Chapter 1. Introductory Observations, Personal and Otherwise

I was first introduced to the subject of this book thirty-four years ago in the spring of my last year in college. I had at that time gone off to my family’s house in the country to complete the writing of my senior thesis. The house had been built by my great-uncle forty years earlier. He had been a civil engineer who had spent much of his professional life designing and building the bridges that carried the railroads across the Western rivers. In this house, which was itself a very complete expression of his view of things, there were still many evidences of his powerful mind and personality: a file room of his blueprints, pictures of his bridges on the walls, and, in the bookcases, copies of his engineering reports including the study he had made for the federal government (just before his death in 1901) of the feasibility of the various isthmian canal routes.

From one of these bookcases one spring evening I took down in idle curiosity a little volume he had written called The New Epoch. It consisted of a series of papers he had delivered at various times and places in the last decade of the last century. These papers were all an elaboration of a central idea suggested to him, so he said in his preface, while reading his classmate John Fiske’s The Discovery of America. Fiske began his work with a description of what he called the “ethnical periods among prehistoric man,” epochs representing the various conditions of savagery and barbarism that led to civilization. The character of these ethnical periods was determined in large part by the tools available to the men living in the period: fire, bows and arrows, pottery, domesticated animals, ironworking, and the alphabet.

From such considerations my uncle had been led to think that he and his generation had entered a new epoch. All earlier history had been determined by the fact that the capacity of man had always been limited to his own strength and that of the men and animals he could control. 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.” In this little book, in a series of essays on different subjects, the author put down his speculations on the changes—social, economic, political, and intellectual—that would be produced by man’s discovery of the means to manufacture power and to distribute it to do work wherever needed. On these matters he was invariably sensible and often prescient. If in supplying possible solutions for the large problems he foresaw he betrayed, at times, the oversimplifying optimism of the nineteenthcentury engineers who had solved so many problems in their own field, nevertheless his sense of the important issues was virtually unerring. The paths of inquiry he laid out in this little book were in many cases those which in later years attracted the attention of such dissimilar intelligences as Veblen, Whitehead, Schumpeter, and Wiener.

I wish I could say that all this had been clear to me at my first reading of these essays. But I was ill prepared for such speculations at the time. My reading of history in school and college had led me to believe that shape and meaning were given to society primarily by the blunders or adroit maneuvers of men who appeared in public life as generals, senators, prime ministers, foreign secretaries, kings, and ambassadors. The senior thesis on which I was working at the time was a canvass of the intricate ineptitudes both at home and abroad of the Emperor Napoleon III. One of the principal recorders of the imperial difficulties, and one of my primary sources, was Philip Guedalla, whose views of the Industrial Revolution, or the new epoch, paralleled, if they did not determine, my own. Once when he could not avoid taking railroads into account, he had said that “the change was one of those queer achievements of the nineteenth century when little men in black coats produced astonishing results whilst thinking hard all the time about something else.” In the history that I had learned, from the sacking of Rome by Alaric to Bethmann-Hollweg’s piece of paper, there had been small place for little men in black coats.

So the concerns of The New Epoch went largely unattended in the year 1932. Indeed, for some time all I retained from its pages was a statement to the effect that the power generated in a modern steamship in a single voyage across the Atlantic was more than enough to raise from the Nile and set in place every stone of the great Egyptian pyramid.

When I next read it, some seventeen or eighteen years later, I had a considerably greater interest in its subject. In the interval I had done several things that took me somewhat closer to the work of the little men in black coats when they were thinking hard. First, I had written the life of a naval officer whose whole career had been determined by the shift from sail to steam and more particularly by the increasing mechanization of the naval gunnery system. I cannot say that in the writing of this book I had been fully aware of how much that remarkable personal career had been produced simply by a change in the tools the officer used. My interest at the time had been to get at the nature and effect of a particular personality. But, at least unconsciously, I could not avoid taking in some of the more obvious implications of the influence exerted by the changes in the mechanical systems he worked with.

