History of technology

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of technology starts 3.3 million years ago, with the Lomekwi stone tools, long before any human being who could be called Homo sapiens walked the earth. The word technology itself is younger and stranger than the tools it names. It comes from the Greek techne, meaning art and craft, and logos, meaning word and speech. For a long stretch it meant only the applied arts. Now it names almost everything that shapes the world around us, from a flint chopper to genetic engineering. That single thread runs from a sharpened rock to information technology that has emerged since the 1980s. How do you measure progress along a line that long? Some thinkers reached for energy as the yardstick. Others reached for information. And the story keeps complicating itself. The same era that gave us the atomic bomb in 1945 also gave us the first test tube baby, and a project to read every chemical unit in human DNA. This is the history of how people invented their tools, and how those tools, in turn, reshaped the people who made them.

• 2. Energy And Information

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  Lewis H. Morgan, Leslie White, and Gerhard Lenski each argued that technological progress is the primary force driving human civilization. Morgan split social evolution into savagery, barbarism, and civilization, marked off by milestones such as fire. White took a different measure entirely. For him, the primary function of culture is to harness and control energy. White laid out five stages of human development. First people use the energy of their own muscles. Then domesticated animals, then plant energy in the agricultural revolution, then coal, oil, and gas, and finally nuclear energy. He even wrote a formula, P equals E over T, where P is the development index, E is energy consumed, and T is the efficiency of using it. Nikolai Kardashev extended White's thinking into the Kardashev scale, which ranks the energy use of advanced civilizations. Lenski focused not on energy but on information. The more a society knows, especially about shaping its environment, the more advanced it is. He traced four stages by advances in communication. Information passes first through genes, then through experience once humans gain sentience, then through signs and logic, and finally through symbols, language, and writing. Lenski also sorted societies by type: hunter-gatherer, simple agricultural, advanced agricultural, industrial, and special cases such as fishing societies. Economists prefer a third yardstick. Productivity rises when fewer inputs of labor and capital produce a unit of output. By that measure something shifted late in the twentieth century. Employment in United States manufacturing fell from over 30 percent in the 1940s to just over 10 percent seventy years later. Thinkers like Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, Daniel Bell, and John Naisbitt called this the arrival of post-industrial society, where services and information outweigh industry and goods.

• 3. The Stone Age Mind

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  In Ethiopia, within the Great Rift Valley, lies the earliest direct evidence of tool use, dating back 2.5 million years. The earliest stone-making method, the Oldowan industry, goes back at least 2.3 million years. Making a tool meant striking a core of hard stone such as flint with a hammerstone, knocking off sharp flakes to use as choppers or scrapers. With those edges, early humans butchered carcasses, cracked bones for marrow, chopped wood, opened nuts, and skinned animals for hide. Beginning roughly 1.65 million years ago, in the Acheulian era, toolmakers learned to work stone into deliberate shapes like the hand axe. The Middle Paleolithic, about 300,000 years ago, brought the prepared-core technique, where many blades came rapidly from a single core. The Upper Paleolithic, from about 40,000 years ago, introduced pressure flaking, shaping stone finely with a wood, bone, or antler punch. The end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, closed the Upper Paleolithic and opened the Mesolithic, with its composite tools built from tiny microliths. In the Neolithic period, polished stone axes were cut from flint, jade, jadeite, and greenstone, and the search for good rock pushed people to tunnel underground, the first steps in mining. Stone Age people did more than survive. They made music, waged organized warfare, and built ocean-worthy outrigger canoes. Those canoes carried migrations across the Malay Archipelago, over the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, and across the Pacific, demanding knowledge of currents, weather, and celestial navigation. Paleolithic cultures left no writing, but they left the Venus of Willendorf, cave paintings, bones, and mummies, from which scientists infer how they lived.

• 4. Metal Changes Everything

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  Metallic copper sits on the surface of weathered ore deposits, and people used it before they understood smelting. Smelting itself likely began when pottery kilns reached high enough temperatures. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was a major advance over stone, both for its strength and ductility and because it could be cast in molds into intricate shapes. Tin, however, sat in relatively few deposits worldwide, so true tin bronze took a long time to spread. Bronze also remade shipbuilding. Bronze nails replaced the old method of threading a cord through drilled holes to join a hull's boards, and better ships enabled long-distance trade. Iron told a different story. Before smelting, the only iron came from meteorites, identified by their nickel content, rare and valuable, sometimes worked into fish hooks. Iron smelting generally replaced bronze with tools that were stronger, lighter, and cheaper. Its raw materials, ore and limestone, are far more abundant than copper and especially tin, so iron was produced across many areas. The high temperatures needed to mass-produce pure iron or steel were out of reach, since crucibles and molds for casting had not been developed. In Europe, the more effective iron axes sped land clearance, and large hill forts rose as wartime refuges and permanent settlements. This whole trend began in the Fertile Crescent and spread outward, but never universally. The Spinifex People, the Sentinelese, and various Amazonian tribes still use Stone Age technology, having developed neither agriculture nor metalworking.

