Industrial art may in time to come be regarded as the characteristic achievement of our civilisation. Its manifestations, so far as they survive, may disclose to posterity all the hesitancies, the conventions, the cautious dependence upon prototypes and the occasional outbursts of courageous innovation, which represent the history of design in industry since the close of the eighteenth century. Our almost exclusive preoccupation with production and mechanical efficiency during the first industrial revolution and our misunder¬ standing of the operation of design and the function of the designer will be duly observed; while the emergence of what has been called “machine art” may be recorded as marking the rise of the second industrial revolution. Our ways of life, the machines and arts upon which that life so greatly depends, may be revealed to the future by the chipped and rusting remains of a gas cooker or a refrigerator, the streamlined body of a motor coach or the fallen skeleton of a skyscraper. From such crushed and corroded bones, the archaeologists of the thirtieth century may attempt to reconstruct our lives. Helped a little by imagination, they may endow us with virtues, the possession of which we have never even suspected; or, with less generosity to the past, they may regard us as far worse than we really are.
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