What does programming have to do
with the spinning jenny? Let History Mesh show you. Everyone knows the old saw
that "no
technology exists in a vacuum." Less clear to our linear-narrative-obsessed culture is the fact
that no
technology was invented in one, either. The strands
that connect the dots of a technology’s path from invention to deployment to adoption criss and cross much more than we give them credit for, even in TED Talks. History Mesh is an interactive timeline tracing the interconnected
of four
technology megatrends over the past four millennia, using the London Tube Map as graphic inspiration. Think the
of computation started in the 1950s and has nothing to do
with "water puppet theater" in the third century B.C.E.? Think again. History Mesh is actually a slight misnomer, since the London Tube Map is less a
than a repurposed wiring diagram. And
really is more like a messy
than a crisp schematic. But History Mesh’s clever visualization still draws more connections between storylines than we’re used to seeing. It’s not exhaustive, but its four conceptual strands--Automatons, Computing, Power, and Textiles--are at once incongruous and adjacent enough to spark lots of intriguing exploration. That connection between water puppets, for example, lies in the Automatons timeline just before a node explaining how an automatic flute player invented in ninth-century Baghdad abstracted the idea of "automaton" over machines
that weren’t necessarily designed to be lifelike, and could be "programmed" to perform different actions. As what History Mesh calls "the first programmable machine," the automatic flute player sits at an intersection between two ur-technologies: the ability to imbue inanimate objects
with "life" (automation) and the ability to make objects transform information (computation).Read Full Story