1) ''From the long Paleolithic (Old Stone) Age came the tools and techniques that separated humankind forever from the animal world: language, fire making, hunting weapons and methods, domestication of animals. From the short Neolithic (New Stone) Age, beginning about 8000 B.C. in Mesopotamia, came agriculture and its tools---plow, sickle, ax, and mortar and pestle or stone grain crusher. The wheel and axle appeared in Mesopotamia between 3000 and 4000 B.C. The arts of cloth making were invented: felting, matting fibers together by boiling and beating to produce a nonwoven fabric; spinning, drawing out fibers of flax or wool and twisting them into a continuous strand, usually by means of a spindle; weaving, interlacing threads with the aid of a loom; fulling, soaking and beating cloth to remove grease; and dyeing. Raw hides were converted into leather by scraping and soaking with tannin, derived from oak bark. The important art of pottery making first modeled clay with fingers and thumb, then coiled strands of clay, and finally shaped its work with the potter's wheel, invented about 3000 B.C.''

2) ''The undershot wheel typically achieved an efficiency of 15 to 30 percent, adequate for milling. For more demanding tasks, a superior design was the overshot wheel. In this arrangement the stream was channelled by a millrace or chute to the top of the wheel, bringing the full weight of the water to bear, with a resulting efficiency of 50 to 70 percent. Because it required dam, millrace, sluice gates, and tailrace as well as gearing, the overshot wheel had a high initial cost. Consequently, large landowners and even the Roman state were reluctant to build it.''

3) ''The Khaifeng clock of 1090 was the creation of Su Sung, who first built a wooden pilot model, then cast his working parts in bronze. The water that supplied power was contained in a reservoir, refilled periodically by manually operated norias. Water passed by siphon from the reservoir to a constant-level tank and thence to the scoops of the waterwheel. An endless-chain drive slowly turned a celestial globe and an armillary sphere one revolution per day. The same waterwheel turned a series of shafts, gears, and wheels working the bells and drums that announced the time (like nearly all early mechanical clocks, Su Sung's had no face). The escapement that was the 'soul of the timekeeping machine' and that kept its movement at an even pace was a complex arrangement of balances, counterweights, and locks that divided the flow of the water into equal parts by repeated weighing, automatically dividing the revolution of the wheel into equal interval.''

4) ''A unique document from thirteenth-century Douai gives an intimate picture of the putting-out system at work. The record of a legal proceeding in 1285-86 against the estate of Sire Jehan Boinebroke, cloth merchant and notorious skinflint, by forty-five clothworkers and other claimants illuminates the human as well as the economic aspect of the system. Boinebroke contracted through his agents to buy wool from Cistercian monasteries in England, making a down payment of about 3 percent. When the wool arrived, he sold it to the weaver, who took it home to sort, card, spin, and weave, with the help of his wife and children. The weaver then sold the unfinished cloth back to Boinebroke, who sold it to a fuller for cleaning and treating, after which he bought the finished cloth back and either sold it to a dyer or sent it to his own dye shop behind his house. Finally, he sold the fulled and dyed cloth to his agents, who took it to sell at either the Douai cloth market or the Flemish or Champagne fairs. Thus Boinebroke bought and sold the wool four times.''

5) ''Of all the medieval cities, those most clearly foreshadowing the future were the great cloth towns of Flanders and Italy, where in place of the many specialized crafts of the smaller cities the dominant textile industry created harsh class differences. The houses of the rich drapers like Jehan Boinebroke clustered in Europe's first beau quartier residential districts, while the warrens of tenements that housed the families of the weavers formed the first proletarian slums.''

6) ''An illustration from a Zurich manuscript of the mid-fourteenth century shows what seems to be the longitudinal suspension of a carriage body from leather straps, but such carriages did not arrive in numbers in western Europe until the following century. Their origin was Hungary, where the town of Kocs (hence 'coach,' coche, Kutsche) became famous for its lightweight, one-horse, leather-suspended passenger vehicles.''

7) ''Adelard of Bath's translation of al-Khwarizmi had expounded the Hindu notation but only to a very limited circle even among the mathematically literate. Leonardo [Fibonacci] perceived its enormous potential value and in 1202 undertook its wider diffusion by writing what proved to be a seminal book in the history of mathematics and science, the Liber abaci (Book of the abacus). The book began: 'The nine Indian figures are 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures and the sign 0, any number may be written, as demonstrated below.'''

8) '''Technology,' says Melvin Kranzberg, founder of the Society for the History of Technology, 'is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.' It is what each age and each society make of it. The Middle Ages used it sometimes wisely, sometimes recklessly, often for dubious purposes, seldom with a thought for the future, and with only a dim awareness of the scientific and mathematical laws governing it. But operating on instinct, insight, trial and error, and perseverance, the craftsmen and craftswomen, the entrepreneurs, the working monks and the clerical intellectuals, and the artist-engineers all transformed the world, on balance very much to the world's advantage.''