Just when you thought one epic thread on economic theory was enough for the day, I think it's time I picked up my history rant from a couple of weeks back. For those of you who don't remember, I was ranting about how we teach history. 1/n

For most of us in the west, we are taught history as a succession of battles & wars. We define our history by these events, by who fort on Senlac ridge? The siege of Leiden (all of them) etc... We define whole periods by it.

I think this is bad.

We can teach history better 2/n

How? Well let's look at the history of our technology. And by technology, I mean out tools. We define our species by our thinking. Homo Sapiens literally means "Man the thinker" but it's how we have thought up the tools to use that really define us. 3/n

On a long enough time line, it goes back to using rocks and sticks to access the marrow in bones of scavenged kills on the African Savannah. But I want to start a bit more recently. I want to start with one specific area. To start with, I want you to look down at your body 4/n

Looking down at your body, what do you see? The for the most part, you probably don't see your body, what you see is your clothes. If you are dressed, and in what we call the west, then chances are pretty good you're wearing Jeans. Sturdy trousers made from denim. 5/n

But even if you're not wearing jeans, then it's an almost dead cert that you're wearing clothes made at least in part from cotton. Humanities use of cotton goes back for thousands of years. But the ubiquity of it, the low cost, that is a relatively recent development. 6/n

If we go back even 50 years, chances are what you would be wearing would be made of wool. Go back even further and the likely hood goes up more and more. The production of wool defines our civilisations. It has literally made us who we are today. How so? let's find out. 7/n

Where does wool come from? well for the most part, sheep. There is wool made from other animal fibre, but for Europeans, the defining creature of origin is the Sheep. Ovis aries, as it prefers to be known on formal occasions, has evolved a lot over the years. 8/n

The Texels and Merinos and Blue faced Leicesters we're used to seeing these days are a far cry from the sheep of a 1000 or even 500 years ago. The sheep of the medieval era have a closer resemblance to the Soay sheep of the modern age. 9/n

I'm not going to go into detail here about how we got sheep in western Europe, as I want to finish this thread today, but the fact that sheep are in Western Europe is an interesting one about how humans have evolved and domesticated animals. 10/n

Sheep produce wool, and we chop the wool off the sheep right? Historically. No. Sheep were not shaun. You could simply comb out the loose fibres. The sheddings. To shear a sheep, you need tools. Our first technology. What tool? well you can use a knife, but shears are better 11/n

Now I could go into a long essay on the technological wonder that is modern steel, but for now, let's stick to wool. To shear a sheep you really want nice shears that take an edge, hold an edge, and have some spring. Wool is dependant on blacksmithing, and the bloomery 11/n

Over the years Humans have selectively bred sheep to produce better wool, to be easier to shear, etc... Believe it or not this is a technological development. The ideas of modern genetics have their foundation in selective breading and animal husbandry. 12/n

Having got the raw fleece off the animal, first by plucking, later by shearing. Now what? Well we want to turn that fleece into a yarn that we can later weave. The concept of cordage is up there with the wheel for it's impact on humanity. To take simple fibres, & make string 13/n

If you look at Otzi the Iceman, he has cordage made from multiple different plants, as well as sinews use across his clothing and equipment. Cordage is technology, and it is fundamental to who we are as a species. Enough string theory... 14/n

In order to turn the fleece into yarn, we need to first get all the fibres in the right direction. The term for this is carding. By hand we do it with two giant combs like paddles, called cards. But that wasn't always the case. Before cards, we used a teasel. 15/n

What's a teasel? it's the head of a big thistle. Specifically it's Dipsacus fullonum. If you've ever come across one, it's like a big pine cone covered in velcro. It's that velcro like function that allows it to work well in carding. Until cards came along. 16/n

From teasels to cards with metal pins to eventually full on steam powered carding machines, the technological evolution of this single step. It's a variant of the carding machine that made the american cotton industry viable. That made cotton plantations happen. 17/n

the cotton that grew best in the US (short staple cotton), is not the one that is easiest to card, as it has a lot of seeds and other stuff in there, so the invention of the cotton gin (short for engine) in the 18th century allowed this to be more viable commecially. 18/n

