Technology Through Time

 I had some fun today. I wanted to research the latest technology, and then I wondered: what is considered the earliest technology, or the history of tech?

As should come as no surprise, my research turned up wildly different ideas about what it was and where it came from. If you don't think something as concrete as technology (concrete itself a technology) could be in debate, consider "science." If you asked 10 people what science is, you might be surprised at the variety of answers you'd get - and not a few of them would likely be more political than scientific. But I digress.

The first answer was that is was some adaptation of a thing that made it a tool. Not just picking up a rock and throwing it, or a (sorry, Scots) a stick, even a log, and hurling it. It had to be a purposeful adjustment, alteration, that turned the object into something more than what it had been, and that "more" needed to be suited to a purpose. So for this example, the suggestion was stone tools: "Made nearly two million years ago, stone tools...are the first known technological invention."

So, we have established that technology should be purposeful and useful.

But another answer suggested that perhaps the thing had to actually be something that didn't just adapt an existing thing to a purpose, but created something new out of existing materials, something that had not existed before. And that something had a useful purpose. Suggested were glass, first made somewhere between 3500 and 5000 BCE (or B.C. for us old-school daters). In 3500 BCE came the wheel (which I would argue was one of, if not the most significant piece of technology in early history). And in 3000 BCE, the Sumerian people in Mesopotamia began to write code. Well, only in a sense - they developed the first written language. One might think that, as a writer, I'd be inclined to say writing was the breakthrough development. My answer would be of course, it had enormous significance, but lacking the leisure that the wheel provided (allowing more rapid movement, transportation of heavy loads, adapted to beasts of burden), the time allocated to writing would have been limited.

But even before that, at about 1 million BCE, humans had learned to use (and ignite at will) fire. Fire, while naturally occurring, can be classified as a technology when it's used purposefully and usefully, and especially when used in the process of creating something new out of something else (like glass, which is made out of melted sand). 

Other landmark technologies: iron, gunpowder, the printing press, the steam engine, the telegraph, the electric light, the radio (and eventually television), the air conditioner (invented right here in Syracuse, NY, this technology opened up the Sun Belt to industry and livability) the computer, the Internet, and now in its early stages - AI, or Artificial Intelligence. 

A technology that perhaps isn't talked about as much, but is as profound as any in terms of its potential for both good and ill is CRISPR. This gene-editing technology can remove harmful gene sequences, but can also insert others. As with fire (and the Olympian Gods punishment for Prometheus for having shared it with humans), this powerful technology can be used for great good, and potentially for great harm - or for curiosity, which, as we know, killed the cat. 

And that might qualify as our third requirement to be a significant technology: it's a game changer. Going back to the example of the wheel, we see that it was deliberately crafted from raw materials (wood or stone); it served a useful purpose; and it changed the way life could be lived. Now, a "day's" work could mean something altogether different than it had. All sorts of piggy-backing technologies developed thanks to the wheel, from carts to toys to grinding grain and generating power and industrial processes, the concept of the wheel altered the way we live in ways that can keep you thinking all day.

Some of the names that come up repeatedly on lists of famous technology pioneers include Da Vinci (flying machines, submarines), Edison (over 1000 patents, including the light bulb), Ford (the assembly line), Pasteur (pasteurization), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), Guttenberg (printing press), and then there was Nikola Tesla, known perhaps as much for what he imagined as what he actually did (he quite literally predicted something along the lines of the smart phone). There are many, many more names, some of them very early, some just popping up now. 

And with Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) having rocketed into space and returned safely this very day (June 20, 2021), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galatic) slated to follow soon, we can safely say that billionaires have officially "launched" a new era of commercial space flight and exploration.