The Origins of the Machine Age
The growth of the machine has tended to create a single world-society, explains Patrick Gordon Walker.
The whole world has been caught up in the toils of the machine. Practically everywhere mankind is wrestling with the machine, seeking in one way or another to master it and to solve the social, psychological and economic problems that this creator of unprecedented wealth brings in its train. Because we see the machine reshaping society and changing men’s habits and ways of life, we are apt to conclude that the machine is, so to speak, an autonomous force that determines the social superstructure. This was the great hypothesis of Karl Marx.
In fact, things happened the other way round. One proof of this is that the factory came into existence before the machine. The very word ‘manufacture’ means literally ‘making by hand’. The first factories, great and small, employed hand workers and had no machines. Let me give one example: Jack of Newbury, the most famous clothier in sixteenth-century England, gathered two hundred looms into a single large room tended by two hundred weavers; in another room one hundred women carded the wool.
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