Historical Perspective

of Technology–Different Ages
The History of Technology

 Early in the history of technology, the development of tools

and materials was based on technological know-how.

 Today, technological development is based on scientific

knowledge and engineering design
 7 Technological Ages

Age of
Intimation Internal
Metal of Combustion
Age Automation Engine

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fire First Expansion Electrical &

Age Machine of Electronic
Steam Age
Age Age
1. Fire Age
■ The age of nomadic hunter-gatherers, using tools and weapons fashioned from
easily available wood, bone or stone and able to induce and control fire.
1. Fire Age
■ First Use of tools
 Homo erectus and Homo sapiens were the first to use tools
 Australoplthecus was the first of man’s predecessors to walk upright. This ability made
available a pair of forelimbs hence the ability to grasp sticks or stones and later to
fashion them
■ Invention of Fire
 one of man’s most wonderful accomplishments leading to innumerable benefits
 The first hominid known to have made fire was the Homo erectus in China
 This activity dates from about 600,000 BC.
 Used primarily for warmth, for cooking, for protection in scaring off wild animals, and
so on
 Used in later period for hollowing out logs to make primitive boats, extraction of copper
and iron from their ores, weapons and ornaments, making of glass objects
1. Fire Age
■ Invention of Fire
 two principal methods of making fire
 by impacting flint and iron or iron pyrites: may have occurred by chance, require additional
dried grass or tinder
 using a fire drill: a higher degree of intellectual capacity for its conception, provides its own
tinder from the friction of the hard, pointed stick on the soft wood of the hearth.
1. Fire Age
■ Development of tools
 most primitive tools found in Kenya, called pebble tools : core and flake tools
 general-purpose tool: bi-faced hand axes, sharpened by flaking all around the
periphery
 Variants of basic knife blades: gravers, spokeshaves, saw blades, planes and drills

Bi-face Hand Axe Gravers

Spoke-shaves
Saw Blades

Drills
1. Fire Age
■ Development of tools
 Tool Making Method: The production of the basic core and flake tools was a skilled
occupation using one of two methods—
 Pressure Flaking Method: In this method, a tool of bone, stone or even wood was pressed
against the core so as to split off a flake and the process was repeated.
 Percussion Flaking Method: In percussion flaking a hammer stone was repeatedly struck
against the core or against an intermediate bone or wooden tool applied to its edge.

