A Visualization of the Historical past of Know-how: 1,889 Improvements Throughout Three Million Years

“Any suf­fi­cient­ly superior tech­nol­o­gy is indis­tin­guish­ready from magazine­ic.” So holds the third and most well-known of the “three legal guidelines” orig­i­nal­ly artic­u­lat­ed by sci­ence fic­tion author Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first pub­lished within the late 9­teen-six­ties, Clarke’s third regulation would have felt true to any res­i­dent of the devel­oped world, sur­spherical­ed by and whol­ly depen­dent on superior tech­nolo­gies whose work­ings they might scarce­ly hope to clarify. Nat­u­ral­ly, it feels even more true now, a quar­ter of the best way into our dig­i­tal twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Certainly, for all we find out about how they actual­ly work, our cred­it playing cards, our sensible­telephones, our com­put­ers, and certainly the inter­web itself would possibly as effectively be magazine­ic.

To greatest beneath­stand the tech­nol­o­gy that increas­ing­ly makes up our world, we must always try to beneath­stand the evo­lu­tion of that tech­nol­o­gy. These sensible­telephones, for examination­ple, may­n’t have been invent­ed within the kind we all know them with­out the pre­vi­ous devel­op­ments of chem­i­cal­ly energy­ened glass, the mul­ti-touch display screen inter­face, and the cam­period telephone. Every of these indi­vid­ual tech­nolo­gies additionally has its pre­de­ces­sors: fol­low the chain again far sufficient, and even­tu­al­ly you get to the likes of the cell radio tele­telephone, invent­ed in 1946; the phased array anten­na, invent­ed in 1905; and glass, invent­ed round 1500 BC. These and depend­much less oth­er paths might be traced at the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree, an ambi­tious venture of author and professional­gram­mer Éti­enne Forti­er-Dubois.

Forti­er-Dubois cred­its amongst his inspi­ra­tions Sid Meier’s Civ­i­liza­tion video games, with their all-impor­tant “tech bushes,” and James Burke’s tele­vi­sion sequence Con­nec­tions, which excessive­mild­ed the unpre­dictable course of­es by which one inno­va­tion may result in oth­ers throughout the cen­turies or mil­len­nia. Even within the sev­en­ties, Forti­er-Dubois writes, “Burke was already con­cerned that our lives rely on tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems that only a few peo­ple deeply beneath­stand. It’s, in fact, pos­si­ble to stay with­out com­pre­hend­ing how com­put­ers, mon­ey, or air­planes work. However when each­factor round us feels imprecise­ly magazine­i­cal, reliant on specialists whose actions we’ve no manner of ver­i­fy­ing, it’s straightforward to lose belief in tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to our cur­lease prob­lems.” He provides the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree as a poten­tial cor­rec­tive to that lack of beneath­stand­ing and the ener­vat­ing atti­tudes it professional­duces.

Forti­er-Dubois him­self admits that the venture “made me actual­ize how lit­tle I knew in regards to the objects round me. I didn’t actual­ly know that ‘elec­tron­ics’ meant con­trol­ling the circulate of elec­trons with vac­u­um tubes or semi­con­duc­tors, or that refin­ing petro­le­um into kerosene makes use of frac­tion­al dis­til­la­tion, or that WiFi and blue­tooth are simply using cer­tain radio fre­quen­cies that may be detect­ed by a spe­cif­ic form of chip.” Any­one who explores even this ear­ly ver­sion of the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree (which, as of this writ­ing, con­tains 1886 tech­nolo­gies and 2180 con­nec­tions between them) will discover it an edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence in the identical manner, professional­vid­ing because it doesn’t simply knowl­edge about tech­nol­o­gyhowever a way of how a lot of that knowl­edge we lack. Our civ­i­liza­tion has made its manner from stone instruments to rob­o­t­axis, mRNA vac­cines, and LLM chat­bots; we’d all be guess­ter in a position to inhab­it it with even a slight­ly clear­er thought of the way it did so. Vis­it the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree right here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Time­line Cov­er­ing 14 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry: From The Large Bang to 2015

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Large, Beau­ti­ful Information­graph­ic

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

The Tree of Mod­ern Artwork: Ele­gant Draw­ing Visu­al­izes the Devel­op­ment of Mod­ern Artwork from Delacroix to Dalí (1940)

The His­to­ry of Mod­ern Artwork Visu­al­ized in a Mas­sive 130-Foot Time­line

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Actual­i­ty”

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the guide The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly often called Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.