Historical Perspective of Technology

Technology refers to the application of science that is used to extend human capability, to achieve
something that seems almost impossible without its help. Come to think about the overwhelming
scenario technology is at today, it did not just happen overnight. It took thousands of years of hard
work and brainstorming of human civilization to take it to such a level. When studying the history
of mankind from the point of view of technological development, it is possible to distinguish seven
to some extent overlapping ages:

1. Fire Age: The age of nomadic hunter-gatherers, using tools and weapons fashioned from
easily available wood, bone or stone and able to induce and control fire.

2. Metal Age: The time when increasing specialization of tasks encouraged change in social
structures.

3. First Machine Age: Age of the first clocks and the printing press, when knowledge began
to be standardized and widely disseminated.

4. Intimation of Automation: The beginnings of quantity production when, with the early
application of steam power, the factory system began irreversibly to displace craft-based
manufacture.

5. Expansion of Steam Age: Full flowering of the Steam Age, affecting all areas of economic
and social life.

6. Age of Internal Combustion: The rapid spread of the internal combustion engine, which
within 50 years had virtually ousted steam as a primary source of power.

7. Electrical and Electronic Age: The present Age, which promises to change human life
more swiftly and more radically than any of its predecessors.
Here are brief descriptions of these ages highlighting the important inventions:
1. Fire Age

First Use of tools

The history of technology can be said to be older than man himself. Homo erectus and Homo
sapiens were the first to use tools. Australoplthecus was the first of man’s predecessors to walk
upright. This ability made available a pair of forelimbs and hence the ability to grasp sticks or
stones and later to fashion them for particular purposes and to sharpen them to a cutting edge. The
ability to fashion stone tools was followed by a further advance otherwise unknown in the animal
kingdom.

Invention of Fire
It is one of man’s most wonderful accomplishments and one which was to lead to innumerable
benefits. The first hominid known to have made fire was the Homo erectus in China. Many layers
of charcoal have been uncovered there in the caves that they used, indicating intermittent
occupation and fire making over a period of many years. This activity dates from about 600,000
BC.

The uses to which fire was put were many and may be summarized as: for warmth, for cooking,
for the curing of hides, for protection in scaring off wild animals, and as a focus for the social life
of the tribe after darkness had fallen. At a later period it was used also for hollowing out logs to
make primitive boats, and in firing pots, bricks and tiles, while the extraction of copper and iron
from their ores, the very bases of the metallurgical eras, and the subsequent working of those
metals into tools, weapons and ornaments, was entirely dependent on fire. The making of glass
objects was also based on the control of fire.

There were two principal methods of doing so, by impacting flint and iron or iron pyrites, and by
the generation of heat by the friction of a hard stick, or fire-drill, against a softwood block, or
hearth. While the flint (silicon dioxide) method seems the more likely to have occurred by chance
and is therefore likely to be the earlier, it does require the addition of dried grass or some other
suitable tinder to make a fire. On the other hand, the fire-drill, which would seem to imply a higher
degree of intellectual capacity for its conception, provides its own tinder from the friction of the
hard, pointed stick on the soft wood of the hearth.
 Development of Tools
The most primitive tools found in Kenya, called pebble tools, have been dated 2.6 million years
old. These include the characteristic core and flake tools; the flakes produced as waste in the
process of developing the core were put to good use, as many of them had sharp cutting edges.
Characteristically such core pebble tools were only flaked to produce a sharp edge at one end.

So-called hand axes, on the other hand, were bi-faced, that is to say, sharpened by flaking all
around the periphery. This was a general-purpose tool, serving not only as an axe but also for
piercing and scraping the hides of animals. From these basic knife blades a number of variants
have been found: gravers, spokeshaves, saw blades, planes and drills have been identified by
paleontologists.
Tool Making Method: The production of the basic core and flake tools was a skilled occupation
using one of two methods—
a. Pressure Flaking Method: In this method, a tool of bone, stone or even wood was pressed
against the core so as to split off a flake and the process was repeated.
b. Percussion Flaking Method: In percussion flaking a hammer stone was repeatedly struck
against the core or against an intermediate bone or wooden tool applied to its edge.

