History of Technology full information


History of Technology

SAINT- LAURENT-DE-LA-PLAINE, France( AP) — If a time trip was possible, medieval carpenters would surely be amazed to see how woodworking ways they innovated in erecting Notre Dame Cathedral further than 800 times agone

             are being used again a moment to rebuild the world- notorious monument's fire- destroyed roof.   clearly, the reverse is true for the ultramodern- day carpenters using medieval-period chops. Working with hand axes to fashion hundreds of tons of oak shafts for the frame of Notre Dame's new roof has, for them, been like rewinding time. It's given them a new appreciation of their forerunners'  work that pushed the architectural envelope back in the 13th century.   “ It’s a little mind-bending occasionally," says Peter Henrikson, one of the carpenters. He says there are times when he is whacking mallet on a chisel that he finds himself allowing about medieval counterparts who were cutting"  principally the same  common 900 times agone

            . ”   “ It’s fascinating, ” he says." We presumably are in some ways allowing the same effects. ”   The use of hand tools to rebuild the roof that dears turned into ashes in 2019 is a deliberate, considered choice, especially since power tools would really have done the work more snappily. The end is to pay homage to the astounding artificer of the edifice's original builders and to ensure that the centuries-old art of hand-fashioning wood lives on.   

“ We want to restore this edifice as it was erected in the Middle periods," says Jean- Louis Georgelin, the retired French army general who's overseeing the reconstruction.   “ It's a way to be faithful to the(  work) of all the people who erected all the extraordinary monuments in France. ”   Facing a tight deadline to renew the edifice by December 2024, carpenters and engineers are also using computer design and other ultramodern technologies to speed the reconstruction. Computers were used in the delineation of detailed plans for carpenters, to help ensure that their hand-chiseled shafts fit together impeccably.   

“ Traditional carpenters had a lot of that in their head, ” Henrikson notes. It's" enough amazing to suppose about how they did this with what they had, the tools and technology that they had at the time. ”   The 61- time-old American is from Grand Marais, Minnesota. The bulk of the other crafters working on the timber frame are French.   The roof reconstruction hit an important corner in May, when a large corridor of the new timber frame was assembled and erected at a factory in the Loire Valley, in western France.   The dry run assured engineers that the frame is fit for purpose. The coming time it's put together will be atop the edifice. 

Unlike in medieval times, it'll be trucked into Paris and lifted by a mechanical crane into position. Some 1,200 trees have been felled for the work.  " The ideal we had was to restore to its original condition the rustic frame structure that faded during the fire of April 15, 2019," says mastermind Remi Fremont, who did detailed delineations of the original frame in 2012.   The rebuilt frame “ is the same rustic frame structure of the 13th century, ” he says. “ We've exactly the same material oak. We have the same tools, with the same axes that were used, exactly the same tools. We have the same know-  style. And soon, it'll return to its same place. ”   “ It is, ” he adds, “ a real rejuvenation. ”    John Leicester contributed to this report from Paris.

The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques and is one of the categories of world history. Technology can refer to methods ranging from as simple as stone tools to the complex genetic engineering and information technology that has emerged since the 1980s. The term technology comes from the Greek word techne, meaning art and craft, and the word logos, meaning word and speech. It was first used to describe applied arts, but it is now used to describe advancements and changes which affect the environment around us.

New knowledge has also enabled people to create new things, and conversely, many scientific endeavors are made possible by technologies that assist humans in traveling to places they could not previously reach, and by scientific instruments by which we study nature in more detail than our natural senses allow.

Since much of technology is applied science, technical history is connected to the history of science. Since the technology uses resources, technical history is tightly connected to economic history. From those resources, technology produces other resources, including technological artifacts used in everyday life. Technological change affects and is affected by, a society's cultural traditions. It is a force for economic growth and a means to develop and project economic, political, and military power and wealth.


history of technology, the development over time of methodical ways for making and doing effects. The term technology, a combination of the Greek technÄ“, “ art, craft, ” with ensigns, “ word, speech, ” meant in Greece a  converse on the trades, both fine and applied. When it first appeared in English in the 17th century, it was used to mean a discussion of the applied trades only, and gradationally these “  trades ” themselves came to be the object of the designation. By the early 20th century the term embraced a growing range of means, processes, and ideas in addition to tools and machines. By mid-century technology was defined by similar expressions as “ the means or exertion by which man seeks to change or manipulate his terrain. 

” Indeed similar broad delineations have been blamed by spectators who point out the added difficulty of distinguishing between scientific inquiry and technological exertion.   A  largely compressed account of the history of technology similar to this one must borrow a rigorous methodological pattern if it's to do justice to the subject without grossly distorting it one way or another. The plan followed in the present composition is primarily chronological, tracing the development of technology through phases that succeed each 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 development in recent centuries; Eastern technology is considered in this composition in the main only as it relates to the development of ultramodern technology.   

Within each chronological phase, a standard system has been espoused for surveying the technological experience and inventions. This begins with a brief review of the general social conditions of the period under discussion and also goes on to consider the dominant accouterments and sources of power of the period, and their operation to food products, manufacturing assiduity,  erecting construction, transport and dispatches, military technology, and medical technology. In a final section, the sociocultural consequences of technological change in the period are examined.

 This frame is modified according to the particular conditions of every period —  conversations of new accouterments, for case,  enthrall a substantial place in the accounts of earlier phases when new essence was being introduced but are comparatively insignificant in descriptions of some of the after phases but the general pattern is retained throughout. One crucial factor that doesn't fit fluently into this pattern is the development of tools. It has sounded most accessible to relate these to the study of accoutrements, rather than to any particular operation, but it has not been possible to be fully harmonious in this treatment. Further discussion of specific areas of technological development is handed in a variety of other papers for illustration, see electronics;  disquisition; information processing.   

1. General considerations   

Basically,  ways are styles of creating new tools and products of tools, and the capacity for constructing similar vestiges is a determining specific of humanlike species. Other species make vestiges notions make elaborate hives to deposit their honey,  catcalls make nests, and beavers make heads. But these attributes are the result of patterns of spontaneous geste 

             and can not be varied to suit fleetly changing circumstances. mortal beings, in discrepancy to other species, don't retain largely advanced spontaneous responses but do have the capacity to suppose totally and creatively about ways. Humans can therefore introduce and purposely modify the terrain in a way no other species has achieved. A ham may on occasion use a stick to beat bananas from a tree, but a person can fashion the stick into a  slice tool and remove a whole bunch of bananas. nearly in the transition between the two, the hominid, the first humanlike species, emerges. By virtue of humanity’s nature as a toolmaker, humans have thus been technologists from the morning, and the history of technology encompasses the whole elaboration of humankind.  

