Encyclopedia of Historical Antecedents in which Social considerations changed the course of Science &

Technology During Ancient period, Middle and Modern Ages.

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Technology In The Ancient World

The beginnings—Stone Age technology (to c. 3000 BCE)

The identification of the history of technology with the history of humanlike

species does not help in fixing a precise point for its origin, because the estimates
of prehistorians and anthropologists concerning the emergence of human species vary
so widely. Animals occasionally use natural tools such as sticks or stones, and
the creatures that became human doubtless did the same for hundreds of millennia
before the first giant step of fashioning their own tools. Even then it was an
interminable time before they put such toolmaking on a regular basis, and still
more aeons passed as they arrived at the successive stages of standardizing their
simple stone choppers and pounders and of manufacturing them—that is, providing
sites and assigning specialists to the work. A degree of specialization in
toolmaking was achieved by the time of the Neanderthals (70,000 BCE);
more-advanced tools, requiring assemblage of head and haft, were produced by
Cro-Magnons (perhaps as early as 35,000 BCE); while the application of mechanical
principles was achieved by pottery-making Neolithic (New Stone Age; 6000 BCE) and
Metal Age peoples (about 3000 BCE).

Earliest communities

For all except approximately the past 10,000 years, humans lived almost entirely
in small nomadic communities dependent for survival on their skills in
gathering food, hunting and fishing, and avoiding predators. It is reasonable to
suppose that most of these communities developed in tropical latitudes, especially
in Africa, where climatic conditions are most favourable to a creature with such
poor bodily protection as humans have. It is also reasonable to suppose that tribes
moved out thence into the subtropical regions and eventually into the landmass of
Eurasia, although their colonization of this region must have been severely limited
by the successive periods of glaciation, which rendered large parts of it
inhospitable and even uninhabitable, even though humankind has shown remarkable
versatility in adapting to such unfavourable conditions.

The Neolithic Revolution

Toward the end of the last ice age, some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, a few of the
communities that were most favoured by geography and climate began to make the
transition from the long period of Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, savagery to
a more settled way of life depending on animal husbandry and agriculture. This
period of transition, the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age, led eventually to
a marked rise in population, to a growth in the size of communities, and to the
beginnings of town life. It is sometimes referred to as the Neolithic Revolution
because the speed of technological innovation increased so greatly and human
social and political organization underwent a corresponding increase in complexity.
To understand the beginnings of technology, it is thus necessary to survey
developments from the Old Stone Age through the New Stone Age down to the emergence
of the first urban civilizations about 3000 BCE.

Stone

The material that gives its name and a technological unity to these periods of
prehistory is stone. Though it may be assumed that primitive humans used other

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materials such as wood, bone, fur, leaves, and grasses before they mastered the
use of stone, apart from bone antlers, presumably used as picks in flint mines and
elsewhere, and other fragments of bone implements, none of these has survived.
The stone tools of early humans, on the other hand, have survived in surprising
abundance, and over the many millennia of prehistory important advances in
technique were made in the use of stone. Stones became tools only when they were
shaped deliberately for specific purposes, and, for this to be done efficiently,
suitable hard and fine-grained stones had to be found and means devised for shaping
them and particularly for putting a cutting edge on them. Flint became a very
popular stone for this purpose, although fine sandstones and certain volcanic rocks
were also widely used. There is much Paleolithic evidence of skill in flaking and
polishing stones to make scraping and cutting tools. These early tools were held
in the hand, but gradually ways of protecting the hand from sharp edges on the stone,
at first by wrapping one end in fur or grass or setting it in a wooden handle, were
devised. Much later the technique of fixing the stone head to a haft converted these
hand tools into more versatile tools and weapons.

With the widening mastery of the material world in the Neolithic Period, other
substances were brought into service, such as clay for pottery and brick, and
increasing competence in handling textile raw materials led to the creation of
the first woven fabrics to take the place of animal skins. About the same time,
curiosity about the behaviour of metallic oxides in the presence of fire promoted
one of the most significant technological innovations of all time and marked the
succession from the Stone Age to the Metal Age.

Power

The use of fire was another basic technique mastered at some unknown time in the
Old Stone Age. The discovery that fire could be tamed and controlled and the further
discovery that a fire could be generated by persistent friction between two dry
wooden surfaces were momentous. Fire was the most important contribution of
prehistory to power technology, although little power was obtained directly from
fire except as defense against wild animals. For the most part, prehistoric
communities remained completely dependent upon manpower, but, in making the
transition to a more settled pattern of life in the New Stone Age, they began to
derive some power from animals that had been domesticated. It also seems likely
that by the end of prehistoric times the sail had emerged as a means of harnessing
the wind for small boats, beginning a long sequence of developments in marine
transport.

Tools and weapons

The basic tools of prehistoric peoples were determined by the materials at their
disposal. But once they had acquired the techniques of working stone, they were
resourceful in devising tools and weapons with points and barbs. Thus, the
stone-headed spear, the harpoon, and the arrow all came into widespread use.
The spear was given increased impetus by the spear-thrower, a notched pole
that gave a sling effect. The bow and arrow were an even more effective
combination, the use of which is clearly demonstrated in the earliest“documentary”
evidence in the history of technology, the cave paintings of southern France and
northern Spain, which depict the bow being used in hunting. The ingenuity of these
primitive hunters is also shown in their slings, throwing-sticks (the boomerang
of the Australian Aborigines is a remarkable surviving example), blowguns, bird
snares, fish and animal traps, and nets. These tools did not evolve uniformly, as
each primitive community developed only those instruments that were most
suitable for its own specialized purposes, but all were in use by the end of the

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Stone Age. In addition, the Neolithic Revolution had contributed some important
new tools that were not primarily concerned with hunting. These were the first
mechanical applications of rotary action in the shape of the potter’s wheel, the
bow drill, the pole lathe, and the wheel itself. It is not possible to be sure when
these significant devices were invented, but their presence in the early urban
civilizations suggests some continuity with the late Neolithic Period. The
potter’s wheel, driven by kicks from the operator, and the wheels of early vehicles
both gave continuous rotary movement in one direction. The drill and the lathe,
on the other hand, were derived from the bow and had the effect of spinning the
drill piece or the workpiece first in one direction and then in the other.

Developments in food production brought further refinements in tools. The processes

of food production in Paleolithic times were simple, consisting of gathering,
hunting, and fishing. If these methods proved inadequate to sustain a community,
it moved to better hunting grounds or perished. With the onset of the Neolithic
Revolution, new food-producing skills were devised to serve the needs of
agriculture and animal husbandry. Digging sticks and the first crude plows, stone
sickles, querns that ground grain by friction between two stones and, most
complicated of all, irrigation techniques for keeping the ground watered and
fertile—all these became well established in the great subtropical river valleys
of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the millennia before 3000 BCE.

Building techniques

Prehistoric building techniques also underwent significant developments in the

Neolithic Revolution. Nothing is known of the building ability of Paleolithic
peoples beyond what can be inferred from a few fragments of stone shelters, but
in the New Stone Age some impressive structures were erected, primarily tombs and
burial mounds and other religious edifices, but also, toward the end of the period,
domestic housing in which sun-dried brick was first used. In northern Europe, where
the Neolithic transformation began later than around the eastern Mediterranean and
lasted longer, huge stone monuments, of which Stonehenge in England is the
outstanding example, still bear eloquent testimony to the technical skill, not
to mention the imagination and mathematical competence, of the later Stone Age
societies.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing industry had its origin in the New Stone Age, with the application
of techniques for grinding corn, baking clay, spinning and weaving textiles, and
also, it seems likely, for dyeing, fermenting, and distilling. Some evidence for
all these processes can be derived from archaeological findings, and some of them
at least were developing into specialized crafts by the time the first urban
civilizations appeared. In the same way, the early metalworkers were beginning to
acquire the techniques of extracting and working the softer metals, gold, silver,
copper, and tin, that were to make their successors a select class of craftsmen.
All these incipient fields of specialization, moreover, implied developing
trade between different communities and regions, and again the archaeological
evidence of the transfer of manufactured products in the later Stone Age is
impressive. Flint arrowheads of particular types, for example, can be found widely
dispersed over Europe, and the implication of a common locus of manufacture for
each is strong.

Such transmission suggests improving facilities for transport and communication.

Paleolithic people presumably depended entirely on their own feet, and this
remained the normal mode of transport throughout the Stone Age. Domestication of

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the ox, the donkey, and the camel undoubtedly brought some help, although
difficulties in harnessing the horse long delayed its effective use. The dugout
canoe and the birch-bark canoe demonstrated the potential of water transport, and,
again, there is some evidence that the sail had already appeared by the end of the
New Stone Age.

It is notable that the developments so far described in human prehistory took place
over a long period of time, compared with the 5,000 years of recorded history, and
that they took place first in very small areas of the Earth’s surface and involved
populations minute by modern criteria. The Neolithic Revolution occurred first
in those parts of the world with an unusual combination of qualities: a warm climate,
encouraging rapid crop growth, and an annual cycle of flooding that naturally
regenerated the fertility of the land. On the Eurasian-African landmass such
conditions occur only in Egypt, Mesopotamia, northern India, and some of the great
river valleys of China. It was there, then, that men and women of the New Stone
Age were stimulated to develop and apply new techniques of agriculture, animal
husbandry, irrigation, and manufacture, and it was there that their enterprise was
rewarded by increasing productivity, which encouraged the growth of population and
triggered a succession of sociopolitical changes that converted the settled
Neolithic communities into the first civilizations. Elsewhere the stimulus to
technological innovation was lacking or was unrewarded, so that those areas had
to await the transmission of technical expertise from the more highly favoured areas.
Herein is rooted the separation of the great world civilizations, for while the
Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations spread their influence westward through
the Mediterranean and Europe, those of India and China were limited by geographical
barriers to their own hinterlands, which, although vast, were largely isolated from
the mainstream of Western technological progress.

 The Urban Revolution (c. 3000–500 BCE)

The technological change so far described took place very slowly over a long period
of time, in response to only the most basic social needs, the search for food and
shelter, and with few social resources available for any activity other than the
fulfillment of these needs. About 5,000 years ago, however, a momentous cultural
transition began to take place in a few well-favoured geographical situations. It
generated new needs and resources and was accompanied by a significant increase
in technological innovation. It was the beginning of the invention of the city.

Craftsmen and scientists

The accumulated agricultural skill of the New Stone Age had made possible a
growth in population, and the larger population in turn created a need for the
products of specialized craftsmen in a wide range of commodities. These craftsmen
included a number of metalworkers, first those treating metals that could be
easily obtained in metallic form and particularly the soft metals, such as gold
and copper, which could be fashioned by beating. Then came the discovery of the
possibility of extracting certain metals from the ores in which they generally occur.
Probably the first such material to be used was the carbonate of copper known
as malachite, then already in use as a cosmetic and easily reduced to copper
in a strong fire. It is impossible to be precise about the time and place of this
discovery, but its consequences were tremendous. It led to the search for other
metallic ores, to the development of metallurgy, to the encouragement of trade in
order to secure specific metals, and to the further development of specialist skills.
It contributed substantially to the emergence of urban societies, as it relied
heavily upon trade and manufacturing industries, and thus to the rise of the

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first civilizations. The Stone Age gave way to the early Metal Age, and a new
epoch in the story of humankind had begun.

By fairly general consent, civilization consists of a large society with a

common culture, settled communities, and sophisticated institutions, all of
which presuppose a mastery of elementary literacy and numeration. Mastery of the
civilized arts was a minority pursuit in the early civilizations, in all probability
the carefully guarded possession of a priestly caste. The very existence of these
skills, however, even in the hands of a small minority of the population, is
significant because they made available a facility for recording and transmitting
information that greatly enlarged the scope for innovation and speculative thought.

Hitherto, technology had existed without the benefit of science, but, by the time
of the first Sumerian astronomers, who plotted the motion of the heavenly bodies
with remarkable accuracy and based calculations about the calendar and irrigation
systems upon their observations, the possibility of a creative relationship between
science and technology had appeared. The first fruits of this relationship appeared
in greatly improved abilities to measure land, weigh, and keep time, all practical
techniques, essential to any complex society, and inconceivable without literacy
and the beginnings of scientific observation. With the emergence of these skills
in the 3rd millennium BCE, the first civilizations arose in the valleys of the
Nile and of the Tigris-Euphrates.

Copper and bronze

The fact that the era of the early civilizations coincides with the technological
classification of the Copper and Bronze ages is a clue to the technological basis
of these societies. The softness of copper, gold, and silver made it inevitable
that they should be the first to be worked, but archaeologists now seem to agree
that there was no true “Copper Age,” except perhaps for a short period at the
beginning of Egyptian civilization, because the very softness of that metal limited
its utility for everything except decoration or coinage. Attention was thus given
early to means of hardening copper to make satisfactory tools and weapons. The
reduction of mixed metallic ores probably led to the discovery of alloying,
whereby copper was fused with other metals to make bronze. Several bronzes were
made, including some containing lead, antimony, and arsenic, but by far the most
popular and widespread was that of copper and tin in proportions of about 10 to
one. This was a hard yellowish metal that could be melted and cast into the shape
required. The bronzesmiths took over from the coppersmiths and goldsmiths the
technique of heating the metal in a crucible over a strong fire and casting it
into simple clay or stone molds to make axheads or spearheads or other solid shapes.
For the crafting of hollow vessels or sculpture, they devised the so-called cire
perdue technique, in which the shape to be molded is formed in wax and set in
clay, the wax then being melted and drained out to leave a cavity into which the
molten metal is poured.

Bronze became the most important material of the early civilizations, and elaborate
arrangements were made to ensure a continuous supply of it. Metals were scarce in
the alluvial river valleys where civilization developed and therefore had to be
imported. This need led to complicated trading relationships and mining operations
at great distances from the homeland. Tin presented a particularly severe problem,
as it was in short supply throughout the Middle East. The Bronze
Age civilizations were compelled to search far beyond their own frontiers for
sources of the metal, and in the process knowledge of the civilized arts was
gradually transmitted westward along the developing Mediterranean trade routes.

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In most aspects other than the use of metals, the transition from the technology
of the New Stone Age to that of early civilizations was fairly gradual, although
there was a general increase in competence as specialized skills became more clearly
defined, and in techniques of building there were enormous increases in the scale
of enterprises. There were no great innovations in power technology, but
important improvements were made in the construction of furnaces and kilns in
response to the requirements of the metalworkers and potters and of new artisans
such as glassworkers. Also, the sailing ship assumed a definitive shape,
progressing from a vessel with a small sail rigged in its bows and suitable only
for sailing before the prevailing wind up the Nile River, into the substantial
oceangoing ship of the later Egyptian dynasties, with a large rectangular sail
rigged amidships. Egyptian and Phoenician ships of this type could sail before the
wind and across the wind, but for making headway into the wind they had to resort
to manpower. Nevertheless, they accomplished remarkable feats of navigation,
sailing the length of the Mediterranean and even passing through the Pillars of
Hercules into the Atlantic.

Drawing of an Egyptian seagoing ship, c. 2600 BCE based on vessels depicted

in the bas-relief discovered in the pyramid of King Sahure at Abū Ṣīr,
Cairo.Courtesy of the Science Museum, London

Irrigation

Techniques of food production also showed many improvements over Neolithic methods,
including one outstanding innovation in the shape of systematic irrigation. The
civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia depended heavily upon the two great
river systems, the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates, which both watered the ground
with their annual floods and rejuvenated it with the rich alluvium they deposited.
The Nile flooded with regularity each summer, and the civilizations building in
its valley early learned the technique of basin irrigation, ponding back the
floodwater for as long as possible after the river had receded, so that enriched
soil could bring forth a harvest before the floods of the following season. In the
Tigris-Euphrates valley the irrigation problem was more complex, because the floods
were less predictable, more fierce, and came earlier than those of the
northward-flowing Nile. They also carried more alluvium, which tended to choke
irrigation channels. The task of the Sumerian irrigation engineers was that of
channeling water from the rivers during the summer months, impounding it, and
distributing it to the fields in small installments. The Sumerian system eventually
broke down because it led to an accumulation of salt in the soil, with a consequent
loss of fertility. Both systems, however, depended on a high degree of social
control, requiring skill in measuring and marking out the land and an
intricate legal code to ensure justice in the distribution
of precious water. Both systems, moreover, depended on
intricate engineering in building dikes and embankments, canals and aqueducts

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(with lengthy stretches underground to prevent loss by evaporation), and the use
of water-raising devices such as the shadoof, a balanced beam with a counterweight
on one end and a bucket to lift the water on the other.

Urban manufacturing

Manufacturing industry in the early civilizations concentrated on such products

as pottery, wines, oils, and cosmetics, which had begun to circulate along
the incipient trade routes before the introduction of metals; these became the
commodities traded for the metals. In pottery, the potter’s wheel became widely
used for spinning the clay into the desired shape, but the older technique of
building pots by hand from rolls of clay remained in use for some purposes. In the
production of wines and oils various forms of press were developed, while the
development of cooking, brewing, and preservatives justified the assertion that
the science of chemistry began in the kitchen. Cosmetics too were an offshoot of
culinary art.

Pack animals were still the primary means of land transport, the wheeled vehicle
developing slowly to meet the divergent needs of agriculture, trade, and war. In
the latter category, the chariot appeared as a weapon, even though its use was
limited by the continuing difficulty of harnessing a horse. Military technology
brought the development of metal plates for armour.

Building

In building technology the major developments concerned the scale of operations

rather than any particular innovation. The late Stone Age communities of
Mesopotamia had already built extensively in sun-dried brick. Their successors
continued the technique but extended its scale to construct the massive square
temples called ziggurats. These had a core and facing of bricks, the facing walls
sloping slightly inward and broken by regular pilasters built into the brickwork,
the whole structure ascending in two or three stages to a temple on the summit.
Sumerians were also the first to build columns with brick made from local clay,
which also provided the writing material for the scribes.

In Egypt, clay was scarce but good building stone was plentiful, and builders used
it in constructing the pyramids and temples that remain today as outstanding
monuments of Egyptian civilization. Stones were pulled on rollers and raised up
the successive stages of the structure by ramps and by balanced levers adapted from
the water-raising shadoof. The stones were shaped by skilled masons, and they were
placed in position under the careful supervision of priest-architects who were
clearly competent mathematicians and astronomers, as is evident from the precise
astronomical alignments. It seems certain that the heavy labour of construction
fell upon armies of slaves, which helps to explain both the achievements and
limitations of early civilizations. Slaves were usually one of the fruits of
military conquest, which presupposes a period of successful territorial expansion,
although their status as a subject race could be perpetuated indefinitely. Slave
populations provided a competent and cheap labour force for the major
constructional works that have been described. On the other hand, the availability
of slave labour discouraged technological innovation, a social fact that goes
far toward explaining the comparative stagnation of mechanical invention in the
ancient world.

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Transmitting knowledge

In the ancient world, technological knowledge was transmitted by traders, who went
out in search of tin and other commodities, and by craftsmen in metal, stone, leather,
and the other mediums, who passed their skills to others by direct instruction or
by providing models that challenged other craftsmen to copy them. This transmission
through intermediary contact was occurring between the ancient civilizations and
their neighbours to the north and west during the 2nd millennium BCE. The pace
quickened in the subsequent millennium, distinct new civilizations arising in Crete
and Mycenae, in Troy and Carthage. Finally, the introduction of the technique of
working iron profoundly changed the capabilities and resources of human societies
and ushered in the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.

 Technological achievements of Greece and Rome (500 BCE–500 CE)

The contributions of Greece and Rome in philosophy and religion, political and legal
institutions, poetry and drama, and in the realm of scientific speculation stand
in spectacular contrast with their relatively limited contributions in technology.
Their mechanical innovation was not distinguished, and, even in the realms of
military and construction engineering, in which they showed great ingenuity
and aesthetic sensibility, their work represented more a consummation of earlier
lines of development than a dramatic innovation. This apparent paradox of the
Classical period of the ancient world requires explanation, and the history of
technology can provide some clues to the solution of the problem.

The mastery of iron

The outstanding technological factor of the Greco-Roman world was the smelting of
iron, a technique—derived from unknown metallurgists, probably in Asia Minor,
about 1000 BCE—that spread far beyond the provincial frontiers of the Roman
Empire. The use of the metal had become general in Greece and the Aegean
Islands by the dawn of the Classical period about 500 BCE, and it appears to have
spread quickly westward thereafter. Iron ore, long a familiar material, had defied
reduction into metallic form because of the great heat required in the furnace to
perform the chemical transformation (about 1,535 °C [2,795 °F] compared with the
1,083 °C [1,981 °F] necessary for the reduction of copper ores). To reach this
temperature, furnace construction had to be improved and ways devised to
maintain the heat for several hours. Throughout the Classical period these
conditions were achieved only on a small scale, in furnaces burning charcoal and
using foot bellows to intensify the heat, and even in these furnaces the heat was
not sufficient to reduce the ore completely to molten metal. Instead, a small spongy
ball of iron—called a bloom—was produced in the bottom of the furnace. This was
extracted by breaking open the furnace, and then it was hammered into bars
of wrought iron, which could be shaped as required by further heating and hammering.
Apart from its greater abundance, iron for most purposes provided a harder and
stronger material than the earlier metals, although the impossibility of casting
it into molds like bronze was an inconvenience. At an early date some smiths devised
the cementation process for reheating bars of iron between layers of charcoal to
carburize the surface of the iron and thus to produce a coat of steel. Such
case-hardened iron could be further heated, hammered, and tempered to make knife
and sword blades of high quality. The very best steel in Roman times was Seric
steel, brought into the Western world from India, where it was produced in blocks
a few inches in diameter by a crucible process, melting the ingredients in an
enclosed vessel to achieve purity and consistency in the chemical combination.

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Mechanical contrivances

Though slight, the mechanical achievements of the Greco-Roman centuries were not
without significance. The world had one of its great mechanical geniuses in
Archimedes, who devised remarkable weapons to protect his native Syracuse from
Roman invasion and applied his powerful mind to such basic mechanical contrivances
as the screw, the pulley, and the lever. Alexandrian engineers, such as Ctesibius
and Hero, invented a wealth of ingenious mechanical contrivances including pumps,
wind and hydraulic organs, compressed-air engines, and screw-cutting machines.
They also devised toys and automata such as the aeolipile, which may be regarded
as the first successful steam turbine. Little practical use was found for these
inventions, but the Alexandrian school marks an important transition from very
simple mechanisms to the more complex devices that properly deserve to be considered
“machines.” In a sense it provided a starting point for modern mechanical
practice.

