Elting Morison Men, Machines and Modern Times

Elting Morison (1909 - 1995) was an American historian of technology, military biographer, and essayist of clarity and style.  The following excerpts are taken from his classic book of essays Men, Machines, and Modern Times (1966).

/---

I once collected evidence on the lives of about thirty of these men [inventors] who flourished in the nineteenth century.  A surprising number turned out to be people with little formal education, who drank a good deal, who were careless with money, and who had trouble with wives or other women.  This is also, I suppose, what is now called a good stereotype of the painter or poet.  And it is quite probable that the inventor who is also something of an engineer is, like all great engineers, and artist and therefore share in what is assumed to be the artistic or creative temperament.  But there may be a little more to it than that.  It is possible, if one sets aside the long-run social benefits, to look upon invention as a hostile act -- a dislocation of existing schemes, a way of disturbing the comfortable bourgeois routines and calculations, a means of discharging the restlessness with arrangements and standards that arbitrarily limit.  An Englishman who some years ago made a canvass of the lives of a good many inventors was surprised to find how many of them had worked as telegraphers.  He concluded that the nature this calling -- itinerant, odd hours, episodic work loads, essentially lonely, in touch with mechanisms -- supplied a kind of rive gauche [lit., Left Bank, an area of intellectual culture] or revolutionary underground for men not at home with standard operating procedures.
---/

Applying Morison's description, I find that I possess all the characteristics of an artist or an inventor -- except, I suppose, talent.

I found an observation from Morison that I wish he had amplified into an entire essay:

/--
[A] machine, any machine, if left to itself, tends to establish its own conditions, to create its own environment and draw men into it.  Since a machine, any machine, is designed to do only a part of what a whole man can do, it tends to wear down those parts of a man that are not included in the design.

This insight seems to me worth pondering.
---/

I believe that the insight can be extended from the machine to the entire technology-based modern society.