Research Catalog

Title

Men, machines, and modern times / Elting E. Morison ; foreword by Rosalind Williams ; with remarks by Leo Marx.

Author

Morison, Elting E. (Elting Elmore)

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2016]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xxv, 312 pages; 17 cm

Summary

"People have had trouble adapting to new technology ever since (perhaps) the inventor of the wheel had to explain that a wheelbarrow could carry more than a person. This little book by a celebrated MIT professor -- the fiftieth anniversary edition of a classic -- describes how we learn to live and work with innovation. Elting Morison considers, among other things, the three stages of users' resistance to change: ignoring it; rational rebuttal; and name-calling. He recounts the illustrative anecdote of the World War II artillerymen who stood still to hold the horses despite the fact that the guns were now hitched to trucks -- reassuring those of us who have trouble with a new interface or a software upgrade that we are not the first to encounter such problems. Morison offers an entertaining series of historical accounts to highlight his major theme: the nature of technological change and society's reaction to that change. He begins with resistance to innovation in the U.S. Navy following an officer's discovery of a more accurate way to fire a gun at sea; continues with thoughts about bureaucracy, paperwork, and card files; touches on rumble seats, the ghost in Hamlet, and computers; tells the strange history of a new model steamship in the 1860s; and describes the development of the Bessemer steel process. Each instance teaches a lesson about the more profound and current problem of how to organize and manage systems of ideas, energies, and machinery so that it will conform to the human dimension." --Publisher's description.

Subject

• Technology > Philosophy
• Inventions
• Technological innovations

Note

• Includes index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introductory observations, personal and otherwise -- Gunfire at sea : a case study of innovation -- Data processing in a bureau drawer -- The pertinence of the past in computing the future -- A little more on the computer -- Men and machinery -- Almost the greatest invention -- Some proposals.

ISBN

• 9780262529310
• 0262529319

LCCN

^^2016001863

OCLC

934938831

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library