TECHNOLOGY

THROUGH THE AGES…

MODULE 2
PROF. MARY GRACE G. VENTURA
Technology is reaching everyone across the world; the
world’s poorest people are more likely to own a smart
phone than to have a toilet in their house.

-World Bank-
 3.3 MILLION YEARS AGO: THE FIRST TOOLS
 The history of technology
begins even before the
beginning of our own species.
 Sharp flakes of stone used as
knives and larger unshaped
stones used as hammers and
anvils have been uncovered
at Lake Turkana in Kenya.
 The tools were made 3.3
million years ago and thus
were likely used by an
ancestor such as 
Australopithecus.
 WATCH THE VIDEO
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFI50iSPWeI
 1 MILLION YEARS AGO: FIRE
 When humanity first used fire
is still not definitively known,
but, like the first tools, it was
probably invented by an
ancestor of Homo sapiens.
Evidence of burnt material
can be found in caves used
by Homo erectus beginning
about 1 million (and maybe
even 1.5 million) years ago.
 MANKIND THE STORY OF ALL OF US: FIRE |
HISTORY
 Watch the video below (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfqf5iyY2YY)
20,000 TO 15,000 YEARS AGO:
NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION
 During the Neolithic Period several key
technologies arose together.
 Humans moved from getting their food by
foraging to getting it through agriculture.
 People came together in larger groups.
Clay was used for pottery and bricks.
 Clothing began to be made of woven
fabrics. The wheel was also likely invented
at this time.
NEOLOTHIC REVOLUTION
 NEOLOTHIC REVOLUTION
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rboewQNMpdU
 6000 BCE: IRRIGATION
 The first irrigation systems arose
roughly simultaneously in the
civilizations of the 
Tigris-Euphrates river valley in 
Mesopotamia and the Nile River
 valley in Egypt. Since irrigation
requires an extensive amount of
work, it shows a high level of
social organization.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=5RP2KfewiJA
 4000 BCE: SAILING
 The first sailing ships were used on the Nile River. Since the Nile does not
allow as much space for free sailing as the ocean, these ships also had oars
for navigation.
 1200 BCE: IRON
 About this time, the
production of iron became
widespread as that metal
supplanted bronze. Iron was
much more abundant than
copper and tin, the two
metals that make up bronze,
and thus put metal tools into
more hands than ever
before.
 850 CE: GUNPOWDER
 Alchemists in China invented 
gunpowder as a result of their search
for life-extending elixirs. It was used
to propel rockets attached to arrows.
The knowledge of gunpowder spread
to Europe in the 13th century.
 GUN POWDER
 Please watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C7R7Mim4NU
 950: WINDMILL
 Nearly 5,000 years after the first
sailing ships, the wind was first
used to operate a mill.
 The first windmills were in Persia.
They were horizontal windmills in
which the blades were set on a
vertical shaft. Later, European
windmills were of the vertical
type. It has been speculated that
the windmill may have been
invented independently in Persia
and in Europe.
 1044: COMPASS
 The first definitive mention of a magnetic compass dates from a Chinese
book finished in 1044.
 It describes how soldiers found their way by using a fish-shaped piece of
magnetized iron floating in a bowl of water when the sky was too cloudy to
see the stars.
 COMPASS
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz99TA7wYNA
 1250–1300: MECHANICAL CLOCK
 Hourglass and water clocks had
been around for centuries, but the
first mechanical clocks began to
appear in Europe toward the end of
the 13th century and were used in
cathedrals to mark the time when
services would be held.
 TimeLine - A Brief Introduction To
The History Of Timekeeping Devices
 https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=At5atF4
mKiU
1455: PRINTING
 Johannes Gutenberg completed
the printing of the Bible, which
was the first book printed in the
West using movable type.
Gutenberg’s printing press led to
an information explosion in
Europe.
STEAM ENGINE
 James Watt improved the Newcomen steam engine
 by adding a condenser that turned the steam back
into liquid water. This condenser was separate from
the cylinder that moved the piston, which meant
that the engine was much more efficient. The 
steam engine became one of the most important
inventions of the Industrial Revolution.
 HISTORY OF STEAM ENGINE
 Please watch the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrJJ9PhHrKM)
 1804: RAILWAYS
 English engineer 
Richard Trevithick
 improved James Watt’s
steam engine and used it
for transport. He built the
first railway locomotive at
an ironworks in Wales.
 1807: STEAMBOAT
 Robert Fulton put the steam engine on water. His
steamboat that was eventually called the Clermont took
32 hours to go up the Hudson River from New York City
to Albany. Sailing ships took four days.
1826/27: PHOTOGRAPHY
 In the early 1820s, Nicéphore Niépce
became interested in using a light-
sensitive solution to make copies of
lithographs onto glass, zinc, and
finally a pewter plate.
 He then had the great idea to use his
solution to make a copy of an image
in a camera obscura (a room or box
with a small hole in one end through
which an image of the outside is
projected).
 In 1826 or 1827, he made an eight-
hour-long exposure of the courtyard of
his house, the first known photograph.
 1831: REAPER
 For thousands of years,
harvesting crops was very
labour-intensive. That changed
with Cyrus McCormick’s
invention of the mechanical 
reaper.
 The earliest reaper had some
mechanical problems, but later
versions spread throughout the
world.
 1844: TELEGRAPH
 Samuel Morse was a successful
painter who became interested in
the possibility of an electric 
telegraph in the 1830s.
