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SIZE

     

((Track down and Insert quote from
Stanislaw Lem about the triviality
of mere scale.))

From: _The Outline of History_
by H.G. Wells, 1922
(p 926 of the 3rd Edition):

Before the nineteenth century there were no ships
in the world much over 2,000 tons burthen; now
there is nothing wonderful about a 50,000-ton
liner.  There are people who sneer at this kind
of progress as being a progress in "mere size,"
but that sort of sneering merely marks the
intellectual limitations of those who indulge in
it.  The great ship of the steel-frame building
is not, as they imagine, a magnified version of
the small ship or building of the past; it is a
thing different in kind, more lightly and
strongly built, of finer and stronger materials;
instead of being a thing of precedent and
rule-of-thumb, it is a thing of subtle and
intricate calculation.  In the old house or ship,
matter was dominant--the material and its needs
had to be slavishly obeyed; in the new, matter                    SCALE
has been captured, changed, coerced.
       
       


       
       
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