Writing is a technology that – like a few others – quite literally changed the course of civilization. The ability to set things down so as to remember them – “external memory storage” – unaltered beyond a single lifetime meant that every aspect of the human condition, every social structural and cultural more, altered significantly. Writing allowed civilization to become organized – organized religion, organized government, organized economy, organized war, organized science. And literature, a great advance (according to authors) over mere oral tales.
To be successfully domesticated, according to Charles Darwin, a type of animal must fit certain criteria. It should be able to consume food that is less attractive to humans (grass or vermin or leftovers). It should mature rapidly, so that it becomes useful quickly and so that it can be husbanded through repeated generations of breeding. The animal should have a pleasant disposition (doesn’t bite the hand that feeds it). It shouldn’t panic easily … or if it does, it should tend to stay together with others of its kind, making it possible for humans or dogs to protect the herd. Finally, it is useful if the animal can be trained or tricked to think of a human as its pack or herd leader.
Archery is the method by which a person uses the spring power stored in a bent stick to shoot a slender pointed projectile a great distance at rapid speed. A very useful technology, whether employed against game animals or against other human beings. Virtually every early civilization employed bows and arrows.
The technology of archery continued to advance. The composite bow, a laminate of wood and horn, spread outward from Asia to Arabia, North Africa and even Europe. The English longbow, so useful for poaching the King’s deer, proved itself in battle first at Sluys and Crécy, before eventually slaughtering the flower of French chivalry at Agincourt. Shortly thereafter the recurve bow, with its slightly outward bend at the end of the arms, provided greater power and range without increasing the draw weight. The complicated compound bow added wheels and pulleys to heighten the power even more. And then there was the crossbow – so simple and undemanding any peasant could use it effectively – developed by the Chinese during their Warring States period and in a few centuries adopted across Europe.
The coming of the crossbow, and even more so firearms, saw the decline of archery, both in hunting and especially in war. Why spend years training an archer to be deadly, when it takes just a few weeks to teach someone to use a musket effectively?
Now considered a “pseudoscience,” astrology is based on the premise that there is some sort of relationship between celestial objects and phenomena and events on this small ball of earth. Constellations, the moon, comets, the sun and planets (those that could be seen from Earth) were associated with gods, and it was believed that these thus had an impact on the physical universe.
Most primitive civilizations attached great significance to this nonsense, and that spurred a number of advances. The Indians, Chinese and Mayans developed elaborate calendars to track celestial events. The standing stones of Stonehenge may have been erected for astrological purposes. The mixing of Hellenic astrology with Babylonian astronomy gave rise to many mathematical principles. Chinese astrology flourished during the Han dynasty, and gave birth to several traditional cultural markers: the yin-yang dichotomy, the five elements, Confucian philosophy, Chinese theories of medicine.
During the so-called Scientific Revolution astrology shed much of its religious and mystical trappings, morphing into astronomy. In 1543 AD Nicolai Copernicus published ‘De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium,’ which postulated that the sun was the center of the universe, not the Earth, and that the planets orbited the sun, and the moon orbited the Earth. If all these heavenly bodies didn’t circle our planet, why should they affect our lives?
Bronze is a simple alloy of copper and usually tin, occasionally with traces of other metals for strength, luster, or ductility.
Deposits of copper and tin rarely occur near each other, and thus the export of tin from readily accessible surface mines became a major economic factor in some places.
Although bronze is harder and can hold a sharp edge longer than iron, it is also harder to find and pound into something useful. Thus, the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age.
The Babylonians too used brick, held together with mortar made of lime and pitch.
The Romans invented concrete, a superior mortar for all that stone and marble building they did … and which could be used as a construction material itself. This “concrete revolution” allowed them to build monumental structures that were impossible using more primitive materials. From 300 BC to the fall of Rome, concrete paved roads, lined aqueducts, and held the Colosseum together (among other things). But the masonry skills were lost during the Dark Ages (as was so much else) until the 1300s, when Europeans again began using concrete as mortar for their castles.
It was Roman engineers who developed large and efficient mining methods; among their other advances in the technology, building aqueducts to bring water to the mine site, where it was used to remove debris (a sort of early hydraulic mining) and separate ore from crushed rock. Romans also developed the process of thermal cracking to shatter rock, building fires against the rock face and heating the stone until it shattered when a stream of water was directed onto it. Their mining methods spread around the world, as men dug for copper, iron, gems, gold, silver, and just about every other mineral and crystal.
