By Kognos, CC BY-SA 4.0
Joseph Needham was born in London on December 9, 1900, under the name (according to the obituary in The Independently Mansel Davies) Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham. This fulsome name reminds us that he arrived in the well-ordered, and now legendary pre-1914 world, an age of science and innocence, that took him to Caius College, Cambridge, where he “read” medicine and, from 1920 to 1942, “made his home, in the most real of senses” in the biological laboratory.” He was a Fellow and then Master at Gonville and Caius College from 1924 to 1976, while serving as Reader in biochemistry from 1933 to 1966. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 (as did his wife, ne’e Dorothy Moyle, in the same year).
On March 24, 1995, in his 94th year, Needham departed a different world and a different career. In the mid-1930s, when three Chinese biochemists visited and remained for some time at Cambridge, Needham was a leading biochemist who had even published on the history of that topic. Being already well equipped in ancient and modern languages of the west, he was now motivated to the study of Chinese. Thus he was prepared for an appointment in 1942 as a “scientific counselor” to the Nationalist government, then at Chungking, where he remained throughout the war. This experience, and his prior interest in the history of biochemistry, made an appropriate background to the idea of producing a comprehensive and academically respectable history of science in China.
On returning to Cambridge, Needham obtained the agreement of his University and of its publishing arm—the latter said to have expressed the hope that the project could be accomplished within the pages of a single volume, but finally to have settled for seven. The title was to be Science and Civilisation in China, a tide that seems curious to the reader who discovers that the work not only covers the history of Chinese technology, but that this comes close to being the main concern of the book. It may reflect an academic unawareness of the history of technology (or perhaps a “market” decision) at the time the book was formally decided upon, but it can hardly have been an afterthought by the time of publication, for the preface to volume one begins: “The history of science is now more and more recognized as an element of cardinal importance in the history of human civilisation. In the course of this development it has been natural for Western Europeans to work backward from modern science and technology, tracing the evolution of scientific thought to the experiences and achievements of Mediterranean antiquity.” The term technology (in one form or another) appears five times (and engineer once) on this page, which concludes, “How could it have been that the weakness of China in theory and geometrical systematization did not prevent the emergence of technological discoveries and inventions often far in advance. . . ?”
An attempt to understand Needham’s approach may benefit from a superimposition on these two careers—scientist and historian— of a third that might be called “applied sociologist.” Davies reports that the young Needham was characterized by “a deep appreciation of Christian teaching and of the Anglican Church.” It is also reported that he “confessed,” after his experience in China, that he might be as much a Taoist. His religion was strongly social. During the General Strike of 1926 he mastered the art of locomotive “engin [sic] driving,” in a gesture of sympathy that subsequently made him a representative of the Labour Party in local politics. Then came the Spanish Civil War, and then his personal observation of the Kuomintang government at Chungking, all leading to a sympathetic view of Marxism that eventually made him persona grata in Beijing and the opposite (fortunately a temporary position) in the United States. He was not a fair-weather friend.
These are highlights of a distinguished career that preceded what readers of this journal know well as his great work, the multivolume (and continuing) Science and Civilisation in China. At the time of Needham’s death the number of actual volumes had reached seventeen and the end was hardly in sight. In the most recent, Needham tells us that those associated with the project have come to refer to the original seven as “heavenly” volumes, the actual volumes as “earthly.”
My personal acquaintance with Needham began in 1959, with the receipt of a printed post card, in Latin, from “Josephus Needham apud Anglos in Universitate Cantabrigiensi scientiae naturalis doctor,” requesting reprints of some articles. In the years following we had occasional communication (in English), mostly queries one to the other, in which I had ample occasion to witness the astonishing range of his informed curiosity.
It seems most appropriate to my personal experience with him, and to the probable interest of the readers of this journal, that I use this space for an evaluation of his great work, particularly from the viewpoint of the history of technology. I make no claim to be Needham’s “peer.” To find his equal as a contributor to the field to which this journal is dedicated, it might be necessary to go back to Johann Beckmann (1739–1811), sometimes cited as the “father” of the history of technology. He was a man of comparable energy, whose Anleitung zur Technologie (1777) and better-known Geschichte der Eifindung (1784–1805), plus a twelve-volume “Contribution” (Beitrage, 1784–1805), were all sandwiched between issues of a twenty-three volume Physikalische-Okonomische Bibliothek published between 1770 and 1807.