Pressure Flaking Method Percussion Flaking Method

1. Fire Age
■ Cave Paintings
 impulse to create
 Charcoal or sometimes black oxide of manganese or the red and yellow oxides of iron,
generally ground to a powder and mixed with some fatty medium, were the colors
generally used
 Mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, reindeer, horse, cave lion and bear have all been
found in these paintings, mostly of men fighting with bows and arrows.
2. Metal Age
■ The time when increasing specialization of tasks encouraged change in social
structures.
 2. Metal Age
■ Dawn of Agriculture
 It started some time about 10,000 BC
 At the end of the last Ice Age, melting ice flooded the land and brought life to dormant seeds
 Accidental cross-fertilization of wild goat grass and wild wheat led to the much more fruitful
bread wheat, probably the first plant to be sown as a crop
■ Domestication of Animals
 people domesticated dog, the sheep, the goat and the onager, a form of donkey
 Some of them were used for agricultural purposes
 Invention of potter wheel
 It originated about 3500 BC in Mesopotamia
 A simple turntable mounted on a central pivot was turned by an assistant so that the potter
had both hands free with which to manipulate the clay
2. Metal Age
■ Invention of Copper and Iron
 Copper ore was mined first at Mount Sinai as early as 5000 BC and 2000 years
later in Oman in the south of Arabia. Copper, as later bronze, was something of a
rarity and consequently expensive. Copper tools, and weapons, thus became
available only to the powerful.
 Iron became more widely available than copper or bronze because it was far
cheaper and could be made into much better and longer lasting tools and
weapons. Iron has rightly been called the democratic metal, the metal of the
people.
2. Metal Age
■ Division of Labor
 In this age, it became obvious that people who are good at something should do it to
increase efficiency.
 Metal workers were a class of specialists
 The construction of furnaces and the manufacture of crucibles were to become other
objects of specialization
 Glass Making
 The earliest manmade glass is dated at about 4000 BC in Egypt, as a simple glaze on
beads.
 A great advance was the blowing iron, allowing larger and thinner vessels to be
made. This originated in the first century under the Romans.
2. Metal Age
■ Gearing
 Aristotle- Pioneer of Gearing
 Ctesibius of Alexandria is said to have constructed a water-clock with gears about 150
BC. This is the earliest reference to toothed gearing, but no mention is made of the
materials used.
 Gearing, then, developed in two materials—in wood for large installations transmitting
power; and in metal, usually bronze or brass initially, for timekeeping and other related
astronomical instruments.
2. Metal Age
■ Early Machines in Egypt
 Egyptians classified five basic machines: the lever, the wheel and axle, the
wedge, the pulley and the screw, but the first three of these had been in
common use since about 3000 BC.
3. First Machine Age
■ Age of the first clocks and the printing press, when knowledge began
to be standardized and widely disseminated.
3. First Machine Age
 Early Time-keeping
 Water-clocks, together with sand hour glasses were the first time measuring
devices which could be used in the absence of the sun
 water-clock freeze up in a cold climate. On the other hand, sand hourglass was
subject to moisture absorption
3. First Machine Age

■ Mechanical Clocks
 Mechanical clocks were made at first for monasteries and
other religious houses where prayers had to be said at set
hours of the day and night.

 More Improvement on Clocks

The most remarkable clock of the age was that completed by
Giovanni di Dondi in 1364 after sixteen years’ work
Jacopo, Giovanni’s father, is credited with the invention of the
dial in 1344.
3. First Machine Age
 More Improvement on Clocks
 Galileo’s observations of the swinging altar
lamp in the cathedral of Pisa marked the start
of the use of the pendulum as a means of
controlling the speed of clocks.
 The Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens
turned this knowledge to good effect when he
built the first pendulum clock in 1656.
3. First Machine Age
■ Marine Clocks
 First sea clock was made by John Harrison in 1761

■ Invention of Telescope
 The telescope originated in the shop of Johannes Lippershey,
a spectacle maker of Middleburg, in 1608.

 Invention of Microscope
 The true inventor of the microscope is not known,
there being several claimants to the invention.
 But Zacharias Jansen is a possible candidate
3. First Machine Age
■ Remarkable Achievement in Metrology
 The invention of Vernier’s scale dates from 1631.

