The Heart, Life, and Soul of Technology
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Date
1988-04-12
Authors
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Publisher
Obafemi Awolowo University Press
Abstract
The ivory-tower ritual of delivering an inaugural lecture
which I am now called upon to perform was of course
transplanted into this country by the British. Within Britain
itself, there was some semblance of this activity at the
University of Oxford- at least as early as 1623 when, as the
first Camden Professor of History, Digory Whear mounted
the rostrum to deliver his oratio auspicalis in the Schola
Grammaticae. By the time of Edward Thwaites (Regius
Professor of Greek, also at Oxford) in 1708, the inaugural
lecture had 'become somewhat _forrn alised, and the lecture
has since come to be perceived by scholars as something of
an intellectual feast prepared by the lecturer according to
his own recipe.
My recipe for this lecture, the first from the Department
of Mechanical Engineering of this University, is a fairly brief
e.~osition of some aspects of technology. The expose
shall be lightly flavoured with summaries in the appropriate
places of some of my contributions to knowledge and activities
in the field for more than twenty years. I shall be di~ging
into the past, tugging at the present, and (occasionally)
crystal-gazing into the future. The thrust of my arguments
shall be directed at some of those key elements which I consider
to be the real foundations of technology. Hence my
choice of a rather basal title: The Heart, Life, and Soul of
Technology.
According to G.K. Chesterton ( a famous English essayist,
novelist, and critic), "All slang is metaphor and all metaphor
is poetry." But my use of the metaphors Heart, Life and
Soul in the title of this lecture (and of similar metaphors
elsewhere in the lecture}, is largely a deliberate attempt to
hum anise technology. Afterall, technology, like the sabbath,
is made for man and not man for technology.
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Keywords
THE HEART OF TECHNOLOGY, THE HEART OF TECHNOLOGY, THE SOUL OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY