the state of their technology, which suffered from “a great want of ingenuity and completeness in instruments and machinery.”
For years, Mill’s “History” was required reading for British civil servants heading to India, where regular steamboat service began running on the Ganges in 1834; by 1852, news of the second Anglo-Burmese war was sent from Kedgeree to Calcutta along newly erected telegraph lines; in the eighteen-sixties, the British promoted cotton manufacturing and the expansion of the railway—which grew from two hundred miles of track in 1857 to twenty-five thousand miles at the end of the century—when the American Civil War blocked supplies of American cotton. (None of this has a place in Klein’s account. The Civil War doesn’t happen in “The Power Makers,” and neither does the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Klein’s fabled America is an island, unconnected to wars in Europe, unconnected to markets in India, unconnected to almost anything or anyone—with the notable exception of other inventors—outside the United States.) If, in the nineteenth century, the idea that machines make people who they are helped justify imperialism, it played a similar role in the twentieth century, when it influenced modernization theory, a set of ideas that served both as a model for historical change and as a rationale for American foreign-policy intervention in postcolonial states: every society, once on board a train called Progress, makes station stops at Literacy, Urbanization, Capitalism, and Democracy before reaching the end of the line at Prosperity. In short, the proposition that “we have become what our technologies made us” has a long and not always edifying history. Historical narratives in which machines drive history look like this: x machine produces y kind of society. “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist,” Karl Marx wrote, in “The Poverty of Philosophy,” in 1847. Lewis Mumford, in his meditative 1934 “Technics and Civilization,” made this swap: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.” For Klein, Edison flipped the switch on “a new era in American life,” the age of abundance. This logic is usually called “technological determinism,” and is something that Mumford himself, during the course of his career, repudiated and vigorously attacked as “a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development.”
Precise definitions are hard to come by, but in its purest form technological determinism looks a lot like the nineteenth-century idea of progress and holds that machines are the most important force in human history, that they follow a fixed path through set stages, and that they bring about social, political, cultural, and economic change. The printing press led to the scientific revolution. The cotton gin carried slavery to the American West. The automobile drove city dwellers to the suburbs. The Pill gave birth to the sexual revolution. Surgical strikes numbed us to the agony of war. These statements have a ring of truth; they’re useful, insightful, and worth considering. And, at first glance, they’re pleasing: you can picture the steam engine, the clock, the light bulb, the printing press, the cotton gin, the Pill, the automobile. You find yourself silently nodding in agreement. Technology changes our lives all the time, in little ways and big ways, sometimes profoundly, very often for good, and sometimes for very great good. Really, it’s not such a big leap to believe that technology drives change, and drives history. Asked to guess which is the more powerful force in history—gadgets you can tinker with or wispy, diaphanous ideas—most people would put their money on gadgets. And why not? The printing press versus, say, predestination isn’t really a fair fight, unless you’ve got a lot of time to think about it, and to read books—printed on a printing press. In some parts of these United States, daily life is like living in a museum dedicated to the proposition that technology is destiny. But what if x isn’t all that triggers y, or even what mostly does; what if it just looks that way, because we are living y? It’s easy to forget that some of these y’s started long before the x’s, suburbs before automobiles. And none of the x’s tell the whole story; the Pill, while not a small thing, wasn’t everything. Statements like “The light bulb ushered in the age of abundance” employ a grammar suspiciously like that of advertising copy. Viagra will save your marriage. Electronic voting will restore faith in American democracy. The iPod will make you groovy. Technological determinism isn’t so groovy anymore, at least among many historians of technology, who, while granting the enormous importance and influence of technological change, do not generally find it to be deterministic. The American cultural historian Leo Marx once argued that the Second World War represented the high-water mark of technological determinism in the American imagination. The plot of the “historical romance called Progress,” he believed, began to fall apart at Hiroshima and unravelled still more every time modernization theory failed in practice. Since then, the word “progress” has become increasingly freighted, at least among historians of technology.
