Technology: A World History
Today technology has created a world of dazzling progress, growing disparities of wealth and poverty, and looming threats to the environment. Technology: A World History offers an illuminating backdrop to our present moment–a brilliant history of invention around the globe. Historian Daniel R. Headrick ranges from the Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution and the electronic revolution of the recent past. In tracing the growing power of humans over nature through increasingly powerful innovations, he compares the evolution of technology in different parts of the world, providing a much broader account than is found in other histories of technology. We also discover how small changes sometimes have dramatic results–how, for instance, the stirrup revolutionized war and gave the Mongols a deadly advantage over the Chinese. And how the nailed horseshoe was a pivotal breakthrough for western farmers. Enlivened with many illustrations, Technology offers a … More >>
Tagged with: History • Technology • World
This is hardly a book, it’s a list. Further, it looks and feels like the user’s manual of some over-designed computer gadget, complete with naff cover and hideous font. Sadly it does not switch to german or japanese half way through.
The author boasts of writing a world history as if the world was currently short of such things. So we learn (though not on the same page) that clay tablets were invented in Mesopotomia, papyrus in Egypt, paper in China, the printing press in Germany, the world wide web in Switzerland. We also learn that bipedalism and opposable thumbs were inventions rather than random mutations.Eh? Apparently language is also an invention, though some might say it was the result of freeing the throat through an upright stance.
The relentlessly chronological approach leaves no room for discussion of themes. What was the influence of the Domesday Book (surely one of the greatest ever inventions), the land registry, the Ordnance Survey? Without them property rights would hardly exist, so neither would ownership of ideas. The Patent Office is just assumed to be a good thing, but this is arguable. 95% of patents don’t get exploited, improvements have to wait for the expiry of the master patent, some inventions (military ones) never are published, and the patenting process is ludicrously expensive and obscurantist. Why not simply replace it with a royalty board, which might at least protect Amazonian tribes who see no benefit from the current craze of big pharma to harvest every obscure plant in the rain forest in case it contains a useful (and synthesisable, patentable) chemical? These and many other questions are never addressed. The big question: how much technology is to thank or blame for our current wealth or ill; is never asked.
This might not matter if the list was reliable, but before transforming this book into a frisbee I found a few howlers which makes me suspicious of the rest. Sheep were not domesticated for their wool. It took thousands of years to breed in. Watt’s governor of the steam engine was unreliable, based on a misunderstanding, and didn’t work. Stopping engines exploding, and making them turn at a certain speed irrespective of load, had to wait for Maxwell’s intellectual breakthrough in 1868.
Who’s this book for? It’s neither use nor ornament, and you can get more from a google search or wikipedia. For a discussion of themes and issues, there are better books around which don’t rely on the reader’s knowledge that toilet paper was invented by the Chinese in the first millennium. (But thanks for that info all the same, Mr Headrick.)
Daniel Headrick has provided a slim (179 pages including index, notes, etc.) overview of the history of technology, from the Stone Age through today. Essentially it’s an executive summary of six thousand years of the history of technology (not counting the Stone Age as history).
This is the book’s strength and weakness. The strength is that you can quickly read a top line review of the evolution of technology and the societies that invented or exploited it. He looks at where certain technologies were invented, how they moved from one civilization to another, and how they were exploited and by whom. Another good thing about the book is that although it’s about technology the author addresses the fact that technology is not necessarily the driver in whether or not a civilization is successful. He points out that geography, climate, governments, religion, and peoples’ attitudes towards technology often impact invention and exploitation.
At the same time he doesn’t focus on any one civilization. He reviews technologies as they impacted, or not, all the major civilizations around the world. It’s not Euro-centric, but it also goes beyond China and the Arabs to discuss early American and African civilizations – all at a very high level.
The weakness is that it lacks depth and rarely provides context. In fact, the last chapter, covering WWII through the present, is nothing more than a laundry list of technological advances in the last 70 years without any historical analysis or context. The author acknowledges that, “it is difficult to draw conclusions from events that are still happening,” but it’s almost as if it’s an excuse to not provide any analysis of the period.
Is the book worth the money? Tough call….you either have to be very interested in the subject and have a desire to keep up with the literature, or you’re new to the subject and want nothing more than an abridged version for you to to want to have this book.