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Technophilia | Defining qualities of tools | Persistence & Pervasiveness | Periods | Triggers | Exaptation

What's a technophile?

One who loves or is so fond of technology that they may overlook the difficulties involved with the machine age such as: externalities, or alienation and misplaced sentiment.An advocate of technical solutions to problems of social, moral or economic origins. Anyone who so cherishes the concept of progress that they believe in the inevitability of constant improvement due to the application of technology to social difficulties. A technophile is anyone who worships material progress, they may be unaware of particularly all three facets of tools, but they do appreciate a culture of technology.

Don't you just love the convenience, comfort and confidence technology brings us?


Technology

A systematic application of knowledge in the expressive, manufacturing, mechanical, industrial, or chemical arts.

Applied use of knowledge to enhance and accumulate efficient changes in the human use of tools. Tools may be devices, instruments, utensils, or artifacts used in the creation of material culture to assure survival by solving problems. To put together.

The Alaska pipeline for oil.

Technology refers to the related series of steps, processes, procedures, tools, and artifacts used to make a product that has a use, finds a market, or meets some need of, or demand from a population.

Vocabulary builder

Tech-Photograph.html

There are three distinct facets of technology which must be understood to actually see how tools shape, influence and eventually envelop our lives, our imaginations, and our relations with others.

Tools, devices or artifacts arranged together into a technically supportive role act over time to speed up, influence, or accelerate power. Technology then has a catalytic impact on any society that relies on tools, fuel and resources that technology makes available to economic exploitation.


Periods where technology has influenced the names and character of past eras.

stone age

bronze age

iron age

information age


Andikithera device, c. 300 BCE, Ancient Greece, Aegean Sea.

This instrument was found beneath the shallow seas off of the island of Andikithera in the Aegean Sea.
The device photographed here was actually a mechanically operated calendar keeping, or calendrical device used by priests in Greek temples to predict the solstices, equinoxes and eclipses. Embedded
beneath the calcium buildup was a gear discovered with the aid of x-rays that was a 1000 years ahead of its time. The gearing allowed those who used the mechanism –as early as the 3rd century before Christ– to predict the occurrence of celestial events, such as the first day of spring. Specialists used the device to track the lunar and solar cycles with great precision.

Inside this machinery was discovered a specialized part known to us as the invention of the differential gear. This is a gear which can turn at two different speeds, hence the name: differential gear, which is an important technical piece of machinery with numerous applications. This type of gear is capable of turning at two different speeds while connected to the same axle, or drive shaft. As the drive shaft or main axle rotates at one speed the differential gear is able to rotate either more rapidly or less rapidly than the main animating axle. Today the differential gear is the foundation of machinery that drives the industrial foundations of many automated systems we use today.

As an essential technological ingredient in modern life, the differential gear is a keystone application in modern transportation. Do you know where differential gears are currently most used in our society?

Exaptation

Similarly, the differential gear was reformulated from clocks to radically alter the productive capacity of the textile industry. The differential gear in undergoing one transition to another as it is applied in different inventions to meet very different needs has played a signal role in the development of modern technology. What invention with the application of the differential gear reshaped the 18th century?

more about exaptation


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Last Updated on August 15, 2008.

by Joseph Siry, author of Marshes of the Ocean Shore

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