Following this I spent four years editing the letters of Theodore Roosevelt. I came to this task accepting the views of many in my generation that the twenty-sixth President was something of a snake-oil salesman whose hold over the citizens came from the fact that like most of them he tended, as Lincoln Steffens said, to think with his hips. Four years of labor among his papers produced an increase of understanding and a quite astonishing change of judgement. Roosevelt had a matchless sense of the nature of the democratic process as it works out in this republic, and his awareness of the place of the Presidency in that process has been equaled by only two or three of the others who have held this office. In addition, he possessed a very clear insight into the nature of the times. He was the first President to discern the meaning of what he called “the wonderful new conditions of industrial growth” and to state directly the issue of what the society would do with itself in these conditions. In the course of his years in the Presidency he put all the hard questions that were accumulating as the country steadily increased its capacity to manufacture power. He also offered interesting answers and gave it as his opinion again and again that if these answers or better alternatives were not supplied in time, the society would be shaken to pieces by the jolts and shocks produced by the continuous introduction of new energy. He was neither morbid nor depressive, but confronted by the rapid acceleration of the wonderful new conditions in his time, he had left many of the complacent assumptions of the nineteenth century—that things would proceed in good order along the whirring grooves of change— somewhat behind. He believed, in fact, that if great care were not taken in the ordering of the new energies, things would jump the rails.

Work with the letters and papers of this man was a further education. In a time when the number of little men in black coats was steadily increasing, the world was not to be held together simply by things like the Ems Dispatch or the Ostend Manifesto or the renewal of the Re-insurance Treaty. When “the strength of materials, the chemical composition of substances [and] the laws of heat and dynamic energy enter into almost every operation of modern life,” some more informed and solidly based arrangements for the ordering of affairs were necessary. Education in this kind of necessity was extended when I became a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946. It was at that time well on the way to becoming what it now is, one of the great intellectual centers of the new epoch. Virtually all the work done in its buildings—investigation, experiment, and the elaboration of theoretical systems—is directly related to the extended application of old forms of power and the development of means to produce new forms of power. Simply to live and work as an historian in such a place was a liberal education in the nature of the new dispensation. Many of the people there were lineal descendants of the fellows in the black coats who produced astonishing results while thinking hard all the time about something else. But some of them were thinking, too, about the results—it was, after all, shortly after Hiroshima—and it was becoming more natural to consider not only the kind of design that would produce a mechanical system that would do more work but something of the effect of the mechanical system on the conditions of the time. Some of these people—Hawthorne, Soderberg, and Wiesner in engineering, Deutsch, Stratton, and Weisskopf in physics, Maclaurin and Millikan in economics, Bavelas in psychology, Wiener in mathematics and everything else—I got to know early on, worked and talked and, in a way, grew up with. Over the years I obtained from them at least a feeling for some of the conditions of an age that lives by the manufacture of power and some of the contemporary social implications and consequences of such manufacture. This may be an overstatement of the case, or an exaggeration of the dimension of the subject of this book. Perhaps it is fairer to say that from them I at the least began to look at the old materials in my field of history in what was for me a new way and let it go at that.

In any event, some years after I became a member of the faculty of the Institute, I thought it would be interesting to arrange some of these old materials in a new way to see what would come out of it. The thing that at the time was on many of my colleagues’ minds as a new kind of inquiry—the kind of fashionable kick that so often appears to stimulate our intellectual life—was technological innovation, what Schumpeter called “the gale of creative destruction,” or, more simply, what happens when you change the machinery. There are many parts of this process: why change, who changes, what design problems, what capital requirements, what institutional modifications, who gets hurt, who profits? Among the parts there is room for many of the intellectual trainings: physical scientist, engineer, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and political scientist. There might also, it seemed to me, be some place for the historian.

So I took some data with which I was thoroughly familiar, the evidence bearing on the introduction of a new system of gunnery into the United States Navy at the turn of the last century. I had used this material ten years before as part of the biography of the naval officer William S. Sims. It had then been cast in a relatively simple narrative form. This time I tried to organize it to emphasize, without undue distortion, what happened when there were changes in the mechanical systems men worked with. When the evidence was put together in this way, it appeared that there was a rather clearly defined anatomy in the whole process and a set of rather interesting connections between certain causes and effects.

