The Shock Of The Old
Technology and Global History since 1900
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
'It's rare for a book to make you see the world differently, but this ... does exactly that on almost every page' Guardian
Standard histories of technology give tired accounts of the usual inventions, inventors, and dates, framing technology as the inevitable march of progress. They split history into ages - electrification, motorisation, and computerisation - and rarely ask whether anyone bothered to use these inventions at the time. Shock of the Old is not one of those histories.
I Letters exist alongside emails and outlasted telegrams; we still make physical books and magazines despite the rise of the Internet - a belated rise considering that the technologies that made it possible was invented in 1965, and bookshops thrive despite Amazon. More horses were used in the Second World War than any other war in history and propeller planes continue to take off from the same runways as jets.
Shock of the Old forces us to reassess the significance of old inventions such as corrugated iron and sewing machines and rethink the relative importance we place on the invention of something new, its application, and its widespread adoption. It challenges the idea that we live in an era of ever increasing change and, interweaving political, economic and cultural history, teaches us to think critically about technology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A class titled History of Modern Technology 101 would probably focus on electricity, mass production, the automobile and the Internet, but according to British historian Edgerton, it would miss the real history of 20th-century technology. We should pay less attention to novelty and invention, he argues, and more to the technologies that people actually use in their daily lives "a whole invisible world of technologies," many of which have served the poor more than the rich, such as corrugated metal and flat-pack IKEA furniture. Ranging across broad swaths of history, Edgerton offers multiple examples of overlooked technologies that are far more important than they might initially seem, including the condom and the sewing machine, as well as innovations in killing, such as insecticides, slaughterhouses and chemical warfare. The result, while sometimes overly pedantic for nonhistorians, is a provocative challenge to students of technology.
