History of Tech

Pottery

10,000 BCE

The earliest known ceramics are the Gravettian culture figurines (little, faceless representations of fat women) that date back to between 29 and 25 thousand BC. These were shaped by hand, and fired in a pit. Somewhere around 12000 years ago, clever folk figured out that clay – often mixed with sand, grit, crushed shells, or bone – could be used to make more useful items: pots, cups, plates, bowls, storage jars, and so forth.

Archery

10,000 BCE

Archery is the method by which a person uses the spring power stored in a bent stick to shoot a slender pointed projectile a great distance at rapid speed. A very useful technology, whether employed against game animals or against other human beings. Now it's considered just recreation.

Irrigation

6000 BCE

Irrigation has been a central feature of agriculture for over 5000 years, and forms the basis for the economy and culture of many civilizations throughout history. Perennial irrigation was first practiced in Mesopotamia with water flowing through small channels connecting to a river or a small lake. In Egypt, several pharaohs during the Twelfth Dynasty used oases to store water for irrigation during the dry season.

Ancient Era

Period: 6000 BCE to 1000 BCE

Sailing

5500 BCE

Since rowing a ship is a lot of work, men developed sails to let the wind push it along. Sailing gave humans a quicker, easier way to travel than over land, and has been used for trade, transport, fishing and warfare since the first mast was raised. The oldest representation of a ship under sail was found on a painted disc in Kuwait, dating to between 5500 and 5000 BC. Tomb paintings c. 3200 BC show reed boats under sail on the Nile.

Bronze Working

4500 BCE

The earliest bronze artifacts – actually, arsenic bronze, alloys of metallic arsenic rather than tin – found by archaeologists in Iranian tombs date back to the fifth millennium BC. Tin-bronze was eventually found to be superior to arsenic-bronze ... and the fumes of the alloying process didn't kill the bronze worker, so that was a plus.

Animal Husbandry

4000 BCE

The dog is thought to be the earliest domesticated animal, probably to assist in hunting game and protect the camp. (They also improved sanitation by eating all the scraps being tossed around the fire pit.) Evidence suggests that dogs were first tamed and bred in China – in fact, geneticists believe that about 95% of the breeds today are descended from just a few common Chinese ancestors.

Mining

4000 BCE

If it can't be found laying about, dig it up. That's the basic premise behind mining, one of civilization's earliest and most pragmatic technologies. The Neolithics mined flint in England and France about 4000 BC; the ancient Egyptians mined malachite at Maadi between 2600 and 2500 BC, using the hard stone for ornamentation and pottery.

Construction

4000 BCE

When the architects and engineers get done mucking about, the contractors take over. Once there was agriculture and a reason to stay in one place, the first huts were constructed by the people who would live in them. As cities grew during the Bronze Age, professional construction workers – just bricklayers and carpenters at first – arose.

Writing

3400 BCE

Writing is a technology that – like a few others – quite literally changed the course of civilization. The ability to set things down so as to remember them – “external memory storage” – unaltered beyond a single lifetime meant that every aspect of the human condition, every social structural and cultural more, altered significantly.

Horseback Riding

3000 BCE

There is archaeological evidence that around 4000 BC humans had used bits on their horses in the basins of the Dnieper and Don rivers; skeletons of horses found in the region shows signs that the horses chomped on bits. Thus, horseback riding. It is thought that the Scythians of the steppes may well have been the first to develop the stirrup and the saddle, although the historical argument is as yet unconvincing.

Masonry

2600 BCE

The ancient Egyptians mastered the art of masonry as early as the fourth millennium BC, constructing temples, palaces, pyramids and other edifices from limestone, sandstone, granite and basalt found in the hills of the Nile River. The Assyrians of the Fertile Crescent lacked easy access to stone but possessed rich deposits of clay, which they sun-dried into bricks.

Engineering

2550 BCE

Engineering is the science (or perhaps “art,” if engineers themselves are involved in the discussion) of using science to design things: buildings, roads and bridges, machines, and other materially useful things. The term is somewhat vague – consider for example, software “engineering.”

Ship Building

2500 BCE

Shipbuilding is, of course, the building of ships. Shipwrights follow a profession that traces its roots back to an age before recorded history. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans sailed to Borneo from Asia 120 thousand years ago aboard constructed ships; and later to New Guinea and Australia some 50 thousand years ago.

