Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious-unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge-in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named. These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

Newton's Opticks is the most influential optical and experimental work of the eighteenth century. This final volume of The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton contains manuscripts that document the evolution of the Opticks through its three principal published editions. It shows how Newton constructed the book that for over a century was the leading treatise on optics, a fecund source of natural philosophical speculations, and which is now considered a classic of science. The volume opens with the manuscript of the first edition (1704) and the first draft of the Opticks in Latin, which he soon abandoned for English. This is followed by the manuscripts of the queries that Newton added to the Latin translation in 1706 and the second English edition in 1717. Other, shorter manuscripts are included, as are copious notes and commentary, making this a valuable resource for historians and philosophers of science, and historians of philosophy.

Building Knowledge, Constructing Histories brings together the papers presented at the Sixth International Congress on Construction History (6ICCH, Brussels, Belgium, 9-13 July 2018). The contributions present the latest research in the field of construction history, covering themes such as: - Building actors - Building materials - The process of building - Structural theory and analysis - Building services and techniques - Socio-cultural aspects - Knowledge transfer - The discipline of Construction History The papers cover various types of buildings and structures, from ancient times to the 21st century, from all over the world. In addition, thematic papers address specific themes and highlight new directions in construction history research, fostering transnational and interdisciplinary collaboration. Building Knowledge, Constructing Histories is a must-have for academics, scientists, building conservators, architects, historians, engineers, designers, contractors and other professionals involved or interested in the field of construction history.

During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly; physicians who prescribed patented drugs could be, and were, ostracized from the medical community. In the decades following the Civil War, however, complex changes in patent and trademark law intersected with the changing sensibilities of both physicians and pharmacists to make intellectual property rights in drug manufacturing scientifically and ethically legitimate. By World War I, patented and trademarked drugs had become essential to the practice of good medicine, aiding in the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry and forever altering the course of medicine. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.

Once known as the "Last of the Gunfighters", the Vought F-8 Crusader has since become a legend in the histories of the U.S. and French navies, as well as a scourge in the skies over North Vietnam in the late 1960s!\nCRUSADER! is a vital oral history of one of the most controversial fighter planes in carrier aviation. A key to the authenticity of this story are the author\s personal interviews with sixteen of the seventeen living Crusader pilots who became MiG killers in the Vietnam air war. His analysis of their aerial engagements over North Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 contains some startling surprises, as well as a validation of many of the tactical lessons learned from World War II and Korea. \nCRUSADER! also contains personal accounts by F-8 speed record holders such as U.S. Marine Corps Major (now Senator) John Glenn and Captains Bob Dose and "Duke" Windsor. Other aviation records held by the Crusader, (not so enviable) are told, in anecdotal form, for the first time by the author, an F-8 driver and participant in some of them!\nColorful, and sometimes humorous, accounts of events involving the F-8 and "Crusader Drivers" abound in this chronicle of carrier aviation covering the three decades when this remarkable airplane was an important element of the U.S. Navy\s carrier strike forces.\nRear Admiral Paul T. Gillcrist commanded a fleet Crusader squadron, then a carrier air wing and finally, as a flag officer, became wing commander for all Pacific Fleet fighter squadrons. During his fleet squadron command he completed three carrier deployments to the Tonkin Gulf and flew 167 combat missions in the Crusader for which he was awarded seventeen combat decorations. The author of FEET WET, Reflections of a Carrier Pilot (1990) and TOMCAT, The Grumman F-14 Story (1994), Admiral Gillcrist is well qualified to write the story of the Crusader!

An unprecedented history of the CIA's secret and amazing gadgetry behind the art of espionage In this look at the CIA's most secretive operations and the devices that made them possible, Spycraft tells gripping life-and-death stories about a group of spytechs-much of it never previously revealed and with images never before seen by the public. The CIA's Office of Technical Service is the ultrasecret department that grappled with challenges such as: What does it take to build a quiet helicopter? How does one embed a listening device in a cat? What is an invisible photo used for? These amazingly inventive devices were created and employed against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions-including the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and continuing terrorist threats. Written by Robert Wallace, the former director of the Office of Technical Service, and internationally renowned intelligence historian Keith Melton, Spycraft is both a fantastic encyclopedia of gadgetry and a revealing primer on the fundamentals of high-tech espionage. "The first comprehensive look at the technical achievements of American espionage from the 1940s to the present."-Wired "Reveals more concrete information about CIA tradecraft than any book."-The Washington Times "This is a story I thought could never be told."-JAMES M. OLSON, former chief of CIA counterintelligence

Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks. As medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky, they came to develop a vibrant scientific culture. In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on a tour of medieval science through the eyes of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. Born in a rural manor, educated in England's grandest monastery, and then exiled to a clifftop priory, Westwyk was an intrepid crusader, inventor, and astrologer. From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk and travel with him through the length and breadth of England and beyond its shores. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy, and the Persian polymath who founded the world's most advanced observatory. The Light Ages offers a gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world and conjures a vivid picture of medieval life as we have never seen it before. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren't so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen U.S. aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Their angular shape, making them look like flying origami, rendered them virtually undetectable. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating. Peter Westwick's new book illuminates the story behind these aircraft, the F-117A, also known as the Stealth Fighter, and their close cousin the B-2, also known as the Stealth Bomber. The development of Stealth unfolded over decades. Radar has been in use since the 1930s and was essential to the Allies in World War Two, when American investment in radar exceeded that in the Manhattan Project. The atom bomb ended the war, conventional wisdom has it, but radar won it. That experience also raised a question: could a plane be developed that was invisible to radar? That question, and the seemingly impossible feat of physics and engineering behind it, took on increasing urgency during the Cold War, when the United States searched for a way both to defend its airspace and send a plane through Soviet skies undetected. Thus started the race for Stealth. At heart, Stealth is a tale of not just two aircraft but the two aerospace companies that made them, Lockheed and Northrop, guided by contrasting philosophies and outsized personalities. Beginning in the 1970s, the two firms entered into a fierce competition, one with high financial stakes and conducted at the highest levels of secrecy in the Cold War. They approached the problem of Stealth from different perspectives, one that pitted aeronautical designers against electrical engineers, those who relied on intuition against those who pursued computer algorithms. The two different approaches manifested in two very different solutions to Stealth, clearly evident in the aircraft themselves: the F-117 composed of flat facets, the B-2 of curves. For all their differences, Lockheed and Northrop were located twenty miles apart in the aerospace suburbs of Los Angeles, not far from Disneyland. This was no coincidence. The creative culture of postwar Southern California-unorthodox, ambitious, and future-oriented-played a key role in Stealth. Combining nail-biting narrative, incisive explanation of the science and technology involved, and indelible portraits of unforgettable characters, Stealth immerses readers in the story of an innovation with revolutionary implications for modern warfare.

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings. This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car, of the genius embodied in the Ford Model T, of the glory of the brilliant-red Mercedes Benz S-Class made by workers for Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, of Kanye West's 'chopped' Maybach, of the salvation of the Volkswagen Beetle by Major Ivan Hirst, of Elvis Presley's 100 Cadillacs, of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and the BMC Mini and even of that harbinger of the end - the Tesla Model S and its creator Elon Musk. As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.

"Implosion" is a focused study of the history and uses of high-reliability, solid-state electronics, military standards, and space systems that support our national security and defense. This book is unique in combining the interdependent evolution of and interrelationships among military standards, solid-state electronics, and very high-reliability space systems.

Starting with a brief description of the physics that enabled the development of the first transistor, "Implosion" covers the need for standardizing military electronics, which began during World War II and continues today. The book shows how these twin topics affected, and largely enabled, the highest reliability and most technologically capable robotic systems ever conceived.

This riveting history helps readers: Realize the complex interdependence of solid-state electronics and practical implementations in the national security and defense space programsUnderstand the evolution of military standards for piece parts, quality, and reliability as they affected these programsGain insight into the attempted reforms of federal systems acquisition of security- and defense-related space systems in the latter half of the twentieth centuryAppreciate the complexity of science and technology public policy decisions in the context of political, organizational, and economic realities

Written in clear, jargon-free language, but with plenty of technical detail, "Implosion" is a must-read for aerospace and aviation engineers, manufacturers, and enthusiasts; technology students and historians; and anyone interested in the history of technology, military technology, and the space program.

