STS in the Ancient

Times
The shift from nomadic life to farming led to the
development of cities:
Network of transportations

Specialized labor

Government and religion

Social class
Nineteenth Century
Invention of textile manufacturing
machines
 Division of labor
 Increase in production
 Crowded cities
 Unsafe and unhealthy working
conditions
Twentieth Century
 Invention of automobiles
 Status symbol
 Harsh, crowded city conditions
HEALTH
Penicillin – Alexander Fleming
- Friday, September 28, 1928
- Penicillium notatum
- The challenge of mass- producing
this drug was daunting. On March
14, 1942, the first patient was
treated for streptococcal
septicemia with US-made penicillin
produced by Merck & Co
Major influence on Society
Egypt – papyrus and hieroglyphics
papyrus- a thick type of
paper made from the pith of
the papyrus plant, Cyperus
papyrus. Papyrus can also
refer to a document written
on sheets of papyrus joined
together side by side and
rolled up into a scroll, an
early form of a book
 Papyrus
 was first manufactured in Egypt as far back as the 4TH millennium BCE
 The earliest archaeological evidence of papyrus was excavated in 2012 and 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, an
ancient Egyptian harbor located on the Red
Sea coast. These documents date from 2560–2550 BCE (end of the reign of Khufu).
 The papyrus rolls describe the last years of building the Great Pyramid of Giza.
 In the first centuries BCE and CE, papyrus scrolls gained a rival as a writing surface in the form of
parchment, which was prepared from animal
skins. Early Christian writers soon adopted the codex form, and in the Greco-
Roman world, it became common to cut sheets from papyrus rolls to form codices
  a formal writing system used by
the ancient Egyptians that combined
logographic and alphabetic
elements
 Egyptians used cursive
hieroglyphs for religious
literature on papyrus and wood
 Early hieroglyphs date back to
somewhere between 3,400 and 3,200
BCE and continued to be used up until
Hieroglyphs - a character about 400 CE, when non-Christian
of the ancient Egyptian temples were closed and their
writing system monumental use was no longer
necessary
Ancient Babylonia – cuneiform
 one of the earliest
systems of writing
, distinguished by
its wedge-shaped marks
on clay tablets, made by means
of a blunt stylus ( tool for
writing)
 This was in use for more than
three millennia, through several
stages of development, from the
34th century BC down to the
second century CE
 Ancient Greece – public speaking, persuasive rhetoric, drama, and
philosophy

Rhetoric - an art that aims to

improve the capability of
writers or speakers to inform,
most likely to persuade, or
motivate particular audiences
in specific situations. As a
subject of formal study and a
productive civic practice,
rhetoric has played a central
role in the European tradition
 the study of rhetoric continued to be central to the study of the
verbal arts; but the study of the verbal arts went into decline for
several centuries, followed eventually by a gradual rise in formal
education, culminating in the rise of medieval universities

 Late medieval rhetorical writings include those of St. Thomas

Aquinas (1225?–1274)

17TH CENTURY
 FRANCIS BACON (1561–1626) - contributed to the field in his writings
 One of the concerns of the age was to find a suitable style for the
discussion of scientific topics, which needed above all a clear exposition
of facts and arguments, rather than the ornate style favored at the time
 “The Advancement of Learning” criticized those who are preoccupied
with style rather than "the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness
of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment."
 On matters of style, he proposed that the style conform to the subject
matter and to the audience, that simple words be employed whenever
possible, and that the style should be agreeable
ANCIENT ROME
Roman alphabet, is a writing system originally used to write
the Latin Language
 The Greek alphabet has descended from
the Phoenician abjad while the Phoenician alphabet is derived
from Egyptian hieroglyphics
 The Etruscans who ruled early Rome adopted and modified the
Cumaean Greek alphabet.
 The Etruscan alphabet was in turn adopted and further modified
by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.
Archaic Latin alphabet

As
Old
𐌀 𐌁 𐌂 𐌃 𐌄 𐌅 𐌆 𐌇 𐌉 𐌊 𐌋 𐌌 𐌍 𐌏 𐌐 𐌒 𐌓 𐌔 𐌕 𐌖 𐌗
Ital
ic
As
Lati A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X
n
 It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨W⟩ (originally
a ligature of two ⟨V⟩s) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent
sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval
Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating
⟨I⟩ and ⟨U⟩ as vowels, and ⟨J⟩ and ⟨V⟩ as consonants, become
established

the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the

Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press
MODERN EUROPE – THE PRINTING PRESS
 one of the most influential
events in the second
millennium revolutionizing the
way people conceive and
describe the world they live in,
and ushering in the period of
modernity
 invented in the Holy Roman
Empire by the German
Johannes Gutenberg around
1440
 By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western
Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes

 In the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their

output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies

 In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type

printing introduced the era of mass communication which
permanently altered the structure of society
Wine Press paper codex of the acclaimed
42- line Bible, Gutenberg's major
work
The Printing Revolution
 The Printing Revolution occurred when the spread of the printing press facilitated
the wide circulation of information and ideas, acting as an "agent of change"
through the societies that it reached

 In the period from 1518 to 1524, the publication of books in Germany alone
skyrocketed sevenfold; between 1518 and 1520, Luther's tracts were distributed
in 300,000 printed copies

 The rapidity of typographical text production, as well as the sharp fall in unit costs,
led to the issuing of the first newspapers, which opened up an entirely new field for
conveying up-to-date information to the public
MODERN WORLD – WORLD WIDE WEB
 Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a global hyperlinked information
system became a possibility by the second half of the
1980s (“mesh”)

 By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe

 hypertext enthusiast, Robert Cailliau, published a more formal proposal

on 12 November 1990 to build a "Hypertext project" called
"WorldWideWeb" as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by
browsers using a client-server architecture
CERN servers