*David Edgerton* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Introduction Promoters of technology tend to focus on novelty. They link the term 'technology' with *invention* (the creation of a new idea) and *innovation* (the first use of a new idea). Timelines are based on dates of invention and innovation. Flight (1903), nuclear power (1945), contraception (1955), and the internet (1965). Research and development, patents, and the early stages of use are prominently featured. > The horse made a greater contribution to Nazi conquest than the V2. Shifts the focus from innovation-centered accounts of technology to use-centered accounts. On 27 March 2004, NASA launched the X-43A space aeroplane. It lasted 10 seconds, and was heralded as an incredible story of progress. 'From Kitty Hawk to the X-43A has been a century's steady advance', wrote one newspaper; from seven miles an hour to Mach Seven is a striking indication of how far powered flight has travelled in a hundred years'. But the headline would have more appropriately said: "1950s aeroplane launches unmanned ramjet plane which flies a little faster than 1960s Right Stuff pilots." That's because a 1950s B-52 was used to launch it, and the key technology of the X-43A was the scramjet, a supersonic version of the ramjet, which was used in the Bloodhound, a 1950s-designed British anti-aircraft missile. In the 1960s, B-52s would fly X-15 experimental planes into the air, which were then flown at speeds reaching up to Mach 6.7. Even in the 1990s, those test pilots could claim to be one of the fastest airplane pilots in the world. > The new history will be surprisingly different. For example, steam power, held to be characteristic of the industrial revolution, was not only absolutely but relatively more important in 1900 than in 1800. Even in Britain, the lead country of the industrial revolution, it continued to grow in absolute importance after that. Britain consumed much more coal in the 1950s than in the 1850s. The world consumed more coal in 2000 than in 1950 or 1900. It has more motor cars, aeroplanes, wooden furniture and cotton textiles than ever before. The tonnage of world shipping continues to increase. We still have buses, trains, radio, television and the cinema, and consume ever increasing quantities of paper, cement and steel. The production of books continues to increase. Even the key novel technology of the late twentieth century, the electronic computer, has been around for many decades. The postmodern world has forty-year-old nuclear power stations as well as fifty-year old bombers. > One particularly important feature of use-based history of technology is that it can be genuinely global. It includes all places that use technology, not just the small number of places where invention and innovation is concentrated. In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology. In use-centred accounts, nearly everywhere does. It gives us a history of technology engaged with all the world's population, which is mostly poor, non-white and half female. A use-perspective points to the significance of novel technological worlds which have emerged in the twentieth century and which have hitherto had no place in histories of technology. Among them are the new technologies of poverty. They are missed because the poor world is thought of as having traditional local technologies, a lack of rich-world technologies, and/or has been subject to imperial technological violence. > A consequence of the new approach is that we shift attention from the new to the old, the big to the small, the spectacular to the mundane, the masculine to the feminine, the rich to the poor. But at its core is a rethinking of the history of all technology, including the big, spectacular, masculine high technologies of the rich white world. For all the critiques, we do not in fact have a coherent productionist, masculine, materialist account of technology and history in the twentieth century. We have big questions, and big issues to address, which are surprisingly open. ## 1- Significance We can use counterfactuals to assess the significance of a technology, by comparing it with the best alternative. For example, Robert Fogel found that railways increased the output of the US economy in 1890 by less than 5% of GDP when he compared them to other means of transportation, such as canals and horse-drawn wagons. > To become widely used, a thing does not have to be massively better than what preceded it; it need only be *marginally* better than alternatives (assuming for the moment that better technologies will replace worse ones). > The paper-clip is ubiquitous not because it is an earth-shatteringly important technology.... We use paper-clips so much because they are, for many uses, marginally better than alternatives, and we know this. ## 2 - Time Before World War I, the British army had 25,000 horses, but by the middle of 1917, it had 591,000 horses, 213,000 mules, 47,000 camels, and 11,000 oxen. In late 1917, there were 368,000 British horses and 82,000 British mules on the Western Front alone. They were needed to transport the vast quantities of materiel from the railheads to the front. Britain bought 429,000 horses and 275,000 mules from the US. When the American armies arrived in Europe in 1918, they brought with them one horse or mule for every four men. In World War II, the German army had even more horses than the British army had in World War I. # Quotes # References