A Brief History of Technology

Author: Sexy Bex
Published on: 12-09-2005
Views: 19035


Discuss this article [4 comments]

The 20th Century

The last 100 years

The 20 th century saw hugely important technological innovations in the fields of medicine, transportation, telecommunications and computing to name but a few. The scientific revolution provided the environment for the industrial revolution, but it was the industrial revolution that elevated society's expectations, thus creating a demand for ‘luxury' technologies. We see the development of these technologies in the 20 th century.

In the 1920's and 1930's much work was done on the development of the Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging), building on the work done by Heinrich Hertz in the late 19 th century. Watson-Watt in particular put much work into creating a device for locating aircraft. The radar was patented in Britain in 1935. In the Second World War Britain benefited hugely from it's prioritisation of radar technology: The use of radar technology was far more widespread than in Germany, as was the use of the required operating systems (it wasn't until later in the war that Germany began to prioritise radar development).

It is still highly debated whether Farnsworth or Zworykin invented the electronic television, but either way it came into being in 1923. In 1927, the first long-distance public broadcast took place between Washington D.C. to New York . In Britain , the BBC started a regular broadcasting service in 1936, and competition in the form of ITV arose in 1955. Further advancements in the technology of TV production meant that they became cheaper and therefore easier for the average household to buy.

A number of incremental innovations lead to the first electronic programmable computer being developed before and during the Second World War, mainly with the aim of deciphering German encryption. It was during this period that mechanical equipment started to be replaced by electronic equivalents. The Colossus computer was a significant development in the field of computing. Designed for cryptanalysis by Tommy Flowers, it used state-of-the-art technology of the time and did its job efficiently.

The Manchester Mark 1 was built in 1949 at the University of Manchester . It was far more flexible than the Colossus, as it could store programs as data in the main memory rather than in the form of hard coding written directly into the machine's wiring.

The creation of the transistor in 1947 earned it's inventors (John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain and William Bradford Shockley) the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956. It is considered to be one of the most significant innovations in modern history, as it is a key component of many modern electronics.

So what made the final step and brought us to where we are now? There are several final contributing developments which took place in the latter part of the 20 th Century.

There has been much argument and speculation concerning how the internet came about. One major forerunner to the internet is the Arpanet (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) which was brought into being by part of the U.S. Department of Defence in 1969. The Arpanet was the first packet switching network in the world, making it a progenitor of the internet. This was a very new and exciting form of communication technology at the time, since previously, similar systems had been based on circuit switching. Packet switching involves data being broken down into packets, which may take different ‘routes' to their destination, but once there reassemble to form the original piece of data. This does not require another person to be at the other end of the circuit (the destination) as was the case with circuit switching.

1971 saw some more important advancements. E-mail was first seen in 1965, but later work by Ray Tomlinson reinvented it in some ways by the introduction of the @ symbol, bringing it closer to how we know it today. E-mailing was greatly facilitated by the Arpanet, and it eventually became the killer application of the Arpanet.

The evolution of the microprocessor caused a great deal of activity in the 1970s. In 1971, Intel released their first ever microprocessor - the 4004, a 4-bit processor made up of only 2,300 transistors. Another important player in the microprocessor market was Texas Instruments (more commonly known as TI). In 1973, they were awarded the patent for the microprocessor. They entered into an agreement with Intel in the 1970s, where Intel paid royalties to TI for the microprocessor patent. Microprocessors evolved enormously over the following years. Notable processors include the 8008 (the first 8-bit microprocessor) and the 8080 (which started the microprocessor revolution).