In Asia and the Americas, mining tech remained fairly primitive until the Europeans arrived to begin carting off the wealth of those lands. During the late Middle Ages, as the rich veins easily reached were exhausted, deep mining evolved, using hand tools to drive shafts further down and shoring the walls and ceilings up with timber. Then the great silver crisis of 1465 AD came when the mines reached such depths that groundwater filled the shafts. It took a hundred years for that obstacle to be overcome, and in the meantime gunpowder blasting replaced the picks and shovels (mostly). Then came the Industrial Revolution, with its thirst for coal, and mining became mechanized and ever more rapacious.
The first wheels were of solid wood, planks with rounded ends that were put together to give a round shape. In other places, stone and even clay (the Harappans of the Indus Valley) were used to make wheels. Spoked wheels first appear around 2000 BC in Asia Minor, where they were used on horse-drawn chariots. Later improvements included iron hubs and rims, greased axles, and the addition of springs or other sort of shock absorber.
The ability to calculate one’s position in the world by looking at the stars provides the backbone of maritime navigation (you know, because there are no other landmarks at sea but the stars and the sun).
The altitude of the sun above the horizon at noon when compared with the altitude of other bodies gave, for instance, the latitude of the ship. Similarly, an angular measurement to the star Polaris and a similar measurement to a star near the western or eastern horizon could give a fairly accurate longitudinal position.
Create with the heart; build with the mind.
When the architects and engineers get done mucking about, the contractors take over.
The history of construction is the history of advances in tools, materials and energy.
The ancient civilizations built in wood occasionally, but mostly in mud brick and in stone. Although remarkably durable, stone and brick are also quite heavy and inflexible. It’s impossible to construct very tall structures out of these materials – unless the structure in question is solid stone or brick and is pyramid-shaped. Otherwise they tend to topple over when given a shake, as with the Pharos of Alexandria. The Greeks built the little things out of brick, but employed marble for the big things like the Parthenon.
While the Romans didn’t develop any new building materials – if you discount their invention of concrete – they did revolutionize construction in terms of designs and of tools. The arch, the waterwheel, the sawmill, and a host of hand tools come from the Romans, who not only were constructing aqueducts, roads and walls but also some really nice villas and colosseums. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Japanese were working in wood, devising the likes of post and lintel construction and mortise and tenon joints to build their pagodas and palaces.
The Industrial Revolution brought steel to construction. Strong and durable. Using steel, contractors could create soaring bridges, deep tunnels, towering skyscrapers, and elevated roadways. And new energy sources – electricity, gas-powered engines, arc welding, etc. – made construction a lot easier.
Currency, where something relatively worthless in itself represents some amount of actual value, has been the bane of civilization since around 2000 BC, when a form of receipt was used to show ownership of stored grain in temples in Sumer. The Egyptians soon adopted the practice for their own grain warehouses, so that individuals could claim a portion they had “banked” therein. Then small bits of rare metals, a lot easier to keep track of than written receipts (especially since these were on clay tablets), came to represent certain amounts of various commodities, able to be exchanged … or hoarded. Thus, wealth was determined by how many of these bits a person had.
But the collapse of the Mesopotamian and Mediterranean trading economy around 1100 BC revealed a flaw in this concept of circulating currency – it was only as good as the guarantees of worth that backed it. It was only with the recovery of Phoenician trade across the Mediterranean that coinage made a reappearance, this time being backed by rulers of the city-states of Phoenicia and Greece. Most of the major economies of the time were soon minting coins, usually out of gold or silver or copper. Trade flourished, taxes could be paid, banking evolved, and now people could even go into debt (a whole new concept).
It was left to the Chinese to “invent” paper currency, initially in the form of promissory notes from wholesaler’s shops backed by the merchant, but these were only useful in the local region. The Song dynasty began issuing a more universal paper currency based on the state monopoly of salt production. It took until the 13th Century for this paper money to finally become standardized and acceptable across the kingdom. Around the same time, the Islamic nations adopted the practice and established a stable, high-value currency (the dinar). A vibrant and vigorous monetary economy resulted; the Muslims thus were the first to have credit, cheques, savings accounts, trusts, exchange rates, and all the other wonders of a “modern” economy.
