History of technology

The centre we have chosen is that of the cotton manufacture; a branch of commerce, the rapid and prodigious increase of which is, perhaps, absolutely unparalleled in the annals of trading nations.

— History of technology

Cease from grinding, ye women who toil at the mill; sleep late, even if the crowing cocks announce the dawn. For has ordered the s to perform the work of your hands, and they, leaping down on top of the wheel, turn its axle which, with its revolving spokes, turns the heavy concave Nisyrian mill-stones. We taste again the joys of the primitive life, learning to feast on the products of Demeter without labour.

— History of technology

To rob Britain of her steam engines would be to rob her of her coal and iron, to deprive her of her sources of wealth, to ruin her prosperity, to annihilate that collosal power.

— History of technology

The hand-axe, made of sandstone, quartz, or lava as well as of flint, served mankind for at least a thousand centuries and spread over nearly one-fifth of the land-surface of the globe. ...With the development of the and the bow, man the technologist began to win his long struggle for human supremecy by matching skill against animal strength. ...the unevenness of technical development runs right through human development.

— History of technology

If the steam engine be the most powerful instrument in the hands of man, to alter the face of the physical world, it operates, at the same time, as a powerful moral lever in forwarding the great cause of civilization. We cannot, therefore, recall... the invention through all its consequences, without feeling the beneficial influence of this discovery upon all nations, from those most advanced, to those which have made the least progress, in the arts and refinements of life.

— History of technology

In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a . Within a very few years he could have had a Freudian analysis, traveled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even space travel.

— History of technology

Since, until recent centuries, technology was chiefly the concern of groups which wrote little, the role which technological development plays in human affairs has been neglected...

— History of technology