The Romans were responsible, through the application and development of available
machines, for an important technological transformation: the widespread
introduction of rotary motion. This was exemplified in the use of the treadmill
for powering cranes and other heavy lifting operations, the introduction of rotary
water-raising devices for irrigation works (a scoop wheel powered by a treadmill),
and the development of the waterwheel as a prime mover. The
1st-century-BCE Roman engineer Vitruvius gave an account of watermills, and by
the end of the Roman era many were in operation.

Agriculture

Iron Age technology was applied to agriculture in the form of the iron (or
iron-tipped) plowshare, which opened up the possibility of deeper plowing and
of cultivating heavier soils than those normally worked in the Greco-Roman
period. The construction of plows improved slowly during these centuries, but
the moldboard for turning over the earth did not appear until the 11th
century CE, so that the capacity of turning the sod depended more on the wrists
of the plowman than on the strength of his draft team; this discouraged tackling
heavy ground. The potentialities of the heavy plow were thus not fully exploited
in the temperate areas of Europe until after the Roman period. Elsewhere, in the
drier climates of North Africa and Spain, the Romans were responsible for
extensive irrigation systems, using the Archimedean screw and the noria (an
animal- or water-powered scoop wheel) to raise water.

Building

Though many buildings of the Greeks survive as splendid monuments to the

civilized communities that built them, as technological monuments they are of
little significance. The Greeks adopted a form of column and lintel construction
that had been used in Egypt for centuries and was derived from experience of timber
construction. In no major sense did Greek building constitute a technological
innovation. The Romans copied the Greek style for most ceremonial purposes, but
in other respects they were important innovators in building technology. They made
extensive use of fired brick and tile as well as stone; they developed a strong
cement that would set under water; and they explored the architectural
possibilities of the arch, the vault, and the dome. They then applied these
techniques in amphitheatres, aqueducts, tunnels, bridges, walls, lighthouses, and
roads. Taken together, these constructional works may fairly be regarded as the
primary technological achievement of the Romans.

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A network of Roman aqueducts showing a section undergoing repairs, painting by

Michael Zeno Diemer (born 1867). In the Deutsches Museum, Munich.Courtesy of the
Deutsches Museum, Munich

Other fields of technology

In manufacturing, transport, and military technology, the achievements of the

Greco-Roman period are not remarkable. The major manufacturing crafts—the making
of pottery and glass, weaving, leatherworking, fine-metalworking, and so on—
followed the lines of previous societies, albeit with important developments in
style. Superbly decorated Athenian pottery, for example, was widely dispersed along
the trade routes of the Mediterranean, and the Romans made good quality pottery
available throughout their empire through the manufacture and trade of the
standardized red ware called terra sigillata, which was produced in large
quantities at several sites in Italy and Gaul.

Transport

Transport, again, followed earlier precedents, the sailing ship emerging as a

seagoing vessel with a carvel-built hull (that is, with planks meeting edge-to-edge
rather than overlapping as in clinker-built designs), and a fully developed keel
with stempost and sternpost. The Greek sailing ship was equipped with a square or
rectangular sail to receive a following wind and one or more banks of oarsmen to
propel the ship when the wind was contrary. The Greeks began to develop a
specialized fighting ship, provided with a ram in the prow, and the cargo ship,
dispensing with oarsmen and relying entirely upon the wind, was also well
established by the early years of Classical Greece. The Romans took over both forms,
but without significant innovation. They gave much more attention to inland
transport than to the sea, and they constructed a remarkable network of carefully
aligned and well-laid roads, often paved over long stretches, throughout the
provinces of the empire. Along these strategic highways the legions marched rapidly
to the site of any crisis at which their presence was required. The roads also served
for the development of trade, but their primary function was always military, as
a vital means of keeping a vast empire in subjection.

Military technology

Roman military technology was inventive on occasion, as in the great siege catapults,
depending on both torsion and tension power. But the standard equipment of the
legionnaire was simple and conservative, consisting of an iron helmet and
breastplate, with a short sword and an iron-tipped spear. As most of their opponents
were also equipped with iron weapons and sometimes with superior devices, such as
the Celtic chariots, the Roman military achievements depended more on organization
and discipline than on technological superiority.

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The Greco-Roman era was distinguished for the scientific activity of some of its
greatest philosophers. In keeping with Greek speculative thought, however, this
tended to be strongly conceptual so that it was in mathematics and other abstract
studies that the main scientific achievements are to be found. Some of these had
some practical significance, as in the study of perspective effects in building
construction. Aristotle in many ways expressed the inquiring empiricism that has
caused scientists to seek an explanation for their physical environment. In at
least one field, that of medicine and its related subjects, Greek inquiry assumed
a highly practical form, Hippocrates and Galen laying the foundations of modern
medical science. But this was exceptional, and the normal Hellenic attitude was
to pursue scientific enquiry in the realm of ideas without much thought of the
possible technological consequences.

From The Middle Ages To 1750

 Medieval advance (500–1500 CE)

The millennium between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th
century CE and the beginning of the colonial expansion of western Europe in the
late 15th century has been known traditionally as the Middle Ages, and the first
half of this period consists of the five centuries of the Dark Ages. We now know
that the period was not as socially stagnant as this title suggests. In the first
place, many of the institutions of the later empire survived the collapse and
profoundly influenced the formation of the new civilization that developed in
western Europe. The Christian church was the outstanding institution of this type,
but Roman conceptions of law and administration also continued to exert an
influence long after the departure of the legions from the western provinces. Second,
and more important, the Teutonic tribes who moved into a large part of western
Europe did not come empty-handed, and in some respects their technology was
superior to that of the Romans. It has already been observed that they were people
of the Iron Age, and although much about the origins of the heavy plow remains
obscure these tribes appear to have been the first people with sufficiently strong
iron plowshares to undertake the systematic settlement of the forested lowlands
of northern and western Europe, the heavy soils of which had frustrated the
agricultural techniques of their predecessors.

The invaders came thus as colonizers. They may have been regarded as “barbarians”
by the Romanized inhabitants of western Europe who naturally resented their
intrusion, and the effect of their invasion was certainly to disrupt
trade, industry, and town life. But the newcomers also provided an element
of innovation and vitality. About 1000 CE the conditions of comparative
political stability necessary for the reestablishment of a vigorous commercial and
urban life had been secured by the success of the kingdoms of the region in either
absorbing or keeping out the last of the invaders from the East, and thereafter
for 500 years the new civilization grew in strength and began to experiment in all
aspects of human endeavour. Much of this process involved recovering the knowledge
and achievements of the ancient world. The history of medieval technology is thus
largely the story of the preservation, recovery, and modification of earlier
achievements. But by the end of the period Western civilization had begun to produce
some remarkable technological innovations that were to be of the utmost
significance.

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Innovation

The word innovation raises a problem of great importance in the history of

technology. Strictly, an innovation is something entirely new, but there is no such
thing as an unprecedented technological innovation because it is impossible for
an inventor to work in a vacuum and, however ingenious his invention, it must arise
out of his own previous experience. The task of distinguishing an element of novelty
in an invention remains a problem of patent law down to the present day, but the
problem is made relatively easy by the possession of full documentary records
covering previous inventions in many countries. For the millennium of the Middle
Ages, however, few such records exist, and it is frequently difficult to explain
how particular innovations were introduced to western Europe. The problem is
especially perplexing because it is known that many inventions of the period had
been developed independently and previously in other civilizations, and it is
sometimes difficult if not impossible to know whether something is spontaneous
innovation or an invention that had been transmitted by some as yet undiscovered
route from those who had originated it in other societies.

The problem is important because it generates a conflict of interpretations about

the transmission of technology. On the one hand there is the theory of the
diffusionists, according to which all innovation has moved westward from the
long-established civilizations of the ancient world, with Egypt and Mesopotamia
as the two favourite candidates for the ultimate source of the process. On the other
hand is the theory of spontaneous innovation, according to which the primary
determinant of technological innovation is social need. Scholarship is as yet
unable to solve the problem so far as technological advances of the Middle Ages
are concerned because much information is missing. But it does seem likely that
at least some of the key inventions of the period—the windmill and gunpowder are
good examples—were developed spontaneously. It is quite certain, however, that
others, such as silk working, were transmitted to the West, and, however original
the contribution of Western civilization to technological innovation, there can
be no doubt at all that in its early centuries at least it looked to the East for
ideas and inspiration.

Byzantium

The immediate eastern neighbour of the new civilization of medieval Europe was
Byzantium, the surviving bastion of the Roman Empire based in Constantinople
(Istanbul), which endured for 1,000 years after the collapse of the western half
of the empire. There the literature and traditions of Hellenic civilization were
perpetuated, becoming increasingly available to the curiosity and greed of the West
through the traders who arrived from Venice and elsewhere. Apart from the influence
on Western architectural style of such Byzantine masterpieces as the great domed
structure of Hagia Sophia, the technological contribution of Byzantium itself was
probably slight, but it served to mediate between the West and other civilizations
one or more stages removed, such as the Islamic world, India, and China.

Islam

The Islamic world had become a civilization of colossal expansive energy in the
7th century and had imposed a unity of religion and culture on much of southwest
Asia and North Africa. From the point of view of technological dissemination, the
importance of Islam lay in the Arab assimilation of the scientific and technological
achievements of Hellenic civilization, to which it made significant additions, and
the whole became available to the West through the Moors in Spain, the Arabs in

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Sicily and the Holy Land, and through commercial contacts with the Levant and North
Africa.

India

Islam also provided a transmission belt for some of the technology of East and South
Asia, especially that of India and China. The ancient Hindu and
Buddhist cultures of the Indian subcontinent had long-established trading
connections with the Arab world to the west and came under strong Muslim influence
themselves after the Mughal conquest in the 16th century. Indian artisans early
acquired an expertise in ironworking and enjoyed a wide reputation for their
metal artifacts and textile techniques, but there is little evidence that
technical innovation figured prominently in Indian history before the foundation
of European trading stations in the 16th century.

China

Civilization flourished continuously in China from about 2000 BCE, when the first
of the historical dynasties emerged. From the beginning it was a civilization
that valued technological skill in the form of hydraulic engineering, for its
survival depended on controlling the enriching but destructive floods of the Huang
He (Yellow River). Other technologies appeared at a remarkably early date,
including the casting of iron, the production of porcelain, and the manufacture
of brass and paper. As one dynasty followed another, Chinese civilization came
under the domination of a bureaucratic elite, the mandarins, who
gave continuity and stability to Chinese life but who also became
a conservative influence on innovation, resisting the introduction of new
techniques unless they provided a clear benefit to the bureaucracy. Such an
innovation was the development of the water-powered mechanical clock, which
achieved an ingenious and elaborate form in the machine built under the
supervision of Su Song in 1088. This was driven by a waterwheel that moved
regularly, making one part-revolution as each bucket on its rim was filled in turn.

The links between China and the West remained tenuous until modern times, but
the occasional encounter such as that resulting from the journey of Marco Polo in
1271–95 alerted the West to the superiority of Chinese technology and
stimulated a vigorous westward transfer of techniques. Western knowledge of silk
working, the magnetic compass, papermaking, and porcelain were all derived from
China. In the latter case, Europeans admired the fine porcelain imported from China
for several centuries before they were able to produce anything of a similar quality.
Having achieved a condition of comparative social stability, however, the Chinese
mandarinate did little to encourage innovation or trading contacts with the outside
world. Under their influence, no social group emerged in China equivalent to the
mercantile class that flourished in the West and did much to promote trade
and industry. The result was that China dropped behind the West in technological
skills until the political revolutions and social upheavals of the 20th century
awakened the Chinese to the importance of these skills to economic prosperity and
inspired a determination to acquire them.

Despite the acquisition of many techniques from the East, the Western world of 500
–1500 was forced to solve most of its problems on its own initiative. In doing
so it transformed an agrarian society based upon a subsistence economy into
a dynamic society with increased productivity sustaining trade, industry, and
town life on a steadily growing scale. This was primarily a technological
achievement, and one of considerable magnitude.

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Power sources

The outstanding feature of this achievement was a revolution in the sources of power.
With no large slave labour force to draw on, Europe experienced a labour shortage
that stimulated a search for alternative sources of power and the introduction
of laboursaving machinery. The first instrument of this power revolution was
the horse. By the invention of the horseshoe, the padded, rigid horse collar,
and the stirrup, all of which first appeared in the West in the centuries of the
Dark Ages, the horse was transformed from an ancillary beast of burden useful
only for light duties into a highly versatile source of energy in peace and war.
Once the horse could be harnessed to the heavy plow by means of the horse collar,
it became a more efficient draft animal than the ox, and the introduction of the
stirrup made the mounted warrior supreme in medieval warfare and initiated
complex social changes to sustain the great expense of the knight, his armour, and
his steed, in a society close to the subsistence line.

Study how a series of gears in a waterwheel translates a stream's energy to a

millstone. Before the Industrial Revolution, power came from three main sources:
humans, draft animals, and water.The ingenuity people used in harnessing waterpower
can be seen in this medieval-style mill. The waterwheel is turned by a stream and
is connected to a shaft that leads into the building. At the other end of the shaft
is a gear. The connection of a series of gears translates the power from the stream
to a shaft that drives a millstone, which grinds flour from grain.(30 sec;
1.84MB)Public DomainSee all videos for this article

Even more significant was the success of medieval technology in

harnessing water and wind power. The Romans had pioneered the use of waterpower
in the later empire, and some of their techniques probably survived. The type of
water mill that flourished first in northern Europe, however, appears to have been
the Norse mill, using a horizontally mounted waterwheel driving a pair of
grindstones directly, without the intervention of gearing. Examples of this simple
type of mill survive in Scandinavia and in the Shetlands; it also occurred in
southern Europe, where it was known as the Greek mill. It is possible that a
proportion of the 5,624 mills recorded in the Domesday Book of England in 1086
were of this type, although it is probable that by that date the vertically mounted
undershot wheel had established itself as more appropriate to the gentle landscape
of England; the Norse mill requires a good head of water to turn the wheel at an
adequate grinding speed without gearing for the upper millstone (the practice of
rotating the upper stone above a stationary bed stone became universal at an early
date). Most of the Domesday water mills were used for grinding grain, but in the
following centuries other important uses were devised in fulling cloth (shrinking
and felting woolen fabrics), sawing wood, and crushing vegetable seeds for
oil. Overshot wheels also were introduced where there was sufficient head of
water, and the competence of the medieval millwrights in building mills and
earthworks and in constructing increasingly elaborate trains of gearing grew
correspondingly.

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The sail had been used to harness wind power from the dawn of civilization, but
the windmill was unknown in the West until the end of the 12th century. Present
evidence suggests that the windmill developed spontaneously in the West; though
there are precedents in Persia and China, the question remains open. What is certain
is that the windmill became widely used in Europe in the Middle Ages. Wind power
is generally less reliable than waterpower, but where the latter is deficient wind
power is an attractive substitute. Such conditions are found in areas that suffer
from drought or from a shortage of surface water and also in low-lying areas where
rivers offer little energy. Windmills have thus flourished in places such as Spain
or the downlands of England on the one hand, and in the fenlands and polders of
the Netherlands on the other hand. The first type of windmill to be widely adopted
was the post-mill, in which the whole body of the mill pivots on a post and can
be turned to face the sails into the wind. By the 15th century, however, many were
adopting the tower-mill type of construction, in which the body of the mill
remains stationary with only the cap moving to turn the sails into the wind. As
with the water mill, the development of the windmill brought not only greater
mechanical power but also greater knowledge of mechanical contrivances, which was
applied in making clocks and other devices.

Post windmill with grinding machinery in mill housing, engraving from Agostino
Ramelli's Li diverse et artificiose macchine, 1588.Rare Book and Special
Collections Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Agriculture and crafts

With new sources of power at its disposal, medieval Europe was able greatly to
increase productivity. This is abundantly apparent in agriculture, where the
replacement of the ox by the faster gaited horse and the introduction of new crops
brought about a distinct improvement in the quantity and variety of food, with
a consequent improvement in the diet and energy of the population. It was also
apparent in the developing industries of the period, especially the woolen cloth
industry in which the spinning wheel was introduced, partially mechanizing this
important process, and the practice of using waterpower to drive fulling stocks
(wooden hammers raised by cams on a driving shaft) had a profound effect on the

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location of the industry in England in the later centuries of the Middle Ages. The
same principle was adapted to the paper industry late in the Middle Ages, the rags
from which paper was derived being pulverized by hammers similar to fulling stocks.

Meanwhile, the traditional crafts flourished within the expanding towns, where
there was a growing market for the products of the rope makers, barrel makers
(coopers), leatherworkers (curriers), and metalworkers (goldsmiths and
silversmiths), to mention only a few of the more important crafts. New crafts such
as that of the soapmakers developed in the towns. The technique of
making soap appears to have been a Teutonic innovation of the Dark Ages, being
unknown in the ancient civilizations. The process consists of decomposing animal
or vegetable fats by boiling them with a strong alkali. Long before it became popular
for personal cleansing, soap was a valuable industrial commodity for
scouring textile fabrics. Its manufacture was one of the first industrial
processes to make extensive use of coal as a fuel, and the development of the coal
industry in northern Europe constitutes another important medieval innovation,
no previous civilization having made any systematic attempt to exploit coal. The
mining techniques remained unsophisticated as long as coal was obtainable near the
surface, but as the search for the mineral led to greater and greater depths the
industry copied methods that had already evolved in the metal-mining industries
of north and central Europe. The extent of this evolution was brilliantly summarized
by Georgius Agricola in his De re metallica, published in 1556. This large,
abundantly illustrated book shows techniques of shafting, pumping (by treadmill,
animal power, and waterpower), and of conveying the ore won from the mines in trucks,
which anticipated the development of the railways. It is impossible to date
precisely the emergence of these important techniques, but the fact that they were
well established when Agricola observed them suggests that they had a long ancestry.

Architecture

Relatively few structures survive from the Dark Ages, but the later centuries of
the medieval period were a great age of building. The Romanesque and Gothic
architecture that produced the outstanding aesthetic contribution of the
Middle Ages embodied significant technological innovations. The
architect-engineers, who had clearly studied Classical building techniques, showed
a readiness to depart from their models and thus to devise a style that was
distinctively their own. Their solutions to the problems of constructing very tall
masonry buildings while preserving as much natural light as possible were the
cross-rib vault, the flying buttress, and the great window panels providing scope
for the new craft of the glazier using coloured glass with startling effect.

Military technology

The same period saw the evolution of the fortified stronghold from the Anglo-Saxon
motte-and-bailey, a timber tower encircled by a timber and earth wall, to
the formidable, fully developed masonry castle that had become
an anachronism by the end of the Middle Ages because of the development of
artillery. Intrinsic to this innovation were
the invention of gunpowder and the development of techniques for casting
metals, especially iron. Gunpowder appeared in western Europe in the mid-13th
century, although its formula had been known in East Asia long before that date.
It consists of a mixture of carbon, sulfur, and saltpetre, of which the first two
were available from charcoal and deposits of volcanic sulfur in Europe, whereas
saltpetre had to be crystallized by a noxious process of boiling stable sweepings
and other decaying refuse. The consolidation of these ingredients into

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an explosive powder had become an established yet hazardous industry by the

close of the Middle Ages.

The first effective cannon appear to have been made of wrought-iron bars strapped
together, but although barrels continued to be made in this way for some purposes,
the practice of casting cannon in bronze became widespread. The technique of casting
in bronze had been known for several millennia, but the casting of cannon presented
problems of size and reliability. It is likely that the bronzesmiths were able to
draw on the experience of techniques devised by the bell founders as an important
adjunct to medieval church building, as the casting of a large bell posed
similar problems of heating a substantial amount of metal and of pouring it into
a suitable mold. Bronze, however, was an expensive metal to manufacture in bulk,
so that the widespread use of cannon in war had to depend upon improvements in
iron-casting techniques.

The manufacture of cast iron is the great metallurgical innovation of the Middle
Ages. It must be remembered that from the beginning of the Iron Age until late
in the Middle Ages the iron ore smelted in the available furnaces had not been
completely converted to its liquid form. In the 15th century, however, the
development of the blast furnace made possible this fusion, with the result that
the molten metal could be poured directly into molds ready to receive it. The
emergence of the blast furnace was the result of attempts to increase the size of
the traditional blooms. Greater size made necessary the provision of a continuous
blast of air, usually from bellows driven by a waterwheel, and the combination
increased the internal temperature of the furnace so that the iron became molten.
At first, the disk of solid iron left in the bottom of the furnace was regarded
as undesirable waste by the iron manufacturer; it possessed properties completely
unlike those of the more familiar wrought iron, being crystalline and brittle and
thus of no use in the traditional iron forge. But it was soon discovered that the
new iron could be cast and turned to profit, particularly in the manufacture of
cannon.

Transport

Medieval technology made few contributions to inland transport, though there was
some experimentation in bridge building and in the construction of canals; lock
gates were developed as early as 1180, when they were employed on the canal between
Brugge (now in Belgium) and the sea. Roads remained indifferent where they existed
at all, and vehicles were clumsy throughout the period. Wayfarers like Chaucer’
s pilgrims traveled on horseback, and this was to remain the best mode of inland
transport for centuries to come.

Sea transport was a different story. Here the Middle Ages produced a decisive
technological achievement: the creation of a reliable oceangoing ship depending
entirely on wind power instead of a combination of wind and muscle. The vital
steps in this evolution were, first, the combination of the traditional square
sail, used with little modification from Egyptian times through the Roman Empire
to the Viking long boats, with the triangular lateen sail developed in the Arab
dhow and adopted in the Mediterranean, which gave it the “lateen” (Latin)
association attributed to it by the northern seafarers. This combination allowed
ships so equipped to sail close to the wind. Second, the adoption of the sternpost
rudder gave greatly increased maneuverability, allowing ships to take full
advantage of their improved sail power in tacking into a contrary wind. Third,
the introduction of the magnetic compass provided a means of checking navigation
on the open seas in any weather. The convergence of these improvements in the ships
of the later Middle Ages, together with other improvements in construction and
equipment—such as better barrels for carrying water, more reliable ropes, sails,

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and anchors, the availability of navigational charts (first recorded in use on board
ship in 1270), and the astrolabe (for measuring the angle of the Sun or a star above
the horizon)—lent confidence to adventurous mariners and thus led directly to the
voyages of discovery that marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of
the expansion of Europe that has characterized modern times.