This book provides an accessible overview of the ways that key areas of technology have impacted global ecosystems and natural communities. It offers a new way of thinking about the overall origins of environmental problems. Combining approaches drawn from environmental biology and the history of science and technology, it describes the motivations behind many technical advances and the settings in which they occurred, before tracing their ultimate environmental impacts. Four broad areas of human activity are described: over-harvesting of natural resources using the examples of hunting, fishing and freshwater use; farming, population, land use, and migration; discovery, synthesis and use of manufactured chemicals; and development of sources of artificial energy and the widespread pollution caused by power generation and energy use. These innovations have been driven by various forces, but in most cases new technologies have emerged out of fascinating, psychologically rich, human experiences. This book provides an introduction to these complex developments and will be essential reading for students of science, technology and society, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.

How increased access to ice—decades before refrigeration—transformed American life. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans depended upon ice to stay cool and to keep their perishable foods fresh. Jonathan Rees tells the fascinating story of how people got ice before mechanical refrigeration came to the household. Drawing on newspapers, trade journals, and household advice books, Before the Refrigerator explains how Americans built a complex system to harvest, store, and transport ice to everyone who wanted it, even the very poor. Rees traces the evolution of the natural ice industry from its mechanization in the 1880s through its gradual collapse, which started after World War I. Meatpackers began experimenting with ice refrigeration to ship their products as early as the 1860s. Starting around 1890, large, bulky ice machines the size of small houses appeared on the scene, becoming an important source for the American ice supply. As ice machines shrunk, more people had access to better ice for a wide variety of purposes. By the early twentieth century, Rees writes, ice had become an essential tool for preserving perishable foods of all kinds, transforming what most people ate and drank every day. Reviewing all the inventions that made the ice industry possible and the way they worked together to prevent ice from melting, Rees demonstrates how technological systems can operate without a central controlling force. Before the Refrigerator is ideal for history of technology classes, food studies classes, or anyone interested in what daily life in the United States was like between 1880 and 1930.

One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time * One of The Economist's Best Books of 2022 * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Nominated for The Next Big Idea Club * The Week Magazine Book of the Week From Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of the Hugo and Locus Award finalist Astounding, comes a revelatory biography of the visionary designer who defined the rules of startup culture and shaped America’s idea of the future.  During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe’s geometry. His views on sustainability, as embodied in the image of Spaceship Earth, convinced him that it was possible to provide for all humanity through the efficient use of planetary resources. From Epcot Center to the molecule named in his honor as the buckyball, Fuller’s legacy endures to this day, and his belief in the transformative potential of technology profoundly influenced the founders of Silicon Valley. Inventor of the Future is the first authoritative biography to cover all aspects of Fuller’s career. Drawing on meticulous research, dozens of interviews, and thousands of unpublished documents, Nevala-Lee has produced a riveting portrait that transcends the myth of Fuller as an otherworldly generalist. It reconstructs the true origins of his most famous inventions, including the Dymaxion Car, the Wichita House, and the dome itself; his fraught relationships with his students and collaborators; his interactions with Frank Lloyd Wright, Isamu Noguchi, Clare Boothe Luce, John Cage, Steve Jobs, and many others; and his tumultuous private life, in which his determination to succeed on his own terms came at an immense personal cost. In an era of accelerating change, Fuller’s example remains enormously relevant, and his lessons for designers, activists, and innovators are as powerful and essential as ever. 

This collection of fourteen key papers deriving from CEEJA's second international conference exploring the Japanese history of technology, concentrates on the routes to acquiring and transmitting technical knowledge in Japan's modern era - from the very earliest endeavours in establishing opportunities for acquiring a technical education to the translation of foreign textbooks and manuals. Published in two volumes and thematically structured in three Parts, this wide-ranging work both complements and expands on the subject-matter contained in the first volume entitled Technical Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (2020).

From its inception over 100 years ago, fingerprint technology has come a long way. This book provides background on and traces the recent history of automated fingerprint identification systems. Included in the book is a brief examination of standards and the role of algorithms. In its history, fingerprints have been used to identify criminal and terrorist suspects, perform background checks, and monitor immigration status, among other applications. Prints found at the scene of a crime, referred to as latent prints, are compared with fingerprint records of known individuals who have been convicted of or arrested for a crime. Law enforcement agencies have been working to automate this comparison process. This book also provides the current landscape of latent Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) interoperability, meaning the ability to share information between networks, systems, components, etc. The book addresses essential elements of interoperability, outlines recent advances in the field and provides a high-level strategic plan for Federal agencies to implement the necessary requirements for interoperability to enhance public safety.

