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Books > Professional & Technical > Technology: general issues > History of engineering & technology
The 18th and 19th centuries saw the emergence of new intermediary
types of knowledge in areas such as applied mechanics, fluid
mechanics and thermodynamics, which came to be labeled as
engineering science, transforming technology into the scientific
discipline that we know today. This book analyzes how the
Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries and the
Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries provided the
intellectual, social, economic and institutional foundations for
the emergence of engineering science. The book then traces the rise
of engineering science from the 18th century through the 19th
century and concludes by showing how it led to new technological
developments in such areas as steel production, the invention of
internal combustion engines, the creation of automobiles and
airplanes, and the formulation of Mass Production and Scientific
Management all of which brought about major transformations in the
materials, power sources, transportation and production techniques
that have come to shape our modern world.
Aristotle's voluminous writings on animals have often been
marginalised in the history of philosophy. Providing the first
full-length comprehensive account of Aristotle's biology, its
background, content and influence, this Companion situates his
study of living nature within his broader philosophy and theology
and differentiates it from other medical and philosophical
theories. An overview of empiricism in Aristotle's Historia
Animalium is followed by an account of the general methodology
recommended in the Parts of Animals. An account of the importance
of Aristotle's teleological perspective and the fundamental
metaphysics of biological entities provides a basis for
understanding living capacities, such as nutrition, reproduction,
perception and self-motion, in his philosophy. The importance of
Aristotle's zoology to both his ethics and political philosophy is
highlighted. The volume explores in detail the changing
interpretations and influences of Aristotle's biological works from
antiquity to modern philosophy of science. It is essential for both
students and scholars.
The diverse forms of regional connectivity in the ancient world
have recently become an important focus for those interested in the
deep history of globalisation. This volume represents a significant
contribution to this new trend as it engages thematically with a
wide range of connectivities in the later prehistory of the
Mediterranean, from the later Neolithic of northern Greece to the
Levantine Iron Age, and with diverse forms of materiality, from
pottery and metal to stone and glass. With theoretical overviews
from leading thinkers in prehistoric mobilities, and commentaries
from top specialists in neighbouring domains, the volume integrates
detailed case studies within a comparative framework. The result is
a thorough treatment of many of the key issues of regional
interaction and technological diversity facing archaeologists
working across diverse places and periods. As this book presents
key case studies for human and technological mobility across the
eastern Mediterranean in later prehistory, it will be of interest
primarily to Mediterranean archaeologists, though also to
historians and anthropologists.
This unique book presents the story of the pioneering manufacturing
company Ferranti Ltd. - producer of the first
commercially-available computers - and of the nine end-user
organisations who purchased these machines with government help in
the period 1951 to 1957. The text presents personal reminiscences
from many of the diverse engineers, programmers and marketing staff
who contributed to this important episode in the emergence of
modern computers, further illustrated by numerous historical
photographs. Considerable technical details are also supplied in
the appendices. Topics and features: provides the historical
background to the Ferranti Mark I, including the contributions of
von Neumann and Turing, and the prototype known as The Baby;
describes the transfer of technologies from academia to industry
and the establishment of Ferranti's computer production resources;
reviews Ferranti's efforts to adapt their computers for sale to
business and commercial markets, and to introduce competitive new
products; covers the use of early Ferranti computers for defence
applications in different government establishments in the UK,
including GCHQ Cheltenham; discusses the installation and
applications of Ferranti computers at universities in the UK,
Canada, and Italy; presents the story of the purchase of a Ferranti
Mark I* machine by the Amsterdam Laboratories of the Shell company;
details the use of Ferranti Mark I* computers in the UK's aerospace
industry and compares this with the American scene; relates the
saga of Ferranti's journey from its initial success as the first
and largest British computer manufacturer to its decline and
eventual bankruptcy. This highly readable text/reference will
greatly appeal to professionals interested in the practical
development of early computers, as well as to specialists in
computer history seeking technical material not readily available
elsewhere. The educated general reader will also find much to enjoy
in the photographs and personal anecdotes that provide an
accessible insight into the early days of computing.