The study, as thus composed, is the first essay in this book. It is also the source or beginning of all the essays that follow. In working on it, I came upon enough matters I could not resolve to my own satisfaction to start me along on further investigations. The subject since that time has remained a sort of subsidiary intellectual concern, taken up now and then from different points of view during the last fifteen years.

Much of the ensuing research and reflection has been spent on four distinct parts of the process: the condition of things at the point of origin of any mechanical change, the character of the primary agents of change, the nature of the resistance to change, and the means to facilitate general accommodation to the changes introduced. Interesting or entertaining things can be found and said on all these matters.

For instance, no man ordinarily can get out very far ahead of the state of the art, or to put it another way, he can’t rise very far above the thresholds of existing knowledge. No intellectual heroism or psychic leap will take you from the development of the wheel immediately to the internal-combustion engine and the automobile. On the other hand, if the state of one art permits a considerable advance, there is not much profit in it unless the state of other related arts supports a general forward movement. The Greeks, for example, had a steam engine which remained a toy and was then forgotten because there was no way for it to do work within the technological surround, no mechanical system to hook it to. Also in Greece, the work that was done was done cheaply by slaves. There is an interesting converse to this proposition: the conditions of the technological surround, if it can inhibit change in a single part, can also foster it in a single part. Years, centuries, of experiment with windmills and waterfalls had produced by the eighteenth century a very sophisticated technology to go with these sources of energy. In some countries impressive linkages to transmit power three and four miles from the water wheels had been developed. All the elaborate machinery needed was a more effective prime mover. Since there wasn’t the steam engine, it became necessary to invent it.

There are a great many other attendant propositions or tentative generalizations. 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 discovering a system for making steel in a way it had been made by accident for generations. Also for generations before Pasteur, European mothers had been pasteurizing when they heated the milk of cows in an effort to get it as warm as their own. Indeed, almost any study of a new invention indicates that for considerable periods of time before the inventor did his work other men were also doing much the same thing.

Whether or not there are inventions it is clear that there are inventors, or at least there is a syndrome, as clearly defined as any neurosis, possessed by men who are said to invent. I once collected evidence on the lives of about thirty of these men who flourished in the nineteenth century. A surprising number turned out to be people with little formal education, who drank a good deal, who were careless with money, and who had trouble with wives or other women. This is also, I suppose, what is now called a good stereotype of the painter or poet. And it is quite probable that the inventor who is also something of an engineer is, like all great engineers, an artist and therefore shares in what is assumed to be the artistic or creative temperament. But there may be a little more to it than that. 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. An Englishman who some years ago made a canvass of the lives of a good many inventors was surprised to find how many of them had worked as telegraphers. He concluded that the nature of this calling—itinerant, odd hours, episodic work loads, essentially lonely, in touch with mechanisms— supplied a kind of rive gauche or revolutionary underground for men not at home with standard operating procedures.

The temptation in the study of these matters historically considered is to proceed by anecdote, for the field is rich in such materials, and then to overload the anecdote with general meaning. Nowhere is the temptation greater than in the area of resistance to change. Through the years I have collected a great many reports and episodes bearing on this subject. The one thing, for instance, which indeed every schoolboy probably does know is that after Richard Arkwright invented the spinning frame in 1769, hostile workmen tried to destroy the machines as rapidly as he could build them. There are literally thousands of such anecdotes; virtually each novelty carries with it its own tale of resistance. The ironworkers at Wyandotte burning down the first industrial laboratory in this country; the men in the vertical chain gangs that passed the buckets of water up the mine shafts in the coal fields of England who destroyed the Newcomen engines that ran the new water pumps; and so forth. Even when the new devices displaced dreadful working conditions, as in these mine shafts, the incidence and persistence of opposition are very great.

