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CHAPTER 17

Toolmakers Take Command

Science and engineering had begun to find common ground by the turn of the twentieth century, and engineers now took command in trans- forming the socio-industrial landscape on a global scale. Several para- digmatic industries—the automobile, electrification, aviation, domes- tic technologies, and entertainment—illustrate how the network of technical innovation and its social consequences formed intricate and interlocked systems that spread across the world from their North American and European roots to transform utterly how people live. Together, those industries form major components of the infrastruc- tures of virtually all twenty-first century societies. Electrical devices, which were nonexistent prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth cen- tury, are now integrated into every need and activity from heat and light to communications, transportation, and entertainment. Aviation has made the world functionally smaller and has effected global intercon- nections, while the automobile industry has led to extensive migration shifts by facilitating suburban sprawl and a mobile lifestyle. The house- hold has been transformed, and today some people amuse themselves splendidly with on-demand movies, music, radio, TV, the Internet, and video games. Industrial civilization has come a long way since the early steam engine and the railroad. While it has vastly improved the qual- ity of life for many—but far from all—of the world’s peoples, the merger of science and technology has displayed a dark and deadly side, notably in the industrialization of warfare.

“See the USA in Your Chevrolet”

The steam engine remained the prime mover in industry and in trans- portation systems—railroads and steamships—to the end of the nine- teenth century. Then, with the development of effective diesel and gaso- line internal-combustion engines by German engineers a new prime mover appeared that, mated to the wagon and the plow, created the

automobile and the tractor, supplanting the omnipresent horse. Cars powered by internal-combustion engines were first developed in the 1880s, and the “horseless carriage” began to make a public impact. Auto sales in the United States in 1900 reached 4,000. By 1911, 600,000 automobiles puttered along on U.S. roads. By 1915, that number had risen to 895,000, and by 1927 it had soared to 3.7 million. Some of the early automobiles were electric or steam-driven, but the internal- combustion engine soon won out as the most successful power source.

In more heroic versions of the history of American technology, Henry Ford (1863–1947) stands as a lone visionary personally responsible for the creation of the automobile industry in America. A self-trained mechanic with a lifelong disdain of experts with university degrees, Ford built his first automobile in 1893, and a decade later he founded the Ford Motor Company. He intended to produce “the car for the great multitude,” and to do so he had to harmonize mass production with mass consumption. Ford was not the first manufacturer to use interchangeable parts or to run an assembly line, but in his quest to produce an inexpensive and standardized product he perfected assem- bly-line production techniques. The results proved dramatic. In 1908, before he introduced the assembly line, Ford made 10,607 Model Ts— the “Tin Lizzie”—which he sold for $850 each. He shifted to an assem- bly line in 1913, and production quickly rose to 300,000 cars a year. In 1916 he sold 730,041 Model Ts for $360 each, and in 1924 he pro- duced two million of the cars retailing at $290 each. A total of fifteen million Model Ts rolled out of Ford plants before production ceased in 1927. Prior to Ford, it took over twelve hours to assemble a car. By contrast, his first assembly line turned out a Model T every 93 minutes, and by 1927 Ford was making a Model T every 24 seconds! The Ford Motor Company became not only the world’s largest automobile man- ufacturer but the world’s largest industrial enterprise.

Ford indeed created a car for the masses. By the 1920s the automo- bile was no longer an esoteric toy for enthusiasts or for the rich and idle but was well on its way to becoming a necessity in industrialized societies and a mainstay of the modern global economy. In less than a century the automobile industry resulted in a significant portion of the American landscape being covered with paved roads. The model of mass production and mass consumption originated by Ford with the Model T would come to be applied to many other “necessities” of mod- ern life.

It is too easy to see Ford as the heroic inventor singlehandedly chang- ing the landscape of American industry and culture. Our understand- ing of his accomplishment is enriched if we think of him, rather, as a system builder who orchestrated the efforts of thousands of others and who oversaw the creation of a diverse and self-sustaining technologi- cal conglomeration. Within his own company, Ford headed a sizable team of talented and enthusiastic young engineers, foundrymen, and

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toolmakers to bring his first assembly line together. (Other companies quickly hired some of them away.) He also created an elaborate orga- nizational structure to secure materials, assemble cars, and then mar- ket them, and the automobile industry provides a clear example of what historians of technology mean when they speak of a technological sys- tem. A piece of technology does not exist in a social vacuum but is con- nected with makers, users, and other technologies in often complex ways. The automobile itself can be thought of as a technological sys- tem, one composed of thousands of parts that integrate fuel, an engine, transmission and power train, brakes, suspension, lights and electrical subsystems, to name only some of the major components. The inven- tion of the electric starter in 1912 and the introduction of balloon tires in 1921 were innovations that significantly improved the automobile, considered as a collection of subsystems. The starter replaced the hand crank and, incidentally, brought women into the automobile market.

Be it noted that the administration and management of technology represent essential, if intangible, aspects of the many new technologi- cal systems that arose in the twentieth century. Frederick Winslow Tay- lor (1856–1915) pioneered “scientific management” in the early years of the century, and his principles of efficiency and the rational analysis of manufacture became universally adopted in the business and tech- nology sectors. Indeed, the great technological achievements of the cen- tury, such as Henry Ford’s assembly line or NASA’s moon voyages, were as much managerial triumphs as they were purely technological ones. Today, technology management has become an integral element of tech- nological innovation and development.

Technological systems were not wholly imposed from above but de-

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Fig. 17.1. The assembly line. Improved by Henry Ford, the assembly line greatly increased produc- tion. The case of the auto- mobile illustrates well the nature of a technological system that must combine many subsystems.

veloped dynamically as users adopted and adapted new technologies and as feedback loops operated between and among whole classes of agents to shape technological systems. Those groups include manufac- turers, distributors, salespeople, actual users, people who can be iden- tified as modifiers and maintainers of systems, and categories of non- users who opt out of a technology or who are technologically excluded. Down on the American farm, farmers transformed Ford cars into trac- tors and farm machinery before Ford itself made and sold them, and housewives on party lines battled the phone company’s version of what they should be doing.

Another aspect of the automobile-as-technological-system emerges in focusing on manufacturing methods. Multifaceted production mech- anisms had to come into place before the automobile could become a significant piece of technology in American life. The Ford factories at Highland Park and River Rouge, for example, became vast industrial sites that grouped together several subsidiary plants to service the main assembly lines, including a coking plant, a foundry, a steel plant, and a cement plant. Ford had his own coal mines, glass factories, rubber plantations, ships, and railroads. Labor comprised a key feature of this intricate manufacturing operation, and Ford gained fame for dramat- ically increasing the wages of his factory workers. While the prevailing rate was eleven dollars a week, Ford announced that he would pay workers five dollars a day for an eight-hour day. Otherwise no friend of organized labor, Ford took this bold step primarily in an effort to create a stable workforce, but it had the effect that Ford factory work- ers could now be buyers of the very products they made.