Education

2076 BCE

Humans learn things, and civilization results. Obviously education has been around as long as mankind has. Through most of history, it was an informal affair, parents teaching their children the skills they needed to know to survive and be productive (household chores and hunting expeditions and dodging barbarians and so forth).

Wheel

2000 BCE

The invention of the wheel comes in the late Neolithic Age, and along with the advance of several other technologies kicks off the Bronze Age. Archaeological evidence for wheeled vehicles appears in the fourth millennia BC, more or less at the same time in Mesopotamia, the Caucasus and Central Europe (obviously, an idea whose time had come). In China the wheel was certainly in existence by 1200 BC, when Chinese chariots appeared.

Currency

2000 BCE

Currency, where something relatively worthless in itself represents some amount of actual value, has been the bane of civilization since around 2000 BC, when a form of receipt was used to show ownership of stored grain in temples in Sumer. The Egyptians soon adopted the practice for their own grain warehouses, so that individuals could claim a portion they had “banked” therein.

Celestial Navigation

2000 BCE

Celestial navigation (or astronavigation, which sounds more scientific than artistic) is the practice of taking angular measurements between a celestial body (sun, moon, planet or star) and a point on the horizon to determine one's position on the globe. A very useful skill for early sailors venturing out of sight of land.

Cartography

1600 BCE

There is a fair amount of scholarly debate about how long the “science” of making maps has been around, since there's a fair amount of debate about what constitutes a map. The oldest “map” to have been discovered is a depiction of what may be local terrain features about Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, dated to the 7th millennium BC.

Iron Working

1200 BCE

While the use of iron has been dated back to 4000 BC, the Hittites were the first to extract the ore, smelt it and fashion weapons – thus setting off the Iron Age around 1200 BC. In Asia, iron working developed at about the same time; iron Chinese artifacts have been unearthed dating back to around 600 BC.

Classical Era

Period: 1000 BCE to 500

Mathematics

600 BCE

The term “mathematics” is derived from the Greek mathema, meaning “knowledge, study, or learning.” Appropriate, given that it is the science of science, focused on quantity, measurement, structure, logic and change. Mathematics, according to some, is also the art of art, focused on space, shape, relationship, perspective, and fractals. Not to mention mathematics relationship to music.

Military Engineering

550 BCE

Loosely defined as “the art and practice of designing and building military works and maintaining lines of military transport and communications,” military engineering dates back to the Roman legions, which each had a small, specialized corps devoted to overseeing the building of fortifications and roads.

Stirrups

322 BCE

Along with writing, gunpowder and pre-sliced bread, the stirrup is considered one of the basic inventions needed to spread civilization ... at least by some historians. Like all great innovations, it seems such a simple idea. Humans had domesticated the horse around 4500 BC, but where to put one's feet and how to stay on when the horse began running?

Machinery

3 BCE

When humans began to develop tasks that they or their animals could not (or would not) do, they invented machines. From those first simple machines – the lever, pulley and screw – that Archimedes went on about, a machine civilization has evolved on Earth.

Astronomy

178

Significant advances in astronomy have usually come with the introduction of new technology; it helps to be able to see things larger, farther away or in other spectrums when studying infinity. Better and better telescopes allowed William Herschel to create a detailed catalogue of nebulae and clusters, and to “discover” the planet Uranus in 1781.

Medieval Era

Period: 500 to 1350

Metal Casting

800

Metal casting is the process by which a craftsman can make multiple, identical metal objects by pouring molten metal into a mold. The oldest such yet found is a copper frog cast in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC. The first production of cast iron was in China between 800 and 700 BC; using sand mold casting, the Chinese were making cast iron plowshares by 233 BC.

Printing

1040

No technology since writing so impacted civilization as did movable-type printing. Woodblock printing had been used for decades in China, India and Europe. The pecia system developed in the early 13th Century at Italian universities gave booksellers a method for producing multiple copies of a book in a relatively short time.

Castles

1066

Great piles of stone – some still intact (more or less) – dominate the varied landscapes of Europe, castles dating back to the early 10th Century AD when feudal lords sought to insure their power and influence. Some were little more than cold, dirty square stone boxes; others were fairy structures with tall towers, crenelated parapets and flying buttresses.

