History 135E
Department of History
University of California, Irvine
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NOTE TO THE READER: I constructed this website to accompany "Spinning the Web of Ingenuity", a course on the History of Technology that I was privileged to teach at UCI until my retirement in 2008.  I developed the website to serve as a reference and resource for my students.  Their insightful comments, questions, and suggestions helped shape its content and structure over the years.  I hope the information and ideas you find on these pages will both satisfy and further stimulate the curiosity that led you here. Instructor:    Dr. Barbara J. Becker E-mail:   bjbecker@uci.edu Chapel Hill, April 2010

Ever since the first things crafted by hand and brain appeared in an ancient toolkit, products and the processes that shaped them have mimicked, improved, abused, and--occasionally--tamed the forces and resources of nature.  Like agile spiders, we walk a self-spun tightwire spanning the natural and the designed worlds.  The tangled web we weave is shrouded in the mists of past and future.  We naively perceive our wire to be a single thread along which to advance or retreat.  At each step we balance precariously between familiarity and novelty, utility and beauty, stability and change, tradition and innovation ... between wisdom and cleverness.  In this course, we will explore a sampling from the historical and contemporary strands that comprise this complex web and sustain its dynamic tension: Who were the earliest technicians? What factors have stimulated and inhibited technological change? How are technological ideas and practices transferred? Can there be society without technology? ___________ pity this busy monster,manunkind, not.  Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim(death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange;lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself.                                A world of made is not a world of born--pity poor flesh and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence.  We doctors know a hopeless case if--listen:there's a hell of a good universe next door;let's go            --e.e. cummings (1944)