 In using rational faculties to concoct ways and modify the terrain, humankind has attacked problems other than those of survival and the product of wealth with which the term technology is generally associated moment. The fashion of language, for illustration, involves the manipulation of sounds and symbols in a meaningful way, and also the ways of cultural and ritual creativity represent other aspects of the technological incitement. This composition doesn't deal with these artistic and religious ways, but it's precious to establish their relationship at the onset because the history of technology reveals a profound commerce between the impulses and openings of technological invention on the one hand and the sociocultural conditions of the mortal group within which they do on the other.   

2. Social involvement in technological advances 

  Mindfulness of this commerce is important in surveying the development of technology through consecutive societies. To simplify the relationship as much as possible, there are three points at which there must be some social involvement in technological invention social need, social coffers, and a sympathetic social morality. In the dereliction of any of these factors, it's doubtful that a technological invention will be extensively espoused or be successful.  

The sense of social need must be explosively felt, or people won't be prepared to devote coffers to a technological invention. The thing demanded may be a more effective slice tool, a more important lifting device, a labor-saving machine, or a means of using new energies or a new source of energy. Or, because military requirements have always handed encouragement to the technological invention, it may take the form of a  demand for better munitions.

 In ultramodern societies,  requirements have been generated by advertising. Whatever the source of social need, it's essential that enough people be conscious of it to  give a  request for an artifact or commodity that can meet the need.

Social coffers are also a necessary prerequisite to a successful invention. numerous inventions have foundered because the social coffers vital for their consummation the capital, accoutrements , and professed labor force were not available. The scrapbooks of Leonardo da Vinci are full of ideas for copters, submarines, and airplanes, but many of these reached indeed the model stage because coffers of one sort or another were lacking. The resource of capital involves the actuality of fat productivity and an association able of directing the available wealth into channels in which the innovator can use it. 

The resource of accoutrements  involves the vacuity of applicable metallurgical, ceramic, plastic, or cloth substances that can perform whatever functions a new invention requires of them. The resource of the professed labor force implies the presence of technicians able of constructing new vestiges and contriving new processes. A society, in short, has to be well-primed with suitable coffers in order to sustain technological invention.  

 A sympathetic social morality implies a terrain open to new ideas, one in which the dominant social groups are prepared to consider invention seriously. similar receptivity may be limited to specific fields of invention — for illustration, advancements in munitions or in nautical ways or it may take the form of a  further generalized station of inquiry, as was the case among the artificial middle classes in Britain during the 18th century, who were willing to cultivate new ideas and formulators, the breeders of similar ideas. 

Whatever the cerebral base of inventive genius, there can be no doubt that the actuality of socially important groups willing to encourage formulators and to use their ideas has been a  pivotal factor in the history of technology.   Social conditions are therefore of the utmost significance in the development of new ways, some of which will be considered below in further detail. It's worthwhile,  still, to register another explicatory note. 

This concerns the rationality of technology. It has formerly been observed that technology involves the operation of reason to ways, and in the 20th century, it came to be regarded as  nearly self-evident that technology is a rational exertion stemming from the traditions of ultramodern wisdom. nonetheless, it should be observed that technology, in the sense in which the term is being used then, is much aged than wisdom, and also that ways have tended to ossify over centuries of practice or to come diverted into similar para-rational exercises as witchcraft. Some ways came so complex,  frequently depending upon processes of chemical change that weren't understood indeed when they were extensively rehearsed, that technology occasionally came itself a “  riddle ” or cult into which an apprentice had to be initiated like a  clerk into holy orders, and in which it was more important to copy an ancient formula than to introduce.

 The ultramodern gospel of progress can not be read back into the history of technology; for the utmost of its long actuality technology has been nearly stagnant, mysterious, and indeed illogical. It isn't fantastic to see some moping fractions of this crucial technological tradition in the ultramodern world, and there's further than an element of immoderation in the contemporary dilemma of a  largely technological society meaning the liability that it'll use its sophisticated ways in order to negotiate its own destruction. It's therefore necessary to guard of the over-facile identification of technology with the “ progressive ” forces in contemporary civilization.   

On the other hand, it's insolvable to deny that there's a progressive element in technology, as it's clear from the most abecedarian check that the accession of ways is an accretive matter, in which each generation inherits a stock of ways on which it can make if it chooses and if social conditions permit. Over time, the history of technology inescapably highlights the moments of invention that show this accretive quality as some societies advance, stage by stage, from comparatively primitive to more sophisticated ways. But although this development has passed and is still going on, it isn't natural to the nature of technology that such a process of accumulation should do, and it has clearly not been an ineluctable development. 

The fact that numerous societies have remained stagnant for long ages of time, indeed at relatively advanced stages of technological elaboration and that some have actually regressed and lost the accumulated ways passed on to them, demonstrates the nebulous nature of technology and the critical significance of its relationship with other social factors.  

 3. Modes of technological transmission

 

 Another aspect of the accretive character of technology that will bear further disquisition is the manner of transmission of technological inventions. This is a fugitive problem, and it's necessary to accept the  miracle of the contemporaneous or resemblant invention in cases in which there's inadequate substantiation to show the transmission of ideas in one direction or another. The mechanics of their transmission have been tremendously bettered in recent centuries by the printing press and other means of communication and also by the increased installation with which trippers visit the sources of invention and carry ideas back to their own homes. 

Traditionally,  still, the major mode of transmission has been the movement of vestiges and tradesmen. Trade in vestiges has assured their wide distribution and encouraged reproduction. Indeed more important, the migration of tradesmen — whether the ambulatory metalworkers of early societies or the German rocket masterminds whose expert knowledge was acquired by both the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II has promoted the spread of new technologies. 

  The substantiation for similar processes of technological transmission is a  memorial that the material for the study of the history of technology comes from a variety of sources. important of it relies, like any literal examination, on talkie matter, although this is meager for the early societies because of the general lack of interest in technology on the part of scribes and historians. 

For these societies,  thus, and for the numerous glories of earlier unlisted history in which slow but substantial technological advances were made, it's necessary to calculate heavily upon archaeological substantiation. Indeed in connection with recent history, the literal understanding of the processes of rapid-fire industrialization can be made deeper and further pictorial by the study of “ artificial archaeology. ” important precious material of this nature has been accumulated in galleries, and indeed more remains in the place of its use for the observation of the field worker. The annalist of technology must be prepared to use all these sources and to call upon the chops of the archaeologist, the mastermind, the mastermind, and other specialists as applicable.    

