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

by Richard L. Currier

But none of the first mechanical clocks had either hands or faces. Instead, they told time by the ringing of bells. (In fact, the English word “clock” comes from the German word Glocke, meaning “bell.”) And the clock face that is familiar to us—with an hour hand and a minute hand rotating inside a circular dial bearing twelve numbers—did not come into general use until 1700, more than four hundred years after the first mechanical clocks were installed in the towers of Europe’s churches and monasteries.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg discovered that an alloy of tin, lead, and antimony in the proper proportions could be easily melted and poured into a matrix of tiny molds, one for each letter of the alphabet. This made it possible for lines of type to be assembled from individual letters, known as “movable type.” By contrast, the method of woodblock printing—the most common method of printing at that time—required the printer to carve an entire page of text and illustrations from a single block of wood.

During the fifty years between 1450 and 1500, slightly more than twelve million books were printed in Europe. Three centuries later, during the fifty years between 1750 and 1800, this number had grown to over 625 million—and this was before the establishment of public schools and the spread of universal literacy.

And in 1709, the Englishman Abraham Darby successfully smelted iron in a blast furnace that burned coke instead of charcoal. Darby’s simple innovation had far-reaching consequences. First, it took the pressure off the dwindling reserves of forest, making it possible for the first time to produce high-quality iron in many areas of Europe that had become dangerously deforested but were nevertheless rich in coal. Second, the charcoal fires traditionally used for smelting were subject to being crushed and smothered if too much iron ore was dumped in on top of them, but the greater physical strength of coke could support much heavier loads of ore. This made it possible for much larger quantities of iron ore to be loaded into the furnace at one time. As a result, blast furnaces were soon being built far larger than was previously possible, and these new furnaces produced greater yields from the same investment of time and labor. Finally, it was far cheaper to mine coal and convert it into coke than it had been to cut down entire forests and saw up the trees in order to produce charcoal from firewood.

The impact of Watt’s success at creating a steam engine that delivered rotary power at relatively high speeds cannot be overstated. It liberated European society from its age-old dependence on water wheels—which could only be placed in favorable locations where a reliable source of falling water could be harnessed—as well as on windmills, which were dependent on the unpredictable coming and going of favorable winds. For the first time, a source of rotary power could be located wherever it was most advantageous.

In the early 1800s, before the first ocean-going steamship was built, a typical trip from Europe to America by sailing ship lasted an average of two months at sea. By contrast, the Great Western, the first paddle-wheel steamer built expressly for crossing the Atlantic, made its maiden voyage from England to New York in April of 1838 in sixteen days, and by 1875 a flotilla of iron-hulled steamships—with advanced steam engines and screw propellers instead of paddle wheels—were regularly crossing the Atlantic in seven days.

When the machinists and inventors of the late eighteenth century perfected the art of creating the precisely fitting piston and cylinder—and linked the piston with a precisely machined crankshaft—the back-and-forth motion of the piston was converted into continuously rotating motion, and the “reciprocating engine” was born. The steam engine was the quintessential reciprocating engine of the nineteenth century, and it quickly became the primary source of power for the mills, ships, and railroads of Europe. But the reciprocating engine was destined for an even more exotic and transformative future.

The problem with all of the early firearms was in their method of manufacture. The barrels of the early guns and cannons were created by casting molten bronze or iron in molds, but the process of casting molten metal does not produce a smooth or precisely straight barrel, and small irregularities inside the barrel would affect the trajectory of the projectile. In addition, the early firearms lacked the “rifling” that is incorporated into all modern firearms. Rifling consists of spiral grooves that cause the projectile to begin spinning as it travels down the length of the barrel, which greatly straightens the trajectory of the bullet, immensely increasing the range and accuracy of the weapon. But the technology of precision machining made it possible to bore the barrel of a firearm into a precisely smooth, straight tube, and it was this development, more than any other, that gave the firearm its deadly effectiveness and that finally rendered obsolete the swords, spears, and arrows of earlier times. This is why, when James Watt needed to build a precisely fitting piston and cylinder for his new steam engine, he turned for a solution to John Wilkinson, a cannon maker.

The effectiveness of modern firearms—combined with the dramatic reduction in the extent of wilderness areas and the steady movement of the human population from the countryside to the cities—has effectively ended the threat to human life once posed by the presence of wild animals in our environment. In the modern world, the threat to human life and safety now comes almost exclusively from other human beings.

