loyment. Connectivity is, however, not a term that is exclusive to telecoms but includes transport, water and power. To put this in an historical context, steam and coal, steel and oil, the motor car, the aeroplane, the valve and the transistor have created and shaped the world that we live in today - the discoveries and developments, inventions and innovations that have provided the foundation for today's modern connected economy. However, technologies always come with a social and environmental price tag attached. a general rule the costs and the benefits are not equally distributed geographically of demographically - technology does not have a good track record for delivering social or economic equality. So, should technology and the engineering needed to exploit technology have an explicit social purpose and if SO how should that purpose be measured and managed? An answer rather than the answer to the question can be found by analysing technology history in the developed world. The Science Museum8 helps with the analysis process by dividing 'recent' (1750 to 2000) technology history into eight overlapping periods 12.9.1 Enlightenment and Measurement 1750 to 18209 Henry the Eighth, a very modern politician, though with a marital record that would have not stood up well to modern media attention, laid the foundation for the age of Enlightenment by 8 These extracts reproduced with permission of the Science Museum http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ 9 http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/enlightenment_and_measurement/05.ST.05/ Making Telecoms Work spending a disproportionate amount of money on the British navy. This allowed Britain to build its colonial empire generating the wealth that went partly into an expanded University system. Two hundred years later, that same University system delivered Isaac Newton to the world and a generation of thinkers with the time and money to consider how the world could be understood and therefore managed through experiment, measurement and reason. Most things that moved 