SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

In many ways—political, sociological, economic, and technological—the end of the nineteenth century marked a decisive turning point in American history. Irrevocably shaping the understanding of "modern times," the decades after 1870 were crucial for the shift in American society from a weak agrarian republic in 1800 to a powerful industrial nation at the dawn of the twentieth century.

SCIENCE, INDUSTRIALIZATION, AND ACCELERATION IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The population of the United States exploded from roughly five million in 1800 to more than seventy seven million in 1900. At the turn of the nineteenth century only 322,000, or a mere 6 percent, of all Americans lived in cities. A hundred years later, the proportion was 40 percent or more than thirty million people. Simultaneously, new technological devices rapidly and dramatically altered the lifestyle of almost every American. Earlier inventions such as the power loom, the sewing machine, the steam-driven flatbed press, the steamboat, the locomotive, the telegraph, the camera, and the spectroscope had strongly influenced the attitudes and mind-sets of nineteenth-century Americans. The large-scale application of these devices to industrial processes and further insight into their underlying scientific principles led to a number of complementary innovations during the final decades of the century (the telephone, the phonograph, moving pictures, the steam turbine, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, and so on) and transformed the physical and psychological conditions of life in America. The second half of the century, then, saw the implementation of the groundbreaking, major discoveries made by the end of the 1850s.

The later phase systematized and applied the sciences to industry and technology on a large scale. By the end of the century, technology became the primary model for progress. Scientific invention based on systematic research and experimentation replaced the older, republican tradition of ingenious tinkering, which depended on tedious trial-and-error procedures or more often, sheer luck. In keeping with this new orientation, and despite its obvious elitist underpinnings, progressive Americans increasingly embraced a culture of technological expertise that valued highly specialized knowledge and favored scientific solutions for practical, everyday problems. Every area of life now demanded "expert" wisdom, from the conservation of nature, agricultural development, mining and steel production, or factory administration and office organization to railroad and street building, city planning, welfare programs, the domestic economy, and even leisure and sports. If, as Carolyn Marvin points out, the retooling of American industries from steam to electricity fostered "a new class of managers of machines and techniques" (p. 9), the idea behind such specialization, namely, that in a complex social system science holds a remedy for every individual and societal problem, became a national creed.

This crucial period in American history was also about speed and acceleration, which some saw as the most distinctive characteristics of American society, and about how they became a determining factor in scientific, industrial, and cultural production. The invention of faster means of transportation such as the train, the automobile and, somewhat later, the airplane, decisively altered the way people perceived the world. Physically, these modes shaped and transformed the landscape by requiring an extensive grid of tracks and roads; psychologically, they changed human perception by destabilizing the relation between the fast-moving passenger and the world outside. The impact of these inventions clearly went beyond their physical existence to challenge perceptions of both self and the world. In 1925 the philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead reflected that "in the past human life was lived in the bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality" (p. 137). Yet to many of his contemporaries, firsthand experience with rapid movement had already become commonplace. By the early 1920s they were riding on turbine-driven high-speed trains, eating fast food in streamlined diners, or rushing to work in the latest Ford or GM models. By that time also, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) had articulated his special theory of relativity (1905), predicated on a universe in fast motion, and Frederick Winslow Taylor (1865–1915), in response to what he perceived as the deliberate hampering of the speed of industrial production by inefficient workers, had published The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), a manifesto that turned workers into virtual human machines.