At one time the sources of this resistance appeared to me to be the single greatest matter of importance and interest in this whole process, so a good deal is said about it in the pages that follow. It still seems to me a subject deserving more attention and investigation than it has received, since without a full understanding of it no one can make much progress in dealing effectively with the last part of the process—easy general accommodation to the conditions produced by a new piece of machinery. One problem here is that men tend to continue the patterns of behavior developed in earlier conditions into the new, often quite different conditions set forth by the introduction of different mechanisms. There was a teamster I knew who had spent most of his life with horses and maintained the horses after the tractor came to take their place simply so he could take care of them and who then, after the horses had died, spent his time mending the harness for the horses that were not there. There was the mechanic at the milling machine who was kept on after a tape had been developed to guide the working of the machine but who had to be replaced after a time because he could not break himself of the habit of stopping the machine every time he was called away from the job for a short time. From anecdotes like these to modern featherbedding there is plenty of evidence that no one has yet been able to solve the problem of easy and rapid transition, for those immediately concerned, from the old to the new.

Much time is given in these pages to the examination of these topics. In one way all that is offered is a series of exercises devised to extend my own understanding of the various parts of the process. These exercises were continued over a period of six or seven years until it became clear enough that without having gotten to the bottom of the subject, I had gone as far as I could. In part this was simply a matter of diminishing returns; I was picking up information which confirmed what I already knew, which did not much advance my understanding. Much of what I had to say by way of definition and analysis had been said in the first essay on the new system of gunnery; what followed was more classification than revision and search for the more general application of a set of developed ideas than the development of ideas that were new. Furthermore, I began to realize that however useful these exercises might be in defining the process of change as it occurred in the early stages of industrialization, they would not fully serve to increase the understanding in such later stages of industrialization as we now have entered.

It will not escape notice, already no doubt has not escaped notice, that much if not most of my information is derived from the experience of the nineteenth century. It serves therefore more as the substance for illuminating parable than as confirming evidence in a contemporary situation.

For instance, the matter of invention. Throughout much of the nineteenth century inventing seemed to be the work of single men. Its occasion was, therefore, relatively haphazard and appeared often enough to be produced as much by accident as design. Today, on the other hand, we are well along into the refinement of what Whitehead called the greatest invention of the last part of the nineteenth century, the invention of the method of invention. We have pretty well left the point where the most interesting work can be done by single men working all alone. Technical knowledge is at once so specialized and so diffused that the work of one becomes in a way the work of all, which is one way of saying that the virtuosity of the inventor has on the whole given way to systematic research and development.

The refinement of method and increase of system have gone forward for another reason. The accelerating elaboration of technological structures, coupled with the advancing nicety of the fit between science and engineering, has given men much clearer contexts, physical and intellectual, to operate in. What is known in these contexts gives men something to work with; what is definable as not yet there, but necessary or desirable, gives them something to work toward. In the earlier days of more primitive contexts it was difficult to proceed with sufficient control—which sometimes helped. Goodyear was not a very impressive mind or talent. But he developed an obsessive idea that it would be nice to do something with rubber. He therefore did a great many different things with rubber, from freezing it to burying it in the ground, until one day an accident provided him with a happy thought, and he popped the substance on the stove—hence vulcanized rubber. The case of Goodyear is a little too close to turning the monkeys loose on the typewriter to produce, as a statistical probability, Hamlet to be of use, but it does suggest the difference between then and now. The then state of innocence may have increased the chances for the big opportunity, but it also increased the chances of failure and irrelevance in insufficient contexts. It is now possible by study of the limitations and lacunae in existing contexts to develop a rather discrete program of invention or development and to organize the intellectual means to fulfill this program. The difference between then and now is, to a considerable extent, the difference between the way in which Mr. Goodyear went about things in getting vulcanized rubber and the way in which the Bell Laboratories got to the transistor.

For most of the time I have spent in the investigation of the subject of change, concentrating as I was on the events of the nineteenth century, I did not take in even the simple fact of difference between the present and the previous condition. And the possible general implications of this change of condition I did not begin to recognize until four years ago when I was putting together the strange history of the steam vessel Wampanoag which appears in this volume. I cannot say that now I fully understand the meaning of these implications, but I hope I have made some progress in defining the problem.

