Portal:Technology

The Technology Portal

P:TECHP:TECH

Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible tools such as utensils or machines, and intangible ones such as software. Technology plays a critical role in science, engineering, and everyday life.

Technological advancements have led to significant changes in society. The earliest known technology is the stone tool, used during prehistory, followed by the control of fire—which in turn contributed to the growth of the human brain and the development of language during the Ice Age, according to the cooking hypothesis. The invention of the wheel in the Bronze Age allowed greater travel and the creation of more complex machines. More recent technological inventions, including the printing press, telephone, and the Internet, have lowered barriers to communication and ushered in the knowledge economy. (Full article...)

Outline of technology

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Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.

Image 1

SS Suevic c. 1908–28

SS Suevic was a steamship built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the White Star Line. Suevic was the fifth and last of the Jubilee-class ocean liners, built specifically to service the Liverpool-Cape Town-Sydney route, along with her sister ship Runic. In 1907 she was wrecked off the south coast of England, but in the largest rescue of its kind, all passengers and crew were saved. The ship herself was deliberately broken in two, and a new bow was attached to the salvaged stern portion. Later serving as a Norwegian whaling factory ship carrying the name Skytteren, she was scuttled off the Swedish coast in 1942 to prevent her capture by ships of Nazi Germany. (Full article...)
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The abandoned station canopy viewed in October 2020.

The Richmond Hill station is a closed station on the Montauk Branch of the Long Island Rail Road in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens in New York City. The station is located at Myrtle Avenue and cuts diagonally from the intersection of Jamaica Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard through to Hillside Avenue. The station has two tracks and an island platform. Richmond Hill was the only station on the Lower Montauk Branch that was elevated with a high-level platform for passengers to wait for trains; the others were at ground level, with low-level platforms.

The Richmond Hill station was originally built by the South Side Railroad of Long Island in 1869 as the Clarenceville station. After New York City and the Long Island Rail Road began negotiating the elimination of numerous at-grade crossings within Queens in the 1910s, the current station was opened on a viaduct in 1923. The station was closed on March 16, 1998, along with nine others due to low ridership and the potential cost of upgrading the stations to modern standards; at the time of its closure, the station averaged one passenger per day. (Full article...)
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TouchWave, Inc. (now WebCom), was a privately held Palo Alto, California IP-telephony network switch provider founded in 1997. TouchWave developed a product line called WebSwitch that was designed to replace traditional private telephone exchange systems in small-to-medium-sized companies. WebSwitch was part of a phone system that incorporates communication features provided by the Internet. The rapid success of TouchWave was memorialized with awards and an acquisition by Ericsson Communications for $46M two years after TouchWave was founded. Ericsson continued the TouchWave product line under the name WebCom, but its efforts have been viewed as less than successful. (Full article...)
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Air-Cobot (Aircraft Inspection enhanced by smaRt & Collaborative rOBOT) is a French research and development project of a wheeled collaborative mobile robot able to inspect aircraft during maintenance operations. This multi-partner project involves research laboratories and industry. Research around this prototype was developed in three domains: autonomous navigation, human-robot collaboration and nondestructive testing.

Air-Cobot is presented as the first wheeled robot able to perform visual inspections of aircraft. Inspection robots using other types of sensors have been considered before, such as the European project Robair. Since the launch of the project, other solutions based on image processing began to be developed, such as EasyJet with a drone, the swarm of drones from Toulouse company Donecle and the Aircam project of the aerospace manufacturer Airbus. (Full article...)
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M-52 is a north–south state trunkline highway in the US state of Michigan. The southern terminus is on the Ohio border, where it continues as State Route 109 (SR 109). The highway passes through communities like Adrian, where it intersects US Highway 223 (US 223), Chelsea and Webberville along its 127.3-mile-long (204.9 km) course. It crosses some major rivers, including the River Raisin and the Shiawassee. The section of the highway between M-50 and Manchester was built as a limited-access highway. M-52's northern terminus is at M-46, nine miles (14 km) west of Saginaw.

Adrian previously converted their downtown streets to one-way traffic between 1950 and 1973. The traffic pattern created an unusual arrangement in the routings of the two state highways downtown. Southbound M-52 followed Winter Street, which also carried both eastbound and westbound directions of the US 223 business loop. These streets carried both highways around the downtown business district in this arrangement until November 2009. (Full article...)
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State Route 228 (SR 228) is a short north–south state highway in the U.S. state of Ohio. The southern terminus of the state route is at State Route 19 (SR 19) nearly five and a half miles (8.9 km) north of Republic. Its northern terminus is at SR 101 approximately 5.5 miles (8.9 km) southwest of Clyde.

