Epic Audiovisual History of Technology Course by a Historian of Innovation: W. Bernard Carlson, “Understanding the Inventions that Changed the World”

For eight years I have been enjoying about a dozen courses offered by the Teaching Company, which now uses the brand name The Great Courses. The flexibility of taking advantage of these recorded lectures has been liberating. The DVDs, CDs, video, or audio downloads are available for me to watch or listen to anytime, making it possible to enjoy the lectures at home, at work, or while traveling, even via mobile phone. I can fast-forward, pause, rewind, or jump to any part of the lecture easily, using the course guidebook to help refresh my memory of the lectures. One of the company’s recently released courses is entitled “Understanding the Inventions that Changed the World” (course no. 1110), delivered by W. Bernard Carlson of the University of Virginia, author of last year’s prizewinning Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age. Many of The Great Courses are available in two or more formats for customers to choose (DVD, CD video, or audio download), each for a different price. Carlson’s course comes in only two: video download and DVD (video streaming is included with the purchase). The emphasis on visual experience of the course becomes apparent when I view the lectures. Carlson uses many illustrations in his course, including maps, graphs, pictures, photographs, paintings, models, patent drawings, historical documents (e.g., a sketch of Edison’s early phonograph design), and animations. A large number of these visuals are provided by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

The variety of visuals that Carlson uses in his course makes his lectures highly informative since viewers can actually see what is being discussed. In lecture 7, for example, when Carlson talks about early clock designs, he explains in detail a new mechanism that was invented for mechanical clocks to control the falling weight, called the “verge-and-foliot escapement.” His description of the clock uses precise terms to explain how the components of the escapement (weight, shaft, crown gear, palettes, and verge) fit together and work, enabling you to follow along even when you only hear the audio of the lecture. But an animated illustration of the clock certainly helps visually inclined learners understand how the technology really functions. The visuals and sounds used in the lectures also serve other purposes than illustration. They help emphasize certain points. Whenever Carlson introduces a new or an unfamiliar term, for instance, the same word would fleetingly appear on the screen (accompanied by a “whoosh” sound) to emphasize it. A lower-third banner is used to show significant texts or quotes in the lecture. At other times, the screen is split to show the lecturer talking on one side and texts on the other side to hammer out certain points.

Carlson’s criteria for selecting what “inventions” to talk about is reflected in the title of the course, that is, the ones “that changed the world.” He elaborates this approach in the first lecture by laying out four criteria of “great” inventions: those that transformed our lives, had fascinating thought processes, had remarkable designs, or were rapidly adopted and developed after being introduced in a society. The course, therefore, covers not just such notable artifacts as paper, guns, cameras, telephones, and phonographs, or sociotechnical systems such as electric power, canals, and railroads, but also everyday objects such as coins, the alphabet, canned foods, and household appliances. As a general framework for the course, Carlson categorizes the inventions he discusses into three categories, in terms of how they create material abundance, sociopolitical order, and cultural meaning. Many cultures focus on creating technologies that focus on establishing a mixture of order and meaning more than abundance and thus create different inventions. But “different,” Carlson emphasizes, “doesn’t mean inferior.” Mentioning this insight in the first lecture helps set the tone of the entire course when he explores inventions that were developed by different societies.

The course has thirty-six lectures, which are divided into three segments of twelve lectures. Each lecture is about thirty minutes long. Carlson...