Cars and car factories themselves form part of an even larger net- work of related technologies and social practices required for an effec- tive technological system. Automobile manufacture incorporated cer- tain traditional techniques like metal working, glass making, and the use of pumps. But the automobile industry also fostered technical inno- vations—the balloon tire, the carburetor, sealed-beam headlights, and, as an ancillary technology, timed traffic signals. And, around all of these subsidiary industries interwoven networks of technical and social enter- prises formed and flourished. For example, cars run on gasoline, so the explosive growth of the automobile industry both occasioned and would have been impossible without an equally massive expansion of the oil industry and improved techniques of “cracking” crude oil to make gasoline. The local gas station thus became an essential element in the larger technological system, as did garages, repair shops, and replacement auto parts. The same point can be made about the neces- sity of reliable roads and road systems, traffic signs, driving conven- tions, and auto insurance, all of which entailed government control and ownership through public works and the bureaucracies of state motor vehicle departments. Similarly, without auto dealerships and advertis- ing the automobile industry would be very different, to say the least.

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Along these lines, the car loan, introduced in 1915, and the “trade-in” were marketing innovations that, along with the car lease today, con- tinue to play a large role in keeping the system going. More than any other technology, mass-produced automobiles defined the culture of the twentieth century and today. Automobile manufacture has spurred in- dustrialization around the world, and from creating suburbia to trans- forming the sex lives of adolescent drivers, the social repercussions of the technological system of the automobile have been and continue to be immense.

The automobile today is a wonder of technology and an icon of industrial civilization. The complexity of cars as assemblages of tech- nology is often taken for granted. Cars are powered by sophisticated, computer-controlled internal-combustion or hybrid engines. Cars have “intelligent” braking, traction, and transmission systems; power steer- ing; and highly sophisticated electrical, lighting, and suspension sys- tems. The tires they run on are wonders of engineering and materials science. Air-conditioning systems automatically maintain cabin tem- peratures and supplies of fresh air. Entertainment systems incorporate not only AM, FM, and satellite radio, but TV and digital electronic de- vices for playing music and movies and entertaining children in the back seats. Protective airbags deploy instantaneously in the event of an acci- dent. Some cars come equipped with voice-activated satellite GPS sys- tems that display maps and directions on color LCD screens. The man- ufacturing standards are exquisitely high, and the interiors of cars can be of virtually unimaginable luxury. Out on the road, the car is a cocoon with the driver the master of his or her universe. For not a few drivers, their cars are more comfortable and technologically sophisticated than their homes.

What has been said of the passenger automobile needs to be extended to all the mechanized beasts that transport goods and people over roads and seas everywhere around the world. Buses and trucks have grown in sophistication and efficiency, and trucking—now complemented by giant tankers and containerization shipping—is another crucial indus- try and technological system underpinning contemporary civilization.

The industrialization of agriculture powered by tractors and related mechanized farm equipment is another part of this same story. Al- though the mechanization of agricultural production occurred in the nineteenth century, horses and humans supplied the power. The trac- tor-driven plow, an offshoot of the automobile industry, changed mat- ters significantly and, with other motorized farm equipment, accounted for a substantial increase in food production. During the 1920s, Ford- manufactured plows were being exported across the world. Distribu- tion of food by road, rail, air, and steamship, along with the increased use of improved fertilizers, and, in the second half of the twentieth cen- tury, the introduction of more productive varieties of crops allowed food production and burgeoning populations to keep in tandem step.

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Today, we speak of agribusiness to mean large, industrial-scale food production by giant, often international corporations. Just 3 percent of the farms in the United States, for example, account for more than 60 percent of America’s agricultural production. The industrialization of agriculture has produced historically dramatic and unprecedented re- ductions in the number of people directly involved in agriculture and food production. That figure stands at less than 5 percent in many in- dustrialized countries today where most agricultural workers are em- ployed on large farms. In those countries small farmers persist in good measure only because of significant government subsidies.

The spectacular success of the American automobile industry led to the myth of “Yankee ingenuity” and “American know-how.” But sub- sequent accomplishments, mainly after World War II, have revealed the contingent nature of American success. Soviet heavy industry rivaled American production, the Japanese automobile industry actually sur- passed the United States in both production and innovation, and East Asia, including China, has become an industrial powerhouse. Tool- makers everywhere, like their Paleolithic ancestors, are developing a universal industrial culture.

In many respects the automobile is synonymous with industrial civ- ilization. Estimates vary, but in 2000 the total number of passenger vehicles on the road was on the order of 600 million or nearly one car for every ten people in the world. The total number of motorized vehi- cles goes up another two or three hundred million when one adds trucks and buses. Counting motorcycles and motorscooters, the world may well have surpassed a billion motorized vehicles at the beginning of the third millennium. In 2003 in the United States alone there were 134 million cars, 79 million light trucks, 8 million commercial vehicles, more than 4 million motorcycles, and 750,000 buses, and they clocked a total of 2.72 trillion miles. In 2002 Japan had already become the largest producer of passenger cars with 8.6 million units, followed by Germany (5.1 million) and the United States (5.0 million). Overall, the world added over 58 million new motorized vehicles of all sorts in 2002, with the European Union leading the way (16.9 million units), followed by NAFTA (the U.S., Canada, and Mexico at 16.7 million) with Japan in third place (10.3 million). What these figures mean for jobs and employ- ment alone around the world, for example, underscores the centrality of the automobile and its manufacturing and servicing as economic engines driving industrial economies and societies.

Electric Bills

Electricity is an especially versatile energy source, and the development of the electric power industry and near-universal electrification in the twentieth century represent another fundamental technological system on which modern industrial civilization depends. The history of elec-

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trification also provides a clear example of how technical progress can overwhelm even established social and political orders. Electricity run- ning through wires from steam-electric and hydroelectric generators impinged on so many industrial and cultural activities that, regardless of the social system, it could not be left to the vagaries of private enter- prise. Within twenty years of its innovation, electric power production and distribution were overriding social and legal conventions that reached back to early modern European history.

The capture and control of electricity by humans may be equated to human mastery of fire so many millennia ago, and the electric power industry was utterly revolutionary as well. It required a novel infra- structure of generators, transformers, and wires that came to extend across continents and under the seas and oceans. Within a few years electricity replaced gas lighting, which had itself been called into being by urbanization and industrialization. In addition to light, electricity began to provide power and heat wherever wires could reach—which meant literally around the globe.

