An Examination on the Impact of Three Transformative Technologies

The first domesticated horses were small, essentially ponies, too small for an armed man to ride. To employ them in war, the peoples of the steppe devised the first high-performance vehicle, the carry. Instead of the heavy solid vagabond of a cart, the chariot had light spoked wheels, and the whole chariot tho weighted perhaps 50 kg. Even steppe ponies could pull it at about 15 km/h - faster than a man could run for more than a short distance, particularly if armed and armored.

The chariot carried a two-man crew, the driver and an archer. On the antique battlefield its impact was something like that of a fighter-bomber today. A squadron of chariots could dig in on a body of foot soldiers and common pepper it with arrows, while easily avoiding counterattack. In principle, well-trained infantry could stand up to a chariot charge, as to a later sawhorse charge, but in practice troops moldiness ofttimes discombobulate broken in the face of a line of charging chariots, thus exposing themselves to annihilation. A battle between chariot forces must have been a fluid environment not dissimilar an aerial dogfight.

Between about 2000 and 1700 BCE, steppe charioteers swept across the warmness East. The major geographical features and crucial centers in the early agitate of chari

A century earlier, however, fewer if any similar ships existed. The Age of Exploration was undertaken using a type of ship, the full-rigged sailing ship, that was positive for sailing along well-established routes, up to now still embodied a striking revolution in seagoing technology. (Columbus' other two ships were caravels, a type that was girded by the Portuguese for exploration, but they turned out not to be the wave of the future.)

Duncan, Bradford. CQD Roman Aqueducts.

Comparing these developments raises a master of ceremonies of questions. The full-rigged ship developed out of useful if more moderate medieval rigs. Shorter water supply channels of various sorts must have shown Romans the basic elements that could be applied to build aqueducts. The war chariot, however, was not imply an improved oxcart.

The spoked wheel and lightweight structure requisite to be extremely developed before a chariot could work at all, so of the examples considered here, the chariot is the most dramatic departure from previous technologies. It must have sprung almost fully-formed from the design board, so to speak. All three examples, however, show the capacity of premodern societies to develop and apply new technologies, often with dramatic effects on themselves and those around them.

Rome won its wars with an infantry army, but the index finger of Rome derived in large part from the sheer size of the city, already by 500 BCE - long before the cracking age of Roman expansion -- one of the major centers of the Mediterranean world (Cornell 208). Rome was able to maintain its large nation in part by providing it with an ample and healthy water supply, no easy task given the irregular and highly seasonal rainfall patterns of central Italy. This was achieved by building the aqueduct system, sum water to Rome, and later to other Roman cities, from hills dozens of kilometers away. close of the eleven major aqueducts ran on roughly parallel courses sou
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