Tools, Machines and Marvels

Summary

Masterful Machinery

Technology, according to Derry and Williams's Short History, ‘comprises all that bewilderingly varied body of knowledge and devices by which man progressively masters his natural environment’. Their casual, and unconscious, sexism is not unrelated to my present topic. Women enter the story as spinners, burden bearers and, at long last, typists. ‘The tying of a bundle on the back or the dragging of it along upon the outspread twigs of a convenient branch are contributions [and by implication the only contributions] to technology which probably had a feminine origin’. Everything else was done by men, and what they did was master, conquer, and control. It is also significant that Derry and Williams take it for granted that ‘the men [sic] of the Old Stone Age, few and scattered, developed little to help them to conquer their environment’: until the advent of agriculture, and settled civilization, there was, they say, neither leisure nor surplus. Later investigation strongly suggests, on the contrary, that hunter-gatherers have time to play with, and keep their ‘surplus’ where it belongs—out in the world. Settled civilization brought us—or most of us—discipline, time-keeping and back-breaking labour. Maybe, as they suggest, Sumerian priests were ‘the first leisured class’, but the emphasis should be on ‘class’. In more egalitarian, less ‘civilized’ days, we were all as leisured as any other primate group, and doubtless as preoccupied with mutual grooming, mutual manipulation and the decorative arts.