Military organizations are societies built around and upon the prevailing weapons systems. Intuitively and quite correctly the military man feels that a change in weapon portends a change in the arrangements of his society.

To a man raised in sail, a sail on an armored cruiser propelled through the water at 14 knots by a steam turbine was a cheering sight to see.

This was the second stage—the attempt to meet Sims’s claims by logical, rational rebuttal.

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 essential idea for change occurred in part by chance but in an environment that contained all the essential elements for change and to a mind prepared to recognize the possibility of change.

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.”

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 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.

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