which scientific or technological development described in this section
account of technology, the development terminated clock time of systematic techniques for making and doing things. The term engineering science, a combination of the Balkan state technē, "art, guile," with Son, "word, address," meant in Greece a discourse happening the arts, both fine and applied. When information technology first appeared in English in the 17th century, it was used to miserly a discussion of the practical arts only, and gradually these "arts" themselves came to be the physical object of the designation. By the earlyish 20th century the term embraced a growing range of means, processes, and ideas in addition to tools and machines. By mid-century engineering was defined by such phrases as "the means or activity by which man seeks to change or manipulate his surround." Even such broad definitions hold been criticized by observers who signalise the raising difficultness of identifying 'tween scientific enquiry and technological activity.
A highly compressed account of the history of technology so much as this one must adopt a rigorous methodological pattern if it is to do-well by to the subject without grossly distorting IT ace way or another. The program followed in the present article is primarily chronological, tracing the growing of applied science through phases that come after all 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 growth in recent centuries; Eastern technology is advised in that clause in the of import only as it relates to the development of modern technology.
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Within each chronological phase angle a standard method has been adopted for surveying the field of study live and innovations. This begins with a short review of the general social conditions of the point low discussion, and and so 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 communication theory, subject area technology, and medical technology. In a final incision the sociocultural consequences of technological change in the period are examined. This framework is modified according to the detail requirements of all period— discussions of new materials, e.g., occupy a substantial place in the accounts of earlier phases when new metals were organism introduced but are comparatively unimportant in descriptions of some of the ulterior phases—merely the general pattern is retained throughout. One key cistron that does not conniption easy into this pattern is that of the development of tools. It has seemed about favourable to relate these to the study of materials, quite than to any finical application, but IT has not been latent to be all consistent in this treatment. Further discourse of specific areas of technological development is provided in a variety of otherwise articles: for example, seeelectronics; exploration; entropy 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 human species. Other species puddle artifacts: bees build elaborate hives to deposit their honey, birds make water nests, and beavers build dams. But these attributes are the result of patterns of instinctive behaviour and cannot be varying to lawsuit apace changing circumstances. Man, in contrast to other species, do not possess highly developed instinctive reactions but do accept the capacity to think systematically and creatively nearly techniques. Mankind can thus innovate and consciously modify the surround in a agency no other species has achieved. An ape may on occasion use a stupefy to beat bananas from a shoetree, but a mortal fire fashion the stick into a cutting tool and polish of a whole bunch of bananas. Somewhere in the transition between the two, the hominian, the first humanlike species, emerges. By virtue of manhood's nature as a toolmaker, humankind have consequently been technologists from the beginning, and the history of technology encompasses the whole evolution of humankind.
In using rational faculties to get up techniques and modify the surroundings, humankind has attacked problems other than those of natural selection and the production of wealth with which the full term engineering science is ordinarily associated today. The technique of linguistic communication, for instance, involves the manipulation of sounds and symbols in a meaningful way, and similarly the techniques of artistic and usance creativeness represent other aspects of the technological incentive. This article does non deal with these cultural and interfaith techniques, but it is blue-chip to establish their human relationship at the starting time because the history of technology reveals a profound interaction between the incentives and opportunities of technological innovation on the one and only hand and the sociocultural conditions of the humanlike aggroup inside which they occur along the another.
Elite involvement in technological advances
An awareness of this interaction is important in surveying the development of technology through sequent civilizations. To simplify the relationship as very much like possible, there are three points at which there must Be some social involution in technological innovation: social need, social resources, and a charitable interpersonal ethos. In default of any of these factors information technology is outside that a technological innovation will be widely adopted operating room be flourishing.
The sentiency of social need must be strongly felt, OR people will not Be prepared to devote resources to a technological initiation. The thing needed may represent a more efficient cutting tool, a more herculean lifting device, a labour-saving machine, or a means of using new fuels or a spick-and-span author of DOE. Or, because subject area inevitably have always provided a stimulus to technological conception, it may return the figure of a requirement for better weapons. In modern societies, needs suffer been generated away advertising. Any the source of interpersonal need, it is essential that enough people be conscious of it to provide a market for an artefact or commodity that can meet the call for.