Technology in the ancient world 

4.  The  onsets — Stone Age technology( toc. 3000 BCE)  The identification of the history

 of technology with the history of humanlike species doesn't help in fixing a precise point for its origin, because the estimates of prehistorians and anthropologists concerning the emergence of mortal species vary so extensively. creatures sometimes use natural tools similar to sticks or monuments, and the brutes that came mortal doubtless did the same for hundreds of glories before the first giant step of fashioning their own tools. Indeed also it was an interminable time before they put similar toolmaking on a regular basis, and still further eons passed as they arrived at the consecutive stages of homogenizing their simple gravestone copters and pounders and of manufacturing them — that is,  furnishing spots and assigning specialists to the work.

 A degree of specialization in toolmaking was achieved by the time of the Neanderthals( 70,000 BCE); more-advanced tools,  taking assemblage of head and grip, were produced by Cro-Magnons (  maybe as early as 35,000 BCE); while the  operation of mechanical principles was achieved by crockery- making 

Neolithic( New Stone Age; 6000 BCE) and Essence Age peoples( about 3000 BCE)

 5. Foremost communities  

For all except roughly the once 10,000 times, humans lived nearly entirely in small vagrant communities dependent for survival on their chops in gathering food, stalking and fishing, and avoiding bloodsuckers. It's reasonable to suppose that utmost of these communities developed in tropical authorizations, especially in Africa, where climatic conditions are most favorable to a  critter with similar poor fleshly protection as humans have.

 It's also reasonable to suppose that lines moved out thence into the tropical regions and ultimately into the mainland of Eurasia, although their colonization of this region must have been oppressively limited by the consecutive ages of glaciation, which rendered large corridor of it negative and indeed uninhabitable, indeed though humankind has shown remarkable versatility in conforming to similar unfavorable conditions.  

 6. The Neolithic Revolution 

 Toward the end of the last ice age,  roughly 15,000 to 20,000 times agone, many of the communities that were most favored by terrain and climate began to make the transition from the long period of Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age,  cultures to a more settled way of life depending on beast husbandry and husbandry. 

This period of transition, the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age, led ultimately to a  pronounced rise in population, to a growth in the size of communities, and to the onsets of city life. It's occasionally appertained to as the Neolithic Revolution because the speed of technological invention increased so greatly and mortal social and political association passed a corresponding increase in complexity. To understand the onsets of technology, it's, therefore, necessary to survey developments from the Old Stone Age through the New Stone Age down to the emergence of the first civic societies about 3000 BCE.   

7. Stone   



The material that gives its name and a technological concinnity to these ages of prehistory is his gravestone. Though it may be assumed that primitive humans used other accouterments similar as wood, bone, fur, leaves, and meadows before they learned the use of gravestone,  piecemeal from bone antlers, presumably used as picks in flint mines and away, and other fractions of bone tools, none of these have survived. The gravestone tools of early humans, on the other hand, have survived in surprising cornucopia, and over the numerous glories of prehistory, important advances in fashion were made in the use of gravestones. 

Monuments came tools only when they were shaped designedly for specific purposes, and, for this to be done efficiently, suitable hard and fine- granulated monuments had to be set up and means cooked for shaping them and particularly for putting a slicing-edge on them. Flint came a  veritably popular gravestone for this purpose, although fine sandstones and certain stormy jewels were also extensively used. 

There's important Paleolithic substantiation of skill in unloading and polishing monuments to make scraping and cutting tools. These early tools were held in the hand, but gradationally ways of guarding the hand against sharp edges on the gravestone, at first by belting one end in fur or lawn or setting it in a  rustic handle, were cooked. Much latterly the fashion of fixing the gravestone head to a grip converted these hand tools into further protean tools and munitions.

With the widening mastery of the material world in the Neolithic Period, other substances were brought into service,  similar as a complexion for crockery and slipup, and adding capability in handling cloth raw accouterments led to the creation of the first woven fabrics to take the place of beast skins. At about the same time, curiosity about the geste of metallic oxides in the presence of fire promoted one of the most significant technological inventions of all time and marked the race from the Stone Age to the Essence Age.   

8. Power  

The use of fire was another introductory fashion learned at some unknown time in the Old Stone Age. The discovery that fire could be regulated and controlled and the further discovery that a fire could be generated by patient disunion between two dry rustic shells were momentous. The fire was the most important donation of prehistory to power technology, although little power was attained directly from fire except as a defense against wild creatures.

 For the utmost part,  neolithic communities remained fully dependent upon force, but, in making the transition to a more settled pattern of life in the New Stone Age, they began to decide some power from creatures that had been domesticated. It also seems likely that by the end of neolithic times, the passage had surfaced as a means of employing the wind for small boats, beginning a long sequence of developments in marine transport.   

9. Tools and munitions  

The introductory tools of neolithic peoples were determined by the accouterments at their disposal. But once they had acquired the ways of working gravestones, they were resourceful in contriving tools and munitions with points and brickbats. therefore, the gravestone-headed shaft, the dart, and the arrow all came into wide use. The shaft was given increased motivation by the shaft-  venture, a notched pole that gave a sling effect. The arc and arrow were indeed a more effective combination, the use of which is easily demonstrated in the foremost “ talkie ”  substantiation in the history of technology, the oils of southern France and northern Spain, which depict the arc being used in stalking. 

The imagination of these nimrods is also shown in their slings, throwing- sticks( the boomerang of Australian Aboriginal people is a remarkable surviving illustration), blowguns,  raspberry snares, fish and beast traps, and nets. These tools didn't evolve slightly, as each community developed only those instruments that were most suitable for its own technical purposes, but all were in use by the end of the In addition, the Neolithic Revolution had contributed some important new tools that weren't primarily concerned with stalking. 

These were the first mechanical operations of rotary action in the shape of the potter’s wheel, the arc drill, the pole lathe, and the wheel itself. It isn't possible to be sure when these significant biases were constructed, but their presence in the early civic societies suggests some durability with the late Neolithic Period. The potter’s wheel, driven by kicks from the driver, and the bus of early vehicles both gave nonstop rotary movement in one direction. The drill and the lathe, on the other hand, were deduced from the arc and had the effect of spinning the drill piece or the workpiece first in one direction and also in the other.   

Developments in food products brought further advances in tools. The processes of food products in Paleolithic times were simple,  conforming of gathering, stalking, and fishing. However, it moved to better stalking grounds or decomposed, If these styles proved shy to sustain a community. With the onset of the Neolithic Revolution, new food-producing chops were cooked to serve the requirements of husbandry and beast husbandry. 

Digging sticks and the first crude plows, gravestone sickles, querns that base grain by disunion between two monuments, and, most complicated of all, irrigation ways for keeping the ground doused and rich all these came well established in the great tropical swash dense of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the glories before 3000 BCE.

