A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium

By Robert Friedel

Book Overview

How technological change in the West has been driven by the pursuit of improvement: a history of technology, from plows and printing presses to penicillin, the atomic bomb, and the computer.

Why does technology change over time, how does it change, and what difference does it make? In this sweeping, ambitious look at a thousand years of Western experience, Robert Friedel argues that technological change comes largely through the pursuit of improvement--the deep-rooted belief that things could be done in a better way. What Friedel calls the "culture of improvement" is manifested every day in the ways people carry out their tasks in life--from tilling fields and raising children to waging war.

Improvements can be ephemeral or lasting, and one person's improvement may not always be viewed as such by others. Friedel stresses the social processes by which we define what improvements are and decide which improvements will last and which will not. These processes, he emphasizes, have created both winners and losers in history.

Friedel presents a series of narratives of Western technology that begin in the eleventh century and stretch into the twenty-first. Familiar figures from the history of invention are joined by others--the Italian preacher who described the first eyeglasses, the dairywomen displaced from their control over cheesemaking, and the little-known engineer who first suggested a grand tower to Gustav Eiffel. Friedel traces technology from the plow and the printing press to the internal combustion engine, the transistor, and the space shuttle. Friedel also reminds us that faith in improvement can sometimes have horrific consequences, as improved weaponry makes warfare ever more deadly and the drive for improving human beings can lead to eugenics and even genocide. The most comprehensive attempt to tell the story of Western technology in many years, engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, A Culture of Improvement documents the ways in which the drive for improvement has shaped our modern world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026251401X
• ISBN13: 9780262514019
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 600 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 8.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The better mousetrap

" Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a pathway to your door" Emerson wrote. The distinguished historian of American Civilization Daniel Boorstin believed that the heart of the American uniqueness was precisely in those improvements in material life, those accumulated advantages in creature comforts. Now Robert Friedel has come to lavishly illustrate for us the idea that the ' culture of improvement' is what Western civilization through its technology has been over the past millenium. Friedel traces innovation by innovation the historical development of a whole host of technologies. From cheese -making to supersonic aircraft we learn how certain technologies 'take off' and others lose their way in the shuffle of social events. We see too how time and again key individuals have been responsible for breakthrough developments which move mankind forward. Friedel is well aware that the development of Western technology is not a one- sided altogether positive story. The weapons of mass - destruction that threaten mankind, and a wide range of threats to the earth itself come in part as result of technological developments. Still overall there is the sense that human life and society have tremendously benefited by the creative innovative powers of Western technological culture. This is a very rich work from which a tremendous amount can be learned not only about the development of specific innovations- but about the overall progress of society through them.