CHAPTER 14
as ªpath-depen dentº for this reason, it is cumulative and yet largely lacks
broad as well as speci®cregularities of process.
A second conclusion is that the closest relationships consistently link
technological change to socioeconomic forces. And it is the socioeconomic
forces rather than spontaneous technological developments that tend to be
primary and determinative. Apart from occasional, limited, and contingent
episodes of apparent technological ªmomentumºÐªsites, sectors, and pe-
riods in which a technology-oriented logic governs,º
1
no convincing case
can be made that technology has ever consistently served as an impersonal,
extrasocietal agency of change in its own right.
Relationships between science and technology constitute a third area of
inquiry that will be consistently pursued, although it lends itself less well
to a concisely summarized proposition that can be stated at the outset. Very
brie¯y , it is a dynamic, evolving relationship of increasing synergy and
mutual interdependency as we approach the modern period. Until quite
recently, it has primarily been viewed from the more consciously docu-
mented perspective of the sciences. This has meant that the active, crea-
tive contributions of a more technological characterÐthose of early crafts-
people, laboratory technicians, machine builders and instrument makers,
designers, and later those of engineersÐha ve not been adequately credited
for their importance. A renewed effort to restore the balance, adding to the
richness and complexity of technoscienti®c interactions in all periods, is
undertaken here.
Similarly underweighted, but unfortunately beyond the reach of this or
any study largely based on secondary accounts, is the role of the ®rm.
Major, long-lived corporations may have surviving archives and so escape
the dif®culty. But smaller undertakings, in many cases the principal seed-
beds of technological innovation and experimentation, have universally
fared less well. The outcome is that any accountÐthis one includedÐ
failing to identify new sources to correct the balance tends to perpetuate a
picture that is distorted in the direction of both size and success. The story
that cannot yet be told is the one that adequately takes into account plans
and efforts that were cut short, orphaning their technological contributions,
by the ever-present likelihood of business failure.
Human beings are the active agents of technological change, but innova-
tions are its units. They obviously vary greatly in their change-promoting,
destabilizing potential, from minor, quickly superseded improvements to
the few in every historic epoch that have ultimately proved to be of decisive
importance. In most of these latter instances, the greatest breaks in continu-
ity occurred at the outset of closely related clusters or series. Such break-
throughs then tended to have an accelerating, focusing effect on lesser
innovations that followed. Cumulatively, however, those lesser, later inno-
vations often added indispensably to the success of the original inventions.