 10. Structure  ways  

neolithic structure ways also passed significant developments in the Neolithic Revolution. Nothing is known of the structure capability of Paleolithic peoples beyond what can be inferred from many fractions of gravestone harbors, but in the New Stone Age some emotional structures were erected, primarily sepultures and burial mounds and other religious edifices, but also, toward the end of the period, domestic casing in which sun-dried slipup was first used. 

In northern Europe, where the Neolithic metamorphosis began latterly than around the eastern Mediterranean and lasted longer, huge gravestone monuments, of which Stonehenge in England is the outstanding illustration, still bear eloquent evidence of the specialized skill, not to mention the imagination and fine capability, of the after Stone Age societies. 

 11. Manufacturing  

Manufacturing assiduity had its origin in the New Stone Age, with the operation of ways for grinding sludge, incinerating complexion, spinning and weaving fabrics, and also, it seems likely, dyeing,  stirring, and distilling. Some substantiation for all these processes can be deduced from archaeological findings, and some of them at least were developing into technical crafts by the time the first civic societies appeared. 

In the same way, the early metalworkers were beginning to acquire the ways of rooting and working the softer essence, gold,  tableware, bobby, and drum, that were to make their successors a select class of tradesmen. All these nascent fields of specialization,  also,  inferred developing trade between different communities and regions, and again the archaeological substantiation of the transfer of cultivated products in the Stone Age is emotional. 

Flint arrowheads of particular types, for illustration, can be set up extensively dispersed over Europe, and the recrimination of a common locus of manufacture for each is strong.   similar transmission suggests perfecting installations for transport and communication. Paleolithic people presumably depended entirely on their own bases, and this remained the normal mode of transport throughout the Stone Age. Domestication of the ox, the jackass, and the camel really brought some help, although difficulties in employing the steed long delayed its effective use. 

The bunker canoe and the birch-dinghy canoe demonstrated the eventuality of water transport, and, again, there's some substantiation that the passage had formerly appeared by the end of the New Stone Age.   It's notable that the developments so far described in mortal prehistory took place over a long period of time, compared with the 5,000 times of recorded history, and that they took place first in veritably small areas of Earth’s face and involved populations nanoseconds by ultramodern criteria. The Neolithic Revolution passed first in those corridors of the world with an unusual combination of rates a warm climate, encouraging rapid-fire crop growth, and a periodic cycle of flooding that naturally regenerated the fertility of the land. On the Eurasian- African mainland similar conditions do only in Egypt, Mesopotamia, northern India, and some of the great swash dense of China. 

It was there,  also, that men and women of the New Stone Age were stimulated to develop and apply new ways of husbandry, beast husbandry, irrigation, and manufacture, and it was there that their enterprise was awarded by adding productivity, which encouraged the growth of population and touched off a race of sociopolitical changes that converted the settled Neolithic communities into the first societies.

 Away the encouragement of technological invention was lacking or was undervalued, so those areas had to await the transmission of specialized moxie from the more largely favored areas. Herein is embedded the separation of the great world societies, for while the Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies spread their influence westward through the Mediterranean and Europe, those of India and China were limited by geographical walls to their own outlands, which, although vast, were largely insulated from the mainstream of Western technological progress.

  12. The civic revolution(c. 3000 – 500 BCE)  

The technological change so far described took place veritably sluggishly over a long period of time, in response to only the most introductory social requirements, the hunt for food and sanctum, and with many social coffers available for any exertion other than the fulfillment of these requirements. About 5,000 times agone,  still, a momentous artistic transition began to take place in many well- favored geographical situations. It generated new requirements and coffers and was accompanied by a significant increase in technological invention. It was the morning of the invention of the megacity.   tradesmen and scientists.

13. The accumulated agrarian 

skill of the New Stone Age had made possible a growth in population, and the larger population in turn created a need for the products of technical tradesmen in a wide range of goods. These tradesmen included a number of metalworkers, first, those treating essence that could be fluently attained in metallic form and particularly the soft essence,  similar to gold and bobby, which could be fashioned by beating. 

also came the discovery of the possibility of rooting certain essence from the ores which they generally do. presumably, the first similar material to be used as the carbonate of bobby known as malachite,  also formerly in use as an ornamental and fluently reduced to bobby in a strong fire. It's insolvable to be precise about the time and place of this discovery, but its consequences were tremendous. It led to the hunt for other metallic ores, to the development of metallurgy, to the stimulant of trade in order to secure specific essence, and to the further development of specialist chops. It contributed mainly to the emergence of civic societies, as it reckoned heavily upon trade and manufacturing diligence, and therefore to the rise of the first societies.

 The Stone Age gave way to the early Essence Age, and a new time in the story of humankind had begun.   By fairly general concurrence, civilization consists of a large society with a common culture, settled communities, and sophisticated institutions, all of which presume a mastery of abecedarian knowledge and numeration. Mastery of the cultivated trades was a  nonage pursuit in the early societies, in all probability the precisely guarded possession of a priestly estate. 

The very actuality of these chops,  still, indeed in the hands of a small nonage of the population, is significant because they made available an installation for recording and transmitting information that greatly enlarged the compass for invention and academic study.   Heretofore, technology had was without the benefit of wisdom, but, by the time of the first Sumerian astronomers, 

who colluded the stir of the heavenly bodies with remarkable delicacy and grounded computations about the timetable and irrigation systems upon their compliances, the possibility of a creative relationship between wisdom and technology had appeared. The first fruits of this relationship appeared in greatly bettered capacities to measure land, weigh, and keep time, all practical ways, essential to any complex society, and implausible without knowledge and the onsets of scientific observation. With the emergence of these chops in the 3rd Renaissance BCE, the first societies arose in the dense of the Nile and of the Tigris- Euphrates. 

14. Bobby and citation 

 The fact that the period of the early societies coincides with the technological bracket of the Bobby Age and Citation Age is an indication of the technological base of these societies. The wimpiness of bobby, gold, and tableware made it ineluctable that they should be the first to be worked, but archaeologists now feel to agree that there was no true “ Bobby Age ” except maybe for a short period in the morning of Egyptian civilization, because the veritable wimpiness of that essence limited its mileage for everything except decoration or concoction. Attention was therefore given early to means of hardening bobby to make satisfactory tools and munitions. 

The reduction of mixed metallic ores presumably led to the discovery of alloying, whereby bobby was fused with other essences to make citations. Several awards were made, including some containing lead, antimony, and arsenic, but by far the most popular and wide was that of Bobby and drum in proportions of about 10 to one. This was a hard unheroic essence that could be melted and cast into the shape needed. The bronzesmiths took over from the coppersmiths and goldsmiths the fashion of hotting the essence in a  gauntlet over a strong fire and casting it into simple complexion or gravestone molds to make layoff- heads or forefronts or other solid shapes. 

