John Staudenmaier, a historian of
technology and a Jesuit priest, for a recent conference at MIT. (The essay will
appear in a book called The Idea of Progress Revisited, edited by Leo
Marx and Bruce Mazlish.) Staudenmaier makes the point--obvious when brought up,
though we've mostly lost sight of it--that from the time of the hominid Lucy,
in Hadar, Ethiopia, to the time of Thomas Edison, in West Orange, New Jersey,
the onset of darkness sharply curtailed most kinds of activity for most of our
ancestors.