Cave Paintings
The impulse to create and the ability to produce images of animals (including men and women)
seems to date from late Palaeolithic times at least, that is before about 12,000 BC. Charcoal or
sometimes black oxide of manganese and the red and yellow oxides of iron, generally ground to a
powder and mixed with some fatty medium, were the colors generally used and probably represent
man’s first excursions into the world of chemistry as well as that of art. Mammoth, woolly
rhinoceros, bison, reindeer, horse, cave lion and bear have all been found in these paintings, mostly
of men fighting with bows and arrows.
2. Metal Age

Dawn of Agriculture
It started some time about 10,000 BC, when a great event took place— the end of the last Ice Age
when the melting ice flooded the land and brought to life a host of plants that had lain dormant in
seeds. Among these was wild wheat as well as wild goat grass. It was the accidental cross-
fertilization of these that led to the much more fruitful bread wheat, probably the first plant to be
sown as a crop, which was harvested.

Domestication of Animals

The people domesticated dog, the sheep, the goat and the onager, a form of donkey, were added to
the domestic animals. Some of them were used for agricultural purposes.

Invention of potter wheel

Pottery was made on the newly invented potter’s wheel. A simple turntable mounted on a central
pivot was turned by an assistant so that the potter had both hands free with which to manipulate
the clay. It originated about 3500 BC in Mesopotamia.

Invention of Copper and Iron

Copper ore was mined first at Mount Sinai as early as 5000 BC and 2000 years later in Oman in
the south of Arabia. Copper, as later bronze, was something of a rarity and consequently expensive.
Copper tools, and weapons, thus became available only to the powerful.
On the other hand, iron became more widely available than copper or bronze because it was far
cheaper and could be made into much better and longer lasting tools and weapons. Iron has rightly
been called the democratic metal, the metal of the people.

Division of Labor
Metal workers were a class of specialists who needed specialist equipment and who depended for
their sustenance on the labors of their fellow men, the farming community for whom they provided
the tools. The construction of furnaces and the manufacture of crucibles were to become other
objects of specialization. In this age, it became obvious that people who are good at something
should do it to increase efficiency.
 Glass Making
Until the plastics age of the twentieth century, and many might say into and beyond it, glass was
the ultimate material for making containers. It resists all substances— except hydrofluoric acid.
The earliest manmade glass is dated at about 4000 BC in Egypt, as a simple glaze on beads. A
great advance was the blowing iron, allowing larger and thinner vessels to be made. This originated
in the first century under the Romans.

Gearing
Aristotle recorded seeing a train of friction wheels set in motion that is a series of contiguous
wheels with smooth peripheries but without teeth. Ctesibius of Alexandria is said to have
constructed a water-clock with gears about 150 BC. In this, a primitive rack was mounted on a
floating drum and meshed with a circular drum so as to rotate it. This is the earliest reference to
toothed gearing, but no mention is made of the materials used. Gearing, then, developed in two
materials—in wood for large installations transmitting power; and in metal, usually bronze or brass
initially, for timekeeping and other related astronomical instruments.

Early Machines in Egypt

Egyptians classified five basic machines: the lever, the wheel and axle, the wedge, the pulley and
the screw, but the first three of these had been in common use since about 3000 BC.

3. First Machine Age

Early Time-keeping
The history of timekeeping, at least by mechanical means, is very much the history of scientific
instrument making. Water-clocks, together with sand hour glasses were the first time measuring
devices which could be used in the absence of the sun but they first had to be calibrated using
sundials. The sand hourglass had one advantage over the water-clock that it did not freeze up in a
cold climate. On the other hand, it was subject to moisture absorption until the glassmaker’s art
became able to seal the hourglasses. Great care was taken to dry the sand before sealing it in the
glass.
 Mechanical Clocks
Mechanical clocks, in the West, were made at first for monasteries and other religious houses
where prayers had to be said at set hours of the day and night. At first they were relatively small
alarms to wake the person whose job it was to sound the bell which would summon the monks to
prayer. Larger monastic clocks, which sounded a bell that all should hear, still had no dials nor any
hands.

More Improvement on Clocks

The most remarkable clock of the age was that completed by Giovanni di Dondi in 1364 after
sixteen years’ work. Giovanni, whose father Jacopo is credited with the invention of the dial in
1344, was lecturer in astronomy at Padua University and in medicine at Florence and also personal
physician to the Emperor Charles IV. He fortunately left a very full manuscript describing in detail
his remarkable clock from which modern replicas have been made.

Galileo’s observations of the swinging altar lamp in the cathedral of Pisa marked the start of the
use of the pendulum as a means of controlling the speed of clocks. The Dutch astronomer Christian
Huygens turned this knowledge to good effect when he built the first pendulum clock in 1656.