For the casting of concave vessels or form, they cooked the so-called cire perdue fashion, in which the shape to be moldered is formed in wax and set in complexion, the wax also being melted and drained out to leave a  depression into which the molten essence is poured.  Citation came the most important material of the early societies, and elaborate arrangements were made to ensure a  nonstop force of it. Essence was scarce in the alluvial swash denes where civilization developed and thus had to be imported. This need to be led to complicated trading connections and mining operations at great distances from the motherland. drum presented a particularly severe problem, as it was in short force throughout the Middle East. 

The Citation Age societies were impelled to search far beyond their own borders for sources of the essence, and in the process knowledge of the cultivated trades was gradationally transmitted westward along the developing Mediterranean trade routes.  In utmost aspects other than the use of essence, the transition from the technology of the New Stone Age to that of early societies was fairly gradational, although there was a general increase in capability as technical chops came more easily defined, and in ways of erecting, there were enormous increases in the scale of enterprises. 

There were no great inventions in power technology, but important advancements were made in the construction of furnaces and kilns in response to the conditions of the metalworkers and potters and of new crafters similar as glassworkers. Also, the sailing boat assumed a definitive shape, progressing from a vessel with a small passage outfitted in its curvatures and suitable only for sailing before the prevailing wind up the Nile River, into the substantial oceangoing boat of the after-Egyptian dynasties, with a large blockish passage outfitted amidships. 

Egyptian and Phoenician vessels of this type could sail before the wind and across the wind, but for making an advance into the wind they had to resort to force. nonetheless, they fulfilled remarkable feats of navigation, sailing the length of the Mediterranean and indeed passing through the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic.  

 15. Irrigation   



ways of food products also showed numerous advancements over Neolithic styles, including one outstanding invention in the shape of methodical irrigation. 

The societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia depended heavily upon the two great swash systems, the Nile and the Tigris- the Euphrates, which both doused the ground with their periodic cataracts and rejuvenated it with the rich topsoil they deposited. The Nile swamped with chronicity each summer, and the  societies erecting in its vale beforehand learned the fashion of receptacle irrigation, ponding back the floodwater for as long as possible after the swash had retreated so that fortified soil could bring forth a crop before the cataracts of the ensuing season. In the Tigris- Euphrates vale the irrigation problem was more complex, because the cataracts were less predictable, more fierce, and came earlier than those of the northward-flowing Nile. They also carried further topsoil, which tended to choke irrigation channels. 

The task of the Sumerian irrigation masterminds was that of channelizing water from the gutters during the summer months, impounding it, and distributing it to the fields in small inaugurations. The Sumerian system ultimately broke down because it led to an accumulation of swabs in the soil, with a consequent loss of fertility. Both systems,  still, depended on a high degree of social control,  taking skill in measuring and marking out the land and an intricate legal law to ensure justice in the distribution of precious water. Both systems,  also, depended on intricate engineering in erecting dikes and dikes,  conduits, and courses( with lengthy stretches underground to help loss by evaporation), and the use of water-raising bias similar as the shadoof, a balanced ray with a  corrective on one end and a pail to lift the water on the other.   

16. Civic manufacturing  

Manufacturing assiduity in the early societies concentrated on similar products as crockery, wines, canvases, and cosmetics, which had begun to circulate along the nascent trade routes before the preface of the essence; these came to the goods traded for the essence. In crockery, the potter’s wheel came extensively used for spinning the complexion into the asked shape, but the aged fashion of erecting pots by hand from rolls of complexion remained in use for some purposes. 

In the product of wines and canvases, colorful forms of the press were developed, while the development of cuisine, brewing, and preservatives justified the assertion that the wisdom of chemistry began in the kitchen. Cosmetics too were an offshoot of culinary art.   Pack creatures were still the primary means of land transport, the wheeled vehicle developing sluggishly to meet the divergent requirements of husbandry, trade, and war. In the ultimate order, the chariot appeared as an armament, indeed though its use was limited by the continuing difficulty of employing a  steed. Military technology brought the development of essence plates for armor. 

  17. structure  

 In structure technology, the major developments concerned the scale of operations rather than any particular invention. The late Stone Age communities of Mesopotamia had formerly erected considerably in a sun-dried slip-up. Their successors continued the fashion but extended its scale to construct the massive square tabernacles called ziggurats. 

These had a core and facing of bricks, the facing walls leaning slightly inward and broken by regular piers erected into the brickwork, the whole structure thrusting in two or three stages to a  tabernacle on the peak. Sumerians were also the first to make columns with slipups made from the original complexion, which also handed the jotting material to the scribes.   

In Egypt,  complexion was scarce but good structure gravestone was generous, and builders used it in constructing the conglomerations and tabernacles that remain moment as outstanding monuments of Egyptian civilization. monuments were pulled on breakers and raised up the consecutive stages of the structure by ramps and by balanced regulators acclimated from the water-raising shadoof. 

The monuments were shaped by professed masons, and they were placed in position under the careful supervision of clerk engineers who were easily competent mathematicians and astronomers, as is apparent from the precise astronomical alignments. It seems certain that the heavy labor of construction fell upon armies of slaves, which helps to explain both the achievements and limitations of early societies. Slaves were generally one of the fruits of military subjection, which presupposes a period of successful territorial expansion, although their status as a subject race could be eternalized indefinitely. 

Slave populations were handed a competent and cheap labor force for the major constructional workshop that has been described. On the other hand, the vacuity of slave labor discouraged technological invention, a social fact that goes far toward explaining the relative recession of mechanical invention in the ancient world.   

18. Transmitting knowledge  

In the ancient world, technological knowledge was transmitted by dealers, who went out in hunt of drums and other goods, and by tradesmen in essence, gravestone, leather, and the other mediums, who passed their chops to others by direct instruction or by furnishing models that challenged other tradesmen to copy them. This transmission through central contact was being between the ancient societies and their neighbors to the north and west during the 2nd Renaissance BCE. The pace quickened in the posterior renaissance, with distinct new societies arising in Crete and Mycenae, in Troy and Carthage. Eventually, the preface of the fashion of working iron profoundly changed the capabilities and coffers of mortal societies and steered in the Classical societies of Greece and Rome.  

