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Summary: Homo Technologicus
Review: When we use the word "technology," we are likely to think of airplanes, computers, and factories. That isn't wrong, of course, but the truth is that unless you are naked and sitting in a pristine landscape, technology is all around you, and even if you are naked and sitting in a pristine landscape, as a citizen of the twenty-first century, you will not be able to abandon thinking patterns based on the technology you know. Pencils, books, and Post-it notes are all indelible parts of our lives. The broader outlook upon technology is what John Lienhard has dwelled upon during his years of making his Public Radio program which has now been turned into a wide-ranging and stimulating book of the same name, _The Engines of our Ingenuity_ (Oxford University Press). Lienhard's background is that he spent a childhood building model airplanes and models of all the other gadgets of the twentieth century. Then he worked for a half a century as an engineer, and he studied a lot of historical technology. His admiration for our technological expertise (even though he is not blind to its darker side) is almost unbounded, and it is infectious. He contends that what differentiates us and makes us human is our ability to think about tools and put them to use.Lienhard never lectures and is never dull. His sweep of knowledge is confined to seventeen chapters, which he admits is looking at technology like the blind men looked at the elephant. It is as an assortment of disparate facts that this book is most appealing. Lienhard tells of geometry, which had been central to the ivory towers of medieval scholasticism as an exercise in logic, not in practical design. Masons had been able to fashion arches and ribbed vaults, but had done so without mathematical foundation. When geometry and masonry married, a baroque architecture based on exact mathematics emerged. Galileo is supposed to have done experiments (maybe from the Leaning Tower of Pisa) to show that heavy balls and light ones fell at the same rate, but he noted something peculiar. The lighter ball started a little faster than the heavy ball, and then it caught up so that they both fell at the same time. This sounds crazy, but a recent analysis of films of people dropping balls shows that strain of the arm holding a heavy ball induces people to let the lighter one go first, even if they are trying to drop simultaneously. Yes, Galileo did indeed do the experiment, and he accurately reported it. A bird model from third century BCE Egypt turns out not to be a bird model at all. Not only does it lack the legs and painted feathers of other bird models, but it had a vertical rudder instead of a bird tail, and the wing had the cross-section of an airfoil. No one could throw the model, but reproduced in balsa wood, it flew; it was not a model bird but a model airplane. No one knows if it was a model for a bigger version. A German officer visiting the US in 1862 begged a ride on a Union observation balloon. He was excited, an excitement that outlasted his four decades of German military service. He was sixty, but he determined to make balloons that were rigid and navigable. He was count Zeppelin, and his first airship flew in 1900. Countless other examples of how technology has influenced us and vice versa burst from this book. Lienhard is able to tell a great story, he knows what he is talking about, and he conveys a passion for his subject that ought to inspire us to delight in our technological world. He may be telling us only about our technology, but technology is us.
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