"if there wasn't any quick, new-fangled way to make
a thing, I could invent one" -- Hank Morgan

Industrializing the Sixth Century

1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION

In our time it's called "technology." The terms most often used in MT's time were "machinery" and "inventions." In both eras expectations ran high: many then felt about steam, electricity and the internal combustion engine the way many now feel about microcircuitry -- that a new world was imminent.

Hank Morgan, who lays telephone wires and telegraph wires across Arthur's England, would have loved the internet. To him, inventors like Watt, Whitney and Bell were "the creators of this world -- after God." "The very first official thing [he] did" as the King's Minister was to start a patent office. His program to resurrect the Dark Ages through Man Factories and Soap Factories, electric lights and printing presses represents the beliefs of both MT and his age.

The exhibits listed below are meant to suggest some of the enthusiasm for new inventions and machines that linked Hank Morgan to MT to their American contemporaries.


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