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n the ensuing decades since the Turing Test was proposed, artificial intelligence has become more widespread and more robust in terms of its capabilities, particularly in the analysis of large data sets. -
The first true solid-state device for generating electricity was created by the Italian inventor Alessandro Volta in 1800. There have been countless refinements to Volta's electrochemical cell design since then, and with the digital revolution the development of battery technology has undergone ever-greater investment and interest. A live electronic device is capable of marvels. O -
The term "cybernetics" is taken from the ancient Greek term to describe the skill of a ship's helmsman, and was re-invigorated in 1948 by American mathematician Nobert Weiner, who used it as a term for the study and practice of controlling complex systems, particularly with regard to human sensory input and locomotor function. -
If human beings are to settle away from planet Earth, it will be necessary to develop competencies for life isolated from the main planet—simp -
Artificial Intelligence systems can create sophisticated models of behavior, with good predictive power for future behavior. This is becoming widely exploited in commercial domains -
Materials are usually selected for use on the basis of a single quality. A brick, for instance, should not be flexible if it is to be a good basis for construction. Smart materials are materials which can assume different properties on command, in response to different situations. -
Beep … beep … beep.” So it began. Sputnik, with an onboard radio signal transmitter, was launched in October 1957 AD by Soviet Russia. Orbiting overhead, the artificial satellite (as opposed to natural satellites like the Moon) Sputnik served notice to the humans huddled on the surface that the world had dramatically changed ... for better or not remained to be determined. -
elegraph and telephone communications were carried by wire, much too slow for the modern day. And even though they made the world smaller and changed the landscape of business, war, and politics, scientists and inventors were soon searching for “wireless” -
The term “laser” is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” which pretty much describes what it happens to be. The theory dates back to a paper by Albert Einstein in 1917 which offered a derivation of Planck's Law concerning stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. -
A composite is any material made from two or more materials with significantly differing physical or chemical properties; composites are distinct from alloys or chemical compounds (in which the components do not retain their original properties). -
The ability to creep around unseen and unleash havoc is the fantasy of every five-year-old; modern scientists are close to making it reality. Modern stealth technology is a combination of multiple military projects and experimental science expanded beyond what humans can see, trying to both hide and detect objects by radar, acoustics, thermal readings, or other less readily visible methods. -
n 1942 AD, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed three “laws of robotics.” In 1948 the American mathematician Norbert Wiener formulated the “principles of cybernetics” as the basis for practical robotics. -
In contrast to nuclear fission – where energy is generated by the division of a nucleus – nuclear fusion occurs when two or more atomic nuclei slam together hard enough to fuse, which also releases photons in quantity. Fusion reactions power the stars of the universe, giving off lots of light and heat. -
Tiny machines inside animals and humans snipping, slicing, splicing, melding or mutating cells. Tiny machines creating new materials on the molecular level. Or tiny machines making more tiny machines. Whatever use it may be put to, nanotechnology is just beyond the edge of science fiction. -
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Although there were internal combustion engines described by engineers before the 19th Century – for instance, a piston-and-cylinder gas-fired engine by Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir in 1860 AD – until industrial-level drilling for petroleum and methods for refining it into gasoline, they really weren't much more than a curiosity. And a smelly and noisy one to boot. -
Mankind has known electricity existed since the first bunch of Neanderthals got blasted by a lightning bolt; in fact, for millennia afterwards, electricity in this form was associated with angry gods. Egyptian texts dating from c. 2750 BC record people getting shocks from electric eels. -
Since the Renaissance, mankind has learned how to fly ... and how to crash too. Leonardo da Vinci's visions of flight are well-known, of course, but he certainly wasn't the first. From the earliest times there have been legends (some maybe even true) of men strapping on wings or other devices and attempting to fly, usually by jumping off something tall (most ended badly). -
The idea of “wireless” communication begins with experiments in wireless telegraphy – sending impulses through the ground, water and even steel railroad tracks – in the 1830s. In 1888 AD, Heinrich Hertz proved conclusively that electromagnetic waves could be transmitted through the air; his publications set off a mad scramble among inventors and crackpots to produce these Hertzian waves. Even the likes of Nikola Tesla, Amos Dolbear, and Sir Oliver Lodge got involved. -
Evidence for the use of interchangeable parts can be traced back to the warships of Carthage during the First Punic War, when standardized parts made repairs to their galleys relatively quick. During the Warring States period, the Qin dynasty employed mass-produced crossbows with interchangeable parts to pummel its rivals. So it was throughout the ages, -
Modern steelmaking got its start in 1855 AD, when Henry Bessemer perfected his process using pig iron as the basis to make “mild” (or “low-carbon”) steel in quantity fairly cheaply, a century after Benjamin Huntsman had established the first steelworks in Sheffield, England -
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Great piles of stone – some still intact (more or less) – dominate the varied landscapes of Europe, castles dating back to the early 10th Century AD when feudal lords sought to insure their power and influence. Some were little more than cold, dirty square stone boxes; -
