A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900

OVERVIEWA Short History of Technology is not really very short. It runs for 782 pages in a 6" x 9" format in paperback. The title simply indicates that this is a 1960 abridgement of an earlier 5-volume scholarly set published in 1949 designed to cover the development of every conceivable technology and its impact on human society starting in Neolithic times (circa 3,200 B.C.). The book is rich in simple illustration, often line drawings about 2" x 2" that nicely illustrate the technology being described. The book concludes with 37 pages of time lines, 8 pages of bibliography, a 12-page index of subjects as well as a 10-page index of person names and place names.ORGANIZATIONIt is organized broadly in two parts with part I covering the period from earliest times to 1750 in 272 pages and Part II covers the intense period of the Industrial Revolution (1750 -1900) in the ensuing 510 pages. In each of these two parts the chapters start with a general survey and then proceed by technological areas such as "production of food," "production for domestic needs," "extraction and working of metals," etc. in a series of 25-page chapters. In each of these chapters, the text leads you through the evolution of a particular technology starting as early as the Neolithic Age.POSITIVESI am not a professional historian but rather a retired businessman pursuing a study of how technology changed the lives or ordinary people over the last 2,000 years. I have read a half dozen books on the history of technology, but I found this to be the most useful. For example, in the area of construction, the book explained that the Romans mastered the use of concrete as well as the use of brick. Inexplicably both concrete and brick were lost in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and brick making did not resume until brick making resumed in the 1200's and cement was perfected in England as late as 1796. We learn that before the steam engine in the 1700's the only machines that produced energy were the waterwheel and the windmill. I was surprised to learn that waterwheels were common during the Roman Empire, but windmills did not appear in Europe until 1180. The book allows you to trace the progress of a rich variety of technologies. The stories are often surprising. What about the invention of eye glasses? Look for the page reference for "spectacles" in the subject index, and you learn that eye glasses are a relatively recent invention with spectacles first appearing in Europe in 1286 and they used convex lenses to improve the sight of far-sighted people. It was not until about 1500 that glasses were produced to correct near-sightedness by grinding concave lenses. The person name index allows you to quickly review the contributions of a particular person. For example, there are six citations for Galileo in which he is the first to employ a telescope for scientific purposes, he contributes to the understanding of the pendulum which became the key to accurate clocks, and we learn that he was one of the first experts consulted to compute the strength of a beam and other construction materials.NEGATIVESIn a few instances, the authors use technical language that a layman such as myself has trouble understanding. For example, it cites the breakthrough when Galileo had a flash of insight about the "isochronous" swing of a pendulum. I had to do a little outside research to learn that isochronous means that if two pendulums are the same length, the time of their swings will be the same even if one swings in a big arc and the other in a shorter arc.WHO WILL FIND THIS BOOK USEFUL?There may not be too many people who are fascinated with the evolution of technology over these past 2000 years, but if you are interested in this subject, this is a perfect book for you. It is ideal for the amateur, but I suspect that it would be a handy reference for professional historians as well.

I am a mechanical engineering student and enjoy learning. This book has been a fascinating read.

Book was in god condition and exactly what I needed

Sent to a friend as a g, so I have no personal opinion

avg good book

Isn't is a shame that history books generally focus on wars, and not people's everyday lives? This book fills a need, explaining how technology evolved to make people's lives better.Too bad that this type of history book isn't taught in schools, because it's really interesting stuff.Human technology is simply awesome, isn't it?. We take so much for granted; and yet, even the simplest thing has a story behind who made it. Take for example a simple thing like a screw: Ever think that someone needed to invent a screw making machine? Or that someone invented a nail making machine? Or how steel, glass, soap, glass, bricks are made? Everything we use was invented by someone.What I found most interesting of all are the "machines that make machines". The authors convinced me that these tools may be the most important tools of all.The only criticism I have is, the book was written by British writers and I felt the book emphasized British inventions. But were the British the most prolific inventors?Also, there was nothing in the book about toilets and toilet paper.

This book surveys the history of vast areas of technological progress (chemicals, mining, agriculture, engines, trains, roads, weapons, printing, what have you), but in each area the information is on the level of a brief encyclopaedia article. Witness the section on "Bridges" (post-industrial revolution to 1900): it is only 9 pages, with the achievements of the Roeblings for example being summarized in 2/3 of a page; and, as with many other areas of inventions, it is very difficult to get, from this capsule treatment, any better than a vague notion of what the key innovations in question involved. One reason for this difficulty in my case is maybe my ignorance of certain terminology here and there, and the book nevertheless manages to explain the technology involved now and then, such as with the use of caissons in bridge-building. Yet too often there is no explanation. Or, when there is, too often it is perfunctory and sheds no light--on tunnel-making techniques for example: "One of the several modes of excavation was to protect the roof of the immediate working-area by timbers drawn forward from a space above the finished lining, their front ends being supported upon posts which rested on a short sill at the bottom of the heading." If you can easily understand what is going on from a description like that, then you will like this book better than I, who still only have the foggiest notion despite best efforts. Or take the example of the brief treatment of reinforced concrete (2 pages): The authors state briefly who did what when (includng numerous details of dates and places that seem to be of pedantic interest only), yet while mentioning such innovations as Mr. Wilkinson's "much more elaborate system of both for embedding iron rods . . . and for reinforcing concrete beams", or Mr. Hennibique's "system of vertical hoop-iron stirrups to resist change of shape by shearing", the book leaves one wondering, But just what ARE these things? As to the illustrations again, one of the editorial reviews says the book is loaded with illustrations, and it is, but they are all small and rather coarse and, like the book generally, they give you a sense more of the general shape and look of things, as opposed to how they actually worked. There are very few cutaways or other diagrammatic pictures in this book. With cars, for example, why can't we have just one simple diagram of an early internal combustion engine, instead of pics of frail carriage-like cars that we've already seen.I suppose I'm just the wrong audience for this book--I got it as a casual reader who just wanted to know a little more about how certain famous contraptions actually worked (like the spinning jenny--incomprehensible from this book), or why exactly is Brunel considered a great genius, that sort of thing. This is not the book for questions like that. Maybe I could see a fan of James Burke's Connections or Day the Universe Changed looking up a book like this, to follow up, but, if so, the best one can get from this book is sort of a broad historical matrix, where you'd have to ply other sources of information to fill in all the gaps where the real interest lies. Or maybe one could sort of skim through the book for an uplifting, if vague, sense of Man's Progress. Apart from this, it's difficult to see this book appealing to people except as a reference work, combining in one place all the encyclopaedia info on the histories of printing, mining, textiles, etc. etc.