- Introduction
- General considerations
- Technology in the ancient world
- From the Middle Ages to 1750
- The Industrial Revolution (1750–1900)
- The 20th and 21st centuries
- Perceptions of technology
History of technology
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- History World - History of Technology
History of technology, the development over time of systematic techniques for making and doing things. The term technology, a combination of the Greek technē, “art, craft,” with logos, “word, speech,” meant in Greece a discourse on the arts, both fine and applied. When it first appeared in English in the 17th century, it was used to mean a discussion of the applied arts only, and gradually these “arts” themselves came to be the object of the designation. By the early 20th century the term embraced a growing range of means, processes, and ideas in addition to 
A highly compressed account of the history of technology such as this one must adopt a rigorous methodological pattern if it is to do justice to the subject without grossly distorting it one way or another. The plan followed in the present article is primarily chronological, tracing the development of technology through phases that succeed each other in time. Obviously, the division between phases is to a large extent arbitrary. One factor in the weighting has been the enormous acceleration of Western technological development in recent centuries; Eastern technology is considered in this article in the main only as it relates to the development of modern technology.
Within each chronological phase a standard method has been adopted for innovations. This begins with a brief review of the general social conditions of the period under discussion, and then goes on to consider the dominant materials and sources of artifacts is a determining characteristic of humanlike species. Other species make artifacts: environment in a way no other species has achieved. An ape may on occasion use a stick to beat bananas from a tree, but a person can fashion the stick into a cutting encompasses the whole evolution of humankind.
In using rational faculties to devise techniques and modify the environment, humankind has attacked problems other than those of survival and the production of wealth with which the term technology is usually associated today. The technique of innovation on the one hand and the sociocultural conditions of the human group within which they occur on the other.
Social involvement in technological advances
An awareness of this interaction is important in surveying the development of technology through successive civilizations. To simplify the relationship as much as possible, there are three points at which there must be some social involvement in technological innovation: social need, social resources, and a sympathetic social ethos. In default of any of these factors it is unlikely that a technological innovation will be widely adopted or be successful.
The sense of social need must be strongly felt, or people will not be prepared to devote resources to a technological innovation. The thing needed may be a more efficient cutting tool, a more powerful lifting device, a labour-saving artifact or commodity that can meet the need.
Social resources are similarly an indispensable prerequisite to a successful innovation. Many 
