knowledge of ultimate effects. Mechanical speed-ups, however 
radical in their reshaping of personal and social life, still were 
allowed to happen sequentially. Men could, for the most part, 
get through a normal life span on the basis of a single set of 
skills. That is not at all the case with electric speed-up. The 
acquiring of new basic knowledge and skill by senior executives 
in middle age is one of the most common needs and harrowing 
facts of electric technology. The senior executives, or “big 
wheels,” as they are archaically and ironically designated, are 
among the hardest pressed and most persistently harassed 
groups in human history. Electricity has not only demanded 
ever deeper knowledge and faster interplay, but has made the 
harmonizing of production schedules as rigorous as that 
demanded of the members of a large symphony orchestra. And 
the satisfactions are just as few for the big executives as for 
the symphonists, since a player in a big orchestra can hear