Communications

While transport technology was evolving toward these revolutionary developments,

techniques of recording and communication were making no less momentous advances.
The medieval interest in mechanical contrivances is well illustrated by the
development of the mechanical clock, the oldest of which, driven by weights and
controlled by a verge, an oscillating arm engaging with a gear wheel, and dated
1386, survives in Salisbury Cathedral, England. Clocks driven by springs had
appeared by the mid-15th century, making it possible to construct more compact
mechanisms and preparing the way for the portable clock. The problem of overcoming
the diminishing power of the spring as it unwound was solved by the simple
compensating mechanism of the fusee—a conical drum on the shaft that permitted
the spring to exert an increasing moment, or tendency to increase motion, as its
power declined. It has been argued that the medieval fascination with clocks
reflects an increased sense of the importance of timekeeping in business and
elsewhere, but it can be seen with equal justice as representing a new sense of
inquiry into the possibilities and practical uses of mechanical devices.

Even more significant than the invention of the mechanical clock was the
15th-century invention of printing with movable metal type. The details of this
epochal invention are disappointingly obscure, but there is general agreement that
the first large-scale printing workshop was that established at Mainz by Johannes
Gutenberg, which was producing a sufficient quantity of accurate type to print a
Vulgate Bible about 1455. It is clear, however, that this invention drew heavily
upon long previous experience with block printing—using a single block to print
a design or picture—and on developments in typecasting and ink making. It also
made heavy demands on the paper industry, which had been established in Europe since
the 12th century but had developed slowly until the invention of printing and the
subsequent vogue for the printed word. The printing press itself, vital for
securing a firm and even print over the whole page, was an adaptation of the screw
press already familiar in the winepress and other applications. The printers found
an enormous demand for their product, so that the technique spread rapidly and the
printed word became an essential medium of political, social, religious, and
scientific communication as well as a convenient means for the dissemination of
news and information. By 1500 almost 40,000 recorded editions of books had been
printed in 14 European countries, with Germany and Italy accounting for two-thirds.
Few single inventions have had such far-reaching consequences.

For all its isolation and intellectual deprivation, the new civilization that
took shape in western Europe in the millennium 500 to 1500 achieved some astonishing
feats of technological innovation. The intellectual curiosity that led to the
foundation of the first universities in the 12th century and applied itself to the
recovery of the ancient learning from whatever source it could be obtained was the
mainspring also of the technological resourcefulness that encouraged the
introduction of the windmill, the improvement and wider application of waterpower,
the development of new industrial techniques, the invention of the mechanical clock
and gunpowder, the evolution of the sailing ship, and the invention of large-scale
printing. Such achievements could not have taken place within a static society.
Technological innovation was both the cause and the effect
of dynamic development. It is no coincidence that these achievements occurred
within the context of a European society that was increasing in population and

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productivity, stimulating industrial and commercial activity, and expressing

itself in the life of new towns and striking cultural activity. Medieval technology
mirrored the aspiration of a new and dynamic civilization.

 The emergence of Western technology (1500–1750)

The technological history of the Middle Ages was one of slow but substantial
development. In the succeeding period the tempo of change increased markedly and
was associated with profound social, political, religious,
and intellectual upheavals in western Europe.

The emergence of the nation-state, the cleavage of the Christian church by the
Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and its accompanying scientific revolution,
and the overseas expansion of European states all had interactions with
developing technology. This expansion became possible after the advance in naval
technology opened up the ocean routes to Western navigators. The conversion of
voyages of discovery into imperialism and colonization was made possible by the
new firepower. The combination of light, maneuverable ships with the firepower of
iron cannon gave European adventurers a decisive advantage, enhanced by other
technological assets.

The Reformation, not itself a factor of major significance to the history of

technology, nevertheless had interactions with it; the capacity of the new printing
presses to disseminate all points of view contributed to the religious upheavals,
while the intellectual ferment provoked by the Reformation resulted in a rigorous
assertion of the vocational character of work and thus stimulated industrial and
commercial activity and technological innovation. It is an indication of the
nature of this encouragement that so many of the inventors and scientists of the
period were Calvinists, Puritans, and, in England, Dissenters.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance had more obviously technological content than the Reformation. The
concept of “renaissance” is elusive. Since the scholars of the Middle Ages had
already achieved a very full recovery of the literary legacy of the ancient world,
as a “rebirth” of knowledge the Renaissance marked rather a point of transition
after which the posture of deference to the ancients began to be replaced by a
consciously dynamic, progressive attitude. Even while they looked back to
Classical models, Renaissance men looked for ways of improving upon them. This
attitude is outstandingly represented in the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. As an
artist of original perception he was recognized by his contemporaries, but some
of his most novel work is recorded in his notebooks and was virtually unknown in
his own time. This included ingenious designs for submarines, airplanes, and
helicopters and drawings of elaborate trains of gears and of the patterns of flow
in liquids. The early 16th century was not yet ready for these novelties: they met
no specific social need, and the resources necessary for their development were
not available.

An often overlooked aspect of the Renaissance is the scientific revolution that

accompanied it. As with the term Renaissance itself, the concept is complex, having
to do with intellectual liberation from the ancient world. For centuries the
authority of Aristotle in dynamics, of Ptolemy in astronomy, and of Galen
in medicine had been taken for granted. Beginning in the 16th century their
authority was challenged and overthrown, and scientists set out by observation and
experiment to establish new explanatory models of the natural world. One
distinctive characteristic of these models was that they were tentative, never

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receiving the authoritarian prestige long accorded to the ancient masters.

Since this fundamental shift of emphasis, science has been committed to a
progressive, forward-looking attitude and has come increasingly to seek practical
applications for scientific research.

Technology performed a service for science in this revolution by providing it with

instruments that greatly enhanced its powers. The use of the telescope by Galileo
to observe the moons of Jupiter was a dramatic example of this service, but the
telescope was only one of many tools and instruments that proved valuable in
navigation, mapmaking, and laboratory experiments. More significant were the
services of the new sciences to technology, and the most important of these was
the theoretical preparation for the invention of the steam engine.

The steam engine

The researches of a number of scientists, especially those of Robert Boyle of

England with atmospheric pressure, of Otto von Guericke of Germany with a
vacuum, and of the French Huguenot Denis Papin with pressure vessels, helped to
equip practical technologists with the theoretical basis of steam power.
Distressingly little is known about the manner in which this knowledge
was assimilated by pioneers such as Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, but
it is inconceivable that they could have been ignorant of it. Savery took out a
patent for a “new Invention for Raiseing of Water and occasioning Motion to all
Sorts of Mill Work by the Impellent Force of Fire” in 1698 (No. 356). His apparatus
depended on the condensation of steam in a vessel, creating a partial vacuum into
which water was forced by atmospheric pressure.

Credit for the first commercially successful steam engine, however, must go to
Newcomen, who erected his first machine near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire in
1712. It operated by atmospheric pressure on the top face of a piston in a cylinder,
in the lower part of which steam was condensed to create a partial vacuum. The piston
was connected to one end of a rocking beam, the other end of which carried the pumping
rod in the mine shaft. Newcomen was a tradesman in Dartmouth, Devon, and his engines
were robust but unsophisticated. Their heavy fuel consumption made them
uneconomical when used where coal was expensive, but in the British coalfields they
performed an essential service by keeping deep mines clear of water and were
extensively adopted for this purpose. In this way the early steam engines fulfilled
one of the most pressing needs of British industry in the 18th century. Although
waterpower and wind power remained the basic sources of power for industry, a
new prime mover had thus appeared in the shape of the steam engine, with tremendous
potential for further development as and when new applications could be found for
it.

Metallurgy and mining

One cause of the rising demand for coal in Britain was the depletion of the woodland
and supplies of charcoal, making manufacturers anxious to find a new source of fuel.
Of particular importance were experiments of the iron industry in using coal instead
of charcoal to smelt iron ore and to process cast iron into wrought iron and
steel. The first success in these attempts came in 1709, when Abraham Darby, a
Quaker ironfounder in Shropshire, used coke to reduce iron ore in his enlarged and
improved blast furnace. Other processes, such as glassmaking, brickmaking, and
the manufacture of pottery, had already adopted coal as their staple fuel. Great
technical improvements had taken place in all these processes. In ceramics, for
instance, the long efforts of European manufacturers to imitate the hard,
translucent quality of Chinese porcelain culminated in Meissen at the beginning

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Technology During Ancient period, Middle and Modern Ages.
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of the 18th century; the process was subsequently discovered independently in

Britain in the middle of the century. Stoneware, requiring a lower firing
temperature than porcelain, had achieved great decorative distinction in the 17th
century as a result of the Dutch success with opaque white tin glazes at their
Delft potteries, and the process had been widely imitated.

The period from 1500 to 1750 witnessed a steady expansion in mining for minerals
other than coal and iron. The gold and silver mines of Saxony and Bohemia provided
the inspiration for the treatise by Agricola, De re metallica, mentioned above,
which distilled the cumulative experience of several centuries in mining and
metalworking and became, with the help of some brilliant woodcuts and the printing
press, a worldwide manual on mining practice. Queen Elizabeth I introduced
German miners to England in order to develop the mineral resources of the country,
and one result of this was the establishment of brass manufacture. This metal,
an alloy of copper and zinc, had been known in the ancient world and in Eastern
civilizations but was not developed commercially in western Europe until the 17th
century. Metallic zinc had still not been isolated, but brass was made by heating
copper with charcoal and calamine, an oxide of zinc mined in England in the Mendip
Hills and elsewhere, and was worked up by hammering, annealing (a heating process
to soften the material), and wiredrawing into a wide range of household and
industrial commodities. Other nonferrous metals such as tin and lead were sought
out and exploited with increasing enterprise in this period, but as their ores
commonly occurred at some distance from sources of coal, as in the case of the
Cornish tin mines, the employment of Newcomen engines to assist in drainage was
rarely economical, and this circumstance restricted the extent of the mining
operations.

Three methods of ventilating a mine, woodcut from De re metallica by Georgius

Agricola, published 1556.The Granger Collection, New York

New commodities

Following the dramatic expansion of the European nations into the Indian
Ocean region and the New World, the commodities of these parts of the world found
their way back into Europe in increasing volume. These commodities created new
social habits and fashions and called for new techniques of manufacture. Tea became
an important trade commodity but was soon surpassed in volume and importance by
the products of specially designed plantations, such as sugar, tobacco, cotton,
and cocoa. Sugar refining, depending on the crystallization of sugar from the syrupy
molasses derived from the cane, became an important industry. So did the processing

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of tobacco, for smoking in clay pipes (produced in bulk at Delft and elsewhere)
or for taking as snuff. Cotton had been known before as an Eastern plant, but its
successful transplantation to the New World made much greater quantities available
and stimulated the emergence of an important new textile industry.

The woolen cloth industry in Britain provided a model and precedent upon which the
new cotton industry could build. Already in the Middle Ages, the processes of cloth
manufacture had been partially mechanized upon the introduction of fulling mills
and the use of spinning wheels. But in the 18th century the industry remained almost
entirely a domestic or cottage one, with most of the processing being performed
in the homes of the workers, using comparatively simple tools that could be operated
by hand or foot. The most complicated apparatus was the loom, but this could
usually be worked by a single weaver, although wider cloths required an assistant.
It was a general practice to install the loom in an upstairs room with a long
window giving maximum natural light. Weaving was regarded as a man’s work, spinning
being assigned to the women of the family (hence, “spinsters”). The weaver could
use the yarn provided by up to a dozen spinsters, and the balanced division of
labour was preserved by the weaver’s assuming responsibility for supervising the
cloth through the other processes, such as fulling. Pressures to increase the
productivity of various operations had already produced some
technical innovations by the first half of the 18th century. The first attempts
at devising a spinning machine, however, were not successful; and without
this, John Kay’s technically successful flying shuttle (a device for hitting
the shuttle from one side of the loom to the other, dispensing with the need to
pass it through by hand) did not fulfill an obvious need. It was not until the rapid
rise of the cotton cloth industry that the old, balanced industrial system was
seriously upset and that a new, mechanized system, organized on the basis of factory
production, began to emerge.

Agriculture

Another major area that began to show signs of profound change in the 18th century
was agriculture. Stimulated by greater commercial activity, the rising market
for food caused by an increasing population aspiring to a higher standard of
living, and by the British aristocratic taste for improving estates to
provide affluent and decorative country houses, the traditional agricultural
system of Britain was transformed. It is important to note that this was a British
development, as it is one of the indications of the increasing pressures of
industrialization there even before the Industrial Revolution, while other
European countries, with the exception of the Netherlands, from which several of
the agricultural innovations in Britain were acquired, did little to encourage
agricultural productivity. The nature of the transformation was complex, and it
was not completed until well into the 19th century. It consisted partly of a legal
reallocation of land ownership, the “enclosure” movement, to make farms more
compact and economical to operate. In part also it was brought about by the increased
investment in farming improvements, because the landowners felt encouraged to
invest money in their estates instead of merely drawing rents from them. Again,
it consisted of using this money for technical improvements, taking the form of
machinery—such as Jethro Tull’s mechanical sower—of better drainage, of
scientific methods of breeding to raise the quality of livestock, and of
experimenting with new crops and systems of crop rotation. The process has often
been described as an agricultural revolution, but it is preferable to regard it
as an essential prelude to and part of the Industrial Revolution.

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Construction

Construction techniques did not undergo any great change in the period 1500–1750.
The practice of building in stone and brick became general, although timber
remained an important building material for roofs and floors, and, in areas in which
stone was in short supply, the half-timber type of construction retained its
popularity into the 17th century. Thereafter, however, the spread of brick and
tile manufacturing provided a cheap and readily available substitute, although
it suffered an eclipse on aesthetic grounds in the 18th century, when Classical
styles enjoyed a vogue and brick came to be regarded as inappropriate for facing
such buildings. Brickmaking, however, had become an important industry for
ordinary domestic building by then and, indeed, entered into the export trade as
Dutch and Swedish ships regularly carried brick as ballast to the New World,
providing a valuable building material for the early American settlements. Cast
iron was coming into use in buildings, but only for decorative purposes. Glass was
also beginning to become an important feature of buildings of all sorts, encouraging
the development of an industry that still relied largely on ancient skills of fusing
sand to make glass and blowing, molding, and cutting it into the shapes required.

Land reclamation

More substantial constructional techniques were required in land drainage and

military fortification, although again their importance is shown rather in their
scale and complexity than in any novel features. The Dutch, wrestling with the sea
for centuries, had devised extensive dikes; their techniques were borrowed by
English landowners in the 17th century in an attempt to reclaim tracts of fenlands.

Military fortifications

In military fortification, the French strongholds designed by Sébastien de

Vauban in the late 17th century demonstrated how warfare had adapted to the new
weapons and, in particular, to heavy artillery. With earthen embankments to protect
their salients, these star-shaped fortresses were virtually impregnable to the
assault weapons of the day. Firearms remained cumbersome, with awkward firing
devices and slow reloading. The quality of weapons improved somewhat as gunsmiths
became more skillful.

Transport and communications

Like constructional techniques, transport and communications made substantial

progress without any great technical innovations. Road building was greatly
improved in France, and, with the completion of the Canal du Midi between the
Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay in 1692, large-scale civil
engineering achieved an outstanding success. The canal is 150 miles (241 km) long,
with a hundred locks, a tunnel, three major aqueducts, many culverts, and a large
summit reservoir.

The sea remained the greatest highway of commerce, stimulating innovation in the
sailing ship. The Elizabethan galleon with its great maneuverability and firepower,
the Dutch herring busses and fluitschips with their commodious hulls and
shallow draft, the versatile East Indiamen of both the Dutch and the British East
India companies, and the mighty ships of the line produced for the French and British
navies in the 18th century indicate some of the main directions of evolution.

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The needs of reliable navigation created a demand for better instruments. The
quadrant was improved by conversion to the octant, using mirrors to align the image
of a star with the horizon and to measure its angle more accurately: with further
refinements the modern sextant evolved. Even more significant was the ingenuity
shown by scientists and instrument makers in the construction of a clock that would
keep accurate time at sea: such a clock, by showing the time in Greenwich when it
was noon aboard ship would show how far east or west of Greenwich the ship lay
(longitude). A prize of £20,000 was offered by the British Board of Longitude for
this purpose in 1714, but it was not awarded until 1763 when John Harrison’
s so-called No. 4 chronometer fulfilled all the requirements.

Chemistry

Robert Boyle’s contribution to the theory of steam power has been mentioned,
but Boyle is more commonly recognized as the “father of chemistry,” in which field
he was responsible for the recognition of an element as a material that cannot be
resolved into other substances. It was not until the end of the 18th and the
beginning of the 19th century, however, that the work of Antoine
Lavoisier and John Dalton put modern chemical science on a firm theoretical
basis. Chemistry was still struggling to free itself from the traditions of alchemy.
Even alchemy was not without practical applications, for it promoted experiments
with materials and led to the development of specialized laboratory equipment that
was used in the manufacture of dyes, cosmetics, and
certain pharmaceutical products. For the most part, pharmacy still relied upon
recipes based on herbs and other natural products, but the systematic preparation
of these eventually led to the discovery of useful new drugs.

The period from 1500 to 1750 witnessed the emergence of Western technology in
the sense that the superior techniques of Western civilization enabled the nations
that composed it to expand their influence over the whole known world. Yet, with
the exception of the steam engine, this period was not marked by outstanding
technological innovation. What was, perhaps, more important than any particular
innovation was the evolution, however faltering and partial and limited to Britain
in the first place, of a technique of innovation, or what has been called
“the invention of invention.” The creation of a political and
social environment conducive to invention, the building up of vast commercial
resources to support inventions likely to produce profitable results, the
exploitation of mineral, agricultural, and other raw material resources for
industrial purposes, and, above all, the recognition of specific needs for
invention and an unwillingness to be defeated by difficulties, together produced
a society ripe for an industrial revolution based on technological innovation. The
technological achievements of the period 1500–1750, therefore, must be judged in
part by their substantial contribution to the spectacular innovations of the
following period.

 The Industrial Revolution (1750–1900)

The term Industrial Revolution, like similar historical concepts, is more

convenient than precise. It is convenient because history requires division into
periods for purposes of understanding and instruction and because there were
sufficient innovations at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries to justify the
choice of this as one of the periods. The term is imprecise, however, because the
Industrial Revolution has no clearly defined beginning or end. Moreover, it is
misleading if it carries the implication of a once-for-all change from a
“preindustrial” to a “postindustrial” society, because, as has been seen, the
events of the traditional Industrial Revolution had been well prepared in a mounting

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tempo of industrial, commercial, and technological activity from about

1000 CE and led into a continuing acceleration of the processes of
industrialization that is still proceeding in our own time. The term Industrial
Revolution must thus be employed with some care. It is used below to describe an
extraordinary quickening in the rate of growth and change and, more particularly,
to describe the first 150 years of this period of time, as it will be convenient
to pursue the developments of the 20th century separately.

The Industrial Revolution, in this sense, has been a worldwide phenomenon, at least
in so far as it has occurred in all those parts of the world, of which there are
very few exceptions, where the influence of Western civilization has been felt.
Beyond any doubt it occurred first in Britain, and its effects spread only gradually
to continental Europe and North America. Equally clearly, the Industrial
Revolution that eventually transformed these parts of the Western world surpassed
in magnitude the achievements of Britain, and the process was carried further to
change radically the socioeconomic life of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and
Australasia. The reasons for this succession of events are complex, but they
were implicit in the earlier account of the buildup toward rapid
industrialization. Partly through good fortune and partly through conscious effort,
Britain by the early 18th century came to possess the combination of social needs
and social resources that provided the necessary preconditions of commercially
successful innovation and a social system capable of sustaining and
institutionalizing the processes of rapid technological change once they had
started. This section will therefore be concerned, in the first place, with events
in Britain, although in discussing later phases of the period it will be necessary
to trace the way in which British technical achievements were diffused and
superseded in other parts of the Western world.

Power technology

An outstanding feature of the Industrial Revolution has been the advance in power
technology. At the beginning of this period, the major sources of power available
to industry and any other potential consumer were animate energy and the power
of wind and water, the only exception of any significance being the atmospheric
steam engines that had been installed for pumping purposes, mainly in coal mines.
It is to be emphasized that this use of steam power was exceptional and remained
so for most industrial purposes until well into the 19th century. Steam did not
simply replace other sources of power: it transformed them. The same sort of
scientific inquiry that led to the development of the steam engine was also
applied to the traditional sources of inanimate energy, with the result that both
waterwheels and windmills were improved in design and efficiency. Numerous
engineers contributed to the refinement of waterwheel construction, and by the
middle of the 19th century new designs made possible increases in the speed of
revolution of the waterwheel and thus prepared the way for the emergence of the
water turbine, which is still an extremely efficient device for converting energy.

Windmills

Meanwhile, British windmill construction was improved considerably by the

refinements of sails and by the self-correcting device of the fantail, which kept
the sails pointed into the wind. Spring sails replaced the traditional canvas rig
of the windmill with the equivalent of a modern venetian blind, the shutters of
which could be opened or closed, to let the wind pass through or to provide a surface
upon which its pressure could be exerted. Sail design was further improved with
the “patent” sail in 1807. In mills equipped with these sails, the shutters were
controlled on all the sails simultaneously by a lever inside the mill connected

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by rod linkages through the windshaft with the bar operating the movement of the
shutters on each sweep. The control could be made more fully automatic by hanging
weights on the lever in the mill to determine the maximum wind pressure beyond which
the shutters would open and spill the wind. Conversely, counterweights could be
attached to keep the shutters in the open position. With these and other
modifications, British windmills adapted to the increasing demands on power
technology. But the use of wind power declined sharply in the 19th century with
the spread of steam and the increasing scale of power utilization. Windmills that
had satisfactorily provided power for small-scale industrial processes were unable
to compete with the production of large-scale steam-powered mills.