By 1900, the stage was set for electrification by the invention of tech- niques for the production and distribution of electric current—the bat- tery, the dynamo, and the development of a copper wire industry. At first, electric power was generated under the traditional auspices of capitalism—private ownership of electric power production and distri- bution. But technology soon proved to be destiny as unprecedented technical imperatives blurred social and political boundaries.

During World War I, the American Congress, as a strictly wartime improvisation to provide electricity for the manufacture of gunpowder, authorized the construction of a hydroelectric station at Muscle Shoals in Alabama—as the authorizing legislation put it, “To be operated solely by the Government and not in conjunction with any other indus- try or enterprise carried on by private capital.” Once the war ended, however, the unfinished Wilson Dam became a bone of political con- tention; although it was still owned by the government, its output would now be sold in competition with private electric power compa- nies. As the engineering work proceeded, the production of hydroelec- tricity in a society devoted to private enterprise brought into focus con- flicting political ideas. Private electric power producers, along with laissez-faire defenders of capitalism, charged that the government’s ownership of Wilson Dam amounted to “communism.”

In 1921, Henry Ford, our automobile tycoon, stepped forward with a proposal to turn the project over to private capital. He offered to buy the Muscle Shoals plant. Ford enlisted the endorsement of Thomas Edi- son, and the popularity of the two technical wizards produced strong support in Congress. But in 1924 Ford abruptly withdrew his offer. The technical realities proved too great to be overcome by ideology, poli- tics, or money. Hydroelectric stations cannot be built only to produce and sell power and light for profit. Large dams inevitably affect the

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public interest: shorelines are altered, land is inundated, and dams must also be designed for use in ways that cannot turn a profit for private investors without heavy-handed government intervention in the form of irrigation, flood control, and recreation.

In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt became president, one of his first acts was the establishment, through Congress, of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to develop the vast water-power potential of the southern states. Roosevelt’s initiative was not motivated by any social- istic bias. Instead, it recognized the technological imperatives dictated by the nature of hydroelectric production. Indeed, Roosevelt’s politi- cally conservative initiative was embodied in the concept of an “Author- ity,” which meant that the TVA was required to appeal to Congress for financing every year, thus restricting the government’s ability to com- pete aggressively with private electric power interests.

That large-scale technology could impinge not only on the public interest but also on ideology and politics was reflected in Lenin’s dic- tum, promulgated shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, that “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.” This was no mere rhetorical flourish. Stalin and his acolytes took it seriously, and between 1927 and 1932 the world’s largest hydroelectric power station was con- structed on the Dnieper River in Russia under the supervision of Amer- ican engineers and with American turbines and generators. Within the frameworks of both American capitalism and Soviet communism hy- droelectric technology wrote its own script. The technical and eco- nomic realities of electric power production weighed more heavily than ideology and politics on the balance of social change. Older technolo- gies could be confined within the limits of private enterprise—even as they nurtured the principles of private enterprise. Hydroelectric power production defied those limits. The Three Gorges Dam in China is merely the latest example of this historical truth. Toolmakers took com- mand, as a matter of necessity.

Public and private power grids spread across the countryside the world over, forming vast regional networks; when they occasionally collapse, they cause blackouts and power failures. Electric power can stand as a surrogate for industrial civilization as a whole. The produc- tion and consumption of electricity have grown spectacularly in tan- dem with the rest of industrial civilization, itself in large measure pow- ered by electricity. The numbers are striking, and they unveil two great facts about industrial civilization: the dramatic increase in scale over previous modes of human organization and the great divergence be- tween the haves and the have-nots of nations and peoples in the world today. World production of electric power, for example, quadrupled from 1900 to 1950, and quadrupled again by 1975. World consump- tion of electricity all but doubled between 1980 and 2002, and fore- casts for world energy consumption project linear, but substantial, increases past the year 2020. By the same token, in 1990, for example,

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the West, with 20 percent of the world’s population, consumed 70 per- cent of commercial energy resources, while the top 10 percent of the world’s developed nations consumed nearly 40 percent of the world’s energy. In 1998 the United States possessed 5 percent of the world’s population but consumed 40 percent of the world’s oil. In 2002, with 4.5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. consumed 25 percent of the world’s electricity and had to import electricity from Canada and Mexico to meet demand. Western Europe, with 11 percent of the world’s population, consumes 20 percent of the world’s electricity, and so on. By contrast, the country of Bangladesh, with 2.2 percent and the ninth largest population in the world, uses only one tenth of one per- cent of the world’s electricity. In 2002 China, with 21 percent of the world’s population, consumed only 10 percent of the world’s electric- ity, but that figure was up strongly from the 1980 figure of 3.6 percent. From the point of view of simple thermodynamics, people living in economically developed societies today have and use more energy per capita than any human group ever in history, and that usage has in- creased dramatically since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Wings over the World

While electricity was being generated by coal- and oil-fired steam plants and wrung from the world’s rivers by turbine-driven generators, and while rails, roads, and automobiles began to crisscross the landscape, humans conquered the air. The skies were invaded by unforeseen fly- ing objects—the airplane came out of the blue, as it were. In the eight- eenth century, hot-air balloons had been invented in France, but their potential never went beyond recreation or limited military use as obser- vation posts. Although human flight was an age-old dream, sustained powered flight became realizable only after compact and relatively light thermal engines, mainly internal-combustion engines, were invented.

In 1903 the Wright brothers (Orville and Wilbur) flew the first air- plane. On December 17 at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, it flew for twelve seconds and covered 120 feet. They made four flights that day, the longest of 852 feet. This was the first powered, controlled, and sustained flight of a human. The plane was a structure of wood and fabric that embodied only a few recent technical develop- ments—gasoline, the internal-combustion engine, and techniques bor- rowed from the manufacture of bicycles (which, surprisingly, had been invented only twenty-five years before, long after the much more com- plex locomotive). The Wright brothers stated that they could only fore- see the use of airplanes in warfare, but they were soon proven, spec- tacularly, to be the “wrong brothers” in this case. Soon, airplanes were being used not only in warfare but much more extensively in mail and passenger services. During World War I, less than fifteen years after the Wrights’ primitive flyer, airplanes mounted with machine guns and car-

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rying bombs were used in Europe, and development of the radial engine enabled Charles Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic in 1927. By the end of the 1920s mail was being carried in rudimentary services, and in the early 1930s passenger airlines got off the ground. The sleek, alu- minum-skinned DC-3 with its pressurized cabin became the workhorse of such systems. In a time frame of less than half a century the Wright flyer evolved into commercial airliners combining hundreds of tech- niques and materials, many of them newly invented. Passenger air travel expanded after World War II, eventually developing into the complex global air transportation system that exists today.