In 1820, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted was delivering a lecture when he noticed that the needle of a compass reacted when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off. Ørsted became the first person to publish the discovery that when electricity flows through a wire, it produces a magnetic field. Although other scientists experimented with Ørsted’s discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism, it was not until the 1830s that Michael Faraday, the son of an English blacksmith, proved that Ørsted’s discovery worked in reverse: that when a magnetic field moves across an electrical conductor such as a wire, it creates an electric current in the conductor. This phenomenon, known as electromagnetic induction, made it possible for Faraday to create working models of the two essential devices of the electric age: the electric generator and the electric motor.

As late as 1900, steam engines still provided more than 80 percent of the mechanical power used in manufacturing, while electric motors provided less than 10 percent. Forty years later, these proportions had become exactly reversed.

In less than two hundred years, the widespread use of fossil fuels, reciprocating engines, and electricity—all of which were made possible by the technology of precision machinery—had thoroughly transformed every aspect of human life.

With the proliferation of employment opportunities for women—and the growing acceptance of men performing routine household chores—living alone has become a realistic option for both sexes. In fact, the single-person household has now become the chosen way of life for roughly 30 percent of the households in Europe and the United States (in Sweden, the number is 47 percent). And the rest of the world is not far behind. Single-person households are even more common in Japan than they are in the United States. But not every nation has embraced this way of life. In India, where family life has remained strong and vibrant, only 3 percent of households consist of only one person.

In the hunting and gathering societies of the past, women not only gathered the firewood and cooked the food but also brought home most of the vegetable foods that the group as a whole could not live without—and that enabled adult men to spend their days hunting for the equally vital supplies of meat. In agricultural societies, women not only worked in the gardens and did all the cooking, cleaning, and washing, but also bore and raised the children that brought wealth, status, and the promise of future security to the family as a whole. But in modern industrial society, the only job that is truly indispensable is earning money through gainful employment, and because this began as “men’s work” during the first decades of industrialization, men have traditionally dominated this sphere and still enjoy a considerable advantage over women as employees. Meanwhile, the importance of women as the bearers of children has lost much of its former significance. The people of the developed world have increasingly come to rely not on their children but rather on their investments, pensions, social security payments, and health insurance policies to provide them with economic security in their old age. In short, cultural inertia—the tendency for a culture to retain values and attitudes that are traditional but have become obsolete due to other changes in society—has dealt the women of the modern world a cruel hand. On the one hand, women are still expected to perform most of the work inv...

By 2013, 75 percent of American women had lived with a partner without being married by the time they were thirty years old.

In fact, the traditional institution of marriage that we inherited from ancient societies was never designed to provide intimacy, companionship, mutual attraction, or sexual satisfaction. Traditional marriage evolved in agricultural societies as a way to create lifelong partnerships, establish mutually beneficial economic relationships between families, and maximize the stability of land ownership in agricultural society. These goals were achieved by a set of customs that made both men and women socially, economically, and psychologically dependent on each other. And it was these customs—not lasting affection or mutual attraction—that ensured the permanence of marriage.

In the final analysis, the technology of precision machinery—and the urbanization of human society that that technology made possible—has rendered the so-called traditional family, with its assumption of lifelong permanence, essentially obsolete. The arranged marriage has become a thing of the past. The economic benefits of having children have been replaced by significant economic costs. The economic and social interdependence between men and women has weakened considerably. And not only virginity in adolescence but also the traditional prohibitions against premarital and extramarital sex have lost most or all of their former social stigma. Yet the human family survives and will continue to survive. Men and women will continue to form sexual partnerships, and they will continue to have children. Those who are not inclined to procreate will contribute neither their inherited biological predispositions nor their learned cultural preferences to future generations. While the “traditional family” has become obsolete, the human family has not. Our innate human natures, the product of millions of years of human evolution, ensure that the human family will survive as long as our species endures.

In 1870, between 70 and 80 percent of the population of the United States still lived and worked on farms. By 2010, this proportion had dwindled to less than 1 percent of the population. Yet as a result of the mechanization of agriculture made possible by the internal combustion engine, the 1 percent of agricultural workers remaining in the United States produce more food than is consumed by the remaining 99 percent of the population.

As recently as 1950, roughly 70 percent of the world’s people still lived in rural communities, while only 30 percent lived in cities. At present, the numbers of rural and urban dwellers are roughly equal. By the year 2050, these proportions will be exactly reversed: roughly 70 percent of the world’s people will live in cities, while only 30 percent will live in the countryside.