Although much of the modern preoccupation with speed was associated with twentieth-century machine technology, the enthusiasm inspired by airplanes or internal combustion engine automobiles that set new records for speed was anticipated in the final decades of the preceding century by increased attention to rationalization and the shrinking of time and space in practically all areas of American culture. Communication and voice recording are a good case in point. Driven by new scientific insights into the nature of electromagnetic waves (Hans Christian Ørsted, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz), experiments in rapid communication finally led to the invention of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), the phonograph, and the dictating machine (both developed by Thomas Edison). These inventions in turn facilitated the rapid growth of modern cities, whose administrations and office networks depended on instant communication without the delays of hand-carried messages and documents. The telephone, according to Stephen Kern, "accelerated business transactions by increasing the liquidity of securities and the speed of fundraising. J. P. Morgan averted a financial panic in 1907 when, over the telephone, he extended $25 million credit to several major banks threatened with excessive withdrawals" (p. 114). By 1900 Americans so thoroughly and efficiently put to use the new time-saving electrical devices that one stunned English traveler remarked, "Life in the United States is one perpetual whirl of telephones, telegrams, phonographs, electric bells, motors, lifts, and automatic instruments" (quoted in Mowry, pp. 1–2).

Artists and writers confronted, and quite frequently subverted, the shifting attitudes, mores, and behavioral patterns of Americans living in a culture dominated by science. Far from being a mere reflection of the larger society and its sociohistorical dynamics, art served to register the subtle changes that marked the dawn of a new era and helped to negotiate the tensions accompanying technological progress and the shift in scientific and economic paradigms. What is more, it gave voice to growing concerns about these developments, even while its own styles and formal structures already betrayed the impact and power of the new system. Although the artistic mind often appeared at odds with new trends and changing material conditions, much of modernist art and literature incorporated the new machine culture and its popular representations in photography and film with astonishing ease. What Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), a prominent voice in the nascent realist movement, represented in his famous painting The Gross Clinic (1875) was not just the wonder, awe, and disgust some felt toward the latest progress in anatomy, but also a formal affinity with scientific methods and objectivity. Eakins's emphasis on the human body as an object of study and observation was evidently out of sync with dominant Victorian aesthetics and the painting was consigned to the medical section of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, rather than the fine arts section.

VISIONS OF THE PAST, ENVISIONING THE FUTURE

Not all writers, however, adopted the new trend toward "authenticity" and realism to articulate their take on the rampant materiality and fast-paced technological progress of America's "Gilded Age." Some used the well-established model of utopian writing, retooling its fantastic elements to launch scathing critiques of the times or to extrapolate a new and better form of society from the wonder-working prospects of contemporary science and technology. One of the most important and enduring examples of a critique is Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887) exemplifies the more optimistic view. Both are steeped in the determinist ideologies of Social Darwinism and the "new" behavioral sciences and treat modern technology as a juggernaut, a historical force that cannot be annihilated or reversed. Yet while Bellamy (1850–1898) stresses the inherent capacity of modern technology to "heal" the widespread social tensions that threatened to divide American society at the turn of the century, Twain (1835–1910) envisions a technological apocalypse with fatal consequences for the future of nature and human civilization.

James M. Cox has suggested (p. 89) that Connecticut Yankee occupies in Twain's oeuvre approximately the same position that Pierre occupies in that of Herman Melville's. But although both works followed towering masterpieces (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick, respectively), Twain's satire of nineteenth-century ingenuity and entrepreneurship might more easily be compared to Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857), also a disturbing, stylistically and structurally flawed critique of corporate America. Even though in Connecticut Yankee criticism of late-nineteenth-century progressivist ideology is partly defused by the story's humorous narrative frame, Twain's backward-in-time travelogue still stands as one of the most radical and deeply analytical revisions of the American technological dream. On the surface a story about an unlikely clash of cultures and historical periods (sixth-century Britain versus nineteenth-century Connecticut), its thematic scope extends to issues of writing and representation, mass media, communication networks, capitalist economics, ethics in authoritarian society, and, most prominently, science and the mystery of human nature.

