Historical Technology Quotes

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

Most buildings, whether they're Gothic cathedrals or Romanesque ones, were high tech for their time.

... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote - the Daguerreotype. (1845)

Women's worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors.

In history, in most cultures, and at most points in time, if you want to find the most advanced technologies, you can look principally in two places. One is weapons and the other is musical instruments. My hypothesis is that instruments are usually ahead of weapons. In fact, I think you can find many examples of instruments being predecessors of weapons and very few in the reverse.

I have gone up in the Pyramids and the stones are so close together you can't force a playing card between them and (they are) in perfect alignment. So those people must have had some hydraulics or something. You take 20 men, put them around a big stone, their legs would get in the way. Even if they could lift it, 20 pairs of legs hitting against each other would throw it off balance. And they would not have it in exact alignment. Not even a fraction of an inch off.

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.