Most people think of photography as a secular enterprise, born of a mechanical age.

Probably the first clock in Europe was installed in a Milan church in 1335, hinting at the dawning mechanical age.

Faces were present, but none were more than partly formed and some of steel-blue hue looked like robots representing the mechanical age.

On "9:20 Special," the band caught the warm, full hum of the arrangement, all cylinders smoothly pumping away paying tribute to a mechanical age.

In the years just before 1914, David Bomberg was exploring, in semi-cubist, Vorticist works, the potentiality of geometric forms in the new mechanical age.

Romantic organs were the most complex musical achievement of the mechanical age, permitting a single musician to summon up entire symphonies of sound.

"In the modern age, this mechanical age, we think we've conquered the planet," he said.

The expeditions that then followed were of a different character from their predecessors, belonging to the "mechanical age" that succeeded the Heroic Age.

The mechanical age smashed all this, for industrialism required a new kind of man.

R. L. Hobson, former curator of ceramics at the British Museum, called her "a rare flower in this mechanical age."