From the books of H.G. Wells to the press releases of NASA, we are awash in cliched claims about technology and history, writes David Edgerton. Now, in The Shock of the Old, Edgerton offers a startling new and fresh way of thinking about the history of technology, radically revising our ideas about the interaction of technology and society in the past and in the present. Our sense of technological time--and our thinking about technology and production, nationalism, war, and more besides--will all be changed, and to a surprising degree. Modern technology, writes Edgerton, is not just a matter of electricity, mass production, aerospace, nuclear power, and the internet. It also involves the rickshaw, the horse, corrugated iron, cement, DDT, small arms, flat-pack furniture and the refrigerator. The Shock of the Old challenges us to view the history of technology in terms of what everyday people have actually used--and continue to use around the world--rather than just what was invented. The reader discovers that many highly touted technologies--from the V-2 rocket to the Concorde jet--have been costly failures. On the other hand, corrugated iron emerges as hugely important, a truly global technology. Its cheapness, lightness, ease of use and long life made it a ubiquitous material in the poor world in a way it never had been in the rich world. Edgerton reassesses the significance of such acclaimed inventions as the Pill and IT, and underscores the continued importance of unheralded technology, debunking the idea that we live in an era of ever-increasing invention and casting doubt upon the many naive assertions about "the information age." A provocative history in the mold of Simon Schama, David S. Landes, and Eric Hobsbawm, The Shock of the Old provides an entirely new way of looking historically at the relationship between technology and society as well as invention and innovation themselves.

作者 大衛·艾傑頓 (David Edgerton )

英國權威曆史學傢，於帝國理工學院創辦科學、技術與醫學史中心並擔任主任及漢斯·勞辛講席教授（Hans Rausing Professor），後隨該中心一同轉至倫敦國王學院，著有《戰爭之國：1920—1970的不列顛》《老科技的全球史》等。

譯者 李尚仁

帝國理工學院科學、技術與醫學史中心博士，颱灣“中研院”曆史語言研究所研究員，著有《帝國的醫師》，譯有《老科技的全球史》《歐洲醫療五百年》《科倫醫師吐真言：醫學爭議教我們的二三事》等。