WORTH THINKING ABOUT: MAKING HAY
Forget about computers for awhile and forget about the Internet. Think
about hay. The physicist Freeman Dyson explained:
"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life
are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound
historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of
cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to
keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the
technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every
village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important
technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.
According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the
decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from
the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did
not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough
in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on
horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay
that allowed populations to grow and civilization to flourish among the
forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and
London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."
The preceding excerpt is from Dyson's 1985 Gifford Lectures. His most recent
book, which examines much newer technologies, is: "The Sun, the Genome, and
the Internet : Tools of Scientific Revolutions"