machines

"No nineteenth-century inventor was more prolific than Thomas Edison, no career more epic... Edison filed his first patent, for an automatic vote-recording machine, in 1868. When he set up his laboratory at Melno Park, in 1876, he promised "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so." He kept that promise, averaging an almost inconceivable forty patents a year - one every nine days - for a lifetime total of more than a thousand. He filed his patent for the incandescent light bulb in 1879, but 1882, the year he lit up New York, marked his personal best of a hundred and seven. Given the pace and scale of technological change, and the enthusiasm for it, it's no wonder that, in Edison's age, the past, the present, and the future seemed to be linked together by an unending chain of machines."

article by Jill Lepore in New Yorker Magazine May 12 '08 edition

think of your reliance in cellphone and computer, tv, ipod, movies, light bulbs, on an on - compare that to caveman days - watching fires for entertainment.. hunting.. gathering nuts, berries..