It has been reported that as early as the 16th century, Giralomo Cardano singled out three inventions—the magnetic compass, printing, and gunpowder—as inventions “to which the whole of antiquity has nothing to show.” This was long before they were recognized as Chinese inventions. By Beckmann’s time they were recognized as exotic, but still not firmly situated. Beckmann believed that gunpowder had been invented in India (from which most European saltpeter came in his time).
By the 17th century China had begun to fascinate Europeans; they studied it extensively in the 18th and 19th centuries, and by the beginning of the 20th century European knowledge of China included an awareness of its priority in other technologies, such as paper and printing. But Ludwig Darmstaedter, in his chronology of inventions and discoveries (Handbuch zur Geschichte der Naturwissenchaften und der Technik, 1908), although he credited the Chinese with the invention of gunpowder (in 1232) and of a “fire-lance” in 1259, remained uncertain about the firearm, crediting Roger Bacon and Marcus Graecus with the introduction of guns (Geschütz) about 1250. In assigning the discovery of the magnetic compass to the year 1181 Darmstaedter only admits the possibility that it may have been a Chinese invention.
When Needham began his project there was still no comprehensive work on the history of science or technology in China, although the latter was in a relatively better state, as exemplified by George Sarton’s publication (in Isis, Technology and Culture not having been invented yet), just after the end of the war, of several articles of unprecedented scholarly quality on the history of firearms in China. These articles revealed that there was then a community of scholars willing and able to contend with the difficulties of that field. One of them was Needham.
The first volume appeared in 1953, with Needham and Wang Ling—one of the Chinese scholars who had visited Cambridge in the 1930s, and by this time a professor at the Australian University at Canberra—as coauthors. Wang Ling was one of the first of a scholarly army of volunteers and collaborators whose participation must have made the project possible. Needham must surely be credited for inspiring that degree of cooperation, but he was never absent, even from the massive volume 6, part 2, on agriculture, where Francesca Bray appears as the sole author; for her thanks for his help is reinforced by her base, Needham’s East Asian History of Science Library, and by the familiar format of Science and Civilisation in China, by now Needham’s trademark to anyone interested in China.
Volumes 1 through 3 appear to have gone according to plan. It was clearly a spacious plan. The first volume, a leisurely tome of Introductory Orientations (1954), cast some doubt on the publisher’s hoped-for containment. In view of the exotic character of the subject it was justified. It gives a preview of many opinions elaborated in later volumes, and indicates the limitations of his “time frame” which begins in “the beginning” but rarely extends beyond the coming of the Jesuits at the end of the 16th century, when “Chinese science fused with universal world science” (SCC, 1:148).
Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought (1956), plunged Needham into the heart of the question, the comparison of western with Chinese “thought.” Westerners have to begin with the early Greek philosophers, to whom the philosophy of nature was fundamental. But whereas in Greece theories of knowledge (epistemology) appear to have grown out of “natural philosophy,” in Needham’s volume 2 the reverse appears to have been the case in China. He appears to have followed what has been represented as the “standard” exposition of Feng Yu-Lan, published in the mid-1930s (and later in an English version, under the title A Short History of Chinese Philosophy [New York: Macmillan, 1948]). Comparing the celebrated Chinese “schools”— Confucians, Taoists, Mohists, and their successors—Needham found “the fundamental ideas of Chinese science” rooted in “Taoist empiricism.” James R. Ware, who began a review of volume 2 by calling it “a superb, a magnificent volume,” doubted Needham’s basing his exposition on Taoism, and particularly his description of Taoists and Confucianists as “absolute enemies.” He also doubted Needham’s association of the Taoists with “primitive cooperative village life,” thinking the ancient Chinese too sophisticated for that, and suggesting that their attitudes may better be compared to “the modern American city-dweller’s yearning for a poultry- or vegetable-farm. Needham recognized the difficulty of reconciling the Taoist interest in technology with their devotion to the simple life, and did his best to rationalize it.