“Progress: Fact or Illusion?” was the title of a 1996 collection of essays that Marx edited with his colleague Bruce Mazlish. In “A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium” (M.I.T.; $39.95), Robert Friedel tells a story that starts with a plow carving up the earth and ends with Apollo landing on the moon. The idea that “things could be done better” holds his analysis together, but, as he is at pains to clarify, “this is not the same as a faith in progress or the belief that the necessary trajectory of history or human experience was upward.” The subtlety of the distinction between the “idea of progress” and the “culture of improvement” is easily lost. And skepticism about progress can, and nearly always does, go too far. True, the introduction of the railroad to India didn’t destroy the caste system (as Karl Marx predicted it would), and maybe the automobile hasn’t made China suburban, but pacemakers regulate heartbeats, and television (or ICBMs, or, who knows, but something else involving engineers) brought glasnost, and the iPod did make you groovy. Really. But Friedel’s point is important. Measuring an invention only by its eventual effect obscures other possible outcomes and, finally, distorts the historical record. The day in 1977 when my brother got a TRS-80, we thought it was some kind of cross between a television and my sister’s cassette tape recorder; we didn’t shout, “Wow, the information age has arrived!” Even the Tandy Corporation would have been hard-pressed to see that coming. It looks different now, of course; the TRS-80 wasn’t a dead end; it was a big deal. The challenge, in this case, would be to write a history that can explain both what we thought then and what we know now. A method that ignores our it-looks-like-a-television response will make it seem as if the information age were inevitable, headlong, and unstoppable (which might even be true) but will fail to prove it.
That Times writer who, in 1882, called Edison’s illumination of New York “satisfactory” may have had a motive for downplaying the story—slighting the much-puffed Edison, maybe—but it’s more likely that he just didn’t think electric lamps were really all that different from gas ones. And, arguably, at the time, they weren’t. Klein considers this a failure of the reporter’s perception—he “never fully grasped” the event’s significance—and waves it away, while himself writing grandly about the “power revolution” we can see from here, looking backward. But the reason historians often avoid labels like the “power revolution” is that observers like that guy at the Times may have had a point. At the peak of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, only one employee in ten worked in a factory. Also, industrialization happened differently in different places: in the United States, telegraph wires followed paths cut by railroads; in India, the telegraph came first, because British civil servants needed to get word of rebellion more than they needed to travel faster. And, for the whole of the nineteenth century, more Americans spent their days doing housework than doing any other kind of work.
Technology can be sublime, but machines aren’t something that happens to us; they’re something we make. That is, they’re less like meteors that come crashing into our planet (actually, “billiard balls” appears to be the preferred metaphor) than like toddlers (O.K., that one’s mine): sure, they crash into you a lot, and change your life, but they didn’t come out of nowhere and, if you set your mind to it, you can teach them manners before they get to be bigger than you. “The story of the power revolution offers more than an interpretation of the origins of industrial America,” Klein writes. “It suggests another insight into the most elusive riddle of all: What is an American?” Klein’s answer to the question Crèvecoeur famously asked in 1782—“What then is this American, this new man?—is disheartening, to say the least. He is a man whose machines run roughshod. I don’t know about you, but I’d take the toddler over the meteor every time. Setting limits. They say it’s all about setting limits. ♦
Thomas Edison didn’t wash, and was convinced that changing his clothes would alter his body’s chemistry, and not in a good way. Nikola Tesla, who developed the first motor for alternating current, had to do everything in multiples of three: twenty-seven laps in the pool, twelve hundred electric lamps for the city of Strasbourg. He was also afraid of earrings, peaches, touching people’s hair, dropping tiny square slips of paper into bowls of liquid, and eating food whose cubic footage he had not been able to estimate at a glance.
The foibles of the eccentric inventor, so often trotted out, have long been cold comfort to the kind of person so mechanically inept and lacking in engineering ingenuity as to suffer countless failures before finally perfecting a method for removing the shrink-wrap on the package from Amazon without destroying the book. (Patent pending, so I can say only this: you might think, as I did before my breakthrough, that it requires the use of your teeth. It does not.) The book is Maury Klein’s “The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America” (Bloomsbury; $29.95), a history of the harnessing and selling of power. The steam engine. The electric motor. The light bulb.
