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Systematic knowledge and action, usually of industrial processes but applicable to any recurrent activity. Technology is closely related to science and to engineering. Science deals with humans' understanding of the real world about them—the inherent properties of space, matter, energy, and their interactions. Engineering is the application of objective knowledge to the creation of plans, designs, and means for achieving desired objectives. Technology deals with the tools and techniques for carrying out the plans.

There are two reasons to pursue scientific knowledge: for the sake of the knowledge itself, and for the practical uses of that knowledge. Because this second aspect of science affects the lives of most people, it is more familiar than the first. Knowledge must be gained, however, before it can be applied, and often the most important technological advances arise from research pursued for its own sake.

Traditionally, new technology has been concerned with the construction of machines, structures, and tools on a relatively large scale. The development of materials for building bridges or skyscrapers is an example of this, as is the development of the internal-combustion engine and the nuclear reactor. While such activities involve all the sciences, from chemistry to nuclear physics, the overriding goal has been the same: to improve the human condition by finding better ways to deal with the macroscopic world.

Since World War II, the focus of technological activity has undergone a major change. While the old activities are still pursued, they have been largely superseded by applications of technology at the microscopic level. Instead of building large-scale structures and machines, modern-day technology tends to concentrate on finding improved ways to transfer information and to develop new materials by studying the way atom s come together. The silicon chip and microelectronics typify this new technological trend, as does the blossoming of genetic engineering. The trend can be expected to continue into the foreseeable future.

The dividing line between what we include in the following list as technology and what we call science elsewhere in this volume is somewhat arbitrary. In general, what we have done is this: if a term is essential to understanding a particular branch of science, it appears in the list for that science. Thus, atom appears with the physical sciences, even though an understanding of atoms is clearly important to the new technology. If, however, the term involves something that is likely to affect an individual's life, even though it is not a central concept of a particular branch of science, it is listed under “Technology.”

The words in the following section have been chosen because they are likely to appear without explanation in many publications, particularly in articles and books dealing with the impact and implications of technology. This section does not emphasize the social consequences of new technology, but concentrates instead on the basic knowledge needed to understand how technology works.

Applying a systematic technique, method or approach to solve a problem. Much of today's technology implies the use of computers. See high tech.

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Early modern Europeans paid new attention to the machines and technical processes that created most of their material goods. Appreciation of rapidly advancing arts and inventions was not particularly new—the Middle Ages also having been an era in which myriad new technologies appeared in Europe. What was becoming noticeably different by the middle of the fifteenth century was that new technologies were becoming a force in the shaping of Europeans' intellectual framework—just as they shaped social frameworks through the expanding manufactories in mining, ordnance, papermaking, printing, and textiles. Both the material and the mental landscapes of early modern Europe were dramatically reconfigured over these centuries, and in a very self-consciously interdependent way.

Homo Faber

"Technology" did not really exist as a concept until at least the seventeenth century; what we see in the early modern period is the attempt to create a realm that constantly straddled growing scientific thought and developing industrial practices. Technology continues today to ambiguously refer both to the practices and tools of material construction, and to the knowledge (the -ology) about how these practices and tools operate. In the centuries spanning the invention of the printing press and the first experiments with electricity, technology gave rise to a particular vision of human effort and learning, one whose central image was that of "progress."

Mechanical arts in the ancient and medieval period had often been disregarded by scholars and philosophers and by the makers of literate culture. To a large extent, the name "mechanic," because associated with manual labor, remained tainted throughout the early modern period (and remains so today). However, starting in the Renaissance, Europeans began to reframe their concept of learning around the study of human productivity. This reframing contributed significantly to the restructuring of the existing system of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The knowledge of machines and technical processes became clues to the natural forces that govern both natural and artificial processes. Galileo Galilei's (1564–1642) formulation of kinematic motion, for example, was completed at the end of long years studying projectiles in the context of military engineering. Early modern theorists of science and enlightenment articulated the faith that philosophical knowledge can be derived from technical arts, and then reapplied to organize the technical world in a more efficacious way. They did not so much dignify craftsmen as seek to appropriate from craftsmen universal principles by which the arts could be directed. The capture of those principles became a major goal of scientific enquiry and underwrote a new professional engineer with status and learning meant to distinguish him from the mere craftsman.

Wonders of the Age

By 1548, the French physician and astronomer Jean Fernel (1497–1558) could proclaim the inventions that testified to "the triumph of our New Age": the compass, the cannon, and the printing press. Of these, the printing press, nearly one hundred years old, was the newest. The full impact of the compass, cannon, and printing press was not obvious until the end of the fifteenth century and depended on the development of other technologies.

Compass. The introduction of the magnetic compass gave mariners not only a new way of navigating in open sea, but, perhaps even more importantly, a means of recording their journeys in a readable and fairly precise way. The portolan map, fully developed by the fifteenth century, was produced by drawing coast lines and islands according to constant lines of compass bearing. The remarkable advance this offered can only be appreciated visually. In the middle of the fifteenth century, this advantage to navigation was joined by a new ship design that allowed greater maneuverability. The medieval carrack was replaced by the three-masted ship, which offered more sail area, the ability to sail windward, and larger sterns for cargo and crew. By 1488, Portuguese sailors, who were also learning the system of winds, were able to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope. Oceanic voyages quickly opened up new prospects for trade with the East, and, after 1492, a New World.

Cannon. The development of gunpowder artillery changed the balance of power both between Europeans and other peoples, and, intermittently and temporarily, between the emerging nation-states of Europe. Invented sometime in the early fourteenth century as a rather cumbersome, if effective, bombard, gunpowder artillery underwent a great deal of development throughout the fifteenth century. Europeans learned to cast and bore cannons (rather than barrel together hoops of forged metal) to specific calibers; they designed gun carriages for better mobility; they learned to make nitrates for the salt-peter necessary to gunpowder production, and to corn (or ball) the gunpowder for better storage. The main effect the advent of widespread cannon warfare had on noncombatants was to change the faces of their cities. Older town walls (and often a number of townsmen's houses) were demolished for newer, lower, and thicker geometrical circuits. Polygonal, bastioned fortifications, the trace Italienne, were built around numerous continental European cities. A secondary effect of military engineering concerns was to focus attention on the problems of projectile motion, impact, and the resistance of materials—all areas of concern in the establishment of a new physics.

In the field, the integration of small arms worked to further alter the conduct of open battle. The shoulder-carried harquebus or musket, already in use by the 1480s, developed into a common weapon of the infantry, even if pikemen continued to be of essential importance into the seventeenth century. A more sudden transformation took place in the cavalry as a result of the spread of the wheellock pistol in the mid 1500s. Employed by mounted German Reiters, and further developed as a cavalry weapon by the French under Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610), the adoption of the pistol led to the dethroning of the armored lance, and "the end of knighthood."

Printing press. The political theorist Jean Bodin (1530–1596) wrote, "The art of printing alone would easily be able to match all the inventions of the ancients." Printing had transformed intellectual life. Before its advent around 1450, a personal library of fifty volumes was considered sumptuous; by Bodin's writing, noblemen routinely collected hundreds; pamphlets and other cheap print were available to most literate people.

