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We’re always so enthusiastic about what’s going to happen in five or 10 years’ time. What’s wrong with our current understanding of technology?ĮDGERTON: When we think about technology, we immediately think about invention and innovation and the future, and not about how things come into use. demands strict intellectual property protections from another nation before agreeing to trade with it, to what degree does that stymie technology transfer and the flowering of new products that often result? By reorienting the way we view technology, we can also better understand whether we’re making wise decisions in adopting new technologies, such as genetically modified crops - especially when there are often less expensive alternatives that, although perhaps not as innovative, may be less risky.

For example, if a country such as the U.S. That understanding has significant consequences for trade policy in a global economy.

Indeed, most growth comes as a result of technology transfer, not of innovation. Such a history would reveal, he says, that many of the fastest-growing countries of the 20th century, such as Japan and China, were not the most inventive.

As Edgerton writes, we must shift our focus “from the new to the old, the big to the small, the spectacular to the mundane, the masculine to the feminine, the rich to the poor.” In his new book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Imperial College London, argues for a new view of the history of technology that focuses not only on “Big Bang” innovations - Sony’s Walkman or a future spaceship that could carry humans to Mars - but also on incremental change and how societies use the technologies they invent or, just as important, borrow. Even as new technologies revolutionize everything from health care to media to warfare, it’s important to remember that our world runs primarily on products and technologies long in use - everything from aspirin to the internal combustion engine.