Ferrous metallurgyFerrous metallurgy is the metallurgy of iron and its alloys. The earliest surviving prehistoric iron artifacts, from the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, were made from meteoritic iron-nickel. It is not known when or where the smelting of iron from ores began, but by the end of the 2nd millennium BC iron was being produced from iron ores in the region from Greece to India, and sub-Saharan Africa. The use of wrought iron (worked iron) was known by the 1st millennium BC, and its spread defined the Iron Age.
Digital RevolutionThe Digital Revolution, also known as the Third Industrial Revolution, is the shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technologies from the Industrial Revolution towards digital electronics which began in the latter half of the 20th century, with the adoption and proliferation of digital computers and digital record-keeping, that continues to the present day. Implicitly, the term also refers to the sweeping changes brought about by digital computing and communication technologies during this period.
Mass productionMass production, also known as flow production or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and batch production, it is one of the three main production methods. The term mass production was popularized by a 1926 article in the Encyclopædia Britannica supplement that was written based on correspondence with Ford Motor Company.
Operations managementOperations management is an area of management concerned with designing and controlling the process of production and redesigning business operations in the production of goods or services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as few resources as needed and effective in meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing an entire production or service system which is the process that converts inputs (in the forms of raw materials, labor, consumers, and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and/or services for consumers).
Kondratiev waveIn economics, Kondratiev waves (also called supercycles, great surges, long waves, K-waves or the long economic cycle) are hypothesized cycle-like phenomena in the modern world economy. The phenomenon is closely connected with the technology life cycle. It is stated that the period of a wave ranges from forty to sixty years, the cycles consist of alternating intervals of high sectoral growth and intervals of relatively slow growth. Long wave theory is not accepted by most academic economists.
ElectrificationElectrification is the process of powering by electricity and, in many contexts, the introduction of such power by changing over from an earlier power source. The broad meaning of the term, such as in the history of technology, economic history, and economic development, usually applies to a region or national economy. Broadly speaking, electrification was the build-out of the electricity generation and electric power distribution systems that occurred in Britain, the United States, and other now-developed countries from the mid-1880s until around 1950 and is still in progress in rural areas in some developing countries.
MechanizationMechanization is the process of changing from working largely or exclusively by hand or with animals to doing that work with machinery. In an early engineering text a machine is defined as follows: Every machine is constructed for the purpose of performing certain mechanical operations, each of which supposes the existence of two other things besides the machine in question, namely, a moving power, and an object subject to the operation, which may be termed the work to be done.
Atomic AgeThe Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, The Gadget at the Trinity test in New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, during World War II. Although nuclear chain reactions had been hypothesized in 1933 and the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1) had taken place in December 1942, the Trinity test and the ensuing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II represented the first large-scale use of nuclear technology and ushered in profound changes in sociopolitical thinking and the course of technological development.
Belle ÉpoqueThe Belle Époque or La Belle Époque (bɛlepɔk; French for "Beautiful Epoch") is a period of French, Belgian and European history, usually considered to begin around 1871–1880 and to end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Occurring during the era of the Third French Republic, it was a period characterised by optimism, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations.
World warA world war is an international conflict that involves most or all of the world's major powers. Conventionally, the term is reserved for the two major international conflicts that occurred during the first half of the 20th century, World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945), although some historians have also described other global conflicts as world wars, such as the Nine Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror.