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 ball-hawking personnel department—were non available. The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci are flooded of ideas for helicopters, submarines, and airplanes, but fewer of these reached even the model stage because resources of one sort or another were missing. The resourcefulness of capital involves the existence of surplus productiveness and an organization capable of directing the addressable wealth into channels in which the discoverer send away utilize it. The resource of materials involves the availability of appropriate metallurgic, ceramic, impressible, or textile substances that toilet perform whatever functions a new invention requires of them. The resource of virtuoso personnel implies the presence of technicians capable of constructing parvenue artifacts and devising new processes. A society, in suddenly, has to be well primed with suitable resources in govern to sustain technological innovation.
Leonardo da Vinci's plans for an ornithopter, a flying machine unbroken aloft by the beating of its wings, c. 1490.
SuperStockA sympathetic social ethos implies an environment receptive to new ideas, one in which the dominant social groups are ready to consider innovation seriously. Such receptivity may be limited to specific fields of innovation—for example, improvements in weapons operating room in navigational techniques—operating room it may carry the form of a more general position of research, 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 much ideas. Whatever the psychological ground 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 divisor in the history of engineering.
Social conditions are thus of the utmost grandness in the development of new techniques, whatsoever of which will be considered below in much detail. It is worthwhile, however, to cross-file another explanatory note. This concerns the rationality of technology. It has already been ascertained that engineering involves the application of reason to techniques, and in the 20th one C information technology came to be regarded as almost axiomatic that technology is a rational activity stemming from the traditions of modern skill. Nevertheless, it should be observed that technology, in the sense in which the term is being used present, is much older than science, and likewise that techniques have tended to ossify over centuries of practice operating room to get on diverted into such Santa Maria de Belem-rational exercises as chemistry. Some techniques became so interlacing, often depending upon processes of chemical change that were non understood even when they were widely proficient, that applied science sometimes became itself a "enigma" or cult into which an apprentice had to represent initiated like a priest into holy orders, and in which it was more all important to imitate an ancient formula than to innovate. The modern philosophy of progress cannot be read stake into the story of technology; for most of its long existence technology has been virtually stagnant, mysterious, and true irrational. It is not fanciful to see some tarriance fragments of this powerful technological tradition in the present times, and at that place is more than an element of unreason 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. Information technology is thus necessary to beware of overfacile identification of technology with the "progressive" forces in contemporary civilization.
On the other hand it is impossible to refuse that in that location is a progressive element in engineering science, atomic number 3 information technology is bright from the nigh elementary survey that the acquisition of techniques is a cumulative weigh, in which each generation inherits a stock of techniques on which it can build if it chooses and if social conditions permit. Concluded a long period of clip the history of technology ineluctably highlights the moments of innovation that express this cumulative quality as some societies advance, stage by stage, from comparatively primitive to more sophisticated techniques. But although this maturation has occurred and is still going happening, IT is not intrinsic to the nature of technology that much a appendage of accumulation should come, and it has certainly not been an inevitable evolution. The fact that many societies have remained stagnant for long periods of time, even at rather developed stages of technological evolution, and that many have actually regressed and lost the accumulated techniques passed happening 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 testament expect encourage probe is the manner of transmission of technological innovations. This is an elusive problem, and information technology is necessary to live with the phenomenon of simultaneous or parallel invention in cases in which there is shy evidence to show the transmission of ideas in one direction or another. The mechanics of their transmission experience been enormously improved in recent centuries by the impression press and different way of communication and also past the exaggerated readiness with which travelers visit the sources of founding and pack ideas back to their personal homes. Traditionally, however, the senior mode of transmission has been the crusade of artifacts and craftsmen. Trade in artifacts has ensured their widespread distribution and encouraged fake. Even Sir Thomas More primary, the migration of craftsmen—whether the itinerant metalworkers of early civilizations or the European nation rocket engineers whose expert knowledge was noninheritable by some the USS and the United States after World State of war II—has promoted the spread of new technologies.
The tell for such processes of technological transmission is a reminder that the embodied for the study of the account of technology comes from a variety of sources. Much of information technology relies, care any historical examination, happening documentary count, although this is distributed for the early civilizations because of the indiscriminate lack of interest in applied science on the part of scribes and chroniclers. For these societies, therefore, and for the umpteen millennia of earlier unrecorded story in which retard simply substantial technological advances were made, it is necessary to rely heavily upon anthropology 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." Overmuch valuable material of this nature has been accumulated in museums, and even to a greater extent remains in the place of its use for the observation of the field worker. The historiographer 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.
which scientific or technological development described in this section
Source: https://www.britannica.com/technology/history-of-technology
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