No technology since writing so impacted civilization as did movable-type printing. Woodblock printing had been used for decades in China, India and Europe. -
Along with writing, gunpowder and pre-sliced bread, the stirrup is considered one of the basic inventions needed to spread civilization ... at least by some historians. Like all great innovations, it seems such a simple idea. -
When humans began to develop tasks that they or their animals could not (or would not) do, they invented machines. From those first simple machines – the lever, pulley and screw – that Archimedes went on about, a machine civilization has evolved on Earth. -
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he earliest known ceramics are the Gravettian culture figurines (little, faceless representations of fat women) that date back to between 29 and 25 thousand BC. These were shaped by hand, and fired in a pit. Somewhere around 12000 years ago, clever folk figured out that clay
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rrigation has been a central feature of agriculture for over 5000 years, and forms the basis for the economy and culture of many civilizations throughout history. Perennial irrigation was first practiced in Mesopotamia with water flowing through small channels connecting to a river or a small lake. -
Since rowing a ship is a lot of work, men developed sails to let the wind push it along. Sailing gave humans a quicker, easier way to travel than over land, and has been used for trade, transport, fishing and warfare since the first mast was raised.
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Writing is a technology that – like a few others – quite literally changed the course of civilization. The ability to set things down so as to remember them – “external memory storage” – unaltered beyond a single lifetime meant that every aspect of the human condition, -
Archery is the method by which a person uses the spring power stored in a bent stick to shoot a slender pointed projectile a great distance at rapid speed. A very useful technology, whether employed against game animals or against other human beings. Now it's considered just recreation. -
The ancient Egyptians mastered the art of masonry as early as the fourth millennium BC, constructing temples, palaces, pyramids and other edifices from limestone, sandstone, granite and basalt found in the hills of the Nile River. The Assyrians of the Fertile Crescent lacked easy access to stone but possessed rich -
The earliest bronze artifacts – actually, arsenic bronze, alloys of metallic arsenic rather than tin – found by archaeologists in Iranian tombs date back to the fifth millennium BC. Tin-bronze was eventually found to be superior to arsenic-bronze ... and the fumes of the alloying process didn't kill the bronze worker, so that was a plus. -
The invention of the wheel comes in the late Neolithic Age, and along with the advance of several other technologies kicks off the Bronze Age. Archaeological evidence for wheeled vehicles appears in the fourth millennia BC, more or less at the same time in Mesopotamia, the Caucasus and Central Europe -
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Celestial navigation (or astronavigation, which sounds more scientific than artistic) is the practice of taking angular measurements between a celestial body (sun, moon, planet or star) and a point on the horizon to determine one's position on the globe. -
When the architects and engineers get done mucking about, the contractors take over. Once there was agriculture and a reason to stay in one place, the first huts were constructed by the people who would live in them. As cities grew during the Bronze Age, professional construction workers -
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Currency, where something relatively worthless in itself represents some amount of actual value, has been the bane of civilization since around 2000 BC, when a form of receipt was used to show ownership of stored grain in temples in Sumer. The Egyptians soon adopted the practice for their own grain warehouses, -
There is archaeological evidence that around 4000 BC humans had used bits on their horses in the basins of the Dnieper and Don rivers; skeletons of horses found in the region shows signs that the horses chomped on bits. Thus, horseback riding. It is thought that the Scythians of the steppes may well have been the first to develop the stirrup and the saddle, although the historical argument is as yet unconvincing. -
Shipbuilding is, of course, the building of ships. Shipwrights follow a profession that traces its roots back to an age before recorded history. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans sailed to Borneo from Asia 120 thousand years ago aboard constructed ships; and later to New Guinea and Australia some 50 thousand years ago. In the fourth millennium BC, -
While the use of iron has been dated back to 4000 BC, the Hittites were the first to extract the ore, smelt it and fashion weapons – thus setting off the Iron Age around 1200 BC. In Asia, iron working developed at about the same time; iron Chinese artifacts have been unearthed dating back to around 600 BC. -
The term “mathematics” is derived from the Greek mathema, meaning “knowledge, study, or learning.” Appropriate, given that it is the science of science, focused on quantity, measurement, structure, logic and change. Mathematics, according to some, -
Engineering is the science (or perhaps “art,” if engineers themselves are involved in the discussion) of using science to design things: buildings, roads and bridges, machines, and other materially useful things. The term is somewhat vague – consider for example, -
If it can't be found laying about, dig it up. That's the basic premise behind mining, one of civilization's earliest and most pragmatic technologies. The Neolithics mined flint in England and France about 4000 BC; the ancient
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The domestication of animals and the selective breeding of some to accentuate certain traits (husbandry) appears to have occurred around the same time as the development of agriculture. The dog is thought to be the earliest domesticated animal, probably to assist in hunting game and protect the camp.