It is thought that the Scythians of the steppes may well have been the first to develop the stirrup and the saddle, although the historical argument is as yet unconvincing.
By the Middle Ages, however, heavily armored mounted knights dominated warfare in Europe. And in the Far East, Japanese samurai fought from horseback for centuries, although mostly as archers. Indeed, horseback riding archers were the most common type of cavalry in Central Asia for a millennium. The Arabians, astride their magnificent stallions, spread Islam across the Middle East, North Africa, and into India and Europe. Horseback riding quite literally shaped history.
After the development of bronze it was only a matter of time for mankind to realize that it needs an easy-to-find, easy-to-work-with metal on which to base its technology. Iron is the logical choice - somewhat less strong than bronze, it is nevertheless a single metal, and not an alloy, and it is found in abundance.
There were two types of iron working, one producing wrought iron and the other cast iron. Wrought iron is a semi-fused alloy, tough, malleable, corrosion-resistant and able to be welded. It could be beaten into all sorts of shapes, and it was used extensively across Europe during the Middle Ages. Besides armor and weapons and tools, iron work was used to protect doors and windows with grills and bars, and even used as decoration for Canterbury Cathedral, Winchester Cathedral and Notre Dame de Paris. The French even made it into balconies and stair railings.
By contrast, cast iron is made by melting the iron ore and pouring it into molds; the Chinese were the first to use it, primarily to make beams and rods to support their elaborate pagodas and other tall buildings. Cast iron also made pretty good arrowheads and cannon shot, as the Chinese soon discovered.
In the West, cast iron working did not take hold until around the 15th Century AD, the technique apparently moving along the Silk Road from Asia to Europe. The Europeans too found cast iron perfect for making cannon barrels and cannonballs, musket barrels and musket balls. During the Industrial Revolution structural engineers found some more creative uses for cast iron, using it to construct cast-iron bridges and as framing for ever taller buildings.
The term “mathematics” is derived from the Greek mathema, meaning “knowledge, study, or learning.” Appropriate, given that it is the science of science, focused on quantity, measurement, structure, logic and change. Mathematics, according to some, is also the art of art, focused on space, shape, relationship, perspective, and fractals. Not to mention mathematics relationship to music.
While the Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians were pretty good at shipbuilding, most of their knowledge was lost during the “Dark” Ages. Save for the Vikings, the Europeans weren’t particularly skilled or innovative. However, in China during the Song and Ming dynasties, shipbuilding reached its peak, building junks and warships that filled the greatest ports of the time. In the Islamic world shipbuilding thrived in Basra and Alexandria, producing the dhows and feluccas that plied trade routes from East Asia to the tip of Africa.
The Age of Exploration, as the Europeans set out to conquer the world, demanded new approaches to shipbuilding. Shipyards became large industrial complexes (like the Arsenal in Venice), able to turn out ships of a standard design (like the carrack) in a matter of weeks or even days. By the Napoleonic Wars, ships were still being built to basic, standardized plans in expansive shipyards; the British in fact established Royal Dockyards across the globe to support their naval aspirations.
Advances in ship design and materials during the Industrial Revolution for shipbuilding for the first time in centuries made new methods mandatory. Massive iron- and steel-hulled ships such as the Great Eastern and the Titanic and modern dreadnaughts meant that most ships now are constructed in expansive drydocks.
The whole system evolved during the late Middle Ages, when a master craftsman was given the right in many town and city charters to employ young people in exchange for lodging, food, a little spending money, and formal training. In effect, the apprentice was bound body and soul to the master for the length of the apprenticeship. But it was better than most other choices for poor and illiterate youngsters looking to get ahead. In most of Europe, once an apprentice became a journeyman (if he/she did), they were considered a freeman with all the rights of any citizen. If they became masters, they were respected and respectable members of society.
Buttresses are architectural elements that reinforce walls, allowing for the construction of higher walls than unsupported construction would permit. The oldest known buttresses were used in the Temple of Eanna in Uruk, dating to around 3200 BC. Gothic architecture saw the proliferation of the flying buttress, where the lateral force of the wall is transmitted via half-arch to a supporting column or pier, allowing the construction of lighter and larger walls. Cathedrals in Europe are particularly illustrative of this construction technique which allowed the builders to add large stained-glass windows to the cathedrals.
