College Board - AP English Language Samples Pa**age IIIII lyrics

A major attraction at the Paris Exposition of 1867 was the locomotive America. Its cab was crafted of ash, maple, black walnut, mahogany, and cherry. Its boiler, smokestack, valve boxes, and cylinders were covered with a glistening silvery material. The tender was decorated with the arms of the Republic, a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, and a number of elaborate scrolls. Other machinery of the day exhibited similar characteristics. Steam engines were built in “Greek revival” style, featuring fluted columns and decorated pedestals. On a printing press called The Columbian each pillar was a caduceus— the serpent-entwined staff of the universal messenger, Hermes—and atop the machine perched an eagle with extended wings, grasping in its talons Jove's thunderbolts, an olive branch of peace, and a cornucopia of plenty, all bronzed and gilt.¹ It is little remembered today that well into the late nineteenth century most American machine manufacturers embellished their creations. While this practice pleased the public, some observers considered it anomalous. A writer in the British periodical Engineering found it “extremely difficult to understand how among a people so practical in most things, there is maintained a tolerance of the grotesque ornaments and gaudy colors, which as a rule rather than an exception distinguish American machines.”² An exasperated critic for Scientific American a**erted that “a highly colored and fancifully ornamented piece of machinery is good in the inverse ratio of the degree of color and ornament.”³ By the beginning of the twentieth century, machine ornamentation yielded to clean lines, economy, and restriction to the essential. “Form follows function” became the precept of a new machine aesthetic. Creators of exotic contraptions like the locomotive America were accused of being sentimentalists, hypocrites and worse. Yet in their reluctance to give up adornment—ridiculous as it might have seemed— these designers were in fact expressing a discomfort we all share, an uneasiness in the face of mathematical severity. The new machine aesthetic, the admiration of slickness and purity of line, spread from factories and power plants into every area of society. The term “industrial design” was first used in 1913, and by 1927 the famed Norman Bel Geddes was calling himself an “industrial designer.”4 During the twenties and thirties practically every human artifact was repatterned in the new mode. Lamps, tables, and chairs; toasters, refrigerators, and clocks; plates, goblets, and flatware—all were simplified, trimmed, and reshaped. Even the humble pencil sharpener did not escape; Raymond Loewy created a streamlined, chrome model in 1933. Along with the revolution in style, came many theories about why it was happening—admiration and emulation of the machine being only one. The new simplicity, it was claimed, was democratic at heart, a rebellion against the baroque ornateness of older, autocratic societies. A more jaundiced view held that the new vogue was intended to distract the ma**es in hard times, or simply to help promote the sale of products by giving the machine a good name.