A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (review)

The term “technology” is notoriously ambiguous, but Robert Friedel begins this well-organized, informative, and elegantly written book by providing his own definition: the invention or adoption of “tools, instruments, machines, structures and the like” (1). He also states his basic thesis: that over the last thousand years there has emerged in the West a “culture of improvement,” which takes it as axiomatic that technological innovation is beneficial to society, and that the rate of technological change has accelerated over the last two centuries. This latter phenomenon contains destructive potential, especially but not exclusively in the military sphere, which now gives rise to skeptical voices.

Friedel devotes several chapters to medieval and early-modern Europe. He outlines “native” traditions and trends—the exploitation of power from the horse and plough through to wind and water mills, and the construction of large buildings, notably cathedrals—but he also identifies influences from Asia which, in the long term, were to guide European technology along new directions. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries Europeans adopted techniques from China to produce paper, cast iron, and gunpowder. In time, Europeans may have developed these products themselves, but medieval commercial links between Europe and China provided conduits through which ready-made knowledge entered Europe. The production of paper, cast iron, and gunpowder transformed the history of the West, and generated satellite technologies, which in their own way helped to shape European history. The availability of relatively cheap paper indirectly contributed to the invention of modern printing in that it encouraged Johannes Gutenberg to experiment with moveable metal type and build his printing press in the mid-1450s. Friedel reflects not only on the rapid expansion of printing presses, but on the almost incalculable contribution that printing was to make to the history of technological innovation.

The relationship between technology and the “Scientific Revolution” of the seventeenth century is a subject of perennial deliberation. Friedel assesses Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon in the light of that debate, but he also scrutinizes such technologies as the production of lenses (essential to astronomy and microscopy) and the design and manufacture of clocks (crucial to the solution of the longitude problem in the eighteenth century). More generally, technology made a decisive impact on large-scale engineering projects. The construction of canals and modern roads encouraged commerce and agriculture in eighteenth-century England, France, and the Netherlands; experiments with steam pumps had important implications for the mining industry; and the cloth industry in England was radically affected by machinery that enabled large-scale spinning and weaving enterprises to flourish. On this last subject, Friedel explains how new machines were adopted in factories at a time when the intellectual climate was still governed by Enlightenment assumptions, exemplified by Diderot, that technology was a force for progress. In retrospect, however, we are conscious that, in the early stages, machinery and the Industrial Revolution to which it contributed, created considerable social distress, which had not been anticipated by optimistic philosophers.

The late eighteenth century saw the emergence of significant technology in North America. All the great Western advances from the 1800s to the present day either came out of North America or were exploited there. Friedel discusses communications, be they “physical” as in railway trains, motor cars, and steamboats, or be they concerned with the rapid transfer of information as in the telegraph and telephone. In the nineteenth century, industrial and civil engineering projects were executed on an unprecedented scale, the spirit of enterprise behind them being celebrated in international exhibitions like that held in London in 1851. In the second half of the century, new products were coming onto the market to enhance the quality of life and sustain belief in “technological improvement”; they included mass-produced goods for the home, instruments, or places of leisure such as cameras, cinemas, and eventually radio and television, and modern pharmaceutical products which were vital to the...