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

These elements were brought into successful combination by minds not interested in the instruments for themselves but in what they could do with them. These minds were, to be sure, interested in good gunnery, overtly and consciously. They may also, not so consciously, have been interested in the implied revolt that is present in the support of all

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.

And this leads me to the second thing that occurs to the mind when it is exposed to the word bureaucracy and that is “red tape,” or what in more dignified terms is called “regulations.”

First stage: At first, there was no response.

So the first part of the problem appears to be whether we can now in fact discover the means to close the gap between the changes that destroy the old, which was not bad but is not, in the new dispensation, good and useful, and the developments which are to take the place of the old, but which do not take place fast enough. Put another way, can we

It is a remarkable fact that a central failure in our industrial society is still, after all these years, the way human beings have to make things in industry.

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

Since one of the distorting by-products of technology is the collapse of human time, we could find ways to retard tempos to permit normal responses and accommodations.

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