A history of modern European technology: the Propyläen Technikgeschichte

In 1997, Propyläen Verlag in Berlin published a five-volume encyclopedia edited by Wolfgang König and titled, straightforwardly, Propyläen Technikgeschichte. ¹ The work, an accessible resource for anyone teaching what has come to be called the “Plato to NATO” course, has no like in the English language, and for many years to come it will provide a handy reference.

It is in the nature of any encyclopedia project that an authors’ collective must undertake a sweeping synthesis of secondary literature. Propyläen has chosen ten authors well known for their extensive familiarity with the corresponding primary historical materials upon which that secondary literature rests. All five volumes are richly illustrated with color plates placed centrally in photo-essays and black and white images integrated throughout the text.

Wolfgang König notes in his brief introduction that the pace of technological change reaches breathtaking speed as we near our own day. For this very reason, the experience of reading the Propyläen Technikgeschichte offers the diametrically opposite experience: one races through the years of Greek and Roman civilization, barely pauses for the early or late middle ages, slows to a brisk trot through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then hikes slowly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which occupy nearly half of the entire collection.

As with any such marathon task, there are bound to be sins of omission, and König immediately apologizes for excluding everything but Europe (actually most of the volumes exclude everything but western Europe). This seems fair enough but hardly explains why Propyläen did not then title the set the Western European History of Technology, which would have at least been honest. König’s introduction also seeks to set a general tone for the whole set, promising to “glance backward from the vantage of modern technology in order to ask how this technology of the present day has come to be” (vol. 1, p. 12; all translations by author). The histories told here are to recount technologies that have won out over the past’s daunting multiplicity. The authors of the individual volumes, on the other hand, do not necessarily follow König’s prescriptions, and he seems to have given them free rein. Each volume contains two main chapters, each by a single author. It therefore seems appropriate to review each chapter individually before returning to comment on the set as a whole.

The first, written by Helmuth Schneider and titled “The Gifts of Prometheus,” covers more than a millennium, the years from 750 bc to 500 ad. Rather than following König’s program and historically foreshadowing modernity through the progressive developments of the ancients, Schneider stresses discontinuity. He maintains that, if anything, only the middle ages first generated the ideals and machines that contributed to the eventual industrial revolution; therefore, antiquity must be viewed on its own terms and not as a harbinger of the modern world. An attempt to tell the history of ancient technology as if it led inexorably toward the present, he asserts, has caused an overweening emphasis on manufacturing rather than agriculture and the monumental building that preoccupied the ancients’ technological imagination, the two endeavors to which Schneider devotes most of his attention.

This chapter’s strength is its rich visual material, all the more important because many of the best historical sources for ancient technology are the visual representations left on potsherds or reliefs. Schneider blends “high-culture” analysis of Plato, Aristotle, and Homer with versions of the Prometheus myth among the hoi polloi, the classic sculpture of the Parthenon with the stone carvings on working people’s gravestones. If the “higher” discourse of the Helenes looked down upon manual labor and “artifice,” Schneider is able to show that, in practice, a counterculture left representations of pride in craftsmanship.

Dieter Hagermann’s “Technology in the Early Middle Ages” follows Schneider, and it begins promisingly by explaining the early medieval conception of Grundherrschaft, the domination of land, which meant not just the control of territory but of the people who worked it. The German word for the...