In this letter, well-known inventor Thomas Edison summarizes his ideas about laboratory work.
Frank Norris (1870-1902), one of the foremost naturalist novelists in American literature, established his reputation through novels such as The Octopus (1901) on the Western expansion of the railroads. In colorful and powerful language, he argues that the "octopus" destroyed the innocence and harmony of rural life.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the best-known engineer of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, is the famous author of Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist best known for his concept of "hegemony," wrote his impression on Fordism in his Prison Notebooks of the 1930s, published posthumously.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a "public intellectual." Educated at Harvard, influenced by William James and George Santayana, he wrote a Preface to Politics when he was only 23 and Drift and Mastery the following year. He was a founding editor of the New Republic . In the following excerpt from Drift and Mastery (1914), Lippmann points to consumer activism as a vital force to keep in check the power of business.
John Muir (1838-1914) was a naturalist, an explorer, and lover of nature committed to preserving the nation's forests, parks, and valleys. He founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and crusaded successfully to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from development in the early twentieth century; the public debate over Hetch Hetchy became a symbol of the fight between naturalists and conservationists determined to limit the development of government administrators increasingly eager to use the state's power to reshape the nation's landscape through large-scale projects such as building dams and deforestation for construction.