We have an utterly fucked up idea of what counts as technology. Something that projects many of our biases including gender, and race.

To many these days it's only technology if it's electronic, and used by western men. But to take such a narrow definition is to ignore the amazing technology that surrounds us, and upon which our society is built. As such. It's time for a thread. I'm gonna talk about two different items you use every day, and the technology that goes into them.

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Unless you happen to be sat naked on a warm beach somewhere, you're probably wearing clothes as you read this. Have you ever stopped to think about how we got to the very probably woven cotton clothing you're wearing right now ?

Archimedes said there are three basic machines, the lever, pulley, and screw. In the renaissance the wheel and axle, the wedge and the inclined plane were added to the list. But I think something else should be added, a discovery that changed humanity.

String.

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Without string, or as some call it, cordage, we would be a lot colder today, and wouldn't be able to build many of the great structures and machines that make up modern life.

When Otzi the iceman was found in the Italian Alps, he had clothing and equipment which used lots of different types of cord from multiple different materials. One of the earliest cords was simple sinue taken from dead animals. This is an interesting material to sew with, but it's strong and quite durable.

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The next big technological development in the world of string was to twist fibres together. The bow string on Otzi's bow was made of sinue fibres twisted together. This allows for a strong longer than the raw material, but also stronger. Much stronger. There more to twisting fibres than you might think tho. If you twist a set of fibres one way to make a cord, and do that a few times, then twist those cords together the opposite way. The twists work to keep the cord together.

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In the world of spinners depending on which direction you twist the fibres, it's called either z twist, or s twist. And using the two in combination makes for the world of cordage and fabric we have today.

The next big leap is rather than using cord to sew bits of animal together to make clothes, we tangle bits if thread together in highly specific arrangements to make bigger pieces we can use to make clothes from. The invention of weaving changed humanity.

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Weaving was essential to move away from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to a settled farming one. It was also necessary for population to grew. It's a lot simpler to farm a field of linen, or to collect fleece from live sheep, than to have to kill an animal each time you needed a new jacket. That's not to say the process of producing fibre from plants is easy. To find a gootube video in how to make linen from flax plants. It's many stages. Laborious and complicated.

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Like when Billy Connolly said "who discovered milk came from cows, and what were they doing at the time ?" You have to wonder how the first human came up with the method for getting fibre from the flax plant. It's a multiple step process that requires days to do. And then it all needs to be spun before it can be Woven.

For millennia spinning was done with a tool called a drop spindle. It was slow, and repetitive, and it took a lot of time to make the thread for a simple garment.

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Spinning was something typically (in western cultures at least) done by women & girls. Picture the Norse Goddess Frigg weaving clouds from her distaff. (Distaff is a tool used to hold the raw fleece while you spin it with a drop spindle). But using a drop spindle is something you can do while you stir the dinner, watch the kids, walk to the market. But it takes ages. It wouldn't be until as late as the 18th century that this technique would be replaced by the more familiar spinning wheel
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Because it was such a slow process it wasn't really something you could make a living from at least not a big one. So spinning remained women's work right up to the industrial revolution.

With the thread woven. Time to weave. The first looms are what we call warp weighted looms. In weaving you have two sets of thread. The warp going up and down. And the weft side to side. With a warp weighted loom tension was applied to the warp using weights. These usually ceramic donut shaped objects...

9/n

Are common finds in archeology. Being ceramic they don't really rot. But this design is slow, laborious, and doesn't make particularly wide cloth. It could take months to make enough cloth to make a dress. The technique stood up for centuries. It was the height of fabric technology. That is until the 12-13th century and the invention of the two bar loom.

This moves the weaving from vertical to horizontal, and from women to men.

Why? It's not like it's operated it with genitals?

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Why then does weaving move from women's work to men's work? Because now with a two bar loom fabric can be made a lot faster, and it can be made wider. This allows for it to be made at a larger scale, & crucially, for it to be something one can do professionally. As soon as a technology can be used to provide an income to support a family, it moves from women's work, to men's work. We see this throughout history. See also computer programming. Once we valued it more, the white men took over

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