In seventeenth-century Delft, a fanatically curious fabric merchant invents the microscope. Even as he neglects and abuses his family, he discovers a new world of life.

A few men gather in a small house to discuss what makes humanity unique as compared to the rest of nature.

While recovering from a serious illness, a ninety-year-old scientist wades through his patchy memory, piecing together fragments of images and emotions from his childhood as an immigrant in the once-moving American 1940s. He thinks about his admiration for airplanes, which have been outlawed in this alternate history. He considers how such scientific advancements can also bring about great destruction.

All his life, a man creates machines to compensate for his idiocy, but, over time, the machines he creates lose respect for him and treat him poorly, causing him to lose all hope. A single machine opens his eyes to the idiocy of others, changing his perspective and giving him back hope and joy.

A married couple clashes over the husband’s unwillingness to work. Laziness and enterprise produce a surprising invention.

In an alternate Great Depressions NYC, a Jewish foreman investigates the true outputs of his factory as his eccentric German employer seeks to use an emerging idea called "industrivism," or the improvement of the human body through technology, created by a bored pulp writer, to recruit workers to fulfill his machinations. Without realizing, a pulp writer in an alternative 1920s New York City invents the idea of "industrivism" that earns her an audience with an eccentric German businessman. Meanwhile, a Jewish foreman investigate the true purpose of the factory and unearths his employer's dark past and future machinations.

Days after announcing an invention that will change the fabric of his futuristic world, an inventor goes missing and two detectives must find out where he is and what his supposedly groundbreaking invention was.

On a train ride to a metallurgical conference in Chicago, a consultant tries to avoid the debate between pure and applied sciences, but he cannot avoid it when he gets cornered in the washroom by two professors and an undecided bright new recruit.

A young man working in an intense laboratory falls madly in love with a machine that can invent new sensations on this skin - until the experiment is destroyed.

A scientist reminisces about an old affair while he watches his time-machine lab burn down.