The social consequences of aviation were commensurate with its technical originality. Tourism and recreation were revolutionized, and regions of the world that had been bypassed by the early days of the Industrial Revolution were brought into the mainstream. And, as in the electric power industry, the government unavoidably became entangled with private enterprise. Passenger terminals had to be constructed, in- evitably by local and central governments. Mail delivery, now largely via air mail, was traditionally a state operation; and uniform opera- tional and safety standards became a responsibility of government. Fleets of military aircraft were of course owned by the government. Moreover, commercial aviation is a global industry; almost every na- tion in the world has its own airline, either government-owned or gov- ernment-regulated. A commercial airliner is now assembled from parts manufactured in different countries, and passenger service is staffed by individuals of different nationalities.

The invention of powered flight by the Wright brothers may have been a small step for them, but it was truly a “giant leap for mankind,” to borrow the expression Neil Armstrong used when he landed on the moon. In only a century, humans have gone from that first flight of 120 feet to the organization of a huge technological system of air trans- portation that is an essential component of industrial civilization today. Ticketing is now largely handled electronically. Other transportation systems whisk us to airports, which are often small cities unto them- selves. There, we and our baggage are processed (by systems modeled after factories) through security and onto stupendous flying machines of extraordinary technological scale and complexity, machines that are maintained and serviced by other elaborate components of the system. The Boeing 747, the inaugural “jumbo jet,” first flew in 1970, and increasingly sophisticated aircraft with increasingly sophisticated elec- tronic guidance and control systems have rolled out since. (The intro- duction of the first SST supersonic passenger plane, the Anglo-French Concorde, marked a turning point in 1976; but SST technology proved too costly and too environmentally unfriendly to be widely adopted in commercial aviation.) The latest in this series, the European Airbus A380 passenger plane, has two decks and four aisles and can transport 555 to 800 passengers along with baggage.

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At any one time thousands of airplanes are in the air. That one can sip a soft drink or an iced cocktail at 35,000 feet is a technological accomplishment of the highest order. Many vessels fly grand routes across the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and it is now possible to get from virtually anywhere in the world to any of a thousand destinations within a day. Radar and air traffic control systems guide planes to their destinations and to exit points at other airports and hubs. Regional air- ports and secondary airlines extend the air-travel network to just about every location on earth. Today, airplane travel has become common and comparatively inexpensive, and masses of passengers now funnel through this air transportation system, 714 million of them in the United States alone in 2002. The top thirty airports accommodated 1.1 billion passengers in 2002. Atlanta and Chicago O’Hare were the busiest airports in the world, with 76 and 66 million passengers respec- tively, followed by London Heathrow and Tokyo Haneda, with Tokyo Narita and Beijing the fastest growing in the world. The system never shuts down. It has shrunk our world.

In these considerations we must not overlook parallel military air transportation systems, for aviation in its military mode has rewritten the laws of war. The air transport of freight and mail is yet another highly sophisticated aspect of global transportation today, as compa- nies like United Parcel Service (UPS) and Federal Express (FedEx) well illustrate.

Machines for Mother

A change has also taken place in family households as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the ongoing maturation of industrial civi- lization. This technological revolution of the household has affected billions of people in their everyday lives, particularly women. The kitchen has been transformed, the home reconstituted. What happened

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Fig. 17.2. A century of flight. The world’s largest passenger plane, the Air- bus A380, on its maiden flight, April 27, 2005. Inset (to scale): The Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. The A380 has a wingspan six times that of the Wright brothers’ flyer and, fully loaded, weighs over two thousand times more.

in the hearths of the family unit coincident with industrialization must be ranked with the other noteworthy technological systems that are fundamental to understanding industrial civilization today.

In 1900, even in the industrializing nations, the instruments of house- work were the traditional washboard and hand-operated wringer, the floor broom, the mechanical carpet sweeper, and the dish towel. Cast- iron stoves for cooking and heating became common with the start of the Industrial Revolution, rendering obsolete the traditional fireplace; but in 1900 coal and wood fires still needed to be tended. The iceman still made his rounds with his horse and wagon. Upper-class families had servants to mind the cooking, cleaning, heating, and other domes- tic chores. By 2000, circumstances had altered radically. The simple appliances and techniques traditional for running the home were re- placed by a powerful and power-hungry army of machines: washing machines (1910) and dryers, refrigerators and freezers (with optional ice-makers and filtered water dispensers), dishwashers, vacuum clean- ers (1901), gas and electric ovens and ranges, microwave ovens, toast- ers (1909), coffee makers, rice cookers, juicers, blenders, mixers, towel warmers, heating pads, garbage disposals, Jacuzzis, and a host of gadgets found in millions upon millions of homes around the world today. And let us not forget frozen and prepared food and the differ- ences these technologies have made for food preparation and meals. The modern middle-class home was the result, and there, servants are few.

This “domestic” revolution did more than relieve the drudgery of housework. Technological innovations played a role in the “women’s liberation” movement. In the United States, in conjunction with in- creasing educational opportunities and militant action, it led, in 1920, to the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote. During World War II women entered the workplace in large numbers, confirming once again that sweeping technological in- novations often result in social change. Critics have argued that labor- saving devices brought to the home by industrialization may have actu- ally created more work for mother, not less, by imposing new sets of “needs” upon households and impossible standards of order and clean- liness that the homemaker was suddenly expected to maintain. But, for umpteen men, women, and children today, their modern lifestyle, not only as they live it at home but in the world at large, would be impos- sible without the underpinning and support it receives from the tech- nological armamentarium of the home.

The twentieth-century transformation of homes into technological showcases bristling with machines and products to perform domestic chores was propelled by advertising that relentlessly sold the new way of life—and, conversely, by consumer demand. Today, homes are awash with cleaning fluids, sprays, soaps, powders, and similar specialty prod- ucts for a myriad of domestic cleaning purposes. Tile scum be gone,

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Fig. 17.3. More work for Mother? A 1919 adver- tisement for the Maytag Electric Washer and Wringer touting “an hour’s interesting experi- ence . . . independent of unreliable servants.” New appliances eased the burden of housework for women, yet arguably enslaved them with more chores and higher stan- dards for the modern home. (opposite)

says one! Antibacterial wipes will cleanse your countertops, says another! New and sophisticated technologies for shaving and feminine hygiene are part of this story. And then, how babies are cared for and raised reflects yet another aspect of this domestic revolution, with in- dustrially processed baby foods, specialty disposable diapers, the tech- nologies of strollers and other paraphernalia—all, again, heavily pro- moted by advertising and purchased by devoted parents.