Steam engines

Although the qualification regarding older sources of power is important, steam

became the characteristic and ubiquitous power source of the British Industrial
Revolution. Little development took place in the Newcomen atmospheric engine
until James Watt patented a separate condenser in 1769, but from that point
onward the steam engine underwent almost continuous improvements for more than a
century. Watt’s separate condenser was the outcome of his work on a model of
a Newcomen engine that was being used in a University of Glasgow laboratory.
Watt’s inspiration was to separate the two actions of heating the cylinder with
hot steam and cooling it to condense the steam for every stroke of the engine. By
keeping the cylinder permanently hot and the condenser permanently cold, a great
economy on energy used could be effected. This brilliantly simple idea could not
be immediately incorporated in a full-scale engine because the engineering of
such machines had hitherto been crude and defective. The backing of a Birmingham
industrialist, Matthew Boulton, with his resources of capital and technical
competence, was needed to convert the idea into a commercial success. Between 1775
and 1800, the period over which Watt’s patents were extended, the Boulton and Watt
partnership produced some 500 engines, which despite their high cost in relation
to a Newcomen engine were eagerly acquired by the tin-mining industrialists of
Cornwall and other power users who badly needed a more economic and reliable source
of energy.

During the quarter of a century in which Boulton and Watt exercised their virtual
monopoly over the manufacture of improved steam engines, they introduced many
important refinements. Basically they converted the engine from a single-acting
(i.e., applying power only on the downward stroke of the piston) atmospheric
pumping machine into a versatile prime mover that was double-acting and could
be applied to rotary motion, thus driving the wheels of industry. The rotary action
engine was quickly adopted by British textile manufacturer Sir Richard
Arkwright for use in a cotton mill, and although the ill-fated Albion Mill, at
the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge in London, was burned down in 1791, when
it had been in use for only five years and was still incomplete, it demonstrated
the feasibility of applying steam power to large-scale grain milling. Many other
industries followed in exploring the possibilities of steam power, and it soon
became widely used.

Watt’s patents had the temporary effect of restricting the development of

high-pressure steam, necessary in such major power applications as the locomotive.
This development came quickly once these patents lapsed in 1800. The Cornish
engineer Richard Trevithick introduced higher steam pressures, achieving an
unprecedented pressure of 145 pounds per square inch (10 kilograms per square
centimetre) in 1802 with an experimental engine at Coalbrookdale, which worked
safely and efficiently. Almost simultaneously, the versatile American
engineer Oliver Evans built the first high-pressure steam engine in the United
States, using, like Trevithick, a cylindrical boiler with an internal fire plate

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and flue. High-pressure steam engines rapidly became popular in America, partly
as a result of Evans’ initiative and partly because very few Watt-type
low-pressure engines crossed the Atlantic. Trevithick quickly applied his engine
to a vehicle, making the first successful steam locomotive for the Penydarren
tramroad in South Wales in 1804. The success, however, was technological rather
than commercial because the locomotive fractured the cast iron track of the
tramway: the age of the railroad had to await further development both of the
permanent way and of the locomotive.

Meanwhile, the stationary steam engine advanced steadily to meet an ever-widening

market of industrial requirements. High-pressure steam led to the development of
the large beam pumping engines with a complex sequence of valve actions, which
became universally known as Cornish engines; their distinctive characteristic was
the cutoff of steam injection before the stroke was complete in order to allow the
steam to do work by expanding. These engines were used all over the world for heavy
pumping duties, often being shipped out and installed by Cornish engineers.
Trevithick himself spent many years improving pumping engines in Latin America.
Cornish engines, however, were probably most common in Cornwall itself, where they
were used in large numbers in the tin and copper mining industries.

Another consequence of high-pressure steam was the practice of compounding, of

using the steam twice or more at descending pressures before it was finally
condensed or exhausted. The technique was first applied by Arthur Woolf, a
Cornish mining engineer, who by 1811 had produced a very satisfactory and
efficient compound beam engine with a high-pressure cylinder placed alongside the
low-pressure cylinder, with both piston rods attached to the same pin of the
parallel motion, which was a parallelogram of rods connecting the piston to the
beam, patented by Watt in 1784. In 1845 John McNaught introduced
an alternative form of compound beam engine, with the high-pressure cylinder
on the opposite end of the beam from the low-pressure cylinder, and working with
a shorter stroke. This became a very popular design. Various other methods of
compounding steam engines were adopted, and the practice became increasingly
widespread; in the second half of the 19th century triple- or quadruple-expansion
engines were being used in industry and marine propulsion. By this time also the
conventional beam-type vertical engine adopted by Newcomen and retained by Watt
began to be replaced by horizontal-cylinder designs. Beam engines remained in use
for some purposes until the eclipse of the reciprocating steam engine in the 20th
century, and other types of vertical engine remained popular, but for both large
and small duties the engine designs with horizontal cylinders became by far the
most common.

A demand for power to generate electricity stimulated new thinking about the steam
engine in the 1880s. The problem was that of achieving a sufficiently high
rotational speed to make the dynamos function efficiently. Such speeds were beyond
the range of the normal reciprocating engine (i.e., with a piston moving backward
and forward in a cylinder). Designers began to investigate the possibilities of
radical modifications to the reciprocating engine to achieve the speeds desired,
or of devising a steam engine working on a completely different principle. In the
first category, one solution was to enclose the working parts of the engine and
force a lubricant around them under pressure. The Willans engine design, for
instance, was of this type and was widely adopted in early British power stations.
Another important modification in the reciprocating design was the uniflow engine,
which increased efficiency by exhausting steam from ports in the centre of the
cylinder instead of requiring it to change its direction of flow in the cylinder
with every movement of the piston. Full success in achieving a high-speed steam
engine, however, depended on the steam turbine, a design of such novelty that
it constituted a major technological innovation. This was invented by Sir
Charles Parsons in 1884. By passing steam through the blades of a series of rotors

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of gradually increasing size (to allow for the expansion of the steam) the energy
of the steam was converted to very rapid circular motion, which was ideal for
generating electricity. Many refinements have since been made in turbine
construction and the size of turbines has been vastly increased, but the basic
principles remain the same, and this method still provides the main source
of electric power except in those areas in which the mountainous terrain permits
the economic generation of hydroelectric power by water turbines. Even the most
modern nuclear power plants use steam turbines because technology has not yet
solved the problem of transforming nuclear energy directly into electricity. In
marine propulsion, too, the steam turbine remains an important source of power
despite competition from the internal-combustion engine.

Electricity

The development of electricity as a source of power preceded this conjunction

with steam power late in the 19th century. The pioneering work had been done by
an international collection of scientists including Benjamin Franklin of
Pennsylvania, Alessandro Volta of the University of Pavia, Italy, and Michael
Faraday of Britain. It was the latter who had demonstrated the nature of
the elusive relationship between electricity and magnetism in 1831, and his
experiments provided the point of departure for both the mechanical generation
of electric current, previously available only from chemical reactions within
voltaic piles or batteries, and the utilization of such current in electric motors.
Both the mechanical generator and the motor depend on the rotation of a continuous
coil of conducting wire between the poles of a strong magnet: turning the coil
produces a current in it, while passing a current through the coil causes it to
turn. Both generators and motors underwent substantial development in the middle
decades of the 19th century. In particular, French, German, Belgian, and Swiss
engineers evolved the most satisfactory forms of armature (the coil of wire) and
produced the dynamo, which made the large-scale generation of electricity
commercially feasible.

The next problem was that of finding a market. In Britain, with its now
well-established tradition of steam power, coal, and coal gas, such a market was
not immediately obvious. But in continental Europe and North America there was
more scope for experiment. In the United States Thomas Edison applied his
inventive genius to finding fresh uses for electricity, and his development of the
carbon-filament lamp showed how this form of energy could rival gas as a domestic
illuminant. The problem had been that electricity had been used successfully for
large installations such as lighthouses in which arc lamps had been powered by
generators on the premises, but no way of subdividing the electric light into many
small units had been devised. The principle of the filament lamp was that a thin
conductor could be made incandescent by an electric current provided that it was
sealed in a vacuum to keep it from burning out. Edison and the English chemist Sir
Joseph Swan experimented with various materials for the filament and both chose
carbon. The result was a highly successful small lamp, which could be varied in
size for any sort of requirement. It is relevant that the success of the
carbon-filament lamp did not immediately mean the supersession of gas lighting.
Coal gas had first been used for lighting by William Murdock at his home in
Redruth, Cornwall, where he was the agent for the Boulton and Watt company, in 1792.
When he moved to the headquarters of the firm at Soho in Birmingham in 1798, Matthew
Boulton authorized him to experiment in lighting the buildings there by gas, and
gas lighting was subsequently adopted by firms and towns all over Britain in the
first half of the 19th century. Lighting was normally provided by a fishtail jet
of burning gas, but under the stimulus of competition from electric lighting the
quality of gas lighting was greatly enhanced by the invention of the gas

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mantle. Thus improved, gas lighting remained popular for some forms of street
lighting until the middle of the 20th century.

Lighting alone could not provide an economical market for electricity because its
use was confined to the hours of darkness. Successful commercial generation
depended upon the development of other uses for electricity, and particularly on
electric traction. The popularity of urban electric tramways and the adoption of
electric traction on subway systems such as the London Underground thus
coincided with the widespread construction of generating equipment in the late
1880s and 1890s. The subsequent spread of this form of energy is one of the most
remarkable technological success stories of the 20th century, but most of the basic
techniques of generation, distribution, and utilization had been mastered by the
end of the 19th century.

Internal-combustion engine

Electricity does not constitute a prime mover, for however important it may be
as a form of energy it has to be derived from a mechanical generator powered by
water, steam, or internal combustion. The internal-combustion engine is a prime
mover, and it emerged in the 19th century as a result both of greater scientific
understanding of the principles of thermodynamics and of a search by engineers for
a substitute for steam power in certain circumstances. In an internal-combustion
engine the fuel is burned in the engine: the cannon provided an early model of a
single-stroke engine; and several persons had experimented with gunpowder as a
means of driving a piston in a cylinder. The major problem was that of finding a
suitable fuel, and the secondary problem was that of igniting the fuel in an enclosed
space to produce an action that could be easily and quickly repeated. The first
problem was solved in the mid-19th century by the introduction of town gas supplies,
but the second problem proved more intractable as it was difficult to maintain
ignition evenly. The first successful gas engine was made by Étienne Lenoir in
Paris in 1859. It was modeled closely on a horizontal steam engine, with
an explosive mixture of gas and air ignited by an electric spark on alternate
sides of the piston when it was in midstroke position. Although technically
satisfactory, the engine was expensive to operate, and it was not until the
refinement introduced by the German inventor Nikolaus Otto in 1878 that the gas
engine became a commercial success. Otto adopted the four-stroke cycle of
induction-compression-firing-exhaust that has been known by his name ever since.
Gas engines became extensively used for small industrial establishments, which
could thus dispense with the upkeep of a boiler necessary in any steam plant, however
small.

Petroleum

The economic potential for the internal-combustion engine lay in the need for a
light locomotive engine. This could not be provided by the gas engine, depending
on a piped supply of town gas, any more than by the steam engine, with its need
for a cumbersome boiler; but, by using alternative fuels derived from oil, the
internal-combustion engine took to wheels, with momentous consequences. Bituminous
deposits had been known in Southwest Asia from antiquity and had been worked
for building material, illuminants, and medicinal products. The westward
expansion of settlement in America, with many homesteads beyond the range of city
gas supplies, promoted the exploitation of the easily available sources of crude
oil for the manufacture of kerosene (paraffin). In 1859 the oil industry took
on new significance when Edwin L. Drake bored successfully through 69 feet (21
metres) of rock to strike oil in Pennsylvania, thus inaugurating the search for
and exploitation of the deep oil resources of the world. While world supplies of

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oil expanded dramatically, the main demand was at first for the kerosene, the
middle fraction distilled from the raw material, which was used as the fuel in oil
lamps. The most volatile fraction of the oil, gasoline, remained an embarrassing
waste product until it was discovered that this could be burned in a light
internal-combustion engine; the result was an ideal prime mover for vehicles. The
way was prepared for this development by the success of oil engines burning cruder
fractions of oil. Kerosene-burning oil engines, modeled closely on existing gas
engines, had emerged in the 1870s, and by the late 1880s engines using the vapour
of heavy oil in a jet of compressed air and working on the Otto cycle had become
an attractive proposition for light duties in places too isolated to use town gas.

The greatest refinements in the heavy-oil engine are associated with the work
of Rudolf Diesel of Germany, who took out his first patents in 1892. Working from
thermodynamic principles of minimizing heat losses, Diesel devised an engine in
which the very high compression of the air in the cylinder secured the spontaneous
ignition of the oil when it was injected in a carefully determined quantity. This
ensured high thermal efficiency, but it also made necessary a heavy structure
because of the high compression maintained, and also a rather rough performance
at low speeds compared with other oil engines. It was therefore not immediately
suitable for locomotive purposes, but Diesel went on improving his engine and in
the 20th century it became an important form of vehicular propulsion.

Meantime the light high-speed gasoline (petrol) engine predominated. The first
applications of the new engine to locomotion were made in Germany, where Gottlieb
Daimler and Carl Benz equipped the first motorcycle and the first motorcar
respectively with engines of their own design in 1885. Benz’s “horseless carriage”
became the prototype of the modern automobile, the development and consequences
of which can be more conveniently considered in relation to the revolution in
transport.

By the end of the 19th century, the internal-combustion engine was challenging the
steam engine in many industrial and transport applications. It is notable that,
whereas the pioneers of the steam engine had been almost all Britons, most of the
innovators in internal combustion were continental Europeans and Americans. The
transition, indeed, reflects the general change in international leadership in
the Industrial Revolution, with Britain being gradually displaced from its
position of unchallenged superiority in industrialization and
technological innovation. A similar transition occurred in the theoretical
understanding of heat engines: it was the work of the Frenchman Sadi Carnot and
other scientific investigators that led to the new science of thermodynamics,
rather than that of the British engineers who had most practical experience of the
engines on which the science was based.

It should not be concluded, however, that British innovation in prime movers was
confined to the steam engine, or even that steam and internal combustion represent
the only significant developments in this field during the Industrial Revolution.
Rather, the success of these machines stimulated speculation about alternative
sources of power, and in at least one case achieved a success the full consequences
of which were not completely developed. This was the hot-air engine, for which
a Scotsman, Robert Stirling, took out a patent in 1816. The hot-air
engine depends for its power on the expansion and displacement of air inside a
cylinder, heated by the external and continuous combustion of the fuel. Even before
the exposition of the laws of thermodynamics, Stirling had devised a cycle of heat
transfer that was ingenious and economical. Various constructional problems
limited the size of hot-air engines to very small units, so that although they were
widely used for driving fans and similar light duties before the availability of
the electric motor, they did not assume great technological significance. But the

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economy and comparative cleanness of the hot-air engine were making it once more
the subject of intensive research in the early 1970s.

The transformation of power technology in the Industrial Revolution

had repercussions throughout industry and society. In the first place, the
demand for fuel stimulated the coal industry, which had already grown rapidly by
the beginning of the 18th century, into continuing expansion and innovation. The
steam engine, which enormously increased the need for coal, contributed
significantly toward obtaining it by providing more efficient mine pumps and,
eventually, improved ventilating equipment. Other inventions such as that of the
miners’ safety lamp helped to improve working conditions, although the immediate
consequence of its introduction in 1816 was to persuade mineowners to work dangerous
seams, which had thitherto been regarded as inaccessible. The principle of the lamp
was that the flame from the wick of an oil lamp was enclosed within a cylinder of
wire gauze, through which insufficient heat passed to ignite the explosive gas
(firedamp) outside. It was subsequently improved, but remained a vital source of
light in coal mines until the advent of electric battery lamps. With these
improvements, together with the simultaneous revolution in the transport system,
British coal production increased steadily throughout the 19th century. The other
important fuel for the new prime movers was petroleum, and the rapid expansion of
its production has already been mentioned. In the hands of John D.
Rockefeller and his Standard Oil organization it grew into a vast undertaking
in the United States after the end of the Civil War, but the oil-extraction industry
was not so well organized elsewhere until the 20th century.

Development of industries

Metallurgy

Another industry that interacted closely with the power revolution was that
concerned with metallurgy and the metal trades. The development of techniques for
working with iron and steel was one of the outstanding British achievements of
the Industrial Revolution. The essential characteristic of this achievement was
that changing the fuel of the iron and steel industry from charcoal to coal
enormously increased the production of these metals. It also provided another
incentive to coal production and made available the materials that were
indispensable for the construction of steam engines and every other sophisticated
form of machine. The transformation that began with a coke-smelting process in
1709 was carried further by the development of crucible steel in about 1740 and
by the puddling and rolling process to produce wrought iron in 1784. The first
development led to high-quality cast steel by fusion of the ingredients (wrought
iron and charcoal, in carefully measured proportions) in sealed
ceramic crucibles that could be heated in a coal-fired furnace. The second
applied the principle of the reverberatory furnace, whereby the hot gases passed
over the surface of the metal being heated rather than through it, thus greatly
reducing the risk of contamination by impurities in the coal fuels, and the
discovery that by puddling, or stirring, the molten metal and by passing it hot
from the furnace to be hammered and rolled, the metal could be consolidated and
the conversion of cast iron to wrought iron made completely effective.

Iron and steel

The result of this series of innovations was that the British iron and steel
industry was freed from its reliance upon the forests as a source of charcoal and

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was encouraged to move toward the major coalfields. Abundant cheap iron thus became
an outstanding feature of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Cast iron was available for bridge construction, for the framework of fireproof
factories, and for other civil-engineering purposes such as Thomas Telford’s
novel cast-iron aqueducts. Wrought iron was available for all manner of mechanical
devices requiring strength and precision. Steel remained a comparatively rare metal
until the second half of the 19th century, when the situation was transformed by
the Bessemer and Siemens processes for manufacturing steel in bulk. Henry
Bessemer took out the patent for his converter in 1856. It consisted of a large
vessel charged with molten iron, through which cold air was blown. There was a
spectacular reaction resulting from the combination of impurities in the iron with
oxygen in the air, and when this subsided it left mild steel in the converter.
Bessemer was virtually a professional inventor with little previous knowledge of
the iron and steel industry; his process was closely paralleled by that of the
American iron manufacturer William Kelly, who was prevented by bankruptcy from
taking advantage of his invention. Meanwhile, the Siemens-Martin open-hearth
process was introduced in 1864, utilizing the hot waste gases of cheap fuel to
heat a regenerative furnace, with the initial heat transferred to the gases
circulating round the large hearth in which the reactions within the molten metal
could be carefully controlled to produce steel of the quality required. The
open-hearth process was gradually refined and by the end of the 19th century had
overtaken the Bessemer process in the amount of steel produced. The effect of
these two processes was to make steel available in bulk instead of small-scale
ingots of cast crucible steel, and thenceforward steel steadily replaced wrought
iron as the major commodity of the iron and steel industry.

Low-grade ores

The transition to cheap steel did not take place without technical problems, one
of the most difficult of which was the fact that most of the easily available
low-grade iron ores in the world contain a proportion of phosphorus, which proved
difficult to eliminate but which ruined any steel produced from them. The problem
was solved by the British scientists S.G. Thomas and Percy Gilchrist, who
invented the basic slag process, in which the furnace or converter was lined with
an alkaline material with which the phosphorus could combine to produce a phosphatic
slag; this, in turn, became an important raw material in
the nascent artificial-fertilizer industry. The most important effect of
this innovation was to make the extensive phosphoric ores of Lorraine and
elsewhere available for exploitation. Among other things, therefore, it
contributed significantly to the rise of the German heavy iron and steel industry
in the Ruhr. Other improvements in British steel production were made in the late
19th century, particularly in the development of alloys for specialized purposes,
but these contributed more to the quality than the quantity of steel and did not
affect the shift away from Britain to continental Europe and North America of
dominance in this industry. British production continued to increase, but by 1900
it had been overtaken by that of the United States and Germany.

Mechanical engineering

Closely linked with the iron and steel industry was the rise of mechanical
engineering, brought about by the demand for steam engines and other large machines,
and taking shape for the first time in the Soho workshop of Boulton and Watt in
Birmingham, where the skills of the precision engineer, developed in manufacturing
scientific instruments and small arms, were first applied to the construction of
large industrial machinery. The engineering workshops that matured in the 19th
century played a vital part in the increasing mechanization of industry and

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transport. Not only did they deliver the looms, locomotives, and other hardware
in steadily growing quantities, but they also transformed the machine tools on which
these machines were made. The lathe became an all-metal, power-driven machine
with a completely rigid base and a slide rest to hold the cutting tool, capable
of more sustained and vastly more accurate work than the hand- or foot-operated
wooden-framed lathes that preceded it. Drilling and slotting machines, milling and
planing machines, and a steam hammer invented by James Nasmyth (an inverted
vertical steam engine with the hammer on the lower end of the piston rod), were
among the machines devised or improved from earlier woodworking models by the new
mechanical engineering industry. After the middle of the 19th century,
specialization within the machinery industry became more pronounced, as some
manufacturers concentrated on vehicle production while others devoted themselves
to the particular needs of industries such as coal mining, papermaking, and sugar
refining. This movement toward greater specialization was accelerated by the
establishment of mechanical engineering in the other industrial nations,
especially in Germany, where electrical engineering and other new skills made rapid
progress, and in the United States, where labour shortages encouraged the
development of standardization and mass-production techniques in fields as
widely separated as agricultural machinery, small arms, typewriters, and sewing
machines. Even before the coming of the bicycle, the automobile, and the airplane,
therefore, the pattern of the modern engineering industry had been clearly
established. The dramatic increases in engineering precision, represented by the
machine designed by British mechanical engineer Sir Joseph Whitworth in 1856 for
measuring to an accuracy of 0.000001 inch (even though such refinement was not
necessary in everyday workshop practice), and the corresponding increase in the
productive capacity of the engineering industry, acted as a continuing
encouragement to further mechanical innovation.