This book introduces recent global advances and innovations in
industry integrated engineering and computing education to
academics, program managers, department heads, and deans, and
shares with readers a critical perspective on future potentials in
industry integrated engineering education. It covers topics and
issues such as integrated engineering and computing education,
part-time engineering masters programs, secure BIM learning,
ethics, and IT workforce development. The book concludes with
detail information on summarizing and extracting different
frameworks, cases, and models into a practitioner toolkit, along
with pragmatic recommendations for engineering education academics
to quickly utilize, adopt, and adapt the toolkits for their own
curricular development activities.
This is the remarkable story of an entrepreneurial firm that helped
to create the petrochemical industry as we know it today. The
author also highlights the important role chemical engineers played
in developing and commercializing new technologies based on the
conversion of hydrocarbons into petrochemicals, which also led to
the transfer of technological dominance from Germany to the United
States. These developments are illustrated by the participants'
personal histories, in the form of interviews and recorded oral
histories. In addition, the book presents a highly relevant case
study for engineers and managers in the chemical industry.
This book contains stories of women engineers' paths through the
golden age of microelectronics, stemming from the invention of the
transistor in 1947. These stories, like the biographies of Marie
Curie and the National Geographic's stories of Jane Goodall's
research that inspired the authors will inspire and guide readers
along unconventional pathways to contributions to microelectronics
that we can only begin to imagine. The book explores why and how
the women writing here chose their career paths and how they
navigated their careers. This topic is of interest to a vast
audience, from students to professionals to university advisers to
industry CEOs, who can imagine the advantages of a future with a
diverse work force. Provides insight into women's early
contributions to the field of microelectronics and celebrates the
challenges they overcame; Presents compelling innovations from
academia, research, and industry into advances, applications, and
the future of microelectronics; Includes a fascinating look into
topics such as nanotechnologies, video games, analog electronics,
design automation, and neuromorphic circuits.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, British firms and
engineers built, laid, and ran a vast global network of submarine
telegraph cables. For the first time, cities around the world were
put into almost instantaneous contact, with profound effects on
commerce, international affairs, and the dissemination of news.
Science, too, was strongly affected, as cable telegraphy exposed
electrical researchers to important new phenomena while also
providing a new and vastly larger market for their expertise. By
examining the deep ties that linked the cable industry to work in
electrical physics in the nineteenth century - culminating in James
Clerk Maxwell's formulation of his theory of the electromagnetic
field - Bruce J. Hunt sheds new light both on the history of the
Victorian British Empire and on the relationship between science
and technology.
For decades, leadership in technological innovation has sustained
U.S. power worldwide. Today, however, processes that undergird
innovation increasingly transcend national borders. Cross-border
flows of brainpower have reached unprecedented heights, while
multinationals invest more and more in high-tech facilities abroad.
In this new world, U.S. technological leadership increasingly
involves collaboration with other countries. China and India have
emerged as particularly prominent partners, most notably as
suppliers of intellectual talent to the United States. In The
Conflicted Superpower, Andrew Kennedy explores how the world's most
powerful country approaches its growing collaboration with these
two rising powers. Whereas China and India have embraced global
innovation, policy in the United States is conflicted. Kennedy
explains why, through in-depth case studies of U.S. policies toward
skilled immigration, foreign students, and offshoring. These make
clear that U.S. policy is more erratic than strategic, the outcome
of domestic battles between competing interests. Pressing for
openness is the "high-tech community"-the technology firms and
research universities that embody U.S. technological leadership.
Yet these pro-globalization forces can face resistance from a range
of other interests, including labor and anti-immigration groups,
and the nature of this resistance powerfully shapes just how open
national policy is. Kennedy concludes by asking whether U.S.
policies are accelerating or slowing American decline, and
considering the prospects for U.S. policy making in years to come.
