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https://www.britannica.com/technology/history-of-technology

History of technology

Written By: Robert Angus Buchanan

Focus on:

The beginnings—Stone Age technology (to c. 3000 bce) ………..…..… 4 – 8

The Urban Revolution (c. 3000–500 bce) …………………………………. 8 – 11

Technological achievements of Greece and Rome (500 bce–500 ce) …… 11 – 14

From the Middle Ages to 1750 ……………………………………………. 14 – 27

History of technology, the development over time of systematic techniques for making and doing

things. The term technology, a combination of the Greek technē, “art, craft,” with logos, “word,

speech,” meant in Greece a discourse on the arts, both fine and applied. When it first appeared in

English in the 17th century, it was used to mean a discussion of the applied arts only, and gradually

these “arts” themselves came to be the object of the designation. By the early 20th century, the term

embraced a growing range of means, processes, and ideas in addition to tools and machines. By mid-

century, technology was defined by such phrases as “the means or activity by which man seeks to

change or manipulate his environment.” Even such broad definitions have been criticized by observers

who point out the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between scientific inquiry and technological

activity.

A highly compressed account of the history of technology such as this one must adopt a rigorous

methodological pattern if it is to do justice to the subject without grossly distorting it one way or

another. The plan followed in the present article is primarily chronological, tracing the development of

technology through phases that succeed each other in time. Obviously, the division between phases is

to a large extent arbitrary. One factor in the weighting has been the enormous acceleration of Western

technological development in recent centuries; Eastern technology is considered in this article in the

main only as it relates to the development of modern technology.

Within each chronological phase a standard method has been adopted for surveying the technological

experience and innovations. This begins with a brief review of the general social conditions of the

period under discussion, and then goes on to consider the dominant materials and sources of power of

the period, and their application to food production, manufacturing industry, building construction,

transport and communications, military technology, and medical technology. In a final section the

sociocultural consequences of technological change in the period are examined. This framework is

modified according to the particular requirements of every period— discussions of new materials, for

instance, occupy a substantial place in the accounts of earlier phases when new metals were being

introduced but are comparatively unimportant in descriptions of some of the later phases—but the

general pattern is retained throughout. One key factor that does not fit easily into this pattern is that of

the development of tools. It has seemed most convenient to relate these to the study of materials, rather

than to any particular application, but it has not been possible to be completely consistent in this

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treatment. Further discussion of specific areas of technological development is provided in a variety of

other articles: for example, see electronics; exploration; information processing.

General considerations

Essentially, techniques are methods of creating new tools and products of tools, and the capacity for

constructing such artifacts is a determining characteristic of humanlike species. Other species make

artifacts: bees build elaborate hives to deposit their honey, birds make nests, and beavers build dams.

But these attributes are the result of patterns of instinctive behaviour and cannot be varied to suit

rapidly changing circumstances. Humanity, in contrast with other species, does not possess highly

developed instinctive reactions but does have the capacity to think systematically and creatively about

techniques. Humans can thus innovate and consciously modify the environment in a way no other

species has achieved. An ape may on occasion use a stick to beat bananas from a tree, but a man can

fashion the stick into a cutting tool and remove a whole bunch of bananas. Somewhere in the transition

between the two, the hominid, the first manlike species, emerges. By virtue of his nature as a

toolmaker, man is therefore a technologist from the beginning, and the history of technology

encompasses the whole evolution of humankind.

In using rational faculties to devise techniques and modify the environment, humankind has attacked

problems other than those of survival and the production of wealth with which the term technology is

usually associated today. The technique of language, for example, involves the manipulation of sounds

and symbols in a meaningful way, and similarly the techniques of artistic and ritual creativity

represent other aspects of the technological incentive. This article does not deal with these cultural and

religious techniques, but it is valuable to establish their relationship at the outset because the history of

technology reveals a profound interaction between the incentives and opportunities of technological

innovation on the one hand and the sociocultural conditions of the human group within which they

occur on the other.

Social involvement in technological advances

An awareness of this interaction is important in surveying the development of technology through

successive civilizations. To simplify the relationship as much as possible, there are three points at

which there must be some social involvement in technological innovation: social need, social

resources, and a sympathetic social ethos. In default of any of these factors it is unlikely that a

technological innovation will be widely adopted or be successful.

The sense of social need must be strongly felt, or people will not be prepared to devote resources to a

technological innovation. The thing needed may be a more efficient cutting tool, a more powerful

lifting device, a labour saving machine, or a means of utilizing new fuels or a new source of energy.

Or, because military needs have always provided a stimulus to technological innovation, it may take

the form of a requirement for better weapons. In modern societies, needs have been generated by

advertising. Whatever the source of social need, it is essential that enough people be conscious of it to

provide a market for an artifact or commodity that can meet the need.

