ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of the development of the tool. It explores four great phases or epochs, those are: the Stone Age, which is divided into the older or Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods; the Copper and Bronze Age; the Iron Age and the Machine Age. The chapter summarizes some of the most useful and important discoveries and inventions. The invention of gunpowder in the fourteenth century may be considered to be the third great advance on the way to man’s dominion over the earth; the two earlier being the subjugation of fire and the working of metals. In the second half of the eighteenth century came the discoveries of the great industrial machines which revolutionized science and manufacture, and led on to the capitalistic system which places the whole civilized world on a different basis, and so introduces another epoch.