Textiles

The industry that, probably more than any other, gave its character to
the British Industrial Revolution was the cotton-textile industry. The
traditional dates of the Industrial Revolution bracket the period in which the
processes of cotton manufacture in Britain were transformed from those of a
small-scale domestic industry scattered over the towns and villages of the South
Pennines into those of a large-scale, concentrated, power-driven, mechanized,
factory-organized, urban industry. The transformation was undoubtedly dramatic
both to contemporaries and to posterity, and there is no doubting its immense
significance in the overall pattern of British industrialization. But its
importance in the history of technology should not be exaggerated. Certainly
there were many interesting mechanical improvements, at least at the beginning of
the transformation. The development of the spinning wheel into the spinning
jenny, and the use of rollers and moving trolleys to mechanize spinning in the shape
of the frame and the mule, respectively, initiated a drastic rise in the
productivity of the industry. But these were secondary innovations in the sense
that there were precedents for them in the experiments of the previous generation;
that in any case the first British textile factory was the Derby silk mill built
in 1719; and that the most far-reaching innovation in cotton manufacture was the
introduction of steam power to drive carding machines, spinning machines, power
looms, and printing machines. This, however, is probably to overstate the case,
and the cotton innovators should not be deprived of credit for their enterprise
and ingenuity in transforming the British cotton industry and making it the model
for subsequent exercises in industrialization. Not only was it copied, belatedly
and slowly, by the woolen-cloth industry in Britain, but wherever other nations
sought to industrialize they tried to acquire British cotton machinery and the
expertise of British cotton industrialists and artisans.

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One of the important consequences of the rapid rise of the British cotton industry
was the dynamic stimulus it gave to other processes and industries. The rising
demand for raw cotton, for example, encouraged the plantation economy of the
southern United States and the introduction of the cotton gin, an important
contrivance for separating mechanically the cotton fibres from the seeds, husks,
and stems of the plant.

Chemicals

In Britain the growth of the textile industry brought a sudden increase of

interest in the chemical industry, because one formidable bottleneck in the
production of textiles was the long time that was taken by natural bleaching
techniques, relying on sunlight, rain, sour milk, and urine. The modern chemical
industry was virtually called into being in order to develop more rapid bleaching
techniques for the British cotton industry. Its first success came in the middle
of the 18th century, when John Roebuck invented the method of mass
producing sulfuric acid in lead chambers. The acid was used directly in bleaching,
but it was also used in the production of more effective chlorine bleaches, and
in the manufacture of bleaching powder, a process perfected by Charles Tennant at
his St. Rollox factory in Glasgow in 1799. This product effectively met the
requirements of the cotton-textile industry, and thereafter the chemical industry
turned its attention to the needs of other industries, and particularly to the
increasing demand for alkali in soap, glass, and a range of
other manufacturing processes. The result was the successful establishment of
the Leblanc soda process, patented by Nicolas Leblanc in France in 1791, for
manufacturing sodium carbonate (soda) on a large scale; this remained the main
alkali process used in Britain until the end of the 19th century, even though the
Belgian Solvay process, which was considerably more economical, was replacing it
elsewhere.

Innovation in the chemical industry shifted, in the middle of the 19th century,
from the heavy chemical processes to organic chemistry. The stimulus here was less
a specific industrial demand than the pioneering work of a group of German
scientists on the nature of coal and its derivatives. Following their work, W.H.
Perkin, at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, produced the first artificial
dye from aniline in 1856. In the same period, the middle third of the 19th century,
work on the qualities of cellulosic materials was leading to the development of
high explosives such as nitrocellulose, nitroglycerine, and dynamite, while
experiments with the solidification and extrusion of cellulosic liquids were
producing the first plastics, such as celluloid, and the first artificial fibres,
so-called artificial silk, or rayon. By the end of the century all these processes
had become the bases for large chemical industries.

An important by-product of the expanding chemical industry was the manufacture of

a widening range of medicinal and pharmaceutical materials as medical knowledge
increased and drugs began to play a constructive part in therapy. The period of
the Industrial Revolution witnessed the first real progress in medical services
since the ancient civilizations. Great advances in the sciences of anatomy and
physiology had had remarkably little effect on medical practice. In 18th-century
Britain, however, hospital provision increased in quantity although not invariably
in quality, while a significant start was made in immunizing people against smallpox
culminating in Edward Jenner’s vaccination process of 1796, by which protection
from the disease was provided by administering a dose of the much less virulent
but related disease of cowpox. But it took many decades of use and further
smallpox epidemics to secure its widespread adoption and thus to make it
effective in controlling the disease. By this time Louis Pasteur and others had
established the bacteriological origin of many common diseases and thereby helped

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to promote movements for better public health and immunization against many
virulent diseases such as typhoid fever and diphtheria. Parallel improvements
in anesthetics (beginning with Sir Humphry Davy’s discovery of nitrous oxide,
or “laughing gas,” in 1799) and antiseptics were making possible elaborate surgery,
and by the end of the century X-rays and radiology were placing powerful new tools
at the disposal of medical technology, while the use of synthetic drugs such
as the barbiturates and aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) had become established.

Agriculture

The agricultural improvements of the 18th century had been promoted by people whose
industrial and commercial interests made them willing to experiment with new
machines and processes to improve the productivity of their estates. Under the same
sort of stimuli, agricultural improvement continued into the 19th century and was
extended to food processing in Britain and elsewhere. The steam engine was not
readily adapted for agricultural purposes, yet ways were found of harnessing it
to threshing machines and even to plows by means of a cable between powerful traction
engines pulling a plow across a field. In the United States mechanization
of agriculture began later than in Britain, but because of the comparative labour
shortage it proceeded more quickly and more thoroughly. The McCormick reaper and
the combine harvester were both developed in the United States, as were barbed
wire and the food-packing and canning industries, Chicago becoming the centre for
these processes. The introduction of refrigeration techniques in the second half
of the 19th century made it possible to convey meat from Australia and Argentina
to European markets, and the same markets encouraged the growth of dairy
farming and market gardening, with distant producers such as New Zealand able
to send their butter in refrigerated ships to wherever in the world it could be
sold.

Civil engineering

For large civil-engineering works, the heavy work of moving earth continued to
depend throughout this period on human labour organized by building contractors.
But the use of gunpowder, dynamite, and steam diggers helped to reduce this
dependence toward the end of the 19th century, and the introduction of compressed
air and hydraulic tools also contributed to the lightening of drudgery. The
latter two inventions were important in other respects, such as in mining
engineering and in the operation of lifts, lock gates, and cranes. The use of
a tunneling shield, to allow a tunnel to be driven through soft or uncertain rock
strata, was pioneered by the French émigré engineer Marc Brunel in the
construction of the first tunnel underneath the Thames River in London (1825
–42), and the technique was adopted elsewhere. The iron bell or caisson was
introduced for working below water level in order to lay foundations for bridges
or other structures, and bridge building made great advances with the perfecting
of the suspension bridge—by the British engineers Thomas Telford and Isambard
Kingdom Brunel and the German American engineer John Roebling—and the
development of the truss bridge, first in timber, then in iron. Wrought iron
gradually replaced cast iron as a bridge-building material, although several
distinguished cast-iron bridges survive, such as that erected at Ironbridge in
Shropshire between 1777 and 1779, which has been fittingly described as the
“Stonehenge of the Industrial Revolution.” The sections were cast at the
Coalbrookdale furnace nearby and assembled by mortising and wedging on the model
of a timber construction, without the use of bolts or rivets. The design was quickly
superseded in other cast-iron bridges, but the bridge still stands as the first
important structural use of cast iron. Cast iron became very important in the
framing of large buildings, the elegant Crystal Palace of 1851 being an

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outstanding example. This was designed by the ingenious

gardener-turned-architect Sir Joseph Paxton on the model of a greenhouse that
he had built on the Chatsworth estate of the duke of Devonshire. Its cast-iron beams
were manufactured by three different firms and tested for size and strength on the
site. By the end of the 19th century, however, steel was beginning to replace cast
iron as well as wrought iron, and reinforced concrete was being introduced. In
water-supply and sewage-disposal works, civil engineering achieved some monumental
successes, especially in the design of dams, which improved considerably in the
period, and in long-distance piping and pumping.

Transport and communications

Transport and communications provide an example of a revolution within the

Industrial Revolution, so completely were the modes transformed in the period 1750
–1900. The first improvements in Britain came in roads and canals in the second
half of the 18th century. Although of great economic importance, these were not
of much significance in the history of technology, as good roads and canals had
existed in continental Europe for at least a century before their adoption in
Britain. A network of hard-surfaced roads was built in France in the 17th and early
18th centuries and copied in Germany. Pierre Trésaguet of France improved road
construction in the late 18th century by separating the hard-stone wearing surface
from the rubble substrata and providing ample drainage. Nevertheless, by the
beginning of the 19th century, British engineers were beginning to innovate in both
road- and canal-building techniques, with J.L. McAdam’s inexpensive and
long-wearing road surface of compacted stones and Thomas Telford’s well-engineered
canals. The outstanding innovation in transport, however, was the application of
steam power, which occurred in three forms.

Steam locomotive

First was the evolution of the railroad: the combination of the steam locomotive
and a permanent travel way of metal rails. Experiments in this conjunction in the
first quarter of the 19th century culminated in the Stockton & Darlington Railway,
opened in 1825, and a further five years of experience with steam locomotives led
to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which, when it opened in
1830, constituted the first fully timetabled railway service with scheduled
freight and passenger traffic relying entirely on the steam locomotive for traction.
This railway was designed by George Stephenson, and the locomotives were the work
of Stephenson and his son Robert, the first locomotive being the famous Rocket,
which won a competition held by the proprietors of the railway at Rainhill, outside
Liverpool, in 1829. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester line may fairly
be regarded as the inauguration of the railway era, which continued until World
War I. During this time railways were built across all the countries and continents
of the world, opening up vast areas to the markets of industrial society.
Locomotives increased rapidly in size and power, but the essential principles
remained the same as those established by the Stephensons in the early 1830s:
horizontal cylinders mounted beneath a multitubular boiler with a firebox at the
rear and a tender carrying supplies of water and fuel. This was the form developed
from the Rocket, which had diagonal cylinders, being itself a stage in the
transition from the vertical cylinders, often encased by the boiler, which had been
typical of the earliest locomotives (except Trevithick’s Penydarren engine, which
had a horizontal cylinder). Meanwhile, the construction of the permanent way
underwent a corresponding improvement on that which had been common on the preceding
tramroads: wrought-iron, and eventually steel, rails replaced the cast-iron rails,
which cracked easily under a steam locomotive, and well-aligned track with easy

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gradients and substantial supporting civil-engineering works became a commonplace

of the railroads of the world.

Road locomotive

The second form in which steam power was applied to transport was that of the road
locomotive. There is no technical reason why this should not have enjoyed a success
equal to that of the railway engine, but its development was so constricted by the
unsuitability of most roads and by the jealousy of other road users that it achieved
general utility only for heavy traction work and such duties as road rolling. The
steam traction engine, which could be readily adapted from road haulage to power
farm machines, was nevertheless a distinguished product of 19th-century steam
technology.

Steamboats and ships

The third application was considerably more important, because it transformed

marine transport. The initial attempts to use a steam engine to power a boat were
made on the Seine River in France in 1775, and several experimental steamships
were built by William Symington in Britain at the turn of the 19th century. The
first commercial success in steam propulsion for a ship, however, was that of the
American Robert Fulton, whose paddle steamer the “North River Steamboat,”
commonly known as the Clermont after its first overnight port, plied between New
York and Albany in 1807, equipped with a Boulton and Watt engine of the modified
beam or side-lever type, with two beams placed alongside the base of the engine
in order to lower the centre of gravity. A similar engine was installed in the
Glasgow-built Comet, which was put in service on the Clyde in 1812 and was the
first successful steamship in Europe. All the early steamships were paddle-driven,
and all were small vessels suitable only for ferry and packet duties because it
was long thought that the fuel requirements of a steamship would be so large as
to preclude long-distance cargo carrying. The further development of the steamship
was thus delayed until the 1830s, when I.K. Brunel began to apply his ingenious
and innovating mind to the problems of steamship construction. His three great
steamships each marked a leap forward in technique. The Great Western (launched
1837), the first built specifically for oceanic service in the North Atlantic,
demonstrated that the proportion of space required for fuel decreased as the total
volume of the ship increased. The Great Britain (launched 1843) was the first
large iron ship in the world and the first to be screw-propelled; its return to
the port of Bristol in 1970, after a long working life and abandonment to the
elements, is a remarkable testimony to the strength of its construction. The Great
Eastern (launched 1858), with its total displacement of 18,918 tons, was by far
the largest ship built in the 19th century. With a double iron hull and two sets
of engines driving both a screw and paddles, this leviathan was never an economic
success, but it admirably demonstrated the technical possibilities of the large
iron steamship. By the end of the century, steamships were well on the way to
displacing the sailing ship on all the main trade routes of the world.

Printing and photography

Communications were equally transformed in the 19th century. The steam engine
helped to mechanize and thus to speed up the processes of papermaking and printing.
In the latter case the acceleration was achieved by the introduction of the
high-speed rotary press and the Linotype machine for casting type and
setting it in justified lines (i.e., with even right-hand margins). Printing,
indeed, had to undergo a technological revolution comparable to the

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15th-century invention of movable type to be able to supply the greatly

increasing market for the printed word. Another important process that was to make
a vital contribution to modern printing was discovered and developed in the 19th
century: photography. The first photograph was taken in 1826 or 1827 by the French
physicist J.N. Niepce, using a pewter plate coated with a form of bitumen that
hardened on exposure. His partner L.-J.-M. Daguerre and the Englishman W.H. Fox
Talbot adopted silver compounds to give light sensitivity, and the technique
developed rapidly in the middle decades of the century. By the 1890s George
Eastman in the United States was manufacturing cameras and celluloid
photographic film for a popular market, and the first experiments with the cinema
were beginning to attract attention.

Telegraphs and telephones

The great innovations in communications technology, however, derived from

electricity. The first was the electric telegraph, invented or at least made into
a practical proposition for use on the developing British railway system by two
British inventors, Sir William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone,
who collaborated on the work and took out a joint patent in 1837. Almost
simultaneously, the American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse devised the
signaling code that was subsequently adopted all over the world. In the next
quarter of a century the continents of the world were linked telegraphically by
transoceanic cables, and the main political and commercial centres were brought
into instantaneous communication. The telegraph system also played an important
part in the opening up of the American West by providing rapid aid in the maintenance
of law and order. The electric telegraph was followed by the telephone, invented
by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and adopted quickly for short-range oral
communication in the cities of America and at a somewhat more leisurely pace in
those of Europe. About the same time, theoretical work on the electromagnetic
properties of light and other radiation was beginning to produce astonishing
experimental results, and the possibilities of wireless telegraphy began to be
explored. By the end of the century, Guglielmo Marconi had transmitted messages
over many miles in Britain and was preparing the apparatus with which he made the
first transatlantic radio communication on Dec. 12, 1901. The world was thus
being drawn inexorably into a closer community by the spread of instantaneous
communication.

Military technology

One area of technology was not dramatically influenced by the application of steam
or electricity by the end of the 19th century: military technology. Although the
size of armies increased between 1750 and 1900, there were few major innovations
in techniques, except at sea where naval architecture rather reluctantly
accepted the advent of the iron steamship and devoted itself to matching
ever-increasing firepower with the strength of the armour plating on the hulls.
The quality of artillery and of firearms improved with the new high explosives that
became available in the middle of the 19th century, but experiments such as the
three-wheeled iron gun carriage, invented by the French army engineer Nicolas
Cugnot in 1769, which counts as the first steam-powered road vehicle, did not give
rise to any confidence that steam could be profitably used in battle. Railroads
and the electric telegraph were put to effective military use, but in general it
is fair to say that the 19th century put remarkably little of its tremendous and
innovative technological effort into devices for war.

In the course of its dynamic development between 1750 and 1900, important things
happened to technology itself. In the first place, it became self-conscious. This

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change is sometimes characterized as one from a craft-based technology to one based

on science, but this is an oversimplification. What occurred was rather an increase
in the awareness of technology as a socially important function. It is apparent
in the growing volume of treatises on technological subjects from the 16th
century onward and in the rapid development of patent legislation to protect the
interests of technological innovators. It is apparent also in the development
of technical education, uneven at first, being confined to the French polytechnics
and spreading thence to Germany and North America but reaching even Britain,
which had been most opposed to its formal recognition as part of the structure of
education, by the end of the 19th century. Again, it is apparent in the growth of
professional associations for engineers and for other specialized groups of
technologists.

Second, by becoming self-conscious, technology attracted attention in a way it had

never done before, and vociferous factions grew up to praise it as the mainspring
of social progress and the development of democracy or to criticize it as
the bane of modern man, responsible for the harsh discipline of the “dark
Satanic mills” and the tyranny of the machine and the squalor of urban life.
It was clear by the end of the 19th century that technology was an important feature
in industrial society and that it was likely to become more so. Whatever was to
happen in the future, technology had come of age and had to be taken seriously as
a formative factor of the utmost significance in the continuing development of
civilization.

The 20th Century

 Technology from 1900 to 1945

Recent history is notoriously difficult to write, because of the mass of material

and the problem of distinguishing the significant from the insignificant among
events that have virtually the power of contemporary experience. In respect to the
recent history of technology, however, one fact stands out clearly: despite the
immense achievements of technology by 1900, the following decades witnessed more
advance over a wide range of activities than the whole of previously recorded
history. The airplane, the rocket and interplanetary probes, electronics, atomic
power, antibiotics, insecticides, and a host of new materials have all been invented
and developed to create an unparalleled social situation, full of possibilities
and dangers, which would have been virtually unimaginable before the present
century.

In venturing to interpret the events of the 20th century, it will be convenient

to separate the years before 1945 from those that followed. The years 1900 to 1945
were dominated by the two World Wars, while those since 1945 were preoccupied by
the need to avoid another major war. The dividing point is one of outstanding social
and technological significance: the detonation of the first atomic bomb at
Alamogordo, N.M., in July 1945.

There were profound political changes in the 20th century related to technological
capacity and leadership. It may be an exaggeration to regard the 20th century as
“the American century,” but the rise of the United States as a superstate was
sufficiently rapid and dramatic to excuse the hyperbole. It was a rise based upon
tremendous natural resources exploited to secure increased productivity through
widespread industrialization, and the success of the United States in achieving
this objective was tested and demonstrated in the two World Wars. Technological
leadership passed from Britain and the European nations to the United States in
the course of these wars. This is not to say that the springs of innovation went

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dry in Europe. Many important inventions of the 20th century originated there. But
it was the United States that had the capacity to assimilate innovations and
take full advantage from them at times when other countries were deficient in one
or other of the vital social resources without which a brilliant invention cannot
be converted into a commercial success. As with Britain in the Industrial
Revolution, the technological vitality of the United States in the 20th century
was demonstrated less by any particular innovations than by its ability to adopt
new ideas from whatever source they come.

The two World Wars were themselves the most important instruments of technological
as well as political change in the 20th century. The rapid evolution of the airplane
is a striking illustration of this process, while the appearance of the tank in
the first conflict and of the atomic bomb in the second show the same signs of
response to an urgent military stimulus. It has been said that World War I was
a chemists’ war, on the basis of the immense importance of high explosives and
poison gas. In other respects the two wars hastened the development of technology
by extending the institutional apparatus for the encouragement of innovation by
both the state and private industry. This process went further in some countries
than in others, but no major belligerent nation could resist entirely the need
to support and coordinate its scientific-technological effort. The wars were thus
responsible for speeding the transformation from “little science,” with research
still largely restricted to small-scale efforts by a few isolated scientists, to
“big science,” with the emphasis on large research teams sponsored by governments
and corporations, working collectively on the development and application of new
techniques. While the extent of this transformation must not be overstated, and
recent research has tended to stress the continuing need for the independent
inventor at least in the stimulation of innovation, there can be little doubt that
the change in the scale of technological enterprises had far-reaching consequences.
It was one of the most momentous transformations of the 20th century, for it altered
the quality of industrial and social organization. In the process it assured
technology, for the first time in its long history, a position of importance and
even honour in social esteem.

Fuel and power

There were no fundamental innovations in fuel and power before the breakthrough
of 1945, but there were several significant developments in techniques that had
originated in the previous century. An outstanding development of this type was
the internal-combustion engine, which was continuously improved to meet the needs
of road vehicles and airplanes. The high-compression engine burning heavy-oil fuels,
invented by Rudolf Diesel in the 1890s, was developed to serve as a submarine
power unit in World War I and was subsequently adapted to heavy road haulage duties
and to agricultural tractors. Moreover, the sort of development that had
transformed the reciprocating steam engine into the steam turbine occurred
with the internal-combustion engine, the gas turbine replacing the reciprocating
engine for specialized purposes such as aero-engines, in which a high
power-to-weight ratio is important. Admittedly, this adaptation had not
proceeded very far by 1945, although the first jet-powered aircraft were in service
by the end of the war. The theory of the gas turbine, however, had been understood
since the 1920s at least, and in 1929 Sir Frank Whittle, then taking a flying
instructor’s course with the Royal Air Force, combined it with the principle of
jet propulsion in the engine for which he took out a patent in the following year.
But the construction of a satisfactory gas-turbine engine was delayed for a
decade by the lack of resources, and particularly by the need to develop new metal
alloys that could withstand the high temperatures generated in the engine. This
problem was solved by the development of a nickel-chromium alloy, and, with the

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gradual solution of the other problems, work went on in both Germany and Britain
to seize a military advantage by applying the jet engine to combat aircraft.

Gas-turbine engine

The principle of the gas turbine is that of compressing and burning air and fuel
in a combustion chamber and using the exhaust jet from this process to provide the
reaction that propels the engine forward. In its turbopropeller form, which
developed only after World War II, the exhaust drives a shaft carrying a normal
airscrew (propeller). Compression is achieved in a gas-turbine engine by admitting
air through a turbine rotor. In the so-called ramjet engine, intended to operate
at high speeds, the momentum of the engine through the air achieves adequate
compression. The gas turbine has been the subject of experiments in road, rail,
and marine transport, but for all purposes except that of air transport its
advantages have not so far been such as to make it a viable rival to traditional
reciprocating engines.

Petroleum

As far as fuel is concerned, the gas turbine burns mainly the middle fractions
(kerosene, or paraffin) of refined oil, but the general tendency of its widespread
application was to increase still further the dependence of the industrialized
nations on the producers of crude oil, which became a raw material of immense
economic value and international political significance. The refining of this
material itself underwent important technological development. Until the 20th
century it consisted of a fairly simple batch process whereby oil was heated until
it vaporized, when the various fractions were distilled separately. Apart from
improvements in the design of the stills and the introduction of continuous-flow
production, the first big advance came in 1913 with the introduction of
thermal cracking. This process took the less volatile fractions after
distillation and subjected them to heat under pressure, thus cracking the heavy
molecules into lighter molecules and so increasing the yield of the most valuable
fuel, petrol or gasoline. The discovery of this ability to tailor the products of
crude oil to suit the market marks the true beginning of
the petrochemical industry. It received a further boost in 1936, with the
introduction of catalytic cracking. By the use of various catalysts in the
process, means were devised for still further manipulating the molecules of the
hydrocarbon raw material. The development of modern plastics followed directly on
this (see below Plastics). So efficient had the processes of utilization become
that by the end of World War II the petrochemical industry had virtually eliminated
all waste materials.

