From man's first
steps to the birth of Christ was a period like no other in the
history of invention. Never again would man's survival be so
dependent on his ability to invent ways to solve fundamental
problems. And never again would man's technological creativity be
the most significant factor in his evolution and the establishing
of civilisation.
By the time modern
man (homo sapiens or man the wise) appeared, probably somewhere in
Africa between 100,000 and 250,000 years ago, his forefathers, the
early hominids, had already invented stone tools. It is possible
that they had also manufactured crude canoes and shelters. However,
it would take many more years and a succession of vital inventions
for man to evolve from a primitive, nomadic hunter-gatherer to the
highly technologically literate citizen of the time of
Christ.
We like to think
that we are currently living through a period when technology has
an unparalleled hold on society, but it is nothing compared with
that of the ancient world, when invention and technology were the
most powerful forces shaping civilisation. Throughout the ancient
world, technology was the one factor that made all the other
changes — social, political and cultural — possible.
Without the inventions of ink and papyrus, many of man's ideas
would not have spread as fast nor as widely. Without weapons and,
later, the wheel, armies would not have conquered new territories
as quickly.
The single largest
step in early man's social evolution came around 10,000 years ago
with the invention of animal husbandry and agriculture. This
enabled him to progress from living in nomadic communities to
settling in villages and small towns. The progress was brought
about by a combination of climatic change and man's invention of
more efficient hunting tools, of a means of controlling and
utilising fire to clear undergrowth and of ways of building lasting
shelters. It led to a massive growth in population, which in turn
triggered a further rapid increase in technological
innovation.
Most of this change
took place in the eastern Mediterranean, where the climate and the
annual flooding of fertile soils favoured the development of
agriculture and later of cities such as Babylon. By around 6500 BC,
Jericho is believed to have been the largest city in the world,
with a population of 2,500.
Four thousand years
later, the urban revolution had brought about a momentous cultural
transition that in turn generated new needs. These were met by a
quantum leap in technological innovation and the establishment of
craftsmen and scientists. For the first time, manufacturing became
established as man invented ways of making textiles, firing
ceramics, producing metalwork and processing foodstuffs. This
prompted barter methods to evolve into more sophisticated trading
arrangements, culminating in the invention
of tokens or early
money.
With these
technological changes came a corresponding increase
in the complexity of the social and political organisation of human
groups, which in turn necessitated the invention of written language, first to keep track of
trading arrangements, then to communicate and record events,
processes, philosophies and,
of course,
inventions.
The history of
invention is littered with inventions that had little or no
purpose and never caught on, but this was
still a period of invention for necessity's
sake. It would be some time before an invention would
be greeted with questions as to its role -and even longer until Michael Faraday would
retort, "What use is a baby?" when asked what use his dynamo
had.
It was also a period when science
and technology's
symbiotic relationship was reversed. Technology, now often the
application of scientific discovery and observation, predated
science and in this period was empirical and handed down through
the generations. By the time the city states were flowering in the
early centuries BC, scientist-inventors began to emerge.
Figures such as Hero, Strata, Ctesibius and Philon used
observations and measurements of the physical and natural world to
devise inventions. However, they were all minnows when compared with Archimedes. Here
was a man of
the calibre
that the world would not see again until Sir Isaac Newton
in the 17th century. The inventor had
truly arrived.
Our achievement is
to see the world made the way humans make things. It is to identify
the insides of objects and the processes of nature with our own
capacity freely, to make models in our minds and to realize them in
the outside world. Effective knowledge therefore has a double aim:
it equates knowledge with the capacity to produce phenomena, but it
also aims to get inside its object. Pushed to an extreme, effective
knowledge aims to make the object, and simultaneously to be at one
with it.
