History of technology

The history of technology is at least as old as humanity. Some primitive forms of tools have been discovered with almost every find of ancient human remains dating from the time of homo habilis). Nevertheless, other animals have been found to use tools—and to learn to use and refine tools—so it is incorrect to distinguish humans as the only tool-using or tool-making animal. The history of technology follows a progression from simple tools and simple (mostly human) energy sources to complex high-technology tools and energy sources.

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The use of fire extended the capability for the treatment of natural resources and allowed the use of natural resources that require heat to be useful. (The oldest projectile found is a wooden spear with fire hardened point, circa 250,000 BC.) Wood and charcoal were among the first materials used as a fuel. Wood, clay, and rock (such as limestone), were among the earliest materials shaped or treated by fire, for making artifacts such as weapons, pottery, bricks, and cement. Continuing improvements led to the furnace and bellows and provided the ability to smelt and forge native metals (naturally occurring in relatively pure form). Gold, copper, silver, and lead, were such early metals. The advantages of copper tools over stone, bone, and wooden tools were quickly apparent to early humans, and native copper was probably used from near the beginning of Neolithic times (about 8000 BCE). Native copper does not naturally occur in large amounts, but copper ores are quite common and some of them produce metal easily when burned in wood or charcoal fires.

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Meanwhile, humans were learning to harness other forms of energy. The earliest known use of wind power is the sailboat. The earliest record of a ship under sail is shown on an Egyptian pot dating back to 3200 BCE. From prehistoric times, Egyptians probably used "the power of the Nile" annual floods to irrigate their lands, gradually learning to regulate much of it through purposely built irrigation channels and 'catch' basins. Similarly, the early peoples of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, learned to use the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for much the same purposes. But more extensive use of wind and water (and even human) power required another invention.

It is still a mystery as to who invented the wheel and when and why it was invented. According to some archaeologists, it was probably originally invented about 8000 B.C. The wheel was almost certainly independently invented in Mesopotamia -— present-day Iraq. Estimates on when this may have occurred range from 5500 to 3000 B.C., with most guesses closer to a 4000 B.C. date. The oldest artifacts with drawings that depict wheeled carts date from about 3000 B.C., though for all anyone knows, the wheel may have been in use for millennia before these drawings were made. But there is also evidence from the same period of time that wheels were used for the production of pottery. (Note that the original potter's wheel was probably not a wheel -— but rather an irregularly shaped slab of flat wood with a small hollowed or pierced area near the center and mounted on a peg driven into the earth. It would have been rotated by repeated tugs by the potter or his assistant.) More recently, the oldest-known wooden wheel in the world was found in the Ljubljana marshes of Slovenia.

The invention of the wheel revolutionized activities as disparate as transportation, war, and the production of pottery (for which it may have been first used). It didn't take long to discover that wheeled wagons could be used to carry heavy loads and fast (rotary) potters' wheels enabled early mass production of pottery. But it was the use of the wheel as a transformer of energy (through water wheels and windmills and even treadmills) that revolutionized the application of nonhuman power sources.

Tools include both simple machines (such as the lever, the screw, and the pulley), and more complex machines (such as the clock, the engine, the electric generator and the electric motor, the computer, radio, and the Space Station, among many others). As tools increase in complexity, so does the type of knowledge needed to support them. Complex modern machines require libraries of written technical manuals of collected information that has continually increased and improved -— their designers, builders, maintainers, and users often require the mastery of decades of sophisticated general and specific training. Moreover, these tools have become so complex that a comprehensive infrastructure of technical knowledge-based lesser tools, processes and practices (complex tools in themselves) exist to support them, including engineering, medicine, and computer science. Complex manufacturing and construction techniques and organizations are needed to construct and maintain them. Entire industries have arisen to support and develop succeeding generations of increasingly more complex tools.

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