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petroleum refineryPetroleum refinery at Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia.Herbert

Lanks/Shostal Associates

Electricity

All the principles of generating electricity had been worked out in the 19th century,
but by its end these had only just begun to produce electricity on a large scale.
The 20th century witnessed a colossal expansion of electrical power generation and
distribution. The general pattern has been toward ever-larger units of production,
using steam from coal- or oil-fired boilers. Economies of scale and the greater
physical efficiency achieved as higher steam temperatures and pressures were
attained both reinforced this tendency. Experience in the United States indicates
the trend: in the first decade of the 20th century, a generating unit with a capacity
of 25,000 kilowatts with pressures up to 200–300 pounds per square inch at 400
–500 °F (about 200–265 °C) was considered large, but by 1930 the largest unit
was 208,000 kilowatts with pressures of 1,200 pounds per square inch at a
temperature of 725 °F, while the amount of fuel necessary to produce a
kilowatt-hour of electricity and the price to the consumer had fallen dramatically.
As the market for electricity increased, so did the distance over which it was
transmitted, and the efficiency of transmission required higher and higher voltages.
The small direct-current generators of early urban power systems were abandoned
in favour of alternating-current systems, which could be adapted more readily
to high voltages. Transmission over a line of 155 miles (250 km) was established
in California in 1908 at 110,000 volts, and Hoover Dam in the 1930s used a line
of 300 miles (480 km) at 287,000 volts. The latter case may serve as a reminder
that hydroelectric power, using a fall of water to drive water turbines, was
developed to generate electricity where the climate and topography make it
possible to combine production with convenient transmission to a market. Remarkable
levels of efficiency were achieved in modern plants. One important consequence of
the ever-expanding consumption of electricity in the industrialized countries
has been the linking of local systems to provide vast power grids, or pools, within
which power can be shifted easily to meet changing local needs for current.

Atomic power

Until 1945, electricity and the internal-combustion engine were the dominant
sources of power for industry and transport in the 20th century, although in
some parts of the industrialized world steam power and even older prime movers
remained important. Early research in nuclear physics was more scientific than
technological, stirring little general interest. In fact, from the work of Ernest
Rutherford, Albert Einstein, and others to the first successful experiments in
splitting heavy atoms in Germany in 1938, no particular thought was given
to engineering potential. The war led the Manhattan Project to produce
the fission bomb that was first exploded at Alamogordo, N.M. Only in its final
stages did even this program become a matter of technology, when the problems
of building large reactors and handling radioactive materials had to be solved.
At this point it also became an economic and political matter, because very heavy
capital expenditure was involved. Thus, in this crucial event of the mid-20th
century, the convergence of science, technology, economics, and politics finally
took place.

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Industry and innovation

There were technological innovations of great significance in many aspects of

industrial production during the 20th century. It is worth observing, in the
first place, that the basic matter of industrial organization became one of
self-conscious innovation, with organizations setting out to increase their
productivity by improved techniques. Methods of work study, first systematically
examined in the United States at the end of the 19th century, were widely applied
in U.S. and European industrial organizations in the first half of the 20th century,
evolving rapidly into scientific management and the modern studies of industrial
administration, organization and method, and particular managerial techniques. The
object of these exercises was to make industry more efficient and thus to increase
productivity and profits, and there can be no doubt that they were remarkably
successful, if not quite as successful as some of their advocates maintained.
Without this superior industrial organization, it would not have been possible to
convert the comparatively small workshops of the 19th century into the giant
engineering establishments of the 20th, with their mass-production and
assembly-line techniques. The rationalization of production, so characteristic of
industry in the 20th century, may thus be legitimately regarded as the result of
the application of new techniques that form part of the history of technology since
1900.

Improvements in iron and steel

Another field of industrial innovation in the 20th century was the production of
new materials. As far as volume of consumption goes, humankind still lives in
the Iron Age, with the utilization of iron exceeding that of any other material.
But this dominance of iron has been modified in three ways: by the skill of
metallurgists in alloying iron with other metals; by the spread of materials such
as glass and concrete in building; and by the appearance and widespread use of
entirely new materials, particularly plastics. Alloys had already begun to become
important in the iron and steel industry in the 19th century (apart from steel itself,
which is an alloy of iron and carbon). Self-hardening tungsten steel was first
produced in 1868 and manganese steel, possessing toughness rather than hardness,
in 1887. Manganese steel is also nonmagnetic; this fact suggests great
possibilities for this steel in the electric power industry. In the 20th century
steel alloys multiplied. Silicon steel was found to be useful because, in contrast
to manganese steel, it is highly magnetic. In 1913 the first stainless steels were
made in England by alloying steel with chromium, and the Krupp works in Germany
produced stainless steel in 1914 with 18 percent chromium and 8 percent nickel.
The importance of a nickel-chromium alloy in the development of the gas-turbine
engine in the 1930s has already been noted. Many other alloys also came into
widespread use for specialized purposes.

Building materials

Methods of producing traditional materials like glass and concrete on a larger scale
also supplied alternatives to iron, especially in building; in the form
of reinforced concrete, they supplemented structural iron. Most of the entirely
new materials were nonmetallic, although at least one new metal, aluminum, reached
proportions of large-scale industrial significance in the 20th century. The ores
of this metal are among the most abundant in the crust of the Earth, but, before
the provision of plentiful cheap electricity made it feasible to use an
electrolytic process on an industrial scale, the metal was extracted only at great
expense. The strength of aluminum, compared weight for weight with steel, made it
a valuable material in aircraft construction, and many other industrial and

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domestic uses were found for it. In 1900 world production of aluminum was 3,000
tons, about half of which was made using cheap electric power from Niagara Falls.
Production rose rapidly since.

Electrolytic processes had already been used in the preparation of other metals.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Davy pioneered the process by isolating
potassium, sodium, barium, calcium, and strontium, although there was little
commercial exploitation of these substances. By the beginning of the 20th century,
significant amounts of magnesium were being prepared electrolytically at high
temperatures, and the electric furnace made possible the production of calcium
carbide by the reaction of calcium oxide (lime) and carbon (coke). In another
electric furnace process, calcium carbide reacted with nitrogen to form calcium
cyanamide, from which a useful synthetic resin could be made.

Plastics

The quality of plasticity is one that had been used to great effect in the crafts
of metallurgy and ceramics. The use of the word plastics as a collective noun,
however, refers not so much to the traditional materials employed in these crafts
as to new substances produced by chemical reactions and molded or pressed to take
a permanent rigid shape. The first such material to be manufactured was Parkesine,
developed by the British inventor Alexander Parkes. Parkesine, made from a mixture
of chloroform and castor oil, was “a substance hard as horn, but as flexible as
leather, capable of being cast or stamped, painted, dyed or carved.” The words
are from a guide to the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, at which
Parkesine won a bronze medal for its inventor. It was soon followed by other plastics,
but—apart from celluloid, a cellulose nitrate composition using camphor as a
solvent and produced in solid form (as imitation horn for billiard balls) and in
sheets (for men’s collars and photographic film)—these had little commercial
success until the 20th century.

The early plastics relied upon the large molecules in cellulose, usually derived
from wood pulp. Leo H. Baekeland, a Belgian American inventor, introduced a new
class of large molecules when he took out his patent for Bakelite in 1909.
Bakelite is made by the reaction between formaldehyde and phenolic materials at
high temperatures; the substance is hard, infusible, and chemically resistant (the
type known as thermosetting plastic). As a nonconductor of electricity, it proved
to be exceptionally useful for all sorts of electrical appliances. The success of
Bakelite gave a great impetus to the plastics industry, to the study of coal
tar derivatives and other hydrocarbon compounds, and to the theoretical
understanding of the structure of complex molecules. This activity led to new
dyestuffs and detergents, but it also led to the successful manipulation of
molecules to produce materials with particular qualities such as hardness or
flexibility. Techniques were devised, often requiring catalysts and elaborate
equipment, to secure these polymers—that is, complex molecules produced by the
aggregation of simpler structures. Linear polymers give strong fibres,
film-forming polymers have been useful in paints, and mass polymers have formed
solid plastics.

Synthetic fibres

The possibility of creating artificial fibres was another 19th-century discovery

that did not become commercially significant until the 20th century, when such
fibres were developed alongside the solid plastics to which they are closely related.
The first artificial textiles had been made from rayon, a silklike material
produced by extruding a solution of nitrocellulose in acetic acid into a

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coagulating bath of alcohol, and various other cellulosic materials were used in
this way. But later research, exploiting the polymerization techniques being used
in solid plastics, culminated in the production of nylon just before the outbreak
of World War II. Nylon consists of long chains of carbon-based molecules,
giving fibres of unprecedented strength and flexibility. It is formed by melting
the component materials and extruding them; the strength of the fibre is greatly
increased by stretching it when cold. Nylon was developed with the women’s stocking
market in mind, but the conditions of war gave it an opportunity to demonstrate
its versatility and reliability as parachute fabric and towlines. This and other
synthetic fibres became generally available only after the war.

Synthetic rubber

The chemical industry in the 20th century put a wide range of new materials at
the disposal of society. It also succeeded in replacing natural sources of some
materials. An important example of this is the manufacture of artificial rubber
to meet a world demand far in excess of that which could be met by the existing
rubber plantations. This technique was pioneered in Germany during World War I.
In this effort, as in the development of other materials such as high explosives
and dyestuffs, the consistent German investment in scientific and technical
education paid dividends, for advances in all these fields of
chemical manufacturing were prepared by careful research in the laboratory.

Pharmaceuticals and medical technology

An even more dramatic result of the growth in chemical knowledge was the expansion
of the pharmaceutical industry. The science of pharmacy emerged slowly from the
traditional empiricism of the herbalist, but by the end of the 19th century there
had been some solid achievements in the analysis of existing drugs and in the
preparation of new ones. The discovery in 1856 of the first aniline dye had been
occasioned by a vain attempt to synthesize quinine from coal tar derivatives.
Greater success came in the following decades with the production of the first
synthetic antifever drugs and painkilling compounds, culminating in 1899 in the
conversion of salicylic acid into acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), which is still
the most widely used drug. Progress was being made simultaneously with the
sulfonal hypnotics and the barbiturate group of drugs, and early in the 20th
century Paul Ehrlich of Germany successfully developed an organic
compound containing arsenic—606, denoting how many tests he had made, but better
known as Salvarsan—which was effective against syphilis. The significance of
this discovery, made in 1910, was that 606 was the first drug devised to overwhelm
an invading microorganism without offending the host. In 1935 the discovery that
Prontosil, a red dye developed by the German synthetic dyestuff industry, was an
effective drug against streptococcal infections (leading to blood poisoning)
introduced the important sulfa drugs. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin
in 1928 was not immediately followed up, because it proved very difficult to isolate
the drug in a stable form from the mold in which it was formed. But the stimulus
of World War II gave a fresh urgency to research in this field, and commercial
production of penicillin, the first of the antibiotics, began in 1941. These drugs
work by preventing the growth of pathogenic organisms. All
these pharmaceutical advances demonstrate an intimate relationship with
chemical technology.

Other branches of medical technology made significant progress. Anesthetics and

antiseptics had been developed in the 19th century, opening up new possibilities
for complex surgery. Techniques of blood transfusion, examination by X-rays
(discovered in 1895), radiation therapy (following demonstration of the

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therapeutic effects of ultraviolet light in 1893 and the discovery of radium in

1898), and orthopedic surgery for bone disorders all developed rapidly. The
techniques of immunology similarly advanced, with the development of vaccines
effective against typhoid and other diseases.

Food and agriculture

The increasing chemical understanding of drugs and microorganisms was applied with
outstanding success to the study of food. The analysis of the relationship between
certain types of food and human physical performance led to the identification of
vitamins in 1911 and to their classification into three types in 1919, with
subsequent additions and subdivisions. It was realized that the presence of these
materials is necessary for a healthy diet, and eating habits and public
health programs were adjusted accordingly. The importance of trace elements, very
minor constituents, was also discovered and investigated, beginning in 1895 with
the realization that goitre is caused by a deficiency of iodine.

As well as improving in quality, the quantity of food produced in the 20th century
increased rapidly as a result of the intensive application of modern technology.
The greater scale and complexity of urban life created a pressure for increased
production and a greater variety of foodstuffs, and the resources of the
internal-combustion engine, electricity, and chemical technology were called upon
to achieve these objectives. The internal-combustion engine was utilized in the
tractor, which became the almost universal agent of mobile power on the farm in
the industrialized countries. The same engines powered other machines such as
combine harvesters, which became common in the United States in the early 20th
century, although their use was less widespread in the more labour-intensive farms
of Europe, especially before World War II. Synthetic fertilizers, an important
product of the chemical industry, became popular in most types of farming, and
other chemicals—pesticides and herbicides—appeared toward the end of the period,
effecting something of an agrarian revolution. Once again, World War II gave a
powerful boost to development. Despite problems of pollution that developed later,
the introduction of DDT as a highly effective insecticide in 1944 was a particularly
significant achievement of chemical technology. Food processing and packaging also
advanced—dehydration techniques such as vacuum-contact drying were introduced in
the 1930s—but the 19th-century innovations of canning and refrigeration remained
the dominant techniques of preservation.

Civil engineering

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engineeringLearn how engineers solve practical problems in the world, such as how
to build airplanes, skyscrapers, and suspension bridges.© The University of
Newcastle, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment with thanks to Jeremy Ley
and Nick Parker from Light Creative (A Britannica Publishing Partner)See all videos
for this article

Important development occurred in civil engineering in the first half of the 20th
century, although there were few striking innovations. Advancing techniques for
large-scale construction produced many spectacular skyscrapers, bridges, and
dams all over the world but especially in the United States. The city of New York
acquired its characteristic skyline, built upon the exploitation of steel frames
and reinforced concrete. Conventional methods of building in brick and masonry
had reached the limits of feasibility in the 1800s in office blocks up to 16-stories
high, and the future lay with the skeleton frame or cage construction pioneered
in the 1880s in Chicago. The vital ingredients for the new tall buildings or
skyscrapers that followed were abundant cheap steel—for columns, beams, and
trusses—and efficient passenger elevators. The availability of these developments
and the demand for more and more office space in the thriving cities of Chicago
and New York caused the boom in skyscraper building that continued until 1931, when
the Empire State Building, with its total height of 1,250 feet (381 metres) and
102 stories, achieved a limit not exceeded for 40 years and demonstrated the
strength of its structure by sustaining the crash impact of a B-25 bomber in July
1945 with only minor damage to the building. The Great Depression brought a halt
to skyscraper building from 1932 until after World War II.

Concrete, and more especially reinforced concrete (that is, concrete set around
a framework or mesh of steel), played an important part in the construction of the
later skyscrapers, and this material also led to the introduction of more
imaginative structural forms in buildings and to the development of prefabrication
techniques. The use of large concrete members in bridges and other structures has
been made possible by the technique of prestressing: by casting the concrete around
stretched steel wires, allowing it to set, then relaxing the tension in the wires,
it is possible to induce compressive stresses in the concrete that offset the
tensile stresses imposed by the external loading, and in this way the members can
be made stronger and lighter. The technique was particularly applicable in bridge
building. The construction of large-span bridges received a setback, however, with
the dramatic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows (Washington) Suspension Bridge in
the United States in 1940, four months after it was completed. This led to a
reassessment of wind effects on the loading of large suspension bridges and to
significant improvements in subsequent designs. Use of massed concrete has produced
spectacular high arch dams, in which the weight of water is transmitted in part
to the abutments by the curve of the concrete wall; such dams need not depend upon
the sheer bulk of impervious material as in a conventional gravity
or embankment dam.

Transportation

Some of the outstanding achievements of the 20th century are provided

by transportation history. In most fields there was a switch from steam power,
supreme in the previous century, to internal combustion and electricity. Steam,
however, retained its superiority in marine transport: the steam turbine provided
power for a new generation of large ocean liners beginning with the Mauretania,
developing 70,000 horsepower and a speed of 27 knots (27 nautical miles, or 50 km,
per hour) in 1906 and continuing throughout the period, culminating in the Queen
Elizabeth, launched in 1938 with about 200,000 horsepower and a speed of 28.5 knots.
Even here, however, there was increasing competition from large diesel-powered
motor vessels. Most smaller ships adopted this form of propulsion, and even the

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steamships accepted the convenience of oil-burning boilers in place of the

cumbersome coal burners with their large bunkers.

On land, steam fought a long rearguard action, but the enormous popularity of the
automobile deprived the railways of much of their passenger traffic and forced them
to seek economies in conversion to diesel engines or electric traction, although
these developments had not spread widely in Europe by the outbreak of World War
II. Meanwhile, the automobile stimulated prodigious feats of production. Henry
Ford led the way in the adoption of assembly-line mass production; his
spectacularly successful Model T, the “Tin Lizzie,” was manufactured in this
way first in 1913, and by 1923 production had risen to nearly two million per year.
Despite this and similar successes in other countries, the first half of the 20th
century was not a period of great technological innovation in the motorcar, which
retained the main design features given to it in the last decade of the 19th century.
For all the refinements (for example, the self-starter) and multitudinous varieties,
the major fact of the automobile in this period was its quantity.

The airplane is entirely a product of the 20th century, unlike the automobile,
to which its development was intimately related. This is not to say that experiments
with flying machines had not taken place earlier. Throughout the 19th century, to
go back no further, investigations into aerodynamic effects were carried out by
inventors such as Sir George Cayley in England, leading to the successful glider
flights of Otto Lilienthal and others. Several designers perceived that
the internal-combustion engine promised to provide the light, compact power unit
that was a prerequisite of powered flight, and on Dec. 17, 1903, Wilbur and
Orville Wright in their Flyer I at the Kill Devil Hills in North
Carolina achieved sustained, controlled, powered flight, one of the great
“firsts” in the history of technology. The Flyer I was a
propeller-driven adaptation of the biplane gliders that the Wright
brothers had built and learned to fly in the previous years. They had devised a
system of control through elevator, rudder, and a wing-warping technique that
served until the introduction of ailerons. Within a few years the brothers were
flying with complete confidence, astonishing the European pioneers of flight when
they took their airplane across the Atlantic to give demonstrations in 1908. Within
a few months of this revelation, however, the European designers
had assimilated the lesson and were pushing ahead the principles of aircraft
construction. World War I gave a great impetus to this technological
development, transforming small-scale scattered aircraft manufacture into a
major industry in all the main belligerent countries, and transforming the
airplane itself from a fragile construction in wood and glue into
a robust machine capable of startling aerobatic feats.

The end of the war brought a setback to this new industry, but the airplane had
evolved sufficiently to reveal its potential as a medium of civil transport, and
during the interwar years the establishment of transcontinental air routes provided
a market for large, comfortable, and safe aircraft. By the outbreak of World War
II, metal-framed-and-skinned aircraft had become general, and the cantilevered
monoplane structure had replaced the biplane for most purposes. War again provided
a powerful stimulus to aircraft designers; engine performance was especially
improved, and the gas turbine received its first practical application. Other novel
features of these years included the helicopter, deriving lift from its rotating
wings, or rotors, and the German V-1 flying bomb, a pilotless aircraft.

The war also stimulated the use of gliders for the transport of troops, the use
of parachutes for escape from aircraft and for attack by paratroops, and the use
of gas-filled balloons for antiaircraft barrages. The balloon had been used for
pioneer aeronautical experiments in the 19th century, but its practical uses had
been hampered by the lack of control over its movements. The application of the

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internal-combustion engine to a rigid-frame balloon airship by Ferdinand von

Zeppelin had temporarily made a weapon of war in 1915, although experience soon
proved that it could not survive in competition with the airplane. The apparently
promising prospects of the dirigible (that is, maneuverable) airship in civil
transport between the wars were ended by a series of disasters, the worst of which
was the destruction of the Hindenburg in New Jersey in 1937. Since then the
airplane has been unchallenged in the field of air transport.

Communications

The spectacular transport revolution of the 20th century was accompanied by a

communications revolution quite as dramatic, although technologically springing
from different roots. In part, well-established media of communication like
printing participated in this revolution, although most of the significant changes
—such as the typewriter, the Linotype, and the high-speed power-driven rotary
press—were achievements of the 19th century. Photography was also a proved and
familiar technique by the end of the 19th century, but cinematography was new and
did not become generally available until after World War I, when it became
enormously popular.

The real novelties in communications in the 20th century came in electronics. The
scientific examination of the relationship between light waves and electromagnetic
waves had already revealed the possibility of transmitting electromagnetic signals
between widely separated points, and on Dec. 12, 1901, Guglielmo
Marconi succeeded in transmitting the first wireless message across the Atlantic.
Early equipment was crude, but within a few years striking progress was made in
improving the means of transmitting and receiving coded messages. Particularly
important was the development of the thermionic valve, a device for rectifying
(that is, converting a high-frequency oscillating signal into a unidirectional
current capable of registering as a sound) an electromagnetic wave. This was
essentially a development from the carbon-filament electric lightbulb. In 1883
Edison had found that in these lamps a current flowed between the filament and a
nearby test electrode, called the plate, if the electric potential of the plate
was positive with respect to the filament. This current, called the Edison effect,
was later identified as a stream of electrons radiated by the hot filament. In 1904
Sir John Ambrose Fleming of Britain discovered that by placing a metal cylinder
around the filament in the bulb and by connecting the cylinder (the plate) to a
third terminal, a current could be rectified so that it could be detected by a
telephone receiver. Fleming’s device was known as the diode, and two years later,
in 1906, Lee De Forest of the United States made the significant improvement that
became known as the triode by introducing a third electrode (the grid) between the
filament and the plate. The outstanding feature of this refinement was its ability
to amplify a signal. Its application made possible by the 1920s the widespread
introduction of live-voice broadcasting in Europe and America, with a consequent
boom in the production of radio receivers and other equipment.