 He patented a prototype in 1837.
In 1844 he sent the first message
over the first long-distance
telegraph line, which stretched
between Washington, D.C., and
Baltimore. The message: “What
hath God wrought.”
 1876: TELEPHONE
 Once it was possible to send
information through a wire in
the form of dots and dashes,
the next step was actual voice
communication. 
Alexander Graham Bell made
the first telephone call, on
March 10, 1876, when he
asked his assistant Tom
Watson to come to him: “Mr
Watson—come here—I want
to see you.”
1876: INTERNAL-COMBUSTION ENGINE
 German engineer 
Nikolaus Otto built an 
engine that, unlike the
steam engine, used the
burning of fuel inside the
engine to move a piston.
This type of engine
would later be used to
power automobiles.
 1879: ELECTRIC LIGHT
 After thousands of trials,
American inventor 
Thomas Edison got a carbon-
filament light bulb to burn for
13½ hours. Edison and others
in his laboratory were also
working on an electrical power
distribution system to light
homes and businesses, and in
1882 the Edison Electric
Illuminating Company opened
the first power plant.
 1885: AUTOMOBILE
 The internal-combustion engine improved,
becoming smaller and more efficient.
 Karl Benz used a one-cylinder engine to
power the first modern automobile, a
three-wheeled car that he drove around a
track.
 However, the automobile did not make a
commercial splash until 1888, when his
wife, Bertha, exasperated with Karl’s slow
methodical pace, took an automobile
without his knowledge on a 64-mile trip to
see her mother.
 1901: RADIO
 Guglielmo Marconi had been experimenting with radio since 1894 and was
sending transmissions over longer and longer distances. In 1901 his reported
transmission of the Morse code letter S across the Atlantic from Cornwall to
Newfoundland excited the world.
 1903: AIRPLANE
 On December 17 Orville
Wright made the first 
airplane flight, of 120
feet, near Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina. 
 He
and his brother Wilbur
 made four flights that
day. On the last, Wilbur
flew 852 feet.
1926: ROCKETRY
 As a young boy in the late
1890s, Robert Goddard was
inspired by H.G. Wells’s The
War of the Worlds and the
possibilities of space travel. As
a middle-aged man in the mid-
1920s, he achieved the first
test flight of a liquid-fueled 
rocket, from his aunt’s farm in
Auburn, Massachusetts. The
rocket flew 12.5 meters (41
feet) in the air.
1927: TELEVISION
 After the development of radio, the
transmission of an image was the next logical
step. Early television used a mechanical disk
to scan an image.
 As a teenager in Utah, Philo T. Farnsworth
 became convinced that a mechanical system
would not be able to scan and assemble
images multiple times a second.
 Only an electronic system would do that. In
1922 the 16-year-old Farnsworth worked out
a plan for such a system, but it wasn’t until
1927 that he made the first electronic
television transmission, a horizontal line.
 1937: COMPUTER
 Iowa State mathematician and physicist John Atanasoff designed the first
electronic digital computer. It would use binary numbers (base 2, in which all
numbers are expressed with the digits 0 and 1), and its data would be stored
in capacitors. In 1939 he and his student Clifford Berry began building the 
Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC).
1942: NUCLEAR POWER
 As part of the Manhattan Project to build the first 
atomic bomb, it was necessary to understand 
nuclear reactions in detail. On December 2 underneath
the football stands at the University of Chicago, a team of
physicists led by Enrico Fermi used uranium to produce
the first self-sustaining chain reaction.
 https://www.history.com/f9830ff8-9347-4f66-9b4e-
b64748f1ee80
 THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
 Please watch the video (The Manhattan Project: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5QtBEhnPwA)
 1947: TRANSISTOR
 On December 23 Bell Labs engineers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and 
William Shockley gave the first public demonstration of the transistor, an
electrical component that could control, amplify, and generate current. The
transistor was much smaller and used less power than vacuum tubes and
ushered in an era of cheap small electronic devices.
1957: SPACEFLIGHT
 The Soviet Union surprised the
world on October 4, when it
launched the first artificial
satellite, Sputnik 1, a small 83.6-
kg (184.3-pound) metal sphere.
 The space race began between
the Soviet Union and the United
States, opening up a new front
in the Cold War.
SPUTNIK 1 - EARTH’S FIRST ARTIFICIAL SATELLITE
 Please watch the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTDb3eKpPiw)
 1974: PERSONAL COMPUTER
 The first computers that emerged after
World War II were gigantic, but, with
advances in technology, especially in
putting many transistors on a 
semiconductor chip, computers became
both smaller and more powerful.
 Finally, they became small enough for
home use. The first such 
personal computer was the Altair, which
was soon supplanted in 1977 by the
Apple II, the TRS-80, and the
Commodore PET.
 1974: INTERNET
 Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn
 produced the TCP/IP
 (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol),
which describes how data
can be broken down into
smaller pieces called packets
and how these packets can
be transmitted to the right
destination.
 TCP/IP became the basis for
Vinton Cerf Robert Kahn
how data is transmitted over
the Internet.
 2012: CRISPR
 American biochemist Jennifer Doudna and French
microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier developed
CRISPR-Cas9, a method for editing genes—that is,
making changes to DNA sequences. Gene editing
has the potential to treat many diseases but also
opens up the ethical gray area of creating designer
humans.

