Cobre em Mumford (1934)

Man’s culture depends for its transmission in time upon the perment record: the building, the monument, the inscribed word. During the early neotechnic phase, vast changes were made here, as important as those brought about five hundred years earlier through the invention of wood-engraving, copper-etching, and printing. The black-and-white image, the color-image, the sound, and the moving image were translated into permanent records, which could be manifold, by mechanical and chemical means. In the invention of the camera, the phonograph, and the moving picture the interplay of science and mechanical dexterity, which has already been stressed, was again manifested. (Mumford 1934:242)

Mathematical accuracy, physical economy, chemical purity, surgical cleanliness – these are some of the attributes of the new regime. And mark this: they do not belong to any one department of life. Mathematical accuracy is necessary in the temperature chart or the blood count, while cleanliness becomes part of the daily ritual of neotechnic society with a strictness quite as great as that enforced by the tabus of the earlier religions like the Jewish or the Mohammedan. The polished copper of the electric radiator is reflected in the immaculacy of the operating room: the wide glass windows of the sanitorium are repeated in the factory, the school, the home. During the last decade, in the finer communities that have been built with State aid in Europe the houses themselves are positively heliotropic: they are oriented to the sun. (Mumford 1934:247)

MUMFORD, Lewis. 1934. Technique and civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.