Humphrey Jennings: Pandæmonium, 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (1985)

Pandaemonium, 1660-1886 is a book of contemporary observations of the coming, development and impact of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, collected by documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings between 1937 and his early death in 1950. His daughter, Mary-Louise Jennings, and a co-founder with Jennings of Mass Observation, Charles Madge, brought his work to publication in 1985. The book takes its title from the first excerpt within it, the section in Book I of Paradise Lost (1660) in which John Milton describes the building of Pandaemonium, the capital city of Hell. (from Wikipedia)

From the New York Times review (1985): “For Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium was a prophetic symbol of industrialism, and it provides not only the title but also the starting point of his attempt to chronicle ‘the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution.’ This was best done, he thought, by letting those who took part in the process speak for themselves, and Milton’s lines usher in a collection of some 370 texts ranging from the 1660’s to the 1880’s – the testimony of scientists, artists, rich men, poor men and a great throng of miscellaneous witnesses. Between them, these passages (or ‘images,’ as Jennings preferred to call them) are meant to provide a composite picture of how contemporaries experienced the triumph of the machine, how it transformed both their outward circumstances and inner lives.” (Review)

The cover above is from the UK edition.

First published by André Deutsch. London, 1985
Edited by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge
Publisher The Free Press, New York
First American Edition, 1985
ISBN 0029164702
376 pages
via joandleefe

PDF (30 MB)

Bertrand Gille: Engineers of the Renaissance (1964–) [French, English]

“In his reconstruction of Renaissance technology informed by research into little-known manuscripts from libraries across Europe, Bertrand Gille emphasises the close continuity of technical invention from antiquity (in particular, the Alexandrian Greeks), through the mediaeval period (in particular, the Germans), to its brief but brilliant high flaring among the Italians of the fifteenth century. The engineers were conscious of embodying the Archimedean tradition, the tradition of “give me a place to stand and I can move the world.” It was an age marked by a close and natural mutuality between the technical and the fine arts, and by the first real union of science and technology, whose issue was a permanent enrichment of both. Science gave to engineering a new sophistication of mathematical precision, and the working models constructed for mechanical inventions prepared the way for a truly experimental science, as later developed by the generation of Galileo.

As might be expected, the figure of Leonardo da Vinci looms large in this book. It is the author’s contention, based on the documents he has uncovered, that Leonardo’s originality as an engineer has been greatly overestimated, that in fact he borrowed and adapted freely from the work of this anonymous and little-known contemporaries, that many of his ideas are already prefigured in the mediaeval period. Nevertheless, although he rests on the foothills leading up to him, he still towers above them as the consummate technical artist.”

Publisher Hermann, Paris, 1964
239 pages

English edition
Publisher MIT Press, 1966
256 pages

Reviews: Alex Keller (Technology and Culture, 1965), Harry Woolf (Science, 1968), M. Daumas (Revue d’Histoire des sciences et de leurs application, 1964, FR).

Wikipedia (FR)

Les ingénieurs de la Renaissance (French, 1964, 8 MB, added on 2018-12-27)
Engineers of the Renaissance (English, 1966, 8 MB, updated on 2018-12-27)

Lewis Mumford: Art and Technics (1952–) [English, Greek]

Lewis Mumford — architectural critic, theorist of technology, urbanist, cultural critic, historian, biographer, and philosopher — was the author of almost thirty books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with “technics.”

In these lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1951, Mumford explores “the ethical problems that drove all of his writings on art, technology and urbanism: the severing of the bonds of fellowship and community in advanced industrial society; the waning sense of a public good and the resulting moral crisis of modern life; the cultural divide separating an instrumental language of technique from the symbolic language of aesthetic experience; and the plight of ‘personality’ in a bureaucratic age.” (from the introduction to the 2000 edition)

Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 1952
Bampton Lectures in America, 4
162 pages

Review (R. L. A., Philosophy of Science, 1953)

Publisher

Art and Technics (English, 1952, removed on 2019-10-3 upon request from publisher)
Τέχνη και τεχνική (Greek, trans. Βασίλης Τομανάς, 1997)