Lynn T. White

Abstract: THE history of technology and invention, especially that of the earlier periods, has been left strangely uncultivated. Our vast technical institutes continue at an ever-accelerating pace to revolutionize the world we live in; yet small effort is being made to place our present technology in the time-sequence, or to give to our technicians that sense of their social responsibility which can only come from an exact understanding of their historical function one might almost say, of their apostolic succession. By permitting those who work in shops and laboratories to forget he past, we have impoverished the present and endangered the future. In the United States this neglect is the less excusable because we Americans boast of being the most technically progressive people of an inventive age. But when the historian of American technology tries to probe the mediaeval and renaissance roots of his subject he runs into difficulties: the materials available to him are scanty and often questionable; for professional mediaevalists have left unmined this vein in the centuries on which they have staked their claim. Broadly speaking, technology is the way people do things. (In a certain sense there is even a technology of prayer.) Yet it is startling to reflect hat we have, as a rule, only the vaguest notion of how the men of the Middle Ages actually did things, and how, from time to time, they learned to do them better. In our museums we cherish mediaeval textiles; we recognize the crucial importance of the cloth industry in the growth of early capitalism. But what do we know of spinning and weaving, of fulling and dyeing, and of the improvements in quality and production which affected both the art and the economics of the time?'