Thomas Jefferson's architectural design for the quadrangle at the University of Virginia following the Greek revival style.

Technology, as a historically ancient and complicated subject, is a little like a puzzle whose parts are not all there.

The art of putting together parts to make a functional whole.

• That means of organizing ideas about technology as a study of cornerstone inventions, keystone devices and techniques that transform land, labor and capital; rationalizing existence.
Three ways to organize information about technology:
Etymologically	Chronologically	Thematically

The parts of an archway.

Etymologically

Meaning the origin of words and how their definition and use changes through time.

What do words like machine, automatic, manufacture, horse power, electricity, robot, cybernetics, transistor, or systems engineering mean and when were they first used?

In what context were words like science and technology brought together once they were initially used?

Words have a lifetime as do all of us, they come into and pass out of use. There was a time when there was no word for science. Not having some words is fine, but there are words that embody such extensive concepts that without those words what exactly does exist in the imaginations of those who use older terms?

For example, the Romans lacked a zero, or "0" in their number system and they did not have mechanical clocks, refrigeration, or books. So would they not have been able to imagine negative amounts, consider time passing, preserve their food, or learn about the world?

This Tuscan landscape was transformed in ancient times by deforestation and then the coming of the olive culture.

Chronologically

Explaining and examining critical turning points to show there is a procession in every tool complex from initiation, adoption, dispersal, adaptation, and exaptation that moves from one well defined period to another.

Postman uses Lewis Mumford's three broad categories in the emergence of modern tools to explain a process of increasing complexity on tools and deepening dependence on fossil fuels from 1500-2000.

Long time-line.

Macroview

Microview

Details of more recent important dates:

• 1780 • Watt's steam engine improvements.
• 1801 • The atomic model of chemical elements.
• 1830 • The earliest railways in England.
• 1905 • Nettie Stevens discovered the Y chromosome; Einstein's description of the photo-electric effect, brownian motion, & relativity.
• 1916 • The general theory of relativity.
• 1942 • The first nuclear chain (fission) reaction occurred in Chicago.
• 1953 • The molecular structure of nucleic acid explained.

Long time-line.

See Postman on communications and information.

Thematically

There is in technological stories or stories that include magical devices (Rumplestiltskin, Don Quixote, Prometheus, or Brave New World) overt or implied reactions to the technology of the times affecting human relationships, testing personal responsibility, or as in Faust offering the hero vast power in exchange for her or his soul. These stories fall into technophilic and technophobic categories, hence the good versus bad themes in the discussion of techniques in the past. We can argue that as technology improves our lives so it destroys older traditions. Some suggest new devices rob us of the capacity to experience essential facets of nature that make us human.

Long time-line.

Other themes.

Symbolism

Contrasting Postman and Pacey.

Reflection

The art of playing your ideas back to yourself. You do this by reading and transcribing your notes. Summarizing your research and asking questions about the context of what you have discovered.

Defining technology.

There are several themes for you to reflect on once you have organized your notes and readings.

• technology as an extension of our human qualities enables us to achieve things we cannot otherwise expect to do.
• technology requires us to judge the outcome of using tools to achieve some end, outcome or goal.
• technology is a poorly defined and basically misunderstood term that arises from the need to use, master and understand materials, tools and means or techniques of using instruments.
• the history of technology is more than just inventions, inventors and tool complexes because it includes social changes and the spread of power from one tool using area to another.

Which of the above statements corresponds to the notes you have taken based on your impressions from the readings?

Submit a page with evidence from all of the readings of your answer to me.

The Syllabus | Technology periods | readings | Timeline

Clarify | Organize | Reflect | Examine

Pacey on Landscape | Organizing the study of Technology | Timeline | Pursell | Pacey overview | Kaku

	Tulips as tools?
	Tools of Toil: what to read.
	Tools are historical building blocks of technology.
Technology can be understood if tools have three facets.
Tools used in both Music and Architecture led to mechanization and automation.
Tools and the study of technology require us to reflect on the power of instruments,