The Industrial Revolution from around 1760 to about 1840 changed life forever. Nothing was ever the same again. Some of the trees in the forests must have borne huge grins because wood was about to give way to coal. Some of the labourers no doubt, especially at the outset, heaved cautious sighs of relief because they themselves were giving way to machines.

The inventor of the wheel, long dead many millennia ago, would have had no idea what his/her brilliance was going to lead to.

History — pictorial history — leads us to believe that the wheel was in use in the fourth millennium BC. By 1200 BC, the Chinese had chariots. In an apparent indication of how slow progress took place back in the time it was another 400 years before the wheel found itself pressed into service by Nubian potters. Ox-driven water wheels too came into use around this time. And everybody appeared happy for a good long while.

Then came the Age of Machines and the wheels of progress took off: the first motorised automobiles in 1886-1886. After that, there was hardly anything that could be done without the concept of the wheel playing a central part. People of the 1800s who were jerked out of their easy going existence; who had to put up with soot from coal staining their pristine skylines; who had to endure new diseases, well they grumbled but eventually accepted that change is a way of life and, anyway, now that they were all used to it, they could cease their moaning and get to work — to work their machines, that is.

Everything was hunky dory for a good long time. Then, someone with a penchant for binary calculations brought us the computer, which, some of us ignoramuses thought would be another passing phase, like the Walkman. People said the same thing when the Industrial Revolution was making its first tentative knocks on the doors of change. “It will go away!” Rather than disappear, the computer — just like the machine and the wheel with the automobile — combined with the Internet and here we are today, some of us clinging desperately to the coat tails of progress, others — the younger generation who have not the faintest idea what a Walkman is — are flying comfortably high and even contributing to the phenomenal, dizzying rate of change taking place all around.

When I first began work as a copy editor at the newspaper the screens on the computers were no larger than those on Apple’s iPads, yet they intimidated me back then until I won their friendship through sheer force of will. Today, I discovered that I have about 500 songs on my laptop. The speakers on the laptop as many will attest are not the same quality as those on one’s home theatre system. So I wished to attach my laptop to the amplifier and play the songs through the large speakers. But how? I hadn’t a clue. The technician at the electrical shop — a young geek — showed me how with his eyes closed as though he was somnambulating through the process. He even led me to the shelf that stocked the necessary cables. He (with eyes open) drew a rough diagram of how I should connect the various jacks. “Easy”, he said, adding patronizingly, “You’ll have no problem believe me.”

I returned home with my head in a bit of a spin, carrying all the relevant details. To the young technician’s credit, it took hardly any time, following his sketch much the same way I do with the recipe book when cooking.

Ironically, the first song that charged through the speakers was Dylan’s Slow Train Coming. I could have laughed and I did. For Dylan’s lyrics too suddenly appeared dated. What we have here with science and technology today resembles no slow train, but a supersonic jet and I wonder how long I’d be able to withstand and keep pace with the G-force of change.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.