The success of William the Conqueror set off a lengthy period of warfare and conquest by contending kings, dominated by castle building throughout western civilization … until gunpowder and cannon showed up in the 1600s.
Just as the thick- and high-walled castles fell out of vogue in Europe, Japan entered its own castle age. Evolving from the wooden stockades of the early daimyo, the first castles were constructed of stone with wooden upper structures. Thus, they tended to burn a lot – especially during the Sengoku (“Warring States”) period. Unlike in Europe, the introduction of gunpowder spurred the building of Japanese castles, and the 16th Century saw a boom in castle-building on a grander scale than ever until the Meiji Restoration and the end of feudalism there.
Humans learn things, and civilization results. Obviously education has been around as long as mankind has. Through most of history, it was an informal affair, parents teaching their children the skills they needed to know to survive and be productive (household chores and hunting expeditions and dodging barbarians and so forth). As a tribe expanded and grew more prosperous, village elders and priests might educate the children while the healthy adults gathered food, built stuff and made war. Eventually a wealthy society might have formal classes for the more important children.
As the thinkers of a nation-state extended its knowledge beyond the merely practical, into realms where learning by imitation wasn’t possible, schools were established. By the time of the Middle Kingdom, the priesthood in Egypt had established schools to teach reading and writing, mathematics, history, the sciences, medicine, astrology and, of course, religion. In Greece, private academies arose to teach the privileged, such as that established by Plato in Athens, the first institution of “higher” education in Europe. Further east, China’s Confucius began a program of establishing schools to teach his philosophies, as well as some basic skills such as reading and mathematics and music.
Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
Strategy requires thought; tactics require observation.
Like all great innovations, it seems such a simple idea. Humans had domesticated the horse around 4500 BC, but where to put one’s feet and how to stay on when the horse began running? The saddle, invented around 800 BC, took care of the latter problem. But adding two pieces of leather with a loop (later made of metal) on the end hanging down didn’t come about until around a half-millennia later – no one is quite sure when or where, although it was somewhere in east Asia as the Chinese Jin dynasty was using it by 322 BC.
Astronomy is the “big brother” of Astrology - or rather, its serious brother. While astrology uses a mixture of facts and faith which is applied to celestial bodies, astronomy uses only science. And despite the fact that astronomy proves unable to provide any immediate military or economic benefits, it does something much more important: it proves that man has been deluding himself when it comes to some of the most important facts in nature.
Significant advances in astronomy have usually come with the introduction of new technology; it helps to be able to see things larger, farther away or in other spectrums when studying infinity. Better and better telescopes allowed William Herschel to create a detailed catalogue of nebulas and clusters, and to “discover” the planet Uranus in 1781. The German Friedrich Bessel managed to measure the distance to a star (61 Cygni) in 1838 for the first time. The spectroscope and photography thrust astronomical knowledge ahead, notably when scientists realized that other stars were similar to the sun in composition – just with a wide range of masses, temperatures and sizes.
But it wasn’t until the early 20th Century that astronomers finally realized that our system was part of a galaxy, the “Milky Way,” and that there were lots of other galaxies floating about.
Until the Industrial Revolution, the idea of “mass production” was limited to pottery (molds), Chinese crossbows with interchangeable parts, and assembly line production of books. But in the Renaissance, Venice began mass-producing ships to maintain their grip on the Mediterranean in their famed Arsenal, using prefabricated parts and assembly lines that would not be matched for output for three centuries. At its peak of efficiency, the Arsenal could produce a seaworthy ship in a day and employed some ten thousand workers.
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind. No technology since writing so impacted civilization as did movable-type printing.
The invention revolutionized the world, and gave rise to mass communication. It spread rapidly across Europe, since booksellers could now make (and sell) lots of copies. It not only standardized language and knowledge – bringing page numbers, tables of contents, indexes, the ability to cite other works and all sorts of things not possible with hand-copied books – but it taught humanity to think in linear (since that’s how folk read now) terms rather than holistically. And it sparked – or at least promoted – the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation. So, if civilization is a mess, blame it on Gutenberg.