• 5. Cradles Of Invention

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  By around 4000 BC, the peoples of Mesopotamia in modern Iraq, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, were living in cities of mud-brick and stone, building with the true arch. The walls of Babylon were so massive they were named a Wonder of the World. Writing was invented here in cuneiform, preserved on clay tablets that have survived for millennia. The potter's wheel appeared in the 5th millennium BC, leading to the wheeled vehicle in the early 4th millennium BC, with wagons depicted on tablets at Uruk dated between 3700 and 3500 BC. The screw, last of the simple machines, arrived in the Neo-Assyrian period. King Sennacherib, who reigned from 704 to 681 BC, claimed to have invented automatic sluices and water screw pumps weighing up to 30 tons. The Babylonian astronomical diaries spanned 800 years, letting observers plot the planets and predict eclipses. In Egypt, builders raised pyramids using the inclined plane, the wedge, and the lever, moving limestone blocks of roughly 3.5 tons each to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, 481 feet high. They made a writing surface from papyrus, a plant of the Nile Delta, cutting it into strips, layering them perpendicular, and pressing them dry into sheets. According to Hossam Elanzeery, they were the first to use sundials, shadow clocks, and obelisks, and built a calendar still echoed today. Far to the east, the Indus Valley Civilization in modern Pakistan and northwestern India was known for early city planning, sanitation, and plumbing, an architecture called Vaastu Shastra that reveals deep understanding of materials, hydrology, and sanitation.

• 6. Inventors Named At Last

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  Archimedes, Philo of Byzantium, Heron, Ctesibius, and Archytas are known to posterity by name, a sharp break from the anonymous inventors of earlier ages. They worked during the Hellenistic period, which began in the 4th century BC with Alexander's conquests and blended Greek and Near-Eastern cultures around the Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. Their inventions came fast. The water organ, devised by Ctesibius, was the earliest keyboard instrument. The Antikythera mechanism, a kind of analog computer driven by a differential gear, showed astonishing refinement in astronomy, as did the astrolabe. In warfare they made the catapult and the gastraphetes crossbow, and in surveying the dioptra. They also built lighthouses, central heating, spiral staircases, the winch, and the odometer. Rome carried the work into the realm of the monumental. Roman engineers were the first to raise arches, amphitheatres, aqueducts, public baths, true arch bridges, harbours, dams, vaults, and domes on a vast scale. Their concrete, formulated from volcanic sand with the right crystalline grains, was so durable that some buildings have stood 2000 years. In Roman Egypt, Hero of Alexandria experimented with a wind-powered device and built the aeolipile, the earliest steam-powered device, though he treated it as a toy. China, meanwhile, produced a remarkable run of firsts: paper, the compass, the rudder, the crossbow, gunpowder, and cast iron, plus deep-well drilling as deep as 900 meters that tapped natural gas to evaporate brine. The solid-fuel rocket was invented in China about 1150, nearly 200 years after gunpowder. Across the ocean, the Maya built the first pressurized water system in Mesoamerica at Palenque, while the Aztec spread the ingenious chinampas farming they inherited from earlier peoples.

• 7. Mills, Clocks, And Automata

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  The Domesday Book recorded 5,624 water mills in Great Britain in 1086, roughly one for every thirty families, a sign of how medieval economies came to lean on water and wind more than on muscle. Water power milled grain, blew air into blast furnaces, pulped rags for paper, and felted wool. In the Islamic world, the Arab Agricultural Revolution transformed farming from the 8th to the 13th century, spreading crops and techniques like the windmill across the Old World. Muslim engineers built fulling mills, gristmills, sawmills, steel mills, and tide mills, and by the 11th century every province had industrial mills running. The windmill and wind pump first appeared in what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan by the 9th century. The earliest paper mills appeared in Abbasid-era Baghdad during 794 to 795. Al-Jazari invented the crankshaft and the camshaft in 1206, and built programmable automata, including four automaton musicians driven by a programmable drum machine. The Banu Musa brothers had already described an automated flute player, an early music sequencer, in their Book of Ingenious Devices in the 9th century. In Ottoman Egypt, Taqi ad-Din invented a practical impulse steam turbine in 1551, rotating a spit with a jet of steam. Medieval Europe answered with mechanical clocks, spectacles, vertical windmills, and the humble functional button. The rib vault and pointed arch gave rise to the Gothic style, and fortifications earned the era its title as the age of castles. A paper mill rose in Sicily in the 12th century, fed by linen and cotton rags. Lynn Townsend White Jr. credited the spinning wheel with increasing the supply of those rags, which led to cheap paper, a factor in the development of printing.

• 8. Steam, Steel, And Genome

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  The stocking frame, invented in 1598, lifted a knitter's output from 100 knots per minute to 1000. Mines were growing deeper and harder to drain, some using as many as 500 horses, until the Savery steam pump of 1698 and the Newcomen steam engine of 1712 took over. The Industrial Revolution that followed, running from 1760 into the 1830s, ran on cheap coal from Britain's abundant reserves. Textile machinery came in a rush: the flying shuttle in 1733 doubled a weaver's output, the spinning jenny arrived in 1764, the water frame patented by Richard Arkwright in 1767, the spinning mule by Samuel Crompton in 1779, and the power loom by Edmund Cartwright in 1787. Coal converted to coke fired hotter blast furnaces, multiplying cast iron and making structures like The Iron Bridge possible. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first purpose-built railway line, opened in 1830, with Robert Stephenson's Rocket among its first locomotives. The Second Industrial Revolution began around 1870 and lasted until World War I, bringing chemical, electrical, petroleum, and steel technologies. Alexander Graham Bell patented his electric telegraph in March 1876. Incandescent bulbs became practical in the late 1870s, and Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Illuminating Company, backed by Spencer Trask, built the first electric power network. The twentieth century turned these into everyday life. The first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. Frederick Sanger and, separately, Dr. Walter Gilbert invented DNA sequencing in the late 1970s, and Gilbert conceived of the Human Genome Project on the 27th of May 1985. That project began on the 1st of October 1990, and was declared complete in 2003, having sequenced all three billion chemical units in human DNA. By 2019, an estimated 87 percent of the world's population had access to electricity. The thread that began with a struck flake now reaches toward the Breakthrough Initiatives, which plans to send light-driven chips to the Proxima Centauri system by midcentury.