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meaning that the pace of invention and change has increased with
amazing rapidity. In fact, the rate of change in science and technology
has become so increasingly swift that according to one estimate, 90
percent of all the scientists who had ever lived were alive and active in

the 1970s. This increased scientific activity has brought new ideas,
processes, and inventions in an ever-growing amount.
This brings us to another characteristic of modern technology, its

relationship to science. Today, science and technology are closely
related. Many modern technologies such as nuclear power and space
flight depend on science and the applications of scientific knowledge
and principles. Each advance in pure science creates new opportunities

for the development of new designs and ways of making things to be
used in daily life, and in turn, technology provides science with new and
more accurate instruments for its investigations and research. This has

been a recent phenomenon, however, with its beginnings in the 16th
century. Before then, science and technology were separate fields with
separate identities. Science involved the ideas and investigations of

philosophers who sought knowledge of the natural and physical world.
The scientific revolution that began in the 16th century was the
first time that science and technology began to work together. Thus,

Galileo, who made revolutionary discoveries in astronomy and physics,
also built an improved telescope and patented a system of lifting water.
Francis Bacon favored experimental science and suggested that
scientists learn the methods of craftspeople while craftspeople learn

more about science. Bacon, Descartes, and other scientists envisioned a
time when humans could master the environment. Ever since, science
and technology have grown closer together.

However, it was not until the 19th century that technology truly
was based on science and inventors began to build on the work of
scientists. For example, Thomas Edison built on the early experiments of
Faraday and Henry in his invention of the first practical system of

electrical lighting. So too, Edison carried on his investigations until he
found the carbon filament for the electric light bulb in a research
laboratory he started in Menlo Park, New Jersey. This was the first true

modern technological research. It is generally agreed that ‘Man is a
toolmaking animal.’ In a sense the history of technology is the history of
“man,” or all humankind. One of the major determining characteristics

of human behavior is the fashioning of tools. This is a pattern of
innovation requiring thought rather than a pattern of instinctive behavior

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