An Outline of Ordinary Technology - table of contents

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• Title page
• Language
• Fire (bonfires, hearths, pit fires, ovens, kilns, furnaces)
• Flint
• Growing crops
  • Plant breeding
  • Soil fertility
  • Plowing
• Keeping animals
• Houses and buildings
  • Wattle and daub
  • Cob
  • Adobe bricks (mud bricks)
  • Building with wood
  • Dry stone walling
  • Splitting stone with hand-held tools
  • Brick (fired bricks)
  • Concrete and steel
• Textiles
  • Basketry
  • Preparing cotton, wool, and synthetic fibers
  • Spinning with a drop spindle
  • Spinning wheel
  • Automated spinning: 1800s to 2000s
  • Weaving
  • Sewing
• Grinding
  • Grinding on a rockface
  • Mortar and pestle
  • Saddle quern (metate)
  • Rotary hand grinder
  • Water mill with vertical shaft
  • Water mill with horizontal shaft and gearing
• Pottery
• Copper and bronze
• Iron and steel:
  • Outline of iron and steel
  • Early iron smelting
  • Blacksmith
  • Cast iron before the 1800s
  • Steel before the 1800s
  • How steel became cheap and plentiful during the industrial revolution of the 1800s
  • Machine tools
  • Railways
  • Iron and steel recycling
• Getting water
  • Hand-dug wells
  • Deep wells
  • Cisterns (water tanks)
  • Water towers
  • Irrigation ditches
  • Terraces
  • Dams
  • Reservoirs
  • Artificial water channels (aqueducts)
  • Canals
  • Qanat
  • Plumbing
  • Lifting water:
    • Windlass and bucket
    • Bucket chain
    • Shaduf
    • Archimedes screw
    • Noria
    • Hand pump
• Machines powered by flowing water
• Mechanisms (cranes, pulleys, gearing, line shafts)
• Windmills and wind turbines
• Combustion engines
• Electric grids, electric motors and dynamos
• Miscellaneous
  • An outline of lime
  • Limestone
  • Limewash