The cannon-armed ships-of-the-line (from the three-deck 1st rates with over 90 guns aboard to the lowly 5th rates with only 18 guns) blasted away at each other into the Napoleonic wars and beyond. Frigates and barques chased enemy merchants. Speedy square-rigged blockade runners slipped past Yankee warships during the American Civil War. Towering clipper ships plied the Pacific and square-rigged American whalers hunted those beasts to near extinction.
As cannon became common in warfare, military engineers began to study the combination of factors (ranging from elevation to windage) that might affect the path of a cannonball on its way to flatten a wall or a human being. They soon divided that study into four subfields: internal ballistics concerned with the initial acceleration, transition ballistics for the shift to unpowered flight, external ballistics which focused on trajectory, and terminal ballistics for the effects when the flight ends (hopefully as planned). Their findings and the advances that resulted helped the military improve not only its weapons, but understanding all sorts of other aspects of warfare (such as the study of “military wound ballistics”). Better bullets, better bombs, better shells.
Simply told, Economics is science applied to money and commerce. The first who thought to do this soon prove how important it is for national development, and then everyone was rushing to study economics. And to invent new and ever more sophisticated and implausible financial instruments with which to rip off the unsuspecting consumer.
In his book, Smith contends that a free market is the most efficient means of assigning worth to and for distributing goods and services. Moreover, when a person pursues his own financial self-interests (i.e., unbounded greed) he automatically is promoting the good of society in general through economic growth and investment. In other words, unbridled capitalism is the best economic basis for civilization.
It would be a thousand years before the next advance in irrigation: the windmill, designed to pump water upward into pipes or ditches to water the fields; the technology spread across Europe, allowing for population growth not seen before. That led to more irrigation. It is estimated that there are approximately 600 million acres being irrigated worldwide now.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
No one starts a war - or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so - without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.
Rifling is merely the cutting of helical grooves into the inner part of a gun barrel so as to induce spin in a ball or bullet which serves to gyroscopically stabilize the projectile, giving it greater accuracy and range. In short, all this means is that it took a skilled marksman to hit anything specific with a smoothbore musket, but any fool with a steady hand has a fair chance of success firing a rifle at a target.
In the early 1700s Benjamin Robins, an English mathematician, proved that an elongated “bullet” rather than a ball would retain the spin from a rifle barrel but cut the air resistance better. Within a couple decades, most continental armies had rifle battalions to augment the musket-armed infantry regiments. At first these units were used to snipe at enemy officers … sharpshooters in truth. But by the time of the Napoleonic wars, and more so during the American Civil War, rifle-armed troops were integrated into the regular line infantry.
Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or exciting our sense of wonder.
Scientific theory, the notion that every claim is only true if it can be tested scientifically, is the basis of advanced modern technology and science. Its notion allows the continuation of the scientific advancement of mankind in most fields, thanks to a systematic approach which eliminates mistaken beliefs and erroneous theories before they can take hold and steer scientists in wrong directions.
Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.
The power of the steam is the basis of modern industry…or at least of its development stage, although a surprising number of machines use steam even today. The only difference is the fuel which provides the heat.
Eventually steam engines would be replaced by internal combustion engines, more efficient and a little less polluting. But before oil, steam was king, and our civilized world would never have existed without it.
The invention of the internal combustion engine opens the way to modern day transport as we know it. Although the steam engine had already started a revolution in transport, and the smoke-belching iron monsters were crossing Europe on their rails, common people couldn’t make such a good use of it. After all, it proved really difficult to make the steam engine small enough for personal transport, and here’s where combustion comes in: its method of transforming energy into motion could be fit into a machine the size of a carriage.
In 1879 Karl Benz was granted a patent for a two-stroke gas engine; a few years later, he devised a four-stroke engine which he put in his “automobiles,” which he then put into production in 1886. By 1884, English tinkerer Edward Butler had invented the spark plug, ignition magneto, coil ignition and jet carburetor (and coined the term “petrol” to confuse motorists for generations). In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler devised the supercharger so his autos would be faster than Benz’s. A few years later, Rudolf Diesel developed his Carnot heat engine type, better known as the “diesel engine.”