To Klein, the quirkiness of the men who invented modern America, even their shabbiness (Edison called his first two children Dot and Dash, and treated them, on days when he noticed them at all, like pets), is a badge of their genius and the price of our prosperity. Their machines, the engines of our abundance, make us who we are. Klein’s book reads like a fairy tale: one thing is always leading to the next, inevitably, and changing everything, overnight, with the wave of a wand. Edison “conquered the world of electricity,” Klein declares of the day, in September of 1882, when the man known as the Wizard of Menlo Park illuminated the first four hundred electric lights installed in New York City, including twenty-seven in the editorial rooms of the New York Times. Edison flipped the switch himself, from a circuit at the offices of his backer, Drexel, Morgan & Co., at 23 Wall Street, ushering in, as Klein argues, “a new era of technology, and with it changes in lifestyle that separated themselves from the past.” When contemporaries disagree, when technological change looks less than revolutionary to people living through it, as it can, Klein is puzzled and impatient. “In every way satisfactory,” a reporter for the Times ho-hummed, in a column on page 8 of the next day’s paper, expressing appreciation that, although the new electric lamps looked just like the old gas ones, they were brighter, didn’t flicker, and didn’t stink. “The newspapers gave the event surprisingly thin coverage,” Klein complains, “and never fully grasped its significance.” Klein himself rarely fails to reach for the full significance of events. (“Every material achievement that would characterize civilization during the next two centuries began with the possibilities opened by the steam engine,” he writes of James Watt’s invention.) “The Power Makers” is at once grandiloquent and granular. At technical descriptions, Klein excels. In explaining a disadvantage of Edison’s direct current—the greater the current, the bigger the wire needed to conduct it—he offers this nifty illustration: “to light Fifth Avenue from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street, the conductors would have to be as large as a man’s leg.”
If you haven’t given Boyle’s law much thought since the Reagan revolution, reading Klein will reward you with an excellent course in heat, electricity, and magnetism, at very little cost to your composure. That a long-standing tradition argues against the inescapability of our machine destiny is to Klein of very little interest.
In the book’s prologue, he tells the story of a character he has made up, a nine-year-old boy named Ned, who visits the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and marvels at the enormous steam engine on display in Machinery Hall (“He felt so tiny standing before it, yet it seemed not the least threatening”); in the middle of the book, Ned, now twenty-six, travels to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, where he watches electricity at work (“Ned stared wide-eyed at machines washing, wringing, drying, and ironing clothes, baking bread, washing dishes, heating rooms and even whole houses”); and Klein ends his book with Ned, a seventy-two-year-old grandfather, taking his first subway ride, to the World’s Fair in Queens in 1939, and visiting the City of Light (“where night never comes”), a scale model of an electrified, illuminated New York with a twenty-two-foot-high Empire State Building. This device, a Ned’s-eye view of the world, has a gee-whiz, corny charm. It also has crippling limits. Of the war beginning in Europe, in 1939, of the disastrous state of the American economy, “Ned didn’t know what to think.” In Klein’s history—which begins before the American Revolution and ends on the eve of the Second World War—nothing really bad ever happens: no strikes, no Civil War. “Building the World of Tomorrow” was the motto of the 1939 World’s Fair, and it’s Klein’s motto, too. (Unlike Ned, E. B. White, who reported on what he called the fair’s “murky bath of canned reverence,” did have a few thoughts in his head, along with a cold: “When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”)
You can learn a lot about how the magnetic telegraph works in “The Power Makers,” but not that Samuel F. B. Morse was a Northern apologist for slavery who ran for Congress in New York, in 1854, on a platform which held that abolitionism was a foreign Catholic conspiracy aimed at destroying the United States, and who, when the war came, regretted that Lincoln had the advantage of the telegraph against the less well-wired Southern states. (Nine days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had all the telegraph wires connecting Washington to points south severed.) In Klein’s account, Morse enjoys unrivalled success with the telegraph in 1844; finds domestic happiness four years later, when he marries his young, poor, deaf cousin; makes a valedictory trip to Europe to visit Hans Christian Oersted’s laboratory in 1856; gains “both fortune and fame at home and abroad”; and dies “rich and revered in April 1872.”
This stuff might be appealing. But when the sun goes down and the power goes out there’s fairy dust all over the place, glittering in the dark. “To a larger degree than most people care to admit,” Klein writes, “we have become what our technologies made us.” This argument, like Ned’s pre-atomic, wide-eyed wonder at technology and Klein’s celebration of the ingenious and endearingly eccentric “men who invented modern America,” has its own history—a history that, Lewis Mumford once argued, needs to be recovered “if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanized culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations.” The idea that our machines make us who we are can be traced to the eighteenth century. “Man is a toolmaking animal,” Benjamin Franklin said, by way of classifying the species. Enlightenment philosophers believed in a rational universe that operated by deducible laws—a universe that worked like a clock—and thought that new and better ways of making and doing things would lead, one day, to the best of all possible worlds.