Gunpowder

1240

The invention of gunpowder is usually attributed to Chinese alchemists during the Tang dynasty, one of the “Four Great Inventions of China.” The earliest written record of it – a formula composed of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate dating to the later Song dynasty – was supposed to be an elixir for immortality ... it was anything but.

Banking

1275

Although there had been “banks” before – Hammurabi even set down laws governing banking in his famous Code – mostly these were private individuals that made loans, with various unsavory methods to insure repayment. With the fall of Rome in the West and the fall of money lending, Banks did not reappear in Europe until the Middle Ages, rediscovered by rulers looking for ways to fund their bloody and expensive Crusades.

Renaissance Era

Period: 1350 to 1725

Square Rigging

1450

The first two-mast square-rigged ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the mid-14th Century AD, replacing the triangular-rigged lanteen sailing ships that had been used for the previous thousand years.

Rifling

1520

Rifling is merely the cutting of helical grooves into the inner part of a gun barrel so as to induce spin in a ball or bullet which serves to gyroscopically stabilized the projectile, giving it greater accuracy and range. In short, all this means is that it took a skilled marksman to hit anything specific with a smoothbore musket, but any fool with a steady hand has a fair chance of success firing a rifle at a target.

Sanitation

1596

A clean water supply and sanitation has been rather important for the rise of civilization, since without such folk tend to fall prey to disease and death. Especially when crowded together in urban centers. The earliest signs of city sanitation have been found in the ruins of the Harappan settlements Mohenjo-daro and Rakhigarhi in the Indus Valley c. 2500 BC.

Electricity

1600

Mankind has known electricity existed since the first bunch of Neanderthals got blasted by a lightning bolt; in fact, for millennia afterwards, electricity in this form was associated with angry gods. Egyptian texts dating from c. 2750 BC record people getting shocks from electric eels. Around 600 BC Thales of Miletus observed that static electricity could be generated by rubbing rods of amber with cat's fur (but didn't investigate what the cats thought of this).

Ballistics

1638

The mechanics of throwing things have been known for quite awhile; primitive cultures are quite adept at throwing things. The science of those mechanics is known as “ballistics.” The first ballistic weapons were sticks, stones and spears.

Chemistry

1661

As astronomy evolved from astrology, chemistry evolved from another pseudoscience: alchemy. Alchemy spans four millennia and three continents; never underestimate mankind's ability to believe in the irrational. The roots of Western alchemy can be traced to Hellenic Egypt, where Zosimos of Panopolis claimed that the ancient priests had discovered a way to transmute metals from one to another (such as lead to gold, the “Holy Grail” for alchemists).

Steam Power

1698

When heated to boiling, water produces steam. Even barbarians knew this. But harnessing that steam wasn't thought of until Taqi al-Din Muhammed ibn Ma’ruf described a hypothetical steam turbine for turning a spit in 1551 AD. The move towards a workable steam engine gets started a century later when Edward Somerset published a collection on his “inventions,” including a steam pump, a working model of which he built in Raglan Castle.

Industrial Era

Period: 1725 to 1890

Economics

1776

Economics is the understanding of “the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.” This understanding was a lot easier in olden times when things were distributed via barter (“I have a daughter and you have some goats; let’s trade."), but even in the early stages of coinage and mercantile trade notions of production and profits was pretty straightforward.

Mass Production

1800

Until the Industrial Revolution, the idea of “mass production” was limited to pottery (molds), Chinese crossbows with interchangeable parts, and assembly line production of books. But in the Renaissance, Venice began mass-producing ships to maintain their grip on the Mediterranean in their famed Arsenal, using prefabricated parts and assembly lines that would not be matched for output for three centuries.

Industrialization

1800

Not many “technologies” (or, in this case a convergence of several technologies) give a label to a revolution and to an era. Industrialization is viewed by scholars as the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one, which was historically accompanied by widespread social and economic upheaval. It is driven by the invention of new machinery and discovery of new power sources.

