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 tools and machines. By mid-century,
technology was defined by such phrases as “the means or activity by which man seeks to change or

manipulate his environment.” Even such broad definitions have been criticized by observers who point
out the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between scientific inquiry and technological activity.

Techniques are methods of creating new tools and products of tools, and the capacity for constructing

such artifacts is a determining characteristic of humanlike species. Other species make artifacts: bees
build elaborate hives to deposit their honey, birds make nests, and beavers build dams. But these

attributes are the result of patterns of instinctive behaviour and cannot be varied to suit rapidly
changing circumstances. Humanity, in contrast with other species, does not possess highly developed

instinctive reactions but does have the capacity to think systematically and creatively about techniques.
Humans can thus innovate and consciously modify the 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 man can fashion the
stick into a cutting tool and remove a whole bunch of bananas. Somewhere in the transition between

the two, the hominid, the first manlike species, emerges. By virtue of his nature as a toolmaker, man is
therefore a technologist from the beginning, and the history of technology encompasses the whole

evolution of humankind.

There were profound political changes in the 20th century related to technological capacity and
leadership. It may be an exaggeration to regard the 20th century as “the American century,” but the rise

of the United States as a superstate was sufficiently rapid and dramatic to excuse the hyperbole. It was
a rise based upon tremendous natural resources exploited to secure increased productivity through
widespread industrialization, and the success of the United States in achieving this objective was tested
and demonstrated in the two World Wars.
The two World Wars were themselves the most important instruments of technological as well as

political change in the 20th century. The rapid evolution of the airplane is a striking illustration of this
process, while the appearance of the tank in the first conflict and of the atomic bomb in the second

show the same signs of response to an urgent military stimulus.