The novel centers on how a modern American technophile who, after a head injury, loses consciousness and upon reawakening finds himself amid the knights at King Arthur's court, navigates his cultural alienation and the surplus of scientific knowledge arising from his advanced, nineteenth-century background. Much of its narrative thrust explores the enormous material progress Anglo-Saxon culture had made over the elapsed thirteen hundred years and also engages the changed psychological conditions that such progress entails. What is more, it asks the crucial question: To what degree can these changes be attributed to individual cultural responses? Or are they innate in human beings generally? Especially in the middle parts of the book, where human behavior is thoroughly discussed, Twain juxtaposes diverging concepts of personality that reflect his transitional position between Romantic idealism and late-nineteenth-century behaviorist social determinism.

In one of the most symbolically loaded moments of the text, Hank Morgan, a former superintendent at the Colt arms factory in Hartford, Connecticut, and his sixth-century ally Clarence prepare for final battle with the Roman Catholic church. To this end they rig the cave of their longtime opponent Merlin with modern explosives, turning the site into a veritable technological limbo. What makes this scene important, however, is less the display of fancy weaponry such as a battery of Gatling guns set off by a huge dynamo, or numerous glass cylinder dynamite torpedoes, but the underlying economics of rationalization, which became a major driving force in the history of modern society. Here is Morgan and Clarence's discussion of the rationale of their various contrivances:

"The wires have no ground-connection outside of the cave. . . . Each is grounded independently."

"No-no, that won't do!"

"Why?"

"It's too expensive—uses up force for nothing. You don't want any ground-connection except the one through the negative brush. The other end of every wire must be brought back into the cave and fastened independently, and without any ground-connection. Now, then, observe the economy of it. A cavalry charge hurls itself against the fence; you are using no power, you are spending no money, for there is only one ground-connection till those horses come against the wire; . . . Don't you see?—you are using no energy until it is needed; your lightning is there, and ready, like the load in a gun; but it isn't costing you a cent till you touch it off." (P. 421)

Twain's story abounds in references to eliminating waste and accelerating production, transportation, and communication. While in the above example it seems that the responsibility for ruthless economizing still lies with the person, the rugged, business-minded Yankee, Twain also offers a more universal and much bleaker explanation. Upon finishing his report on how they blow up the cave and its adjacent area, Clarence proudly exclaims: "It's an innocent looking garden, but you let a man start in to hoe it once, and you'll see" (p. 422). Once cultivation begins and human ingenuity is put to work, there is no way to avoid the total destruction of both nature and human beings. Influenced by contemporary social science, in particular the determinism of Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Twain depicts technological societies as essentially destructive and doomed to self-annihilation. The novel ends with a gruesome Armageddon of burnt flesh and a growing pile of dead bodies that foreshadow not only the horrors associated with modern technological warfare but also the ambiguous blessings of yet another late-century invention, the "electric chair."

Whereas in Connecticut Yankee the wedding of science and technology to democratic, republican agendas inexorably leads to disaster (it is, after all, Morgan's deep aversion to the centralist institutions of church and crown that triggers the final carnage), in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward scientific and technological know-how prove advantageous in creating a truly democratic, Christian socialist society. And where Twain's bleak cultural critique invokes Melville's The Confidence-Man as its literary predecessor, Looking Backward follows in the tradition of American utopian reformist writing, associated with authors as diverse as Benjamin Rush, Thomas Paine, Robert Owen, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like them, Bellamy strongly believed that human beings are rational, eternally struggling to better social conditions and, over the long term, to eradicate tensions arising from ill-conceived notions of class and gender. In its celebration of technology put to democratic, socially stabilizing uses, Bellamy's utopian novel is a very American text. It tapped into a powerful desire among Americans at the turn of the twentieth century to eclipse the negativity expressed in Twain's and Charles Dudley Warner's Gilded Age (1873), for example, and to envision instead modern American society in the not too distant future as a "Golden Age," a technological paradise regained.

