ABSTRACT
Around 1680 a French physicist, Denis Papin, then working in Germany—as a Protestant he had been forced to leave his native country—invented the steam engine. Whether he actually built one we do not know; but he designed one, and he actually put together the first safety valve. In 1946, the first computer, the ENIAC, came on stream. And with it began an age in which information will be the organizing principle for work. Information, however, is the basic principle of biological rather than of mechanical processes. Very few events have as much impact on civilization as a change in the basic principle for organizing work. Up until A.D. 800 or 900, China was far ahead of any Western country in technology, in science, and in culture and civilization generally. Then the Benedictine monks in northern Europe found new sources of energy.