The eighteenth century’s magnificent inventions, especially Watt’s steam engine (1769) and Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1793), seemed to bear them out. What was once done by hand could now be done by extraordinary machines, machines that would liberate mankind from toil, machines that words could scarcely describe. In 1829, Jacob Bigelow, Harvard’s Rumford Professor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, published a widely read treatise titled “Elements of Technology,” which popularized the term “technology” in something like its current sense. In 1861, the year that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, telegraph wires reached across the continent. (“May the Union be Perpetual” was the heartbreaking sentiment from California, on the eve of four years of devastating civil war.) The following year, Congress authorized construction of the transcontinental railroad. (The golden spike linking the Eastern and the Western lines was driven into the ground in Utah, in 1869.) When Bigelow delivered an address at M.I.T., in 1865, he marvelled at how the world had changed in the three decades since he had published his “Elements of Technology.” War had torn the United States apart, but trains and telegraphs promised to tie it together again: everywhere, technology was changing everything for the better, saving the Union, making us who we are. To Bigelow’s generation, technology seemed to be driving, and even redeeming, the course of human events. His M.I.T. address reveals something more, too: the close alignment between nineteenth-century Americans’ sense of their manifest destiny to settle the continent and their faith in their machines’ ability to help them do it.
Jacob Bigelow’s faith was not clockwork Deism but mechanical millenarianism. “Next to the influence of Christianity on our moral nature,” he said, technology “has had a leading sway in promoting the progress and happiness of our race.” Awestruck wonder at machine-driven, millennial progress animated the nineteenth century the way the obsession with innovation animates American culture today. It’s what Perry Miller called the “technological sublime.” In prints and paintings, “Progress” was pictured as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Inventors and the people who operated their inventions abounded. (The occupation “engineer” first appeared in the U.S. Census in 1850.) “Men of Progress,” they were called, and “Conquerors of Nature.” The genius of Eli Whitney was said to rival that of Shakespeare. More usually, the triumph of the sciences over the arts was figured as the defeat of the ancients by the moderns: the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamship “a mightier epic” than the Iliad, and any fool could see that James Watt had a thing or two on Cicero. Surely the eccentricities of genius were to be smiled upon. (Klein, who writes of these men with much the same fervor as the head of the Patent Office, practically sighs with relief when their needy wives and children get out of the way of progress: John Fitch, an inventor of the steamboat, marries a woman who “nagged him constantly until Fitch, unaware that his wife was again pregnant, carried out his threat to leave”; Joseph Henry is lucky to find a “quiet, supportive wife who made his home a safe haven.”)
No nineteenth-century inventor was more prolific than Thomas Edison, no career more epic. (Klein assures us that Edison, after the premature death of an unhappy first wife who “found solace in eating,” married a nineteen-year-old girl who dutifully undertook “the difficult task of learning the role of wife to a famous man.”) Edison filed his first patent, for an automatic vote-recording machine, in 1868. When he set up his laboratory at Menlo Park, in 1876, he promised “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” He kept that promise, averaging an almost inconceivable forty patents a year—one every nine days—for a lifetime total of more than a thousand. He filed his patent for the incandescent light bulb in 1879, but 1882, the year he lit up New York, marked his personal best of a hundred and seven. Given the pace and scale of technological change, and the enthusiasm for it, it’s no wonder that, in Edison’s age, the past, the present, and the future seemed to be linked together by an unending chain of machines.
“There is no end to machinery,” the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle wrote in his 1829 essay “Signs of the Times.” Carlyle dubbed those times “the Age of Machinery,” about which he was less than sanguine. The world begins to look like one great machine, “the Machine of Society,” he observed. “Considered merely as a metaphor, all this is well enough,” he went on. “But here, as in so many other cases, the ‘foam hardens itself into a shell,’ and the shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding.” The worship of the mechanical was, to Carlyle, something akin to religious delusion (“our true Deity is Mechanism”), one he compared to seventeenth-century New Englanders’ belief in witchcraft. “Practically considered, our creed is Fatalism; and, free in hand and foot, we are shackled in heart and soul.” We may be blind to those shackles, blinded, as he put it, by a fog as thick as London’s, but we are just as surely “fettered by chains of our own forging.” In 1831, in an essay in the North American Review, an Ohio lawyer named Timothy Walker offered one of many rebuttals to “Signs of the Times.”