The printing press relied on a set of standard-sized raised letters, cast in a matrix that had been impressed with the letter's impression by a steel punch, and then set into a form. The system of punches, matrices, and forms was the most significant (and expensive) aspect of the invention, and established printing as the first industry to employ interchangeable parts. The success of the print trade relied on the earlier development of paper technology, which in the previous 150 years had largely replaced parchment (scraped animal skins) and greatly reduced the expense of books. It also depended on sophisticated metallurgy; steel was difficult to produce, and the metals used had to perform properly.

Other arts. Aside from these "revolutionary" technologies, a host of smaller-scale innovations enriched domestic interiors between 1450 and 1550. Venetian glassmakers pioneered a refined clear glass in the late fifteenth century, and Italian potters began to manufacture brightly painted majolica. The European silk industry expanded greatly. In the sixteenth century, the French potter Bernard Palissy (1510–1589) formulated a pure white glaze in imitation of porcelain. All these products offered domestic alternatives to goods that had previously been imported from the Middle or Far East. Meanwhile, techniques for quicksilvering mirrors and the development of oil paints that could capture dramatic lighting effects offered new adornments.

With printing, the techniques of numerous arts were recorded in printed books. By the end of the sixteenth century, books were available on the employments, tools, and "secrets" of trades as diverse as fishing, pyrotechnics, metallurgy, and architecture. Many were written by practicing artisans and mechanics. Some of these books amounted to little more than lists of recipes, while others eloquently discussed the relationship between art and nature, and insisted on the need for both theory and practice in the proper execution of crafts. These discussions offered an alternative discourse on these subjects to that available through elite education. Later promoters, apologists, and organizers of technological knowledge drew heavily on this vast literature.

Architects and Humanists

Renaissance artists created some of the most impressive engineering feats of their day. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) awed his contemporaries with the construction of the enormous duomo atop the Florentine cathedral. The dome was constructed without centering or beams by connecting eight spears above the cathedral. Even Brunelleschi's scaffolding and lifting machine designs were copied by other artists. The most developed mechanical knowledge available was no doubt cultivated by architects. This was particularly obvious in Italian cities, where architects and other artists were highly trained in practical mathematics, and constantly experimented, at least in sketches, with various combinations of machine elements. Leonardo da Vinci's (1452–1519) well-known breadth of interests—stretching from his designs of ingenious devices to sculpture to painting—was not uncommon. Francesco di Giorgio (1439–1502) also developed great expertise in the fields of engineering and hydraulics, along with his more decorative work. Architects directed sometimes dramatic refigurement of major cities. Rome was largely rebuilt in the sixteenth century and Paris in the seventeenth. Architects also designed dams and waterways, fortifications, and stage machinery.

As works of architecture and engineering gained greater cultural capital as markers of status and power, scholars and patrons themselves often came to seek the knowledge of the architects and to share their literate culture. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was a humanist who carved a new role for himself as the technical counselor to powerful men. His treatises detailing mathematical and conventional rules for painting, sculpture, and architecture became classics even in manuscript. Cooperation between elites and architects centered on military engineering and the study of ancient technical texts, works that promised the secrets of recreating the splendid world of the ancients. The duke of Urbino, Federigo Montefeltro (1422–1482), himself tried to aid Francesco di Giorgio in a translation of De architectura by the Roman architect Vitruvius. Alberti had given up making sense of this text, but the first editions came from practicing architects: Fra Giovanni Giocondo da Verona's (c. 1433–1515) Latin text of 1511, and Cesare Cesariano's vernacular edition in 1521. Other texts considered clues to ancient marvels of engineering were also routed to prominent architects and painters by their patrons. Texts of Archimedes, the hydraulics of Hero, and the mechanical collections of Pappus were books examined by scholars of both elite and artisanal status.

By the end of the sixteenth century, mathematicians such as Federico Commandino (1509–1575) and Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607) had developed their own elaboration of a classical rational mechanics. This work remained rooted to the world of the mechanic, but began to address a new sort of engineering professional that was just then beginning to emerge.

Natural Magic and Alchemy

No easy category existed during the late Renaissance in which to place figures who performed technological feats. The Syracusan Archimedes (c. 287–212 B.C.E.), for example, was famous as the maker of a wooden bird that flew all by itself, and as the engineer whose special mirrors burned Roman ships in the harbor—both accomplishments that early modern engineers attempted to recreate well into the eighteenth century. In the language of Renaissance Neoplatonism, the term magus often served best to characterize such figures. The magus was figured as a wise man whose knowledge of occult (hidden) natural properties allowed him to unleash operative forces and create amazing effects. Scholars of magic—among the most learned of the age—developed a doxography that linked magical, philosophical, and religious figures in historical progressions: from the legendary Egyptian magus Hermes Trismegistus, to Moses, to Pythagoras, to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers, to Ptolemy as a judicial astrologer, and thence to the Hellenistic mathematician and reputed engineer Archimedes.

Meanwhile engineers themselves, military engineering writers such as Conrad Keyser (1366–1405) and Giovanni da Fontana (1395?–1455?), had cultivated a mixture of technology and magic. "Natural magic" pointed to the operative power inherent in technology, and offered a framework outside that of Aristotelian causality. By the turn of the seventeenth century, discussions of technology often adopted the name "magic" as "the practical part of natural philosophy." Influential writers such as Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) and Giambattista della Porta (1535?–1615) continued to configure technological work as natural magic. Della Porta in particular had himself demonstrated success experimenting with lenses and was a key member of the Accademia dei Lincei before Galileo, with his mathematical-philosophical approach to technology, gained center stage among the academicians. In England the connection remained intact through Robert Fludd (1574–1637), whose work explicitly drew together mechanical technologies and divinatory arts within a mystical Christian framework. The work of John Wilkins (1614–1672) is a late echo of the connection between mathematics, technology, and magic. His compendium of the most current work in rational and practical mechanics was entitled Mathematical Magic, but the "magic" was completely removed from occult overtones, and merely captured the transformative power of technology.

