A history of technology
told through its artefacts

Technology is older than we are

We did not invent it. We arrived to find it already here, and it went on shaping the hand that held it.

Eight artefacts/3.3 million years/scroll

01 / Lomekwi

~3.3 Ma

West Turkana, Kenya

The first thing that was made

It externalised the hand.

Someone picked up a cobble, struck it against another, and kept the piece that came away. That is the whole of it. A flake of stone with an edge, made on purpose, kept for later.

The cores and flakes at Lomekwi 3 are dated to about 3.3 million years ago. No member of our genus existed yet — Homo would not appear for another half a million years, which means the first tools were not made by humans at all.

We did not invent technology. We arrived to find it already here, and it went on shaping the hand that held it.

Man is a Tool-using Animal. Without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.
Thomas Carlyle/Sartor Resartus/1834

2,900,000 years

Nothing much happens. Hands change shape. The tools do not.

02 / Fire

~400 ka

Qesem Cave, Levant

The day was made longer

It externalised heat, and the night.

Fire was not invented. It was captured, then kept, then made — and the order of those three verbs took hundreds of thousands of years.

What changed was not warmth. It was time. Cooking moved calories out of the gut and into the brain, and the hearth extended the usable day past sunset, which is when talking to each other stopped being a luxury.

Every energy technology since is a variation on the same trick: hold a reaction still enough to work beside it.

This discovery of fire, probably the greatest ever made by man, excepting language, dates from before the dawn of history.
Charles Darwin/The Descent of Man/1871

390,000 years

The ice comes and goes, four times over, and finds us still hunting.

03 / Grain and wheel

~10 ka

The Fertile Crescent

A way to store next year

It externalised time.

A granary is a machine for moving food through time. Once a surplus can be held, it can be counted, owed, taxed and stolen — and everything we mean by a society follows from that.

The wheel arrives late, and not for transport. Its first job is the potter's, spinning clay into vessels that hold the surplus the granary made possible.

This is the era where technology stops being a thing you carry and starts being a thing you live inside.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau/Discourse on the Origin of Inequality/1755

about 4,800 years

Villages thicken into cities. Nobody writes any of it down.

04 / Cuneiform

~3200 BCE

Uruk, Sumer

Memory left the body

It externalised memory.

The first writing is not poetry. It is accounting: how much barley, owed by whom, held where. Literature arrives centuries later, riding a technology built for debt.

A wedge pressed into wet clay does something no brain can — it remembers exactly, indefinitely, without the rememberer. Knowledge stops dying with the person who holds it.

Plato saw the cost immediately, and he was not wrong. Something is always traded away.

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories.
Plato/Phaedrus, Jowett translation/c. 370 BCE

about 4,650 years

Every book in the world is copied by hand, one at a time, by people who mostly cannot read them.

05 / The press

1450

Mainz

One thing became many

It externalised the copy.

Movable type did not make books better. It made them cheap, and cheapness is the more violent property.

Within seventy years the same machinery had split a church, standardised a dozen languages and made it possible for an idea to outrun the authority that wanted it stopped.

Every copying technology since — the photocopier, the tape, the file — has repeated that argument in a new medium, and lost none of its heat.

Printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.
Francis Bacon/Novum Organum, Aphorism 129/1620

319 years

Print spreads across a continent. Power does not move at all.

06 / Steam and dynamo

1769

Birmingham, then everywhere

Power stopped being alive

It externalised force.

Before the engine, every unit of force in the world came out of a muscle or a river. Work was bounded by what could be fed or where water fell.

Watt's separate condenser broke that bound, and the dynamo a century later made the force portable enough to send down a wire. The factory did not need the waterfall any more, so it moved to where the people were, and the people moved to the factory.

The shape of the modern city is a side effect of a thermodynamic efficiency gain.

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
Karl Marx/The Poverty of Philosophy/1847

178 years

Two world wars are fought, and the fastest switch anyone has is still a moving part.

07 / Transistor

1947

Bell Labs, Murray Hill

A switch with no moving parts

It externalised calculation, and distance.

The transistor is a valve for electrons that never wears out and can be made arbitrarily small. That is an unremarkable sentence describing the most consequential object of the twentieth century.

Everything downstream — the computer, the network, the phone in your hand — is that one component, repeated. There are more transistors in the device you are reading this on than there were seconds in the last thirty thousand years.

Then ARPANET connected them, and distance stopped being a property of information.

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
Norbert Wiener/The Human Use of Human Beings/1950

65 years

The machines get faster every single year, and understand nothing.

08 / Learned machines

2012

Toronto, then a great many data centres

The part we have not finished

It externalised judgement itself.

Every era before this one externalised something we could watch leave: the hand, the hearth, the ledger, the muscle. This one externalises the act of deciding, which is harder to see going.

A model trained on enough examples produces judgements nobody wrote down and nobody can fully account for. That is not a flaw in the engineering — it is the property that makes it work.

Which is why this chapter has no closing line. We are still finding out what it costs.

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Alan Turing/Computing Machinery and Intelligence/1950

And then

Every era handed something over. This is the first time we cannot see what it is.

The hand, the hearth, the ledger, the muscle, the calculation — each of them left a mark we can point at. Judgement leaves no flake, no ash, no tablet. It is being handed over now, in the years you are reading this, and the artefact has not been found yet.

Opening date: Harmand et al., 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya, Nature 521 (2015)