• change in the economy from the majority of people employed in agriculture to the majority of people employed in industry
• the change in the organization of work makes possible the change in technology
• the change in technology makes possible a change in the organization of work--the factory
• but new technology did not simply cause the industrial revolution, but rather the cause was people's willingness to adopt new technologies
  
• a period of rapid technological change as one new technology leads to another or requires another or make possible another
  

• Bigger patterns, Allen's reinforcing revolutions
  
• How one step led to another (cause and effect)
• What was the impact of industrialization on people’s lives

Notice that these are a different approach to history

• it had the first industrial revolution, copied by other countries including the U.S.
• Allen considers the question of why England was first
  
• since it was first it is the most interesting case study of how technological revolutions start
  
• it also had to invent as it went along how to manage the social consequences of industrialization
  
• Britain had the largest percentage of factory workers of any country so their influence on politics is particularly significant
  

• he is an economic historian but sees technology as crucial to economic change
• labor productivity (how much is produced per day of labor by one worker) is central to the difference technology makes
• you can't have increases in production unless you have a market of people to buy the additional goods
  

• Jane Goodall has shown that chimpanzees use tools in the same sense humans do, as do orangutans
  
• paleontologists find that early species of humans, as much as 3 million years ago, used fire and produced simple tools.  But in primitive societies there is little division of labor so the work process tends to stay very simple.
• hunting and gathering seems to be an easy life--12 to 19 hours of work a week--so why develop agriculture?
• less than 10 thousand years ago agriculture was invented in northern Iraq, and within a few thousand years independently in other parts of the world--China, India, central America.
• slash and burn agriculture did not make much difference, because it cannot support large populations.
• Irrigation is the key to the development of cities because it supports 14 times the population on the same area of land.  It takes twice the labor as dry farming.
• Mesopotamian writing:

• labor demands increased as a result of technological advance, but it also allowed specialization--the invention of government, writing, and in general of civilization.  This second revolution happened in Egypt and Mesopotamia about 3000 BCE.

• This meant the opportunities of a market, but at first opportunities to do new things were very limited by people's beliefs
• belief that the physical world was controlled by Gods who behaved irrationally (example: Mesopotamia)
• slavery--you don't need labor-saving devices if you have slaves to do the hard work
• the attitude that practical life was beneath the dignity of educated men (example: Hellenistic Alexandria)
• Plutarch said of Archimedes: "Although his inventions had won for him a name and fame for superhuman sagacity, he would not consent to leave behind him any treatise on this subject, but regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest efforts only to those studies the subtlety and charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity." (a source) Archimedes

 the four season, from bnf.fr

• The mouldboard plow (8th century, also known as the heavy or wheeled plow) turned the soil--needed on wet soils in northern Europe
  
• required 6 to 8 oxen to pull so led to cooperative farming

PEM photo: Mouldboard Plow, National Museum of American History
• Three field crop rotation (9th century)
• winter wheat or rye
• spring oats, beans, or barley
• fallow
• 2/3 of the fields produced food each year instead of the old system where half the fields were left fallow
• Horsepower replaces oxen (widespread by 12th century)--horse could work for more hours a day and moved 50% faster
• oats (oxen can work on grass alone while horses need grain)
• the horse-collar (8th-9th century)--allows a horse to pull 4 or 5 times more weight.
 

 Horse-collar
• iron horseshoes (common by 11th century) allowed horses to work on wet ground
• the stirrup made possible the mounted knight, creating a demand for more and better horses

• --Manorial System : the serfs (not a slave, but bound to the land--cannot move away) lived in a village and farmed the land communally, giving a share of their labor and the crop to the knight
• --the knight and his family lived in the castle and had responsibility to protect the serfs and to fight when called up by the king
• --theoretically the king owned all the land and gave the lords the right to use it in return for military service, the lords then divided it up among knights on the same deal
  
• --such government as there was was provided by the knights and lords
• --the farmers had some opportunity to better themselves by improving farming practices