 19. Technological achievements of Greece and Rome( 500 BCE – 500 CE) 

 The benefactions of Greece and Rome in gospel and religion, political and legal institutions, poetry and drama, and the realm of scientific enterprise stand in spectacular discrepancy with their fairly limited benefactions in technology. Their mechanical invention wasn't distinguished, and, indeed in the realms of military and construction engineering, in which they showed great imagination and aesthetic sensibility, their work represented more a consummation of earlier lines of development than a dramatic invention. This apparent incongruity of the Classical period of the ancient world requires explanation, and the history of technology can give some suggestions for the result of the problem.   

20. The mastery of iron

 The outstanding technological factor of the Greco- Roman world was the smelting of iron, a  fashion —  deduced from unknown metallurgists,  presumably in Asia Minor, about 1000 BCE — that spread far beyond the parochial borders of the Roman Empire. The use of the essence had come general in Greece and the Aegean islets by the dawn of the Classical period about 500 BCE, and it appears to have spread snappily westward later. Iron ore, long a familiar material, had defied reduction into metallic form because of the great heat needed in the furnace to perform the chemical metamorphosis( about 1,535 °C( 2,795 °F) compared with the 1,083 °C( 1,981 °F) necessary for the reduction of bobbyBobby ores). 

To reach this temperature, furnace construction had to be bettered and ways cooked to maintain the heat for several hours. Throughout the Classical period, these conditions were achieved only on a small scale, in furnaces burning watercolor and using bottom bellows to consolidate the heat, and indeed in these furnaces, the heat wasn't sufficient to reduce the ore fully to molten essence. rather, a small spongy ball of iron — called a bloom was produced in the bottom of the furnace. 

This was uprooted by breaking open the furnace, and also it was pounded into bars of wrought iron, which could be shaped as needed by further heating and forging. piecemeal from its lesser cornucopia, iron for utmost purposes handed a harder and stronger material than the before essence, although the impossibility of casting it into molds like citation was a vexation. 

At an early date, some smiths cooked the cementation process for reheating bars of iron between layers of watercolor to carburize the face of the iron and therefore produce a fleece of sword. similar case- hardened iron could be further hotted,  pounded, and tempered to make cutter and brand blades of high quality. The veritably stylish sword in Roman times was the Seric sword, brought into the Western world from India, where it was produced in blocks many elevations in the periphery by a  gauntlet process, melting the constituents in an enclosed vessel to achieve chastity and thickness in the chemical combination.

21. Mechanical contrivances


   Though slight, the mechanical achievements of the Greco- Roman centuries weren't without significance. The world had one of its great mechanical geniuses in Archimedes, who cooked remarkable munitions to cover his native Syracuse from Roman irruption and applied his important mind to similar introductory mechanical contrivances as the screw, the pulley, and the switch. Alexandrian masterminds,  similar to Ctesibius and Hero,  constructed a wealth of ingenious mechanical contrivances including pumps, wind, and hydraulic organs, compressed- air machines, and screw-cutting machines. They also cooked toys and automata similar to the aeolipile, which may be regarded as the first successful brume turbine. Little practical use was set up for these inventions, but the Alexandrian academy marks an important transition from veritably simple mechanisms to the more complex bias that duly earn to be considered “ machines. ” In a sense, it handed a starting point for ultramodern mechanical practice.   The Romans were responsible, through the operation and development of available machines, for an important technological metamorphosis the wide preface of rotary stir. This was instanced in the use of the routine for powering cranes and other heavy lifting operations, the preface of rotary water-raising bias for irrigation workshop( a scoop wheel powered by a  routine), and the development of the waterwheel as a  high transport. The 1st- century- BCE Roman mastermind Vitruvius gave an account of watermills, and by the end of the Roman period, numerous were in operation. 

22. Agriculture


 Iron Age technology was applied to husbandry in the form of the iron( or iron-sloped) plowshare, which opened up the possibility of deeper furrowing and cultivating heavier soils than those typically worked in the Greco- Roman period. The construction of plows bettered sluggishly during these centuries, but the moldboard for turning over the earth didn't appear until the 11th century CE, so the capacity of turning the sod depended more on the wrists of the plowman than on the strength of his draft platoon; this discouraged diving heavy ground. The possibilities of the heavy plow were therefore not completely exploited in the temperate areas of Europe until after the Roman period. Away, in the drier climates of North Africa and Spain, the Romans were responsible for expansive irrigation systems, using the Archimedean screw and the noria(a beast- or water-powered scoop wheel) to raise water.  

23. structure



    Though numerous structures of the Greeks survive as splendid monuments to the cultivated communities that erected them, as technological monuments they're of little significance. The Greeks espoused a form of column and lintel construction that had been used in Egypt for centuries and was deduced from the experience of timber construction. In no major sense did Greek structure constitute a technological invention. The Romans copied the Greek style for utmost conventional purposes, but in other felicitations, they were important originators in erecting technology. They made expansive use of fired slipup and pipe as well as a gravestone; they developed a strong cement that would set under water; and they explored the architectural possibilities of the bow, the vault, and the pate. They also applied these ways in amphitheaters,  courses, coverts, islands, walls, lighthouses, and roads. Taken together, this constructional workshop may fairly be regarded as the primary technological achievement of the Romans.  

 24. Other fields of technology 

 In manufacturing, transport, and military technology, the achievements of the Greco- Roman period aren't remarkable. The major manufacturing crafts the timber of crockery and glass, weaving, leatherworking, fine- metalworking, and so on — followed the lines of former societies, albeit with important developments in style. Superbly decorated Athenian crockery, for illustration, was extensively dispersed along the trade routes of the Mediterranean, and the Romans made good quality crockery available throughout their conglomerate through the manufacture and trade of the formalized red earthenware called terra sigillata, which was produced in large amounts at several spots in Italy and Gaul. 

 25. Transport

Transport, again, followed before precedents, the sailing boat arising as an oceangoing vessel with a carvel-  erected housing( that is, with planks meeting edge-to-edge rather than lapping as in clinker-erected designs), and a completely advanced ship with stempost and sternpost. The Greek sailing boat was equipped with a square or blockish passage to admit a following wind and one or further banks of rowers to propel the boat when the wind was contrary. The Greeks began to develop a technical fighting boat,  handed with a ram in the prow, and the weight boat,  allocating with rowers and counting entirely upon the wind, was also well established by the early times of Classical Greece. The Romans took over both forms but without significant invention. They gave much further attention to inland transport than to the ocean, and they constructed a remarkable network of precisely aligned and well-laid roads,  frequently paved over long stretches, throughout the businesses of the conglomerate. Along these strategic roadways, the legions marched fleetly to the point of any extremity at which their presence was needed. The roads also served for the development of trade, but their primary function was always military, as a vital means of keeping a vast conglomerate in domination.  