The state highway was established in 1924. It serves as a connector between SR 19 and SR 101 east and northeast of where the two routes intersect. SR 19 jogs west from SR 228's southern terminus, and SR 101 traverses in a southwest-to-northeast fashion, creating a tight angle between the two routes. SR 778 serves a similar purpose to SR 228 to the west and southwest of the junction of SR 19 and SR 101. (Full article...)
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1927 postcard showing L'Oiseau Blanc, with pictures of Nungesser (left) and Coli (right)

L'Oiseau Blanc ([lwazo blɑ̃]; English: The White Bird) was a French Levasseur PL.8 biplane that disappeared in 1927 during an attempt to make the first non-stop transatlantic flight between Paris and New York City to compete for the Orteig Prize. French World War I aviation heroes Charles Nungesser (third highest French ace with 43 air combat victories during World War I) and François Coli took off from Paris on 8 May 1927 and were last seen over Ireland. Less than two weeks later, Charles Lindbergh flew New York–Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis and claimed the prize.

The disappearance of L'Oiseau Blanc is considered one of the great mysteries in the history of aviation. Many rumors circulated about the fate of the aircraft and crew, with mainstream opinion at the time being that it was probably lost in a squall over the Atlantic. Investigations starting in the 1980s suggest that it probably reached Newfoundland and may have crashed in Maine. (Full article...)

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Image 1
Overhead power line
Credit: Simon Koopmann
An overhead power line is a structure used in electric power transmission and distribution to transmit electrical energy along large distances. It consists of one or more conductors suspended by towers or utility poles.
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Wheel
Credit: fir0002
A wheel is a circular component that is intended to rotate on an axial bearing. The wheel is one of the main components of the wheel and axle which is one of the six simple machines.
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Caliper
Image credit: Joaquim Alves Gaspar
An animation showing how to use a vernier caliper, which is a caliper that uses a vernier scale to interpolate linear measurements. Vernier calipers can measure internal and external dimensions using, respectively, the uppermost and lower jaws, and also depths, using the depth probe (located at the right end). In this example, the first two digits (2.4) are decided by the location of the zero of the vernier scale in the centimeter scale, and the last digit (0.07), by the first line of the vernier scale that exactly matches a line of the centimeter scale above.
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Image 4
Escalator
Credit: Stig Nygaard
An escalator is a moving staircase for carrying people between floors of a building. The device consists of a motor-driven chain of individual, linked steps that move up or down on tracks, allowing the step treads to remain horizontal.
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Laptop computer
Credit: Mike McGregor
The OLPC XO-1 is an inexpensive subnotebook laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries.
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Mazda RX-8
Photo credit: Fir0002
The Mazda RX-8 sports car is a front mid-engine, rear-wheel drive four-seat coupé manufactured by Mazda Motor Corporation. It is the successor to the RX-7 and, like its predecessors in the RX range, it is powered by a rotary engine. The RX-8 began North American sales in the 2004 model year.
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Aerospike engine
Photo credit: Marshall Space Flight Center
A test firing of twin linear XRS-2200 aerospike engines, originally built for the Lockheed Martin X-33, a next-generation, commercially operated reusable launch vehicle. The aerospike engine is a type of rocket engine that maintains its efficiency across a wide range of altitudes through the use of an aerospike nozzle. A vehicle with an aerospike engine uses 25-30% less fuel at low altitudes, where most missions have the greatest need for thrust.
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Image 8
Keypunch
Picture: Unknown; restoration: Mmxx
A woman using a Hollerith pantograph, a machine developed by Herman Hollerith for the punching of cards, providing data which could then be processed. Such tools were used in the 1890 United States census, the first time the country's census was tabulated by machine.
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Image 9
Steam turbine
Photo credit: Christian Kuhna
The rotor of a modern steam turbine , which converts steam (heat) energy into kinetic (mechanical) energy. The steam path is from the smallest blade, expanding through progressively larger blade elements. Steam turbines are used in power plants to extract mechanical work from pressurized steam and benefit from their high efficiency and high power-to-weight ratio compared to other technologies, leading to their widespread deployment from electricity generation to marine propulsion.
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Image 10
Eiffel Tower
Photo: Benh Lieu Song
The Eiffel Tower as seen from the Champ de Mars. At 324 metres (1,063 ft) tall, the tower, an iron lattice tower, is the tallest building in Paris, the most-visited paid monument in the world, as well as one of the most recognizable structures in the world. Named after its designer, Gustave Eiffel, it was built as an entrance arch for the 1889 Exposition Universelle and has since become the most prominent symbol of both Paris and France.
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Empire State Building
Image credit: Lewis Hine
A structural worker bolts beams on the framework during the construction of the Empire State Building in New York City. The 1,250-foot (380 m) building opened on May 1, 1931, at the time the tallest building in the world, overtaking the Chrysler Building (seen to the right), which had just been completed the year before. The addition of a pinnacle and antennas later increased its overall height to 1,472 feet (449 m).
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Hybrid-propellant rocket
Photograph credit: Matt Steiner and Kees08
A hybrid-propellant rocket is a rocket with an engine that uses propellants in two different phases, one solid and the other gaseous or liquid. The concept can be traced back to at least the 1930s.

