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.

Britain's Canals is a charming and insightful exploration into the amazing architecture and engineering wonders that surround Britain's inland waterways - from the awe-inspiring 30-lock flight on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, to the delightful chocolate-box lock-keepers' cottages that line the cut of every canal, to masterpieces such as the 18-arch Pontcysyllte aqueduct, the highest aqueduct in the world, to beautiful bridges, grand company buildings, the social hubs that were, and still are, canal-side pubs, plus so much more. In contrast to many inland waterways books which are organised geographically by canal, Britain's Canals is structured thematically, with chapters covering the line (the shape of the canal), locks and lock cottages, bridges, aqueducts, lifts and planes, company buildings, wharves, basins and quays and finally the canal-side pub. Each chapter explores how these features were created and have changed through history, right through to the present, with plenty of ideas for places to visit - plus full information on how to get to them. An abundance of full-colour photography throughout, both historical and modern-day, will delight readers and inspire them to explore Britain's wondrous inland waterways, whether on boat, by foot or by bike. In Britain's Canals, two inland waterways experts and admired authors come together to produce the definitive word on the man-made wonders that make Britain's canals so special, so loved and enjoyed by so many.

From the preeminent Edison scholar . . . The definitive life of the inventor of the modern age

The conventional story is so familiar and reassuring that it has come to read more like American myth than history: With only three months of formal education, a curious and hardworking young man beats the odds and becomes one of the greatest inventors in history. Not only does he invent the phonograph and the first successful electric light bulb, but he also establishes the first electrical power distribution company and lays the technological groundwork for today's movies, telephones, and sound recording industry. Through relentless tinkering, by trial and error, the story goes, Thomas Alva Edison perseveres—and changes the world.

In the revelatory Edison: A Life of Invention, author Paul Israel exposes and enriches this one-dimensional view of the solitary "Wizard of Menlo Park," expertly situating his subject within a thoroughly realized portrait of a burgeoning country on the brink of massive change. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of corporate America, and with it the newly overlapping interests of scientific, technological, and industrial cultures. Working against the common perception of Edison as a symbol of a mythic American past where persistence and individuality yielded hard-earned success, Israel demonstrates how Edison's remarkable career was actually very much a product of the inventor's fast-changing era. Edison drew widely from contemporary scientific knowledge and research, and was a crucial figure in the transformation of invention into modern corporate research and collaborative development.

Informed by more than five million pages of archival documents, Paul Israel's ambitious life of Edison brightens the unexamined corners of a singularly influential and triumphant career in science. In these pages, history's most prolific inventor—he received an astounding 1,093 U.S. patents—comes to life as never before. Edison is the only biography to cover the whole of Edison's career in invention, including his early, foundational work in telegraphy. Armed with unprecedented access to Edison's workshop diaries, notebooks, and letters, Israel brings fresh insights into how the inventor's creative mind worked. And for the first time, much attention is devoted to his early family life in Ohio and Michigan—where the young Edison honed his entrepreneurial sense and eye for innovation as a newsstand owner and editor of a weekly newspaper—underscoring the inventor's later successes with new resonance and pathos.

In recognizing the inventor's legacy as a pivotal figure in the second Industrial Revolution, Israel highlights Edison's creation of the industrial research laboratory, driven by intricately structured teams of researchers. The efficient lab forever changed the previously serendipitous art of workshop invention into something regular, predictable, and very attractive to corporate business leaders. Indeed, Edison's collaborative research model became the prototype upon which today's research firms and think tanks are based.

The portrait of Thomas Alva Edison that emerges from this peerless biography is of a man of genius and astounding foresight. It is also a portrait rendered with incredible care, depth, and dimension, rescuing our century's godfather of invention from myth and simplification.

Advance Praise for Edison: A Life of Invention

"Familiar Edison stories come alive with fresh insight . . . Israel's scholarship is impeccable while his deceptively easy grace transforms a challenging story into a page turner. One hundred years of history texts have been right all along. Thomas Edison, a protean actor on the American landscape, requires our attention. Paul Israel has given us a book to satisfy that requirement for a long time to come."— John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Editor, Technology and Culture

Praise for Paul Israel's Edison's Electric Light "Well documented and significant."