26.  Military technology 


   Roman military technology was inventive on occasion, as in the great siege catapults, depending on both torsion and pressure power. But the standard outfit of the warrior was simple and conservative,  conforming of an iron helmet and breastplate, with a short brand and an iron-sloped shaft. As utmost of their opponents were also equipped with iron munitions and occasionally with superior bias,  similar to the Celtic chariots, the Roman military achievements depended more on association and discipline than on technological superiority.   

The Greco- Roman period was distinguished for the scientific exertion of some of its topmost proponents. In keeping with Greek academic study,  still, this tended to be explosively abstract so it was in mathematics and other abstract studies that the main scientific achievements are to be set up. Some of these had some practical significance, as in the study of perspective goods in erecting construction. Aristotle in numerous ways expressed the inquiring empiricism that has caused scientists to seek an explanation for their physical terrain. 

In at least one field, that of drugs and its affiliated subjects, Greek inquiry assumed a  largely practical form, with Hippocrates and Galen laying the foundations of ultramodern medical wisdom. But this was exceptional, and the normal Hellenic station was to pursue scientific inquiry in the realm of ideas without the important study of the possible technological consequences. 


 From the Middle periods  to 170

 27.  Medieval advance( 500 – 1500 CE) 


    The renaissance between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE and the morning of the social expansion of Western Europe in the late 15th century has been known traditionally as the Middle periods, and the first half of this period consists of the five centuries of the Dark periods. We now know that the period wasn't as socially stagnant as this title suggests. In the first place,  numerous institutions of the after conglomerate survived the collapse and profoundly told the conformation of the new civilization that developed in Western Europe.

 The Christian church was the outstanding institution of this type, but Roman generalizations of law and administration also continued to ply an influence long after the departure of the legions from the Western businesses. Second, and more important, the Teutonic lines who moved into a large part of Western Europe didn't come empty-handed, and in some felicitations, their technology was superior to that of the Romans. It has formerly been observed that they were people of the Iron Age, and although important about the origins of the heavy plow remain obscure these lines appear to have been the first people with sufficiently strong iron plowshares to take over the methodical agreement of the forested lowlands of northern and western Europe, the heavy soils of which had frustrated the agrarian ways of their forerunners.   

The raiders came therefore as pioneers. They may have been regarded as “ heathens  ” by the Romanized occupants of Western Europe who naturally begrudged their intrusion, and the effect of their irruption was clearly to disrupt trade, assiduity, and city life. 

But the beginners also handed an element of invention and vitality. About 1000 CE the conditions of relative political stability necessary for the reestablishment of a vigorous marketable and civic life had been secured by the success of the fiefdoms of the region in either absorbing or keeping out the last of the raiders from the East, and later for 500 times the new civilization grew in strength and began to experiment in all aspects of mortal bid. important of this process involved recovering the knowledge and achievements of the ancient world. 

The history of medieval technology is therefore largely the story of the preservation, recovery, and revision of earlier achievements. But by the end of the period Western civilization had begun to produce some remarkable technological inventions that were to be of the utmost significance. 

28. Innovation  

The word invention raises a problem of great significance in the history of technology. rigorously, an invention is a commodity entirely new, but there's no similar thing as an unknown technological invention because it's insolvable for an innovator to work in a vacuum and,  still ingenious his invention, it must arise out of his own former experience.

 The task of distinguishing an element of novelty in an invention remains a problem of patent law down to the present day, but the problem is made fairly easy by the possession of full talkie records covering former inventions in numerous countries. For the Renaissance of the Middle periods,  still, many similar records live, and it's constantly delicate to explain how particular inventions were introduced to Western Europe. 

The problem is especially perplexing because it's known that numerous inventions of the period had been developed singly and preliminarily in other societies, and it's occasionally delicate if not insolvable to know whether the commodity is a robotic invention or an invention that had been transmitted by a some as yet undiscovered route from those who had begun it in other societies.   The problem is important because it generates a conflict of interpretations about the transmission of technology. On the one hand, there's the proposition of the diffusionists, according to which all invention has moved westward from the long-established societies of the ancient world, with Egypt and Mesopotamia as the two favorite campaigners for the ultimate source of the process. 

On the other hand, is the proposition of robotic invention, according to which the primary determinant of technological invention is social need. Education is as yet unfit to break the problem so far as technological advances of the Middle periods are concerned because important information is missing. But it does feel likely that at least some of the crucial inventions of the period — the windmill and gunpowder are good exemplifications were developed spontaneously. It's relatively certain,  still, that others,  similar as silk working, were transmitted to the West, and,  still originally the donation of Western civilization to the technological invention, there can be no doubt at all that in its early centuries at least it looked to the East for ideas and alleviation. 

 29. Byzantium   


 The immediate eastern neighbor of the new civilization of medieval Europe was Byzantium, the surviving fortification of the Roman Empire grounded in Constantinople( Istanbul), which endured 1,000 times after the collapse of the western half of the conglomerate. There the literature and traditions of Hellenic civilization were eternalized,  getting decreasingly available to the curiosity and rapacity of the West through the dealers who arrived from Venice and away. piecemeal from the influence on the Western architectural style of similar intricate masterpieces as the great domed structure of the Hagia Sophia, the technological donation of Byzantium itself was presumably slight, but it served to intervene between the West and other societies one or further stages removed,  similar as the Islamic world, India, and China.


30. India 


   Islam also handed a transmission belt for some of the technology of East and South Asia, especially that of India and China. The ancient Hindu and Buddhist societies of the Indian key had long-established trading connections with the Arab world to the west and came under strong Muslim influence after the Mughal subjection in the 16th century. Indian crafters early acquired an moxie in ironworking and enjoyed a wide character for their essence vestiges and cloth ways, but there's little substantiation that specialized invention figured prominently in Indian history before the foundation of European trading stations in the 16th century.  

31. China  

  Civilization flourished continuously in China from about 2000 BCE, when the first of the literal dynasties surfaced. From the beginning, it was a civilization that valued technological skill in the form of hydraulic engineering, for its survival depended on controlling the enriching but destructive cataracts of the Huang He( Yellow River). Other technologies appeared at a remarkably early date, including the casting of iron, the product of demitasse, and the manufacture of brass and paper.

 As one dynasty followed another, Chinese civilization came under the domination of a regulatory nobility, the bureaucrats, who gave durability and stability to Chinese life but who also came to a conservative influence on invention,  defying the preface of new ways unless they handed a clear benefit to the bureaucracy. Such an invention was the development of the water-powered mechanical timepiece, which achieved an ingenious and elaborate form in the machine erected under the supervision of Su Song in 1088. This was driven by a waterwheel that moved regularly, making one part- revolution as each pail on its hem was filled in turn.  

