A relationship with technology is central to being human, but it is not well under­stood. Humans create technology and have done since the earliest times, and this is commonly taken as a sign of what distinguishes humanity from the sub-primates. Equally, though, our technologies create us, enabling the activities and experiences and forms of social organization that make us who we are. This intimate imbrica­tion of technologies in the formation of human bodies, minds, and structures of feeling is less well appreciated. To understand fully this reciprocal relationship between humanity and its technology is becoming an ever more urgent task. The world that we experience is one where technology seems to be taking control (which is not necessarily a new perception of human life), but also a world where the affordances of our technologies are having a detrimental effect on the planet we inhabit (which is a new and urgent perception). Hands on history is a central method in the overdue rethinking of the reciprocal relationship between humanity and the technologies it creates. The hands on approach validates physical encounters and revalues ‘skills’ as the basis of the generation of knowledge and thought, as Ellis argues in his con­tribution to this collection. Hands on history techniques involve various forms of physical exploration of technologies as means of understanding how technolo­gies have changed, and how they have changed us. History provides a distance, a ‘making strange’ (Shklovsky 1991) which, in this case, makes it much easier to reflect upon how our bodies relate to technologies and how we have taken for granted views about the use of technologies. Humans habitually adapt themselves physically and mentally to their technologies. Almost all technologies have affor­dances which remain unexploited. It is difficult to perceive these two features of our relationship with our everyday technologies. An encounter with the tech­nologies of the past, once equally familiar but now fallen into disuse, will more eadily reveal the double sided relationship between machines and people, bodies and tools, perceptions and potentials.