The Prehistory of “Technology”

In this chapter, we examine the engineering accomplishments of Western society before the concept of “technology” appeared. These accomplishments, some quite impressive and enduring even today, suggest a historical specificity for “technology,” an invented concept from the nineteenth century as more than simply an aggregation of tools and instrumentalities. We posit that technologies always exist in an institutional context, just as the concept of “technology” exists in a specific historical context. As obvious as this is, many efforts to deny or at least ignore the institutional context of technologies abound. We show that the building blocks of technology, like the bricks and beams in the construction of a cathedral, were all present at the outset of the Industrial RevolutionIndustrial revolution making possible the assembly of the edifice that we now label as technology, a word that was only coined in the seventeenth century.