This, however, was only one of the results derived from the application of the
thermionic valve. The idea of harnessing the flow of electrons was applied in
the electron microscope, radar (a detection device depending on the capacity of
some radio waves to be reflected by solid objects), the electronic computer, and
in the cathode-ray tube of the television set. The first experiments in the
transmission of pictures had been greeted with ridicule. Working on his own in
Britain, John Logie Baird in the 1920s demonstrated a mechanical scanner able
to convert an image into a series of electronic impulses that could then be
reassembled on a viewing screen as a pattern of light and shade. Baird’s system,
however, was rejected in favour of electronic scanning, developed in the United
States by Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin with the powerful backing of

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the Radio Corporation of America. Their equipment operated much more rapidly and
gave a more satisfactory image. By the outbreak of World War II, television services
were being introduced in several countries, although the war suspended their
extension for a decade. The emergence of television as a universal medium of mass
communication is therefore a phenomenon of the postwar years. But already by 1945
the cinema and the radio had demonstrated their power in communicating
news, propaganda, commercial advertisements, and entertainment.

Military technology

It has been necessary to refer repeatedly to the effects of the two World Wars in
promoting all kinds of innovation. It should be observed also that technological
innovations transformed the character of war itself. One weapon developed during
World War II deserves a special mention. The principle of rocket propulsion was
well known earlier, and its possibilities as a means of achieving speeds sufficient
to escape from Earth’s gravitational pull had been pointed out by such pioneers
as the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert H. Goddard. The
latter built experimental liquid-fueled rockets in 1926. Simultaneously, a group
of German and Romanian pioneers was working along the same lines, and it was this
team that was taken over by the German war effort in the 1930s and given the resources
to develop a rocket capable of delivering a warhead hundreds of miles away. At the
Peenemünde base on the island of Usedom in the Baltic, Wernher von Braun and his
team created the V-2. Fully fueled, it weighed 14 tons; it was 40 feet (12 metres)
long and was propelled by burning a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen. Reaching
a height of more than 100 miles (160 km), the V-2 marked the beginning of the space
age, and members of its design team were instrumental in both the Soviet and U.S.
space programs after the war.

V-2Test launch of a V-2 rocket.Camera Press/Globe Photos

Technology had a tremendous social impact in the period 1900–45. The automobile
and electric power, for instance, radically changed both the scale and the quality
of 20th-century life, promoting a process of rapid urbanization and a virtual
revolution in living through mass production of household goods and appliances.
The rapid development of the airplane, the cinema, and radio made the world seem
suddenly smaller and more accessible. In the years following 1945 the constructive
and creative opportunities of modern technology could be exploited, although the
process has not been without its problems.

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Space-age technology

The years since World War II ended have been spent in the shadow of nuclear
weapons, even though they have not been used in war since that time. These weapons
underwent momentous development: the fission bombs of 1945 were superseded by the
more powerful fusion bombs in 1950, and before 1960 rockets were shown capable of
delivering these weapons at ranges of thousands of miles. This new military
technology had an incalculable effect on international relations, for it
contributed to the polarization of world power blocs while enforcing a caution,
if not discipline, in the conduct of international affairs that was absent earlier
in the 20th century.

The fact of nuclear power was by no means the only technological novelty of the
post-1945 years. So striking indeed were the advances in engineering, chemical
and medical technology, transport, and communications that some commentators
wrote, somewhat misleadingly, of the “second Industrial Revolution” in describing
the changes in these years. The rapid development of electronic engineering created
a new world of computer technology, remote control, miniaturization, and instant
communication. Even more expressive of the character of the period was the leap
over the threshold of extraterrestrial exploration. The techniques of rocketry,
first applied in weapons, were developed to provide launch vehicles for satellites
and lunar and planetary probes and eventually, in 1969, to set the first men on
the Moon and bring them home safely again. This astonishing achievement was
stimulated in part by the international ideological rivalry already mentioned, as
only the Soviet Union and the United States had both the resources and the will
to support the huge expenditures required. It justifies the description of this
period, however, as that of “space-age technology.”

Power

The great power innovation of this period was the harnessing of nuclear energy.
The first atomic bombs represented only a comparatively crude form of nuclear
fission, releasing the energy of the radioactive material immediately and
explosively. But it was quickly appreciated that the energy released within a
critical atomic pile, a mass of graphite absorbing the neutrons emitted by
radioactive material inserted into it, could generate heat, which in turn could
create steam to drive turbines and thus convert the nuclear energy into usable
electricity. Atomic power stations were built on this principle in the advanced
industrial world, and the system is still undergoing refinement, although so far
atomic energy has not vindicated the high hopes placed in it as an economic source
of electricity and presents formidable problems of waste disposal and
maintenance. Nevertheless, it seems probable that the effort devoted to experiments
on more direct ways of controlling nuclear fission will eventually produce results
in power engineering.

Meanwhile, nuclear physics was probing the even more promising possibilities of
harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, of creating the conditions in which simple
atoms of hydrogen combine, with a vast release of energy, to form heavier atoms.
This is the process that occurs in the stars, but so far it has only been created
artificially by triggering off a fusion reaction with the intense heat generated
momentarily by an atomic fission explosion. This is the mechanism of the hydrogen
bomb. So far scientists have devised no way of harnessing this process so that
continuous controlled energy can be obtained from it, although researches into
plasma physics, generating a point of intense heat within a stream of electrons
imprisoned in a strong magnetic field, hold out some hopes that such means will
be discovered in the not-too-distant future.

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Alternatives to fossil fuels

It may well become a matter of urgency that some means of extracting usable power
from nuclear fusion be acquired. At the present rate of consumption, the world’
s resources of mineral fuels, and of the available radioactive materials used in
the present nuclear power stations, will be exhausted within a period of perhaps
a few decades. The most attractive alternative is thus a form of energy derived
from a controlled fusion reaction that would use hydrogen from seawater, a virtually
limitless source, and that would not create a significant problem of waste disposal.
Other sources of energy that may provide alternatives to mineral fuels include
various forms of solar cell, deriving power from the Sun by a chemical or physical
reaction such as that of photosynthesis. Solar cells of this kind are already
in regular use on satellites and space probes, where the flow of energy out from
the Sun (the solar wind) can be harnessed without interference from the atmosphere
or the rotation of the Earth.

Gas turbine

The gas turbine underwent substantial development since its first successful
operational use at the end of World War II. The high power-to-weight ratio of this
type of engine made it ideal for aircraft propulsion, so that in either the pure
jet or turboprop form it was generally adopted for all large aircraft, both military
and civil, by the 1960s. The immediate effect of the adoption of jet propulsion
was a spectacular increase in aircraft speeds, the first piloted airplane exceeding
the speed of sound in level flight being the American Bell X-1 in 1947, and
by the late 1960s supersonic flight was becoming a practicable, though
controversial, proposition for civil-airline users. Ever larger and more powerful
gas turbines were designed to meet the requirements of airlines and military
strategy, and increasing attention was given to refinements to reduce the noise
and increase the efficiency of this type of engine. Meanwhile, the gas turbine
was installed as a power unit in ships, railroad engines, and automobiles, but in
none of these uses did it proceed far beyond the experimental stage.

Materials

The space age spawned important new materials and uncovered new uses for old
materials. For example, a vast range of applications have been found for plastics
that have been manufactured in many different forms with widely varied
characteristics. Glass fibre has been molded in rigid shapes to provide motorcar
bodies and hulls for small ships. Carbon fibre has demonstrated remarkable
properties that make it an alternative to metals for high-temperature turbine
blades. Research on ceramics has produced materials resistant to high
temperatures suitable for heat shields on spacecraft. The demand for iron and its
alloys and for the nonferrous metals has remained high. The modern world has found
extensive new uses for the latter: copper for electrical conductors, tin for
protective plating of less-resistant metals, lead as a shield in nuclear power
installations, and silver in photography. In most of these cases the development
began before the 20th century, but the continuing increase in demand for these
metals is affecting their prices in the world commodity markets.

Automation and the computer

Both old and new materials were used increasingly in the engineering industry,
which was transformed since the end of World War II by the introduction of control

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engineering, automation, and computerized techniques. The vital piece of equipment

has been the computer, especially the electronic digital computer, a
20th-century invention the theory of which was expounded by the English
mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage in the 1830s. The essence of
this machine is the use of electronic devices to record electric impulses coded
in the very simple binary system, using only two symbols, but other devices such
as punched cards and magnetic tape for storing and feeding information have been
important supplementary features. By virtue of the very high speeds at which such
equipment can operate, even the most complicated calculations can be performed in
a very short space of time.

The Mark I digital computer was at work at Harvard University in 1944, and
after the war the possibility of using it for a wide range of industrial,
administrative, and scientific applications was quickly realized. The early
computers, however, were large and expensive machines, and their general
application was delayed until the invention of the transistor revolutionized
computer technology. The transistor is another of the key inventions of the space
age. The product of research on the physics of solids, and particularly of those
materials such as germanium and silicon known as semiconductors, the transistor
was invented by John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley at
Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States in 1947. It was discovered that
crystals of semiconductors, which have the capacity to conduct electricity in some
conditions and not in others, could be made to perform the functions of a thermionic
valve but in the form of a device that was much smaller, more reliable, and more
versatile. The result has been the replacement of the cumbersome, fragile, and
heat-producing vacuum tubes by the small and strong transistor in a wide range of
electronic equipment. Most especially, this conversion has made possible the
construction of much more powerful computers while making them more compact and
less expensive. Indeed, so small can effective transistors be that they have made
possible the new skills of miniaturization and microminiaturization, whereby
complicated electronic circuits can be created on minute pieces of silicon or other
semiconducting materials and incorporated in large numbers in computers. From the
late 1950s to the mid-1970s the computer grew from an exotic accessory to
an integral element of most commercial enterprises, and computers made for home
use became widespread in the ’80s.

The potential for adaptation and utilization of the computer seems so great that
many commentators have likened it to the human brain, and there is no doubt that
human analogies have been important in its development. In Japan, where computer
and other electronics technology made giant strides since the 1950s, fully
computerized and automated factories were in operation by the mid-1970s, some of
them employing complete workforces of robots in the manufacture of other robots.
In the United States the chemical industry provides some of the most striking
examples of fully automated, computer-controlled manufacture. The characteristics
of continuous production, in contrast to the batch production of most engineering
establishments, lend themselves ideally to automatic control from a central
computer monitoring the information fed back to it and making adjustments
accordingly. Many large petrochemical plants producing fuel and raw materials
for manufacturing industries are now run in this way, with the residual human
function that of maintaining the machines and of providing the initial instructions.
The same sort of influences can be seen even in the old established chemical
processes, although not to the same extent: in the ceramics industry, in which
continuous firing replaced the traditional batch-production kilns; in the paper
industry, in which mounting demand for paper and board encouraged the installation
of larger and faster machines; and in the glass industry, in which the float-glass
process for making large sheets of glass on a surface of molten tin requires close
mechanical control.

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In medicine and the life sciences the computer has provided a powerful tool of
research and supervision. It is now possible to monitor complicated operations and
treatment. Surgery made great advances in the space age; the introduction of
transplant techniques attracted worldwide publicity and interest. But perhaps of
greater long-term significance is research in biology, with the aid of modern
techniques and instruments, that began to unlock the mysteries of cell formation
and reproduction through the self-replicating properties of the DNA molecules
present in all living substances and thus to explore the nature of life itself.

Food production

Food production has been subject to technological innovation such as

accelerated freeze-drying and irradiation as methods of preservation, as well
as the increasing mechanization of farming throughout the world. The widespread
use of new pesticides and herbicides in some cases reached the point of abuse,
causing worldwide concern. Despite such problems, farming was transformed in
response to the demand for more food; scientific farming, with its careful breeding,
controlled feeding, and mechanized handling, became commonplace. New
food-producing techniques such as aquaculture and hydroponics, for farming the
sea and seabed and for creating self-contained cycles of food production without
soil, respectively, are being explored either to increase the world supply of food
or to devise ways of sustaining closed communities such as may one day venture
forth from the Earth on the adventure of interplanetary exploration.

Civil engineering

One industry that has not been deeply influenced by new control-engineering
techniques is construction, in which the nature of the tasks involved makes
dependence on a large labour force still essential, whether it be in constructing
a skyscraper, a new highway, or a tunnel. Nevertheless, some important new
techniques appeared since 1945, notably the use of heavy earth-moving and
excavating machines such as the bulldozer and the tower crane. The use
of prefabricated parts according to a predetermined system of construction
became widespread. In the construction of housing units, often in large blocks of
apartments or flats, such systems are particularly relevant because they make
for standardization and economy in plumbing, heating, and kitchen equipment. The
revolution in home equipment that began before World War II has continued apace
since, with a proliferation of electrical equipment.

Transport and communications

Many of these changes were facilitated by improvements in transport and

communications. Transport developments have for the most part continued those well
established in the early 20th century. The automobile proceeded in its phenomenal
growth in popularity, causing radical changes in many of the patterns of life,
although the basic design of the motorcar has remained unchanged. The airplane,
benefiting from jet propulsion and a number of lesser technical advances, made
spectacular gains at the expense of both the ocean liner and the railroad.
However, the growing popularity of air transport brought problems of crowded
airspace, noise, and airfield siting.

World War II helped bring about a shift to air transport: direct passenger flights
across the Atlantic were initiated immediately after the war. The first generation
of transatlantic airliners were the aircraft developed by war experience from
the Douglas DC-3 and the pioneering types of the 1930s incorporating all-metal

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construction with stressed skin, wing flaps and slots, retractable landing gear,
and other advances. The coming of the big jet-powered civil airliner in the 1950s
kept pace with the rising demand for air services but accentuated the social
problems of air transport. The solution to these problems may lie partly in the
development of vertical takeoff and landing techniques, a concept successfully
pioneered by a British military aircraft, the Hawker Siddeley Harrier.
Longer-term solutions may be provided by the development of air-cushion vehicles
derived from the Hovercraft, in use in the English Channel and elsewhere, and
one of the outstanding technological innovations of the period since 1945. The
central feature of this machine is a down-blast of air, which creates an air
cushion on which the craft rides without direct contact with the sea or ground
below it. The remarkable versatility of the air-cushion machine is beyond doubt,
but it has proved difficult to find very many transportation needs that it can
fulfill better than any craft already available. Despite these difficulties, it
seems likely that this type of vehicle will have an important future. It should
be remembered, however, that all the machines mentioned so far, automobiles,
airplanes, and Hovercraft, use oil fuels, and it is possible that the exhaustion
of these will turn attention increasingly to alternative sources of power and
particularly to electric traction (electric railroads and autos), in which field
there have been promising developments such as the linear-induction motor.
Supersonic flight, for nearly 30 years an exclusive capability of military and
research aircraft, became a commercial reality in 1975 with the Soviet Tu-144 cargo
plane; the Concorde supersonic transport (SST), built jointly by the British and
French governments, entered regular passenger service early in 1976.

In communications also, the dominant lines of development continue to be those that

were established before or during World War II. In particular, the rapid growth
of television services, with their immense influence as media of mass communication,
was built on foundations laid in the 1920s and 1930s, while the universal adoption
of radar on ships and airplanes followed the invention of a device to give early
warning of aerial attack. But in certain features the development of communications
in the space age has produced important innovations. First, the transistor, so
significant for computers and control engineering, made a large contribution to
communications technology. Second, the establishment of space satellites,
considered to be a remote theoretical possibility in the 1940s, became part of the
accepted technological scene in the 1960s, and these have played a dramatic part
in telephone and television communication as well as in relaying meteorological
pictures and data. Third, the development of magnetic tape as a means of recording
sound and, more recently, vision provided a highly flexible and useful mode of
communication. Fourth, new printing techniques were developed. In phototypesetting,
a photographic image is substituted for the conventional metal type. In xerography,
a dry copying process, an ink powder is attracted to the image to be copied by static
electricity and then fused by heating. Fifth, new optical devices such as zoom
lenses increased the power of cameras and prompted corresponding improvements in
the quality of film available to the cinema and television. Sixth, new physical
techniques such as those that produced the laser (light amplification
by stimulated emission of radiation) made available an immensely powerful means
of communication over long distances, although these are still in their
experimental stages. The laser also acquired significance as an important addition
to surgical techniques and as an instrument of space weaponry. The seventh and final
communications innovation is the use of electromagnetic waves other than light
to explore the structure of the universe by means of the radio telescope and its
derivative, the X-ray telescope. This technique was pioneered after World War II
and has since become a vital instrument of satellite control and space research.
Radio telescopes have also been directed toward the Sun’s closest neighbours in
space in the hope of detecting electromagnetic signals from other intelligent
species in the universe.

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Military technology

Military technology in the space age has been concerned with the radical
restructuring of strategy caused by the invention of nuclear weapons and the means
of delivering them by intercontinental ballistic missiles. Apart from these
major features and the elaborate electronic systems intended to give an early
warning of missile attack, military reorganization has emphasized high
maneuverability through helicopter transport and a variety of armed vehicles. Such
forces were deployed in wars in Korea and Vietnam, the latter of which also saw
the widespread use of napalm bombs and chemical defoliants to remove the cover
provided by dense forests. World War II marked the end of the primacy of the heavily
armoured battleship. Although the United States recommissioned several battleships
in the 1980s, the aircraft carrier became the principal capital ship in the
navies of the world. Emphasis now is placed on electronic detection and the support
of nuclear-powered submarines equipped with missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
The only major use of nuclear power since 1945, other than generating large-scale
electric energy, has been the propulsion of ships, particularly missile-carrying
submarines capable of cruising underwater for extended periods.

Space exploration

The rocket, which has played a crucial part in the revolution of military
technology since the end of World War II, acquired a more constructive
significance in the U.S. and Soviet space programs. The first spectacular step
was Sputnik 1, a sphere with an instrument package weighing 184 pounds (83
kilograms), launched into space by the Soviets on Oct. 4, 1957, to become the first
artificial satellite. The feat precipitated the so-called space race, in which
achievements followed each other in rapid succession. They may be conveniently
grouped in four chronological although overlapping stages.

The first stage emphasized increasing the thrust of rockets capable of putting
satellites into orbit and on exploring the uses of satellites in communications,
in weather observation, in monitoring military information, and in topographical
and geological surveying.

The second stage was that of the manned space program. This began with the successful
orbit of the Earth by the Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin on April 12, 1961, in
the Vostok 1. This flight demonstrated mastery of the problems of weightlessness
and of safe reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. A series of Soviet and U.S.
spaceflights followed in which the techniques of space rendezvous and docking were
acquired, flights up to a fortnight were achieved, and men “walked” in space
outside their craft.

The third stage of space exploration was the lunar program, beginning with
approaches to the Moon and going on through automatic surveys of its surface to
manned landings. Again, the first achievement was Soviet: Luna 1, launched on
Jan. 2, 1959, became the first artificial body to escape the gravitational field
of the Earth, fly past the Moon, and enter an orbit around the Sun as an artificial
planet. Luna 2 crashed on the Moon on Sept. 13, 1959; it was followed by Luna 3,
launched on Oct. 4, 1959, which went around the Moon and sent back the first
photographs of the side turned permanently away from the Earth. The first soft
landing on the Moon was made by Luna 9 on Feb. 3, 1966; this craft carried cameras
that transmitted the first photographs taken on the surface of the Moon. By this
time excellent close-range photographs had been secured by the United States
Rangers 7, 8, and 9, which crashed into the Moon in the second half of 1964 and
the first part of 1965; and between 1966 and 1967 the series of five Lunar Orbiters
photographed almost the entire surface of the Moon from a low orbit in a search

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for suitable landing places. The U.S. spacecraft Surveyor 1 soft-landed on the Moon
on June 2, 1966; this and following Surveyors acquired much useful information about
the lunar surface. Meanwhile, the size and power of launching rockets climbed
steadily, and by the late 1960s the enormous Saturn V rocket, standing 353 feet
(108 metres) high and weighing 2,725 tons (2,472,000 kilograms) at lift-off, made
possible the U.S. Apollo program, which climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Neil
Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin clambered out of the Lunar Module of their Apollo
11 spacecraft onto the surface of the Moon. The manned lunar exploration thus begun
continued with a widening range of experiments and achievements for a further five
landings before the program was curtailed in 1972.

U.S. weather satellite orbiting the Earth.NASA

The fourth stage of space exploration looked out beyond the Earth and the Moon to
the possibilities of planetary exploration. The U.S. space probe Mariner 2 was
launched on Aug. 27, 1962, and passed by Venus the following December, relaying
back information about that planet indicating that it was hotter and less hospitable
than had been expected. These findings were confirmed by the Soviet Venera 3, which
crash-landed on the planet on March 1, 1966, and by Venera 4, which made the first
soft landing on Oct. 18, 1967. Later probes of the Venera series gathered further
atmospheric and surficial data. The U.S. probe Pioneer Venus 1 orbited the planet
for eight months in 1978, and in December of that year four landing probes conducted
quantitative and qualitative analyses of the Venusian atmosphere. Surface
temperature of approximately 900 °F reduced the functional life of such probes
to little more than one hour.

Research on Mars was conducted primarily through the U.S. Mariner and Viking probe
series. During the late 1960s, photographs from Mariner orbiters demonstrated a
close visual resemblance between the surface of Mars and that of the Moon. In July
and August 1976, Vikings 1 and 2, respectively, made successful landings on the
planet; experiments designed to detect the presence or remains of organic material
on the Martian surface met with mechanical difficulty, but results were generally
interpreted as negative. Photographs taken during the early 1980s by the U.S. probes
Voyagers 1 and 2 permitted unprecedented study of the atmospheres and satellites
of Jupiter and Saturn and revealed a previously unknown configuration of rings
around Jupiter, analogous to those of Saturn.

In the mid-1980s the attention of the U.S. space program was focused primarily upon
the potentials of the reusable space shuttle vehicle for extensive orbital
research. The U.S. space shuttle Columbia completed its first mission in April

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1981 and made several successive flights. It was followed by the Challenger, which
made its first mission in April 1983. Both vehicles were used to
conduct myriad scientific experiments and to deploy satellites into orbit.
The space program suffered a tremendous setback in 1986 when, at the outset of
a Challenger mission, the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing the
crew of seven. The early 1990s saw mixed results for NASA. The $1.5 billion Hubble
Space Telescope occasioned some disappointment when scientists discovered
problems with its primary mirror after launch. Interplanetary probes, to the
delight of both professional and amateur stargazers, relayed beautiful,
informative images of other planets.

