Abstract
This chapter reviews the history of how humans became a species that creates and uses technology along with some important milestones. The key features of Homo sapiens include our brains, and our ability to use them to form abstractions through language, as well as the extraordinary dexterity of our hands as enablers of technological evolution. We argue that the replacement or augmentation of human and animal strength with machines, such as the steam engine, was one of those key milestones. We review several technological revolutions, including electrification starting in the nineteenth century and the information age which started in the twentieth century. We briefly discuss the role of national identity and conflicts in claiming or accelerating technological progress and speculate on what humanity’s next technological revolution might be in the future.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The study of paleontology also concerns the same period of time before the Holocene which started about 11,700 years ago with the end of the last glacial period. However, paleontology excludes the study of human activity which is considered within the scope of archeology.
- 2.
The Encephalization Quotient (EQ) is the coefficient “C” as calculated in the following equation: E = CS<Emphasis Type="Sscript">r</Superscript>, where E is the weight of the brain, C is the cephalization factor, and S is the body weight, and r is an exponential constant. The EQ is normalized to 1.0 for the cat (Roth and Dicke 2005).
- 3.
An interesting question is how to quantify and compare the ability of individual humans to form abstractions, see patterns, and correctly anticipate future outcomes of actions, thus understanding causal chains. This is often described as “intelligence” and while a variety of IQ tests exist, we are still actively researching this important area of cognitive science. The number of different words used in the spoken and written dictionary by humans can be used as a (imperfect) proxy for our ability to form abstractions.
- 4.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been intensively critiqued, and revisions have been proposed. For example, it has been pointed out that in some cultures the need for self-actualization and social interaction may actually be stronger than or precede physiological needs.
- 5.
It has been pointed out that the seemingly exponential growth of Portuguese control suggested by Fig. 2.4 (right) did not continue forever. It peaked in the early 1600s after which competition with other European nations such as the Dutch and the British (e.g., East India Company) and the end of the Iberian Union in 1668 precipitated the Portuguese empire’s decline.
- 6.
The invention of the broad horse collar or Dutch collar in the twelfth century was important, since it allowed horses to pull without experiencing the pain caused by narrower straps.
- 7.
The first law of thermodynamics states that ΔU = Q − W. This means that the change in internal energy of a system U is equal to the amount of (heat) energy Q added to the system, minus the work W performed by the system.
- 8.
More on how to define FOMs and quantify technological progress in Chap. 4.
- 9.
One of the advantages of steam engines is that they are essentially fuel agnostic and can be powered by wood, coal, gas, oil, or even without fossil fuels such as concentrated solar power. This gives steam engines a degree of flexibility not available to other types of engines. The automobile (see Chap. 6) requires gasoline or diesel fuel which must be obtained from refined petroleum and relies on a complex supply chain that was scaled up by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the early twentieth century. Creating this infrastructure created a captive audience.
- 10.
A lifecycle property of a system is a characteristic that cannot easily be measured instantaneously but requires operating and observing the system over longer periods of time.
- 11.
Note: the subsequent text on the competition between AC and DC is adapted from de Weck et al. (2011).
- 12.
A recent major Hollywood-produced motion picture, “The Current War” (2017), is recounting this era with Benedict Cumberbatch portraying Thomas Edison and Michael Shannon playing George Westinghouse.
- 13.
This project was stopped by Airbus in 2020. Nevertheless, there is an expectation in the aerospace community that electric propulsion will be used and improved for drones and light aircraft with few passengers and moderate range requirements.
- 14.
A recent project at the Broad Institute, jointly operated by MIT and Harvard and funded by IARPA, aims at using synthetic DNA to store and retrieve nonbiological information similar to the hard drive on a computer (Jan 2020).
- 15.
The older parts of the state archives of Venice which cover over 1000 years of history in great detail are written in vellum, a kind of parchment, which uses animal skins as its basis.
- 16.
There are other ways in which information can be and has been stored and transmitted as in the field of art and architecture, take, for example, Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel.
- 17.
Humans have used mechanical aids for computation – such as the abacus – for millennia greatly augmenting speed. An interesting phenomenon is abacus speed competitions (soroban), such as those held in Japan, where humans demonstrate impressive computing speeds. It is said that champions in this discipline no longer need the physical abacus but that they run these computations purely in their minds to achieve higher speeds (cf. flash anzan).
