The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

A Mumford essay also tends to be multidisciplinary combining. Life
Mumford was born in Flushing Queens New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912. He viewed this device as the key invention of the whole Industrial Revolution contrary to the common view of the steam engine holding the prime position writing: "The clock not the steam-engine is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford. Bacon and Vannevar Bush. Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright Clarence Stein Frederic Osborn Edmund N.