Along these lines, the houses and apartments we live in also need to be seen as technological systems that have become refashioned through industrialization and the modern economy. Even modest homes today embody wonders that prior to industrialization were rare or unimag- inable even in mansions: running fresh, potable water (hot and cold); indoor showers and flushing toilets connected to reliable public sewage systems; fully automatic gas, electric, or fuel oil furnaces permitting central heating; air conditioning; security systems; electric lighting, of course, and telephone and electric lines and cable connections in and out linking individual dwellings to the outside world of voice commu- nications, television, the Internet, and reservoirs of electric power or natural gas. The home likewise connects with necessary garbage and recycling systems. The elevator made possible urban office and high- rise apartment buildings. The suburban house comes with its own range of ancillary equipment such as lawn mowers, swimming pools, and bar- becue grills. The system of the home very easily plugs into the world of the automobile, for in so many cases getting into their cars is the first thing people do when leaving their homes.

Innovative home appliances transformed housework and food prep- aration, and many new technological marvels of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, including frozen and prepared foods, made the home a much more comfortable and interesting place to eat, sleep, and base one’s family and private life. It hardly needs to be said, however, that, comparatively speaking, this revolution in domestic technologies affected only a minority of households. In many less-developed parts of the world and among the world’s poor everywhere, shelter is prim- itive, if not precarious. Most women are still chained to the kitchen, a kitchen that has few amenities.

“Let Me Entertain You”

An extraordinary constellation of sociologically and economically sig- nificant new technologies developed in the twentieth century centering on personal and mass entertainment—performers moved from the vaudeville house to radio, records, and the big screen to sing, as ex- pressed in the 1959 musical Gypsy, “Let me entertain you.” The enter- tainment industries that arose are characteristic of the modern era. Radio was the first, a new science-based technology that arose quickly, if not directly, out of Heinrich Hertz’s confirmation of electromagnetic

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waves in 1887 and Guglielmo Marconi’s subsequent efforts to develop wireless telegraphy. Creating operational systems for radio required substantial technical refinements of transmission and reception of sig- nals, and radio was improved by a series of inventors and radio ama- teurs in the early 1900s, improvements marked, notably, by the ampli- fying Audion vacuum tube patented by Lee De Forest in 1906. In the fall of 1920 regular commercial radio broadcasts began over a 100- watt station in Pittsburgh, KDKA; by 1922, 564 licensed stations dot- ted the country. Radio networks emerged with the BBC in 1922 and NBC in 1926. Radio quickly became a new and pleasant form of home entertainment, and the radio receiver an early piece of consumer elec- tronics. It became the new family hearth. Radio was made feasible and profitable through advertising revenues, a development aided and abet- ted by the new science of applied psychology. The technology of radio broadcasting improved over the years, and the radio itself moved from hobbyist object to consumer product. In its first heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, radio became the medium of the Great Depression and World War II. Consumers purchased eight million radios, and three- quarters of all American families had a radio in the home by 1936. Great clear-channel beacons like WLS in Chicago broadcast popular music and entertainment across America and brought the wider world to small towns and the rural hinterland. In 1949 over two thousand American stations were broadcasting, and $628 million was spent on radio advertising. In 1950 there were two radios for every home.

The political applications of radio were less appealing. Radio became a major medium for propaganda, often by repressive political author- ities. And in warfare it gave rise to new espionage technologies of send- ing and detecting radio signals.

Music, both live and recorded, predominated in radio from early on. Sports broadcasting quickly became popular in the United States, espe- cially baseball games and boxing matches; in the New York region alone, three hundred thousand people (!) listened to the Dempsey- Carpentier fight in 1921, and that was just the beginning. Radios be- came the new hearths and the nexus of new forms of popular culture. Through the Depression and World War II families gathered around their radios to listen to President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats.” The Ameri- can listening public panicked when Orson Welles broadcast his radio play about an invasion from Mars in 1938. Programs like The Lone Ranger or The Shadow inspired the imaginations of millions of youths. The introduction of the transistor in early 1950s made for truly port- able radios and marked the end of vacuum tubes as a key technologi- cal component of radios. Engineers developed FM (frequency modu- lated) radio in 1939 that allowed for “high fidelity” reception, but the technology of FM radio spread only in the 1950s. Inevitably, the radio was soon married to the automobile, and already in 1935 over a mil- lion radios were installed in cars.

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The invention of the phonograph and the rise of technologies of recorded music represent another powerful personal and home enter- tainment technology. (The capture of an ephemeral moment via a re- cording may be likened to the much earlier technology of writing.) Thomas Edison invented cylinder recording in 1877, but its initial use as an office dictating machine did little to change the world. Again, the creation of a complete technological system had to take place before “records” (patented by Emile Berliner in 1896) and record players could become standard items in American and European homes. This process was not fully stabilized until the introduction in 1906 of the “Victrola” record-playing machine, which played recorded vinyl disks. On the other end, recording equipment and the technologies for record- ing music likewise continued to be perfected. There was much synergy between the radio and recording industries, obviously, as radio stations played music that listeners purchased to enjoy at home on their own record players. Seventy-eight revolutions per minute (rpm) was the orig- inal standard speed of recording and reproducing sound. “Long-play- ing” records at 33 1/3 rpm date from the 1930s, but they did not begin to predominate until the 1950s. The 45-rpm format originated in 1949 and proved very successful, particularly for popular music, and drove the 78-rpm record to extinction. Stereo recordings followed in 1957. For better or for worse, the phonograph record effectively ended the tradition of making music in the home, and the technology changed the social and aesthetic experience of listening to music.