Another tradition of natural magic ran from Hermes to alchemical thinkers such as the medieval Islamic alchemist Geber and the learned friar Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1292). Alchemy was a repository of knowledge for a variety of distillation and metallurgical techniques. Before a more rationalized nomenclature could be instituted, alchemical lore was often veiled in occult language and bizarre images. Alchemy enjoyed something of a vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and occupied some of the finest minds of the age, including the twenty-year concentrated studies of Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Alchemy consisted of distillation and metallurgical techniques, and created seemingly new substances through the combination and heating of reagents. These practices were often conceived within a theory of metals and a religious-spiritual view of nature and human labor. Probably due to the shapes of mineral veins, metals were believed to grow inside the earth; over long periods of time all metal would mature into gold. Alchemy was the art and labor by which nature could be hastened and perfected. While alchemists did indeed believe it was possible to turn base metals into gold, the operations of alchemy also provided both consumable products and an observable, experimental analog to the processes of nature. Metallurgists utilized the literature and techniques of alchemy, and Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) developed a chemical medicine and alchemical view of nature that found numerous followers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Baconians and the Direction of Progress

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) spent much of his forced retirement from politics writing on a reform of knowledge that would account for and extend the success of technological traditions but avoid the drawbacks of its current practices. His Novum Organum (1620; New organon) detailed both criticisms of the current state of knowledge and remedies. Bacon advocated the redirection of philosophy away from erudition and logical terminology, toward experience and the advancement of material wealth. Mechanics, mathematicians, physicians, alchemists, and magicians, Bacon noted, had handson knowledge of nature, "but all [have met with] faint success." Bacon had patience neither to wait for the happenstance of a lucky discovery or invention, nor to suffer the "fanciful philosophy" advanced by alchemists and others who presumed too much based on a narrow base of technical knowledge. "Knowledge and human power are synonymous," he proclaimed. While he advocated a program of experimentation, he was decidedly more articulate about a more descriptive collection of facts from the natural and technological worlds. For example, from a "history of trades" that would chart information from all manner of tradesmen, the philosopher would draw out axioms of principal import. The axioms could then be used to organize and further the trades.

Bacon's program, with the approach of the 1640 Puritan Revolution, appeared to some to offer the prospect of a "new Albion," an Edenic England created through technology in a great reform of religion, mind, and social organization. Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662), for example, worked toward such a vision. Hartlib was in fact central to the circle of men who later founded the Royal Society.

The Royal Society, founded on explicitly Baconian inspiration, at first tried to fulfill the role of collectors of histories of trades. While this project was not successful, the society often centered around the experiments made by its curator. Information on mines, machines, and other technological news was assiduously collected along with accounts from physicians, mathematicians, and naturalists, and was printed in the Philosophical Transactions. Exhaustive histories of trades were finally realized at the end of the eighteenth century in France. The overt Baconians Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783) and the more staid Académie des Sciences both produced encyclopedias of arts and trades in the decades before the French Revolution.

Technologies for Science; Science for Technologies

While Bacon had fully recognized the mutual relationship between the reform of natural philosophy and the progress of the arts, he had paid relatively little attention to the technologies that were themselves transforming the practices of science. While mechanics, architects, and craftsmen had always used mathematical measuring instruments in their work, and these themselves underwent great refinement in the sixteenth century, the new scientific instruments of the seventeenth century—the telescope, microscope, air pump, and to a lesser degree thermometers and barometers—depended on technologies and offered possibilities on a whole new level. The telescope and the microscope extended human vision enormously and produced experiential evidence in debates such as that over the Copernican hypothesis. The air pump, as it was developed by Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and his mechanic-client, Robert Hooke (1635–1703), consisted of a ratchet and piston system that could evacuate a glass receiver one cylinder-volume at a time. This served as a stage of observation for an artificial environment of evacuated air and allowed Boyle to make claims concerning the nature of the tiniest units of matter. This was a sort of instrument that had never been used in natural philosophy before. Such instruments were difficult to get to work dependably, and often relied on the skills of a mechanic like Robert Hooke.

Meanwhile, both elite and practical mathematicians developed mathematical skills that were meant to aid the design of ever more complicated technical tasks. Vernacular editions of Euclid had been available since Niccolò Tartaglia's (1499–1557) 1543 Italian edition. Above all, these editions spread and popularized geometrical proportioning techniques. Simultaneously, in the early seventeenth century the Scottish nobleman John Napier (1550–1617) and the Swiss watchmaker Joost Bürgi (1552–1632) developed logarithms that would make trigonometrical computations much easier. Napier in particular drew explicit attention to the ways logarithms would ease tasks in military engineering and survey. Napier also employed the decimal notation developed by the Dutch engineer and counselor to Maurice of Nassau (1567–1625), Simon Stevin (1548–1620). Decimal notation eased work with fractions. Proportional compasses and calculating sectors also eased practical calculations. The foundations of algebraic analysis were meanwhile made by Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), and a century later the use of analysis became essential to the cadets of France's technical institutes, and made possible a new style of engineering. Meanwhile, projective geometry, always to some extent a tool of architects and engineers, had been highly developed and integrated into perspective by Gérard Desargues (1591–1661). Descriptive geometry was institutionalized in technical drawing, again at the French écoles, by Gaspard Monge (1746–1818).

Projectors, Artificers, and Their Patrons

In his fable of the ideal technological and moral society, the New Atlantis (1627), Francis Bacon had presented a kind of intellectual mirror opposite of mercantilist programs. In his imaginary Benthalem, technological secrets were constantly imported by explorers and developed by technicians; no technologies, however, would be exported to other nations. This speaks both to concerns about industrial espionage and difficulties caused by undeveloped patent laws that infected all states in Europe. It also indicates some of the enthusiasm political and cultural leaders had in the wholesale collection of technical knowledge, and their reliance on mechanical workers to feed their interests.

European rulers had long tried to prohibit the export of technologies on which their economies depended. Venice, for example, forced glassmakers to swear they would not take their art outside of the city's dominion. The importance of technological transference through the migration of skilled persons is most forcefully demonstrated in the case of Lucca's silk-throwing machine, the filotoio. Anyone carrying knowledge of this machine outside the confines of the city was threatened with death. Meanwhile, a design of the machine had been publicly available for years in Vittorio Zonca's Novo Teatro di Machine et Edificii (1607). It was not until the eighteenth-century industrial spy John Lombe spent two years studying the machine in Italy that the machine could be reproduced and operated.

Semi-itinerant mechanics often haunted baroque courts. Mechanicians such as Dutch-born Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633) attracted attention in England (and for a short time in Prague) with perpetual motion machines, inventive skills for such devices as diving bells, and technical know-how for such major works as the draining of fens. As a projector in various German courts, the alchemist and mechanic Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682) rose to something of a patron himself. He solicited secrets from a range of artificers, and probably used his alchemical skills to advertise his ideas for a new political economy based on trade and technology rather than agriculture. Numerous enthusiasts and scientific gentlemen cultivated relationships with their own artificers to construct machines.

Clocks and Watches

The first town clocks were constructed in the Middle Ages, usually as way of letting workmen know when shifts should change in new textile factories. While watchmakers themselves continually refined methods of gear-cutting throughout the period, scientists dramatically innovated clocks in the mid-seventeenth century. Clocks became more accurate and more convenient and promised a solution to the problem of determining longitude at sea—one of the most long-standing obstacles to navigation—as well as offering advantages to positional astronomy. If one could accurately keep track of the time of the home port and local time, longitude could easily be calculated. In 1656, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) designed a clock using a pendulum oscillator with a tautochronic, one-second period. The pendulum clock, however, proved inappropriate for the pitching deck of a ship. In the mid 1660s, Huygens turned to oscillators formed of a spiral hair spring—just as Robert Hooke was also investigating the use of a hair spring. This gave rise to a bitter, ultimately unresolved controversy over patents. However, neither watch proved accurate enough to serve the purposes of a marine chronometer. The government prize for the solution of the longitude problem, £20,000, was finally awarded in 1765 after the Yorkshire watchmaker John Harrison (1693–1776) improved accuracy through advances in workmanship rather than design.

