Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

Who would have guessed that the development of precision machinery by medieval clockmakers—driven by the simple desire to produce more accurate clocks—would lead before long to the invention of the modern printing press, an explosion of knowledge, and a Renaissance in the arts and sciences throughout the Western world? Or that when the forests of Europe were being consumed by the clockmakers’ rising demand for iron and steel, the civilized world would begin mining coal, which would lead before long to the invention of the steam engine with all of its multiple effects on the nature of manufacturing, travel, and trade? Or that the success of the steam engine would spawn an industrial revolution that would, within the course of a single century, produce the internal combustion engine, the automobile, the airplane, and the widespread use of electric power? Who would have guessed that these industrial technologies would ultimately result in the abandonment of food production and the wholesale movement by the great majority of the earth’s people from the countryside to the cities? Who would have predicted that precision machinery would ultimately produce the media of mass communications, the rise of the employment society, the mechanization of house and home, the deforestation of Earth’s land areas, the destabilization of global climates, the mass extinction of plants and animals, and all of the fundamental changes that have taken place in the customs and traditions that govern ...