This semester (Spring 2018), I will be offering an undergraduate elective at Tsinghua: *General History of Technology*.
Basic Course Information
Course number: 00691572
Time: Every Tuesday, period 4 (15:20–16:55)
Note: Classes start on February 27
Location: Building 4, Room 4202
Assessment: Reading notes / short paper + open-book final exam
Note: I hope every student can write a relatively complete paper (more than 6,000 Chinese characters), but past experience shows that many students still lack adequate academic training, and the papers handed in are often a miserable patchwork. So this time I am considering allowing reading notes, with a more flexible format, to substitute for the paper; but students who are capable are still encouraged to write a paper. As for the open-book final, I am not yet quite clear about the rules. Roughly speaking, it will probably be an in-class exam in the final session, mainly consisting of open-ended essay questions, with no need for rote memorization.
Course Introduction
This is the second course I have offered since coming to Tsinghua, and also my first undergraduate course. Although I have been mulling it over for a long time, I am sure the preparation is still inadequate, and this course has very few ready-made reference models in China. How to teach it, and what to teach, will have to be explored while teaching.
This is meant to be a course that will be offered long term. If conditions permit, it will be offered every year, in coordination with Professor Wu’s *General History of Science*.
Relation to General History of Science
Of course, although my “general history of technology” takes Professor Wu’s “general history of science” as its model, and likewise upholds the aim of fostering communication between the humanities and the sciences, in actual design it is hard to make direct use of Professor Wu’s successful experience.
Professor Wu’s general history of science in fact includes technology, but although he long ago proposed views such as “technology is an ocean, science is an island,” in the actual course content technology still appears only as scattered embellishment. In my case, history of science will become an occasional inserted background, while “technology” itself is cast as the protagonist.
It is worth noting that even in the historiographical program of history of science, there has long been all kinds of struggle over who the “protagonist” should be—for example, whether to emphasize the level of ideas or social factors, mathematical sciences or empirical sciences, astronomy or alchemy… But these disputes seem to be only about whether the first male lead or the second male lead gets more screen time, whether the heroine or a supporting actress gets the spotlight. To make technology the protagonist, however, is as if to say that we want the original “extras” to become the lead. That is a completely different matter.
At least in the following four respects, a general history of science can quite easily be made to “hang together,” whereas a general history of technology cannot simply copy that experience:
1. The standpoint of reductionism
“Science” seems to be “one,” whereas technology is “many.” When people look at “science,” they consciously or unconsciously bring with them a certain inherent reductionist standpoint, treating the various sciences as a unity; indeed, this reductionist standpoint even supplies a ready-made sequence of priorities—mathematics and physics are more central, chemistry and biology next, natural history and the social sciences most marginal… This reductionist standpoint directly provides a set of clues for historical narration: for example, modern science begins with the astronomical revolution and then the physical revolution, followed by the chemical revolution and the biological revolution, and then we welcome a new physical revolution, and so on in cycles.
But in the realm of “technology,” such a ready-made unity cannot be found. Which is more fundamental, hydraulic engineering or architecture? Which is more important, spacecraft or zippers? How to determine the main plot of technological history thus becomes a problem.
2. The island and the ocean
Historically, scientists and their scientific activities have been a relatively small and isolated group. Although it is true that in antiquity the identity of “scientist” had not yet formed, in general scientific research belonged to the intellectual stratum. By contrast, the figures and settings involved in the history of technology are much richer, including engineers and artisans, as well as countless users. Their activities are more complex and varied, and hard to focus on.
3. The status of texts
Communication among scientists and the results they leave for posterity are usually primarily in textual form, so the history of science mainly confronts such ideational content. It is therefore easy to carry out a logical reconstruction and tell a continuous story of the accumulation of knowledge in the realm of thought and concepts. In the history of technology, however, there are not many core texts available for logical reconstruction; even when some texts are found, it is hard to say they are sufficient to indicate the lines of development in technological history.
4. Vivid central figures
Traditional history of science often simply becomes a series of moving stories about scientists pursuing truth and dispelling ignorance. Even in more advanced forms of writing, one can still find all kinds of vividly drawn figures to narrate. But in the history of technology—especially ancient technological history—apart from a very few special cases, inventors are often anonymous; even when their names can be traced, there is still a lack of rich stories around technological invention.