Although Bellamy initially admits that he "sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative" (p. 35), Looking Backward is far from a fantastic tale of America's bright technological prospects. As a former lawyer, muckraking journalist, and political activist, Bellamy took great care to address the social unrest and widespread economic fears lamented by most contemporary Americans. To every conceivable social plight, Looking Backward offers a solution, often backed by modern labor- and time-saving devices. It explores the impact on society of mass media such as radio and introduces a monetary system (including, in a surprisingly visionary insight, the use of credit cards) in which money no longer figures as a substitute for an imagined value but as a representative of everyone's true share of the gross national product. By merging the socialist convictions Bellamy encountered during a trip to Germany with progressivist technophilia, scientific determinism, the Puritan work ethic, and a millennialist belief that the promises of the New Testament will be fulfilled on American soil, he hoped to overcome the innate contradictions and paradoxes of end-of-century social and scientific discourse.

One of the tensions arising from an ever-accelerating market economy lay in the creation of large, powerful corporations and the growing influence they brought to bear on politics and the future of the nation. Another lay in the adaptation and redefinition of evolutionary social theory to ensure that it would not lead to the disruption of national consensus or spawn an all-out struggle for survival between rugged individuals. Put another way, in Looking Backward Bellamy tried to remedy nagging social problems with the very instruments that many suspected were playing a crucial role in the creation of these problems. And while he was convinced that much in contemporary American society had gone awry, he still believed that "the army of industry" he envisioned for America's utopian nationalist future would be an "army not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its members" (p. 89). His acute awareness of social ills and their underlying economic causes notwithstanding, Bellamy, like many of his nineteenth-century reformist predecessors, turns out to be an indefatigable idealist whose unremitting trust in the natural goodness of human beings led him to design a Christian socialist society where everyone, by dint of diligence in service to the nation, would be granted an appropriate rank and place. Although he abandons formal legislation, his is a system based on a codification of the "law of nature," or, in his own terms, "the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions" (pp. 100–101).

Looking Backward exemplifies the ongoing attempt of modern writers and intellectuals to close the widening gap between the specialized spheres of science, technology, and the arts. Bellamy, who considered himself a writer first and only second a political visionary and activist, was careful to design his utopian state as a haven for all professions, including the fine arts, which, according to many of his contemporaries, were of only minor import to the wellbeing and further prosperity of the nation. Time and again, Dr. Leete, the author's mouthpiece and scientific tour guide of the novel, emphasizes the confluence of material and moral evolution, maintaining that what ultimately distinguishes the "new" from the "old" order is the recognition of merit in all fields of original genius, in science and mechanical invention as well as in music, art, writing, and design. As he tells a receptive Julian West, when Americans pushed on to a "new plane of existence with an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all their faculties. . . . There ensued an era of mechanical invention, scientific discovery, art, musical and literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world offers anything comparable" (p. 128). Significantly, Bellamy's plea for a more encompassing understanding of what it means to be productive coincides with his criticism of the dwindling authority of the "real" in modern capitalist society and the accompanying proliferation of signs that refer only to other signs rather than to material objects (a vicious dilution/delusion of responsibility he saw at work, for example, in the thriving American credit system). While in the new society all business is executed in direct relation to "real" things, in the old money and credit figured as their "misleading representatives" (p. 174). Rereading evolutionary development as a movement toward greater simplicity and thus authenticity, Bellamy expresses a desire for the "real thing" that became constitutive of modernist culture at large. Although this desire frequently conflicted with the harsh social and economic realities of late-nineteenth-century America, in Looking Backward it becomes the cornerstone of a meticulously reformed, "new" society and, in its wake, a more systematic, that is, scientific use of industrial power.

TECHNOLOGY, GENDER, AND THE ARTS AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

Few of Bellamy's fellow writers were prepared to view the differences between the reigning scientific materialism and the artistic imagination as anything but insurmountable. This is particularly true of women authors, who often denounced the positivist scientific worldview as in direct opposition to their own agendas. In the classic short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1850–1935), the clash of science, gender, and the imagination is dramatized in such a way that it becomes the epicenter of mutual misunderstanding and discrimination. The story turns on the male "scientific" obsession with order, regularity, discipline, and self-control as personified by the husband/physician of the female protagonist. It also revolves around the imagery of the wallpaper and its elusive, ever-changing patterns, which introduce an elaborate play on essence versus appearance, on the real as a given versus reality as created by the imagination. And while the physician's wife represents the imaginative process, the story illuminates the quashing of the imagination by scientific rationalism and the toll such rationalism takes on a woman who does not submit to its limited, gendered propositions.

