John Joseph Fahie (1846 1934) was an engineer for the Electric and International Telegraph Company before being posted overseas in the Indo-European Government Telegraph Department. He was also a respected historian whose History of Wireless Telegraphy (1899) sold out two impressions in little over a year. In this second edition (1901), he traces the development of wireless communication during the nineteenth century, drawing extensively from the correspondence and technical illustrations of inventors themselves. This edition was fully updated to take account of the latest advances in radio technology, including Marconi's latest public demonstrations. As a practising telegraph engineer, Fahie was in the perfect position not only to understand the significance of these developments, but to explain them to a non-specialist audience. Contemporary reviews indicate he did this with great success. His book gives an eyewitness account of the rise of radio technology that still fascinates scholars and enthusiasts today.

Silvanus P. Thompson (1851 1916) was a physicist and electrical engineer. A professor by the age of 27, he taught at University College, Bristol, and the City and Guilds Finsbury Technical College in London, and was a leading expert on the newly emerging subject of electrical lighting. This work, first published in 1884, is considered a classic in the field. In this third edition (1888), Thompson explains that he has updated much of the work, and made an important amendment in Chapter XIV about the introduction of magnetic circuits into theoretical arguments about energy production. The book begins with an explanation of how dynamos turn mechanical power into electricity, and moves on to discuss some historical background and theoretical aspects before giving detailed descriptions and illustrations of the many types of dynamo. It is an important source document for the field of electrical engineering at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the folklore of mathematics, James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897) is the eccentric, hot-tempered, sword-cane-wielding, nineteenth-century mathematician who, together with the taciturn Arthur Cayley, developed a theory and language of invariants that then died spectacularly in the 1890s as a result of David Hilbert's groundbreaking `modern' techniques. This, like all folklore, has some grounding in fact but owes much to fiction.

The present volume brings together for the first time 140 letters from Sylvester's correspondence in an effort to establish the true picture. It reveals--through the letters as well as through the detailed mathematical and historical commentary accompanying them--Sylvester the friend, man of principle, mathematician, poet, professor, scientific activist, social observer, and traveller. It also provides a detailed look at Sylvester's thought processes as it shows him acting in both personal and professional spheres over the course of his eighty-two year life. The Sylvester who emerges from this analysis--unlike the Sylvester of the folkloric caricature--offers deep insight into the development of the technical and social structures of mathematics.

A Short History of the Steam Engine, first published in 1939, remains one of the most readable and clear explanations of the topic for the non-specialist. H. W. Dickinson limits himself to stationary engines and boilers, and only touches on the beginnings of locomotive and marine engines. He puts the stages of development in their context, showing how economic and social factors were involved in the evolution of the steam engine. The illustrations are plentiful and the text, while technical, never becomes impenetrable. The successive improvements to the simple engines of the seventeenth century, as new materials or purposes arose, are developed chapter by chapter to the twentieth century. Each engineer was building on the work of his predecessors, rather than there being any single inventor of genius. Dickinson also wrote biographies of key figures of the Industrial Revolution, which are being reissued in this series.

This book highlights the close interactions between plants, plant knowledge, politics, and social life in Padua during the age of revolution. It explores the lives and thoughts of two brothers, the lawyer Andrea Meneghini and the botanist GiuseppeMeneghini, illustrating the unspoken dreams of progress and a new social order, but also sheds light on the ambiguous relationship between the Paduan elite and Austrian rule before the 1848 revolution. A closer look at park designs, gardening associations and networks, fl ower exhibitions, agricultural societies, organicist metaphors, and botanical research on the organization of living bodies opens up unexpected parallels between actors and ideas of two apparently distant areas: botany and political economy.

Data Borders investigates entrenched and emerging borderland technology that ensnares all people in an intimate web of surveillance where data resides and defines citizenship. Detailing the new trend of biologically mapping undocumented people through biotechnologies, Melissa Villa-Nicholas shows how surreptitious monitoring of Latinx immigrants is the focus of and driving force behind Silicon Valley's growing industry within defense technology manufacturing. Villa-Nicholas reveals a murky network that gathers data on marginalized communities for purposes of exploitation and control that implicates law enforcement, border patrol, and ICE, but that also pulls in public workers and the general public, often without their knowledge or consent. Enriched by interviews of Latinx immigrants living in the borderlands who describe their daily use of technology and their caution around surveillance, this book argues that in order to move beyond a heavily surveilled state that dehumanizes both immigrants and citizens, we must first understand how our data is being collected, aggregated, correlated, and weaponized with artificial intelligence and then push for immigrant and citizen information privacy rights along the border and throughout the United States.

