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A Brief on the Earliest Times to the Renaissance
Invention has been going on ever since our apish ancestors learned to feed a fire and flake a flint. But the conditions under which invention takes place, and the pace of invention, have changed greatly since the beginning of historic times.
Some primitive inventions, like the manioc squeezer of the South American Indians, the Australian boomerang, and the Eskimo toggle-joint harpoon, are extremely ingenious. They point to inventive talents as keen as anything the civilized world can show.
Nevertheless, during nearly all of the last million years, invention progressed with glacial slowness. Men chopped with ax heads held in the fist for hundreds of thousands of years before they learned to fasten handles to their axes. During the earlier part of the Pleistocene Period, it is possible that men were too stupid to be very inventive. By 100,000 years ago, however, men had probably become quite as intelligent as we are - but still technology advanced at a crawl.
The reasons for the sloth of invention in primitive societies are not hard to understand. For one thing, primitive peoples live a hand-to-mouth existence. Most of their foods cannot be stored, so that they have no economic surplus. Therefore, they can less well afford to risk experiment than more advanced peoples. If an experiment fails, they die.
As a result, primitive societies are very conservative. Tribal customs prescribe exactly how everything shall be done, on pain of the gods' displeasure. An inventor is likely to be liquidated as a dangerous devisionist.
Peasant farmers are almost equally conservative. Man's inventive faculties are stimulated by the breakdown of established custom that takes place in the urban environment; hence most inventions have been made by city dwellers.
Another cause of the slowness of primitive invention is the scarcity of inventors. A hunting and food-gathering technology can support only a very small population for a given area. Thus the few hundred thousand members of the human species living at any time before the Agricultural Revolution were divided into many isolated little hunting bands.
Such a band seldom exceeds fifty or a hundred people, counting the many but short-lived children. Because the radius of action of the hunters is limited to the distance they can walk to kill their game and carry it back to camp, an increase in numbers does not enlarge the area that can be hunted at one time. It merely causes the same area to be hunted more intensively. So, if the band grows too large, game in the neighborhood becomes scarce: and the band must migrate or starve. Eventually it will have to split up. Perhaps human factiousness - our tendency to divide up into factions on almost any pretext (racial, religious, cultural, political, economic, or sporting) and fight it out - is a survival mechanism evolved during man's hunting phase, to insure that hunting bands split up before they grew too large to feed themselves.
Now, in any society, only a few human beings ever have original ideas or make inventions. Of these inventors, only a fraction have the courage, stubbornness, and energy to keep on bettering their inventions until they really work and to keep on promoting them until they persuade others to take them up.
A rough idea of the percentage of inventors among modern Americans can be obtained from the statistics of the United States Patent Office. The Patent Office issues about 40,000 patents every year. So we can estimate that the mid-twentieth-century American population of 180,000,000 people produces about one patentable invention each year for every 4,500 citizens.
Suppose, now, that all Americans were wiped out except one band of fourty-five people. If this group continued to produce inventions at the same rate, it would turn out only one invention every century! This is of course a gross oversimplification. But it does indicate why a small tribal society, no matter how clever the tribesmen, cannot be expected to produce inventions rapidly.
In actual fact, the rate of inventions among Stone Age hunters was enormously slower than among our imaginary band of fourty-five Americans. For modern Americans are encouraged to invent in ways that primitive folk are not. We are used to the thought that men can improve their lot by inventing things, and that invention is a worthy act. On the contrary, primitive people, who have all they can do to keep alive and who cannot afford to support a fellow tribesman in idleness while he dreams up new ideas, regard inventors with glowering suspicion.
Suppose new that there are two bands of forty-five Americans. If they are isolated from each other, each band will produce one invention a century, so that each progresses at the same rate as before. Their cultures will diverge somewhat, as they will hit upon the same inventions only rarely, by chance. But each group will plod along at the same old rate of one invention a century.
However, if they meet and join forces, then all ninety persons will take advantage of the inventions produced by any one of them. The combined group will produce inventions twice a century instead of once. In other words, they will progress technologically twice as fast.
To sum up: Progress in civilization depends upon invention, and a rapid rate of invention in turn depends upon the sizable populations that are only possible under civilization. The crucial inventions that made such progress possible - knowledge of raising domesticated, edible animals and plants - took place in Syria and Iraq about -8000 (8000 B.C.).
Once the Agricultural Revolution had taken place, much denser and more numerous populations that had ever before existed could and did live in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus. As the Reverend Thomas Malthus pointed out a hundred and ninety years ago, people quickly breed up to the greatest density the land will support at the current technological level. At that point the population levels off, because excess people are destroyed by starvation, pestilence, or war.
The mere fact of having large interconnected populations, then, meant that inventions took place at faster rate than before, and these inventions in turn made denser and more widely interconnected populations possible. Hence civilized men tended to draw farther and farther ahead of their primitive fellows.
Moreover, the inventions on which civilization was founded tended to spread. These inventions did not spread out evenly in all directions. They spread along trade routes, and they spread to lands where these ideas could be profitably applied. They were stopped by strong natural barriers, such as deserts and oceans; and they died out where conditions made them useless.
Thus the idea of raising cotton or dates could not spread to Europe, because the cotton tree and the date palm will not grow there. The wheel failed to spread from Iraq to neighboring Arabia, because there was no place in the wastes of the Arabian desert where wheeled vehicles would have been very useful.
