Traditional wisdom about the nature of technology has customarily stressed the importance of necessity and utility.  Again and again we have been told that technologists through the ages provide humans with utilitarian objects and structures necessary for survival.

                                                                                    Basalla [1988, 2].

Basalla offers many examples where the original invention of something new occurred long before a need was recognized.  For example the automobile; the four-stroke internal combustion engine was invented in 1876 when clearly no one was in need of the automobile, ditto for trucks over the horse drawn wagon; and even the wheel appears as a toy in the archeological record before it appears as a tool.

Likewise Basalla offers examples of clear need where no invention has been successful, e.g.  fusion and a cure for cancer.

Basalla offers a third reason to doubt that "Necessity is the mother of invention," (my words not his). 

            widespread fantasization of technology is primarily a Western phenomenon.  The examples cited here are not the result of a deliberate and parochial concentration on European and American sources.  It would have been impossible to assemble a comparable set of records of any other of the great civilizations.  The process and the results are readily documented.  Perhaps the occurrence of technological fantasies at all levels of Western societies can be attributed to certain values that gained ascendancy during the Renaissance: secularization , the idea of progress, and the domination of nature.

                                                                                    Basalla [1988, 77].

Basalla's discussion of necessity and the invention of new artifacts is an excellent antidote for the clearly misguided notion that there is a simple relationship preceding from recognized need to new artifact.  But, in the end, I do not find Basalla providing a satisfactory explanation of that relationship.  He acknowledges this, "there is no broad theory of technological innovation that includes a majority of the factors influencing the emergence of novelty." [1988, 134].

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