Jennifer Doudna Emmanuelle Charpentier

 2017: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 The team behind the AlphaGo 
artificial intelligence program announced that
it had become the world’s best go player. 
 Go is a game with very simple rules but many
possible positions. The previous year
AlphaGo had defeated the great player Lee
Sedol in a match 4–1.
 AlphaGo then played itself and, through
continual improvement, was able to defeat
the version that had defeated Lee, 100–0.
Through machine learning, AlphaGo had
become better at the game than any human.
 2019-2020
 5G Data Networks: The 5th generation of mobile internet connectivity is going to give us super-fast
download and upload speeds as well as more stable connections.
 Autonomous Driving: Tesla chief Elon Musk has said he expects his company to create a truly
“complete” autonomous vehicle by this year, and the number of vehicles capable of operating with a
lesser degree of autonomy – such as automated braking and lane-changing – will become an
increasingly common sight. In addition to this, other in-car systems not directly connected to driving,
such as security and entertainment functions – will become increasingly automated and reliant on
data capture and analytics.
 Personalized and predictive medicine. When it comes to treatment, we will see much more
personalized approaches. This is also referred to as precision medicine which allows doctors to more
precisely prescribe medicines and apply treatments, thanks to a data-driven understanding of how
effective they are likely to be for a specific patient.
 Computer Vision. In computer terms, “vision” involves systems that are able to identify items, places,
objects or people from visual images – those collected by a camera or sensor. It’s this technology that
allows your smartphone camera to recognize which part of the image it's capturing is a face, and
powers technology such as Google Image Search.
 PAST AND PRESENT | TECHNOLOGY THEN AND NOW

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 TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION TIMELINE
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IS TECHNOLOGY MOVING TOO FAST? | EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND
THE INVENTIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

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 7 AMAZING TECHNOLOGIES WE'LL SEE BY 2030
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AMAZON’S CITY OF THE FUTURE