As a result of this speed-up and spread of technology, a high level of civilization had been achieved a thousand years before Christ in a broad belt stretching from the lands around the Mediterranean through the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia to China. Any new invention, originating at one end of this Main Civilized Belt, traveled in a few centuries to the other. China, partly isolated at one end of the Belt by the Nongolian deserts, the Tibetan mountains, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, was a thousand years late in getting started but soon became as civilized as the rest.
Some of these advances in technics spread to Central Asia and Central Europe as well. Civilization had little effect on northern Europe and northern Asia, however, because the population of these lands was very thinly scattered and conditions of life were so different from those of the Belt that most inventions made in warmer lands were of little use there.
Civilization also failed to penetrate Negro Africa, being stopped by the barrier of the Sahara Desert, the swamps of the White Nile, and the mountains of Abyssinia. This barrier isolated sub-Sahara Africa as effectively as if it had been an island. Furthermore, Old World civilization failed to leap the watery barriers to reach the Pacific Islands, Australia, or the Americas. In another millennium, however, the peoples of Central and South America began independently to develop their own civilization.
It would seem, then, that the main factor in determining whether any particular people took part in the technological adventure that followed the Agricultural Revolution was neither race, nor climate, nor local resources. The main factor was simply a matter of geography - where the people lived with respect to the river valleys in which this revolution took place. Those lucky enough to dwell along the cultural highways from China to Spain received the benefits of the speed-up; those who lived elsewhere did not, or did so only tardily.
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In the arts, people's taste have changed from age to age, but in a capricious and faddish manner. People have often abandoned some canon of beauty in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, or poetry and embraced another simply because they were bored with the old and eager to try something new.
But through all the ages of history, one human institution - technology - has plodded ahead. While empires rose and fell, forms of government went through their erratic cycles, science flared up and guttered out, men burned each other over differences of creed, and the masses pursued bizarre fads and fashions, the engineers went ahead with raising their city walls, erecting their temples and palaces, paving their roads, digging their canals, tinkering with their machines, and soberly and rationally building upon the discoveries of those who had gone before.
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Technology has progressed continuously from the time of the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, slowly and hesitantly at first, then with increasing sureness and speed. The sixteenth century marked the beginning of modern engineering because, from that time on, professional societies were formed, treatises on engineering subjects were printed in quantity, engineering schools sprang up, specialization within the profession began, and engineers began to take advantage of the brilliant scientific discoveries of the time. The Industrial Revolution, which started two centuries ago and is still going on (although some would argue that the Information Revolution is upon us now), was a surge in the growth of technology. Barring a nuclear war, the end of this fruition of engineering is nowhere in sight.
Nowadays, we draw fine distinctions among the meanings of such words as craftsman, engineer, technician, and inventor. The United States Patent Office has elaborate rules for deciding whether an invention is original, or whether it is merely "an improvement obvious to one skilled in the art," such as a change in size, strength, speed, proportions, or materials.
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In speaking of ancient technical men, however, there is no point in observing such delicate differences. Every time an ancient craftsman made something that was not a close copy of a previous article, he invented, even though his invention might not be patentable according to modern laws.
We think of an engineer as a man who designs some structure or machine, or who directs the building of it, or who operates and maintains it. In practice most ancient engineers were inventors; while most ancient inventors, at least after the rise of civilization, could also be classed as engineers. So let us lump all these ancient innovators and designers together as "engineers."
Despite the enormous importance of engineers and inventors in making our daily life what it is, history does not tell much about them. The earliest historical records were made by priests praising their gods and poets flattering their kings. Neither cared much about such mundane matters as technology.
As a result, ancient legend and history are one-sided. We hear much about mighty kings and heroic warriors, somewhat less about priests, philosophers, and artists, and very little about the engineers who built that stages on which these players performed their parts. The warriors Achilles and Hector were celebrated in song and story - but the forgotten genious who, about the time of the siege of Troy, invented the safety pin, lies wholly forgotten. Everybody has heard of Julius Ceasar - but who knows about his contemporary Sergius Orata, the Roman building contractor who invented central indirect house heating? Yet Orata has affected our daily lives far more than Ceasar ever did.
Nevertheless, of all the phases of civilized life, the advance of technology gives the best ground for belief in progress. If there is any consistent pattern of evolution in politics and government, it is not easy to discern. Great soldiers and statesmen have built up empires - but a few generations later these empires faded away as though they had never been. In the field of government, many people thought over a half a century ago that there was a natural evolutionary trend towards the democratic republic - but then many parts of the world turned in the other direction, towards authoritarian despotism. It is mere soothsaying to predict what form of government, if any, will finally prevail.
Pure science has advanced enormously in the last three centuries. But, looked at over the whole stretch of recorded history, the advance of science has been erratic. It has leaped ahead in sudden spurts, shot off on pseudo-scientific tangents like astrology and alchemy, become embroiled in religious and political conflicts, and sometimes been repudiated by whole nations.
Today, in technologically advanced lands, men live very similar lives in spite of geographical, religous, and political differences. The daily lives of a Christian bank clerk in Chicago, a Buddhist bank clerk in Tokyo, and a Communist bank clerk in Shanghai are far more alike than the life of any one of them is like that of any single man who lived a thousand years ago. These resemblances are the result of a common technology, and this technology is what many generations of engineers have built up, and with the greatest skill and diligence of which human beings are capable, and handed down to us.
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Observation