/lit/ - Literature

>Yet the conception of new kinds of power-machines fascinated various minds from the thirteenth century on, notably Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Campanella-all, be it noted, monks. Dreams of horseless carriages, flying machines, apparatus for effecting instantaneous communication, or transmuting the elements, multiplied. These fantasies were no doubt incited by such rudimentary machines as were already in operation: for there must have been a moment when the first windmill or the first automaton moving by clockwork seemed as marvellous as the first dynamo or the first 'talking machine' less than a century ago.

>Though a whole literature of utopias soon followed in the wake of More's picture of an ideal commonwealth, it is significant that the only one whose direct effects can be traced was the mere fragment of a utopia left behind by Francis Bacon: for it was his 'The New Atlantis' that first canvassed the possibility of a joint series of operations that would combine a new system of scientific investigation with a new technology. At a moment when the bitter struggle within Christianity between contentious doctrines and sects had come to a stalemate, the machine itself seemed to offer an alternative way of reaching Heaven. The promise of material abundance on earth, through exploration, organized conquest, and invention, offered a common objective to all classes.

>But apart from the direct effects of the printing press upon the invention of later machines, it had a social result that was perhaps even more important: for almost at a stroke, the cheap and rapid production of books broke down the ancient class monopoly of knowledge, particularly of the kind of accurate, abstract knowledge, of mathematical operations and physical events, that had long been the monopoly of a small professional class. The printed book made all knowledge progressively available to all those who learned to read even if poor: and one of the results of this democratization was that knowledge itself, as contrasted with legend, dogmatic tradition, or poetic fantasy, became a subject of intense independent interest, spreading by means of the printed book into every department of life, and immensely increasing the number of minds, past, present, and future, having intercourse with each other.

>The enrichment of the collective human mind, through the printing and circulation of books, is comparable only to that linking together of individual brains and experiences through the invention of discursive language. The increase of the scope of scientific discovery and the tempo of mechanical invention can both be largely attributed to the printed book, and from the seventeenth century on, to the printed scientific paper and review. Changes that might have taken centuries to achieve through the circulation of a limited number of manuscripts took place almost over night through the agency of print.