Technics and Civilization (1934), is considered a founding work in the social history of technology.  This reading is taken from section 2 of chapter 2 called "The Monastery and the Clock."  Many consider this section to contain some of Lewis Mumford's most profound and timeless observations.  In perhaps the most quoted lines from all of Mumford's works, he makes the bold and provocative claim that with the advent of the first machine clock, "time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.” 

(episode image:  one of the earliest clocks, Salisbury Cathedral Clock, supposedly dating from about 1386)