In the tug-of-war between the machine metaphor and a more ecological concept of nature, the mechanical view was gaining ground. As the twentieth century began, Henry Adams—scion of the old New England political family that had produced a leader of the American Revolution and two presidents—was taken by a friend to the Paris Exhibition to see the hall of the electric dynamos. Standing there, as he later wrote in The Education of Henry Adams, he realized that the genteel eighteenth-century tradition his family had upheld for so long was gone forever, that “man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old.”

“To Adams,” he wrote of himself,

the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt of the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power…Before the end, one began to pray to it.

By the time Adams had his epiphany in Paris, the machine age—and the machine metaphor—was in high gear. Within a decade the Wright brothers would fly, J. P. Morgan would form U.S. Steel, and Henry Ford would begin flooding the world with cars—adding standardization to Descartes’ mechanism and reductionism, as the third great premise of the machine age. Also during that period, a novel concept came to England in the form of speed limits, and in America something called a weekend gained popularity. Mary Pickford became the first film star, as Bakelite plastic and neon lights also made debuts.

In 1909 a new art movement idolizing speed, aggression, and the power of machines burst upon Europe with the publication of F. T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto.” In it he bade farewell to the whole classical ideal in art and culture, saying, “A roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

With due respect to ancient Greece and its famed statue of “winged victory,” the effort to limit the impact on culture of machines was no longer a real contest. Whatever else may be said of Marinetti, he was right about the future. A popular echo of the winged victory survives today as a Rolls-Royce hood ornament.

Tags: cars, dynamo, electricity, France, Futurism, Henry Adams, industrial revolution, infinity, Marinetti, mechanical metaphor, standardization

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Posted on April 17th, 2006 @ 6:00 am