Flight

1804

Since the Renaissance, mankind has learned how to fly ... and how to crash too. Leonardo da Vinci's visions of flight are well-known, of course, but he certainly wasn't the first. From the earliest times there have been legends (some maybe even true) of men strapping on wings or other devices and attempting to fly, usually by jumping off something tall (most ended badly).

Replaceable Parts

1850

Evidence for the use of interchangeable parts can be traced back to the warships of Carthage during the First Punic War, when standardized parts made repairs to their galleys relatively quick. During the Warring States period, the Qin dynasty employed mass-produced crossbows with interchangeable parts to pummel its rivals.

Steel

1855

Modern steelmaking got its start in 1855 AD, when Henry Bessemer perfected his process using pig iron as the basis to make “mild” (or “low-carbon”) steel in quantity fairly cheaply, a century after Benjamin Huntsman had established the first steelworks in Sheffield, England – a refinement but not much improvement over the old “crucible” method.

Combustion

1860

Although there were internal combustion engines described by engineers before the 19th Century – for instance, a piston-and-cylinder gas-fired engine by Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir in 1860 AD – until industrial-level drilling for petroleum and methods for refining it into gasoline, they really weren't much more than a curiosity.

Petroleum Refining

1860

Petroleum refining developed in parallel with the chemical revolution of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, starting with the drilling of the first oil wells in the United States around 1860. The increased volume in crude oil's availability led to experiments in improving its qualities, starting with simple distillation rigs, and increasing in complexity and sophistication.

Radio

1888

The idea of “wireless” communication begins with experiments in wireless telegraphy – sending impulses through the ground, water and even steel railroad tracks – in the 1830s. In 1888 AD, Heinrich Hertz proved conclusively that electromagnetic waves could be transmitted through the air; his publications set off a mad scramble among inventors and crackpots to produce these Hertzian waves. Even the likes of Nikola Tesla, Amos Dolbear, and Sir Oliver Lodge got involved.

Modern Era

Period: 1890 to 1945

Rocketry

1914

Until the Second World War, rockets remained relatively short-range, inaccurate, clumsy weapons ... or were used for making pretty fireworks (not that military rockets don't make pretty explosions). In 1792, iron-cased rockets were used by Tipu Sultan defending Mysore against the avaricious British East India Company. The British, sensing a good thing, developed the solid-fuel Congreve Rocket for use against the French, Americans and other unpleasant sorts.

Plastics

1920

Synthetic or semi-synthetic organic polymers derived (generally) from petrochemicals of high molecular mass that are incredibly durable, malleable, lightweight and now pervasive in modern civilization. Plastic. It comes in many forms, some tougher, some more flexible, some with a greater or lesser tolerance to heat. Plastic can be molded, pressed, or extruded into virtually any shape desired.

Computers

1920

If one thinks of a computer as a device simply to aid computation, then these have been around for millennia. An abacus, used as early as 2400 BC, is just such as device. (For that matter, so is counting using fingers, but that’s far too simple for modern civilization.) A mechanical astrolabe with a calendar calculator was devised by Abi Bakr in Persia in 1235 AD.

Composites

1930

A composite is any material made from two or more materials with significantly differing physical or chemical properties; composites are distinct from alloys or chemical compounds (in which the components do not retain their original properties).

Advanced Flight

1940

The first flight of a jet aircraft was made by the Italian Caproni Campini N.1 prototype in August 1940. The Germans had kept their own work, the Messerschmitt Me-262, under wraps. Although successfully test flown as early as 1941, mass production didn't start until mid-1944 when several Luftwaffe jet squadrons took to the skies against the Allied bombers.

Predictive Systems

1940

Artificial Intelligence systems can create sophisticated models of behavior, with good predictive power for future behavior. This is becoming widely exploited in commercial domains (as anyone who carefully observes the Internet advertisements served up them can tell you) but it is also being used in other areas as well. Medical and health professionals are interested in increased efficacy of targeted preventative programs.

Synthetic Materials

1941

Once chemistry took hold of civilization, scientists started searching for ways to improve upon naturally occurring animal and plant products. First up, synthetic fibers pioneered by Joseph Swan in the early 1880s; his fiber was made from tree bark, intended as a longer-lasting filament for light bulbs but somewhat better as a textile. Next the Frenchman Hilaire de Chardonnet invented artificial silk, which was displayed to great acclaim at the 1889 Paris Exhibition.