Back to wool. Having carded your fleece, your fibres are now in the right direction, but they need to be spun to make a fibre. You can do this on a small scale by just rolling it across your thigh or a flat stone. But that doesn't scale. 19/n

In the west, the first invention for this is the drop spindle. This is a stick with a weight on it, that when tied to a thread, and dropped, spins, making the thread spin. The Drop spindle is the only hand tool you do not hold to use. For hundreds of years, it was used. 20/n

The drop spindle is often depicted in use along side the distaff. This is a stick around which you store the raw fleece. The distaff is used by the goddess Frigg in norse mythology to weave clouds. This drop spindle has a key part in a woman's life. 21/n

Spinning was considered woman's work (see also spinster). A woman in the medieval period would rarely be without her drop spindle and distaff. It was something you could do as you walked along to market, or as you watched the sheep in the fields, or watched you kids. 22/n

It was something even girls of a young age could start to do. Spin spin spin. And it remained women's work, even with the invention of the spinning wheel. Right up to the point of industrialisation. It was women's work. Why? this is where things are interesting. 23/n

It's women's work because you can't support a whole family by spinning wool with a drop spindle. You just can't make enough thread. It doesn't scale. Sure you can make enough for the clothes of your family, but not much more. Even with the spinning wheel. 24/n

Having spun the yarn, we now need to weave it. There are other ways of turning yarn into fabric, all of them are essentially creative application of knots, but while Naalbinding has been around for a few thousand years, crochet and knitting are relatively new. 25/n

Naalbinding is slow and not great for making big areas of fabric. Good for socks and weird shapes, but not for a dress. For that you need a loom.

The first looms were what we call warp weighted looms. The weights feature strongly in the archaeological record. 26/n

This is a wooden frame, upon which hang the warp threads, of the fabric, attached to big heavy clay or soap stone weights. The Weft is then woven across the warp. This style of loom existed for thousands of years. The sales of viking ships were woven on these looms. 27/n

Yep, viking ship sales are made of wool. It took a lot of sheep, and a lot of women spinning to put a sale on one viking longship, so the men could go off raiding and trading...

But the warp weighted loom has limitations. It's slow, and can only make fabric so wide. 28/n

This limit kept weaving as women's work, it was slow, and you couldn't support a family on it. That is until the invention of the two bar loom, and it's friend the horizontal loom. Here wooden bars are used instead of weights to tension the warp. Fabric can be wider. 29/n

But more importantly, production speeds up. Here we start to see weaving switch to men's work. You can feed a whole family on the product of a single man weaving. Women continue to spin, but several supply one man weaving. There are incremental developments in looms. 30/n

But until the industrial revolution comes along, not much changes. There's various societal implications around spinning and weaving, guilds, unions, etc... But one of the bigger impacts of this increase in output, is a need for more sheep. A big need for sheep. 31/n

In the house of lords, the lord speaker sits on a sack of wool, Called (imaginatively), the woolsack. This is to remind us all how important wool is to our nation. The demand for wool, and the demand for sheep drove the highland clearances. 32/n

One of those many situations the English shat all over the Scots. The highland clearances involved moving the peasant farmers off the land, to make space for sheep. It's yet another dark part of British history. As well as shitting all over the people, it changed the land. 33/n

As well as moving the people off, they also cut down a lot of trees. The beautiful tree less uplands of much of Britain today come about cos of sheep. They were't always like that. It's not a natural landscape. It's made by humans, by a desire for wool fabric to make clothes 34/n

So where are we? What's the point of this 35+ post thread? Well I've tried to tell the story of the clothes we stand up in, the technology that's got us here, and the impact it's had on our history and society. Without just being about wars and battles. 35/n

Technology you say? But I've not even really got to the Industrial revolution.

Yep. That's intentional. We think of technology as big machines and steam and electronics. But there's more to it than that. The technology that surrounds us. Clothes us, is us. 36/n

Helen Czerski wrote a great article about this for Ada Lovelace day. We have people saying girls don't do technology, yet sit them in a room with a sewing machine. Have you any idea the amount of tech in even a simple hand cranked singer sewing machine? 37/n

Technology, and it's history, surround us everywhere. It defines who we are, it defines how we think. And it's more than just a succession of wars and battles. Let's appreciate it, let's teach it. Technology is who we are. Humans thinking.

End rant. 38/38.