 The links between China and the West remained tenuous until ultramodern times, but the occasional hassle similar to that performed during the trip of Marco Polo in 1271 – 95 advised the West of the superiority of Chinese technology and stimulated a vigorous westward transfer of ways. Western knowledge of silk working, the glamorous compass, papermaking, and demitasse were each deduced from China. In the ultimate case, Europeans respected the fine demitasse imported from China for several centuries before they were suitable to produce anything of an analogous quality. 

Having achieved a condition of relative social stability,  still, the Chinese mandarinate did little to encourage invention or trading connections with the outside world. Under their influence, no social group surfaced in China originally to the mercantile class that flourished in the West and did much to promote trade and assiduity.

 The result was that China dropped behind the West in technological chops until the political revolutions and social paroxysms of the 20th century awakened the Chinese to the significance of these chops to profitable substance and inspired a determination to acquire them.   Despite the accession of numerous ways from the East, the Western world of 500 – 1500 was forced to break utmost of its problems on its own action. In doing so it converted an agricultural society grounded upon subsistence frugality into a dynamic society with increased productivity sustaining trade, assiduity, and city life on a steadily growing scale. This was primarily a technological achievement and one of considerable magnitude.  

32. Power sources 


  The outstanding point of this achievement was a revolution in the sources of power. With no large slave labor force to draw on, Europe endured a labor deficit that stimulated a hunt for indispensable sources of power and the preface of the laboursaving ministry. The first instrument of this power revolution was the steed. By the invention of the horseshoe, the padded, rigid steed collar, and the stirrup, all of which first appeared in the West in the centuries of the Dark periods, the steed was converted from an ancillary beast of burden useful only for light duties into a  largely protean source of energy in peace and war. 

Once the steed could be exercised to the heavy plow by means of the steed collar, it came a more effective draft beast than the ox, and the preface of the stirrup made the mounted legionnaire supreme in medieval warfare and initiated complex social changes to sustain the great expenditure of the knight, his armor, and his horse, in a society close to the subsistence line.   Indeed more significant was the success of medieval technology in employing water and wind power. The Romans had innovated the use of waterpower in the after-conglomerate, and some of their ways presumably survived.

 The type of water shop that flourished first in northern Europe,  still, appears to have been the Norse shop, using a horizontally mounted waterwheel driving a brace of grindstones directly, without the intervention of gearing. exemplifications of this simple type of shop survive in Scandinavia and in the Shetlands; it also passed in southern Europe, where it was known as the Greek shop. It's possible that a proportion of the 5,624  manufactories recorded in the Domesday Book of England in 1086 were of this type, although it's probable that by that date the vertically mounted undershot wheel had established itself as more applicable to the gentle geography of England; the Norse shop requires a good head of water to turn the wheel at an acceptable grinding speed without gearing for the upper millstone( the practice of rotating the upper gravestone above a stationary bed gravestone came universal at an early date). 

utmost of the Domesday water manufactories was used for grinding grain, but in the following centuries other important uses were cooking in fulling cloth( shrinking and felting woolen fabrics), sawing wood, and crushing vegetable seeds for oil painting. Overshot bus also were introduced where there was sufficient head of water, and the capability of the medieval millwrights in structure manufactories and bulwarks and in constructing decreasingly elaborate trains of gearing grew similarly.   The passage had been used to harness wind power from the dawn of civilization, but the windmill was unknown in the West until the end of the 12th century. Present substantiation suggests that the windmill developed spontaneously in the West;  however there are precedents in Persia and China, and the question remains open. What's certain is that the windmill came extensively used in Europe in the Middle periods. 

Wind power is generally less dependable than waterpower, but where the ultimate is deficient wind power is a seductive cover. similar conditions are set up in areas that suffer from failure or from a  deficit of face water and also in low-lying areas where gutters offer little energy. Windmills have therefore flourished in places similar to Spain or the downlands of England on the one hand, and in the fenlands and polders of the Netherlands on the other hand.

 The first type of windmill to be extensively espoused was the post-mill, in which the whole body of the shop pivots on a post and can be turned to face the cruises into the wind. By the 15th century,  still,  numerous were espousing the palace-shop type of construction, in which the body of the shop remains stationary with only the cap moving to turn the cruises into the wind. As with the water shop, the development of the windmill brought not only lesser mechanical power but also lesser knowledge of mechanical contrivances, which was applied in making timepieces and other biases.  


33.  husbandry and crafts



   With new sources of power at its disposal, medieval Europe was suitable greatly to increase productivity. This is abundantly apparent in husbandry, where the relief of the ox by the briskly gaited steed and the preface of new crops brought about a distinct enhancement in the volume and variety of food, with a consequent enhancement in the diet and energy of the population. 

It was also apparent in the developing diligence of the period, especially the woolen cloth assiduity in which the spinning wheel was introduced,  incompletely demobilizing this important process, and the practice of using waterpower to drive fulling stocks(  rustic hammers raised by cams on a driving shaft) had a profound effect on the position of the assiduity in England in the after centuries of the Middle periods. The same principle was acclimated to the paper assiduity late in the Middle periods, the rags from which paper was deduced being pulverized by hammers analogous to fulling stocks.  

 Meanwhile, the traditional crafts flourished within the expanding municipalities, where there was a growing request for the products of rope makers, barrel makers( coopers), leatherworkers(carriers), and metalworkers( goldsmiths and silversmiths), to mention only many more important crafts. New crafts similar as that of the soapmakers developed in the municipalities. The fashion of making cleaner appears to have been a Teutonic invention of the Dark periods, being unknown in ancient societies.

 The process consists of putrefying beast or vegetable fats by boiling them with a strong alkali. Long before it came popular for particular sanctification, the cleaner was a  precious artificial commodity for combing textile fabrics. Its manufacture was one of the first artificial processes to make expansive use of coal as energy, and the development of the coal assiduity in northern Europe constitutes another important medieval invention, no former civilization having made any methodical attempt to exploit coal.

 The mining ways remained simpleminded as long as coal was accessible near the face, but as the hunt for the mineral led to lesser and lesser depths the assiduity copied styles that had formerly evolved in the essence- mining diligence of north and central Europe. The extent of this elaboration was brilliantly epitomized by Georgius Agricola in his De re Metallica, published in 1556.

 This large, abundantly illustrated book shows ways of shafting, pumping( by routine, beast power, and waterpower), and conveying the ore won from the mines in exchanges, which anticipated the development. ment of the railroads. It's insolvable to date precisely the emergence of these important ways, but the fact that they were well established when Agricola observed them suggests that they had a long strain.



Post a Comment

0 Comments