The importance of design has often been neglected in studies considering the history of structural and civil engineering. Yet design is a key aspect of all building and engineering work. This volume brings together a range of articles which focus on the role of design in engineering. It opens by considering the principles of design, then deals with the application of these to particular subjects including bridges, canals, dams and buildings (from Gothic cathedrals to Victorian mills) constructed using masonry, timber, cast and wrought iron.

In the light of new archival material the editors take a fresh look at Russian aviation in the twentieth century. Presenting a comprehensive view of Russian aviation, from its genesis in the late czarist period to the present era, the approach is essentially chronological with a major emphasis on the evolution of military aviation. The contributions are diverse, with appropriate attention to civilian and institutional themes.

Contents:
Introduction
Part One: Ancient Cities 1. Urban origins: a review of theories Harold Carter 2. Bricks and Brickmaking in Mud and Clay P.R.S.Moorey 3. History Herodotus 4. Deir el-Medina A.R. David 5. Heavy Transport in Classical Antiquity A. Bruford 6. Ancient Greek Water Supply Alfred Burns 7. Lifting in Early Greek Architecture J.J. Coulton 8. The Construction of Fortified Towns Vitruvius 9.The Organization and Supply of Roman Building James c. Anderson jr. 10. On the Water Supply of the City of Rome Frontinus 11. A Model of Agricultural Change Neville Morley 12. The Transformation of the Roman Suburbium Neville Morley
Part Two: Medieval and Early Modern Cities 13. Water Supply in Early Medieval Italy Bryan Ward-Perkins 14. From Polis to Madina: Urban Change in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria Hugh Kennedy 15. Medieval Technology and Social Change Lynn White 16. Fuelling the city: production and distribution of firewood and fuel in London's region, 1290-1400 James A. Galloway 17. Road Improvement in Thirteenth-century Pisa David HerlihyL 18. Town and Hinterland in Medieval Scotland Elizabeth Ewan 19. Building Renaissance Florence: materials, techniques, organization Richard A Goldthwaite 20. Repositioning the Vatican Obelisk Domenico Fontana 21. Urbanization in Early Modern Europe: Change or Continuity? Christopher R. Friedrichs 22. Technology and the Built Environment of the Early Modern City Christopher R. Friedrichs 23. A Golden Age: Innovations in Dutch Cities, 1648-1720 Jonathan Israel 24. Fire-fighting Technology in Early Modern England Stephen Porter 25. Technological Innvation in Seventeenth-century Paris Leon Bernard 26. Rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 John Evelyn 27. Technological Change in a Traditional Society: The Case of the Desagiie in Colonial Mexico Louisa Schell Hoberman
Part Three: Pre-Industrial Cities of China and Africa 28. Building in 'The Book of Odes' 29. Meanings of Walls and Gates Nelson I. Wu 30. Water-pipes, Fountains and Clocks Joseph Needham and Wang Ling 31. Tiles, Bricks and Coal Sung Ying-Hsing 32. Guilds and Property Development in Hankou William T. Rowe 33. Fire Brigades and Ferries in Hankou William T. Rowe 34. A Description of Hankou in 1850 Evariste Regis Huc 35. Hausa Building Techniques J.C. Moughtin 36. Building-types of the Hausa People: characteristics and formative influences J.C. Moughtin
Part Four: The Sjoberg Model 37. The Pre-Industrial City Gideon Sjoberg 38. Some Reflections on the Pre-Industrial City Peter Burke

This book deals with the period when iron became the dominant 'high-technology' material, increasingly taking over from timber and masonry. It was necessary for the engines and machines of the new industries, but equally vital for the vast civil engineering works which supported this industrialisation. It was these works - mills, warehouses, dockyards, and above all bridges - which so impressed the public in the early 19th century. The papers selected here trace the evolving structural uses of cast and wrought iron in frames and roofs for buildings, and look in particular at the development of bridge design and construction, in America, France, and Russia, as well as in Britain. They cover the processes of design and testing, and at the same time throw much light on the attitudes and careers of the engineers themselves.

