In "The Shock of the Old," British historian David Edgerton describes how technology and global history have developed together since 1900. Edgerton's provocative thesis states that we should pay less attention to the new technologies that emerged from the 20th century - such as electricity, aerospace, nuclear power, the transistor, the laser, the Concord, genetic engineering and the Internet, to name a few. Instead, the historian believes that we should focus our studies more on the technologies people use in their daily lives - corrugated metal, insecticide, the refrigerator, cement, rickshaws, the telephone, small firearms and many other such things. People should view the history of technology not in terms of citing what is currently being or has been invented.

Rather we should look in greater detail at what technologies people are using on a broad scale. Those who do so will experience the shock of the old. I recommend that readers to get ready for this viewpoint: Where only the new is considered, the old grows as logic demands. The new is namely old when it is there and people are demanding something new again.

But what is really new?

The book (written in English) is introduced by a quote from Bertholt Brecht, who in 1939 described a "Parade of the Old New," which begins as follows: "I stood on the hill, where I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New. It hobbled on new crutches that no one had ever seen before and stank of the new smell of decay that no one had ever smelled before."

Of course, there is something new under the sun now and then. Unfortunately, our thinking about the new is not included. It is so old that we should be ashamed. Since the 19th century, for example, the notion has circulated unchanged that inventors are ahead of their time and their developments occur too quickly for human society and ask too much of it. It is possible that there were once such ideas and inventions. But they soon failed. We do not know the details because no one writes the history of the losers.

We should become friends with the old

Unfortunately, in this country hardly anyone writes the history of the winners either, such as the inventions and developments that established themselves and are in constant use - engines, lasers, transistors, airbags. We lust for what is new and do not want to know where the old comes from, even when it runs us over. Maybe we should become better friends with the old. We need it all the time.

Incidentally - one of the greatest achievements that should be included under the header "Technology and Global History" is the combining of the laser and metal. For the outsider, this might initially sound as if a new technology were used on old material. Yet, those who hold that view are overlooking the characteristic attributes of our society so diversely influenced by innovation: We want the new, but we live from and with the old - like corrugated metal sheets that we use to construct almost anything imaginable, like entire metal airplanes, which we have been doing for almost 100 years.

True advance

Perhaps the important and truly humane advance consists of the old, which is good - sheet metal - combined with the new, which is also good - the laser. This gives us the better world that we achieved through knowledge and inventing technology at the beginning of the modern era. Using the example mentioned, machine manufacturers are increasingly showing that the plan is bearing fruit.