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There is a fair amount of scholarly debate about how long the “science” of making maps has been around, since there's a fair amount of debate about what constitutes a map. The oldest “map” to have been discovered is a depiction of what may be local terrain features about Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, dated to the 7th millennium BC -
Until the Industrial Revolution, the idea of “mass production” was limited to pottery (molds), Chinese crossbows with interchangeable parts, and assembly line production of books. But in the Renaissance, Venice began mass-producing ships to maintain their grip on the Mediterranean in their famed Arsenal, -
Although there had been “banks” before – Hammurabi even set down laws governing banking in his famous Code – mostly these were private individuals that made loans, with various unsavory methods to insure repayment. With the fall of Rome in the West and the fall of money lending, Banks did not reappear in Europe until the Middle Ages, -
The invention of gunpowder is usually attributed to Chinese alchemists during the Tang dynasty, one of the “Four Great Inventions of China.” The earliest written record of it – a formula composed of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate dating to the later Song dynasty – was supposed to be an elixir for immortality ... -
Significant advances in astronomy have usually come with the introduction of new technology; it helps to be able to see things larger, farther away or in other spectrums when studying infinity. Better and better telescopes allowed William Herschel to create a detailed catalogue of nebulae and clusters, and to “discover” the planet Uranus in 1781. -
Metal casting is the process by which a craftsman can make multiple, identical metal objects by pouring molten metal into a mold. The oldest such yet found is a copper frog cast in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC. The first production of cast iron was in China between 800 and 700 BC; -
Humans learn things, and civilization results. Obviously education has been around as long as mankind has. Through most of history, it was an informal affair, parents teaching their children the skills they needed to know to survive and be productive (household chores and hunting expeditions and dodging barbarians and so forth). -
Loosely defined as “the art and practice of designing and building military works and maintaining lines of military transport and communications,” military engineering dates back to the Roman legions, which each had a small, -
The first two-mast square-rigged ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the mid-14th Century AD, replacing the triangular-rigged lanteen sailing ships that had been used for the previous thousand years.
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he first two-mast square-rigged ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the mid-14th Century AD, replacing the triangular-rigged lanteen sailing ships that had been used for the previous thousand years. -
Rifling is merely the cutting of helical grooves into the inner part of a gun barrel so as to induce spin in a ball or bullet which serves to gyroscopically stabilized the projectile, giving it greater accuracy and range. -
Not many “technologies” (or, in this case a convergence of several technologies) give a label to a revolution and to an era. Industrialization is viewed by scholars as the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one, which was historically accompanied by -
The mechanics of throwing things have been known for quite awhile; primitive cultures are quite adept at throwing things. The science of those mechanics is known as “ballistics.” The first ballistic weapons were sticks, stones and spears. -
When heated to boiling, water produces steam. Even barbarians knew this. But harnessing that steam wasn't thought of until Taqi al-Din Muhammed ibn Ma’ruf described a hypothetical steam turbine for turning a spit in 1551 AD. The move towards a workable steam engine gets started a century later when Edward Somerset published a collection on his “inventions, -
A clean water supply and sanitation has been rather important for the rise of civilization, since without such folk tend to fall prey to disease and death. Especially when crowded together in urban centers. The earliest signs of city sanitation have been found in the ruins of the Harappan settlements Mohenjo-daro and Rakhigarhi in the Indus Valley c. 2500 BC. -
Economics is the understanding of “the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.” This understanding was a lot easier in olden times when things were distributed via barter (“I have a daughter and you have some goats; let’s trade."), -
As astronomy evolved from astrology, chemistry evolved from another pseudoscience: alchemy. Alchemy spans four millennia and three continents; never underestimate mankind's ability to believe in the irrational. The roots of Western alchemy can be traced to Hellenic Egypt, where Zosimos of Panopolis claimed that the ancient priests had discovered a way to transmute metals from one to another (such as lead to gold, the “Holy Grail” for alchemists). -
Petroleum refining developed in parallel with the chemical revolution of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, starting with the drilling of the first oil wells in the United States around 1860. The increased volume in crude oil's availability led to experiments in improving its qualities, starting with simple distillation rigs, and increasing in complexity and sophistication.