spring.” Only in our own time have people begun to analyse: 
“what is a business?” B. J. Muller-Thym answers that it is a 
machine for making wealth, successor to the family as the 
wealth-making unit of the pre-industrial ages. G. T. Guilbaud in 
asking the question What is Cybernetics?  refers to the work of 
Jacques Lafitte, engineer and architect, saying (pp. 9­10) that 
whereas today nobody doubts “the importance of the study of 
machines for their own sake”

     . . . twenty-five years ago, as Lafitte pointed out in his book, 
     the science of machines did not exist. Elementary fragments 
     of it could be found here and there among the works of 
     engineers, in the writings of philosophers or sociologists, in 
     novels or essays—but nothing systematic had so far taken 
     shape.
          ‘The organized  constructions of man’ . . . these are our