Having used up two of his seven volumes, Needham came, in volume 3, to mathematics, astronomy, and geology {Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, 1959). Su-Shu Huang, an astrophysicist reviewing this volume, remarked that the absence in China of western subdivisions of natural science forced Needham to select materials from various sources and put them together. And he questioned Needham’s positive conclusions, claiming that Chinese science was descriptive, devoid of logical system, and utilitarian to the level of practical arts. In the case of astronomy, Huang held that the focus of the Chinese astronomer on the celestial pole (while the western astronomer focused on the ecliptic) enabled him to develop the equatorial mounting and a water-driven mechanism to compensate for diurnal revolution. Huang (who was associated with the American National Aeronautics and Space Agency) found astronomy important in China because it was “the business of the federal government.”
Western studies of particular sciences in China had uniformly found more of value than they had expected, although not enough to compete with the western science as revealed by studies in the history of science. But some thought that Chinese science had at one time been as advanced, or even superior to, western science, and that it had “declined” after the 15th century under the pressure of western military and political dominance. Needham took this view with a vengeance, supporting it with a flood of evidence from an apparently inexhaustible reservoir, literary and archaeological, most of it unavailable to his critics. Not all were silenced. Huang thought Chinese science backward because a government of scholars chosen by examination (in the “classics”) lacked an incentive to pursue other fields.
Science and Civilisation in China reached a moment of truth when it became evident that volume 4, Physics and Physical Technology, could not encompass both; so it was subdivided into two “parts” that were actually volumes in themselves. Even so, part 2, Mechanical Engineering (1965), reached 759 pages and a part 3 was added, for Civil Engineering and Nanties (1971). At 931 pages this threatened the weight-lifting power of the reader, and inspired complaints that were answered by promises of smaller volumes. These problems clearly stemmed from the inclusion of technology. As already appears in Huang’s review of volume 3, technology was not only too interesting to be ignored, but was often the basis for arguments about the importance of science. Thus was recognized the inevitable intrusion of technology between science and civilization that was to expand the project to a total of fifteen, with, according to the Needham Research Institute, “a good number to come.”
It appears to me that volume 4, in its three parts, redefined the project as primarily a history of technology, with excursions into its consequences for both science and society in China; and that arguments for Chinese priority have become a conspicuous feature of the work. With reference to physics, Needham wrote (vol. 4, pt. 2) that in ancient and medieval China “the mathematization of hypothesis had not yet brought modern science to birth . . . mechanics was weakly studied and formulated, dynamics almost absent” (SCC, 4:2:xliii).
But where, in volume 4, part 2, he took up the piece de resistance of early western technology, the European Hellenistic “machine books” (which he typically described at length), he showed that the Chinese topped them. Who could the West find to compare with Ma Chün, who flourished about 260 AD, later than the major Hellenistic machine-builders, but who produced automata of dancing girls who played music, men who beat drums and played flutes, others who made a mountain with wooden images dancing on balls, throwing swords about, hanging upside-down on rope ladders, showed government officials in their offices, pounding and grinding (I think these are two different events), cocks fighting . . . and all continuously changing with a hundred variations. Nor was Ma Chün as frivolous as might appear; he improved the silk loom, explained the operation of the south-pointing chariot (a non-magnetic device already ancient in his time), irrigated gardens with man-powered square pallet chainpumps, and invented the rotary ballista, a flywheel with stones attached to the rim by cords which were cut on attainment of the appropriate rotational speed—thus a kind of machine-gun (SCC, 4:2:39, 4:2:158).
Ma Chün was “an engineer,” and hence, Needham reported, unappreciated by the official scholars. And there are areas of technology where the Chinese may have lagged: for example, locks, where Needham speculated on a transmission from Egypt or Mesopotamia, while cautioning that in this topic “everything is waiting to be done.” “Everything” wasn’t waiting in the case of the windmill, but Needham found “very few references” to any type of windmill before a European traveler mentioned seeing windmills—of the horizontal type known in the middle ages in Islam—along the Grand Canal in 1656 (SCC, 4:2:557–61). This is in remarkable contrast to what he found about clocks. It is a notorious case, for Needham termed the introduction in China of European “self sounding bells” (alarm clocks) by the Jesuits in 1583 “the first decisive step” in “the unification of world science in eastern Asia.” But Needham, who had called the clock “a distinctively European invention” in volume 1 (SCC, 1:243), now withdrew that. In along argument (part of which he had already made, with Derek Price and Wang Ling, in Heavenly Clockwork: The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960]), he traced the Chinese escapement, crucial element of the mechanical clock, back to the eighth Christian century (and “pre-clocks” to about the year 125 AD.
