In 1829, Jacob Bigelow, Harvard’s Rumford Professor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, published a widely read treatise titled “Elements of Technology,” which popularized the term “technology” in something like its current sense. In 1861, the year that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, telegraph wires reached across the continent. (“May the Union be Perpetual” was the heartbreaking sentiment from California, on the eve of four years of devastating civil war.) The following year, Congress authorized construction of the transcontinental railroad. (The golden spike linking the Eastern and the Western lines was driven into the ground in Utah, in 1869.) When Bigelow delivered an address at M.I.T., in 1865, he marvelled at how the world had changed in the three decades since he had published his “Elements of Technology.” War had torn the United States apart, but trains and telegraphs promised to tie it together again: everywhere, technology was changing everything for the better, saving the Union, making us who we are. To Bigelow’s generation, technology seemed to be driving, and even redeeming, the course of human events. His M.I.T. address reveals something more, too: the close alignment between nineteenth-century Americans’ sense of their manifest destiny to settle the continent and their faith in their machines’ ability to help them do it. Jacob Bigelow’s faith was not clockwork Deism but mechanical millenarianism. “Next to the influence of Christianity on our moral nature,” he said, technology “has had a leading sway in promoting the progress and happiness of our race.”

Awestruck wonder at machine-driven, millennial progress animated the nineteenth century the way the obsession with innovation animates American culture today. It’s what Perry Miller called the “technological sublime.” In prints and paintings, “Progress” was pictured as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Inventors and the people who operated their inventions abounded. (The occupation “engineer” first appeared in the U.S. Census in 1850.) “Men of Progress,” they were called, and “Conquerors of Nature.” The genius of Eli Whitney was said to rival that of Shakespeare. More usually, the triumph of the sciences over the arts was figured as the defeat of the ancients by the moderns: the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamship “a mightier epic” than the Iliad, and any fool could see that James Watt had a thing or two on Cicero. Surely the eccentricities of genius were to be smiled upon. (Klein, who writes of these men with much the same fervor as the head of the Patent Office, practically sighs with relief when their needy wives and children get out of the way of progress: John Fitch, an inventor of the steamboat, marries a woman who “nagged him constantly until Fitch, unaware that his wife was again pregnant, carried out his threat to leave”; Joseph Henry is lucky to find a “quiet, supportive wife who made his home a safe haven.”)

No nineteenth-century inventor was more prolific than Thomas Edison, no career more epic. (Klein assures us that Edison, after the premature death of an unhappy first wife who “found solace in eating,” married a nineteen-year-old girl who dutifully undertook “the difficult task of learning the role of wife to a famous man.”) Edison filed his first patent, for an automatic vote-recording machine, in 1868. When he set up his laboratory at Menlo Park, in 1876, he promised “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” He kept that promise, averaging an almost inconceivable forty patents a year—one every nine days—for a lifetime total of more than a thousand. He filed his patent for the incandescent light bulb in 1879, but 1882, the year he lit up New York, marked his personal best of a hundred and seven. Given the pace and scale of technological change, and the enthusiasm for it, it’s no wonder that, in Edison’s age, the past, the present, and the future seemed to be linked together by an unending chain of machines.

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“There is no end to machinery,” the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle wrote in his 1829 essay “Signs of the Times.” Carlyle dubbed those times “the Age of Machinery,” about which he was less than sanguine. The world begins to look like one great machine, “the Machine of Society,” he observed. “Considered merely as a metaphor, all this is well enough,” he went on. “But here, as in so many other cases, the ‘foam hardens itself into a shell,’ and the shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding.” The worship of the mechanical was, to Carlyle, something akin to religious delusion (“our true Deity is Mechanism”), one he compared to seventeenth-century New Englanders’ belief in witchcraft. “Practically considered, our creed is Fatalism; and, free in hand and foot, we are shackled in heart and soul.” We may be blind to those shackles, blinded, as he put it, by a fog as thick as London’s, but we are just as surely “fettered by chains of our own forging.”

In 1831, in an essay in the North American Review, an Ohio lawyer named Timothy Walker offered one of many rebuttals to “Signs of the Times.” Machines not only define us and drive progress, Walker argued; by liberating the ordinary man from drudgery, they make a different kind of living possible. In that sense, they drive democracy. As the century progressed and the speed of change only increased, nearly everyone—critics and boosters, dystopians and utopians, on both sides of the Atlantic—seemed to agree that machines were driving history. “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us,” Thoreau wrote from Walden Pond. The question was no longer whether machines were driving the course of human events but where. Any answer to that question, of course, involved as much prophecy as history. In 1848, John Stuart Mill found it “impossible not to look forward to a vast multiplication and long succession of contrivances for economizing labor and increasing its produce; and to an ever wider diffusion of the use and benefit of those contrivances.” If the coercion of labor was brutal and unrelenting, if the era’s economic development was uneven and unstable—there were several major depressions in the United States between 1819 and 1929—these things, too, seemed only further consequences of technology. In 1867, Karl Marx argued, “It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” That was the gloomy version. To Edward Bellamy, the future looked brighter. In “Looking Backward,” Bellamy wrote about a man who fell asleep in May, 1887, and woke up in September, 2000, to find a socialist utopia in which the “labor problem” had been cured “as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, machines had become the yardstick by which Americans and Europeans measured the rest of the world, on a scale beginning with barbarity and ending with civilization. If machines make us who we are, the lack of our machines makes other people different from us and, usually, lower down on the scale. Consider James Mill’s “History of British India” (1817). Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) believed that there was no better “index of the degree in which the benefits of civilization are any where enjoyed, than the state of the [society’s] tools and machinery.” The more machines, the higher the degree of civilization. The fact that Mill had never been to India proved no obstacle to his demonstrating, in six volumes, that Indians were stalled near the lowest stage of development, just past barbarism—something that was easily measured by the state of their technology, which suffered from “a great want of ingenuity and completeness in instruments and machinery.” For years, Mill’s “History” was required reading for British civil servants heading to India, where regular steamboat service began running on the Ganges in 1834; by 1852, news of the second Anglo-Burmese war was sent from Kedgeree to Calcutta along newly erected telegraph lines; in the eighteen-sixties, the British promoted cotton manufacturing and the expansion of the railway—which grew from two hundred miles of track in 1857 to twenty-five thousand miles at the end of the century—when the American Civil War blocked supplies of American cotton. (None of this has a place in Klein’s account. The Civil War doesn’t happen in “The Power Makers,” and neither does the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Klein’s fabled America is an island, unconnected to wars in Europe, unconnected to markets in India, unconnected to almost anything or anyone—with the notable exception of other inventors—outside the United States.)