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Introduction

Michael Hobday, Andrea Prencipe, and Andrew Davies

in The Business of Systems Integration

This chapter introduces systems integration as the main topic book and then sets the scene for the discussion of the main themes presented in the book such as modularity, technology, the theory of ... More

This chapter introduces systems integration as the main topic book and then sets the scene for the discussion of the main themes presented in the book such as modularity, technology, the theory of the firm, and competitive advantage.Less

Technology in an Expanded Field: A Review of History ofTechnology Scholarship on Latin America in SelectedEnglish-Language Journals

Michael Lemon and Eden Medina

in Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America

Lemon and Medina analyze how two different academic communities, Latin American studies and the history of technology, have approached the telling of Latin American history of technology, based on a ... More

Lemon and Medina analyze how two different academic communities, Latin American studies and the history of technology, have approached the telling of Latin American history of technology, based on a review of the English-language literature on the history of technology in Latin America in two of the top journals from the history of technology and three of the top journals on Latin America. Through an analysis of number of articles published, they identify important differences in how each community addresses the topic of technology, and the authors highlight what has been made visible and invisible in each field. They conclude by suggesting ways to broaden how scholars in these fields write technology history in the Latin American context.Less

Suppression and Revival: Technology in World War II and the Cold War

Eric Schatzberg

in Technology: Critical History of a Concept

By the end of the 1930s, the concept of technology seemed on the verge of becoming a keyword in academic discourse. But during and after World War I, science became even more identified with ... More

By the end of the 1930s, the concept of technology seemed on the verge of becoming a keyword in academic discourse. But during and after World War I, science became even more identified with technological modernity, displacing the concept of technology. Ironically, in an era when modern technology drew ever more heavily on science, natural scientists and humanist intellectuals doubled down on the ideology of pure science. Yet countervailing trends during the early Cold War encouraged wider use of the concept of technology. These trends included a new economic discourse on technological innovation, critiques of technology based in Continental philosophy, and the rise of the history of technology as an academic field.Less

Introduction

Michael Hobday, Andrea Prencipe, and Andrew Davies

in The Business of Systems Integration

Introduces and sets the scene for the discussion of the main themes presented in the book.

Introduction: Beyond Imported Magic

Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes

in Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America

The introductory chapter to the edited volume Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America argues that understanding international science and technology ... More

The introductory chapter to the edited volume Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America argues that understanding international science and technology requires moving beyond models of diffusion (or imported magic) into concepts developed in postcolonial science studies and Latin American studies. Such concepts, the introduction suggests, allow the field to formulate and incorporate new ideas and knowledge about how Latin American peoples, countries, cultures, and environments create, adapt, and use science and technology. The chapter reviews the book’s three themes: Latin American perspectives on science, technology, and society; local and global networks of innovation; and science, technology and Latin American politics. It also presents a genealogy of STS research in Latin America.Less

Engineering Gold Rushes: Engineers and the Mechanics of Global Connectivity

Stephen Tuffnell

in Global History of Gold Rushes

This chapter, “Engineering Gold Rushes,” by Stephen Tuffnell, examines the mechanics of late nineteenth-century global connectivity through the development of “mine engineering” as a global ... More

This chapter, “Engineering Gold Rushes,” by Stephen Tuffnell, examines the mechanics of late nineteenth-century global connectivity through the development of “mine engineering” as a global profession and the manifold interactions between the global and the national that contributed to that process. Internationally mobile mine engineers developed the mechanisms for transporting and maintaining the technologies of empire and extraction that converged on the goldfields. Nongovernmental mining institutes founded across the world, international congresses, and widely circulating technical journals acted as mechanisms for knowledge exchange and forums for cooperation. Underlying the emergence of specialist engineers were higher education systems that aimed at developing rival national or imperial professional identities that existed in tension with their global roles. Mine engineers were therefore key protagonists in the shifts discussed in this volume: from individual placer mining to highly capitalized corporate mining, from simple technologies to complex chemical extraction, and from free enterprise to wage labor.Less

World History of Technology: Dr. Franz Maria Feldhaus

Markus Krajewski and Charles Marcrum

in World Projects: Global Information before World War I

This chapter discusses Dr. Franz Maria Feldhaus’s national index of Source Research on the History of Technology and Industry Inc. that collects and meticulously archives every bit of fact on ... More