The giant volume 4, part 3, is devoted to Civil Engineering and Nautics (1971). One would expect more activity in the former in China than in Europe, in consideration of China’s greater size and antiquity. Needham’s originality appears here, as he considered the road systems of Rome and China more or less equal and found both declining in the 3rd century AD, but for different reasons; Rome was then breaking up into underdeveloped “feudal kingdoms,” while China was abandoning roads in favor of “an immense system of navigable rivers and artificial canals.”
“Hydraulic engineering” in antiquity is everywhere a neglected subject. In rectifying this for China, Needham considered Babylonia and Egypt, and later India and Ceylon, comparable in terms of techniques of irrigation as well as canals for transport, and noted the relative unimportance of this technology in Europe up to the French canals of the 17th century. China had lock gates from the 1st century BC, later than Mesopotamia; in Europe the Dutch pioneered lock gates from the 11th century. And Needham detailed six great hydraulic innovations, ranging from the most familiar, the Grand Canal, “born” in the 4th century BC and taking its “definitive form” in 1327, to the still functioning Kuanhsien irrigation system on the Cheng-tu plain in Szechuan, an overlooked wonder of the ancient world (SCC, 4:3:288–96).
This gives a clue to the space given “nautics.” Chinese superiority in nautical technology comes as a surprise in view of China’s reputation as a closed society, but there are the famous cases of the magnetic compass, the sternpost rudder, the navigation of the Yangtze, and Cheng Ho’s great fleet of immense ships that toured the Indian ocean at the beginning of the 15th century. These are tips of an iceberg that Needham described in over three hundred pages, concluding with a tabulation of innovations that he claimed had been “transmitted” to the west.
Volume 5, which has dwarfed volume 4, reflects the merits of the decision to subdivide each into subvolumes, and also its defects. Still incomplete after seven published earthly volumes (Needham thought that the number might eventually reach thirteen!), heavenly volume 5 is titled Chemistry and Chemical Technology, and its bulk is presumably to be explained, in part, by the fact this it is closest to Needham’s own “field,” as a scientist, and to his predilection for Taoism, the workshop of Chinese alchemy. But volume 5 is also something of a catchall. Part 1, Paper and Printing (1985), by T. H. Tsien (Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin) of the University of Chicago, was the first to be solely attributed (although with a foreword by Needham) to another author. In response to the complaints about volume 4, it totals a mere 485 pages—still enough to overwhelm several meritorious predecessors (Tsien’s author’s note reveals the effort involved and the assistance required in producing these volumes).
One could surmise that volume 5 came close to breaking the publisher’s back. Tsien’s part 1 followed by eleven years the publication of part 2, Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality (1974), written by Needham (who explains that his title refers to “alchemy and early chemistry”) “with the collaboration” of Lu Gwei-Djen (another of the trio who visited Cambridge in the 1930s). The authors subdivide alchemy into “aurifaction” and “aurifiction,” differentiating “the belief that it is possible to make gold,” from “the conscious imitation of gold,” and distinguish both from “macrobiotics . . . the belief that it is possible to prepare drugs or elixirs which will prolong human life beyond old age . . . finally attaining the status of eternal life.” For the benefit of the uninitiated, Needham refers to these as “gold-faking, gold-making, and the preparation of the drug of deathlessness.” The volume ends in a discussion of “terminal incorruptibility” (SCC, 5:2:10–11).
Part 3, titled Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: From Cinnabar Elixirs to Synthetic Insulin (1976) is designated as a continuation of its predecessor and appears to be a response to the complaints of the size of volume 4. For it Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen were joined by a third coauthor, Ho Ping Yu. In his author’s note, Needham emphasizes the importance of distinguishing “alchemy from proto-chemistry . . . particularly as illustrated in the muddled thinking and confused terminology” of the traditional history in the West (SCC, 5:3:xx). He begins with “the historical development of alchemy and early chemistry” and ends, formally, with “the coming of modern chemistry.” But modern chemistry, as he notes, came only towards the end of the 18th century. The volume really ends with “the legacy of the Chinese alchemical tradition,” and a discussion of the domination of a “psychophysiological alchemy” and rejection of Taoist thought by “the age-old Confucian disdain for artisinal technology” (SCC, 5:3:219 ff).
