The history of technology

The twenty-fifth entry is le genre et la technique, the name of a whole field of research, and its second noun is a false friend hiding in plain sight. In English « technique » is always one particular way of doing something: a pianist’s technique, a surgical technique, a technique for getting wine out of a carpet. It is small, personal and countable. French has that sense as well, with the indefinite article, so that une technique de soudure is a welding technique. But la technique, singular, definite and standing on its own, is the entire domain of tools, machines and networks that a society builds and then depends on — what English calls « technology ». That is why the discipline behind this list calls itself l’histoire des techniques, and why le progrès technique means technological progress rather than better skill. La technologie exists too, but it leans towards the recent and the electronic. So the entry names gender and technology: a field that asks who a washing machine was designed for and who was expected to operate it. Rendered as « gender and technique », it shrinks into a question about method.