"An accurate and exciting narrative . . . the standard source on Edison's greatest invention."—Science

"Eminently readable and meticulously researched . . . a scholarly work of high order."—Library Journal

Between 1900 and 1950, Americans built the most powerful steam locomotives of all time-enormous engines that powered a colossal industry. They were deceptively simple machines, yet, the more their technology was studied, the more obscure it became. Despite immense and sustained engineering efforts, steam locomotives remained grossly inefficient in their use of increasingly costly fuel and labor. In the end, they baffled their masters and, as soon as diesel-electric technology provided an alternative, steam locomotives disappeared from American railroads. Drawing on the work of eminent engineers and railroad managers of the day, this lavishly illustrated history chronicles the challenges, triumphs and failures of American steam locomotive development and operation.

Analog computing is one of the main pillars of Unconventional Computing. Almost forgotten for decades, we now see an ever-increasing interest in electronic analog computing because it offers a path to high-performance and highly energy-efficient computing. These characteristics are of great importance in a world where vast amounts of electric energy are consumed by today's computer systems. Analog computing can deliver efficient solutions to many computing problems, ranging from general purpose analog computation to specialised systems like analog artificial neural networks. The book "Analog Computing" has established itself over the past decade as the standard textbook on the subject and has been substantially extended in this second edition, which includes more than 300 additional bibliographical entries, and has been expanded in many areas to include much greater detail. These enhancements will confirm this book's status as the leading work in the field. It covers the history of analog computing from the Antikythera Mechanism to recent electronic analog computers and uses a wide variety of worked examples to provide a comprehensive introduction to programming analog computers. It also describes hybrid computers, digital differential analysers, the simulation of analog computers, stochastic computers, and provides a comprehensive treatment of classic and current analog computer applications. The last chapter looks into the promising future of analog computing.

Thomas Telford's life was extraordinary: born in the Lowlands of Scotland, where his father worked as a shepherd, he ended his days as the most revered engineer in the world, known punningly as The Colossus of Roads. He was responsible for some of the great works of the age, such as the suspension bridge across the Menai Straits and the mighty Pontcysyllte aqueduct. He built some of the best roads seen in Britain since the days of the Romans and constructed the great Caledonian Canal, designed to take ships across Scotland from coast to coast. He did as much as anyone to turn engineering into a profession and was the first President of the newly formed Institution of Civil Engineers. All this was achieved by a man who started work as a boy apprentice to a stonemason. He was always intensely proud of his homeland and was to be in charge of an immense programme of reconstruction for the Highlands that included building everything from roads to harbours and even designing churches. He was unquestionably one of Britains finest engineers, able to take his place alongside giants such as Brunel. He was also a man of culture, even though he had only a rudimentary education. As a mason in his early days he had worked alongside some of the greatest architects of the day, such as William Chambers and Robert Adams, and when he was appointed County Surveyor for Shropshire early in his career, he had the opportunity to practice those skills himself, designing two imposing churches in the county and overseeing the renovation of Shrewsbury Castle. Even as a boy, he had developed a love of literature and throughout his life wrote poetry and became a close friend of the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. He was a man of many talents, who rose to the very top of his profession but never forgot his roots: he kept his old masons tools with him to the end of his days. There are few official monuments to this great man, but he has no need of them: the true monuments are the structures that he left behind that speak of a man who brought about a revolution in transport and civil engineering.

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.

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.

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

History is a weapon. The powerful have their version of events, the people have another. And if we understand how the past was forged, we arm ourselves to change the future. This is a history of struggle, revolution and social change: of hominids, hunters and herders; of emperors and slaves; of patriarchs and women; of rich and poor; of dictators and revolutionaries. From the ancient empires of Persia and Rome to the Russian Revolution, the Vietnam War, and the 2008 Crash, this is a history of greed and violence, but also of solidarity and resistance. Many times in the past, a different society became an absolute necessity. Humans have always struggled to create a better life. This history proves that we, the many, have the power to change the world.

