Now in a thoroughly updated new edition, this successful textbook surveys the history of technology in America from the 1600s to the 21st century. Alan I Marcus and Howard P. Segal explore the effect society, culture, politics and economics have had upon technological advances, and place the evolution of American technology within the broader context of the development of systems such as transportation and communications. This unique book connects phenomena such as colonial printing presses with the American Revolution; early photographs with the creation of an allegedly unique American character; and high-tech advances in biotechnology with a growing desire for individual autonomy. This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of the history of technology, the history of science, and American history.

For much of the postwar era, French society had a contradictory view of passenger trains, scorning them as quaint anachronisms on the one hand, yet also fearing their economic and social impact. All this changed with the introduction of the famed Train a Grande Vitesse (TGV) between Paris and Lyon in the early 1980s. In vivid detail, Meunier describes the political, economic, and social factors that both helped and hindered the development of the world's fastest, most technologically advanced train.

The present-day enthusiasm in France for high-speed rail travel dates only to the successful launch of the now-famous TGV in 1981. Until now, most published accounts of French high-speed rail have been of a technical nature and have ignored or minimized the historical, political, economic, and social context. Historians have been left with detailed descriptions of locomotives and experimental test runs, but there has been scant information cercerning why the machines were built and why the tests were carried out in the first place. This book is the first full-length treatment of high-speed rail travel and the bibliography is one of the most complete on the subject.

In the face of today's environmental and economic challenges, doomsayers preach that the only way to stave off disaster is for humans to reverse course: to de-industrialize, re-localize, ban the use of modern energy sources, and forswear prosperity. But in this provocative and optimistic rebuke to the catastrophists, Robert Bryce shows how innovation and the inexorable human desire to make things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper is providing consumers with Cheaper and more abundant energy, Faster computing, Lighter vehicles, and myriad other goods. That same desire is fostering unprecedented prosperity, greater liberty, and yes, better environmental protection.Utilizing on-the-ground reporting from Ottawa to Panama City and Pittsburgh to Bakersfield, Bryce shows how we have, for centuries, been pushing for Smaller Faster solutions to our problems. From the vacuum tube, mass-produced fertilizer, and the printing press to mobile phones, nanotech, and advanced drill rigs, Bryce demonstrates how cutting-edge companies and breakthrough technologies have created a world in which people are living longer, freer, healthier, lives than at any time in human history.The push toward Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper is happening across multiple sectors. Bryce profiles innovative individuals and companies, from long-established ones like Ford and Intel to upstarts like Aquion Energy and Khan Academy. And he zeroes in on the energy industry, proving that the future belongs to the high power density sources that can provide the enormous quantities of energy the world demands.The tools we need to save the planet aren't to be found in the technologies or lifestyles of the past. Nor must we sacrifice prosperity and human progress to ensure our survival. The catastrophists have been wrong since the days of Thomas Malthus. This is the time to embrace the innovators and businesses all over the world who are making things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.

The history of the development of the unique vessels built for the New England fishing industry from colonial days to the first third of the twentieth century is here recounted by the leading authority on the subject. Mr. Chapelle gathered material from numerous sources over many years for this book, bringing together a vast amount of important information on the beautiful American fishing schooners, now extinct, built at Essex and other shipbuilding areas of New England. This book traces the evolution of the American fishing schooner from the eighteenth century to the last working and racing schooners of the mid-1930s. The designers, builders, and crews are also discussed. There are 137 plans of schooners which graphically show the development of the type. An important feature of the book is its illustrated glossary-appendix based on Mr. Chapelle's notebooks. It covers scores of items of hull construction and equipment, rigging and gear, color and carving, and includes notes by the builders and riggers themselves, in fact, everything that could be recorded about these crafts, then fast-disappearing.