Automatons and Popular Demonstrations

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, mechanical devices for delight had largely been cultivated in personal collections and gardens. Self-moving statues, ingenious fountains, and hydraulic devices designed by architects like Salomon de Caus (1576–1626) delighted visitors. Mechanical marvels were often placed next to exotic naturalia and antiquities. In the eighteenth century, automatons, such as those designed by Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782), were exhibited in shows and fairs.

More serious forms of enlightened infotainment were provided by popularizers of Isaac Newton's work. Jean Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744), for example, offered ten-week courses at a cost of two guineas a head. Demonstrators of "Newtonian" devices showed their wares from town to town. The abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700–1770) made presentations of the new physics, and was a favorite in French salons. These popular mechanical demonstrations and lectures were probably one of the best venues in which to learn about applied mechanics. The automatons and demonstration devices, however, belonged to a larger cultural context in which machinery powered more tasks, and automation of labor was becoming more prevalent.

Mills: Age of Water and Wood

If the nineteenth century was predominantly an age of coal and iron, the preceding centuries were largely characterized by water and wood. The vertical water wheel and the windmill were both imported to the Latin West in the Middle Ages. By 1450, these sources of power were already applied to brewing, hemp production, fulling, ore stamping, tanning, sawmills, blast furnaces, paper production, and mine pumping. Their use and development continued throughout the early modern period. The principle of translating circular wheel motion into other forms of translational motion was also applied through human or animal labor. Concern for milling and water-lifting machines is testified by the printed machine books of Agostino Ramelli (1531–c. 1600), Jacques Besson (1540–1576), and Vittorio Zonca (born c. 1580). These books present the intricate connection of wheels, gears, cams, and winches. Concurrent with the pressing need for machines to power manufactories was the need for machines that could pump or raise water. The latter were everywhere employed for drinking-water, for evacuating deep mines, for draining swamps, and for building canals.

The Netherlands, not surprisingly, led Europe in these technologies, both because of the superabundance of water and the need to drain the land and dredge ports. Because prevailing westerlies dependably blow over its lands, the Dutch also perfected windmills. Top sails could be rotated (either because mounted on a rotating cap or because the bottom of the tower could be rotated on wheels) to face wind. The Wimpolen drove bucket chains that drained water from the soil, then dumped it into the canals, and was part of land reclamation projects. Dutch experts in water reclamation and water wheel machinery were in high demand throughout the seventeenth century.

The main drawback of these early modern machines was that they were made of wood. By the late sixteenth century, Europe had been largely deforested, and wood became increasingly expensive. Wood also was a material in which precision tooling was limited, and which broke easily and required much maintenance.

Textiles

Textiles were among the first products to be produced on a large scale through division of labor and mechanization. Important textile manufactories were well established in Italy and the Netherlands by the thirteenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modest mechanized advances in ribbon weaving were introduced. In the 1730s, John Kay's (1704–1764) "flying shuttle" made weaving much faster and allowed broader cloth. This invention was soon followed by methods that mechanized jacquard weaving and repetitive pattern weaving.

Increased speed in weaving put heavier demands on the spinning of the yarns. Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) became one of the richest men in late-eighteenth-century England by mechanizing the spinning process of newly exploitable cotton imports. Arkwright's "waterframe" managed to imitate the touch of spinning and drawing out yarns by hand. Cotton fibers were drawn along through three pairs of rollers, each pair spinning at an increasingly faster rate. Arkwright began a spinning mill powering his invention with one horse in 1769, but established a water-powered mill only two years later. He continued to mechanize the industry with carding machines and a drawing frame.

Mining, Metallurgy, and the Steam Engine

With a demand for more intensive mining, and often entrepreneurial investment, sixteenth-century mining employed a vast array of machines and techniques, including the first form of the railroad. These were detailed in the elaborately illustrated volume De Re Metallica by the humanist Georgius Agricola (1494–1555). Deep ore deposits required pumps to evacuate water; the ore had to be raised; it was then roasted to make crushing easier. By the sixteenth century, most crushing was done by power-driven stamping mills. Ores were then fired in a blast furnace to extract the metals, and finally refined through a variety of metallurgical techniques, depending on the metals present.

The blast furnace was introduced by the beginning of the sixteenth century, and adopted across Europe. It was larger than its predecessor and required mechanical power to work the large bellows that provided the "blast" of hot air across the smelting metals. The furnace also had to be kept going around the clock. These alterations meant that blast furnaces needed to be built where there were plentiful supplies of water to run the water wheel, timber to make charcoal and fuel the furnace, plentiful labor, and exploitable ores. The blast furnace also made possible a new product: cast iron. While cast iron, particularly English cast iron, had a use in the making of ordnance, most cast iron was formed into wrought iron in a secondary process.

The iron trade was freed from the expense of charcoal fuel and the necessity and drawbacks of water-driven wheels in the mid-eighteenth century by the innovations of Henry Cort (1740–1800) and James Watt (1736–1819). Henry Cort developed a new style of furnace that made possible the use of coal in smelting iron by designing a way in which the sulfurous coke was kept out of direct contact with the metal. Watt improved the Newcomen steam engine used in mine drainage so that it was far more powerful. Thomas Newcomen's (1663–1729) steam engine was itself a variation of a philosophical curiosity invented by the mechanic Denis Papin (1647–1712?). The principle of both was to raise a piston in a cylinder by forcing it up with steam, then allowing condensation to create a vacuum so that atmospheric pressure would push the piston down. Watt added a separate condenser and a steam jacket around the cylinder, thus creating a far more rapid and powerful engine. Watt's steam engine was later adapted for use in many other manufactories, notably in textile and brass production, and made possible many new technologies. By the end of the eighteenth century, an average furnace consumed at least 2,000 tons of coke, processed 3,000 to 4,000 tons of iron ore, and produced 1,000 tons of iron per year.

Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Enlightenment

As a generalization, one might say that the Renaissance gave rise to the great Italian architect-engineers; the baroque hailed the itinerant skilled mechanic from German and Dutch lands; and the Enlightenment saw the development of the highly trained French engineer and fostered the activities of the English entrepreneurial engineer.

By the end of the seventeenth century, Edmond Halley (1656–1742), otherwise beholden to various patronage networks and government service, set up his own ship-salvaging firm based on his innovative diving bell and diving suit. James Watt was one of the most successful (in part due to his association with Matthew Boulton [1728–1809]) and prominent of a number of engineers and inventors whose businesses flourished in eighteenth-century England. His association with the Birmingham "Lunar Society" is also instructive: a group composed of Watt, Boulton, the ceramics manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), the botanist Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), chemists James Keir (1735–1820) and Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), among others. These men saw the power of the connection between science and industry, and its possibilities for the improvement of society. They themselves had become engineers, curators of craftsmen, and scientists in eighteenth-century England's free mix of popular science and artisanal mechanics; however, they advocated a more rigorous scientific education for following generations. Whatever the workers in the mills, mines, and manufactories might have thought, members of the Lunar Society saw the values and products of science and technology as those most likely to lead to the moral, intellectual, and material liberation of humanity. This ideology they shared with many French Revolutionaries. Indeed, their forces were scattered in 1791 when a mob sacked the house of Priestley and others for their support of the French Revolution.

