Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell have lived, so far as human pleasures are concerned, in vain.

From Music at Night by Aldous Huxley.  The essay is Wanted, a New Pleasure.  1931

It was while disporting myself, or rather while trying to disport myself, in the midst of this apparatus, that I came to my depressing conclusion about the absence of new pleasures. The thought, I remember, occurred to me one dismal winter evening as I emerged from the Restaurant des Ambassadeurs at Cannes into one of those howling winds, half Alpine, half marine, which on certain days transform the Croisette and the Promenade des Anglais into the most painfully realistic imitations of Wuthering Heights. I suddenly realized that, so far as pleasures were concerned, we are no better off than the Romans or the Egyptians. Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell have lived, so far as human pleasures are concerned, in vain. The great joint-stock companies which control the modern pleasure industries can offer us nothing in any essential way different from the diversions which consuls offered to the Roman plebs or Trimalchio’s panders could prepare for the amusement of the bored and jaded rich in the age of Nero. And this is true in spite of the movies, the talkies, the gramophone, the radio, and all similar modem apparatus for the entertainment of humanity. These instruments, it is tme, are all essentially modern; nothing like them has existed before. But because the machines are modem it does not follow that the entertainments which they reproduce and broadcast are also modem. They are not. All that these new machines do is to make accessible to a larger public the drama, pantomime, and music which ha-s e from time immemorial amused the leisures of humanity.