Machines not only define us and drive progress, Walker argued; by liberating the ordinary man from drudgery, they make a different kind of living possible. In that sense, they drive democracy. As the century progressed and the speed of change only increased, nearly everyone—critics and boosters, dystopians and utopians, on both sides of the Atlantic—seemed to agree that machines were driving history. “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us,” Thoreau wrote from Walden Pond. The question was no longer whether machines were driving the course of human events but where. Any answer to that question, of course, involved as much prophecy as history. In 1848, John Stuart Mill found it “impossible not to look forward to a vast multiplication and long succession of contrivances for economizing labor and increasing its produce; and to an ever wider diffusion of the use and benefit of those contrivances.” If the coercion of labor was brutal and unrelenting, if the era’s economic development was uneven and unstable—there were several major depressions in the United States between 1819 and 1929—these things, too, seemed only further consequences of technology.
In 1867, Karl Marx argued, “It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made
since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” That was the gloomy version. To Edward Bellamy, the future looked brighter. In “Looking Backward,” Bellamy wrote about a man who fell asleep in May, 1887, and woke up in September, 2000, to find a socialist utopia in which the “labor problem” had been cured “as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise.” By the end of the nineteenth century, machines had become the yardstick by which Americans and Europeans measured the rest of the world, on a scale beginning with barbarity and ending with civilization. If machines make us who we are, the lack of our machines makes other people different from us and, usually, lower down on the scale. Consider James Mill’s “History of British India” (1817). Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) believed that there was no better “index of the degree in which the benefits of civilization are any where enjoyed, than the state of the [society’s] tools and machinery.” The more machines, the higher the degree of civilization. The fact that Mill had never been to India proved no obstacle to his demonstrating, in six volumes, that Indians were stalled near the lowest stage of development, just past barbarism—something that was easily measured by the state of their technology, which suffered from “a great want of ingenuity and completeness in instruments and machinery.”
For years, Mill’s “History” was required reading for British civil servants heading to India, where regular steamboat service began running on the Ganges in 1834; by 1852, news of the second Anglo-Burmese war was sent from Kedgeree to Calcutta along newly erected telegraph lines; in the eighteen-sixties, the British promoted cotton manufacturing and the expansion of the railway—which grew from two hundred miles of track in 1857 to twenty-five thousand miles at the end of the century—when the American Civil War blocked supplies of American cotton. (None of this has a place in Klein’s account. The Civil War doesn’t happen in “The Power Makers,” and neither does the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Klein’s fabled America is an island, unconnected to wars in Europe, unconnected to markets in India, unconnected to almost anything or anyone—with the notable exception of other inventors—outside the United States.) If, in the nineteenth century, the idea that machines make people who they are helped justify imperialism, it played a similar role in the twentieth century, when it influenced modernization theory, a set of ideas that served both as a model for historical change and as a rationale for American foreign-policy intervention in postcolonial states: every society, once on board a train called Progress, makes station stops at Literacy, Urbanization, Capitalism, and Democracy before reaching the end of the line at Prosperity. In short, the proposition that “we have become what our technologies made us” has a long and not always edifying history. Historical narratives in which machines drive history look like this: x machine produces y kind of society. “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist,” Karl Marx wrote, in “The Poverty of Philosophy,” in 1847. Lewis Mumford, in his meditative 1934 “Technics and Civilization,” made this swap: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.” For Klein, Edison flipped the switch on “a new era in American life,” the age of abundance. This logic is usually called “technological determinism,” and is something that Mumford himself, during the course of his career, repudiated and vigorously attacked as “a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development.”