Part 4 is a further continuation of Spagyrical Discovery and Invention, with the subtitle Apparatus, Theories and Gifts (1980). The authors are now four, Nathan Sivin being added (specializing in “the theoretical background of elixir alchemy”). The principal topics are, in addition to Sivin’s specialty, distillation, the chemistry of solutions, and again “macrobiotics.” At 772 pages this earthly volume again threatened the stability of the project. And yet Spagyrical Discovery continued, in a part 5 subtitled Physiological Alchemy (1983), and with only the two original authors. Needham found it prudent to begin with an apologia, to readers who feared that the work might be “enlarging according to some form of geometrical progression or along some exponential curve” (author’s note). He repeats verbatim his reference to the problem posed by “the muddled thinking and confused terminology of the traditional history in the West,” which confuses “that great creative dream” of “belief in an elixir, good against death, as the supreme achievement of the chemist . . . Once one has obtained a clear idea of the distinctions between aurifiction, aurifaction and macrobiotics everything that one encounters in the proto-chemistry and alchemy of all the Old World civilisations falls into place” (xxiv–xxv).
This earthly volume begins with a discussion of European esoteric alchemy, from Martin Luther to C. G. Jung, deals with corresponding Chinese thought, and ends with “macrobiogenesis,” by which Needham means respiration control, gymnastics, meditation and the like—leading up to “proto-biochemistry,” or “the enchymoma in the test tube”—and protoendocrinoiogy (SCC, 5:5:299). Here Needham is supported by both his specialties, in science and in sinology; and his inaccessibility to the layman may simply exemplify the handicap presently imposed on that increasingly hapless individual in the face of the obstacles posed by specialization.
Spagyrical Discovery and Invention is now finished, but volume 5 is not. In 1986 Needham published part 7 and in 1994 part 6, both dealing with military history. The latter, coauthored by Needham and Robin D. S. Yates, a specialist in sieges, deals with Missiles and Sieges. Liberated from the burden of explaining perfect medicines, Needham can relax; “nobody,” he notes “has ever been more successful than were the scholar-bureaucrats in keeping the soldiers down through the ages” (xxvii). “Ever since the Han epoch,” he tells us, “the military element was “treated as a manifestation of the
dark, negative, female [rzr] element Yin” (also characterized by “force, violence, torture, discretion and killing” [SCC, 5:6:92–93]). The crossbow (another celebrated invention of Chinese priority) is given thorough treatment, including a tentative conclusion that it originated with primitive peoples. With Wang Ling, and less thoroughly, Needham deals with ballistic machinery (throwing machines). Yates’s history of sieges, roughly three hundred pages long, is largely a study of archaeological sites. The inclusion of this topic in heavenly volume 5 is probably explained by part 7, The Gunpowder Epoch, which brings Needham to a piece de resistance. There is nothing occult in this volume. Illusions concerning European priority in virtually any kind of firearm before 1500 are thoroughly dispelled, and the cluster of inventions (guns, gunpowder, etc.) fundamental in world history are at last given the treatment they deserve—up to the 16th century and the large scale introduction of European weapons in China. Needham’s account of the discovery of saltpeter (mainly in parts 2 and 4 of volume 5) and the invention of gunpowder appears to be close to definitive. His account of firearms, although impressive, is less so—or perhaps it shows the limits of Chinese interest in a technology in which the addiction of Europeans has never flagged, a race in which the apparent tortoise turned out to be the hare.
This brings the project more or less up-to-date. In the prospectus of the entire work, published separately and included in volume 1, the topics to be treated were subdivided into fifty “sections,” and the first twenty-nine are treated successively in volumes 1 through 4. But it was that volume that approached the bulk of a sumo wrestler, leading to its subdivision into (three) parts. The reader will be relieved at the manageable size of (most) subsequent volumes, but unhappy to discover that he must try to keep track of parts as well as volumes and sections. Whereas heavenly volume 2 (Scientific Thought) contained eleven sections in one part, section 33 (“Alchemy and Chemistry”) occupies four parts (earthly volumes) of heavenly volume 5.