At the dawn of the space age it is possible to perceive only dimly its scope and
possibilities. But it is relevant to observe that the history of technology has
brought the world to a point in time at which humankind, equipped with unprecedented
powers of self-destruction, stands on the threshold of extraterrestrial
exploration.

Perceptions Of Technology

Science and technology

Among the insights that arise from this review of the history of technology is
the light it throws on the distinction between science and technology. The history
of technology is longer than and distinct from the history of science. Technology
is the systematic study of techniques for making and doing things; science is the
systematic attempt to understand and interpret the world. While technology is
concerned with the fabrication and use of artifacts, science is devoted to the
more conceptual enterprise of understanding the environment, and it depends
upon the comparatively sophisticated skills of literacy and numeracy. Such skills
became available only with the emergence of the great world civilizations, so it
is possible to say that science began with those civilizations, some 3,000
years BCE, whereas technology is as old as humanlike life. Science and technology
developed as different and separate activities, the former being for several
millennia a field of fairly abstruse speculation practiced by a class of
aristocratic philosophers, while the latter remained a matter of essentially
practical concern to craftsmen of many types. There were points of intersection,
such as the use of mathematical concepts in building and irrigation work, but
for the most part the functions of scientist and technologist (to use these modern
terms retrospectively) remained distinct in the ancient cultures.

The situation began to change during the medieval period of development in the
West (500–1500 CE), when both technical innovation and scientific
understanding interacted with the stimuli of commercial expansion and a
flourishing urban culture. The robust growth of technology in these centuries
could not fail to attract the interest of educated men. Early in the 17th century
the natural philosopher Francis Bacon recognized three great technological
innovations—the magnetic compass, the printing press, and gunpowder—as the
distinguishing achievements of modern man, and he advocated experimental science
as a means of enlarging man’s dominion over nature. By emphasizing a practical
role for science in this way, Bacon implied a harmonization of science and
technology, and he made his intention explicit by urging scientists to study the
methods of craftsmen and urging craftsmen to learn more science. Bacon, with
Descartes and other contemporaries, for the first time saw man becoming the master
of nature, and a convergence between the traditional pursuits of science and
technology was to be the way by which such mastery could be achieved.

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Yet the wedding of science and technology proposed by Bacon was not
soon consummated. Over the next 200 years, carpenters and mechanics—practical
men of long standing—built iron bridges, steam engines,
and textile machinery without much reference to scientific principles, while
scientists—still amateurs—pursued their investigations in a haphazard manner.
But the body of men, inspired by Baconian principles, who formed the Royal
Society in London in 1660 represented a determined effort to direct scientific
research toward useful ends, first by improving navigation and cartography, and
ultimately by stimulating industrial innovation and the search for mineral
resources. Similar bodies of scholars developed in other European countries, and
by the 19th century scientists were moving toward a professionalism in which many
of the goals were clearly the same as those of the technologists. Thus, Justus
von Liebig of Germany, one of the fathers of organic chemistry and the first
proponent of mineral fertilizer, provided the scientific impulse that led to the
development of synthetic dyes, high explosives, artificial fibres, and plastics,
and Michael Faraday, the brilliant British experimental scientist in the field
of electromagnetism, prepared the ground that was exploited by Thomas A.
Edison and many others.

The role of Edison is particularly significant in the deepening relationship

between science and technology, because the prodigious trial-and-error process by
which he selected the carbon filament for his electric lightbulb in 1879 resulted
in the creation at Menlo Park, N.J., of what may be regarded as the world’s first
genuine industrial research laboratory. From this achievement the application of
scientific principles to technology grew rapidly. It led easily to
the engineering rationalism applied by Frederick W. Taylor to the
organization of workers in mass production, and to the time-and-motion studies
of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth at the beginning of the 20th century. It provided
a model that was applied rigorously by Henry Ford in his automobile assembly
plant and that was followed by every modern mass-production process. It pointed
the way to the development of systems engineering, operations research,
simulation studies, mathematical modeling, and technological assessment in
industrial processes. This was not just a one-way influence of science on technology,
because technology created new tools and machines with which the scientists were
able to achieve an ever-increasing insight into the natural world. Taken together,
these developments brought technology to its modern highly efficient level of
performance.

Criticisms of technology

Judged entirely on its own traditional grounds of evaluation—that is, in terms

of efficiency—the achievement of modern technology has been admirable. Voices from
other fields, however, began to raise disturbing questions, grounded in other modes
of evaluation, as technology became a dominant influence in society. In the mid-19th
century the non-technologists were almost unanimously enchanted by the wonders of
the new man-made environment growing up around them. London’s Great Exhibition
of 1851, with its arrays of machinery housed in the truly innovative Crystal Palace,
seemed to be the culmination of Francis Bacon’s prophetic forecast of man’s
increasing dominion over nature. The new technology seemed to fit the prevailing
laissez-faire economics precisely and to guarantee the rapid realization of
the Utilitarian philosophers’ ideal of “the greatest good for the greatest
number.” Even Marx and Engels, espousing a radically different political
orientation, welcomed technological progress because in their eyes it produced
an imperative need for socialist ownership and control of industry. Similarly,
early exponents of science fiction such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells explored
with zest the future possibilities opened up to the optimistic imagination by modern
technology, and the American utopian Edward Bellamy, in his novel Looking

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Backward (1888), envisioned a planned society in the year 2000 in which

technology would play a conspicuously beneficial role. Even such late Victorian
literary figures as Lord Tennyson and Rudyard Kipling acknowledged the
fascination of technology in some of their images and rhythms.

Yet even in the midst of this Victorian optimism, a few voices of dissent were heard,
such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ominous warning that “Things are in the saddle
and ride mankind.”For the first time it began to seem as if“things”—the artifacts
made by man in his campaign of conquest over nature—might get out of control and
come to dominate him. Samuel Butler, in his satirical novel Erewhon (1872), drew
the radical conclusion that all machines should be consigned to the scrap heap.
And others such as William Morris, with his vision of a reversion to a craft society
without modern technology, and Henry James, with his disturbing sensations of being
overwhelmed in the presence of modern machinery, began to develop a
profound moral critique of the apparent achievements of technologically
dominated progress. Even H.G. Wells, despite all the ingenious and prophetic
technological gadgetry of his earlier novels, lived to become disillusioned about
the progressive character of Western civilization: his last book was titled Mind
at the End of Its Tether (1945). Another novelist, Aldous Huxley, expressed
disenchantment with technology in a forceful manner in Brave New World (1932).
Huxley pictured a society of the near future in which technology was firmly
enthroned, keeping human beings in bodily comfort without knowledge of want or pain,
but also without freedom, beauty, or creativity, and robbed at every turn of a unique
personal existence. An echo of the same view found poignant artistic expression
in the film Modern Times (1936), in which Charlie Chaplin depicted the
depersonalizing effect of the mass-production assembly line. Such images were
given special potency by the international political and economic conditions of
the 1930s, when the Western world was plunged in the Great Depression and seemed
to have forfeited the chance to remold the world order shattered by World War I.
In these conditions, technology suffered by association with the tarnished idea
of inevitable progress.

Paradoxically, the escape from a decade of economic depression and the successful
defense of Western democracy in World War II did not bring a return of
confident notions about progress and faith in technology. The horrific
potentialities of nuclear war were revealed in 1945, and the division of the world
into hostile power blocs prevented any such euphoria and served to
stimulate criticisms of technological aspirations even more searching than
those that have already been mentioned. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the
design and assembly of the atomic bombs at Los Alamos, N.M., later opposed the
decision to build the thermonuclear (fusion) bomb and described the accelerating
pace of technological change with foreboding:

One thing that is new is the prevalence of newness, the changing scale
and scope of change itself, so that the world alters as we walk in
it, so that the years of man’s life measure not some small growth
or rearrangement or moderation of what he learned in childhood, but
a great upheaval.
The theme of technological tyranny over individuality and traditional patterns
of life was expressed by Jacques Ellul, of the University of Bordeaux, in his
book The Technological Society (1964, first published as La Technique in
1954). Ellul asserted that technology had become so pervasive that man now lived
in a milieu of technology rather than of nature. He characterized this new milieu
as artificial, autonomous, self-determining, nihilistic (that is, not directed
to ends, though proceeding by cause and effect), and, in fact, with means enjoying
primacy over ends. Technology, Ellul held, had become so powerful
and ubiquitous that other social phenomena such as politics and economics had

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become situated in it rather than influenced by it. The individual, in short, had
come to be adapted to the technical milieu rather than the other way round.

While views such as those of Ellul have enjoyed a considerable vogue since World
War II—and spawned a remarkable subculture of hippies and others who sought, in
a variety of ways, to reject participation in technological society—it is
appropriate to make two observations on them. The first is that these views are,
in a sense, a luxury enjoyed only by advanced societies, which have benefited from
modern technology. Few voices critical of technology can be heard in developing
countries that are hungry for the advantages of greater productivity and the rising
standards of living that have been seen to accrue to technological progress in
the more fortunate developed countries. Indeed, the antitechnological movement is
greeted with complete incomprehension in these parts of the world, so that it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that only when the whole world enjoys the benefits
of technology can we expect the subtler dangers of technology to be appreciated,
and by then, of course, it may be too late to do anything about them.

The second observation about the spate of technological pessimism in the advanced
countries is that it has not managed to slow the pace of technological advance,
which seems, if anything, to have accelerated. The gap between the first powered
flight and the first human steps on the Moon was only 66 years, and that between
the disclosure of the fission of uranium and the detonation of the first atomic
bomb was a mere six and a half years. The advance of the information revolution
based on the electronic computer has been exceedingly swift, so that, despite the
denials of the possibility by elderly and distinguished experts, the sombre spectre
of sophisticated computers replicating higher human mental functions and even human
individuality should not be relegated too hurriedly to the classification of
science fantasy. The biotechnic stage of technological innovation is still in its
infancy, and, if the recent rate of development is extrapolated forward, many
seemingly impossible targets could be achieved in the next century. Not that this
will be any consolation to the pessimists, as it only indicates the ineffectiveness
to date of attempts to slow down technological progress.

The technological dilemma

Whatever the responses to modern technology, there can be no doubt that it presents
contemporary society with a number of immediate problems that take the form of a
traditional choice of evils, so that it is appropriate to regard them
as constituting a “technological dilemma.” This is the dilemma between, on the
one hand, the overdependence of life in the advanced industrial countries on
technology, and, on the other hand, the threat that technology will destroy
the quality of life in modern society and even endanger society itself.
Technology thus confronts Western civilization with the need to make a decision,
or rather, a series of decisions, about how to use the enormous power available
to society constructively rather than destructively. The need to control the
development of technology, and so to resolve the dilemma, by regulating its
application to creative social objectives, makes it ever more necessary to define
these objectives while the problems presented by rapid technological growth can
still be solved.

These problems, and the social objectives related to them, may be considered under
three broad headings. First is the problem of controlling the application of nuclear
technology. Second is the population problem, which is twofold: it seems necessary
to find ways of controlling the dramatic rise in the number of human beings and,
at the same time, to provide food and care for the people already living on the
Earth. Third, there is the ecological problem, whereby the products and wastes of
technical processes have polluted the environment and disturbed the balance of

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natural forces of regeneration. When these basic problems have been reviewed, it
will be possible, finally, to consider the effect of technology on life in town
and countryside, and to determine the sort of judgments about technology and society
to which a study of the history of technology leads.

Nuclear technology

The solution to the first problem, that of controlling nuclear technology, is

primarily political. At its root is the anarchy of national self-government, for
as long as the world remains divided into a multiplicity of nation-states, or even
into power blocs, each committed to the defense of its own sovereign power to
do what it chooses, nuclear weapons merely replace the older weapons by which such
nation-states maintained their independence in the past. The availability of a
nuclear armoury has emphasized the weaknesses of a world political system based
upon sovereign nation-states. Here, as elsewhere, technology is a tool that can
be used creatively or destructively. But the manner of its use depends entirely
on human decisions, and in this matter of nuclear self-control the decisions are
those of governments. There are other aspects of the problem of nuclear technology,
such as the disposal of radioactive waste and the quest to harness the energy
released by fusion, but, although these are important issues in their own right,
they are subordinate to the problem of the use of nuclear weapons in warfare.

Population explosion

Assuming that the use of nuclear weapons can be averted, world civilization will
have to come to grips with the population problem in the next few decades if life
is to be tolerable on planet Earth in the 21st century. The problem can be tackled
in two ways, both drawing on the resources of modern technology.

In the first place, efforts may be made to limit the rate of population increase.
Medical technology, which through new drugs and other techniques has provided a
powerful impulse to the increase of population, also offers means of controlling
this increase through contraceptive devices and through painless sterilization
procedures. Again, technology is a tool that is neutral in respect
to moral issues about its own use, but it would be futile to deny that
artificial population control is inhibited by powerful moral constraints and
taboos. Some reconciliation of these conflicts is essential, however, if stability
in world population is to be satisfactorily achieved. Perhaps the experience
of China, already responsible for one-quarter of the world’s population, is
instructive here: in an attempt to prevent the population growth from exceeding
the ability of the country to sustain the existing standards of living, the
government imposed a “one-child family” campaign in the 1970s, which is maintained
by draconian social controls.

In the second place, even the most optimistic program of population control can
hope to achieve only a slight reduction in the rate of increase, so
an alternative approach must be made simultaneously in the shape of an effort
to increase the world’s production of food. Technology has much to contribute at
this point, both in raising the productivity of existing sources of food supply,
by improved techniques of agriculture and better types of grain and animal stock,
and in creating new sources of food, by making the deserts fertile and by
systematically farming the riches of the oceans. There is enough work here to keep
engineers and food technologists busy for many generations.

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Ecological balance

The third major problem area of modern technological society is that of preserving
a healthy environmental balance. Though humans have been damaging the environment
for centuries by overcutting trees and farming too intensively and though some
protective measures, such as the establishment of national forests and wildlife
sanctuaries, were taken decades ago, great increases in population and in the
intensity of industrialization are promoting a worldwide ecological crisis. This
includes the dangers involved in destruction of the equatorial rainforests, the
careless exploitation of minerals by open-mining techniques, and the pollution of
the oceans by radioactive waste and of the atmosphere by combustion products. These
include oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, which produce acid rain, and carbon
dioxide, which may affect the world’s climate through the greenhouse effect. It
was the danger of indiscriminate use of pesticides such as DDT after World War
II that first alerted opinion in advanced Western countries to the delicate nature
of the world’s ecological system, presented in a trenchant polemic by American
science writer Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring (1962); this was
followed by a spate of warnings about other possibilities of ecological disaster.
The great public concern about pollution in the advanced nations is both overdue
and welcome. Once more, however, it needs to be said that the fault for this
waste-making abuse of technology lies with man himself rather than with the tools
he uses. For all his intelligence, man in communities behaves with a lack of
respect for the environment that is both shortsighted and potentially suicidal.

Technological society

Much of the 19th-century optimism about the progress of technology has dispersed,
and an increasing awareness of the technological dilemma confronting the world
makes it possible to offer a realistic assessment of the role of technology in
shaping society today.

Interactions between society and technology

In the first place, it can be clearly recognized that the relationship between
technology and society is complex. Any technological stimulus can trigger a variety
of social responses, depending on such unpredictable variables as differences
between human personalities; similarly, no specific social situation can be relied
upon to produce a determinable technological response. Any “theory of invention,”
therefore, must remain extremely tentative, and any notion of a “philosophy” of
the history of technology must allow for a wide range of possible interpretations.
A major lesson of the history of technology, indeed, is that it has no precise
predictive value. It is frequently possible to see in retrospect when one
particular artifact or process had reached obsolescence while another
promised to be a highly successful innovation, but at the time such historical
hindsight is not available and the course of events is indeterminable. In short,
the complexity of human society is never capable of resolution into a simple
identification of causes and effects driving historical development in one
direction rather than another, and any attempt to identify technology as an agent
of such a process is unacceptable.

The putative autonomy of technology

Secondly, the definition of technology as the systematic study of techniques for

making and doing things establishes technology as a social phenomenon and thus as

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one that cannot possess complete autonomy, unaffected by the society in which it
exists. It is necessary to make what may seem to be such an obvious statement because
so much autonomy has been ascribed to technology, and the element of despair in
interpretations like that of Jacques Ellul is derived from an exaggerated view of
the power of technology to determine its own course apart from any form of social
control. Of course it must be admitted that once a technological development, such
as the transition from sail to steam power in ships or the introduction of
electricity for domestic lighting, is firmly established, it is difficult to stop
it before the process is complete. The assembly of resources and the arousal of
expectations both create a certain technological momentum that tends to prevent
the process from being arrested or deflected. Nevertheless, the decisions about
whether to go ahead with a project or to abandon it are undeniably human, and it
is a mistake to represent technology as a monster or a juggernaut threatening
human existence. In itself, technology is neutral and passive: in the phrase of
Lynn White, Jr., “Technology opens doors; it does not compel man to enter.” Or,
in the words of the traditional adage, it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools,
and so, just as it was naive for 19th-century optimists to imagine that technology
could bring paradise on Earth, it seems equally simplistic for pessimists today
to make technology itself a scapegoat for human shortcomings.

Technology and education

A third theme to emerge from this review of the history of technology is the
growing importance of education. In the early millennia of human existence, a craft
was acquired in a lengthy and laborious manner by serving with a master who gradually
trained the initiate in the arcane mysteries of the skill. Such instruction, set
in a matrix of oral tradition and practical experience, was frequently more closely
related to religious ritual than to the application of rational scientific
principles. Thus, the artisan in ceramics or sword making protected the skill
while ensuring that it would be perpetuated. Craft training was institutionalized
in Western civilization in the form of apprenticeship, which has survived as a
framework for instruction in technical skills. Increasingly, however, instruction
in new techniques requires access both to general theoretical knowledge and to
realms of practical experience that, on account of their novelty, were not available
through traditional apprenticeship. Thus, the requirement for a significant
proportion of academic instruction has become an important feature of most aspects
of modern technology. This accelerated the convergence between science and
technology in the 19th and 20th centuries and created a complex system of
educational awards representing the level of accomplishment from simple
instruction in schools to advanced research in universities. French and German
academies led in the provision of such theoretical instruction, while Britain
lagged somewhat in the 19th century, owing to its long and highly successful
tradition of apprenticeship in engineering and related skills. But by the 20th
century all the advanced industrial countries, including newcomers like Japan, had
recognized the crucial role of a theoretical technological education in achieving
commercial and industrial competence.

The recognition of the importance of technological education, however, has never

been complete in Western civilization, and the continued coexistence of other
traditions has caused problems of assimilation and adjustment. The British
author C.P. Snow drew attention to one of the most persistent problems in his
perceptive essay The Two Cultures (1959), in which he identified
the dichotomy between scientists and technologists on the one hand and humanists
and artists on the other as one between those who did understand the second law
of thermodynamics and those who did not, causing a sharp disjunction of
comprehension and sympathy. Arthur Koestler put the same point in another way
by observing that the traditionally humanities-educated Westerner is reluctant to

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admit that a work of art is beyond comprehension but will cheerfully confess to
not understanding how a radio or heating system works. Koestler characterized such
a modern individual as an “urban barbarian,” isolated from a
technological environment that he or she possesses without understanding. Yet
the growing prevalence of “black-box” technology, in which only the rarefied
expert is able to understand the enormously complex operations that go on inside
the electronic equipment, makes it more and more difficult to avoid becoming such
a barbarian. The most helpful development would seem to be not so much seeking to
master the expertise of others in our increasingly specialized society as
encouraging those disciplines that provide bridges between the two cultures,
and here there is a valuable role for the history of technology.

The quality of life

A fourth theme, concerned with the quality of life, can be identified in the
relationship between technology and society. There can be little doubt that
technology has brought a higher standard of living to people in advanced
countries, just as it has enabled a rapidly rising population to subsist in the
developing countries. It is the prospect of rising living standards that makes the
acquisition of technical competence so attractive to these countries. But however
desirable the possession of a comfortable sufficiency of material goods, and the
possibility of leisure for recreative purposes, the quality of a full life in any
human society has other even more important prerequisites, such as the possession
of freedom in a law-abiding community and of equality before the law. These are
the traditional qualities of democratic societies, and it has to be asked whether
technology is an asset or a liability in acquiring them. Certainly, highly illiberal
regimes have used technological devices to suppress individual freedom and to
secure obedience to the state: the nightmare vision of George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-four (1949), with its telescreens and sophisticated torture, has provided
literary demonstration of this reality, should one be needed. But the fact that
high technological competence requires, as has been shown, a high level of
educational achievement by a significant proportion of the community holds out the
hope that a society that is well educated will not long endure constraints on
individual freedom and initiative that are not self-justifying. In other words,
the high degree of correlation between technological success and educational
accomplishment suggests a fundamental democratic bias about modern technology. It
may take time to become effective, but, given sufficient time without a major
political or social disruption and a consequent resurgence of national
assertiveness and human selfishness, there are sound reasons for hoping that
technology will bring the people of the world into a closer and more creative
community.

Such, at least, must be the hope of anybody who takes a long view of the history
of technology as one of the most formative and persistently creative themes in the
development of humankind from the Paleolithic cave dwellers of antiquity to the
dawn of the space age. Above all other perceptions of technology,
the threshold of space exploration on which humankind stands provides the
most dynamic and hopeful portent of human potentialities. Even while the threat
of technological self-destruction remains ominous and the problems of population
control and ecological imbalance cry out for satisfactory solutions, man has found
a clue of his own future in terms of a quest to explore and colonize the depths
of an infinitely fascinating universe. As yet, only a few visionaries have
appreciated the richness of this possibility, and their projections are too easily
dismissed as nothing more than imaginative science fiction. But in the long run,
if there is to be a long run for our uniquely technological but willful species,
the future depends upon the ability to acquire such a cosmic perspective, so it
is important to recognize this now and to begin the arduous mental and physical

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Encyclopedia of Historical Antecedents in which Social considerations changed the course of Science &
Technology During Ancient period, Middle and Modern Ages.
(Source:https://www.britannica.com/technology/history-of-technology/Technology-and-education)

preparations accordingly. The words of Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most

perceptive of contemporary seers, in his Profiles of the Future (1962), are worth
recalling in this context. Thinking ahead to the countless aeons that could stem
from the remarkable human achievement summarized in the history of technology, he
surmised that the all-knowing beings who may evolve from these humble beginnings
may still regard our own era with wistfulness: “But for all that, they may envy
us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it
was young.”

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