Concepts defined with examples from the text & not placed in chronological order: from the earliest to the most recent in history, but listed in thematic and in alphabetical order:

The primary concepts:

• The use of fire and eventually its exaptation to pottery, ceramics, and metal making.
  
• “Division of labor”: originated in the ancient world, examined by Adam Smith's famous reference to the pin factory with respect to creating wealth,
  • related to time spent at work with Gilbreth's studies of worker behavior, but
  • taken to extremes by Ford's assembly line and its many imitators.
  • Critics charged that alienation increases as the division of labor becomes more extreme.
    
• “Interchangeable parts”: New England armory manufacture of guns by Eli Whitney and then applied to machinery making in the 19th century and eventually workers in 20th century by Taylor.
• “reduce people to their smallest meaningful parts:” essential to Taylorism, furthered industrial organization particularly by Henry Ford, but also extended by the rise of mass marketing and consumer behavior research to create markets for mass produced goods.

Alphabetical order of the most significant terms:

• “The American System of Manufacturers”: interchangeable identical – standardized parts, 1800’s.
  
• Aechulean hand ax: unchanged for 100,000’s of years
  
• Analog clocks: FACE & HANDS – tracked by mimicry solar, lunar and Earth’s movement in the heavens.
  
• Automata: 17th-18th centuries, RUR – 20th century: robots – to assemble cars.
• Automation is a concept associated with machinery taking the place of workers, employed by Oliver Evans in a grain milling during the 1780s.
  
• Bar code reader: inventory control (Pursell).
  
• Cartesian grid: efficient standard used to measure performance.
  
• Computer viruses binary code to disable programs or automatically-use programs
  
• Digital clocks binary code – heart of a computer is binary code
  
• Lasers convergence with bar-code reader.
  
• Mechanization took place in Renaissance Europe –based on wind, water, steam and animal labor borrowing concepts from Persia, Arabia, India, and China.
  
• Pacey’s three dimensions of tool use, or three aspects of technical development based on Aristotle: the functional, societal, and imaginative facets.
  
• Protocol, the official order or system of rules governing a situation; a formal or sanctioned order of procedures to follow.
• Renaissance visual revolution, grid / and the use of perspective in painting.
  
• Segmentation breaking into pieces – based on a percentage concept, necessary for an effective human manufacture as in China and the eventual use of mechanical devices which revolutionized the division of labor.
  
• Sequencing to place in a time-ordered motions or steps, from earliest to latest pattern of performance related to protocol, the necessary ordering of tasks in sequenced moves to make anything function well.
  
• Telegraph electrical current used to improve railway safety, used for long-distance communication, stock sales and commodity price sales before being widely applied to consumer needs.
  
• Telephone electrical current used to send voice messages over distances.
  
• Time discipline made possible by clocks after Renaissance basis for sequencing - labor control –wages – order – rations – and Gilbreth's "time and motion" studies. See time.
  
• Visual thinking Pacey says 3 varieties of used to change perception (Art) & technical scale drawings.
  
• Zoetrope a device (19th century) for moving a series of still images so fast as to not perceive separate sequences of photos, sequentially placed still images played at a speed to simulate motion. A step in the sequence of inventions such as the kinetiscope, or kinetoscope, that led to film (motion pictures) and movies.

How does technology influence our behavior, in comparison to how it affects the lives of the people you have interviewed?

Interviews

Pursell | Pacey | Time line | Core | Pursell all Chapters | Pacey Technology in World Civilization: One| Postman | Kaku

Pacey, Meaning in Technology | Syllabus | Core | Pursell: two | Pursell Contents

Topic Overview

Three facets of technology and tools

definitions