A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovati…

“Any suf­fi­cient­ly advanced tech­nol­o­gy is indis­tin­guish­able from mag­ic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” orig­i­nal­ly artic­u­lat­ed by sci­ence fic­tion writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first pub­lished in the late nine­teen-six­ties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any res­i­dent of the devel­oped world, sur­round­ed by and whol­ly depen­dent on advanced tech­nolo­gies whose work­ings they could scarce­ly hope to explain. Nat­u­ral­ly, it feels even truer now, a quar­ter of the way into our dig­i­tal twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Indeed, for all we know about how they real­ly work, our cred­it cards, our smart­phones, our com­put­ers, and indeed the inter­net itself might as well be mag­ic.

To best under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy that increas­ing­ly makes up our world, we should attempt to under­stand the evo­lu­tion of that tech­nol­o­gy. Those smart­phones, for exam­ple, could­n’t have been invent­ed in the form we know them with­out the pre­vi­ous devel­op­ments of chem­i­cal­ly strength­ened glass, the mul­ti-touch screen inter­face, and the cam­era phone. Each of those indi­vid­ual tech­nolo­gies also has its pre­de­ces­sors: fol­low the chain back far enough, and even­tu­al­ly you get to the likes of the mobile radio tele­phone, invent­ed in 1946; the phased array anten­na, invent­ed in 1905; and glass, invent­ed around 1500 BC. These and count­less oth­er paths can be traced at the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree, an ambi­tious project of writer and pro­gram­mer Éti­enne Forti­er-Dubois.

Forti­er-Dubois cred­its among his inspi­ra­tions Sid Meier’s Civ­i­liza­tion games, with their all-impor­tant “tech trees,” and James Burke’s tele­vi­sion series Con­nec­tions, which high­light­ed the unpre­dictable process­es by which one inno­va­tion could lead to oth­ers across the cen­turies or mil­len­nia. Even in the sev­en­ties, Forti­er-Dubois writes, “Burke was already con­cerned that our lives depend on tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems that very few peo­ple deeply under­stand. It is, of course, pos­si­ble to live with­out com­pre­hend­ing how com­put­ers, mon­ey, or air­planes work. But when every­thing around us feels vague­ly mag­i­cal, reliant on experts whose actions we have no way of ver­i­fy­ing, it’s easy to lose trust in tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to our cur­rent prob­lems.” He offers the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree as a poten­tial cor­rec­tive to that loss of under­stand­ing and the ener­vat­ing atti­tudes it pro­duces.

Forti­er-Dubois him­self admits that the project “made me real­ize how lit­tle I knew about the objects around me. I didn’t real­ly know that ‘elec­tron­ics’ meant con­trol­ling the flow of elec­trons with vac­u­um tubes or semi­con­duc­tors, or that refin­ing petro­le­um into kerosene uses frac­tion­al dis­til­la­tion, or that WiFi and blue­tooth are just the use of cer­tain radio fre­quen­cies that can be detect­ed by a spe­cif­ic kind 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 find it an edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence in the same way, pro­vid­ing as it does not just knowl­edge about tech­nol­o­gybut a sense of how much of that knowl­edge we lack. Our civ­i­liza­tion has made its way from stone tools to rob­o­t­axis, mRNA vac­cines, and LLM chat­bots; we’d all be bet­ter able to inhab­it it with even a slight­ly clear­er idea of how it did so. Vis­it the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

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

The His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art 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 Real­i­ty”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.