The conventional understanding of Japanese wartime ideology has for years been summed up by just a few words: anti-modern, spiritualist, and irrational. Yet such a cut-and-dried picture is not at all reflective of the principles that guided national policy from 1931-1945. Challenging the status quo, Constructing East Asia examines how Japanese intellectuals, bureaucrats, and engineers used technology as a system of power and mobilization-what historian Aaron Moore terms a "technological imaginary"-to rally people in Japan and its expanding empire. By analyzing how these different actors defined technology in public discourse, national policies, and large-scale infrastructure projects, Moore reveals wartime elites as far more calculated in thought and action than previous scholarship allows. Moreover, Moore positions the wartime origins of technology deployment as an essential part of the country's national policy and identity, upending another predominant narrative-namely, that technology did not play a modernizing role in Japan until the "economic miracle" of the postwar years.

Covering almost every line in the country, this acclaimed series of books juxtaposes photographs of the same railway location separated in time by just a few years, or maybe a century or more. Sometimes the result is dereliction or disappearance, in others a transformation into a modern high-speed railway. In both cases, the contrasts are intriguing and informative. This volumes includes: the Midland Main Line from Wellingborough to Loughborough; the former Great Central route; LNWR lines through Northamptonshire; Melton Mowbray, Oakham and the railways of Rutland; the East Coast Main Line from St Neots to Peterborough; and, Great Eastern routes through Cambridge, Ely and March.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...In the world of affairs the wind was howling, too, and the storm was gathering which culminated in the series of lawsuits brought by Morse and his associates against the infringers on his patents. The letters to his brother are full of the details of these piratical attacks, but throughout all the turmoil he maintained his poise and his faith in the triumph of justice and truth. In the letter just quoted from he says: "These matters do not annoy me as formerly. I have seen so many dark storms which threatened, and particularly in relation to the Telegraph, and I have seen them so often hushed at the 'Peace, be still' of our covenant God, that now the fears and anxieties on any fresh gathering soon subside into perfect calm." And on November 27, he writes: "The most annoying part of the matter to me is that, notwithstanding my matters are all in the hands of agents and I have nothing to do with any of the arrangements, I am held up by name to the odium of the public. Lawsuits are commenced against them at Cincinnati and will be in Indiana and Illinois as well as here, and so, notwithstanding all my efforts to get along peaceably, I find the fate of Whitney before me. I think I may be able to secure my farm, and so have a place to retire to for the PEACE IN THE NEW HOME 283 evening of my days, but even this may be denied me. A few months will decide.... You have before you the fate of an inventor, and, take as much pains as you will to secure to yourself your valuable invention, make up your mind from my experience now, in addition to others, that you will be robbed of it and abused into the bargain. This is the lot of a successful inventor or discoverer, and no precaution, I believe, will save him from it. He will meet with a mixed estimate; the...

"An adulating biography of Apple's left-brained wunderkind, whose work continues to revolutionize modern technology." --"Kirkus Reviews"
In 1997, Steve Jobs discovered a scruffy British designer toiling away at Apple's headquarters, surrounded by hundreds of sketches and prototypes. Jony Ive's collaboration with Jobs would produce some of the world's most iconic technology products, including the iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. Ive's work helped reverse Apple's long decline, overturned entire industries, and created a huge global fan base. Yet little is known about the shy, soft-spoken whiz whom Jobs referred to as his "spiritual partner."
Leander Kahney offers a detailed portrait of the English art school student with dyslexia who became the most acclaimed tech designer of his generation. Drawing on interviews with Ive's former colleagues and Apple insiders, Kahney "takes us inside the creation of these memorable objects." ("The Wall Street Journal")

The Albatross was the premier fixed-wing rescue aircraft for the U.S. Air Force and Coast Guard. Its very colorful history begins in 1946 and spans nearly a quarter of a century, including service with twenty-two foreign nations. With a total of 466 built by Grumman, more than eighty examples still thrive on the civil register. The Albatross also saw extensive service in the Korean and Vietnam wars. The fascinating history of this unique aircraft is complemented by over 200 photographs including many in color showing the great variations in color schemes and markings.