This is a polemical and provocative book. Its title is a pun on The shock of the new by Robert Hughes about the modernist revolution in art. The author, Hans Rausing Professor at Imperial College, London, is well known among historians of technology. In this book, he raises a critical point about the history of technology as ordinarily conceived; economic and social historians are bound to agree with his approach. ‘This book’, the author states, ‘is animated by a belief that putting a new and more adequate history of technology into global history would change both for the better’ (p. 248). In the view of Edgerton, standard histories of technology record when devices or processes were invented or predicted. They pay much less attention to the actual use of these inventions. Thus, historians of technology tend to overlook renewed or continued uses of past technologies, failed inventions, and small tools in everyday use.

It seems quite obvious to any historian that the invention and the actual utilization of specific devices do not coincide. A history of technology focused on usage can be far different from an innovation-centred one. In the rooms where we live, we are often surrounded by the old to a greater extent than the new. Every day we use past technology, often tools from times gone by. The book by Edgerton is full of examples, which span the twentieth century and the entire world.

‘For the years up to around 1940 electricity, motor cars and aviation are conventionally deemed to be the most important’ (p. 1). But working animals were still playing an important role in agriculture and transportation. We discover that, for the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German armies, some 625,000 horses were assembled (p. 35). In modern urban centres, the old corrugated iron or corrugated asbestos-cement roofs cover the buildings of many poor families. Urban transport is often based on bicycles or on old systems, such as the rickshaw in Calcutta. Cable TV was disappearing in the 1950s and 1960s, but made a comeback in the 1980s. Domestic production was seen to increase, rather than decrease as is often proposed by historians, thanks to the introduction of new machines into houses.

Many of these, such as washing machines, electric irons, refrigerators, freezers, sewing machines, and others, were already available at the end of the nineteenth century. Today, maintenance and repair account for a non-negligible part of national product, and are provided mainly by small traders and skilled workers. In war, many old technologies are often in use, such as ships in the epoch of aviation and submarines. Many techniques we use today were originally developed for purposes of war and only later were adopted in civil technology: the aeroplane, the radio, radar, atomic energy ... and pesticides and insecticides. We rediscover and develop old tools as we develop new tools. The old lives alongside the new.

No doubt the new approach by Edgerton can shake the traditional view of the history of technology. It is doubtful, by contrast, that the reconsideration of technology from the point of view of use will imply a reconsideration of the ‘history of the world’ (p. 212) on the whole. While history of technology is actually invention-centred, social history is not. Social and economic historians have always focused on the actual influence on the real world of technology and not only of inventions. They know that the water mill was invented in ancient times, but remember that its actual use spread from the early Middle Ages and that water devices were still employed and sometimes being developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they know that sails were increasingly used in mediaeval and early modern times, although the use of wind in order to propel ships was already well known as far back as the neolithic revolution; they know that steam power, not unknown in ancient times, was rediscovered in the second half of the seventeenth century, and from then on its use increased rapidly. The polemic by Edgerton has to be seen as directed not against any branch of social history, as the author sometimes suggests, but more particularly against the history of technology, as often, but not always, presently conceived. In the field of social history, scholars already know that there is a lot of the old within the new. The historian, however, awaits a positive proposal of the consequences of Edgerton's view, since the approach of The shock of the old is critical and negative. In his book we find few positive notes. We discover the mistakes of the traditional views, but we cannot yet delineate the contours of a new history of technology based on the revision of the old approach. Perhaps David Edgerton is progressing on this positive path at present, as recently stated in an interview. His next book will be devoted, in fact, to science, technology, and industry in Britain during the Second World War. We await the reconstruction, after the destruction.