 Development of Crank Mechanism

 An important development in the middle Ages was that of mechanisms for the inter-
conversion of rotary and reciprocating motions.
 Initially used for grinding swords. Later used to apply tension to the strings of a
crossbow. Frequent use in carpenter’s brace, flour mill, looms etc.
3. First Machine Age
 Invention of Printing Press
 One of the greatest inventions of the middle ages was the printing process devised by
Johannes Gutenberg, in 1440
 The first book printed in England was by William Caxton at his press in Westminster in
1474.
4. Age of Intimation of Automation
■ Modification of Coining Process
– King Croesus was the first to use gold and silver coins, in Lydia
– About AD 1000, coin blanks were formed from sheets of metal, hammered to
the right thickness and then cut into strips
– after 1500 Bramante of Florence introduce the screw press for coining
– A further sixteenth-century development was the use of small rolling mills
4. Age of Intimation of Automation
■ Industrial Revolution
– the new machines arrived: lathe, machines for boring, milling, shaping,
slotting, planning, grinding and gear-cutting
– they were all operated by a steam engine or a water wheel, either of which
could be able to drive a number of machines: a factory
4. Age of Intimation of Automation
■ Industrial Revolution
– Instead of being spaced out along the river banks so as to take advantage of
the available water power, factories could now huddle together as close as was
convenient to their owners.
– Regular working hours were introduced and penalties strictly enforced for
failure to keep to them.
– Britain’s major industrial cities, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow,
Leeds…Nottingham, Birmingham.
■ First Look at Computer
– Charles Babbage, designed and attempted to manufacture , a Difference
Engine (1823), later an Analytical Engine (1824) to calculate figures, statistical
data and others
– His machines were purely mechanical and the precision needed in their
manufacture was almost beyond impossible.
– He died a disillusioned man, but left behind him thousands of drawings that
contain the basic principles upon which modern computers are built.
5. Expansion of Steam Age
■ Experimentation with Steam
– In 1606, Francesco Della Porta demonstrated the suction caused by condensing
steam and its power to draw up water.
– In 1643, Evangelista Torricelli demonstrated the vacuum in a mercury barometer.
– Otto von Guericke, in 1654 performed his most dramatic experiment in which two
teams of eight horses were shown to be unable to pull apart two halves of a
copper sphere from which the air had been exhausted by an air pump to leave a
vacuum. Atmospheric pressure held them together.
– In 1660, Robert Boyle formulated the Gas Laws and demonstrated the maximum
height that water could be drawn by a suction pump.
– Denis Papin, in the early 1690s, constructed a small atmospheric steam engine.
5. Expansion of Steam Age
■ Improvement of Steam Engine
– Thomas Newcomen was the first designer of steam engines. James Watt
improved steam engine model using separate exhaust vessels. He was
patented for this in 1769.
■ Building of Railway Industry
– ‘railway mania’, which reached its height in 1845–6, were many, various,
sudden and dramatic.
– Providing employment for thousands of people
– More and more people travelled, many of whom had never travelled outside
their own villages before.
– excellent for the rapid transport of goods
6. Age of Internal Combustion Age
■ Early Internal Combustion Engines
– In 1884, Gottlieb Daimler built and ran the first of his light high-speed petrol
engines
– In 1885; Carl Benz built his first three-wheeled car
– In 1892, Rudolph Diesel patented his ‘universal economic engine’
■ Improvements of Motor Vehicles
– Henry Ford started making his first ‘product for the people’, the Ford Model ‘A’
in 1903.
■ First Successful Aeroplane Experiment
– First look at Aeroplane- Wright Brothers (1903)
– On 17 December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew some 165m (540ft) in
twelve seconds
7. Electrical and Electronic Age
■ Research on Electricity
– William Gilbert wrote his De Magnete in 1600 (‘On the
magnet and magnetic bodies, and on the great magnet,
the earth’)
– In this book of his, he researched about magnetism and
static electricity and distinguished between them.

■ Invention of First Battery

– Alessandro Volta, some two hundred years later, took a series of discs of zinc
and silver separated by moist cardboard and arranged alternately to form a
pile. This Voltaic pile was the first true battery, a static source of electric power.
7. Electrical and Electronic Age
■ Invention of Electromagnetism
– Michael Faraday showed in 1831 constructed a machine for producing a
continuous supply of electricity, i.e. the first electric generator.
– The substitution of electromagnets for permanent magnets by Wheatstone and
Cooke in 1845 was the final step to bringing about the dynamo.
 Development of Electric Bulbs
 Development of Incandescent Light Bulb- T.A. Edison (USA),
J.W. Swan (England)
 Development of Electrical Industries (1881-1889)
7. Electrical and Electronic Age
■ Revolution through Electronics
– invention of the thermionic valve by J.A. Fleming, patented in 1904.
– Invention of Triode- Lee De Forest
– After, there were transistors, ICs, Optoelectronic Devices, Resistors, Capacitors,
Triac, BJT, MOSFET, Op-Amps etc. that quite changed the picture.
– All these became possible because of man’s never-ending quest for
knowledge.
Thank You