"Mr. Dahlstrom...has written a superb history of the tractor and this long-forgotten period of capitalism in U.S. agriculture. We now know the whole story of when farming, business and the free-market economy diverged, divided and conquered." -Wall Street Journal Discover the untold story of the "tractor wars," the twenty-year period that introduced power farming-the most fundamental change in world agriculture in hundreds of years. Before John Deere, Ford, and International Harvester became icons of American business, they were competitors in a forgotten battle for the farm. From 1908-1928, against the backdrop of a world war and economic depression, these brands were engaged in a race to introduce the tractor and revolutionize farming. By the turn of the twentieth century, four million people had left rural America and moved to cities, leaving the nation's farms shorthanded for the work of plowing, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and threshing. That's why the introduction of the tractor is an innovation story as essential as man's landing on the moon or the advent of the internet-after all, with the tractor, a shrinking farm population could still feed a growing world. But getting the tractor from the boardroom to the drafting table, then from factory and the farm, was a technological and competitive battle that until now, has never been fully told. A researcher, historian, and writer, Neil Dahlstrom has spent decades in the corporate archives at John Deere. In Tractor Wars, Dahlstrom offers an insider's view of a story that entwines a myriad of brands and characters, stakes and plots: the Reverend Daniel Hartsough, a pastor turned tractor designer; Alexander Legge, the eventual president of International Harvester, a former cowboy who took on Henry Ford; William Butterworth and the oft-at-odds leadership team at John Deere that partnered with the enigmatic Ford but planned for his ultimate failure. With all the bitterness and drama of the race between Ford, Dodge, and General Motors, Tractor Wars is the untold story of industry stalwarts and disruptors, inventors, and administrators racing to invent modern agriculture-a power farming revolution that would usher in a whole new world.

One half-century later, the catastrophic ramming of the MS Stockholm into the Italian luxury liner the SS Andrea Doria in 1956 is relived in this candid, heartrending account. Author Pierette Domenica Simpson, who, with her grandparents, survived the tragedy off the shoals of Nantucket, shares the human and technical aspects of what has become known as the greatest sea rescue in history. As only an eyewitness can do, the author presents survivors' recollections in dramatic vignettes that meticulously re-create a horrific event-one that could have been another Titanic. Both poor immigrants and wealthy travelers give their accounts of ultimate despair and infinite elation after staring at their own reflections in the black ocean that night and seeing death stare back. Equally dramatic are the revelations of new facts exposed by nautical experts from two continents facts that solve the "mystery" of who was to blame for this most improbable collision between two ships on the open seas.

#1 Amazon New Release ─ Surprising history of ordinary things

Learn the fascinating history and trivia you never knew about things we use daily from the host of The Story Behind podcast.

Everyday objects and major events in history: Every single thing that surrounds us has a story behind it. Many of us learn the history of humans and the major inventions that shaped our world. But what you may not have learned is the history of objects we surround ourselves with every day. You might not even know how the major events in history (World Wars, ancient civilizations, revolutions, etc.) influenced the inventions of things we use today.

The history and science behind the ordinary: From the creator of The Story Behind podcast comes this revelatory new book. The Story Behind will give insight into everyday objects we don’t think much about when we use them. Topics covered in the podcast will be examined in more detail along with many new fascinating topics. Learn how lollipops got started in Ancient Egypt, how podcasts were invented, and why Comic Sans was created. Learn the torture device origins of certain exercise equipment and the espionage beginnings of certain musical instruments. Ordinary things from science to art, food to sports, customs to fashion, and more are explored.

Readers will:

- Understand the wonders behind everyday objects

- Learn truly obscure history and fun facts that will change the way they see the world

- Learn how major historic events still affect us today through seemingly mundane things

- Become formidable trivia masters

Discover the fascinating story behind everything!

Historian Alfred W. Crosby looks at hard, accurate throwing and the manipulation of fire as unique human capabilities. Humans began throwing rocks in prehistory and then progressed to javelins, atlatls, bows and arrows. We learned to make fire by friction and used it to cook, drive game, burn out rivals, and alter landscapes. In historic times we invented catapults, trebuchets, and such flammable liquids as Greek Fire. About 1,000 years ago we invented gunpowder, which accelerated the rise of empires and the advance of European imperialism. In the 20th century, gunpowder weaponry enabled us to wage the most destructive wars of all time, peaking at the end of World War II with the V-2 and atomic bomb. Today, we have turned our projectile talents to space travel which may make it possible for our species to migrate to other bodies of our solar system and even other star systems.