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Jardine, Lisa. Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution. New York and London, 1999.

Long, Pamela O. Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Baltimore, 2001.

Mc Cray, Patrick W. Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1999.

Mc Neil, Ian, ed. An Encyclopaedia of the History of Technology. London and New York, 1996.

Rossi, Paolo. Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. Edited by Benjamin Nelson. New York, 1970.

Schaffer, Simon. "Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics." Osiris 2nd ser., 9 (1995): 157–182.

——. "Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century." History of Science 21 (1983): 1–43.

Singer, Charles, E. J. Holmyard, and A. R. Hall, eds. A History of Technology. Vol. 2, From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, c. 1500–c. 1750. Oxford, 1957.

Smith, Pamela. The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire. Princeton, 1994.

Stewart, Larry. "A Meaning for Machines: Modernity, Utility, and the Eighteenth-Century British Public." Journal of Modern History 70, no. 2 (1998): 259–294.

——. The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

—MARY HENNINGER-VOSS

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Quotes:

"Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute." - J. G. Ballard

"Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue. Anthropological Commentary The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true." - Niels Bohr

"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road." - Stewart Brand

"When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances." - Thomas Carlyle

"We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers." - Edward Dahlberg

"If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives." - Freeman Dyson

See more famous quotes about Technology

By the mid 20th century, humans had achieved a mastery of technology sufficient to leave the atmosphere of the Earth for the first time and explore space.

Technology is the making, modification, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems, methods of organization, in order to solve a problem, improve a preexisting solution to a problem, achieve a goal or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, modifications, arrangements and procedures. Technologies significantly affect human as well as other animal species' ability to control and adapt to their natural environments. The word technology comes from Greek τεχνολογία (technología); from τέχνη (téchnē), meaning "art, skill, craft", and -λογία (-logía), meaning "study of-".^[1] The term can either be applied generally or to specific areas: examples include construction technology, medical technology, and information technology.

The human species' use of technology began with the conversion of natural resources into simple tools. The prehistorical discovery of the ability to control fire increased the available sources of food and the invention of the wheel helped humans in travelling in and controlling their environment. Recent technological developments, including the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet, have lessened physical barriers to communication and allowed humans to interact freely on a global scale. However, not all technology has been used for peaceful purposes; the development of weapons of ever-increasing destructive power has progressed throughout history, from clubs to nuclear weapons.

Technology has affected society and its surroundings in a number of ways. In many societies, technology has helped develop more advanced economies (including today's global economy) and has allowed the rise of a leisure class. Many technological processes produce unwanted by-products, known as pollution, and deplete natural resources, to the detriment of the Earth and its environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and new technology often raises new ethical questions. Examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, a term originally applied only to machines, and the challenge of traditional norms.

Philosophical debates have arisen over the present and future use of technology in society, with disagreements over whether technology improves the human condition or worsens it. Neo-Luddism, anarcho-primitivism, and similar movements criticise the pervasiveness of technology in the modern world, opining that it harms the environment and alienates people; proponents of ideologies such as transhumanism and techno-progressivism view continued technological progress as beneficial to society and the human condition. Indeed, until recently, it was believed that the development of technology was restricted only to human beings, but recent scientific studies indicate that other primates and certain dolphin communities have developed simple tools and learned to pass their knowledge to other generations.

Contents 1 Definition and usage 2 Science, engineering and technology 3 History 3.1 Paleolithic (2.5 million – 10,000 BC) 3.1.1 Stone tools 3.1.2 Fire 3.1.3 Clothing and shelter 3.2 Neolithic through classical antiquity (10,000BC – 300AD) 3.2.1 Metal tools 3.2.2 Energy and transport 3.3 Medieval and modern history (300 AD —) 4 Technology and philosophy 4.1 Technicism 4.2 Optimism 4.3 Skepticism and critics of technology 4.4 Appropriate technology 5 Technology and competitiveness 6 Other animal species 7 Future technology 8 See also 8.1 Theories and concepts in technology 8.2 Economics of technology 8.3 Technology journalism 9 References 10 Further reading

Definition and usage

The invention of the printing press made it possible for scientists and politicians to communicate their ideas with ease, leading to the Age of Enlightenment; an example of technology as a cultural force.

The use of the term technology has changed significantly over the last 200 years. Before the 20th century, the term was uncommon in English, and usually referred to the description or study of the useful arts.^[2] The term was often connected to technical education, as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (chartered in 1861).^[3] "Technology" rose to prominence in the 20th century in connection with the second industrial revolution. The meanings of technology changed in the early 20th century when American social scientists, beginning with Thorstein Veblen, translated ideas from the German concept of Technik into "technology." In German and other European languages, a distinction exists between Technik and Technologie that is absent in English, as both terms are usually translated as "technology." By the 1930s, "technology" referred not to the study of the industrial arts, but to the industrial arts themselves.^[4] In 1937, the American sociologist Read Bain wrote that "technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them."^[5] Bain's definition remains common among scholars today, especially social scientists. But equally prominent is the definition of technology as applied science, especially among scientists and engineers, although most social scientists who study technology reject this definition.^[6] More recently, scholars have borrowed from European philosophers of "technique" to extend the meaning of technology to various forms of instrumental reason, as in Foucault's work on technologies of the self ("techniques de soi").

Dictionaries and scholars have offered a variety of definitions. The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers a definition of the term: "the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area" and "a capability given by the practical application of knowledge".^[1] Ursula Franklin, in her 1989 "Real World of Technology" lecture, gave another definition of the concept; it is "practice, the way we do things around here".^[7] The term is often used to imply a specific field of technology, or to refer to high technology or just consumer electronics, rather than technology as a whole.^[8] Bernard Stiegler, in Technics and Time, 1, defines technology in two ways: as "the pursuit of life by means other than life", and as "organized inorganic matter."^[9]

Technology can be most broadly defined as the entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to achieve some value. In this usage, technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems. It is a far-reaching term that may include simple tools, such as a crowbar or wooden spoon, or more complex machines, such as a space station or particle accelerator. Tools and machines need not be material; virtual technology, such as computer software and business methods, fall under this definition of technology.^[10]

The word "technology" can also be used to refer to a collection of techniques. In this context, it is the current state of humanity's knowledge of how to combine resources to produce desired products, to solve problems, fulfill needs, or satisfy wants; it includes technical methods, skills, processes, techniques, tools and raw materials. When combined with another term, such as "medical technology" or "space technology", it refers to the state of the respective field's knowledge and tools. "State-of-the-art technology" refers to the high technology available to humanity in any field.

