Fournier d’Albe proposes that one god of Olympus survived the flood that swept the rest away: Hephaestus, the lame smith, now enthroned in the place of Zeus. After a playful biography of the god, he turns to the history and future of machinery, the illusion of a clockwork universe that coloured a century of philosophy, and what mechanisation may yet do for mankind.
A brief, provocative essay on technology and progress from the 1920s. Download the free EPUB.