Challenging the popular myth of a present-day 'information revolution', Media Technology and Society is essential reading for anyone interested in the social impact of technological change. Winston argues that the development of new media forms, from the telegraph and the telephone to computers, satellite and virtual reality, is the product of a constant play-off between social necessity and suppression: the unwritten law by which new technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is limited.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203024370

Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century.

Mahoney s work ranged widely, from logic and the theory of computation to the development of software and applications as craft-work. But it was always informed by a unique perspective derived from his distinguished work on the history of medieval mathematics and experimental practice during the Scientific Revolution. His writings offered a new angle on very recent events and ideas and bridged the gaps between academic historians and computer scientists. Indeed, he came to believe that the field was irreducibly pluralistic and that there could be only "histories" of computing.

In this collection, Thomas Haigh presents thirteen of Mahoney s essays and papers organized across three categories: historiography, software engineering, and theoretical computer science. His introduction surveys Mahoney s work to trace the development of key themes, illuminate connections among different areas of his research, and put his contributions into context. The volume also includes an essay on Mahoney by his former students Jed Z. Buchwald and D. Graham Burnett. The result is a landmark work, of interest to computer professionals as well as historians of technology and science.

In 1961, only a few weeks after Alan Shepherd completed the first American suborbital flight, President John F. Kennedy announced that the U.S. would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. The next year, NASA awarded the right to meet the extraordinary challenge of building a lunar excursion module to a small airplane company called Grumman from Long Island, New York.

Chief engineer Thomas J. Kelly gives a firsthand account of designing, building, testing, and flying the Apollo lunar module. It was, he writes, "an aerospace engineer's dream job of the century". Kelly's account begins with the imaginative process of sketching solutions to a host of technical challenges with an emphasis on safety, reliability, and maintainability. He catalogs numerous test failures, including propulsion-system leaks, ascent-engine instability, stress corrosion of the aluminum alloy parts, and battery problems, as well as their fixes under the ever-present constraints of budget and schedule. He also recaptures the anticipation of the first unmanned lunar module flight with Apollo 5 in 1968, the exhilaration of hearing Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong report that "The Eagle has landed", and the pride of having inadvertently provided a vital "lifeboat" for the crew of the disabled Apollo 13.

From researching and writing the contract-winning proposal through six successful moon landings and returns, Kelly provides a compelling look at the protean efforts of the nearly 7,000 Grumman workers who together created the most important component of the first manned spaceflights.

This book evaluates the importance of various historical sources and discusses their role in the creation and transmission of scientific knowledge. It presents an annotated translation of the introductory words given by Johan Ludvig Heiberg to his translation of the works of Archimedes. Further, it offers English translations of and commentaries on selected fundamental works by Ernst Hellinger and Gabrio Piola, which lay the groundwork for the modern theory of advanced materials, and also examines the criteria used to evaluate scientific works.

In terms of breadth, depth, and originality, this work ranked Cajal with Pasteur and Darwin as giants of 19th century biology. Summarizing almost 20 years of intense research, Cajal systematically described the cellular organization of almost every part of the nervous system in all five classes of vertebrate, and provided a synthetic account of their embryogenesis as well. This revolutionary work laid a broad foundation for modern neuroscience.

Neuroscientists, neurologists, psychologists, computer and cognitive scientists, and nonspecialists will find this work of great use. Modern neuroanatomical terminology is used wherever possible, while attempting to preserve the style of the original text. Summarizing almost 20 years of intense research, Cajal systematically described the cellular organization of almost every part of the nervous system in all five classes of vertebrate, and provided a synthetic account of their embryogenesis as well. This work was revolutionary and laid a broad foundation for modern neuroscience because two new concepts - the neuron doctrine and the law of functional polarity - were used to interpret the data, and because the resulting interpretations opened vast new fields of research with profound clinical implications in neurology and psychiatry. In terms of breadth, depth and originality, this work is second only to that of Vesalius in the history of anatomy, and ranked Cajal with Pasteur and Darwin as the giants of 19th century biology. In many ways, the Histology is as valuable today as when it was written, and these volumes will be of use to a broad spectrum of neuroscientists, neurologists, psychologists, and computer and cognitive scientists. To make this work accessible to non specialists, the translators have used modern neuroanatomical terminology wherever possible, while attempting to preserve the style of the original text. They have also provided extensive cross-referencing of synonyms in the index, and notes to clarify difficult passages.

