FROM SECOND WAVE TO THE THIRD WAVE

                                           THE SECOND WAVE

Alvin Toffler

Three hundred years ago, give or take a half-century, an explosion was heard that sent concussive shock waves racing across the earth, demolishing ancient societies and creating a wholly new civilization. This explosion was, of course, the industrial revolution. And the giant tidal force is set loose on the world--the Second Wave--collided with all the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions.

During the long millennia when First Wave civilization reigned supreme, the planet’s population could have been divided into two categories--the “primitive’ and the civilized.”The so-called primitive peoples, living in small bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, or fishing, were those who had been passed over the agricultural revolution.

The “civilized” world, by contrast, was precisely that part of the planet on which most people worked the soil. For wherever agriculture arose, civilization took root. From China and India to Benin and Mexico, in Greece and Rome, civilizations rose and fell, fought and fused in endless, colorful admixture.

However, beneath their differences lay fundamental similarities. In all of them, land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics. In all of them life was organized around the village. In all of the, a simple division of labor reviled and few clearly defined castes and classes arose: nobility, priesthood, warriors, helots, slaves or serfs. In all of them, power was rigidly authoritarian. In all of them, the economy was decentralized, so that each community produced most of its own necessities.

There were exceptions--nothing is simple in history. There were commercial cultures whose sailors crossed the seas, and highly centralized kingdoms organized around giant irrigation systems. But despite such differences, we are justified in seeing all these seemingly distinctive civilization as special cases of a single phenomenon: agricultural civilization the civilization spread by the First Wave.

During its dominance there were occasional hints of things to come. There were embryonic mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Oil was drilled one of the Greek islands in 400 B.C. and in Burma A.D. 100.Vast bureaucracies florists in Baby like and Egypt. Great urban metropolis grew up in Asia and South America. There was money and exchange. Trade routes crisscrossed the deserts, oceans and mountains from Cathay to Calais Corporations and incipient nation’s existed. There was even in ancient Alexandria, a startling forerunner of the steam engine.

Yet nowhere was there anything that might remotely have been termed an industrial civilization. These glimpses of the future, so to speak, were mere oddities in history, scattered through different places and periods. They never were brought together into a coherent system, nor could they have been. Until 1650-1750, therefore, we can speak of a first Wave world. Despite patches of primitivism and hints of the industrial future, agricultural civilization dominated the planet and seemed destined to do so forever.

This was the world in which the industrial revolution erupted, launching the Second Wave and creating a strange, powerful, feverishly energetic counter civilization. Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touches every aspect of human life and attacked every feature of the first Wave past. It produced the great Willow Run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It produced the daily newspaper and the cinema, the subway and the DC-3. It gave us cubism and twelve-tone music. It gave us Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs, sit-down strikes, vitamin pills, and lengthened life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More important, it linked all these things together--assembled them, like a machine--to form the most powerful, cohesive and expansive social system the world had ever know: Second Wave civilization.

INDUSTRIALIZATION IN THE WEST

The West in the Age of Industrialization and Imperialism

As far-reaching as the transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance had been, no one around 1800 could have predicted the even more profound changes that would occur in the nineteenth century. When Napoleon met defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Europe's population was 200 million, with as many as 25 million people of European descent living in the rest of the world. When World War I began in 1914, these numbers stood at 450 million and 150 million, respectively. In 1815 most Europeans and Americans lived in rural villages and worked the land; during the nineteenth century millions migrated from the countryside to cities, and by 1914, in highly industrialized nations such as Great Britain, a majority of the population was urban. In 1815, despite two decades of democratic revolution, most governments were aristocratic and monarchical; in 1914 representative assemblies and universal manhood suffrage were the norm in most of Europe, the United States, and the British dominions of Canada, Australia. and New Zealand. In 1815 most governments limited their activities to defense, the preservation of law and order, and some economic regulation; in 1914 governments in most industrialized states subsidized education, sponsored scientific research, oversaw public health, monitored industry, and provided social welfare care and, as a result, had grown enormously. 

Europe's global role also changed dramatically. In 1815 it appeared that the Europeans' political power was declining throughout the world. Great Britain no longer ruled its thirteen North American colonies, and Portugal and Spain were losing their colonies in Central and South America. Decisions by several European states to outlaw the slave trade seemed a step toward a diminished role for Europeans in Africa, and nothing Suggested that the Western nations had the power or inclination to extend their influence in Southwest or east Asia. Only the continuing expansion of British power in India hinted at what the nineteenth century would bring -- the West's take-over of Africa and southeast Asia, its Intrusions into the politics of China and southwest Asia, and its unparalleled control of world trade and investment. 

To a certain extent, these and other changes resulted from the acceleration of trends deeply rooted in Europe's past. The scientific and technological developments of the nineteenth century, for example, were built on a foundation dating to the Middle Ages. Nor was the profusion of a new literary, philosophical, and artistic movements unique intellectual ferment had characterized Europe since the twelfth century. Late nineteenth-century imperialism , but another chapter in the long story of Western expansionism, and the struggle of disenfranchised groups such as factory workers and w omen for political rights was the logical extension of the doctrines of equality and individual rights enunciated during the Enlightenment and French Revolution. 

