Men, Machines and History [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION When I wrote the first edition of this book, one of my main difficulties was the lack of published material about its subject matter. Facts had to be scraped together from many and diverse sources. My difficulty is now the reverse. In the intervening years a great deal of research has been done and many thousands of pages have been written on the history of technology. Time has therefore been my main enemy. To have attempted to digest all this new material would have postponed to the dim future the publication of a revised edition. I have had to read selectively, and can only hope that my selections have been judicious. Certainly they have compelled me to make extensive changes in the text. In expanding the book to cover developments since 1945, I should not have found it possible to give any adequate treatment, were it not for the happy discovery that a major part of the required information could be acquired by the process of scanning the pages of the New Scientist from its beginnings in 1956 onwards. I freely confess that I have only looked elsewhere for material on those not very numerous occasions when the New Scientist failed me, or to confirm some doubtful point. This will explain the many references to that journal in Part Three. The bulk of Part Three was completed at the end of September 1964, but some revisions take account of major developments in the following three months and a few later footnotes have been added. It is with regret that I have decided to omit the discussion of the problem of measuring technological progress, which bulked large in the concluding chapter of the first edition. I have done so, partly to keep down the length and therefore the cost of the book, but largely because the task of revising this material in the light of later researches by others would have been prohibitively heavy, while the extension of my 'relative invention rate' index to the post-war period would have presented formidable diffi- xi