Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes (1856–1936) was a French officer and early historian of technology. After his early retirement from the French army in 1901, Lefebvre devoted his time to technological studies, then quite a new field, becoming a main proponent of the negative impact of slavery on technological progress in classical antiquity. Although dissenting voices emerged as early as the 1930s, his primitivist views of ancient traction technology met with considerable success in the 1950s and 1960s when authorities like the medievalist Lynn White and the sinologist Joseph Needham, but also many classicists, relied rather uncritically on his research.