In short, to tell the history of technology in a way that “hangs together,” one needs to find perspectives or methods different from those of ordinary general history of science. Regarding the four points above, my preliminary solution is:
1. Replace reductionism with holism, and propose the concept of “the technology totality / technological environment,” unifying the countless links in human life-worlds on the basis of the integrity of lived experience, and taking as the ultimate aim the shaping and transformation of individual life by technological development. Concretely, for example, the engineering of bridges and the technology of road paving are not the same thing, but bridges and roads converge in people’s walking activities; the making of pens and the production of paper are two different matters, but paper and pens meet in people’s writing activities. No matter how rich and how complex the technological world may be, in the end we still have only “one life” in this world. Technology is our living environment. If we focus on one scene after another within that environment, then the environment is of course “many”; but if we focus on “life” itself, then the environment becomes “one” again.
2. Take only a single grain from the vast ocean, and focus on those most crucial technologies: they must have a global impact on the economy and society, and establish new scales within the life-world. (Here one can borrow the concept of “general purpose technology” / General purpose technology.)
3. Understand technology through a broad conception of intellectual history: if we also regard technological artifacts themselves as the condensation and manifestation of thought, and hold that man-made artifacts are all carriers of memory, while material structures are the externalization of thought structures, then from this perspective any artifact contains thought and ideas, and written texts are only one form of carrying or expressing them. We note that external knowledge (technology) and internal knowledge (ideas) mutually shape one another and are mutually presupposed (for example, the clock and the concept of time, money and the concept of value). Then we can also tell a “history of technology from the standpoint of ideas”: we can ask after the intellectual premises that made technology acceptable, and reconstruct the conceptual consequences of corresponding technologies.
4. In keeping with the development of Western historiography, no longer focus only on heroic achievements, but also on the everyday lives of ordinary people. There is no need to get too hung up on praising the inventors of specific technologies; instead, we should pay more attention to the “users” of technology, to the links through which new technologies truly bring about an all-around transformation of the life-world. (For example, if we look at printing, Bi Sheng is less important than Gutenberg, and Gutenberg may perhaps be less important than Martin Luther (the most influential user of printing); and beyond Luther’s theses, the printed recipe cards a housewife arranges in her kitchen are equally worth attention. We do not need to spend too much time on who invented a certain technology or how it was invented, but should instead place the focus on how technology affects the world as a whole.
Course Features
In sum, the defining feature of our course is that it takes as its focus the shaping and transformation of the “life-world” by technology, does not emphasize the presentation of an “invention chronology,” does not stress the priority of invention (for example, China being N hundred years earlier than the West); and does not emphasize the structural principles of technological artifacts. Instead, it foregrounds the humanistic aspect of technology, highlights the interactive relationship between technology and social culture, and attends to the remaking of the life-world by new technologies.
Of course, as a general-education course, it will naturally still take chronology as the main thread, with topic lectures centered on the most representative technological cases of each era; and within each topic, it will not be limited to one time or place. For example, the rise of the “mechanical clock” occurred in late medieval Europe; this course will arrange a lecture on the “mechanical clock” under the historical backdrop from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. But the content of that lecture will not be limited to late medieval Europe; rather, it will trace timekeeping technologies from antiquity to the modern atomic clock, and introduce ancient Chinese timekeeping technologies and related cultural phenomena for comparison. In this broader perspective, one can understand the origins and development of the mechanical clock and its influence on Western European social culture.
Course Outline
Finally, here is the tentative outline (it will certainly undergo major adjustments as the course progresses):
| 1 | Introduction and prehistory: stone tools, fire |
| 2 | Antiquity: pottery, settlement, writing |
| 3 | Classical era: water conservancy, transportation, cities |
| 4、5 | Early modern period: mechanical clock, navigation, printing |
| 6、7 | The Scientific Revolution: telescope, vacuum pump |
| 8、9 | The Industrial Revolution: steam engine, textile machine, |
| 10、11、12 | Electrification: electric power, refining, assembly line |
| 13、14 | Information age: mass media, computers |
| 15、16 | Reflection and prospects: big data, artificial intelligence |
Recommended Readings
There is no textbook. You are welcome to follow my blog; I should be updating the course lectures every week, and each class will have corresponding reference materials. I recommend reading Mumford, such as “Technics and Civilization” and *The Myth of the Machine*. As for general works on the history of technology, I have not yet found anything especially suitable. A seven-volume Oxford history of technology would obviously be too thick; I can just browse it myself, so I won’t recommend it.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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