Speed

In February 1909, the French newspaper Le Figaro published Filippo Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” a passionate proclamation of the virtues of the machine world, the glory of war and the dominance of man1 over Nature. Marinetti and his Futurist colleagues were by no means unique in staking their quest for modernity on such ideas, but they were perhaps the first to assign them a name that we now know so well: “speed.”