Social resources are similarly an indispensable prerequisite to a successful innovation. Many

inventions have foundered because the social resources vital for their realization—the capital,

materials, and skilled personnel—were not available. The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci are full of

ideas for helicopters, submarines, and airplanes, but few of these reached even the model stage

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because resources of one sort or another were lacking. The resource of capital involves the existence

of surplus productivity and an organization capable of directing the available wealth into channels in

which the inventor can use it. The resource of materials involves the availability of appropriate

metallurgical, ceramic, plastic, or textile substances that can perform whatever functions a new

invention requires of them. The resource of skilled personnel implies the presence of technicians

capable of constructing new artifacts and devising novel processes. A society, in short, has to be well

primed with suitable resources in order to sustain technological innovation.

A sympathetic social ethos implies an environment receptive to new ideas, one in which the dominant

social groups are prepared to consider innovation seriously. Such receptivity may be limited to specific

fields of innovation—for example, improvements in weapons or in navigational techniques—or it may

take the form of a more generalized attitude of inquiry, as was the case among the industrial middle

classes in Britain during the 18th century, who were willing to cultivate new ideas and inventors, the

breeders of such ideas. Whatever the psychological basis of inventive genius, there can be no doubt

that the existence of socially important groups willing to encourage inventors and to use their ideas has

been a crucial factor in the history of technology.

Social conditions are thus of the utmost importance in the development of new techniques, some of

which will be considered below in more detail. It is worthwhile, however, to register another

explanatory note. This concerns the rationality of technology. It has already been observed that

technology involves the application of reason to techniques, and in the 20th century it came to be

regarded as almost axiomatic that technology is a rational activity stemming from the traditions of

modern science. Nevertheless, it should be observed that technology, in the sense in which the term is

being used here, is much older than science, and also that techniques have tended to ossify over

centuries of practice or to become diverted into such para-rational exercises as alchemy. Some

techniques became so complex, often depending upon processes of chemical change that were not

understood even when they were widely practiced, that technology sometimes became itself a

“mystery” or cult into which an apprentice had to be initiated like a priest into holy orders, and in

which it was more important to copy an ancient formula than to innovate. The modern philosophy of

progress cannot be read back into the history of technology; for most of its long existence technology

has been virtually stagnant, mysterious, and even irrational. It is not fanciful to see some lingering

fragments of this powerful technological tradition in the modern world, and there is more than an

element of irrationality in the contemporary dilemma of a highly technological society contemplating

the likelihood that it will use its sophisticated techniques in order to accomplish its own destruction. It

is thus necessary to beware of over facile identification of technology with the “progressive” forces in

contemporary civilization.

On the other hand it is impossible to deny that there is a progressive element in technology, as it is

clear from the most elementary survey that the acquisition of techniques is a cumulative matter, in

which each generation inherits a stock of techniques on which it can build if it chooses and if social

conditions permit. Over a long period of time the history of technology inevitably highlights the

moments of innovation that show this cumulative quality as some societies advance, stage by stage,

from comparatively primitive to more sophisticated techniques. But although this development has

occurred and is still going on, it is not intrinsic to the nature of technology that such a process of

accumulation should occur, and it has certainly not been an inevitable development. The fact that

many societies have remained stagnant for long periods of time, even at quite developed stages of

technological evolution, and that some have actually regressed and lost the accumulated techniques

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passed on to them, demonstrates the ambiguous nature of technology and the critical importance of its

relationship with other social factors.

Modes of technological transmission

Another aspect of the cumulative character of technology that will require further investigation is the

manner of transmission of technological innovations. This is an elusive problem, and it is necessary to

accept the phenomenon of simultaneous or parallel invention in cases in which there is insufficient

evidence to show the transmission of ideas in one direction or another. The mechanics of their

transmission have been enormously improved in recent centuries by the printing press and other means

of communication and also by the increased facility with which travelers visit the sources of

innovation and carry ideas back to their own homes. Traditionally, however, the major mode of

transmission has been the movement of artifacts and craftsmen. Trade in artifacts has ensured their

widespread distribution and encouraged imitation. Even more important, the migration of craftsmen—

whether the itinerant metalworkers of early civilizations or the German rocket engineers whose expert

knowledge was acquired by both the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II—has

promoted the spread of new technologies.

The evidence for such processes of technological transmission is a reminder that the material for the

study of the history of technology comes from a variety of sources. Much of it relies, like any

historical examination, on documentary matter, although this is sparse for the early civilizations

because of the general lack of interest in technology on the part of scribes and chroniclers. For these

societies, therefore, and for the many millennia of earlier unrecorded history in which slow but

substantial technological advances were made, it is necessary to rely heavily upon archaeological

evidence. Even in connection with the recent past, the historical understanding of the processes of

rapid industrialization can be made deeper and more vivid by the study of “industrial archaeology.”

Much valuable material of this nature has been accumulated in museums, and even more remains in

the place of its use for the observation of the field worker. The historian of technology must be

prepared to use all these sources, and to call upon the skills of the archaeologist, the engineer, the

architect, and other specialists as appropriate.

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,

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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 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

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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 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

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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 the ox, the donkey, and the camel undoubtedly brought

some help, although difficulties in harnessing the horse long delayed its effective use. The dugout

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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

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