Technology - the use of materials, energy, and living beings for practical purposes - is a defining feature of the human species.

Though it has played a role throughout history, its recognition by the historical profession has been a long time coming. Only recently have works on the history of technology entered the mainstream of scholarship and aroused the interest of literate elites.

In the Western world, Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert’s Encyclopedic (1751-72) was among the first works of literate culture to feature articles and images of everyday crafts and techniques. This encyclopedia, though quite elaborate, was soon rendered obsolete by the many changes taking place in the sciences and technologies in the late eighteenth century. Its publisher therefore proposed to issue a new and more up-to-date encyclopedia called Encyclopedic Methodique, ou par Ordre de Matiercs (Methodical Encyclopedia in Thematic Order). This work, begun in 1782, was intended to become a sixty-volume work, but ended up many years later with 200 volumes and few readers. Though a general, not a technical, encyclopedia, it contained many volumes devoted to the technology of the day, making it a valuable source for later historians. Meanwhile, in 1794 the French revolutionaries founded the first institution for the collection and study of technological artifacts, the Conserva­toire National des Arts et Metiers (National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts).

While an interest in technology dates back to the eighteenth century, the history of technology and technological innovation is a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The first book to treat the history of technology as a scholarly subject is Johann Heinrich Moritz von Poppe’s Geschichte aller Erfindungen und Entdcckungcn im Bereiche der Gewerbe, Kunste und Wissenschaften von der Jruhesten Zeit bis auf unsere Tage (History of all the Inventions and Discoveries in the Trades, Arts, and Sciences from Earliest Times to Our Day).¹ Karl ^[230]

Marx based his theory of historical materialism on changes in technology as the causative factors in social evolution; in his pithy phrase, “The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”² They and their successors have wrestled with the major questions in the history of technology: How do technological innov­ations arise? Why are some societies more open to innovation than others? In a given society, why do some innovations succeed and others fail? What roles do individuals, organizations, and societies play in encouraging or obstruct­ing innovations? What are the relations between science and technology? And how do technological innovations impact society?