UTArlingtonX-AP | Publish-Part_1.

1-Chronology-Four_Periods

PRANESH B.

Hi, welcome back. This is Pranesh Aswath, the Associate Dean at The College of

ASWATH:

Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. And the next two weeks, this
week and the next week, I will be focusing on the chronology of the innovations, the
inventions, and the discoveries, and the individuals who were responsible for these
innovations over the last 5,000 years. In order to do that, we can break up the
history of engineering into four distinctive periods.
The first period is what we call the pre-Industrial Revolution period, which is sort of a
catch-all time frame dating back to 3000 BC all the way to the middle part of the
18th century. So this is actually a very large time frame, almost 4,500 to 5,000
years, so the developments that occurred over this long time frame were
incremental. There were some significant developments that have happened in
3000 BC, 2000 BC in the area of civil engineering, construction structures and so
forth, but really the major areas of development happened during the next time
frame, which is the Industrial Revolution, which is a period that spanned from the
mid-part of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century with significant
innovations in the area of civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and the
transition from hobbyists and artists to what we consider today as scientific
professionals and the rise of industries.
However, the major industries of mass production as well as electrification
happened during the second Industrial Revolution, which started somewhere
around the middle part of the 19th century all the way to the mid-part of the 20th
century. And that led to the rise of various new classes of industries, for example,
mechanical industries, chemical industries, telecommunication industries, electrical
industries, and a lot of new innovations in the area of communications and radio
waves, television, automobiles, aircraft, and mass production. So we will focus on,
not just looking at the technologies that were developed in this time frame, but also
trying to understand who are the individuals who played a very critical role in the
development of these technologies.

And later, after the Second World War time frame, we are going to look at the
Information era, where the rise of semiconductors and, if you've been through a
translation to information technology and the control of robots and so forth and the
rise of fields such as mechatronics that happened towards the latter part of the 20th
century. And then we'll very briefly spend a few minutes talking about where we are
likely to be going in the 21st century. However, before we start breaking this whole
thing down and talking about each of these time frames, let me spend a little bit of
time looking at the chronology of human evolution and its relationship to
engineering as a field.
So if you look at early human migration, as all of us know, the early humans actually
came out of Africa, and you can categorize them into two groups. You have the
Homo erectus and the Homo sapiens, and we would be people who would be
considered to be descendants of Homo sapiens. And so when they came out of
Africa, there were several migration patterns. And this map that you see here is
actually a very interesting map that links together all of the archaeological sites,
where they've found early traces of Homo sapiens and Homo erectus.
And this time frame was really not a time frame of innovation. This was primarily
migration and survival, and this time frame dates back to over 1.6 million years ago
when the earliest fossil records of humans were excavated in Kenya, in Africa, all
the way down to around 10000 BC. So this very long time frame was one where
there was not very much, in terms of discovery, innovation and so forth.
So the 10000 BC time frame dates back to the Paleolithic period. That is the early
Stone Age period. That was the time frame with which innovation started to happen,
so what I will do in the next couple of slides is really look at innovations from the
point of view of material science and how that impacted human evolution as well as
the discovery of different types of mechanical, electrical, and other innovations that
would have resulted in mass manufacturing and other technologies that had a fairly
important role to play in the Industrial Revolution.
So when we go back again to 10000 BC, you have the Paleolithic period. We are

primarily humans at that time frame. We're food gatherers, and the primary
materials that they were working with were natural materials like leather and straw.
So the primary focus in that time frame was survival and protection from the
elements, and so the materials that were used were basically natural material.
There were no innovations in terms of new material development.
The next time frame we can look at is the Mesolithic, or the mid-Stone Age, period
from 10000 BC to around 4000 BC. We are transitioning from what we consider are
food gatherers to more as hunters. So when you're dealing with hunting, you need
to have weapons to hunt, so that's where the ability to use natural materials to make
weapons became possible. So the primary weapons of choice were bow and
arrows, which are made out of wood, and the tips of the arrows are made out of flint
or other types of stone.
This is also the time frame where fire was discovered, or in other words, humans in
that frame would actually be able to make fire on demand. And the choice of
material was critical. Using flint with chips and create sparks was critical to create
fire. So in those days, there were no innovations in materials, but rather, material
selection played a role, so the early Mesolithic humans would actually be able to
distinguish between flint and other types of stone. The Neolithic period or the New
Stone Age is between 4000 BC to 2000 BC, where humans transition from being
hunters to Stone Age food producers, so cultivation and society development
became important.
This is also the time frame for the rise of the Egyptian civilization around 3000 BC,
which we will talk a little bit later when we talk about the building of the great
pyramids. And in addition, in the Neolithic period was when gold was starting to be
used, which is rather interesting because gold is a novel metal and is very hard to
find, but it's also the only metal that exists in its pure form and doesn't have to be
purified, so that was the first metal to be used.
The Bronze Age comes right after the Neolithic period and dates from 2000 BC to
500 BC and also the rise of the Chinese civilization and the European civilization.

And at a later stage, we'll talk about what is bronze and how do you make bronze.
Bronze is really a mixture of copper and tin.
After the Bronze Age was the Iron Age. The Iron Age is from 500 BC to 1500 AD,
and one of the interesting aspects of bronze, even though copper and tin are less
plentiful in the earth's crust, came before the Iron Age. And the primary reason for
that is copper melts at 1,000 degrees, tin melts at 300 degrees, bronze can be
made at around 800 degrees centigrade, iron, on the other hand, can only be made
1,500 degrees centigrade, and the only reason that the Iron Age came after the
Bronze Age was because it's much harder to melt and extract iron than to make
bronze. There is a lot more iron in the earth's crust than there is copper and tin.
The transition from the Iron Age to the Steel Age occurred between 1500 AD to the
20th century. And the only difference between iron and steel is iron has a large
amount of carbon, steel has a small amount of carbon, so purification of iron took
several hundred years to master. And today we are living in what is known as the
Silicon Age or the Information Age. Where primarily silicon that is used and the
semiconductor is used to make transistors and other devices that are used for
calculations and information technology.
I'll spend just a few more minutes talking about the Mesolithic and Neolithic period
just to show you some artifacts from that time frame. And you can see here, for
example in the Mesolithic period, which is the middle Stone Age, there is not that
much definition in the stone pieces that were recovered from that time frame. When
you go to the Neolithic time frame, which is the New Stone Age, you can see that
these pieces of stone were actually polished and shaped to the shapes that they
want, whether it's an arrowhead or whether it is for the sake of digging or for the
sake of any other application. So there was a lot more refinement in how they used
the stone.
And this next slide here also shows examples of the Neolithic implement. You can
see that pieces of flint or other pieces of stone were actually sharpened so they
could be used as arrowheads or a digging implement or, for that mater, as axis. So

you have a wooden handle and a stone on the front, and that could be used as an
axe. And there are other examples of arrowheads that you see here, where these
are pieces of flint or other pieces of stone that were sharpened so that the could be
attached to the tip of a wooden arrow and could be used to hunt.
There are also-- during the Neolithic period, we started seeing the early stages of
pottery. This is an example of pottery from the Levant, which is in the Middle
Eastern region from seventh century BC. This show's fairly sophisticated ability to
make pottery in the shape of vessels for storage of water or food or the case of face
masks and so forth.
So to recap, we go back to four different time frames. They were the pre-Industrial
Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the second Industrial Revolution, and then
eventually, the Silicon Age. Or the Information Age in which we currently are living
in. So this sort of summarizes the four periods, and in the next section, we'll start
looking at the pre-Industrial Revolution period, and then transition to the different
time frames and look at all the innovations and discoveries that happened during
that time frame.