To this list we need to add moving pictures or “movies,” of course. The redoubtable Edison patented the Kinetograph in 1888 for captur- ing motion and the Kinetoscope for viewing it. Kinetoscope parlors with machines for individual viewing permitted consumption of the films created in Edison’s “Black Maria” studio in West Orange, New Jersey. In 1895, with their Cinématographe the French brothers Au- guste and Louis Lumière first successfully brought together the requi- site camera and projection technologies for mass viewing, and so launched the motion-picture era. With paying customers watching in theaters—sometimes stupefied at the illusion of trains surely about to hurtle off the screen and into the room—movies immediately became a highly successful popular entertainment and industry. Not to be out- done, the Edison Manufacturing Company quickly adopted the new technology and produced 371 films, including The Great Train Rob- bery (1903), until the company ceased production in 1918. Sound movies—the talkies—arrived in 1927 with Al Jolson starring in The Jazz Singer; by that time Hollywood was already the center of a vigor- ous film industry with its “stars” and an associated publicity industry supplying newsstands everywhere with movie magazines. The use of color in movies is virtually as old as cinema itself, but with technical improvements made by the Kodak Company in the film, truly vibrant color movies made it to the screen in the 1930s in such famous exam-

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ples as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939). (Color did not become an industry standard, however, until the 1960s.) Elaborate production, marketing, and distribution systems brought movies, newsreels, and the glamour of industrial civilization to towns and villages all over the world. The local movie house became the cul- tural and entertainment hub of communities. Television undercut the movie industry somewhat in the 1950s, but Hollywood soon began producing movies for television, sexually more explicit works, and films with dramatic special effects like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977). Different national traditions are notable in film, with the French, Italian, Japanese, and Swedish among the more highly regarded examples, while the film industry in India is the largest in the world. Movies sharply undermined the truly popular culture of music- making, dancing, and similar activities in rural settings, and they turned traditional theater and concert hall performances into an activity re- stricted largely to cultural elites. (Likewise, the preservation of the opera house today would be unimaginable without persistent financial sup- port from wealthy patrons.) The introduction of videocassette record- ers in 1969 ultimately created a subsidiary industry of movie rentals. This development, now dominated by compact disk (CD) technology, has drawn television and movie technologies closer together, but it has also made entertainment an ever more solitary activity.

The technology of radio provided a natural model for the idea of sending pictures via electromagnetic waves. Against a background of several systems under development, including one by the pioneer Vladi- mir Zworykin (1889–1982) in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth (1906–71), a farm boy and then a college student, first patented the technology for the electronic transmission and reception of moving images. In 1930, the first commercial television was already broadcasting. Promoters famously exhibited television technology at the World’s Fair in New York and the Golden Gate International Exhibition, both in 1939. World War II interrupted development, but television experienced ex- plosive growth after the war and soon became a major industry, and the “box” became a common household appliance. U.S. manufactur- ers produced four million TV sets in 1949, and in the same year ninety- eight television stations beamed programming into a rapidly growing number of homes; in 1952 there were 21 million TV sets in America. Color television emerged only after 1953, when the Federal Commu- nications Commission settled on one of several incompatible technolo- gies, but usage remained limited for technical reasons until NBC be- came the first all-color network in 1966. Beginning with Telstar in 1962, communication satellites allowed for global television broadcasts, which are now commonplace. The infared remote control changed viewers’ habits and the experience of watching TV. Digital television transmissions (HDTV) began in 1998, but the success of that technol- ogy remains to be seen.

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The power and importance of television as the premier news and entertainment medium of industrial civilization is self-evident but can- not be overemphasized. Radio had already begun to change politics with its coverage of election results and political conventions, but TV did even more, especially with the development of network television news, and from the 1950s onward television became a universal fix- ture in homes everywhere around the globe, a powerful outlet for inces- sant advertising and an omnipresent communicator of norms. Espe- cially in the 1950s, television conveyed a monolithic set of social values, and only starting in the 1970s did TV come more to reflect America’s racial, ethnic, gender, and class diversity.

Today, the technologies of radio, television, movies, and recorded music of one sort or another have indeed conquered the world. They have spread their roots deep into the bedrock of human cultures. Radio, TV, the movies, the music industry, and in short, the modern electronic media have become intertwined as well through overlapping hierar- chies of economic interests. Today’s media are undeniably powerful instruments of cultural homogenization around the world. Television, for example, is known to have reduced regional accents all across Amer- ica, and professional sports, for example, would not exist as they do at present without radio and television. Yet, ironically, even as giant media conglomerates become more global, centralized, and ever more rich and powerful, the technologies of the media have allowed for and even encouraged diversity and choice among consumers. In other words, the modern media, although monolithic in its ownership, has responded to federal regulations and to consumer and advertiser demand by break- ing down markets and people into smaller subgroups. Radio, for exam- ple, is omnipresent and a continuing technical success with 11,000 radio stations on the air and with five or six radios for each household in the United States. Every automobile comes with a radio. Listeners can tune into a host of different stations, including music stations that limit their repertoires to country music, rock, classical, jazz, and so forth; talk radio includes stations dedicated to various foreign lan- guages, news, sports, or religious material.

The same point holds true for television. In his 1964 landmark work Understanding Media, the prescient theorist Marshall McLuhan artic- ulated the concept of the “global village” with television as the leading medium. Certainly no more powerful medium than television arose in the twentieth century for bringing peoples together. By creating a “you are there” feeling, television brings the world to viewers. The coverage of the moon landing in 1969 or the subsequent Apollo 13 disaster uni- fied virtually all of humanity for a single moment. The coverage of the war in Vietnam, to pick another example, brought the war into living rooms everywhere and was instrumental in the success of the contem- porary antiwar movement. An extraordinary number—1.1 billion people—simultaneously watched the live broadcast from Japan of the

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soccer World Cup final in 2002. And, thanks to communications satel- lites, every night on the nightly news, we see reporters live from hot spots around the world with video footage shot the same day. Yet diversity and fragmentation rule in the “cool” medium of television. Sixteen hundred television stations currently broadcast in the United States, and with the advent of cable and satellite TV viewers have lit- erally hundreds of channels to choose from, channels that cater to all kinds of tastes. TV stations now specialize in news, movies, business reporting, sports, weather, cartoons, children’s subjects, music videos, history, hobbies, religion, pornography, and, in blind self-reflection, TV itself. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) originated in 1967 with the forlorn hope of bringing culture to America.

Movies and music, too, represent giant, converging industries and technologies. Often on huge screens and with exquisite sound systems, multiplex cinema palaces show multimillion-dollar blockbuster films with spectacular special effects. On the one hand, the same James Bond film will bind the world together by playing in theaters from Moscow to Sydney to Toronto. On the other hand, low-budget and art films per- sist, and on a national or regional basis at least, such as India’s Bolly- wood, variation in the movie world does exist. But movies can also be played on TVs and monitors at home in tape (VCR) and digital (DVD) formats, and here customers of video stores and chains all over the world are free to enjoy their favorite types of films, be that kung-fu movies, crime dramas, or the latest romantic comedy.