Each volume in this new series is a collection of seminal articles on a theme of central importance in the study of transport history, selected from the leading journal in the field. Each contains between ten and a dozen articles selected by a distinguished scholar, as well as an authoritative new introduction by the volume editor. Individually they will form an essential foundation to the study of the history of a mode of transport; together they will make an incomparable library of the best modern research in the field.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology gives readers a view into this increasingly vital and urgently needed domain of philosophical understanding, offering an in-depth collection of leading and emerging voices in the philosophy of technology. The thirty-two contributions in this volume cut across and connect diverse philosophical traditions and methodologies. They reveal the often-neglected importance of technology for virtually every subfield of philosophy, including ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and political theory. The Handbook also gives readers a new sense of what philosophy looks like when fully engaged with the disciplines and domains of knowledge that continue to transform the material and practical features and affordances of our world, including engineering, arts and design, computing, and the physical and social sciences. The chapters reveal enduring conceptual themes concerning technology's role in the shaping of human knowledge, identity, power, values, and freedom, while bringing a philosophical lens to the profound transformations of our existence brought by innovations ranging from biotechnology and nuclear engineering to artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and robotics. This new collection challenges the reader with provocative and original insights on the history, concepts, problems, and questions to be brought to bear upon humanity's complex and evolving relationship to technology.

‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.’

It’s been almost 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell said these immortal words on the first ever phone call, to his assistant in the next room. Between 10 March 1876 and now, the world has changed beyond recognition. And telecommunications, which has played a fundamental role in this change, has itself evolved into an industry that was the sole preserve of science fiction.

When the world’s first modern mobile telephone network was launched in 1979, there were just over 300 million telephones. Today, there are more than eight billion, most of which are mobile. Most people in most countries can now contact each other in a matter of seconds. Soon we’ll all be connected, to each other, and to complex computer networks that provide us with instant information, but also observe and record our actions. No other phenomenon touches so many of us, so directly, each and every day of our lives.

This book describes how this transformation came about. It considers the technologies that underpin telecommunications – microcircuits, fibre-optics and satellites – and touches on financial aspects of the industry: privatisations, mergers and takeovers that have helped shape the $2-trillion telecom market. But for the most part, it’s a story about us and our need to communicate.

Biologist James Watson and physicist Francis Crick’s 1953 revelation about the double helix structure of DNA is the foundation of virtually every advance in our modern understanding of genetics and molecular biology. But how did Watson and Crick do it—and why were they the ones who succeeded? In truth, the discovery of DNA’s structure is the story of a race among five scientists for advancement, fame and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and Linus Pauling. They were fascinating and brilliant, with strong personalities that often clashed. But it is Rosalind Franklin who becomes a focal point for Howard Markel. The Secret of Life is a story of genius and perseverance but also a saga of cronyism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and misconduct. Markel brilliantly recounts the intense intellectual journey—and the fraught personal relationships—that resulted in the discovery of DNA.

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.

We are always hearing about the Next Big Thing. Whether it is a new iPhone or the New World, the freshest and newest inventions, discoveries, and fads loom large in the public mind. The impact that everyone thinks these "next big things" will have is often more important than the actual impact it generates. After all, if it fails, it will be almost immediately forgotten. The Next Big Thing searches through 3,000 years of Western culture to find the colorful and key steps (and missteps) that led us to where we are today. Paradigm-shifting events, such as the spread of ethical monotheism and the invention of the printing press, stand beside such cultural ephemera as the aborted U.S metric campaign and the misbegotten vogue for smart drinks. Each entry features the historical context of that Next Big Thing as well as an overview of its legacy, including photos, sidebars, trivia, and quotes.

A critical examination of the rise of wearable EEG monitors. From Fitbits to GPS trackers, wearables promise to help us understand and improve ourselves in quantified ways. We count our steps, track our location, and even monitor our brain waves as we strive to achieve better fitness, clearer direction, or a more focused mind. But why do we rely on wearables to learn about ourselves? In Instrumental Intimacy, Melissa M. Littlefield questions our desire for mechanistic guidance by examining brain-based EEG wearables that promise to improve sleep, relationships, self-knowledge, and learning. Littlefield focuses specifically on EEGs' transition out of the laboratory and into the hands of consumers. While other brain-imaging technologies (such as MRI, PET, and MEG) are used only in specialized laboratories, human electroencephalography (a.k.a. EEG) is embedded in portable, user-friendly devices. These direct-to-consumer wearables visualize brain activity as accessible data, and many offer the promise of self-optimization. Littlefield's illuminating book brings the histories of EEG to bear on the contemporary development of EEG wearables via case studies of EEG-based sleep aids, bio-mapping instruments, fashionable surveillance tools, and athletic training devices. The author argues that, over the past century, applied uses of EEG helped to create new states of mind to be monitored and manipulated, as well as discourses about the existence of brain waves and their viability as a tool for brain optimization. By contextualizing and analyzing EEG wearables, Instrumental Intimacy provides a crucial intervention in an emergent consumer market and in the scholarly fields of STS, critical neuroscience, and the history of technology.