Our world has been transformed beyond recognition, particularly in the twentieth century, and so were our lives and our aspirations. Throughout James May's Magnificent Machines, our Top Gear guide explores the iconic themes of the past hundred years: flight, space travel, television, mechanised war, medicine, computers, electronic music, skyscrapers, electronic espionage and much more. But he also reveals the hidden story behind why some inventions like the Zeppelin, the hovercraft or the Theremin struggled to make their mark. He examines the tipping points - when technologies such as the car or the internet became unstoppable - and gets up close by looking at the nuts and bolts of remarkable inventions. Packed with surprising statistics and intriguing facts, this is the ideal book for anyone who wants to know how stuff works and why some stuff didn't make it.

First published in 1863, this is a first-hand account of Henry Walter Bates' eleven-year expedition to the river Amazon in 1848, during which he discovered some eight thousand species unknown to the natural sciences. Written in the first person, it records the astonishing range of natural life in the regions traversed by the Amazon and its tributaries. Describing his adventures south of the equator, Bates takes the reader through Para, Tocantins, Cameta, Marajo, Caripi, Obydos, Manos, Santarem, Tapajos, and Ega, descriptively cataloguing the rich vegetation, aboriginal population, and wondrous birds, animals and insects of these regions. More than just a scientist's log, the work that took Bates three years to complete was considered by Darwin to be 'the best work of natural history travels ever published in England.' This third edition of the book (1873) also contains numerous illustrations by the noted zoologist Joseph Wolf.

This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of 'religion' and 'belief', it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity.

A deep dive into the political roots of advertising on the internet The contemporary internet's de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy, Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising. The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet's rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called "surveillance advertising." He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance. The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices-not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.

Eminent physicist and economist, Robert Ayres, examines the history of technology as a change agent in society, focusing on societal roots rather than technology as an autonomous, self-perpetuating phenomenon. With rare exceptions, technology is developed in response to societal needs that have evolutionary roots and causes. In our genus Homo, language evolved in response to a need for our ancestors to communicate, both in the moment, and to posterity. A band of hunters had no chance in competition with predators that were larger and faster without this type of organization, which eventually gave birth to writing and music. The steam engine did not leap fully formed from the brain of James Watt. It evolved from a need to pump water out of coal mines, driven by a need to burn coal instead of firewood, in turn due to deforestation. Later, the steam engine made machines and mechanization possible. Even quite simple machines increased human productivity by a factor of hundreds, if not thousands. That was the Industrial Revolution. If we count electricity and the automobile as a second industrial revolution, and the digital computer as the beginning of a third, the world is now on the cusp of a fourth revolution led by microbiology. These industrial revolutions have benefited many in the short term, but devastated the Earth's ecosystems. Can technology save the human race from the catastrophic consequences of its past success? That is the question this book will try to answer.

In this work, Flexner chronicles the lives of three men, all striving to invent the first steamboat, and shows the pattern of their interwoven fates. In his introduction, Flexner profiles his first protagonist, John Fitch, as an archetypal wild man of genius ... born to create what would not be accepted, to fight man and God for what he considered justice, and in the end, destroy himself. Fitch's rival and enemy, James Rumsey, was A backwoods gambler, suave and humorous where Fitch was torrential, Rumsey was also (but how differently ) self-destroyed. Enter Robert Fulton, an inventor born to succeed, with whom the tale of anguished pioneering ends. Flexner paints the final hero as an able and cynical opportunist who became rich, socially elevated, and down through the generations, famous.

This book, within the vision of the study on the image history, clearly manifests the development of Chinese image science and technology of over 2000 years based on compendium, while having briefly sorted out expositions by scientists since ancient times in China, demonstrates the spiritual course, ideas of thinking and forms of life and reveales profound humane ideas, basis of sentiments and styles of the spirit featured by Chinese image culture. The historic outline of images is clear-cut along with authenticated inter-attestation for clues of images and texts. Historic facts concerning images are ecologically diversified, while historic documents about images are properly chosen, in addition to the integration between liberal arts and science and perfect combination between images and texts. Blessed with nice integration between images and texts, this book serves as reference to experts, scholars, undergraduates and postgraduates related to the study on image history, history of science and technology, study of history and news communication.

A leading voice in technology studies shares a collection of essential essays on the preservation of software and history of games. Since the early 2000s, Henry Lowood has led or had a key role in numerous initiatives devoted to the preservation and documentation of virtual worlds, digital games, and interactive simulations, establishing himself as a major scholar in the field of game studies. His voluminous writings have tackled subject matter spanning the history of game design and development, military simulation, table-top games, machinima, e-sports, wargaming, and historical software archives and collection development. Replayed consolidates Lowood's far-flung and significant publications on these subjects into a single volume.