Technology can be viewed as an activity that forms or changes culture.^[11] Additionally, technology is the application of math, science, and the arts for the benefit of life as it is known. A modern example is the rise of communication technology, which has lessened barriers to human interaction and, as a result, has helped spawn new subcultures; the rise of cyberculture has, at its basis, the development of the Internet and the computer.^[12] Not all technology enhances culture in a creative way; technology can also help facilitate political oppression and war via tools such as guns. As a cultural activity, technology predates both science and engineering, each of which formalize some aspects of technological endeavor.

Science, engineering and technology

The distinction between science, engineering and technology is not always clear. Science is the reasoned investigation or study of phenomena, aimed at discovering enduring principles among elements of the phenomenal world by employing formal techniques such as the scientific method.^[13] Technologies are not usually exclusively products of science, because they have to satisfy requirements such as utility, usability and safety.

Engineering is the goal-oriented process of designing and making tools and systems to exploit natural phenomena for practical human means, often (but not always) using results and techniques from science. The development of technology may draw upon many fields of knowledge, including scientific, engineering, mathematical, linguistic, and historical knowledge, to achieve some practical result.

Technology is often a consequence of science and engineering — although technology as a human activity precedes the two fields. For example, science might study the flow of electrons in electrical conductors, by using already-existing tools and knowledge. This new-found knowledge may then be used by engineers to create new tools and machines, such as semiconductors, computers, and other forms of advanced technology. In this sense, scientists and engineers may both be considered technologists; the three fields are often considered as one for the purposes of research and reference.^[14]

The exact relations between science and technology in particular have been debated by scientists, historians, and policymakers in the late 20th century, in part because the debate can inform the funding of basic and applied science. In the immediate wake of World War II, for example, in the United States it was widely considered that technology was simply "applied science" and that to fund basic science was to reap technological results in due time. An articulation of this philosophy could be found explicitly in Vannevar Bush's treatise on postwar science policy, Science—The Endless Frontier: "New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature... This essential new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research." In the late-1960s, however, this view came under direct attack, leading towards initiatives to fund science for specific tasks (initiatives resisted by the scientific community). The issue remains contentious—though most analysts resist the model that technology simply is a result of scientific research.^[15][16]

History

Main articles: History of technology and Timeline of historic inventions

Paleolithic (2.5 million – 10,000 BC)

A primitive chopper

Further information: Outline of prehistoric technology

The use of tools by early humans was partly a process of discovery, partly of evolution. Early humans evolved from a species of foraging hominids which were already bipedal,^[17] with a brain mass approximately one third that of modern humans.^[18] Tool use remained relatively unchanged for most of early human history, but approximately 50,000 years ago, a complex set of behaviors and tool use emerged, believed by many archaeologists to be connected to the emergence of fully modern language.^[19]

Stone tools

Hand axes from the Acheulian period

A Clovis point, made via pressure flaking

Human ancestors have been using stone and other tools since long before the emergence of Homo sapiens approximately 200,000 years ago.^[20] The earliest methods of stone tool making, known as the Oldowan "industry", date back to at least 2.3 million years ago,^[21] with the earliest direct evidence of tool usage found in Ethiopia within the Great Rift Valley, dating back to 2.5 million years ago.^[22] This era of stone tool use is called the Paleolithic, or "Old stone age", and spans all of human history up to the development of agriculture approximately 12,000 years ago.

To make a stone tool, a "core" of hard stone with specific flaking properties (such as flint) was struck with a hammerstone. This flaking produced a sharp edge on the core stone as well as on the flakes, either of which could be used as tools, primarily in the form of choppers or scrapers.^[23] These tools greatly aided the early humans in their hunter-gatherer lifestyle to perform a variety of tasks including butchering carcasses (and breaking bones to get at the marrow); chopping wood; cracking open nuts; skinning an animal for its hide; and even forming other tools out of softer materials such as bone and wood.^[24]

The earliest stone tools were crude, being little more than a fractured rock. In the Acheulian era, beginning approximately 1.65 million years ago, methods of working these stone into specific shapes, such as hand axes emerged. The Middle Paleolithic, approximately 300,000 years ago, saw the introduction of the prepared-core technique, where multiple blades could be rapidly formed from a single core stone.^[23] The Upper Paleolithic, beginning approximately 40,000 years ago, saw the introduction of pressure flaking, where a wood, bone, or antler punch could be used to shape a stone very finely.^[25]

Fire

The discovery and utilization of fire, a simple energy source with many profound uses, was a turning point in the technological evolution of humankind.^[26] The exact date of its discovery is not known; evidence of burnt animal bones at the Cradle of Humankind suggests that the domestication of fire occurred before 1,000,000 BC;^[27] scholarly consensus indicates that Homo erectus had controlled fire by between 500,000 BC and 400,000 BC.^[28][29] Fire, fueled with wood and charcoal, allowed early humans to cook their food to increase its digestibility, improving its nutrient value and broadening the number of foods that could be eaten.^[30]

Clothing and shelter

Other technological advances made during the Paleolithic era were clothing and shelter; the adoption of both technologies cannot be dated exactly, but they were a key to humanity's progress. As the Paleolithic era progressed, dwellings became more sophisticated and more elaborate; as early as 380,000 BC, humans were constructing temporary wood huts.^[31][32] Clothing, adapted from the fur and hides of hunted animals, helped humanity expand into colder regions; humans began to migrate out of Africa by 200,000 BC and into other continents, such as Eurasia.^[33]

Neolithic through classical antiquity (10,000BC – 300AD)

Further information: Outline of prehistoric technology

An array of Neolithic artifacts, including bracelets, axe heads, chisels, and polishing tools.

Man's technological ascent began in earnest in what is known as the Neolithic period ("New stone age"). The invention of polished stone axes was a major advance because it allowed forest clearance on a large scale to create farms. The discovery of agriculture allowed for the feeding of larger populations, and the transition to a sedentist lifestyle increased the number of children that could be simultaneously raised, as young children no longer needed to be carried, as was the case with the nomadic lifestyle. Additionally, children could contribute labor to the raising of crops more readily than they could to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.^[34][35]

With this increase in population and availability of labor came an increase in labor specialization.^[36] What triggered the progression from early Neolithic villages to the first cities, such as Uruk, and the first civilizations, such as Sumer, is not specifically known; however, the emergence of increasingly hierarchical social structures, the specialization of labor, trade and war amongst adjacent cultures, and the need for collective action to overcome environmental challenges, such as the building of dikes and reservoirs, are all thought to have played a role.^[37]

Metal tools

Continuing improvements led to the furnace and bellows and provided the ability to smelt and forge native metals (naturally occurring in relatively pure form).^[38] Gold, copper, silver, and lead, were such early metals. The advantages of copper tools over stone, bone, and wooden tools were quickly apparent to early humans, and native copper was probably used from near the beginning of Neolithic times (about 8000 BC).^[39] Native copper does not naturally occur in large amounts, but copper ores are quite common and some of them produce metal easily when burned in wood or charcoal fires. Eventually, the working of metals led to the discovery of alloys such as bronze and brass (about 4000 BC). The first uses of iron alloys such as steel dates to around 1400 BC.

Energy and transport

The wheel was invented circa 4000 BC.