• invented in Roman times but used only rarely through the 5th century
• Spread of the water wheel in the 8th and 9th centuries
• In 1086 the Domesday Book lists 5624 mills in 3000 English communities--an average of one mill for every 50 households
• first mills were floating mills or mills attached to bridges.  They first had undershoot wheels (20-30% efficient), then overshoot (50-60% efficient, 13th century) with the water directed by a canal or a wooden millrace
• the invention of the cam allows the conversion of rotary motion into reciprocating motion
• new uses for water power:
• around 1000: fulling wool cloth, beating hemp, water driven trip hammers to break up iron ore
• around 1100 water powered bellows, edge runner wheels to crush olives for oil
• around 1200 saw mills that used water power both to power a rotary saw and to feed in the log
• around 1300 water powered grindstones, pumps to remove water from mines
• damming a river for water power--1177 Toulouse had 3 dams with 43 mills.  The largest dam was 1300 feet long
• windmills (12th century) used in areas where land was flat or streams froze in the winter

    23. Life and Miracles of Saint Louis

Christianity and attitudes towards technology in the Middle Ages

• motivation to go out and spread Christianity
• God no longer inhabits nature
• Man's dominion over the earth--new attitude
  
• monasteries developed and spread technology because they needed it to be self-supporting on marginal land and because they believed work was virtuous
  
• monks work with their hands--the first intellectuals who got their hands dirty   ( The Cistercians )
• Christianity prohibited the owning of Christians as slaves so slavery became much less common
• Cathedrals were a technological achievement with a religious purpose--competition to build taller both for civic pride and because people saw it as getting closer to God (a medieval mason, images of medieval art and architecture)
• the invention of the clock in the late 13th century--at a monastery 

• medieval books cost $2000-10,000 in today's money
• the first universities developed in the middle ages, and the demand for books was so high that some workshops had a kind of mass production with one person reading and a number writing
• paper was already mass produced, the screw press and oil-based inks used for wooden block prints
• Gutenberg's key innovation (in 1452) was moveable type (more history )
• by 1483 the same amount of labor would produce 3 hand copies of 1025 printed copies
• the cost of a book dropped to a few hundred dollars in today's money
• by 1500 8 million books published--equal to total previous world output

• students didn't have to spend all their time memorizing the books
• more books available meant it was easier to compare books and notice contradictions
• more accurate and faster transmission of knowledge
• people read the Bible for themselves, leading to the reformation
• Luther takes his stand in 1517--argues that we are saved by God's grace not by good works and that everyone has the right to interpret the Bible for themselves
• in 1531 Henry VIII breaks England away from the Catholic church

• Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbis Celestium in 1543.  He was a priest motivated by the need for calendar reform, but his argument that the earth goes around the sun (instead of vice versa) started the downfall of Aristotelian science
• Kepler published the theory that the planets move in elliptical orbits in 1609.
• Galileo published his defense of the Copernican system in 1632 and his new physics in 1638.  Galileo is most important because he put into place a new scientific method in which scientists argued from experiment and from his observations with the telescope, not from logic alone.
• Newton published the law of universal gravitation in 1687.  He was slowed down a bit because he had to invent calculus in order to show that his theory worked.
• more openness to trial and error, more willingness to try new things
  

• the problem of navigation was not solved during the age of exploration
  
• magnetic compass introduced in 13th century, but knowing which way you are going doesn't help much if you don't know where you are
• more careful map-making was the main improvement of the 14th and 15th centuries, particularly knowledge of the winds
  
• minor improvements in methods for measuring latitude in 15th century
• the problem of measuring longitude was not solved until the mid to late 1700s ( story)
• in 1340 the Muslims cut off overland trade to Asia and Europeans start exploring outside the Mediterranean
• slow exploration down the coast of Africa until Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487
• Columbus underestimated the circumference of the earth and reached America in 1492
• in 1519 Magellan set out on a 3 year voyage around the world

• multiple masts and more than one sail on each mast
• rudder permanently attached to a stern post instead of a steering oar
• rounded shape
• military technology was also critical, because of the fighting to control sea routes
• primitive cannon about 1325 used carved stone balls and exploded a lot
• iron cannonballs introduced 1350, corned gunpowder for more even explosion about 1420
• cannon became safe enough to use on a ship about 1500
• very quickly warships began carrying large numbers of cannon--England rose to power partly because they were more successful in making iron cannon (because they happened to have high-phosphorous ore)

 Early gunpowder weapons