VISIONS OF TECHNOLOGY

Reviewed 3/30/2003

Visions of Technology, by Richard Rhodes

VISIONS OF TECHNOLOGY
A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World
Richard Rhodes
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN-13 978-1-84971-336-8
ISBN 0-684-83903-2 399pp. HC/BWI $30.00

Wow! What a gold mine! "A vast wasteland". "Too cheap to meter". This book is a treasure trove of short essays on technology collected from all across the Twentieth Century. Who would have guessed that the source texts for those two well-known phrases quoted above, and many others, would be collected between the pages of a single volume? Not I, or not me.1

The majority of the selections are quite short, a page or two; some are only a paragraph, one or two sentences. There are poems and parodies of poems, a song by Loretta Lynn, lists and letters, an excerpt from a play. There are diagrams and drawings, graphs and photographs. And there is this mind-boggling quotation from U.S. Congressman James G. Fulton:

Page 208: Possibly in space the approach to vegetables might be different. Did that ever strike you—because we are thinking of three-dimensional vegetables, maybe in space, where you have a lot of sunlight, you might get a two-dimensional tomato. It might be one million miles long and as thin as a sheet of paper, aimed toward the sun—a tomato.

The collection is divided into four time periods:

  1. The New Technology: 1900-1933
  2. Depression and War: 1932-1945
  3. Postwar Boom: 1945-1970
  4. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: 1970-

A bibliography and an index follow these.

There are pearls of humor and gems of wisdom in this book. It truly belongs in everyone's library.

1 "Twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea it lays — or lies; I'm not too sure."
              – John Lennon, Yellow Submarine
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