- 18.
$15/h was recently introduced in several US cities such as San Francisco as a minimum “living” wage, exceeding the US federal minimum wage (2019) set at $ 7.25/h.
- 19.
We saw in the case of the steam engine (Fig. 2.8), that while technological progress is continual, it looks like a discontinuous staircase and not like a smooth continuous curve. When averaging over long time periods of a century or more, however, it may be valid to work with a continuous and differentiable approximation of the “staircase,” see Chap. 4 for details.
- 20.
The history of technology – at least as it is mainly recorded today – is dominated by men and we unfortunately only find few examples of women as recorded inventors of new technology. This is likely due to the societal norms of past centuries and millennia. However, in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, women have become more prominent as originators of new technology and innovations. An example we celebrated recently is Margaret Hamilton who led the development of flight software in the Apollo program that enabled the first human landing on the Moon (1969).
- 21.
Chapter 4 introduces the formal notion of quantifying and tracking technological progress.
- 22.
See also Chap. 20 for a more detailed discussion on military and intelligence technologies.
- 23.
MIT recently concluded (2020) a study on the Future of Work
- 24.
A well-known example of such a society which voluntarily limits the use of modern technology are the Amish
References
Azevedo FA, Carvalho LR, Grinberg LT, Farfel JM, Ferretti RE, Leite RE, Filho WJ, Lent R, Herculano-Houzel S. Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain. Journal of Comparative Neurology. 2009 Apr 10;513(5):532–41.
Buchheim, G., Sonnemann R., “Geschichte der Technikwissenschaften”, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, Boston, Berlin, ISBN 3-7643-2270-5, 1990.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and mind. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
de León MS, Golovanova L, Doronichev V, Romanova G, Akazawa T, Kondo O, Ishida H, Zollikofer CP. Neanderthal brain size at birth provides insights into the evolution of human life history. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2008 Sep 16;105(37):13764–8.
de Weck A.L. Penicillin allergy: its detection by an improved haemagglutination technique. Nature. 1964 Jun 6;202:975–7.
de Weck O., Roos D., Magee C., “Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World”, MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0-262-01670-4, November 2011.
Eknoyan G. A history of obesity, or how what was good became ugly and then bad. Advances in chronic kidney disease. 2006 Oct 1;13(4):421–7.
Helveston JP, Liu Y, Feit EM, Fuchs E, Klampfl E, Michalek JJ. Will subsidies drive electric vehicle adoption? Measuring consumer preferences in the US and China. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. 2015 Mar 1;73:96–112.
Hughes T.P. Networks of power: electrification in Western society, 1880–1930. JHU Press; 1993.
Koh H. and Magee C. L., “A Functional Approach for Studying Technological Progress: Application to Information Technology,” Technological Forecasting & Social Change. 2006; 73: 1061–1083.
Leveson N.G. Engineering a safer world: Systems thinking applied to safety. The MIT Press; 2016.
Magee, Christopher L., and Tessaleno C. Devezas. “How many singularities are near and how will they disrupt human history?.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 78, no. 8 (2011): 1365–1378.
Maslow AH. A theory of human motivation. Readings in managerial psychology. 1989;20:20–35.
Rankine WJ. VII.—On the Mechanical Action of Heat, especially in Gases and Vapours. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 1853; 20(1):147–90.
Rolian C. The role of genes and development in the evolution of the primate hand. In The evolution of the primate hand 2016 (pp. 101–130). Springer, New York, NY.
Roth G, Dicke U. Evolution of the brain and intelligence. Trends in cognitive sciences. 2005 May 1;9(5):250–7.
Smil V. Energy and civilization: a history. MIT Press; 2017 May 12.
Stevenson RD, Wassersug RJ. Horsepower from a horse. Nature. 1993 Jul 15;364(6434):195–.
Tyson N.D., Lang A. Accessory to war: The unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military. WW Norton & Company; 2018 Sept 11.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Weck, O.L. (2022). Technological Milestones of Humanity. In: Technology Roadmapping and Development . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88346-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88346-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-88345-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-88346-1
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)