This picture shows a transparent 3D-printed hybrid-rocket fuel grain with dual helical fuel ports, a post-combustion chamber, and a de Laval nozzle, photographed prior to the hot-fire test. The motor used nitrous oxide as the oxidizer and Pyrodex pellets for the igniter.
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Image 13
Pin tumbler lock
Photo credit: Eric Pierce
The pin tumbler lock is a lock mechanism that utilizes a group of pins of varying lengths to prevent opening the lock without the correct key. Pin tumblers are most commonly employed in cylinder locks, but may also be found in tubular or radial locks.

When the correct key is inserted, the gaps between the key pins (red) and driver pins (blue) align with the edge of the plug (yellow).
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Image 14
Thermoplastic-sheathed cable
Photograph credit: Petar Milošević
A thermoplastic-sheathed cable consists of a toughened outer thermoplastic sheath of polyvinyl chloride, covering one or more individual annealed copper conductors. Each of the current-carrying conductors in the "core" is insulated by an individual thermoplastic sheath, coloured to indicate the purpose of the conductor concerned. The protective earth conductor may also be covered with insulation, although, in some countries, this conductor may be left as bare copper. The type of thermoplastic, the dimensions of the conductors and the colour of their individual insulation are specified by the regulatory bodies in the various countries concerned.
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Trojan Room coffee pot
Picture: Quentin Stafford-Fraser
The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam. The coffee pot was located in the corridor just outside the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. The webcam was created in 1991 to help people working in other parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee pot by providing, on the user's desktop computer, a live 128×128 pixel greyscale picture of the state of the coffee pot. The webcam was shut down on 22 August 2001, following the Computer Laboratory's move to the William Gates Building.
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Nesjavellir
Photo credit: Gretar Ívarsson
The Nesjavellir geothermal power plant, located near Þingvellir, Iceland is the largest of five such plants in the country. Because of the high concentration of volcanoes in Iceland, geothermal energy is so inexpensive that in the wintertime, some pavements in Reykjavík and Akureyri are heated.
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Commodore 64
Photo: Evan Amos
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced in 1982 by Commodore International. Its low retail price and easy availability led to the system becoming the market leader for three years. It remains the best-selling single personal computer model of all time.
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Fuel injection
Image credit: WikipedianProlific
An animated cut-away diagram of a typical fuel injector, which is used to spray controlled amounts of petrol (gasoline) into an internal combustion engine. A solenoid is activated when fuel is intended to be delivered to the engine, causing the plunger to become pulled toward the solenoid by magnetic force. This uncovers the valve opening, allowing fuel to flow into the atomiser and out the spray tip. The route of fuel is shown in orange; grey/blue indicates no fuel present.
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Telephone
Credit: Berthold Werner
A telephone, or phone, is a telecommunications device that converts sound, typically the human voice, into electronic signals suitable for transmission via cables or other transmission media over long distances through satellite.
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Windmills
Photograph: Uberprutser
A windmill is a mill that converts the energy of wind into rotational energy by means of vanes called sails or blades. Traditional windmills were often used to mill grain, pump water, or both. Most modern windmills take the form of wind turbines used to generate electricity, or windpumps used to pump water, either for land drainage or to extract groundwater.

