Technology

The end of World War II brought thousands of young servicemen back to America to pick up their lives and start new families in new homes with new jobs. With an energy never before experienced, American industry expanded to meet peacetime needs. Americans began buying goods not available during the war, which created corporate expansion and jobs. Growth everywhere. The baby boom was underway...

Many historians of science argue not only that technology is an essential condition of advanced, industrial civilization but also that the rate of technological change has developed its own momentum in recent centuries. Innovations now seem to appear at a rate that increases geometrically, without respect to geographical limits or political systems. These innovations tend to transform traditional cultural systems, frequently with unexpected social consequences. Thus technology can be conceived as both a creative and a destructive process.

Technology has been a dialectical and cumulative process at the center of human experience. It is perhaps best understood in a historical context that traces the evolution of early humans from a period of very simple tools to the complex, large-scale networks that influence most of contemporary human life. For the sake of simplicity, the following account focuses primarily on developments in the Western world, but major contributions from other cultures are also indicated.

The earliest known human artifacts are roughly flaked stones used for chopping and scraping, found primarily in eastern Africa. Known as Oldowan tools, they date from about 2.3 million years before present, and serve to define the beginning of the Stone Age. The first toolmakers were nomadic groups of people who used the sharp edges of stone to process food. By about 40,000 years before present, humans had begun to use fire and to make a variety of tools, including pear-shaped axes, scrapers, knives, and other instruments of stone, bone, and other materials. They had also begun to use tools to make clothing and build shelters for protection from inclement weather. The use of tools can be observed in many members of the animal kingdom, but the capacity for creating tools to craft other objects distinguishes humans from all other animals.

Early technologies were not centered only on practical tools. Colorful minerals were pulverized to make pigments that were then applied to the human body, to