Critics repeatedly claimed that Gilman's intricately woven, double-voiced text should be read as a testament to the stamina and willpower of the female writer who, under circumstances adverse to her professional career, continued to confront current Social Darwinian stereotypes about differences between men and women and the social roles suitable for each. Gilman's own life as a mother, writer, and political activist stands as a glaring example of that stamina. A one-time follower of Bellamy and one of the most influential feminist thinkers of the pre–World War I period, Gilman wrote a utopian novel of her own, Herland (1915), based on ideas articulated in her earlier study Women and Economics (1898). Contrary to Bellamy, she believed that to restrict women in their intellectual and professional evolution amounted to hampering the evolution of the species as such. Although she shared his emphasis on the principles of evolution and human progress, hers was a program that included all members of society, regardless of gender or physical ability. Moreover, in "The Yellow Wall-Paper" she repudiated the pervasive positivist worldview (associated with the French sociologist Auguste Comte) by juxtaposing it with the female poetic imagination and female ingenuity.

Late-nineteenth-century feminist writers often conceived of the lingering opposition between science, technology, and art in terms of a struggle between the sexes and the respective social roles traditionally ascribed to each. In contrast to these efforts, two of their male contemporaries, Frank Norris (1870–1902) and Henry Adams (1838–1918), posited a more fundamental and ultimately futile battle between the past and the future, between the waning influence of a bygone era and the sweeping forces of the new century. In the first installment of his "epic of the wheat" trilogy The Octopus (1901), Norris dramatized a gigantic clash between nature and culture driven by the worldwide demand for natural resources and the ensuing ruthless exploitation of them. There is neither good nor bad in this novel of the post-frontier American West, only a universe of relentless forces connected to varying degrees with the economic interests of farmers, railroad corporations, and the political machine. Norris introduces, as alienated outsiders to this naturalist universe, two artist figures: Presley, a hopeless romantic aspiring to write the great poem of the West; and his former friend the shepherd Vanamee, who lives close to nature and has developed a poetic attitude by instinct. The two learn different lessons from the new order, yet they both eventually acknowledge their anachronistic marginality in view of the overriding presence of the machine. While in the rapidly industrializing West the creative powers of the imagination are utterly out of place, the merging of nature, machine, and corporate culture has spawned its own generative force: the dynamics of the marketplace and its sole objective, economic growth. Against the inexorable onrush of social evolution, the fate of the individual, which had long been the focus of artistic activity, is but a grain of sand in the cogs of the great organic machinery that constitutes and drives the world. There is no malevolence, no heroism or sacrifice in Norris's sobering modern American epic, only forces, conditions, laws.

The other American writer who came to a devastating conclusion about the future of art in modern society is Henry Adams. Standing amid the aweinspiring machinery at the Great Exposition of 1900, Adams wrote, in an oft-quoted passage of The Education of Henry Adams (1907), that he "began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross" (p. 380). What he finds especially striking in this new electro-mechanical environment is the smooth, noiseless way that the dynamo wields its enormous power: "Barely murmuring—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's breadth's further for respect of power—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame" (p. 380). The image of the machine lulling a baby to sleep drives home the writer's concern about modern technology and his increasing estrangement from late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century American culture. Adams metaphorically describes the ongoing replacement of the creative power of art by the over-whelming reproductive potential of the machine. In the modern scientific-technological environment, as his distancing stance of third-person autobiographical narration suggests, the writer ceases to be a producer and creator and adopts the role of commentator and disconnected observer. By stubbornly clinging to outmoded aesthetic models such as the female procreative power he saw embodied in both the Epicurean Venus and the Christian Virgin, powers that had never been duly acknowledged by Protestant America, this avowedly nineteenth-century author finally surrendered to having "his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new" (p. 382).