Meanwhile, humans were learning to harness other forms of energy. The earliest known use of wind power is the sailboat.^[40] The earliest record of a ship under sail is shown on an Egyptian pot dating back to 3200 BC.^[41] From prehistoric times, Egyptians probably used the power of the Nile annual floods to irrigate their lands, gradually learning to regulate much of it through purposely built irrigation channels and 'catch' basins. Similarly, the early peoples of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, learned to use the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for much the same purposes. But more extensive use of wind and water (and even human) power required another invention.

According to archaeologists, the wheel was invented around 4000 B.C. probably independently and nearly-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe. Estimates on when this may have occurred range from 5500 to 3000 B.C., with most experts putting it closer to 4000 B.C. The oldest artifacts with drawings that depict wheeled carts date from about 3000 B.C.; however, the wheel may have been in use for millennia before these drawings were made. There is also evidence from the same period of time that wheels were used for the production of pottery. (Note that the original potter's wheel was probably not a wheel, but rather an irregularly shaped slab of flat wood with a small hollowed or pierced area near the center and mounted on a peg driven into the earth. It would have been rotated by repeated tugs by the potter or his assistant.) More recently, the oldest-known wooden wheel in the world was found in the Ljubljana marshes of Slovenia.^[42]

The invention of the wheel revolutionized activities as disparate as transportation, war, and the production of pottery (for which it may have been first used). It didn't take long to discover that wheeled wagons could be used to carry heavy loads and fast (rotary) potters' wheels enabled early mass production of pottery. But it was the use of the wheel as a transformer of energy (through water wheels, windmills, and even treadmills) that revolutionized the application of nonhuman power sources.

Medieval and modern history (300 AD —)

Main articles: Medieval technology, Renaissance technology, Industrial Revolution, Second industrial revolution, Productivity improving technologies (historical), and Information Technology

Innovations continued through the Middle Ages with innovations such as silk, the horse collar and horseshoes in the first few hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire. Medieval technology saw the use of simple machines (such as the lever, the screw, and the pulley) being combined to form more complicated tools, such as the wheelbarrow, windmills and clocks. The Renaissance brought forth many of these innovations, including the printing press (which facilitated the greater communication of knowledge), and technology became increasingly associated with science, beginning a cycle of mutual advancement. The advancements in technology in this era allowed a more steady supply of food, followed by the wider availability of consumer goods.

The automobile revolutionized personal transportation.

Starting in the United Kingdom in the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was a period of great technological discovery, particularly in the areas of agriculture, manufacturing, mining, metallurgy and transport, driven by the discovery of steam power. Technology later took another step with the harnessing of electricity to create such innovations as the electric motor, light bulb and countless others. Scientific advancement and the discovery of new concepts later allowed for powered flight, and advancements in medicine, chemistry, physics and engineering. The rise in technology has led to the construction of skyscrapers and large cities whose inhabitants rely on automobiles or other powered transit for transportation. Communication was also greatly improved with the invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a revolution in transportation with the invention of the steam-powered ship, train, airplane, and automobile.

F-15 and F-16 flying over a burning oil field in Kuwait in 1991.

The 20th century brought a host of innovations. In physics, the discovery of nuclear fission has led to both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Computers were also invented and later miniaturized utilizing transistors and integrated circuits. The technology behind got called information technology, and these advancements subsequently led to the creation of the Internet, which ushered in the current Information Age. Humans have also been able to explore space with satellites (later used for telecommunication) and in manned missions going all the way to the moon. In medicine, this era brought innovations such as open-heart surgery and later stem cell therapy along with new medications and treatments. Complex manufacturing and construction techniques and organizations are needed to construct and maintain these new technologies, and entire industries have arisen to support and develop succeeding generations of increasingly more complex tools. Modern technology increasingly relies on training and education — their designers, builders, maintainers, and users often require sophisticated general and specific training. Moreover, these technologies have become so complex that entire fields have been created to support them, including engineering, medicine, and computer science, and other fields have been made more complex, such as construction, transportation and architecture.

Technology and philosophy

Technicism

Generally, technicism is a reliance or confidence in technology as a benefactor of society. Taken to extreme, technicism is the belief that humanity will ultimately be able to control the entirety of existence using technology. In other words, human beings will someday be able to master all problems and possibly even control the future using technology. Some, such as Stephen V. Monsma,^[43] connect these ideas to the abdication of religion as a higher moral authority.

Optimism

See also: Extropianism

Optimistic assumptions are made by proponents of ideologies such as transhumanism and singularitarianism, which view technological development as generally having beneficial effects for the society and the human condition. In these ideologies, technological development is morally good. Some critics see these ideologies as examples of scientism and techno-utopianism and fear the notion of human enhancement and technological singularity which they support. Some have described Karl Marx as a techno-optimist.^[44]

Skepticism and critics of technology

See also: Luddite, Neo-luddism, Anarcho-primitivism, and Bioconservatism

On the somewhat skeptical side are certain philosophers like Herbert Marcuse and John Zerzan, who believe that technological societies are inherently flawed. They suggest that the inevitable result of such a society is to become evermore technological at the cost of freedom and psychological health.

Many, such as the Luddites and prominent philosopher Martin Heidegger, hold serious, although not entirely deterministic reservations, about technology (see "The Question Concerning Technology^[45])". According to Heidegger scholars Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, "Heidegger does not oppose technology. He hopes to reveal the essence of technology in a way that 'in no way confines us to a stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same thing, to rebel helplessly against it.' Indeed, he promises that 'when we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology, we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim.'^[46]" What this entails is a more complex relationship to technology than either techno-optimists or techno-pessimists tend to allow.^[47]

Some of the most poignant criticisms of technology are found in what are now considered to be dystopian literary classics, for example Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and other writings, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. And, in Faust by Goethe, Faust's selling his soul to the devil in return for power over the physical world, is also often interpreted as a metaphor for the adoption of industrial technology. More recently, modern works of science fiction, such as those by Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, and films (e.g. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell) project highly ambivalent or cautionary attitudes toward technology's impact on human society and identity.

The late cultural critic Neil Postman distinguished tool-using societies from technological societies and, finally, what he called "technopolies," that is, societies that are dominated by the ideology of technological and scientific progress, to the exclusion or harm of other cultural practices, values and world-views.^[48]

Darin Barney has written about technology's impact on practices of citizenship and democratic culture, suggesting that technology can be construed as (1) an object of political debate, (2) a means or medium of discussion, and (3) a setting for democratic deliberation and citizenship. As a setting for democratic culture, Barney suggests that technology tends to make ethical questions, including the question of what a good life consists in, nearly impossible, because they already give an answer to the question: a good life is one that includes the use of more and more technology.^[49]

Nikolas Kompridis has also written about the dangers of new technology, such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and robotics. He warns that these technologies introduce unprecedented new challenges to human beings, including the possibility of the permanent alteration of our biological nature. These concerns are shared by other philosophers, scientists and public intellectuals who have written about similar issues (e.g. Francis Fukuyama, Jürgen Habermas, William Joy, and Michael Sandel).^[50]

Another prominent critic of technology is Hubert Dreyfus, who has published books On the Internet and What Computers Still Can't Do.

