Concepts:We have already considered one of the major questions this course requires you to answer. How does technology evolve, and what are the drivers of that evolution? We have considered the idea that technology does not necessarily progress by itself. Perhaps philosophy progresses that way, which may explain the success of the writings of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. We know those gentlemen for their thoughts, but not for their inventions. Technology requires that its inventor give us something to do with a new or improved idea. It requires that there be an application of the idea. In the material I presented in the first week, there was a list of inventors and inventions. Let's consider one of them.
Thales
is mentioned on this web site as well, but scroll down a bit and look
at the entry for Otto von Guerike.
You may not be familiar with von Guerike, but you will be interested in
his inventions. He is probably best known for his invention of a pump
to create a vacuum inside a chamber. It worked best when the chamber
was a sphere, and he famously demonstrated that a sphere, constructed
of two hemispherical sections, could not be pulled apart by two horses
once he created a vacuum inside the object. That was pretty special,
since Aristotle
had implied that you couldn't create a vacuum. Von Guerike did, which
led to others inventing uses for a vacuum. It is also interesting to
note that von Guerike used valves in his device that were taken from a
fire extinguisher. He devised a new use for existing technology that
led to his creation of a new technology. He deserves a place in our
discussion for that alone, but he did something else that relates to
the theme for this lesson.
Now, does it sound important? How about the concept of wiring several
Leyden jars in a circuit that provided more power than one jar alone?
Benjamin Franklin was the first to use a particular word for that kind
of array of Leyden jars. He called it a battery. That leads us to a concept that may require some speculation on our part.
What is it about a development that leads us to make something that uses
the science we learned from that development? What must be true about
the situation we are in that leads us to a world changing technology?
I have skipped a few steps, which were quite interesting to the people involved in them. The point I am moving toward is not
that the evolution of a technology is slow, or boring, or unimportant.
Each step forward is important. My point is that there is a difference
between other steps and the one that takes us into a world where the
technology affects most or all of us. The Internet, for example, has
been around since the 1960s. Did it affect many people at that time?
No, not at all. It took the proliferation of personal computers and
access to Internet Service Providers to make the Internet what it has
become, and to make us what we have become. It takes an event that
touches people to make a difference to them. It takes an event that
causes people to have a meaningful interaction with the technology, and
that is the major point of this lesson. A technology may be innovative,
ground breaking, and revolutionary, but if it is important only to a
select few, it does not have the quality we are searching for. It has
to be something that touches most of a market, most of a population, or
most of the world to be the kind of innovation that changes life as we
know it. So, this week we are considering whether a technology has an important
interaction with people. What is it about the evolution
of this technology that changed the lives of the people it touched?
You need to answer those questions for the mid-term project, as well as
the others you have been assigned. What did your technology do that changed
the world for someone?
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