Marine Clocks
Accurate clocks that could run at sea were essential to mariners for establishing longitude. Such a
clock was made by John Harrison in 1761 and enabled him to win a £10,000 prize offered by the
British government. On a nine-week trip to Jamaica, it was only five seconds out, equivalent to
1.25 minutes of longitude.

Invention of Telescope
The telescope originated, so history relates, in the shop of Johannes Lippershey, a spectacle maker
of Middleburg, in 1608. Two children playing in this unlikely environment put two lenses in line,
one before the other, and found the weathervane on the distant church tower miraculously
magnified. Lippershey confirmed this and, mounting the lenses in a tube, started making telescopes
commercially.
 Invention of Microscope
The true inventor of the microscope is not known, there being several claimants to the invention.
But Zacharias Jansen is a possible candidate.

Remarkable Achievement in Metrology

The surveyor’s quadrant is an instrument of particular importance, for it was the first to which
Pierre Vernier’s scale was fixed so that an observer could read an angle to an accuracy of one
minute of arc. The invention dates from 1631.

Development of Crank Mechanism

An important development in the middle Ages was that of mechanisms for the inter-conversion of
rotary and reciprocating motions. The cam had been known to the Greeks. In the early middle ages
the crank came into use. About AD 850 the same simple mechanism was applied to the grindstone
for sharpening swords. In the fourteenth century it was used to apply tension to the strings of the
crossbow, while it was frequently to be found in the carpenter’s brace. Other applications were in
flour mills and looms.

Invention of Printing Press

One of the greatest inventions of the middle ages was the printing process devised by Johannes
Gutenberg, a goldsmith of Mainz in Germany, about 1440. It involved the mechanical processes
of cutting punches of brass or copper and later of iron, each of a single letter; the stamping of the
punches into copper plate to form the molds into which the molten type metal of tin, lead and
antimony could be cast. The stems of all the letters were of the same cross-sections and the same
height, so that they could be assembled in any order and were interchangeable. They were then
clamped in trays to form blocks of type to make up pages, inked and then pressed against sheets
of paper in a screw press. There were 1050 printing presses in Europe after the first publication by
Gutenberg came out. The first book printed in England was by William Caxton at his press in
Westminster in 1474.
4. Age of Intimation of Automation

Modification of Coining Process

Coinage originated long before Gutenberg, as early as the sixth century BC. Herodotus writes that
King Croesus was the first to use gold and silver coins, in Lydia. About AD 1000, coin blanks
were formed from sheets of metal, hammered to the right thickness and then cut into strips. Not
until after 1500 did Bramante of Florence introduce the screw press for coining. A further
sixteenth-century development was the use of small rolling mills, not only to standardize the blank
thickness but with the dies, circular-faced in the rolling axis, set into pockets in the rolls.

Industrial Revolution
When the new machines arrived: lathe, machines for boring, milling, shaping, slotting, planning,
grinding and gear-cutting, they were all operated by a steam engine or, at least, a water wheel,
either of which could be able to drive a number of machines: a factory. It thus became necessary
for the workers to travel daily from their homes to a central place of work. With the steam engine
as a power source, factory masters were no longer constrained to set up their enterprises on the
banks of fast-flowing rivers or streams. Instead of being spaced out along the river banks so as to
take advantage of the available water power, factories could now huddle together as close as was
convenient to their owners. Regular working hours were introduced and penalties strictly enforced
for failure to keep to them. Thus, were founded Britain’s major industrial cities, Liverpool,
Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds…Nottingham, Birmingham.

First Look at Computer

Charles Babbage, at one time Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, devoted a great
deal of his time to calculating figures, astronomical, statistical, actuarial and others. He devoted
much of his life to the design and attempted manufacture of, first, a Difference Engine, which he
started in 1823, and then, from 1834, an Analytical Engine. The former was a special-purpose
calculating machine, the latter a universal or multi-purpose calculator. His machines were purely
mechanical and the precision needed in their manufacture was almost beyond impossible. He died
a disillusioned man, but left behind him thousands of drawings that contain the basic principles
upon which modern computers are built. Gears, cams and ratchets could not do what transistors or
even the diode valve was capable of. The computer had to wait for the age of electronics.
5. Expansion of Steam Age

Experimentation with Steam

In 1606, Francesco Della Porta demonstrated the suction caused by condensing steam and its power
to draw up water. In 1643, Evangelista Torricelli demonstrated the vacuum in a mercury
barometer. Otto von Guericke, Mayor of Magdeburg, in 1654 performed his most dramatic
experiment in which two teams of eight horses were shown to be unable to pull apart two halves
of a copper sphere from which the air had been exhausted by an air pump to leave a vacuum.
Atmospheric pressure held them together. In 1660, Robert Boyle formulated the Gas Laws and
demonstrated the maximum height that water could be drawn by a suction pump. Denis Papin, a
Huguenot refugee from France, worked for Robert Boyle and later, in the early 1690s, constructed
a small atmospheric steam engine.

