Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age

Cultural historian Megan Prelinger did an exceptional job with her new book Inside the Machine. With great writing, it’s perfectly suitable to the average interested lay reader as well as scientists, artists, technicians, computer programmers, all electronic gurus and everyone else in electronic field. The two main topics of her subject are history of electronics from its early starts in the 1880s (Edison’s Mazda light bulb) through the early days of computing in the 1960s and how artists illustrated the progress. The art was almost entirely commercial graphic art, and Prelinger illustrates her book with a large number of artworks mostly commissioned by major corporations for advertising. We see commercial advertising and posters created during the period and their art was strongly influenced by many European artists who fled to the US prior to WW II. These artists depicted the invisible and intangible of electronics into art form. We see connections between art and science, art and technology through these illustrations. Prelinger breaks the text into short sections for easy readability, and nine chapters according to topics from the early tubes to space electronics. She includes and extensive set of Notes, references to figures, and a good index.