The great innovations in communications technology, however, derived from electricity. The first was the electric telegraph, invented or at least made into a practical proposition for use on the developing British railway system by two British inventors, Sir William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who collaborated on the work and took out a joint patent in 1837. Almost simultaneously, the American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse devised the signaling code that was subsequently adopted all over the world. In the next quarter of a century the continents of the world were linked telegraphically by transoceanic cables, and the main political and commercial centres were brought into instantaneous communication. The telegraph system also played an important part in the opening up of the American West by providing rapid aid in the maintenance of law and order. The electric telegraph was followed by the telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and adopted quickly for short-range oral communication in the cities of America and at a somewhat more leisurely pace in those of Europe. About the same time, theoretical work on the electromagnetic properties of light and other radiation was beginning to produce astonishing experimental results, and the possibilities of wireless telegraphy began to be explored. By the end of the century, Guglielmo Marconi had transmitted messages over many miles in Britain and was preparing the apparatus with which he made the first transatlantic radio communication on Dec. 12, 1901. The world was thus being drawn inexorably into a closer community by the spread of instantaneous communication. Military technology
One area of technology was not dramatically influenced by the application of steam or electricity by the end of the 19th century: military technology. Although the size of armies increased between 1750 and 1900, there were few major innovations in techniques, except at sea where naval architecture rather reluctantly accepted the advent of the iron steamship and devoted itself to matching ever-increasing firepower with the strength of the armour plating on the hulls. The quality of artillery and of firearms improved with the new high explosives that became available in the middle of the 19th century, but experiments such as the three-wheeled iron gun carriage, invented by the French army engineer Nicolas Cugnot in 1769, which counts as the first steam-powered road vehicle, did not give rise to any confidence that steam could be profitably used in battle. Railroads and the electric telegraph were put to effective military use, but in general it is fair to say that the 19th century put remarkably little of its tremendous and innovative technological effort into devices for war.
In the course of its dynamic development between 1750 and 1900, important things happened to technology itself. In the first place, it became self-conscious. This change is sometimes characterized as one from a craft-based technology to one based on science, but this is an oversimplification. What occurred was rather an increase in the awareness of technology as a socially important function. It is apparent in the growing volume of treatises on technological subjects from the 16th century onward and in the rapid development of patent legislation to protect the interests of technological innovators. It is apparent also in the development of technical education, uneven at first, being confined to the French polytechnics and spreading thence to Germany and North America but reaching even Britain, which had been most opposed to its formal recognition as part of the structure of education, by the end of the 19th century. Again, it is apparent in the growth of professional associations for engineers and for other specialized groups of technologists.
Second, by becoming self-conscious, technology attracted attention in a way it had never done before, and vociferous factions grew up to praise it as the mainspring of social progress and the development of democracy or to criticize it as the bane of modern man, responsible for the harsh discipline of the “dark Satanic mills” and the tyranny of the machine and the squalor of urban life. It was clear by the end of the 19th century that technology was an important feature in industrial society and that it was likely to become more so. Whatever was to happen in the future, technology had come of age and had to be taken seriously as a formative factor of the utmost significance in the continuing development of civilization. The 20th century Technology from 1900 to 1945
Recent history is notoriously difficult to write, because of the mass of material and the problem of distinguishing the significant from the insignificant among events that have virtually the power of contemporary experience. In respect to the recent history of technology, however, one fact stands out clearly: despite the immense achievements of technology by 1900, the following decades witnessed more advance over a wide range of activities than the whole of previously recorded history. The airplane, the rocket and interplanetary probes, electronics, atomic power, antibiotics, insecticides, and a host of new materials have all been invented and developed to create an unparalleled social situation, full of possibilities and dangers, which would have been virtually unimaginable before the present century.
In venturing to interpret the events of the 20th century, it will be convenient to separate the years before 1945 from those that followed. The years 1900 to 1945 were dominated by the two World Wars, while those since 1945 were preoccupied by the need to avoid another major war. The dividing point is one of outstanding social and technological significance: the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M., in July 1945.
There were profound political changes in the 20th century related to technological capacity and leadership. It may be an exaggeration to regard the 20th century as “the American century,” but the rise of the United States as a superstate was sufficiently rapid and dramatic to excuse the hyperbole. It was a rise based upon tremendous natural resources exploited to secure increased productivity through widespread industrialization, and the success of the United States in achieving this objective was tested and demonstrated in the two World Wars. Technological leadership passed from Britain and the European nations to the United States in the course of these wars. This is not to say that the springs of innovation went dry in Europe. Many important inventions of the 20th century originated there. But it was the United States that had the capacity to assimilate innovations and take full advantage from them at times when other countries were deficient in one or other of the vital social resources without which a brilliant invention cannot be converted into a commercial success. As with Britain in the Industrial Revolution, the technological vitality of the United States in the 20th century was demonstrated less by any particular innovations than by its ability to adopt new ideas from whatever source they come.
The two World Wars were themselves the most important instruments of technological as well as political change in the 20th century. The rapid evolution of the airplane is a striking illustration of this process, while the appearance of the tank in the first conflict and of the atomic bomb in the second show the same signs of response to an urgent military stimulus. It has been said that World War I was a chemists’ war, on the basis of the immense importance of high explosives and poison gas. In other respects the two wars hastened the development of technology by extending the institutional apparatus for the encouragement of innovation by both the state and private industry. This process went further in some countries than in others, but no major belligerent nation could resist entirely the need to support and coordinate its scientific-technological effort. The wars were thus responsible for speeding the transformation from “little science,” with research still largely restricted to small-scale efforts by a few isolated scientists, to “big science,” with the emphasis on large research teams sponsored by governments and corporations, working collectively on the development and application of new techniques. While the extent of this transformation must not be overstated, and recent research has tended to stress the continuing need for the independent inventor at least in the stimulation of innovation, there can be little doubt that the change in the scale of technological enterprises had far-reaching consequences. It was one of the most momentous transformations of the 20th century, for it altered the quality of industrial and social organization. In the process it assured technology, for the first time in its long history, a position of importance and even honour in social esteem. Fuel and power