That problem, in its two parts, seems to me to be as follows. The first part is suggested at least in the concluding pages of my great-uncle’s small book. He says that “in many ways the new epoch must open as an era of destruction. It must from its very nature destroy many of the conditions which give most interest to the history of the past, and many of the traditions which people hold most dear. … There must be a great destruction, both in the physical and in the intellectual world, of old buildings and old boundaries and old monuments and, furthermore, of customs and ideas, systems of thought and methods of education.”

Though he said that the book was not prepared in the spirit of prophecy, he went on to say two prophetic things. Remarking that the new epoch would put an end once and for all to barbarous races by the increase of education necessary to meet the new demands of the time, he discerned that “one of the greatest dangers must come from this very source, when the number of half educated people is greatest, when the world is full of people who do not know enough to recognize their limitations but know too much to follow loyally the direction of better qualified leaders.” Finally he said that “the danger is that the destructive changes will come too fast, and the developments which are to take their place not fast enough. The trouble will lie in the possible gap between the two. The next two or three centuries may have periods of war, insurrection and other trials, which it would be well if the world could avoid.”

He wrote these words at the turn of the century, as possible portents severely qualified by subjunctives and conditionals. His concern over such possibilities was in fact tempered by the confidence if not the complacence shared by those of his generation. Those who had spent their lives in the nineteenth century had worked with forces large enough to give them a sense for the first time in history that they were in possession of power sufficient to profoundly change the conditions of life. But the forces were never sufficiently developed to fulfill the promise they gave. The two great influences at their disposal were steam power and the largescale production of steel. It took the better part of the century to bring these influences to a point where their impact was widely, generally felt. The power these men were dealing with, in other words, was limited; it could produce only limited change, and time was supplied to make useful accommodations to the changes made.

Today, the forces at our command, the energy in the technological structure, give shape to virtually all the conditions of life and a rapidly changing shape since we have developed the means by refining the method of invention to change the shape of the technology almost at will.

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 think of better means of accommodation than that improvised by the old teamster who mended harness after the horses were gone? And not just for the occasional man like him left momentarily technologically unemployed, but for all of us all of the time in a world where radical change is the steady state?

And the second part of the problem is like unto it. The point of invention from the earliest days of fire, iron, and the wheel has always been to give man some additional advantage over the natural environment. For much of his history the advantages obtained were, on the whole, occasional, small-scale, and, at least in the early stages, local in effect. The conditions of the natural environment, though slowly modified, continued to dominate the condition of man. Now this is changing. With our extensive knowledge and sophisticated instruments we can, in some sort, fix stars of our own in their courses and meddle with the number of the days of our years. We are well on the way, in our timeless effort to bring the natural environment under control, to replacing it by an artificial environment of our own contriving. This special environment has a structure, a set of tempos, and a series of dynamic reactions that are not always nicely scaled to human responses. The interesting question seems to be whether man, having succeeded after all these years in bringing so much of the natural environment under his control, can now manage the imposing system he has created for the specific purpose of enabling him to manage his natural environment.

As I have said, I did not begin to think about problems and questions of this kind until a short time ago. My speculations ordinarily were limited to a small sector of the general subject, a sector of perhaps diminishing significance within the whole. I worked slowly out from the events surrounding a change in a six-inch gun mount, through a new development in the dairy industry, to a tentative investigation of the use of computers. Evidence obtained in these studies, as already noted, permitted reflections on such matters as the process and immediate effects of change in specific pieces of machinery, such things as the nature of individual responses to change, the costs of accommodation to change, the impact of change on institutional structure, the means to keep what is now called creativity in formal institutions, and so forth. Such thoughts as I have had on these subjects appear in the essays that follow. Pursuing them over the years I was led to a concern with the larger topic of the character of the new epoch. In the final chapter of this book such tentative conclusions as I have reached on this topic are presented.