""HAS the machine in its last furious manifestation begun to eliminate workers faster than new tasks can be found for them?" wonders Stuart Chase, an American writer. "Mechanical devices are already ousting skilled clerical workers and replacing them with operators...Opportunity in the white-collar services is being steadily undermined." The anxiety sounds thoroughly contemporary. But Mr Chase's publisher, MacMillan, "set up and electrotyped" his book, "Men and Machines", in 1929.

Stuart Chase understood the virtuous economics of technological change, but he still could not stop himself from fretting. "An uneasy suspicion has gathered that the saturation point has at last been reached," he reflected darkly. Could it be that, with the invention of the automobile, central heating, the phonograph and the electric refrigerator, entrepreneurs had at long last emptied the reservoir of human desires? He need not have worried. Today's list of human desires includes instant messaging, online role-playing games and internet dating services, all unknown in the 1920s. And there will be many more tomorrow."