The recorded music industry today perhaps best represents the not- so-paradoxical paradox of technological homogeneity and global cor- porate reach alongside greatly increased diversity, individual choice, and concurrent social and cultural segregation of people into groups. Recorded music is essentially no longer played on vinyl records, except by a dwindling core of aficionados, and, after evolving through several varieties of magnetic tape, music technology today has moved over to the new digital platforms. The industry is worth billions, and mega- stores selling music discs are cornucopias bursting with hundreds of varieties of music, not to mention thousands of performers and perfor- mances. In the 1960s music was a vehicle for social upheaval and social change; today music is a personal statement, with music and players available for every taste or mood. In this connection video games are notable for being forms of entertainment produced by media giants that can cost tens of millions of dollars to develop and that preoccupy sig- nificant sections of a generally younger population around the world. But digital music and video games are strongly tied up with computers and the digital world, a technological development of science of world- historic proportions discussed further in chapter 19.

The distribution of these remarkable entertainment technologies is uneven, as would be expected, yet radio, TV, movies, and recorded music have penetrated well beyond the bounds of the industrialized

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world and have reached the most remote corners of the world. The new media of the twentieth century have indeed been powerful forces in spreading and unifying industrial civilization, and they continue to exercise powerful functions in shaping the global village today.

One Global System

The history of technology, particularly in the twentieth century, shows the rise of the great technological systems surveyed here and the ways that they have come together to forge contemporary industrial civiliza- tion. The globalizing changes that are now sweeping the world are sus- tained by interlocked technical and social systems that cannot be con- fined to any region. The automobile industry became interconnected with aviation, another major system, and with rubber and glass pro- duction, domestic labor relations, foreign trade, communications, tour- ism, recreation facilities, and educational institutions. Automobiles are now manufactured in many countries, many beyond the precocious areas of Western Europe and North America, nor can the aviation industry be restricted to any country, or even any region of the world. Hydroelectric power production could not be contained within capi- talism; electric power distribution likewise knows no boundaries. A Coke or a McDonald’s hamburger tastes more or less the same any- where in the world. In countless ways, old and new technologies, embedded in diverse social and governmental settings, by the end of the twentieth century had coalesced into a global culture.

To gain a sense of the scale of the global socio-industrial system that formed in the twentieth century and that continues to expand today, the automobile industry might be compared with the much smaller eighteenth-century system surrounding the steam engine. By the early nineteenth century steam engines powered the iron industry, coal min- ing, small-scale manufacturing, and, to a smaller extent, steam boats. Steam engines touched the lives of a small part of the population in only a few countries and reached only slightly beyond the borders of any nation. By contrast, the automobile today has directly altered the lives of everyone in the advanced industrial nations and indirectly everyone everywhere else. The parts of a single car are manufactured in many different parts of the world, and they are designed in confor- mity with international safety and environmental regulations. The road systems that automobiles have engendered are marked by internation- ally uniform icons. The Ford Motor Company, which sells more cars than any other, sells them all over the world.

Did globalization begin with the prehistoric spread of humanity to all habitable parts of the globe? Surely, in some sense; human cultures have long been aware of each other, and exchanges have resulted. One thinks in this connection of historical relations between Japan and China or the appearance of Chinese silk in ancient Rome. But global-

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ization as we have come to recognize the phenomenon today may be said to have begun in the fifteenth century of the common era with Por- tuguese and Spanish expansion outside the borders of Europe. This process continued to unfold in the centuries that followed through the activities of merchant traders—including slave traders—and European colonists and imperialists. We noted earlier how the technological capa- bilities of the railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph propelled the nascent forces of globalization in the nineteenth century. These trends were dramatically accelerated by the twentieth-century developments under discussion here.

As a consequence of the rise of industrial civilization, similar to the earlier great transitions of the Neolithic and Urban Bronze Age revo- lutions, global industrialization brought new efficiencies and dramatic increases in production that have resulted in a historically unprece- dented population explosion. By 1750 world population reached 760 million, and humanity crossed the threshold of one billion people only around 1800. That number leapt to 1.6 billion in 1900 with more bil- lions continuing to be added in shorter and shorter periods, especially after 1950. In 2004 world population neared 6.5 billion with approx- imately 85 million more demanding souls added every year. Projections of world population vary from 9 to 12 billion human beings by 2050. In 1700, the population of Western Europe was 120 million; today it is 750 million. In Asia, including the Near East, population grew from 415 million in 1700 to around 4 billion today. In the Americas popu- lation increased fiftyfold, and even in Africa, where industrialization lagged, population grew more than tenfold in the same period. A strik- ing and perhaps ominous feature of these statistics is that essentially all of this population growth is occurring in less developed countries. Today, even as they consume most of the world’s resources, popula- tions in more developed countries are growing only slowly, if at all, and in some cases, such as Japan and Italy, the birth rate is not sufficient to replace the existing population.

Urbanization is another telling indicator of industrial civilization. Urbanization on a world level only reached 15 percent in 1900, but the figure doubled to 30 percent in 1950, and surged to 45 percent in 1990; humanity as a whole crossed the landmark of being 50 percent urban dwellers in 2004. Germany already reached 50 percent urban popula- tion in 1900, France and the United States by 1920, and by 2000 75 percent of the population of more developed countries were urban dwellers. In 2001 the largest urban agglomeration was Tokyo with 26.5 million inhabitants, followed by São Paulo (18.3 million), Mexico City (18.3 million), New York (16.8 million), and Mumbai/Bombay (16.3 million). Virtually all projected population growth in the next 30 to 50 years is urban growth, with most of that in mega-cities in less devel- oped countries.

But innovation generates not only technical progress, it also results

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in technical decay, and often feeds a sense of nostalgia. The automo- bile replaced more than just the horse. Wherever the culture of the auto- mobile has taken hold it has often led to the decline of small commu- nities and urban neighborhoods. The railroad industry encrusted the earth’s surface with track during the nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies and fostered a habit of leisurely and refined travel—which fell into decline in competition with hectic and tiresome road traffic. So- phisticated technological systems require a better-educated and better- trained work force, but improvements often result in unemployment. For example, devices installed by water companies in customer’s homes can transmit data automatically to a central computer, but this tech- nology is rendering the old-fashioned meter reader obsolete. The mar- vels of computers and microelectronic devices today are myriad, but an unanticipated result was the abrupt demise of the inexpensive type- writer and of the slide rule, that humble token of a more innocent engi- neering craft.

Industrial civilization has its decidedly dark side, too. Aerial bom- bardment, often of residential districts, napalm, land mines, weapons of mass destruction, pollution, massive deforestation, global warm- ing—all inextricably interwoven with the miracles, the benefits, and the comforts of contemporary industrial civilization. While technology has proven to be a powerful binder, drawing the world together in a global network, traditional national and socioeconomic divisions have not only survived, but may have increased, in part because of the multivo- cal possibilities of technology today.