The single most important cause of the West's transformation and expansion in the nineteenth century was the Industrial Revolution, a series of wide-ranging economic changes invoking the application of new technologies and energy sources to industrial production, Communication, and transportation. These changes began in England in the late eighteenth century when power-driven machines began to produce cotton textiles. By 1914 industrialization had taken root in Europe, Japan, and the United States and was spreading to Canada, Russia, and parts of Latin America. As much as the discovery of agriculture many centuries earlier, industrialization profoundly altered the human condition. 

Industrialization and Its Impact

The English were the first and for many decades the only people in the world to experience the material benefits and social costs of industrialization. By the 1760s, new mechanical devices were transforming the textile industry, and by the early 1800s, machines driven by steam engines were producing not just textiles but also a wide variety of other industrial goods. England's early industrial lead had multiple causes: an abundant labor supply, strong domestic and overseas markets, plentiful capital, a sound banking system, good transportation, rich coal deposits, a stable government, a favorable business climate, and, finally, a series of remarkable inventions that first transformed the textile industry and subsequently, a host of' others. 

During the nineteenth century industrialization spread from England to continental Europe, the United States, and Japan, and in the process changed considerably. The last three decades of the nineteenth century saw the appearance of larger forms of business organization such as corporations, monopolies, and cartels; the growing importance of finance capital, the introduction of petroleum and electricity as energy sources, and, most important, the application of new technologies, especially in chemistry, to thousands of industrial processes. 

With industrialization largely limited to Europe and the United States, the West's economic ascendancy was guaranteed. As Western businesses marketed their products throughout the world and as Western investors took control of the world's railroads, oil wells, mines, and factories, Europe and the United States established unprecedented dominion over the world's wealth and resources. Industrialization had its ugly side, however. Social dislocation, overcrowded cities, inadequate housing, worker exploitation. child labor, new extremes of wealth and poverty, political conflict, and Pollution were some of the costs that accompanied the transition from an agrarian to industrial society. 

TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

                           Peter F. Drucker

Technological activity during the 20th century has changed in its structure, methods, and scope. It is this qualitative change which explains even more than the tremendous rise in the volume of work the emergence of technology in the 20th century as central in war and peace, and its ability within a few short decades to remake man's way of life all over the globe.

Throughout the 19th century technological activity, despite tremendous success, was still in its structure almost entirely what it had been through the ages: a craft. It was practiced by individuals here, there, and yonder, usually working alone and without much formal education. By the middle of the 20th century technological activity has become thoroughly professional, based, as rule, on specific university training. It has become largely specialized, and is to a very substantial extent being carried out in a special institution—the research laboratory, particularly the industrial research laboratory--devoted exclusively to technological innovation.

Each of these changes deserves a short discussion. To begin with, few of the major figures in 19th-century technology received much formal education. The typical inventor was mechanic who began his apprenticeship at age fourteen or earlier. The few who had gone to college had not, as a rule, been trained in technology or science but were liberal arts students, trained primarily in Classics. But in general, technological invention and the development industries based on new knowledge were in the hands of craftsmen and artisans with little scientific education but a great deal of mechanical genius. These men considered themselves mechanics and inventors, certainly not "engineers" or "chemists" & let alone "scientists."

The 19th century was also the era of technical-university building.  Still, in the opening decades of the 20th century the momentum of technical progress was being carried by the self-taught mechanic without specific technical or scientific education.

Technological work has thus become a profession. The inventor has become an "engineer," the craftsman, a "professional."In part this is only a reflection of the uplifting of the whole educational level of the Western world duringthelast150 years. The college-trained engineer or chemist in the Western world today is not more educated, considering the relative standard of his society, that the craftsman of 1800 (who, in a largely illiterate society, could read and write).It is our entire society--and not the technologist alone--that has become formally educated and professionalized. But the professionalization of technological work points up the growing complexity of technology and the growth of scientific and technological knowledge. It is proof of a change in attitude toward technology, an acceptance by society, government, education, and business that this work is important, that it requires a thorough grounding in scientific knowledge, and, above all, that it requires many more capable people that "natural genius" could produce.

Technological work has become increasingly specialized, also, during the 20th century.  This professionalization and specialization have been made effective by the institutionalization of work in the research laboratory. The research laboratory—and especially the industrial research laboratory--has become the carrier of technological advance in the 20^th century. It is increasingly the research laboratory, rather than the individual, which produces new technology. More and more, technological work is becoming a team effort in which the knowledge of a large number of specialists in the laboratory is brought to bear on a common problem and directed toward a joint technological result.

During the 19th century the "laboratory" was simply the place where work was done that required technical knowledge beyond that of the ordinary mechanic. In industry, testing and plant engineering were the main functions of the laboratory; research was done on the side, if at all. Similarly, the government laboratory during the 19th century was essentially place to test, and all the large government laboratories in the world today (such as the Bureau of Standards in Washington) were founded for that purpose. In the 19th-century College or university, the laboratory was used primarily for teaching rather than for research.

Before World War I the research laboratory was still quite rare. Between World War I and World War II it became standard in a number of industries, primarily the chemical, pharmaceutical, electrical, and electronics industries. Since World War II research activity has become as much of a necessity in industry as a manufacturing plant, and as central in its field as is the infantry soldier for defense, or the trained nurse in medicine.