Precise definitions are hard to come by, but in its purest form technological determinism looks a lot like the nineteenth-century idea of progress and holds that machines are the most important force in human history, that they follow a fixed path through set stages, and that they bring about social, political, cultural, and economic change. The printing press led to the scientific revolution. The cotton gin carried slavery to the American West. The automobile drove city dwellers to the suburbs. The Pill gave birth to the sexual revolution. Surgical strikes numbed us to the agony of war. These statements have a ring of truth; they’re useful, insightful, and worth considering. And, at first glance, they’re pleasing: you can picture the steam engine, the clock, the light bulb, the printing press, the cotton gin, the Pill, the automobile. You find yourself silently nodding in agreement. Technology changes our lives all the time, in little ways and big ways, sometimes profoundly, very often for good, and sometimes for very great good. Really, it’s not such a big leap to believe that technology drives change, and drives history. Asked to guess which is the more powerful force in history—gadgets you can tinker with or wispy, diaphanous ideas—most people would put their money on gadgets. And why not? The printing press versus, say, predestination isn’t really a fair fight, unless you’ve got a lot of time to think about it, and to read books—printed on a printing press. In some parts of these United States, daily life is like living in a museum dedicated to the proposition that technology is destiny. But what if x isn’t all that triggers y, or even what mostly does; what if it just looks that way, because we are living y? It’s easy to forget that some of these y’s started long before the x’s, suburbs before automobiles. And none of the x’s tell the whole story; the Pill, while not a small thing, wasn’t everything. Statements like “The light bulb ushered in the age of abundance” employ a grammar suspiciously like that of advertising copy. Viagra will save your marriage. Electronic voting will restore faith in American democracy. The iPod will make you groovy. Technological determinism isn’t so groovy anymore, at least among many historians of technology, who, while granting the enormous importance and influence of technological change, do not generally find it to be deterministic. The American cultural historian Leo Marx once argued that the Second World War represented the high-water mark of technological determinism in the American imagination. The plot of the “historical romance called Progress,” he believed, began to fall apart at Hiroshima and unravelled still more every time modernization theory failed in practice. Since then, the word “progress” has become increasingly freighted, at least among historians of technology.
“Progress: Fact or Illusion?” was the title of a 1996 collection of essays that Marx edited with his colleague Bruce Mazlish. In “A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium” (M.I.T.; $39.95), Robert Friedel tells a story that starts with a plow carving up the earth and ends with Apollo landing on the moon. The idea that “things could be done better” holds his analysis together, but, as he is at pains to clarify, “this is not the same as a faith in progress or the belief that the necessary trajectory of history or human experience was upward.” The subtlety of the distinction between the “idea of progress” and the “culture of improvement” is easily lost. And skepticism about progress can, and nearly always does, go too far. True, the introduction of the railroad to India didn’t destroy the caste system (as Karl Marx predicted it would), and maybe the automobile hasn’t made China suburban, but pacemakers regulate heartbeats, and television (or ICBMs, or, who knows, but something else involving engineers) brought glasnost, and the iPod did make you groovy. Really. But Friedel’s point is important. Measuring an invention only by its eventual effect obscures other possible outcomes and, finally, distorts the historical record. The day in 1977 when my brother got a TRS-80, we thought it was some kind of cross between a television and my sister’s cassette tape recorder; we didn’t shout, “Wow, the information age has arrived!” Even the Tandy Corporation would have been hard-pressed to see that coming. It looks different now, of course; the TRS-80 wasn’t a dead end; it was a big deal. The challenge, in this case, would be to write a history that can explain both what we thought then and what we know now. A method that ignores our it-looks-like-a-television response will make it seem as if the information age were inevitable, headlong, and unstoppable (which might even be true) but will fail to prove it.
That Times writer who, in 1882, called Edison’s illumination of New York “satisfactory” may have had a motive for downplaying the story—slighting the much-puffed Edison, maybe—but it’s more likely that he just didn’t think electric lamps were really all that different from gas ones. And, arguably, at the time, they weren’t. Klein considers this a failure of the reporter’s perception—he “never fully grasped” the event’s significance—and waves it away, while himself writing grandly about the “power revolution” we can see from here, looking backward. But the reason historians often avoid labels like the “power revolution” is that observers like that guy at the Times may have had a point. At the peak of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, only one employee in ten worked in a factory. Also, industrialization happened differently in different places: in the United States, telegraph wires followed paths cut by railroads; in India, the telegraph came first, because British civil servants needed to get word of rebellion more than they needed to travel faster. And, for the whole of the nineteenth century, more Americans spent their days doing housework than doing any other kind of work.
Technology can be sublime, but machines aren’t something that happens to us; they’re something we make. That is, they’re less like meteors that come crashing into our planet (actually, “billiard balls” appears to be the preferred metaphor) than like toddlers (O.K., that one’s mine): sure, they crash into you a lot, and change your life, but they didn’t come out of nowhere and, if you set your mind to it, you can teach them manners before they get to be bigger than you. “The story of the power revolution offers more than an interpretation of the origins of industrial America,” Klein writes. “It suggests another insight into the most elusive riddle of all: What is an American?” Klein’s answer to the question Crèvecoeur famously asked in 1782—“What then is this American, this new man?—is disheartening, to say the least. He is a man whose machines run roughshod. I don’t know about you, but I’d take the toddler over the meteor every time. Setting limits. They say it’s all about setting limits. ♦
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