Fear of Machines
Mechanophobia
Mechanophobia is a fear of machines or of anything mechanical, and it is one of the few phobia names with a date of birth: it emerged in the nineteenth century as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. The machines it names are the ones that actually remove fingers.
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Why the word has a date
Most of the vocabulary in this catalogue is undatable: a Greek stem and a suffix, assembled at some point by someone unrecorded. Mechanophobia is not. Wikipedia dates it to the nineteenth century and attributes it to the effects of the Industrial Revolution, which makes it a fear that came into existence with its object.
That is a strong claim and it fits the trigger list. The machines named as particularly potent are industrial:
- shredders and grinders
- chainsaws
- the overlockers and sergers used in garment factories What they have in common is not noise or size but a specific capacity to inflict serious injury if handled without care. None of them existed before the century the word appeared in.
How the fear usually starts
The condition is described as frequently arising after a traumatic incident involving machinery, and the example Wikipedia gives is limb loss. That is a different aetiology from most specific phobias, where the majority of cases have no identifiable precipitating event.
It also complicates the diagnosis in the way that recurs throughout this catalogue. A specific phobia requires fear out of proportion to actual danger, and a chainsaw is dangerous. Someone who has lost a hand to a grinder and cannot go near one has a fear that is correct about the machine and wrong only about the odds. Where the line falls is not addressed in the sources.
What John Vassos said about it
The designer and artist John Vassos published a book called Phobia in 1931, illustrating a set of fears in the Art Deco style he was known for. Its account of mechanophobia is quoted by Wikipedia and it is worth recording in full because of what it assumes: mechanophobia is an affliction of the sexually incompetent or the economic misfit, who view machines as symbols of power or achievement.
Two things are happening in that sentence. The fear is being explained as a failure of the person rather than a response to the machine, which was ordinary for 1931. And the machine is being treated as a symbol of potency, which is a reading available only to someone who was not working next to one. The people the trigger list describes are operating shredders and overlockers, and they are not admiring them.
What is not on record
No prevalence figure, no case series and no diagnostic listing under the name. A presentation of this kind would be coded as a specific phobia of the situational or other type, and the machine would be named in the notes. The catalogue records the term because its origin story is unusually well attested and because its trigger list is unusually honest about what is actually feared.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Machines
- Fear of Submerged Man-Made ObjectsSubmechanophobia takes the same root and puts the machine underwater, where the objects feared are shipwrecks, buoys and animatronics rather than anything that could injure the person looking at them.
- Fear of TechnologyTechnophobia is about what machines do to a way of life and has a political history running back to machine-breaking. Mechanophobia is about what a specific machine can do to a hand.
- Fear of InjuryThe most common route into mechanophobia described is a machinery accident, so on the usual case the fear of the machine is a fear of the injury with an object attached.
Common questions
Questions about Mechanophobia
- Which machines are named as triggers?
- Industrial ones with a real capacity to injure: shredders, grinders, chainsaws, and the overlockers and sergers used in garment work. The sources are explicit that it is their capacity for causing significant injury when mishandled that makes them potent, rather than their noise or size.
- Is it a nineteenth-century condition?
- Wikipedia dates its emergence to the nineteenth century as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which is unusual: most phobia names cannot be dated at all.
- What did John Vassos say about it?
- That it afflicts the sexually incompetent or the economic misfit, who see machines as symbols of power or achievement. He wrote that in a 1931 illustrated book called Phobia. The explanation locates the problem in the person rather than the machine, and it describes someone admiring machinery rather than working beside it.
- Can the fear be justified?
- Partly, and the sources do not resolve it. A specific phobia requires fear out of proportion to the danger, and the danger from a grinder is real. Someone who lost a hand to one and now cannot approach one is right about the machine and wrong only about the likelihood.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of Submerged Man-Made ObjectsMost sufferers name no trauma and no triggering event, reporting instead that symptoms arrived after a lifetime of ordinary contact.
- Fear of TechnologyParliament made demolishing a machine a capital offence in 1727, and the Luddites, who arrived later, objected to something more specific than machines.
- Fear of InjuryMerriam-Webster ties the word to combat. Wikipedia files it with blood and injections. One definition describes a veteran and the other a patient avoiding a procedure.
- Fear of ClocksThe clean form is chronometrophobia. The spelling everybody uses has an extra letter and a Latin etymology invented to justify it, which does not work.
- Fear of Robots Turning Against UsAsimov coined it in 1947 and conceded in the same story that the fear had a certain justification, which is why the First Law exists at all.
- Distrust of AlgorithmsAlgorithm aversion is rejecting from a system the advice you would take from a person. It reverses by task, which is what makes it a judgement rather than a fear.