The Atlantic

Lessons About the iPhone, Courtesy of a Depression-Era Children's Book

<em>Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel</em> and other classics by Virginia Lee Burton capture a bias in the way people look at technological innovation.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

I loved the children’s story Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel when I was young. Mike Mulligan, the operator of Mary Anne, his beloved steam-powered excavating machine, attempts to dig a cellar for the town hall of Popperville in a single day, in a last hurrah of obsolete steam technology. Everything goes well until (spoiler!) Mike Mulligan forgets to provide a way for Mary Anne to leave the hole that they’ve dug. The solution: turn Mary Anne into the town hall’s boiler and Mike Mulligan into the janitor. Problem solved.

I was recently reading this story to my 3-year-old daughter, along with two other stories by ’s author, Virginia Lee Burton: and . These three books were published over the course of about 15 years several decades ago, beginning in 1939 with , during a period of hefty economic and societal upheavale experienced it for the first time), I noticed that they were engaging with the same ideas that are now constantly in the news: how people perceive and adapt to technological change, how workers deal with automation, and how machines are changing jobs.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic4 min read
Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was
The Atlantic3 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
The Legacy of Charles V. Hamilton and Black Power
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. This week, The New York Times published news of the death of Charles V. Hamilton, the
The Atlantic6 min read
The Happy Way to Drop Your Grievances
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In 15th-century Germany, there was an expression for a chronic complainer: Greiner, Zanner, which can be translated as “whiner-grumbler.” It was no

Related Books & Audiobooks