This chapter discusses Dr. Franz Maria Feldhaus’s national index of Source Research on the History of Technology and Industry Inc. that collects and meticulously archives every bit of fact on ordinary items such as a saw, a pencil, and a bathtub. His collection project aims to clarify the discrepancies and contradictions published in different books about the history of electrical engineering and technology. Critics praised the collection for its structured production arrangement, media-technological implementation and historiographical methodology, which followed the library-oriented principle of writing down all information on index cards in card-catalog format. The project’s method of collecting relied on the participation of different people. It asked them to send in clippings from local newspapers, from local historical journals, provided that the notes or articles somehow concern old machines and apparatuses, old engineering structures, or old technicians.Less

Spaceflight, Millionaires, and National Defense: Robert Goddard’s Fund-Raising Program

Alexander MacDonald

in The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War

Robert Goddard was the American “father of liquid-fuel rocketry” and his career constituted the world’s first spaceflight development program. This chapter provides an economic analysis of Goddard’s ... More

Robert Goddard was the American “father of liquid-fuel rocketry” and his career constituted the world’s first spaceflight development program. This chapter provides an economic analysis of Goddard’s career and explores his motivations and financial strategy for long-run space development. Goddard was not only the first to achieve flight with a liquid-fuel rocket, he was also the first to earn significant funding for spaceflight research. He raised much of his funding from private and semi-public sources—including philanthropic funds provided by James Smithson, Andrew Carnegie, Daniel Guggenheim and Harry Guggenheim. Though it was largely private funding that allowed Goddard to make the substantial progress that he did, he also believed that the resources required to develop the first orbital launch vehicles would vastly exceed what private individuals were likely to provide. As a result, Goddard shared with his contemporaries, Werner von Braun in Germany and Sergei Korolev in Russia, a belief that military funding provided the key to the development of spaceflight and enthusiastically and persistently pursued U.S. military funding throughout his life. He was so committed to transacting this Faustian bargain that he would work with the Chemical Warfare Service on gas warfare applications and would later leave the security and long-standing patronage of the Guggenheim family in pursuit of a major military rocket development contract in the Second World War. An economic analysis of Goddard’s career thus situates the motivating force of space history at the level of the individual, with the spaceflight developer willing and able to manipulate external demands, particularly in the military, in order to achieve his interplanetary objectives.Less

Introduction: Opera, Staging, Technologies

Gundula Kreuzer

in Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera

Starting with the Metropolitan Opera’s paradoxical emphasis on both authenticity and technological innovation in its 2010–12 Ring cycle, the introduction highlights the longstanding dissociation in ... More

Starting with the Metropolitan Opera’s paradoxical emphasis on both authenticity and technological innovation in its 2010–12 Ring cycle, the introduction highlights the longstanding dissociation in European thought of the technical and the cultural, a distinction that influenced both the aesthetics and the study of nineteenth-century opera. A post-revolutionary appetite for realism and spectacle was fed by the ever more advanced stage technologies that composers deployed to realize their creative visions. But, as Richard Wagner championed in his 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future,” the artificiality of these supplementary machineries had to be veiled so that they might appear a natural part of the illusionist stage image. Novel “Wagnerian technologies” were designed to be perceived as media interfaces and thus to promote opera’s intended seamless multimediality. The study of their application and reception over time sheds new light on the materiality, ephemerality, and historicity of operatic staging.Less

Introduction

Helen Anne Curry

in Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America

The introduction outlines the aims of the book and situates it within the histories of plant breeding, genetics, and biotechnology, American agriculture, and technological innovation. It explains why ... More

The introduction outlines the aims of the book and situates it within the histories of plant breeding, genetics, and biotechnology, American agriculture, and technological innovation. It explains why plant breeders were eager to find tools that would allow them to “speed up evolution” by generating heritable variation on demand and advances the argument that breeders’ pursuit of these tools cannot be understood apart from the broader history of technological innovation in the twentieth century. It further suggests that the account of genetic technologies provided in the book offers a new perspective on the history of biotechnologies. It reveals not only their entanglement with other areas of industrial production and innovation but also the role played in their development by many Americans who believed in the transformative power of genetics and clamored for technologies that would grant control over the heredity and evolution of living organisms.Less