Empire of the Air tells the story of three American visionaries-Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff-whose imagination and dreams turned a hobbyist's toy into radio, launching the modern communications age. Tom Lewis weaves the story of these men and their achievements into a richly detailed and moving narrative that spans the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the American romance with science and technology was at its peak. Empire of the Air is a tale of pioneers on the frontier of a new technology, of American entrepreneurial spirit, and of the tragic collision between inventor and corporation.

The Pickering Masters Works of Charles Babbage is the first and only collected edition of all the known works of this major thinker. Texts have been edited by an expert to reflect the development of the many facets of Babbage's work. For easy reference, volumes are arranged by genre, so that Babbage's work on mathematics, table-making and calculating engines, science, technology, inventions and his writing on economics and statistics, theology and politics, is grouped together, in chronological order within each volume where appropriate.

'Entertaining and engrossing' Sean Carroll Press the snooze button on your alarm once too often and you soon remember the importance of good timekeeping. That need to tell the time connects you to over five thousand years of human history, from the first solstice markers at Newgrange to quartz crystal oscillating in your watch today. Science underpins time: measuring the movement of Sun, Earth and Moon, and unlocking the mysteries of quantum mechanics and relativity theory - the key to ultra-precise atomic clocks. Yet time is also socially decided: the Gregorian calendar we use today came out of fraught politics, while the ancient Maya used sophisticated astronomical observations to produce a calendar system unlike any other. In his quirky and accessible style, Chad Orzel reveals the wondrous physics that makes time something we can set, measure and know.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as something extraordinary, a dream-or a nightmare-that awakens metaphysical questions on human life. Yet far from a distant technology of the future, the true power of AI lies in its subtle revolution of ordinary life. From voice assistants like Siri to natural language processors, AI technologies use cultural biases and modern psychology to fit specific characteristics of how users perceive and navigate the external world, thereby projecting the illusion of intelligence. Integrating media studies, science and technology studies, and social psychology, Deceitful Media examines the rise of artificial intelligence throughout history and exposes the very human fallacies behind this technology. Focusing specifically on communicative AIs, Natale argues that what we call "AI" is not a form of intelligence but rather a reflection of the human user. Using the term "banal deception," he reveals that deception forms the basis of all human-computer interactions rooted in AI technologies, as technologies like voice assistants utilize the dynamics of projection and stereotyping as a means for aligning with our existing habits and social conventions. By exploiting the human instinct to connect, AI reveals our collective vulnerabilities to deception, showing that what machines are primarily changing is not other technology but ourselves as humans. Deceitful Media illustrates how AI has continued a tradition of technologies that mobilize our liability to deception and shows that only by better understanding our vulnerabilities to deception can we become more sophisticated consumers of interactive media.

J. B. S. Haldane's life was rich and strange, never short on genius or drama-from his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father, who first instilled in him a devotion to the scientific method; to his time in the trenches during the First World War, where he wrote his first scientific paper; to his numerous experiments on himself, including inhaling dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and drinking hydrochloric acid; to his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during the Second World War. He is best remembered as a geneticist who revolutionized our understanding of evolution, but his peers hailed him as a polymath. One student called him "the last man who might know all there was to be known." He foresaw in vitro fertilization, peak oil, and the hydrogen fuel cell, and his contributions ranged over physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, mathematics, and biostatistics. He was also a staunch Communist, which led him to Spain during the Civil War and sparked suspicions that he was spying for the Soviets. He wrote copiously on science and politics in newspapers and magazines, and he gave speeches in town halls and on the radio-all of which made him, in his day, as famous in Britain as Einstein. It is the duty of scientists to think politically, Haldane believed, and he sought not simply to tell his readers what to think but to show them how to think. Beautifully written and richly detailed, Samanth Subramanian's A Dominant Character recounts Haldane's boisterous life and examines the questions he raised about the intersections of genetics and politics-questions that resonate even more urgently today.

Because science and technology have opened new avenues for vintners, our taste in wine has grown ever more diverse. Wine is now the subject of careful chemistry and global demand. Paul Lukacs recounts the journey of wine through history how wine acquired its social cachet, how vintners discovered the twin importance of place and grape, and how a basic need evolved into a realm of choice.

