10 - Technology and Communication Systems

Summary

Politics was only the uppermost sphere in the Danish revolution. If we pass downwards through this sphere and through changes in the disease pattern, in social structure, in working hours, in the landscape, and in production methods in agriculture and in the energy and raw materials sector, we finally come to rest on the firm ground of technology.

It was the growing technological potential that made it possible during the eighteenth century to mine coal not only for domestic heating but also for smelting iron, so that the destructive nexus between wood and iron, whereby the latter could be obtained only by using the former, could be broken. Without this colossal technological development the energy and raw materials revolution would never have been possible. This in turn would have halted the green revolution, which could only be carried through if an answer were found to the energy and raw materials problem.

The green revolution was also dependent upon technological progress in another, more direct manner. Without agronomics, which is a combination of applied botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, geology, and veterinary medicine, agriculture would not, as the Danish landowner C. W. von Munthe af Morgenstierne put it in 1773, have been able to develop “from a thoughtless craft … to a cultivated science established on a firm basis.”

At that time, as today, technology was primarily the practical application of the results of basic research in the natural sciences.