David Edgerton's 'mule spinners' and my grannie's lifelong optimistic disposition

    My father's mother, May ,was born in 1900 and was 15 in 1915.
    I must say I never saw any sign that the horrors of the Great War, 1914-1918, had ever effected her much.
   I think this was because she grew into her formative teenage years under circumstances never seen before or since in Manchester England.
  Her father Eddie made his living installing mule spinners into Northern England's cotton mills and I never appreciated just how good his business was, during May's early years ,until I re-read David Edgerton's SHOCK OF THE OLD.

SVE 'MUST READ' book : David Edgerton's "SHOCK OF THE OLD"

     Re-reading British historian of technology David's Edgerton's "SHOCK OF THE OLD" recently, I found it a fount of zillions of ideas, stimulating my mind into overdrive, and forcing me to look at our world anew.
   Perhaps in light of my recent studies on the continuing impact of (mutated) Romanticism upon everything, I can better appreciate the force of Edgerton's main argument that histories of technology and science focus far, far, far too exclusively on 'priority' and 'original originality' ----- entrepreneurs,inventors and scientists all being obsessed with being original ,creative and 'the first'.