Meanwhile, some daredevil types were fitting small gas-powered engines onto bicycle frames and tearing about the countryside in Europe. In 1894, the firm Hildebrand & Wolfmüller became the first to begin production of a motorrad (i.e., motorcycle). For true aficionados, Harley-Davidson began production of its bikes in 1903. That same year the Wright brothers put one on a glider and flew. Then Henry Ford figured out how to mass-produce internal combustion engines and stick them in cheaply-made, assembly-line Model-Ts, founding the Ford Motor Company in 1908 … and launching a love-affair with excessive speed civilization has yet to outgrow.
Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
The increased volume in crude oil’s availability led to experiments in improving its qualities, starting with simple distillation rigs, and increasing in complexity and sophistication. It quickly became possible to produce higher-quality, cleaner-burning fuels like kerosene and fuel oil from crude oil, rather than relying on whale oil or distilled animal fats.
Development of internal combustion engines was driven in part by the availability of these new refined fuels, and in turn increased demand for these.
Along with petroleum, steel is the backbone of modern civilization.
Once humans started shooting off rockets, the need for a new understanding of ballistics became clear. The flight of rockets, jets, missiles, spacecraft and such simply couldn’t be covered by the current knowledge of internal, transition, external and terminal ballistics that had been accumulated by engineers to that time.
Although Newtonian mechanics still applied, ballistics for rockets and missiles became so complex that mathematicians had to derive second-order differential equations to calculate the plot, compute the drag, and estimate the arrival on target. Even gravity had to be taken into account. Then add in launching missiles and rockets from fast-moving aircraft in aft-crossing trajectory and only computers could possibly make sense of it all.
The application of ballistics has become so advanced that mere men can no longer deal with it.
Steel is not the only material which defines modernity. Plastics also define modernity. This magic material is so lightweight and malleable, but at the same time impregnable, resistant (too resistant, some will say), and most importantly, cheap!
Synthetic or semi-synthetic organic polymers derived (generally) from petrochemicals of high molecular mass that are incredibly durable, malleable, lightweight and now pervasive in modern civilization. Plastic. It comes in many forms, some tougher, some more flexible, some with a greater or lesser tolerance to heat. Plastic can be molded, pressed, or extruded into virtually any shape desired. It’s found in every facet of life today, used in everything from automobile bumpers to prosthetic limbs, from product packaging to modernist furniture, home entertainment to the latest weaponry.
A composite is any material made from two or more materials with significantly differing physical or chemical properties; composites are distinct from alloys or chemical compounds (in which the components do not retain their original properties).
The earliest examples of Composites were likely Egyptian bricks, made from straw and mud, which were both durable and cheap. The Romans invented concrete, another composite used in construction. Around 3400 BC the Mesopotamians invented plywood, thin sheets of various woods glued together giving added strength and durability. Barbarians were using composite bows made of wood, bone, horn, and silk to slaughter the civilized; Mongolian composite bows carried their rule across much of the known world in the 14th Century AD. Papier-mâché, a composite of glue and paper, has been used for centuries by artists and other children. More recently, fiberglass was invented in the 1930s.
Modern composites are produced only in laboratories or specialized industrial plants. In 1961, carbon fiber was spun and within a few years the first carbon fiber composites were commercially available. The 1970s and 1980s saw a series of breakthroughs in producing ultra-high molecular weight composites, exceedingly sturdy and resistant to corrosion, soon used in the production of aircraft, boats, automobiles and a lot of household gadgets. By the mid-1990s, the production of composite materials dominated materials manufacturing.
I am a big proponent of harnessing the power of fusion - from 93 million miles away. Fusion is done by our sun really, really well and for free. Here on Earth in reactors, not so much.
In contrast to nuclear fission – where energy is generated by the division of a nucleus – nuclear fusion occurs when two or more atomic nuclei slam together hard enough to fuse, which also releases photons in quantity. Fusion reactions power the stars of the universe, giving off lots of light and heat.
Robotics has been around forever, and it’s been the next big thing forever, and it is so exciting and compelling that it’s easy to get carried away.
Of course, robots need not be humanoid in form. In fact, the human form is an inefficient design, and so there are a plethora of possibilities, all being explored by engineers and manufacturers for various tasks – wheeled robots, spherical-orb robots, tracked robots, etc. – with all sorts of grapplers and manipulators rather than hands.