"

Bishop is undoubtedly one of the most widely-known names in the soil mechanics, or geotechnical engineering, community today, alongside the `founding father', Karl Terzaghi. This is mainly due to the method Bishop devised for estimating the stability of soil slopes; it became known as The Bishop Method and immortalised his name. However, Bishop's contributions to the development of soil mechanics were far wider and of greater significance than his slope stability `method'. His colleague, Professor Skempton, makes this very clear in his contribution to the Bishop eulogy published in Geotechnique in 1988. ...It was a great privilege and the best of good luck to be associated for nearly 40 years with one of the finest intellects in our subject ... his work in this field brought about a highly beneficial revolution in soil mechanics... He was loved and respected by his numerous students... Through them and the strict but friendly criticism of his colleagues' work, and his own important contributions, he exerted a unique influence. Bishop began his career in 1943 when the new soil mechanics world was still grappling with the fundamental issue of soil shear strength. Even the great Terzaghi had not sorted this out. Bishop applied himself immediately to this problem and by the mid 1950s had largely solved it. He published his findings in 1960 in a paper co-authored with Lauritz Bjerrum. This established the parameters to be determined by triaxial testing and the two methods of analysis in use today. This was undoubtedly Bishop's most influential paper. In the eyes of many people Bishop did not receive the recognition he deserved during his lifetime, and indeed has not received since. However, The Bishop Method makes it clear just how influential and important Bishop's contributions were to soil mechanics. The book comprises three parts: Part 1 - the story of Bishop's life, emphasising his particular problem-solving skills Part 2 - his contribution to soil mechanics in some detail, of particular interest to anyone with a technical/professional perspective Part 3 - articles by past students and others who knew him which together paint a fascinating picture of the man

Engineering Disasters - Lessons to be Learned shows that there is always something to be learned from disasters. In this practical and highly relevant text Don Lawson has provided * Thoroughly researched accounts of well-known disasters and failures worldwide * Valuable interpretative sections, drawing out the lessons to be learned in each case * Examples from a wide range of industries * Background information and views of other experts in the field * An excellent source of references for further study * Common threads and conclusions from accident investigations Humans design, build, operate, use, maintain and can wreck engineering products. Humans are fallible. Engineers have to take into account all the potential failures of people, including other engineers, as well as failures of equipment and materials. Design engineering is a structured process using both art and science to create new or improved products - building on experience, bad as well as good. Failure occurs when something or someone fails to perform to expectations.

The Palace of Westminster, home to Britain's Houses of Parliament, is one of the most studied buildings in the world. What is less well known is that while Parliament was primarily a political building, when built between 1834 and 1860, it was also a place of scientific activity. The construction of Britain's legislature presents an extraordinary story in which politicians and officials laboured to make their new Parliament the most radical, modern building of its time by using the very latest scientific knowledge. Experimentalists employed the House of Commons as a chemistry laboratory, geologists argued over the Palace's stone, natural philosophers hung meat around the building to measure air purity, and mathematicians schemed to make Parliament the first public space where every room would have electrically-controlled time. Through such dramatic projects, Edward J. Gillin redefines our understanding of the Palace of Westminster and explores the politically troublesome character of Victorian science.

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.

On July 19, 1048, the Yellow River breached its banks, drastically changing its course across the Hebei Plain and turning it into a delta where the river sought a path out to the ocean. This dramatic shift of forces in the natural world resulted from political deliberation and hydraulic engineering of the imperial state of the Northern Song Dynasty. It created eighty years of social suffering, economic downturn, political upheaval, and environmental changes, which reshaped the medieval North China Plain and challenged the state. Ling Zhang deftly applies textual analysis, theoretical provocation, and modern scientific data in her gripping analysis of how these momentous events altered China's physical and political landscapes and how its human communities adapted and survived. In so doing, she opens up an exciting new field of research by wedding environmental, political, economic, and social history in her examination of one of North China's most significant environmental changes.

The Royal Society is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious scientific bodies, but what has it done in recent decades? Increasingly marginalised by postwar developments and the reforms of civil science in the 1960s, the Society was at risk of resting on its laurels. Instead, it found ways of exploiting its unique networks of scientific talent to promote science. Creating opportunities for outstanding individuals to establish and advance research careers, influencing policymaking at national and international levels, and engaging with the public outside the world of professional science, the Society gave fresh expression to the values that had shaped its long history. Through unparalleled access to the Society's modern archives and other archival sources, interviews with key individuals and extensive inside knowledge, Peter Collins shows how the Society addressed the challenges posed by the astounding growth of science and by escalating interactions between science and daily life.