Coal, gas and oil have been capitalism's main fuels since the industrial revolution. And yet, of all the fossil fuels ever consumed, more than half were burned in the last 50 years. Most alarming of all, fossil fuel consumption has grown fastest in the last three decades, since scientists confirmed that it is the main cause of potentially devastating global warming. In Burning Up, Simon Pirani recounts the history of fossil fuels' relentless rise since the mid twentieth century. Dispelling explanations foregrounding Western consumerism, and arguments that population growth is the main problem, Pirani shows how fossil fuels are consumed through technological, social and economic systems, and that these systems must change. This is a major contribution to understanding the greatest crisis of our time.

The untold story of America's wholesale food business. In nineteenth-century America, municipal deregulation of the butcher trade and state-incorporated market companies gave rise to a flourishing wholesale trade. In Movable Markets, Helen Tangires describes the evolution of the American wholesale marketplace for fresh food, from its development as a bustling produce district in the heart of the city to its current indiscernible place in food industrial parks on the urban periphery. Tangires follows the middlemen, those intermediaries who became functional necessities as the railroads accelerated the process of delivering perishable food to the city. Tracing their rise and decline in the wake of a deregulated food economy, she asks: How did these people, who occupied such key roles as food distributors and suppliers to the retail trade, end up exiled to urban outskirts? Moving into the early twentieth century, she explains how progressive city planners and agricultural economists responded to anxieties about the high cost of living, traffic congestion, and disruptions in the food supply by questioning the centrality, aging infrastructure, and organizational structure of wholesale markets. Tangires combines economic and cultural history by analyzing popular literature, innovative scholarship, and USDA publications. Detailing the legal, physical, and organizational means behind the complex exodus of food wholesaling from the urban core, Tangires also reveals how the trade adjusted to life beyond the city limits as it created new channels of distribution, product lines, and markets. Readers interested in US history, city and regional planning history, food history, and public policy, as well as anyone curious about the disappearance of the central produce district as a major component of the city, will find Movable Markets a fascinating read.

The first history of the Institution of Civil Engineers to be illustrated in colour looks at the development of the profession over nearly 200 years and includes biographies of some of the greatest engineers who made these changes possible, charting the successes of construction from the great engineering advances of Victorian times to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. A fascinating and informative read for all those interested in the history of ICE and how it has grown as well as the civil engineering industry and its impact on the world in which we live.

Intriguing, real-life espionage stories bring to life a comparative history of the Allies' efforts to seize, control, and exploit German science and technology after the Second World War. During the Second World War, German science and technology posed a terrifying threat to the Allied nations. These advanced weapons, which included rockets, V-2 missiles, tanks, submarines, and jet airplanes, gave troubling credence to Nazi propaganda about forthcoming "wonder-weapons" that would turn the war decisively in favor of the Axis. After the war ended, the Allied powers raced to seize "intellectual reparations" from almost every field of industrial technology and academic science in occupied Germany. It was likely the largest-scale technology transfer in history. In Taking Nazi Technology, Douglas M. O'Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land-including that of other Allied nations. Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed-and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself.

The question of gender in science and technology is pursued by scholars from different disciplines and perspectives: historians study the lives of women scientists within the context of institutions that for centuries held women at arm's length; sociologists uncover women's access to the means of scientific production; biologists scrutinize how science has studied female and male bodies; cultural critics explore normative understandings of femininity and masculinity; philosophers and historians of science analyse how gender has influenced the content and methods of science and technology. Now, this new four-volume collection from Routledge enables users to make sense of the interlocking pieces of the gender, science, and technology puzzle: the history of women's participation in science and engineering; the structure of research institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge. The volumes bring together important representative publications treating these issues from antiquity to the present, and across cultures.

A gripping narrative of the love and betrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told through the lives of three unique women.

Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, "An Atomic Love Story "unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the 20th century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with the young Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history. His first and most intense love was for Jean Tatlock, though he married the tempestuous Kitty Harrison--both were members of the Communist Party--and was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with the brilliant Ruth Sherman Tolman, ten years his senior and the wife of another celebrated physicist. Although each were connected through their relationship to Oppenheimer, their experiences reflect important changes in the lives of American women in the 20th century: the conflict between career and marriage; the need for a woman to define herself independently; experimentation with sexuality; and the growth of career opportunities.

Beautifully written and superbly researched through a rich collection of firsthand accounts, this intimate portrait shares the tragedies, betrayals, and romances of an alluring man and three bold women, revealing how they pushed to the very forefront of social and cultural changes in a fascinating, volatile era.

The world’s tech giants are at the centre of controversies over fake news, free speech and hate speech on platforms where influence is bought and sold. Yet, at the outset, almost everyone thought the internet would be a positive, democratic force, a space where knowledge could be freely shared to enable everyone to make better-informed decisions. How did it all go so wrong?

Noam Cohen reports on the tech libertarians of Silicon Valley, from the self-proclaimed geniuses Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg to the early pioneers at Stanford University, who have not only made the internet what it is today but reshaped society in the process. It is the story of how the greed, bias and prejudice of one neighbourhood is fracturing the Western world.

The successful laying of a transatlantic cable in 1866 remade world communications. A message could travel across the ocean in minutes, shrinking the space between continents, cultures, and nations. An eclectic group of engineers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and media visionaries then developed this technology into a telecommunications system that spread a particular vision of civilization-but not everyone wanted to wire the world the same way. Wiring the World is a cultural and social history that explores how the large Anglo-American cable companies won out over alternative visions. Bitter rivalries emerged over telegram prices, visions for world peace, scientific innovation, and the role of the nation-state. Such struggles determined the growth of cable technology, which in turn influenced world history. Filled with fascinating characters and new insights into pivotal events, Wiring the World traces globalization's diverse paths and close ties to business and politics.

In the folklore of mathematics, James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897) is the eccentric, hot-tempered, sword-cane-wielding, nineteenth-century British Jew 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, traveller. It also provides a detailed look at Sylvester's thoughts and 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.

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.

Pockets, matches, spectacles, postage stamps. Whether it's the stitches that hold our clothes together or the syringes that deliver life-saving vaccines, small things really do make a big difference. Yet these modest but essential components of everyday life are often overlooked. Science and comedy writer Helen Pilcher shares the unexpected stories of 50 humble innovations - from the accidental soldering of two bits of metal that created the pacemaker, to the eighteenth-century sea captain whose ingenious invention paved the way for the filming of Star Wars - and celebrates the joy of the small yet mighty.

In this open access book, Mikael Hard tells a story of how people around the world challenged the production techniques and products brought by globalization. Retaining their autonomy and freedom, creative individuals selectively adopted or rejected modern gadgets, tools, and machines. In standard historical narratives, globalization is portrayed as an unstoppable force that flattens all obstacles in its path. Modern technology is also seen as inexorable: in the nineteenth century, steamships, telegraph lines, and Gatling guns are said to have paved the way for colonialism and other forms of dominating people and societies. Later, shipping containers and computer networks purportedly pulled the planet deeper into a maelstrom of capitalism. Hard discusses instances that push back against these narratives. For example, in Soviet times, inhabitants of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, preferred to remain in-and expand-their own mud-brick houses rather than move into prefabricated, concrete residential buildings. Similarly, nineteenth-century Sumatran carpenters ignored the saws brought to them by missionaries-and chose to chop down trees with their arch-bladed adzes. And people in colonial India successfully competed with capitalist-run Caribbean sugar plantations, continuing to produce their own muscovado and sell it to local consumers. This book invites readers to view the history of technology and material culture through the lens of diversity. Based on research funded by the European Research Council and conducted in the Global South, Microhistories of Technology: Making the World shows that the spread of modern technologies did not erase artisanal production methods and traditional tools.