But Not “One World”

By drawing attention away from individual artifacts, the concept of a technological system has proven an extremely useful one for thinking about technologies in general and about the particular bases of indus- trial civilization on a world scale today. The concept of a technologi- cal system has its limits, however. At the margin, it is hard to distin- guish where one “system” ends and another takes up. And there is plenty of variation in the implementation of the “same” technology in different social and cultural settings. In France, for example, Dijon mus- tard is served in McDonald’s restaurants; in the 1950s and 1960s the sizes of cars in America and Japan were quite different because of social, not technological, factors. Then, too, we need to understand technol- ogy not only as a triumphal march of systems, but as subject to counter- currents that resist the introduction and spread of new technologies and that operate to defeat systems. In this connection forces are actively at play today to limit, modify, or even turn back globalization and the spread of the technological systems. We need to define limits to indus- trial civilization.

For one thing, as previously noted, industrial civilization spread un-

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evenly in the twentieth century, and that growth continues to be uneven. By 1950 most of the world’s population still did not live in industrial- ized regions, and by the turn of the twenty-first century the West and Japan remained the dominant industrialized powers.

The rapid industrialization of Japan and the Soviet Union in the twen- tieth century and of China beginning in the 1980s suggests that indus- trialization will attach itself to any system and ideological program. The Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the eighteenth century and for the next two centuries spread itself wherever European populations were dominant induced the misunderstanding that it was inherently associated with European culture and bourgeois society. Now, the exam- ples of Japan, China, South Korea, India, and Brazil show otherwise and confirm one of the subtexts of this book, that science and technol- ogy, along with their offshoots, display world-historical patterns.

And yet, a striking feature of industrialization in the twentieth cen- tury has been an increasing divergence of wealth on a global scale, often along national lines. The West, for example, still consumes the lion’s share of commercial energy resources; the top 10 percent of the world’s population consumes nearly 40 percent of the world’s energy. Figures for per capita annual income are similarly revealing. In 2002 the median national per capita income in the world was $5,120, meaning that half of the world’s nations fell higher and lower than that figure on a per capita basis. The top figures approach $40,000; in 2002 the United States stood sixth with $35,400. The median income in the top 10 per- cent of countries is over one hundred times that of the poorest 10 percent. Forty percent of humanity subsists on two dollars a day or less. The poverty of Africa is striking in this regard, with twenty-nine coun- tries on that continent posting per capita incomes of less than $400 a year; Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, with a per capita in- come in 2002 having reached only $440. Bangladesh, the country whose utterly insignificant energy consumption we noted earlier, ranks 171st (out of 209) with a per capita income of $380 a year. These and simi- lar statistics paint a portrait of skewed wealth and uneven consump- tion of resources in the leading industrialized countries and regions compared to developing and third-world countries. Even within devel- oped countries, electronic miracles like cell phones and personal com- puters are unavailable to large populations mired in poverty.

Most underdeveloped countries remain economically subservient to the industrialized nations. Decolonization after World War II brought political independence to many former colonies, but in most cases their dependent economic status remained largely unchanged. Nevertheless, new industrial or industrializing nations have emerged since World War II, notably the Pacific rim countries—Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. A series of “emerging markets” now complement the more established industrial societies—markets like Malaysia, Singa- pore, Thailand, the Philippines, India, and certain countries of Latin

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America, while China is surging towards the first rank. In some cases, such as the development of the oil industry in the Persian Gulf region or diamond and gold mining in South Africa, only small sectors of a nation’s economy have become industrialized. The current industrial- ization of China and to a lesser extent India, with their combined pop- ulations of 2.3 billion of the world’s 6.5 billion people, are now at the forefront of rapid change in the ongoing history of industrial civiliza- tion. China produced as much iron as the United States in 1996 and in 2002 could boast double the U.S. output. It is estimated that China’s production will double again by 2010. Europe and North America are destined to remain potent regional powers for years to come, but they will be joined by Asia as humanity charts its course across the twenty- first century.

Several factors have combined to transform the more mature indus- trial economies, notably an increasing emphasis on service industries, information management, electronic industries, and biotechnology. The entry of substantial numbers of women into the workforce in the West and, increasingly, elsewhere has effected great social and economic change. The emergence of the multinational corporation has helped forge an interdependent global economic system. Some multinational corporations are wealthier than whole countries, and to a considerable extent they rival the importance of many nations and national eco- nomic policies. For example, in the year 2000 Microsoft was the tenth largest economic enterprise in the world; Intel and Exxon-Mobil were said to be larger economic entities than South Korea or Brazil. The point explains much about industrial civilization today.

New techniques and new industries called for new approaches to the solution of technical problems. Over the centuries traditional technolo- gies had acquired refined rules of thumb. But for steel suspension bridges, electrical devices, airplanes, plastics, and the many innovations that followed in rapid succession in the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twentieth-first centuries there were no traditional rules of thumb and no time for them to be derived from experience. Instead, rules derived from science increasingly took their place, and the merger of modern science and the new technologies created a scientific-industrial culture. The universities were brought into technology, and governments were brought into science. University-trained engineers, still a small minor- ity in the nineteenth century, became the norm in the twentieth century and beyond. Since World War II, the skyrocketing costs of “Big Sci- ence” have necessitated government patronage of scientific research, which was justified by the public benefits of its technological spinoff. Antibiotics and the atomic bomb are the emblems, beneficial and bale- ful, of the application of theoretical science to practical problems in the twentieth century. This key aspect of industrial civilization—applied science—receives well-deserved separate treatment in chapter 19.

The processes let loose by the Industrial Revolution continue to un-

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fold across the globe. Industrial civilization has been accompanied by an expanded middle class and higher standards of living. For a very large number of people the results have been historically unprecedented lives with good health, comfort, and technological trinkets of amazing variety. By the same token, the material progress that many enjoy has not been achieved without heavy costs, not the least of which are the increasing stratification of rich and poor and a more hectic pace of life. Recent years have seen lower real wages in advanced countries. In many parts of the world, consumerism now represents the dominant values. Current environmental problems with pollution, oil spills, acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, waste disposal, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and similar concerns reflect the tremendous, and likely irreversible, ecological degradation accompanying industrialization. Population growth and increasing demands on limited resources such as fresh water and oil add to the pressures. The ultimate outcome of events that began with the Industrial Revolution in England is not clear, but it seems unlikely that the world can long sustain further industrial intensification. The toolmakers have done their work. Now, the peace- makers and the stewards of the Earth must do theirs.

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