The eighteenth century was an ‘age of machines’. This much we know. But recently literary critics and cultural historians have become concerned with just how controversial drawing instruments, hot air balloons, mechanical dolls and other products of virtuosi science were in the period. Some thinkers used the analogy of machines and automata to prove that a well-governed, self-propelling society was not only desirable but possible. Others complained that the time and effort that went into exhibiting and selling mechanical trinkets and spectacular exhibitions proved that modern culture was economically corrupt and morally indiscriminate. Nevertheless, already by the first decades of the nineteenth century, machines had become part of the social and economic background. Even those whom we might expect to be against them found ways to accommodate machines and find a moral high ground from which to view them. A Tory naturalist, William Wordsworth could in 1833 look at a railway viaduct and declare:

The claim that the materialist revolution might be assuaged by the sublime is a stretch, but it proves the larger point.

How did this happen? The simple answer is that people just got used to new machines much like we have cell phones and iPods. A better answer has to do with how technologies appear in other technologies, a process that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call ‘remediation’. Normally, the word remediation means to remedy or clean up (as in an environmental spill), but as Bolter and Grusin use it, it also means to resituate one medium into another. Googlebooks is a good example: printed books are photographed and then posted onto the web; the old linear medium becomes subject to the non-linear mechanisms of the computer interface; the limitations of print are thus remediated. The process works the other way as well. No one knew much about cyberspace until William Gibson wrote about it in his novel Neuromancer. Historians of science see something similar at work in the Enlightenment.