Before 1800, only a tiny fraction of the earth’s human population worked at jobs for wages. Aside from hereditary rulers, most people were farmers, and the rest were tradespeople, craftsmen, learned professionals, bureaucrats, soldiers, and clergymen. But with the proliferation of factories and offices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, working for wages rapidly became the most common form of work in the new employment society.

We may take it for granted that people need jobs, and that the health of our society rises and falls on the availability of well-paid employment, but the fact remains that a society composed almost entirely of people who work under the direction of other people—who in turn provide them with a regular supply of money—is an entirely new phenomenon in human history. And the values and traditions that modern cultures have developed to deal with the social and psychological problems created by the employment society remain immature and embryonic.

It is surely one of the great paradoxes of human history that the evolution of modern life, with all of its safety, security, comfort, and diversions, has been plagued by an epidemic of eating disorders, heart disease, insomnia, drug addiction, neurosis, psychosis, and pathological discontent that is unprecedented in the history of the human species.

In a bold attempt to solve the Census Bureau’s problem, the American engineer Herman Hollerith built a tabulating calculator that used a keypunch machine to create decks of punched cards that his machine could read automatically. Hollerith’s machine created a sensation when it succeeded in tabulating the results of the 1890 census in a single year. Hollerith went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company, leasing his machines to countries across Europe to tabulate their censuses. In 1911, the Tabulating Machine Company merged with three other corporations, and in 1924 its name was changed to the International Business Machine Company, better known as “IBM.”

But the proliferation of computer technology after mid-century accelerated enormously when, in 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, a small wafer of germanium, silicon, or gallium arsenide. The transistor performed the same functions as a vacuum tube, but it was both vastly smaller and used only a fraction as much power as a vacuum tube. For this invention, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.

In September of 1958, the Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby produced the first operational integrated circuit, using germanium wafers, and a few months later, Robert Noyes of Fairchild Semiconductor produced an improved version of the integrated circuit using silicon wafers.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, cofounder of the Intel Corporation, published a now-famous article in the magazine Electronics entitled “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.” In this article, Moore predicted that ten years in the future (i.e., by 1975) as many as sixty-five thousand electronic components would be fabricated on a single microchip. “I believe,” he added confidently, “that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.” Years later, when Moore’s prediction had proven unnervingly prophetic, the phenomenon he described was dubbed “Moore’s Law.” It states that the number of components contained in a single microchip—and thus its processing speed and power—will double approximately every two years. Yet Moore’s Law turns out to have been, if anything, slightly conservative, as Moore himself had guessed.3 Since 1965, the processing power of the microchip has doubled almost every eighteen months, and in 2014, Intel announced the 15-Core Xeon E7 v2, an integrated circuit with more than 4.3 billion transistors on a single microchip roughly the size of a soda cracker.

The year 2000 marks the approximate beginning of the horizon of digital history, after which the recorded information of all human societies will be available to future generations with unparalleled completeness and fidelity. By contrast, most of recorded history before the year 2000 is fragmentary and incomplete.

All of our most soaring achievements, as well as our most banal frivolities, will live on in a mass of ones and zeroes long after we have gone, and they will be available for the enlightenment and amusement of future generations as long as human civilization itself endures.

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 ...

As people find it easier to interact across geographical space, they can more easily visualize other people as belonging to their own familiar worlds. The more easily they communicate with each other, the more likely they are to seek and find a common language. The more they travel to each other’s lands and settle in each other’s territories, the more likely they are to adopt each other’s customs and traditions. Over time, they become more likely to eat the same foods, wear the same clothes, and even observe the same holidays. They become more likely to intermarry, and to produce children that grow up exposed to more than one set of customs, values, and attitudes.

The current threats to the biosphere are more than the consequences of human technologies. They are also the expression of Homo sapiens’ animal nature. For all of its technological prowess, our species is still motivated by ancient animal instincts, including the drive to expand and multiply to the limits of the possible. This kind of elemental self-interest is to be expected of any life form. But in our desire to provide ourselves with ever-increasing amounts of progeny, food, clothing, shelter, energy, weapons, and material possessions, we have too often overlooked the needs of other forms of plant and animal life. After all, Homo sapiens is the only species capable of both comprehending and addressing the needs of all other life forms. It is therefore incumbent upon us to use our higher consciousness not only for our own well-being but also for the greater well-being of all the many species that share the biosphere with us.