Even as new technologies revolutionize everything from health care to media to warfare, it’s important to remember that our world runs primarily on products and technologies long in use — everything from aspirin to the internal combustion engine. In his new book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Imperial College London, argues for a new view of the history of technology that focuses not only on “Big Bang” innovations — Sony’s Walkman or a future spaceship that could carry humans to Mars — but also on incremental change and how societies use the technologies they invent or, just as important, borrow.

By reorienting the way we view technology, we can also better understand whether we’re making wise decisions in adopting new technologies, such as genetically modified crops — especially when there are often less expensive alternatives that, although perhaps not as innovative, may be less risky.

What’s wrong with our current understanding of technology?

EDGERTON: When we think about technology, we immediately think about invention and innovation and the future, and not about how things come into use. We’re always so enthusiastic about what’s going to happen in five or 10 years’ time. But we lack an explicit history of technology, by which I mean a history of the vast number of products that are in use at any particular time — as well as a history of innovation, outlining all of the inventions (large and small) from a particular period. Instead we have an unsatisfactory mixture of the two, leaving us with little more than excitable descriptions of the early life of some of the earth-shattering technologies that later became widely used.

That’s a major gap, because if we’re interested in the relationship between technology and society, we need to know what’s in use and what advances are being made throughout a culture at any particular time. And it is just as important to understand the inventions that failed as it is to study those that succeeded. In fact, the majority of all inventions fail, and they fail for a reason.

Your new book includes a table listing the top corporate spenders in R&D, the point being that they’re mostly very old companies. Why is that?

EDGERTON: The top five innovation spenders for 2003 were Ford Motor Company, Pfizer Inc., DaimlerChrysler AG, Siemens AG, and Toyota Motor Corporation. All but Toyota were in business before 1914. There’s extraordinary stability at the top of the list, and it’s certainly not the biotech and the IT companies that are up there, even though you’d expect that to be the case if you were listening to the hype of the futurists and innovation cheerleaders.

Why are several car companies at the top? Well, it costs a lot of money to develop a new car. Most people think that research expenditures are driven by the nature of the technologies themselves and their productivity. But that’s not the case. R&D levels are determined by what people want to pay for. And if people still want to pay for new cars — an invention running on an idea from 100 years ago — you’re going to have a lot of R&D in that area.

What can that tell us about the role of corporate R&D in the innovation process?

EDGERTON: There’s a lot of mythmaking about what R&D, even at universities, was like in the past. People exaggerate the extent to which blue-skies research dominated research. Now, that’s not to say that research with no particular object in mind has not been important. But thinking about actual uses of technology has always been much more important in research than people have made out.

That’s why it’s important to bear in mind that a lot of inventions emerge from use. The transistor didn’t come out of Bell Labs simply because they were doing blue-skies research. They had a long tradition of thinking about rectifiers and semiconductors. Yes, it involved a lot of creative thinking, but in a context in which people were immersed in a world of use of particular technologies.

We think we know what innovation means, but to study it, we use fiscal measures that don’t actually tell you much about innovation or invention. Consider patents. What are patents? They’re legal documents. They’re not in themselves a measure of inventiveness. Research and development spending is a measure of how much you spend on research and development. It doesn’t tell you anything about outputs.

A lot of people talk about the need for a new kind of business model and the spinout from universities and the small firm and the entrepreneurial small firm. That’s been the talk of the last 20 or 30 years, has it not? And yet, here we have IBM, which is a terrifically old company and has gone through many generations of technologies, but it is obviously the same corporate entity, the same high-level innovator. There are lots of different kinds of successful innovating firms.

One way of putting it is that the danger is not just in believing that there has been one model in the past and there should be one model in the future. It’s believing that we actually understand the history of technology, of processes of discovery, of what was in use and of invention, as well.