Nuclear Fission

1942

Mushroom clouds and boundless energy; utopia or annihilation. The technology of nuclear fission carries the promise of both, or neither. In physics and chemistry, nuclear fission is the decay – natural or not – whereby the nucleus of an atom breaks down into lighter nuclei, spinning off neutrons and photons, thus releasing significant amounts of energy.

Atomic Era

Period: 1945 to 1995

Nuclear Fusion

1946

In contrast to nuclear fission – where energy is generated by the division of a nucleus – nuclear fusion occurs when two or more atomic nuclei slam together hard enough to fuse, which also releases photons in quantity. Fusion reactions power the stars of the universe, giving off lots of light and heat.

Cybernetics

1948

The term "cybernetics" is taken from the ancient Greek term to describe the skill of a ship's helmsman, and was re-invigorated in 1948 by American mathematician Nobert Weiner, who used it as a term for the study and practice of controlling complex systems, particularly with regard to human sensory input and locomotor function.

Advanced Power Cells

1954

The first true solid-state device for generating electricity was created by the Italian inventor Alessandro Volta in 1800. There have been countless refinements to Volta's electrochemical cell design since then, and with the digital revolution the development of battery technology has undergone ever-greater investment and interest.

Telecommunications

1957

Telegraph and telephone communications were carried by wire, much too slow for the modern day. And even though they made the world smaller and changed the landscape of business, war, and politics, scientists and inventors were soon searching for “wireless” telecommunications, the process of sending electronic signals through the atmosphere to special receivers. In 1894 Guglielmo Marconi built the first commercially viable wireless telegraph, soon termed “radio.”

Satellites

1957

“Beep … beep … beep.” So it began. Sputnik, with an onboard radio signal transmitter, was launched in October 1957 AD by Soviet Russia. Orbiting overhead, the artificial satellite (as opposed to natural satellites like the Moon) Sputnik served notice to the humans huddled on the surface that the world had dramatically changed ... for better or not remained to be determined.

Offworld Missions

1957

If human beings are to settle away from planet Earth, it will be necessary to develop competencies for life isolated from the main planet—simple matters like “growing food” and “finding enough water” and “not having to run home for spare parts.” Approaches for sustained life away from Earth are still in the theoretical stages in the early Twenty-First Century.

Nanotechnology

1959

Tiny machines inside animals and humans snipping, slicing, splicing, melding or mutating cells. Tiny machines creating new materials on the molecular level. Or tiny machines making more tiny machines. Whatever use it may be put to, nanotechnology is just beyond the edge of science fiction.

Lasers

1960

The term “laser” is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” which pretty much describes what it happens to be. The theory dates back to a paper by Albert Einstein in 1917 which offered a derivation of Planck's Law concerning stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. In 1928, the atomic physicist Rudolf Ladenburg confirmed the phenomena of stimulated emission and negative absorption.

Smart Materials

1960

Materials are usually selected for use on the basis of a single quality. A brick, for instance, should not be flexible if it is to be a good basis for construction. Smart materials are materials which can assume different properties on command, in response to different situations. An analogy would be a brick that is solid when used as a building material, but which could be flat and flexible for easy storage and portability otherwise.

Robotics

1961

In 1942 AD, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed three “laws of robotics.” In 1948 the American mathematician Norbert Wiener formulated the “principles of cybernetics” as the basis for practical robotics. And in 1961 the first programmable robot – “Unimate” – was constructed to lift and stack hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine.

Stealth Technology

1964

The ability to creep around unseen and unleash havoc is the fantasy of every five-year-old; modern scientists are close to making it reality. Modern stealth technology is a combination of multiple military projects and experimental science expanded beyond what humans can see, trying to both hide and detect objects by radar, acoustics, thermal readings, or other less readily visible methods.

Advanced AI

1979

In the ensuing decades since the Turing Test was proposed, artificial intelligence has become more widespread and more robust in terms of its capabilities, particularly in the analysis of large data sets. An AI in these cases often “studies” a problem through developing and testing hypotheses about underlying patterns in the data, matching them against the data, and creating iteratively refined models with considerable explanatory power.

Information Era

Period: 1995 to 2020

Future Era

Period: 2020 to 2050