Here, the smock mill Goliath is viewed in front of the wind farm Growind in Eemshaven in the Netherlands.
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Main topics

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The following are images from various technology-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 13D printer (from Emerging technologies)
Image 2Alessandro Volta with the first electrical battery. Volta is recognized as an influential inventor. (from Invention)
Image 3Pont du Gard in France, a Roman aqueduct (from History of technology)
Image 4A water-powered mine hoist used for raising ore, ca. 1556 (from History of technology)
Image 5The compartmented water wheel, here its overshot version (from History of technology)
Image 6Johannes Gutenberg's printing press was voted the most important invention of the second millennium. (from Invention)
Image 7A late Bronze Age sword or dagger blade (from History of technology)
Image 8A rare 1884 photo showing the experimental recording of voice patterns by a photographic process at the Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Many of their experimental designs panned out in failure. (from Invention)
Image 9Solid-state air batteries
Li-Air composition (from Emerging technologies)
Image 10Ford assembly line, 1913. The magneto assembly line was the first. (from History of technology)
Image 11Clock from Salisbury Cathedral, ca. 1386 (from History of technology)
Image 12Design for a flying machine (c.1488) by da Vinci (from History of technology)
Image 13The preserved Rocket (from History of technology)
Image 14Edison electric light bulbs 1879–80 (from History of technology)
Image 15Top 30 AI patent applicants in 2016 (from Emerging technologies)
Image 16An axehead made of iron, dating from the Swedish Iron Age (from History of technology)
Image 17NASA Fuel cell stack
Direct-methanol cell (from Emerging technologies)
Image 18A variety of stone tools (from History of technology)
Image 19Eric M. C. Tigerstedt (1887–1925) was known as a pioneer of sound-on-film technology. Tigerstedt in 1915. (from Invention)
Image 20'BUILD YOUR OWN TELEVISION RECEIVER.' Science and Invention magazine cover, November 1928 (from Invention)
Image 21Walls at Sacsayhuaman (from History of technology)
Image 22The wheel, invented sometime before the 4th millennium BC, is one of the most ubiquitous and important technologies. This detail of the "Standard of Ur", c. 2500 BCE., displays a Sumerian chariot. (from History of technology)
Image 23Dome of Florence Cathedral (from History of technology)
Image 24Self-replicating 3D printer (from Emerging technologies)
Image 25Newcomen steam engine for pumping mines (from History of technology)
Image 26Thomas Edison with his second phonograph, photographed by Levin Corbin Handy in Washington, April 1878 (from History of technology)
Image 27Agriculture preceded writing in the history of technology. (from History of technology)

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

... that the Japanese manga series Mink featured futuristic technology even though its creator was unfamiliar with computers?
... that astrophysicist Alan C. Cummings has led more than 1,700 weekly birdwatching walks at Caltech since 1986?
... that Kathanar – The Wild Sorcerer is being shot on a custom-built studio spanning 45,000 square feet (4,200 m²), utilizing the virtual production technology?
... that Carmel Naughton, having been told that girls were "stupid and couldn't do maths", sponsored a STEM scholarship fund?
... that Byrnihat was ranked by an air technology company as the world's most polluted city in 2024?
... that the Illinois Institute of Technology created Chicago's smallest park by deeding a 54-square-foot (5 m²) granite slab to the city?
... that Aileen Davies sang roles on the first two D'Oyly Carte Opera Company recordings using the new electrical-recording technology?
... that, after an attempt to sell the Tokamak de Varennes to Iran failed, it became a display at the Canada Science and Technology Museum?

News

June 19, 2026 –: Malaysian researchers identify Pleurocordyceps cornusynnemata, a new fungal species in Borneo that parasitizes Ophiocordyceps fungi infecting ants. Scientists also report the discovery of a previously undocumented spider-infecting fungus. (AFP via CBS News)
June 16, 2026 – China–Kenya relations, Kenya–Taiwan relations: Taiwan says the Kenyan foreign ministry revoked visas issued to Taiwanese scientists and prevented them from attending the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa. China states that Kenya's actions are consistent with its adherence to the One China policy. (Reuters)
June 10, 2026 –: Chinese scientists discover the largest known whale graveyard in the Indian Ocean, identifying nearly 500 whale skeletons spanning millions of years and documenting deep-sea ecosystems associated with the remains. A new species, Pterocetus diamantinae named after the location, was also discovered. (AFP via France 24) (The Guardian)
May 12, 2026 –: American autonomous driving technology company Waymo recalls 3,800 robotaxis over risks that they could enter flooded areas. (Reuters)
May 5, 2026 – COVID-19 drug development: German biotechnology company BioNTech announces it will halt production of its COVID-19 vaccine due to drastic restructuring plans, leaving sole production of the vaccine to its partner Pfizer. (DW) (Wall Street Journal)
April 30, 2026 –: American company Cloudflare states that Russian messenger app Max is a spyware app. (Ukrainian News)