Another, more infamous anti-technological treatise is Industrial Society and Its Future, written by Theodore Kaczynski (aka The Unabomber) and printed in several major newspapers (and later books) as part of an effort to end his bombing campaign of the techno-industrial infrastructure.

Appropriate technology

See also: Technocriticism and Technorealism

The notion of appropriate technology, however, was developed in the 20th century (e.g., see the work of Jacques Ellul) to describe situations where it was not desirable to use very new technologies or those that required access to some centralized infrastructure or parts or skills imported from elsewhere. The eco-village movement emerged in part due to this concern.

Technology and competitiveness

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In 1983 a classified program was initiated in the US intelligence community to reverse the US declining economic and military competitiveness. The program, Project Socrates, used all source intelligence to review competitiveness worldwide for all forms of competition to determine the source of the US decline. What Project Socrates determined was that technology exploitation is the foundation of all competitive advantage and that the source of the US declining competitiveness was the fact that decision-making through the US both in the private and public sectors had switched from decision making that was based on technology exploitation (i.e., technology-based planning) to decision making that was based on money exploitation (i.e., economic-based planning) at the end of World War II.

Technology is properly defined as any application of science to accomplish a function. The science can be leading edge or well established and the function can have high visibility or be significantly more mundane but it is all technology, and its exploitation is the foundation of all competitive advantage.

Technology-based planning is what was used to build the US industrial giants before WWII (e.g., Dow, DuPont, GM) and it what was used to transform the US into a superpower. It was not economic-based planning.

Project Socrates determined that to rebuild US competitiveness, decision making throughout the US had to readopt technology-based planning. Project Socrates also determined that countries like China and India had continued executing technology-based (while the US took its detour into economic-based) planning, and as a result had considerable advanced the process and were using it to build themselves into superpowers. To rebuild US competitiveness the US decision-makers needed adopt a form of technology-based planning that was far more advanced than that used by China and India.

Project Socrates determined that technology-based planning makes an evolutionary leap forward every few hundred years and the next evolutionary leap, the Automated Innovation Revolution, was poised to occur. In the Automated Innovation Revolution the process for determining how to acquire and utilize technology for a competitive advantage (which includes R&D) is automated so that it can be executed with unprecedented speed, efficiency and agility.

Project Socrates developed the means for automated innovation so that the US could lead the Automated Innovation Revolution in order to rebuild and maintain the country's economic competitiveness for many generations.^[51][52][53]

Other animal species

This adult gorilla uses a branch as a walking stick to gauge the water's depth; an example of technology usage by non-human primates.

The use of basic technology is also a feature of other animal species apart from humans. These include primates such as chimpanzees, some dolphin communities,^[54][55] and crows.^[56][57] Considering a more generic perspective of technology as ethology of active environmental conditioning and control, we can also refer to animal examples such as beavers and their dams, or bees and their honeycombs.

The ability to make and use tools was once considered a defining characteristic of the genus Homo.^[58] However, the discovery of tool construction among chimpanzees and related primates has discarded the notion of the use of technology as unique to humans. For example, researchers have observed wild chimpanzees utilising tools for foraging: some of the tools used include leaf sponges, termite fishing probes, pestles and levers.^[59] West African chimpanzees also use stone hammers and anvils for cracking nuts,^[60] as do capuchin monkeys of Boa Vista, Brazil.^[61]

Future technology

Main article: Emerging technologies

Theories of technology often attempt to predict the future of technology based on the high technology and science of the time.

See also

Main article: Outline of technology

	Book: Technology
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Technology portal

Bernard Stiegler Golden hammer Critique of technology History of science and technology Knowledge economy Lewis Mumford List of years in science

Luddite Niche construction Technology assessment Timeline of historic inventions Technological convergence Technology and society Technology tree -ology Science and technology Science and technology in Argentina Technological superpowers

Theories and concepts in technology

Main article: Theories of technology

Diffusion of innovations Paradigm Philosophy of technology Posthumanism Precautionary principle Science and technology Strategy of technology Techno-progressivism Technocentrism Technocracy

Technocriticism Technological evolution Technological determinism Instrumental conception of technology Technological nationalism Technology readiness level Technological singularity Technological society Technorealism Technological revival Transhumanism Technology Management

Economics of technology Technocracy (bureaucratic) Technocapitalism Technological diffusion Technology acceptance model Technology lifecycle Technology transfer Energy accounting Nanosocialism Post-scarcity

Technology journalism The Verge Engadget TechCrunch Wired (magazine)

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Definition of technology". Merriam-Webster. http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technology. Retrieved 2007-02-16. 
2. ^ For ex., George Crabb, Universal Technological Dictionary, or Familiar Explanation of the Terms Used in All Arts and Sciences, Containing Definitions Drawn From the Original Writers, (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1823), s.v. "technology."
3. ^ Julius Adams Stratton and Loretta H. Mannix, Mind and Hand: The Birth of MIT (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 190-92. ISBN 0262195240.
4. ^ Eric Schatzberg, "Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology Before 1930," Technology and Culture 47 (July 2006): 486-512.
5. ^ Read Bain, "Technology and State Government," American Sociological Review 2 (December 1937): 860.
6. ^ Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, "Introductory Essay" in The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed. (Buckingham, England : Open University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-335-19913-5.
7. ^ Franklin, Ursula. "Real World of Technology". House of Anansi Press. http://www.anansi.ca/titles.cfm?series_id=4&pub_id=58. Retrieved 2007-02-13. 
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Further reading

• Kremer, Michael (1993). "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990". Quarterly Journal of Economics (The MIT Press) 108 (3): 681–716. DOI:10.2307/2118405. JSTOR 2118405 .
• Frank Popper (2007) From Technological to Virtual Art, Leonardo Books, MIT Press
• Charlie Gere (2005) Art, Time and Technology: Histories of the Disappearing Body, Berg
• Ambrose, Stanley H. (2001-03-02) (PDF). Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution. Science. http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~junwang4/langev/localcopy/pdf/ambrose01science.pdf. Retrieved 2007-03-10. 
• Kevin Kelly. What Technology Wants. New York, Viking Press, October 14, 2010, hardcover, 416 pages. ISBN 978-0-670-02215-1

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - teknologi, teknik

Nederlands (Dutch)
technologie

Français (French)
n. - technologie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Technik, Technologie

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - τεχνολογία

Italiano (Italian)
tecnologia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - tecnologia (f)

Русский (Russian)
техника; технические и прикладные науки, технология (атомная/безот- ходная, напр.)

Español (Spanish)
n. - tecnología

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - teknologi, teknik(en), teknisk terminologi, fackspråk

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
技术, 科学技术, 工业技术, 工艺

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 技術, 科學技術, 工業技術, 工藝

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 과학 기술, 공학, 응용 과학

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 科学技術, 工学, 専門用語

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) أللغه ألتقنيه, التكنولوجيا‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮האמנויות הטכניות והמדעים השימושיים, חקירתם והשימוש בהם, מינוח טכני, טכנולוגיה‬

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