Timeline for Complete graph (DAG) of prerequisite relationships of human technology
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 14, 2020 at 10:44 | comment | added | Tamas Ferenci | Thanks @JBH for this plan! While it has a quite different focus, it look rather awesome (and also shows the difficulties...). | |
| Oct 14, 2020 at 10:37 | comment | added | Tamas Ferenci | Thanks! I would nevertheless still argue that it is not actually cyclic. In my view, the root is the temporal evolution of the graph: you first have low quality coal, which allows you to make a bit better quality steel, which in turn allows you to produce medium quality coal, which makes it possible... and so on, and so on. | |
| Oct 14, 2020 at 10:16 | vote | accept | Tamas Ferenci | ||
| Oct 13, 2020 at 6:32 | answer | added | Jann Poppinga | timeline score: 1 | |
| Oct 11, 2020 at 5:55 | comment | added | JBH | Just to show you the complexity of this process, back in the 1980s Rockwell International created a chart kinda like this, the Integrated Space Plan. This chart did not diagram technologies per se, it diagrammed concepts and achievements. And even that enormous simplification created a chart so complex that it adorns my wall as a piece of art. Thus, the only practical answer is "heck no." In fact, it would be very hard to do with just one tech tree. | |
| Oct 11, 2020 at 5:52 | comment | added | JBH | Ash is right. Not only can tech be subdivided into ridiculously small units - but almost all technology is in one way or another connected (see the TV show Connections). That reality makes the map D.J.'s suggesting a very large, very black, fundamentally meaningless map. Worse, I can easily imagine the map has "feedback" or "recursion," meaning that an advancement in one field allows us to go back to a previous step in another and create a new, branch advancement. Yuck. But... | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 22:15 | comment | added | StephenS | Are you sure it’s acyclic? You need coal to make steel and steel to make coal, at least decent quality and quantity of both. And that’s just one tiny example. | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 21:59 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Oct 10, 2020 at 21:35 | answer | added | D.J. Klomp | timeline score: 5 | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 18:17 | comment | added | AlexP | @Willk: Trevor I. Williams, A short history of technology from the earliest times to AD 1900, Oxford, 1960. (This "short history" has 784 pages.) | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 17:54 | comment | added | AlexP | See this answer of mine, and please oh please read Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, in which the pencil, speaking in the first person, "details the complexity of its own creation, listing its components (cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, glue) and the numerous people involved, down to the sweeper in the factory and the lighthouse keeper guiding the shipment into port" (Wikipedia). It is a great introduction. | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 17:49 | comment | added | AlexP | @Willk: H. R. Schubert, History of the British iron and steel industry from 450 BC to AD 1775, London, 1955. Hillary Bauerman, A treatise on the metallurgy of iron, London, 1890. Charles Singer, E.J. Holmyard, et al., A History of Technology, Oxford University Press, 1954; volume I, volume II, volume III. | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 16:24 | comment | added | Tamas Ferenci | @Willk "and possibly a life's scholarly work". Sure. I'd say even more, as this can be only imagined as a collaborative project with many people for different domains. But given that someone spent four years to take an underwater photo of a beaver, who knows... | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 16:03 | answer | added | Ash | timeline score: 8 | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 15:48 | comment | added | Willk | A heady undertaking you propose: the epistemology of technology crossed with sociocultural cross currents and historical examples. A PhD thesis easily and possibly a life's scholarly work. I dig stuff like this, but I think the perspective to include all technology would be from such an altitude as to lose the fun details. For example, I have been looking for years for a book about the history of iron - the tech that made it possible, its discovery and dissemination etc. Link welcome if someone knows of such a book! The scope of what you propose is much bigger - awesome and ambitious. | |
| Oct 10, 2020 at 14:03 | review | First posts | |||
| Oct 10, 2020 at 15:20 | |||||
| Oct 10, 2020 at 13:58 | history | asked | Tamas Ferenci | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