By focusing on chromosomes, Heredity under the Microscope offers a
new history of postwar human genetics. Today chromosomes are
understood as macromolecular assemblies and are analyzed with a
variety of molecular techniques. Yet for much of the twentieth
century, researchers studied chromosomes by looking through a
microscope. Unlike any other technique, chromosome analysis offered
a direct glimpse of the complete human genome, opening up seemingly
endless possibilities for observation and intervention. Critics,
however, countered that visual evidence was not enough and pointed
to the need to understand the molecular mechanisms. Telling this
history in full for the first time, Soraya de Chadarevian argues
that the often bewildering variety of observations made under the
microscope were central to the study of human genetics. Making
space for microscope-based practices alongside molecular
approaches, de Chadarevian analyzes the close connections between
genetics and an array of scientific, medical, ethical, legal, and
policy concerns in the atomic age. By exploring the visual evidence
provided by chromosome research in the context of postwar biology
and medicine, Heredity under the Microscope sheds new light on the
cultural history of the human genome.
This study is the first to essay an appreciation and analysis of
the scientist Alexander von Humboldt as a writer. Its focus is
literary, and it inquires into the historical preconditions,
contexts, and impacts of Humboldta (TM)s successful writing career.
Humboldta (TM)s extended and extensive activities as a writer
illuminate important aspects of scientific modernization and
specialization, the increasingly problematic concept of nature, and
the specific history of German education in the 19th century.
Circuits, Packets, and Protocols tells the story of the engineers,
entrepreneurs, investors, and visionaries who laid the groundwork
and built the foundations of the Internet. In the late 1960s, two
American corporate behemoths were poised to dominate the rapidly
converging industries of computing and communications-the computer
giant, IBM, and the regulated telecommunications monopoly,
AT&T. But in 1968, a key ruling by the Federal Communications
Commission gave small businesses a doorway into an emerging market
for communication devices that could transmit computer data over
telephone lines. In the two decades that followed, an industry of
networking technology emerged that would impact human history in
profound and unfathomable ways. Circuits, Packets, and Protocols is
a groundbreaking study of the men and women in the engineering
labs, board rooms, and regulatory agencies whose decisions
determined the evolution of our modern digital communication
networks. Unlike histories that glorify the dominant players with
the benefit of hindsight, this is a history of a pivotal era as it
happened. Drawing on more than 80 interviews recorded in 1988, the
book features insights from now-famous individuals such as Paul
Baran, JCR Licklider, Vint Cerf, Louis Pouzin, and Robert Metcalfe.
Inspired by innovations from government-sponsored Cold War defense
projects and the birth of the modern venture capital industry,
these trailblazers and many others built the technologies and
companies that became essential building blocks in the development
of today's Internet. Many of the companies and products failed,
even while they helped propel the industry forward at breakneck
speed. Equal parts academic history and thrilling startup drama,
Circuits, Packets, and Protocols gives the reader a vivid picture
of what it was like to take part in one of the most exciting
periods of technological advance in our time.
It is common for us today to associate the practice of science
primarily with the act of seeing-with staring at computer screens,
analyzing graphs, and presenting images. We may notice that
physicians use stethoscopes to listen for disease, that biologists
tune into sound recordings to understand birds, or that engineers
have created Geiger tellers warning us for radiation through sound.
But in the sciences overall, we think, seeing is believing. This
open access book explains why, indeed, listening for knowledge
plays an ambiguous, if fascinating, role in the sciences. For what
purposes have scientists, engineers and physicians listened to the
objects of their interest? How did they listen exactly? And why has
listening often been contested as a legitimate form of access to
scientific knowledge? This concise monograph combines historical
and ethnographic evidence about the practices of listening on shop
floors, in laboratories, field stations, hospitals, and conference
halls, between the 1920s and today. It shows how scientists have
used sonic skills-skills required for making, recording, storing,
retrieving, and listening to sound-in ensembles: sets of
instruments and techniques for particular situations of knowledge
making. Yet rather than pleading for the emancipation of hearing at
the expense of seeing, this essay investigates when, how, and under
which conditions the ear has contributed to science dynamics,
either in tandem with or without the eye.
