Lessons About the iPhone, Courtesy of a Depression-Era Children's Book

I loved the children’s story Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel when I was young. Mike Mulligan, the operator of Mary Anne, his beloved steam-powered excavating machine, attempts to dig a cellar for the town hall of Popperville in a single day, in a last hurrah of obsolete steam technology. Everything goes well until (spoiler!) Mike Mulligan forgets to provide a way for Mary Anne to leave the hole that they’ve dug. The solution: turn Mary Anne into the town hall’s boiler and Mike Mulligan into the janitor. Problem solved.

I was recently reading this story to my 3-year-old daughter, along with two other stories by ’s author, Virginia Lee Burton: and . These three books were published over the course of about 15 years several decades ago, beginning in 1939 with , during a period of hefty economic and societal upheavale experienced it for the first time), I noticed that they were engaging with the same ideas that are now constantly in the news: how people perceive and adapt to technological change, how workers deal with automation, and how machines are changing jobs.