Improvement of Steam Engine

Thomas Newcomen was the first designer of steam engines. But he could not make it work because
he was using one exhaust vessel. James Watt improved on this model. He used separate exhaust
vessels, a mechanism that made the steam engine to work. He was patented for this in 1769.

Building of Railway Industry

The effects of the ‘railway mania’, which reached its height in 1845–6, were many, various, sudden
and dramatic. Providing employment for thousands of surveyors, engineers and clerks, it changed
the landscape of Britain and earned fortunes for contractors and investors. They popularized
seaside and other holiday resorts and improved communications by their use of the telegraph. More
and more people travelled, many of whom had never travelled outside their own villages before.
Lastly, they were excellent for the rapid transport of freight. The supremacy of the railways for
carrying both passengers and freight was to last until early in the twentieth century, when the
internal combustion engine began to be made in large quantities.
6. Freedom of Internal Combustion Age

Early Internal Combustion Engines

In 1884, Gottlieb Daimler built and ran the first of his light high-speed petrol engines and in
1885; Carl Benz built his first three-wheeled car. In 1892, Rudolph Diesel patented his ‘universal
economic engine’, thereby completing the base upon which modern road transport runs. The
internal combustion engine, petrol or oil fueled, effectively ended the supremacy of the steam
locomotive for long distance transport, as well as contributing towards marine propulsion and other
applications

Improvements of Motor Vehicles

Henry Ford started making his first ‘product for the people’, the Ford Model ‘A’ in 1903. Motor
cars were luxury commodities. Ransom Olds had the same idea in 1899, but his success was
nothing like that of Ford.

First Successful Aeroplane Experiment

On 17 December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew some 165m (540ft) in twelve seconds, the
culmination of four years of experiments with kites and gliders and even longer in theoretical
studies. Unable to find a suitable engine on the market, they had built one to their own
specification, an in-line 4-cylinder giving about 9kW (12hp) at 1200rpm with an aluminum
crankcase.

7. Electrical and Electronic Age

Research on Electricity
Electricity, which was to do so much to change the world, had long been the subject of
experimental investigations, at least since William Gilbert wrote his De Magnete in 1600 (‘On the
magnet and magnetic bodies, and on the great magnet, the earth’). In this book of his, he researched
about magnetism and static electricity and distinguished between them.
 Invention of First Battery
Alessandro Volta, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Pavia some two hundred years later, took a
series of discs of zinc and silver separated by moist cardboard and arranged alternately to form a
pile. This Voltaic pile was the first true battery, a static source of electric power.

Invention of Electromagnetism
Michael Faraday showed in 1831 that an electric current can be generated in a wire by the
movement of a magnet near it and constructed a machine for producing a continuous supply of
electricity, i.e. the first electric generator. Many other scientists repeated his experiments and
produced similar machines. The substitution of electromagnets for permanent magnets by
Wheatstone and Cooke in 1845 was the final step to bringing about the dynamo.

Development of Electric Bulbs

The development of the incandescent light bulb independently by T.A. Edison in the USA and by
J. W. Swan in England brought public lighting by electricity into the realms of reality. Incandescent
bulbs ran on the mechanism that the copper filament used here will light up eventually as a result
of extensive heating. During 1881-1889, electrical industries were being built up enormously.

Revolution through Electronics

The science of electronics could be said to have started with the invention of the thermionic valve
by J.A. Fleming, patented in 1904. Designed at first as radio wave detectors in early wireless sets,
thermionic valves made use of the effect that Edison had noted with his carbon filament lamps, a
bluish glow arising from a current between the two wires leading to the filament. The current
flowed in the opposite direction to the main current in the filament, allowing current to flow in
only one direction, from cathode to anode. This was the diode and was followed in a short time by
Lee de Forest’s triode in America.
After the invention of diodes and triodes, there were transistors, ICs, Optoelectronic Devices,
Resistors, Capacitors, Triac, BJT, MOSFET, Op-Amps etc. that quite changed the picture. All
these became possible because of man’s never-ending quest for knowledge.