A Simpler Life approaches the developing field of synthetic biology
by focusing on the experimental and institutional lives of
practitioners in two labs at Princeton University. It highlights
the distance between hyped technoscience and the more plodding and
entrenched aspects of academic research. Talia Dan-Cohen follows
practitioners as they wrestle with experiments, attempt to publish
research findings, and navigate the ins and outs of academic
careers. Dan-Cohen foregrounds the practices and rationalities of
these pursuits that give both researchers' lives and synthetic life
their distinctive contemporary forms. Rather than draw attention to
avowed methodology, A Simpler Life investigates some of the more
subtle and tectonic practices that bring knowledge, doubt, and
technological intervention into new configurations. In so doing,
the book sheds light on the more general conditions of contemporary
academic technoscience.
Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise
history of the Industrial Revolution places the eighteenth-century
British Industrial Revolution in global context, locating its
causes in government protection, global competition, and
colonialism. Inventions from spinning jennies to steam engines came
to define an age that culminated in the acceleration of the fashion
cycle, the intensification in demand and supply of raw materials
and the rise of a plantation system that would reconfigure world
history in favour of British (and European) global domination. In
this accessible analysis of the classic case of rapid and
revolutionary technological change, Barbara Hahn takes readers from
the north of England to slavery, cotton plantations, the
Anglo-Indian trade and beyond - placing technological change at the
centre of world history.
Conquering the Electron offers readers a true and engaging history
of the world of electronics, beginning with the discoveries of
static electricity and magnetism and ending with the creation of
the smartphone and the iPad. This book shows the interconnection of
each advance to the next on the long journey to our modern-day
technologies. Exploring the combination of genius, infighting, and
luck that powered the creation of today's electronic age,
Conquering the Electron debunks the hero worship so often plaguing
the stories of great advances. Want to know how AT&T's Bell
Labs developed semiconductor technology-and how its leading
scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand
how radio and television work-and why RCA drove their inventors to
financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers
these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological
advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too
often took place.
We all like to think we are pretty smart. New medical advances seem to come along every day; space travel suddenly doesn't seem so difficult; self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future . but if we were stranded on a desert island tomorrow, most of us wouldn't know how to catch a fish or start a fire, let alone rebuild all that extraordinary technology we now rely on.
The truth is that we're not necessarily more clever than our ancestors, we just have an accumulation of centuries of technological progress on which we can rely. As this book shows, many of the ancients were much more advanced that we realize - indeed there are recent inventions that had actually been discovered centuries earlier and then forgotten. And what about all those modern day devices and machines that rely on ancient inventions such as paper, levers and gears?
From brain surgery in the Stone Age to Chinese whisky from the 7th century BC, to Damascus steel - once the hardest metal in the world, which we no longer know how to make - this insightful book collects together the stories of hundreds of ancient devices, inventions and breakthroughs from around the world and across the centuries, giving us a fascinating glimpse into past eras that were far more technologically advanced than we sometimes realize.
This engaging book places Leonardo da Vinci's scientific
achievements within the wider context of the rapid development that
occurred during the Renaissance. It demonstrates how his
contributions were not in fact born of isolated genius, but rather
part of a rich period of collective advancement in science and
technology, which began at least 50 years prior to his birth.
Readers will discover a very special moment in history, when
creativity and imagination were changing the future-shaping our
present. They will be amazed to discover how many technological
inventions had already been conceived or even designed by the
engineers and inventors who preceded Leonardo, such as Francesco di
Giorgio and Taccola, the so-called Siena engineers. This engaging
volume features a wealth of illustrations from a variety of
original sources, such as manuscripts and codices, enabling the
reader to see and judge for him or herself the influence that other
Renaissance engineers and inventors had on Leonardo.
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