Lewis Mumford
The first 'megamachine' was an organization of human beings, not metal; and a life-centered polytechnics has always existed alongside — and been suppressed by — power-centered monotechnics.
Key work
Technics and Civilization (1934) / The Myth of the Machine (1967–70)
Lewis Mumford spent six decades arguing that the standard history of technology — the story of tools and engines, of coal and steam and electricity — was radically incomplete. In Technics and Civilization, he proposed that the clock, invented by Benedictine monks to regulate prayer, was the true origin of the modern technical regime because it imposed an abstract, uniform, measurable time on human life, making the synchronization of labor possible. The machine presupposes a temporal discipline; that discipline precedes and enables the machine. Mumford's chronological typology — eotechnic (wood and water), paleotechnic (coal and iron), neotechnic (electricity and alloying) — situated each era of invention within a full cultural matrix of energy sources, materials, and social forms.
In The Myth of the Machine, Mumford radicalized this argument. He identified the first true 'megamachine' not in the Industrial Revolution but in the pyramid-building state of dynastic Egypt: thousands of human bodies coordinated by command, script, and hierarchy to perform tasks no individual or small group could accomplish. The idea of the organized technical system — centralized, power-amplifying, self-legitimating — is ancient; the steam engine merely gave it a new material substrate. Against this tradition he counterposed what he called 'polytechnics': the full range of craft, art, agriculture, and social technology that serves the needs of living communities rather than the accumulation of power. For Mumford, the question of technology's origins is inseparable from the question of whose ends it serves.
“The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.”