Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

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Voices in Time

1906 / New York City

Mark Twain Defines Man the Machine

Tags:: 1900s,; Mark Twain,; New York City

Old Man
What are the materials of which a steam engine is made?

Young Man
Iron, steel, brass, white metal, and so on.

Old Man
Where are these found?

Young Man
In the rocks.

Old Man
You could make the engine out of the rocks themselves?

Young Man
Yes, a brittle one and not valuable.

Old Man
You would not require much of such an engine as that?

Young Man
No—substantially nothing.

Old Man
To make a fine and capable engine how would you proceed?

Young Man
Drive tunnels and shafts into the hills; blast out the iron ore; crush it, smelt it, reduce it to pig iron; put some of it through the Bessemer process and make steel of it. Mine and treat and combine the several metals of which brass is made.

Old Man
Then?

Young Man
Out of the perfected result, build the fine engine.

Old Man
You would require much of this one?

Young Man
Oh, indeed yes.

Old Man
It could drive lathes, drills, planers, punches, polishers—in a word, all the cunning machines of a great factory?

Young Man
It could.

Old Man
What could the stone engine do?

Young Man
Drive a sewing machine, possibly—nothing more, perhaps.

Old Man
Men would admire the other engine and rapturously praise it?

Young Man
Yes.

Old Man
But not the stone one?

Young Man
No.

Old Man
The merits of the metal machine would be far above those of the stone one?

Young Man
Of course.

Old Man
Personal merits?

Young Man
Personal merits? How do you mean?

Old Man
It would be personally entitled to the credit of its own performance?

Young Man
The engine? Certainly not.

Old Man
Why not?

Young Man
Because its performance is not personal. It is a result of the law of its construction. It is not a merit that it does the things which it is set to do—it can’t help doing them.

Old Man
And it is not a personal demerit in the stone machine that it does so little?

Young Man
Certainly not. It does no more and no less than the law of its make permits and compels it to do. There is nothing personal about it; it cannot choose. In this process of “working up to the matter” is it your idea to work up to the proposition that a man and a machine are about the same thing, and that there is no personal merit in the performance of either?

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Ways of Learning

About the Text

From "What Is Man?" After his older brother bought the Hannibal Journal in 1851, Samuel Clemens set type and wrote sketches for the paper. He left home in 1853 at the age of seventeen, piloting steamboats on the Mississippi River and panning for gold in Nevada, before writing again for a newspaper in 1863 under the name "Mark Twain." In 1935 Ernest Hemingway conceded, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.