The experience of forty years of discussions in ICOHTEC has produced a mature understanding of the nature of technology. Crucial to this understanding has been the development of ideas about technological education, not as a sub-set of scientific education but as a distinctive procedure, requiring a combination of theoretical knowledge with practical skills, together with a comprehension of the global role of technology in stimulating innovation and securing its development. This subject was first tackled systematically by ICOHTEC in its 22nd Symposium, held in Bath in 1994, when a series of eighteen papers was presented on ‘The institutional organisation of engineers’ in which the educational culture of technology was explored in several dimensions. This in turn was one of five sections, in which the second, on ‘The manufacture and marketing of gunpowder’, also instituted what was to become a long-lasting group of scholars within ICOHTEC. Whereas the gunpowder group still survives, however, that on the educational culture of technology only ran for a few more symposia – at Liege, Lisbon, Belfort and Prague – before dispersing into a more general concern about the institutional and environmental consequences of modern technology.