Episode 251: The History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet

February 24, 2022 / Early Modern Europe, History of Science, History of Technology, History of the Modern World, History of the United States, Modernity

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:11:24 — 98.1MB)

“My underlying goal,” writes my guest Tom Misa, “has been to display the variety of technologies, to describe how they changed across time, and to understand how they interacted with diverse societies and cultures. There’s no simple definition of technology that adequately conveys the variety of its forms or sufficiently emphasizes the social and cultural interactions and consequences that I believe are essential to understand. The key point is that technologies are consequential for social and political futures. There is not “one path” forward.”

These words come from the conclusion of Misa’s Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, now being published in a third edition by Johns Hopkins University Press, as one of the structural pillars of the Johns Hopkins Series in the History of Technology. Thomas J. Misa recently retired as Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he directed the Charles Babbage Center (history of computing); taught courses in the Program for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; and was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

For Further Investigation

Dutch fluit ships, the embodiment of the commercial/capitalist era
FIAT Lingotto factory on YouTube; chase-scene in original Italian Job movie (1969) [and our “cover art” for this episode’s web page]
Reading Questions for every chapter of From Leonardo to the Internet
More interesting web sites!