Needham had warned in the prospectus that beyond section 30 (“Military Technology”) the remainder were still to be decided on. As it has turned out, Section 30 has become another part of “Chemistry,” and has yielded two volumes, mentioned above, with (I believe) another to come. And the expandable heavenly volume 5 still owes us what should be one of the most important sections, section 36, “Mining and Metallurgy,” as well as another, “The Salt Industry,” which some might consider less important. Among the numerous other books published by Needham in his spare time is a volume on the history of iron and steel in China (The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China, London: Newcomen Society for the Study of the History of Engineering and Technology, 1958), but the absence of section 36 leaves unanswered many questions that arise in the mechanical parts of volume 4 (sections 26–29).
Of additional volumes that have been published, part 9 of volume 5, published in 1988, deals with spinning and reeling, with Dieter Kuhn as the sole author; it is one of two “earthly” volumes on textile technology, leaving to appear a second volume on textiles and another on ceramic technology. Of volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology, we have botany (section 38, 1986), with Needham as one of three coauthors, and agriculture (section 41, 1984), with Francesca Bray as sole author. In an April, 1994, newsletter, the Needham Research Institute reported the near-completion of an earthly volume on language, logic, and science in China, which would appear to be section 49, and a volume of general conclusions—section 50, and the last, according to the prospectus. Needham himself will appropriately be the author. Needham is also one of the authors of an unpublished history of Chinese medicine, and in progress are volumes on horticulture and botanical technology and on the salt industry.
As the work expanded it gave birth to the Needham Research Institute, with its own building and library on the Cambridge campus, completed in 1991. Needham was of course director, a position that was offered after his death to his longtime collaborator Ho Pengyoke.
The criticisms implied in some of my remarks are reluctantly made, although it would be an unsophisticated reader indeed who expected perfection in a work of this magnitude. Not even Aristotle (with whom one memorialist has compared Needham) managed to be flawless. Needham himself frequently noted the inadequacy of information on a particular topic, and one encounters tentative and dogmatic claims in the same context. Needham marched to a different drummer than Aristotle, but both were virtual founders of a discipline, masons, as it were, who laid a firm launching pad from which others can make “advances” in a history that had barely existed before them.
Robert P. Multhauf
Previously published as Robert P. Multhauf, “Joseph Needham (1900–1995),” Technology and Culture 37, no. 4 (1996): 880–91. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1996.0030.
Forum on Needham. Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 553–53. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0048. [A joint publication with ISIS, the journal for the History of Science Society, whose “Second Look” section has explored key classic texts in the History of Science. Four of the articles published here (by Hsia, Schäfer, Nappi, Wark, Chen, and Tilley) also appeared in ISIS (vol. 110, no. 1), and three (by Mei, Kuijpers, Zhang, and Tian) are unique to Technology and Culture.]
Hsia, Florence, and Dagmar Schäfer. “Introduction.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 554–61. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0035.
Nappi, Carla, and McKenzie Wark. “Reading Needham Now.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 562–73. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0036.
Chen, Buyun. “Needham, Matter, Form, and Us.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 574–82. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0037.
Tilley, Helen. “A Great (Scientific) Divergence: Synergies and Fault Lines in Global Histories of Science.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 583–93. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0038.
Mei, Jianjun. “Some Reflections on Joseph Needham’s Intellectual Heritage.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 594–603. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0039.
Kuijpers, Maikel H. G. “Materials and Skills in the History of Knowledge: An Archaeological Perspective from the “Non-Asian” Field.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 604–15. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0040.
Baichun, Zhang, and Tian Miao. “Joseph Needham’s Research on Chinese Machines in the Cross-Cultural History of Science and Technology.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 616–24. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0041.
Perdue, Peter C. “Joseph Needham’s Problematic Legacy.” Technology and Culture 47, no. 1 (2006): 175–78. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2006.0092.
Needham, Joseph, and Colin A. Ronan. The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978–1995.
Bedini, Silvio A. Review of The Hall of Heavenly Records: Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks 1380–1780, by Joseph Needham, et al. Technology and Culture 30, no. 3 (1989): 678–80. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1989.0076.
Gwei-Djen, Lu, Joseph Needham, and Phan Chi-Hsing. “The Oldest Representation of a Bombard.” Technology and Culture 29, no. 3 (1988): 594–605. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1988.0097.
Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–1987.
Needham, Joseph and Francesca Bray. Science and Civilization in China. Vol. 6. Biology and Biological Technology, Pt. 2, Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Needham, Joseph. “Chinese Priorities in Cast Iron Metallurgy.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 3 (1964): 398–404. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894858.