From Ancient Times to the Swing Riots
Talk of automatic machinery replacing human muscle power goes back to the
ancient world. The Iliad, Homer’s eighth-century BCE epic, describes a
driverless vehicle, the tripod of Hephaestus, that navigates on its own. Homer
refers to the vehicle as “automatic.”1 Aristotle, around 350 BCE, raised the
possibility of machines replacing humans:
For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or
anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of
Hephaestus, which, says the poet, “of their own accord entered the assembly
of the Gods”; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum
touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want
servants, nor masters slaves.2
FIGURE 13.1. Frequency of Appearance of Labor-Saving Machinery and Technological Unemployment in
Books, 1800–2008
Narratives of losing one’s job to a machine have a long history, with mutations creating different epidemics.
Source: Google Ngrams, no smoothing.
The statues of Daedalus were said to be able to walk or run, like modern-day
robots. Hero of Alexandria in the first century BCE wrote a book, Automata,

describing how to make a programmable tripod of Hephaestus, as well as a coin-
operated vending machine and other remarkable devices. Water-powered mills
began grinding grain into flour by the first century BCE. So the idea of machines
replacing jobs was in place long before the start of the Common Era, along with
fears of unemployment.
Searching eighteenth-century newspapers, we find evidence of great interest
in how technological advances are changing the economy, but without much
alarm about technology’s effects on jobs. The term industrial revolution does not
come up at all in a search of eighteenth-century newspapers—historians
introduced that term later on. But by the nineteenth century, concerns about
technology-based unemployment took center stage. The narrative was
particularly contagious during economic depressions when many were
unemployed.
The defining event was a protest in 1811 in the United Kingdom by a group
that claimed a mythical man, Ludd, as their spiritual leader. The mutation that
renewed the old narrative and made it so virulent in 1811 was a new kind of
power loom that was eliminating weavers’ jobs. The word Luddite continued to
appear regularly in newspapers in following years and today remains a synonym
for a person who resists technological progress.
In 1830, the Swing Riots in Britain were a response to the loss of farm jobs
that occurred when the new mechanical thresher entered widespread use. The
rioters’ spiritual leader was the imaginary “Captain Swing,” and again rioters
destroyed the machinery. Certainly the decline in agricultural employment due to
mechanization was widely noted. It was a frightening change for the people in
the advanced countries undergoing the fastest mechanization. Living on and
working the land was an ancient tradition, and now workers had to do something
entirely new to earn their keep, and the new jobs probably required moving to
crowded urban areas. In describing their fears, they did not use the words
technological unemployment, computers, or artificial intelligence, but they did
have their own terms for the phenomenon, including labor-saving, as in labor-
saving appliances, labor-saving devices, labor-saving inventions, labor-saving
machines, and labor-saving processes.

Depression Narratives of the 1870s
In the depression of 1873–79, a particularly strong depression in the United
States and Europe, concern that labor-saving inventions were at least partly to
blame for high unemployment took center stage in the popular consciousness,
likely worsening the depression. In the United States, this depression is typically
attributed to financial speculation leading to the banking panic of 1873, but the
fear-inducing narrative about a long-term loss of jobs and job prospects due to
labor-saving inventions may help to explain why the depression went global.
Certainly the depression of the 1870s was accompanied by farmers’ accelerated
adoption of labor-saving machinery, along with more workers destroying
machines and hired farm laborers threatening violence.3 Underneath the violence
was widespread concern about the outlook for the common laborer.
In the middle of that depression, the famous 1876 Centennial Exhibition in
Philadelphia, a celebration of one hundred years of US independence, turned out
to be more a testimony to labor-saving machinery than a remembrance of the
American Revolution. The exhibition did display some of George Washington’s
personal items, but not much more about history. Instead, it presented examples
of modern industry from twenty countries. The visitor’s guide describes one of
the most dramatic exhibits in the gigantic Machinery Hall:
In the centre of this building is located a 1400 horse-power Corliss engine,
capable of driving (if required) the entire shafting necessary to run all the
machinery exhibits. This engine has a 40-inch cylinder with 120-inch stroke,
and was constructed for this especial service. It will be run when required, but
it is expected that the engines on exhibition will do a portion of the work of
driving the shafting. The main lines of shafting are at a height of 18 feet
above the floor, and extend almost the entire length of the building;
countershafts extend from the aisles into the avenues at necessary points.4
The exhibition also gave reason for alarm regarding jobs in agriculture:
Among the most extensive and interesting exhibits will be the agricultural
machines in active operation, comprising everything used on the farm or
plantation, in tillage, harvesting, or preparation for market; manufactured
foods of all kinds, and all varieties of fish, with the improved appliances for