Men, Machines, and Modern Times (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS77 the Civil War years will be complete without an acknowledgment to Agriculture and the Civil War. Theodore Saloutos University of California at Los Angeles Men, Machines, and Modern Times. By Elting E. Morison. (Cambridge : M.I.T. Press, 1966. Pp. ix, 235, $5.95.) In this series of essays on a provocative theme, Morison seeks to illustrate what happens when there are changes in the mechanical systems that men work with. Although he is concerned with the process of invention, Morison has little to add to present knowledge on this point. His chief interest, and the subject on which he does best, is in what one might call the entrepreneurial stage of innovation—the time when the invention is introduced to the public, rarely by the inventor himself, but by someone else who has grasped the potentialities of the new machine. The entrepreneurs of invention—whether it be a new method of naval gunnery, a new and superior steamship, a new way of making steel, or a new way to treat milk—are always looked upon as hostile forces by the group upon which they seek to impose the new way of doing things. It is not simply those whose jobs are threatened who look upon invention as an anti-social act—the pasteurization of milk could hardly cause technological unemployment—but it is all of those who in any way identify themselves with the old. What is generally being threatened, so Morison's evidence suggests, is a settled, well-delineated system in which men feel comfortable . The reluctance with which men give up such a system is nowhere better illustrated than in his account of the steamship Wampanoag, a radically different vessel that was introduced into the United States Navy during the Civil War. Despite the demonstrated (and officially recorded ) superiority of the Wampanoag, it was retired from active service by a naval board in 1869, and eventually sold. The naval officers, so Morison says, simply saw the Wampanoag as a destructive energy in their comfortable society—it violated their concept of what a seaman was—and furthermore , even if it were better, there was no need for such a ship. Some may wish to quibble with the broad generalizations that Morison derives from a study that is so heavily concerned with the navy. He explains his preoccupation with the navy by saying that it is like a highly structured society that has been placed under laboratory conditions, relatively isolated from random influences. Under such conditions, the impact of a change can be more clearly discerned, and the dislocations in structure more easily discovered. The careful reader might question whether the same dislocations in structure are likely to occur in the less structured, more flexible society that exists outside the navy. Surely this might limit the range of his generalizations, but before discounting them entirely one should read the anecdote on page forty which has to do with the introduction of the Bessemer process into America. The story explains why the 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY Cambria Company's Pennsylvania farm boys, who had never seen a Bessemer converter, proved to be better workmen than thoroughly-trained British workers who had been imported by Cambria's nine competitors. Again, some might be taken aback when Morison seems almost to agree with the naval officers in the Wampanoag affair [p. 119]; or when, in discussing modern times, he argues for a planned slow-down of the technological process. A machine, he points out, tends to create its own environment and draws men into it; and since a machine is designed to do only a part of what a whole man can do, it tends to wear down the parts of a man not included in the design. The message is simply the familiar one, and I think a truism by now, that with all our mechanical triumphs we have yet to answer the question asked by Thomas Huxley: "What are you going to do with all these things?" in a way that takes satisfactory account of the whole of man, including his inner needs. Although the question remains sound, his answer is no more satisfactory than all the others that...