Driving in Control

Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, Stefan Krebs, and Gijs Mom

in Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel

This chapter sets the stage by claiming that the relative silence in our noise-controlled cars secludes us from the world, while the sound of car radio, warning signals and other audio information ... More

This chapter sets the stage by claiming that the relative silence in our noise-controlled cars secludes us from the world, while the sound of car radio, warning signals and other audio information connects us to it. Many of us thoroughly love the auditory privacy that comes with it: the ability to control the sounds that enter our auditory domain. This enables us to dwell in acoustic cocooning and find sonic relief in the car, to enjoy moments in which we can relax with help of sound and music in between home and work. Yet how did we, as a society, manage to turn the car, once a highly noisy vehicle, into a listening booth? After introducingthis question, Chapter One explains how the bookdraws on Sound Studies, Sensory Studies, Mobility Culture, and History of Technology to answer it, and how the study is structured.Less

Conclusions: Careers from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima

Sean F. Johnston

in The Neutron's Children: Nuclear Engineers and the Shaping of Identity

The Anglo-Saxon atom experts, born during wartime secrecy, have always been contentious. The viability of the early ad hoc specialists was disputed; in secure post-war environments, their growing ... More

The Anglo-Saxon atom experts, born during wartime secrecy, have always been contentious. The viability of the early ad hoc specialists was disputed; in secure post-war environments, their growing expertise was hidden between the lines of promotional press releases and the archived reports of government and industry. And—less secure and vocal than their cousins, the atomic scientists—they were represented second-hand by their employers and via their contentious products. Constructing a stable identity proved to be a perennial battle. This chapter compares the experiences of nuclear engineers in the USA, UK, and Canada over their first seven decades, focusing on how identities were shaped in distinct political, occupational, and disciplinary environments. It links this work to sociology of the professions, to history of technology, and to cultural history.Less

Scientific Method as Cultural Innovation

Robert N. McCauley

in Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion

Consideration of scientific method as a cultural innovation requires examining the philosophy and sociology of science, anthropology, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology as well as the ... More

Consideration of scientific method as a cultural innovation requires examining the philosophy and sociology of science, anthropology, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology as well as the histories of science and technology. Anarchistic philosophical proposals about science set the stage for subsequent endorsements of quite liberal conceptions of science and scientific thinking that root these pursuits in basic features of human—even animal—cognition or in the intimate connection between science and technology. That every methodological prescription has its limits or that science is not uniform does not entail methodological anarchism. Like any other radial category, science includes more and less central instances and practices. Justifications for such liberality regarding science that are grounded in the acquisition of empirical knowledge by infants and other species downplay the sciences’ systematic approach to criticizing hypotheses and scientists’ mastery of a vast collection of intellectual tools, facts, and theories. Justifications that look to the close ties between science and technology neglect reasons for distinguishing them. Intimate ties are not inextricable ties. Research on scientific cognition suggests that, in some respects, human minds are not well suited to do science and that measures progressively sustaining science’s systematic program of criticism and its ever more counterintuitive representations both depend on cultural achievements and are themselves cultural achievements involving what have proven to be comparatively extraordinary social conditions. This richer, epistemologically unsurpassed form of science is both rare and fragile, having arisen no more than a few times in human history. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.Less

Controlled Exchanges: Public-Private Hybridity, Transnational Networking, and Knowledge Circulation in US-China Scientific Discourse on Nuclear Arms Control

Zuoyue Wang

in How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

In the mid-1980s, American and Chinese scientists began to engage each other in a low-key manner in nuclear arms control that would develop into wide-ranging bilateral interactions to the present, ... More

In the mid-1980s, American and Chinese scientists began to engage each other in a low-key manner in nuclear arms control that would develop into wide-ranging bilateral interactions to the present, even withstanding geopolitical changes brought by the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989 and the end of the Cold War. This paper explores these important and yet little-known transnational scientific interactions and addresses a number of issues relevant to the writing of history of science and technology: the proper roles of scientists and experts in national policy and international diplomacy, the social and political values of transnational scientific discussions and ethnic scientific networking, the potentials and limits of transnational knowledge circulation in sensitive areas such as nuclear weapons, and the possibility of historical learning in policy making as the world struggles to deal with global problems such as nuclear proliferation and climate change.Less