This is a sad hoax, for industrial man no longer
eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.
(Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, 1971)
The
Greeks knew the power of steam and built the first steam engine as a plaything;
they even knew the principle behind electricity. Water toilets were developed
in Egypt some 5000 years ago and were used by the Romans, but it took thousands
of years before they came into common use. The wheel was known in Latin
America, but was not used productively before Columbus. The first faxes were
developed in the nineteenth century but it took another 100 years for them to
become common.[1] Fuel cells, which are seen as technology for the future, have been
around for more than 150 years, but never reached the stage of a technological
breakthrough. The first steam engines in Sweden stood idle, collecting dust,
mainly because they were not profitable and partly because there were no
competent operators (Hård and Jamison 2005), a situation similar to that of a
lot of technologies that are, mistakenly, introduced in developing countries
today. All these examples show clearly that the existence or the knowledge of a
technology doesn’t mean it will be used.
Many reasons
exist for why a technology is or is not used. The word technology comes from
Greek techne, meaning ‘art’, and we know that a lot of technology was
(and still is) used for pleasure, for the demonstration of power or for
religion. Realms with a large population and a small elite whose wealth is
based on extortion of the masses most likely developed very few productive
innovations, the majority being developed to amuse and entertain the rulers.
Therefore, technological development was very slow in the big agrarian empires.
War
and conflict have been forceful drivers of innovation, comprising examples of
the importance of government-supported innovation. The Egyptians knew of the
wheel, yet their slaves used sledges to pull boulders for the pyramids. But the
use of the wheel rapidly spread in its military application in the form of the
chariot. One can also compare the spread of the saddle and the spur with the
spread of the harness. The saddle and the spur were of critical military
importance and gave a marked advantage to the armies using them, so they spread
rapidly. The harness was mainly used for draught animals in farming and spread
across the world very slowly (Lönnroth 1977). Modern examples of innovations
with a military origin are pasteurization, the Internet and antibiotics.
Communications is another area in which innovation was (and still is) very
strong. Innovations in shipbuilding or navigation played a major role in
determining which people would rule. The supple Viking ships could reach into
narrow fjords and rivers and were key to the Viking expansion; later the cogs
of the Hanseatic League took over, owing to greater capacity (Lönnroth 1977).
Thus, societies that developed quicker or safer means of communication or those
of higher capacity had a marked advantage over others.
The Chinese emperors were sceptical to technological development
as it threatened stability. The Japanese are another example. Japan first came
in contact with guns in the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth
century, it produced more and better guns than any other country in the world.
However, the samurai, the military nobility, felt threatened by this foreign
invention and gradually managed to curb production and licensing. Ultimately
production ceased altogether, and resumed only when the first American warships
appeared in Japanese waters in 1853 (Diamond 1997). In France, the scythe was
not allowed to replace the sickle for a long time because there were communal
rights to graze cattle on stubble, the value of which would be lost if a scythe
were used (Boserup 2005).
Technology is
not neutral. It serves the interest of the social group that develops it. With
its symbolic power it supports the legitimizing ideology of society and the
worldview it represents. Think of the steam engine or the space ship not to
speak of the atomic bomb. Schiermeier et al. write that nuclear energy has ‘benefited from decades of
expensive research, development and purchases subsidized by governments;
without that boost it is hard to imagine that nuclear power would currently be
in use’ (2008: 18). Technology has also enabled development of the modern city
and the relative independence of its hinterland. The early cities were, with a
few exceptions, built on the relationship with the surrounding agrarian
landscape. A lot of production occurred in the farms and the economy of the
city and its hinterland was interwoven. With the Industrial Revolution, the
transport revolution and capitalism, cities could free themselves from ties to
their hinterland for raw materials, labour and markets. Thus, workers in
Manchester spun cotton from the United States, picked by African slaves, and
sold the fabrics in India.
[1] To soon be
forgotten again. Young readers will probably have to look up ‘fax’ in Wikipedia
to check what it is.
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