To be sure, the authorship, publication, and distribution of literary texts survived well into the days of word processing, e-books, and blogs. Moreover, battles over the role and fate of the writer in a new, fast-changing nation date back at least as far as the American Renaissance and Jacksonian democracy. Yet by fore-grounding issues of creativity and the representation of the real within the technological framework of modern society, both male and female end-of-century writers paved the way for modernist debates. The influential German critic Walter Benjamin (1829–1940) described the state of art at the turn of the century as involving a fundamental shift from originality to repetition, from unique, authentic works of art to mechanically reproduced, dissimulating works. "Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes" (Illuminations, pp. 219–220). One of the key terms of this essay is "aura," the ritual function of art, its ongoing negotiation of distance and presence, authenticity and artificiality. Aura, according to Benjamin, is ontologically connected to the original, unique work of art and for this reason does not permit of reproduction or replication. Benjamin is mainly concerned with painting, photography, and film, yet his general argument applies to written texts as well. With technological progress and the concomitant proliferation of forums for amateur writers (newspapers, professional and special interest magazines, dime novels, serials, and so forth), the distinction between author and reader, between the "real" and the "sham" writer, became increasingly blurred. In the age of mechanical reproduction, as Benjamin explains elsewhere, "the reader is at all times ready to become a writer." Because of the division of labor, the majority of the workforce are "experts" in something (if only in a very circumscribed and specialized area), that is, potential authors: "As an expert—even if not on a subject but only on the post he occupies—he gains access to authorship" (Reflections, p. 225).

MODERNISM AND THE NEW AESTHETICS OF SPEED

Inasmuch as Benjamin attributed the disappearance of traditional authorship to technological progress, he evoked a recurring theme in Western cultural criticism: the widespread anxiety about the loss of authorial control in a scientific-technological environment, which resurfaced with every new and more powerful technology. Yet this is only half the story. Along with such anxieties there had always been an effort to co-opt the scientific and technological paradigms in art. And while Adams's and Norris's negative stances foreshadow the elegiac disgust with contemporary mass society that informs the later works of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, they in no way reflect the enthusiasm about that same modern environment by the early vorticist Pound, by much of popular literature, dime novels, and books for adolescent readers (such as the widely popular Tom Swift series), or by the many writers, poets, painters, photographers, and musicians committed to forging from an increasingly machine-engineered world a new form of aesthetics. To a large degree this new modernist aesthetics is predicated on the encroachment of science and technology into practically every sphere of society, and, as a result, on the ever-accelerating pulse of everyday life. Eager to respond to the fast pace of modern life, authors presented their own view of the formative and deforming power of speed, translating the dynamic potential of urban space into an abstract, kinetic verbal construction.

See alsoCentennial; Darwinism; Health and Medicine; Pseudoscience; Psychology; Transportation; Weaponry

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Adams, Henry. 1907. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Bellamy, Edward. 1887. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. Edited by Cecelia Tichi. New York: Penguin, 1982.

Carnegie, Andrew. 1908. Problems of To-day: Wealth, Labor, Socialism. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1933.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1915. Herland. Introduction by Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Twain, Mark. 1889. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Edited by Bernard L. Stein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan, 1925.

Secondary Works

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflection. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968.

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Cox, James M. "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: The Machinery of Self-Preservation." Yale Review 50 (autumn 1960): 89–102.

Cummings, Sherwood. Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Golden, Catherine, ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper." New York: Feminist Press, 1992.

Kenner, Hugh. The Mechanic Muse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934.

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Patai, Daphne, ed. Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

United States Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975.

Klaus Benesch