User:Histotech/Sandbox

Before the 20th century, the term technology was uncommon in English. In the 19th century, technology generally referred to the description or study of the useful arts. The term was often connected to technical education, as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (chartered in 1861). Oldenziel and Leo Marx have described the rise of technology to prominence in the 20th century in connection with the second industrial revolution. In the process, the concept of technology became associated with the worlds of science, big business, and engineering, implicitly excluding workers, women, and non-Western peoples. Schatzberg has argued that the meanings technology changed in the early 20th century when American social scientists, beginning with Thorstein Veblen, translated ideas from the German concept of Technik into technology. German and other European languages make a distinction between Technik and Technologie that does not exist in English, as both terms are usually translated as technology. By the 1930s, technology referred not to the study of the industrial arts, but to the industrial arts themselves. In 1937, the American sociologist Read Bain wrote that "technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them." Bain's definition remains common among scholars today, especially social scientists.