In the early years of collective human existence, observation of events required the usage of people’s senses to analyse the events and the underlying order behind them.
Developments in the fields of astronomy, medicinal sciences, mathematics, etc., were appreciable and intercultural contacts between people enabled collective growth of humans as a species.
But, however broad the progress in understanding reality was, people always met a dead end, not in what they observed, but the means through which they saw reality obstructed them in progressing further.
The observation of the stars, the Sun and the Moon in the sky made people realise they were floating on a piece of rock around which all the heavenly bodies revolved, while observation of the flesh and bones in living organisms made people realise the difference between organic and inorganic matter.
However hard one might have looked into, he or she could not look past the flesh and blood of living organisms and look into the cellular structures that lay below, and one couldn’t understand the working of the stars or how vast the universe housing them was!
These incapacities prompted humankind to develop machines and technologies to help them in their research about reality in a more enhanced way. Varied explanations about the working of reality at different times in history are proof for this. While Ptolemy explained the sky using his naked eyes, Galileo and Copernicus did so using telescopes! While Isaac Newton explained gravity using an apple, Albert Einstein explained gravity using theories and calculations!
What happened during those intermediate periods was the growth of science and technology. Developments in science and technology were slow until the 19th century owing to various reasons (with religions topping the list), but with the advent of the industrial revolution, the technological growth humankind saw was unprecedented!
The imagination of humans soared to new levels, and the instruments and methods they used to study reality were increasingly improvised to higher perfection!