There is no necessary relationship between fame and power, and great influence is often wielded in willful obscurity. So it was with the irascible, indomitable Eugene Fubini. A physics prodigy who fled Italy when the fascists came to power, his searing intelligence and relentless determination lifted him from obscurity to the highest levels of the Pentagon. Indifferent to anything but results, Fubini worked behind the scenes to shape the strategy and substance of his adopted country's post-World War II defense. Along the way he exerted enormous influence over the development of radar, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the Space Race, and many of the other signature events and movements of mid-twentieth-century American geopolitics. But even as his unbending determination to do things his way earned him the admiration of his colleagues, it left him feared and isolated within his own family. "Let Me Explain" is a portrait of a man whose unwillingness and inability to compromise paid enormous rewards, and extracted a heavy emotional price. David G. Fubini is a director of McKinsey & Company, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. For more than a decade he was the managing director of the Boston office, and led the firm's activities in New England. Prior to joining McKinsey, David was an initial member of a small group that became the McNeil Consumer Products Company of Johnson & Johnson. David received a degree in business administration with honors from the University of Massachusetts, and a master's degree in business administration, with distinction, from Harvard University. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife, Bertha Rivera, and their four children.

The former Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire, India remains, by any measure, a major economic and political actor on the world scene. Without her extensive railway network—completed against all odds by her British colonial masters—it is impossible to imagine what might have become of the diverse lands and peoples of the subcontinent. These railway networks brought them together as a colony; these networks fostered the nationalism that would be Britain's downfall. This rail network both remade the physical landscape and brought social-cultural cohesion to a diverse and wide-ranging populace. It would be common rail travel that Gandhi would employ to reach the masses. From its romantic mystique to its dangerous reality, it is rail travel today that keeps vital social, cultural, economic and political forces moving. India's railroad history serves as a unique lens to her larger story of triumph over adversity. By 1905, India had the world's fourth largest railway network—a position it retains in the early 21st century. The railroads were at the organizational and technological center of many of the inter-related economic, political, social, cultural, and ecological transformations that produced modern India through, and out of, its colonial past. In addition to this vast technical achievement, and (in keeping with the series focus), there is an equally important and wide-sweeping human-interest tale to be told with evocative vignettes of the triumph of the human spirit (one billion strong!) in the face of great adversity.

This is a volume of chapters on the historical study of information, computing, and society written by seven of the most senior, distinguished members of the History of Computing field. These are edited, expanded versions of papers presented in a distinguished lecture series in 2018 at the University of Colorado Boulder - in the shadow of the Flatirons, the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Topics range widely across the history of computing. They include the digitalization of computer and communication technologies, gender history of computing, the history of data science, incentives for innovation in the computing field, labor history of computing, and the process of standardization. Authors were given wide latitude to write on a topic of their own choice, so long as the result is an exemplary article that represents the highest level of scholarship in the field, producing articles that scholars in the field will still look to read twenty years from now. The intention is to publish articles of general interest, well situated in the research literature, well grounded in source material, and well-polished pieces of writing. The volume is primarily of interest to historians of computing, but individual articles will be of interest to scholars in media studies, communication, computer science, cognitive science, general and technology history, and business.

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods, and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. Volumes contain technical articles ranging widely in subject, time and region, as well as general papers on the history of technology. In addition to dealing with the history of technical discovery and change, History of Technology also explores the relations of technology to other aspects of life -- social, cultural and economic -- and shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods, and the measures taken to solve them, form the concern of this annual collection of essays. It deals with the history of technical discovery and change, and explores the relation of technology to other aspects of life.

Since ancient times, technological advances have increased man's chances for survival. From the practicality of a Roman aqueduct to the art of the written word, man has always adapted his environment to meet his needs, and to provide himself with sustenance, comfort, comfort, leisure, a higher quality of living, and a thriving culture. This concise reference source takes a closer look at six technological events that significantly impacted the evolution of civilization, from the Palaeolithic age to the height of the Roman Empire. As he touches on the common elements of ancient technology—energy, machines, mining, metallurgy, ceramics, agriculture, engineering, transportation, and communication—Humphrey asks questions central to understanding the impact of ancient tools on the modern world: What prompts change? What cultural traditions inhibit change? What effect do these changes have on their societies and civilization? Humphrey explores technologies as both physical tools and as extensions of the human body, beginning with the invention of the Greek alphabet and including such accomplishments as early Neolithic plant cultivation, the invention of coinage, the building of the Parthenon, and Rome's urban water system. Detailed line drawings of tools and machines make ancient mechanics more easily accessible. Primary documents, glossary, biographies, and a timeline dating from the Palaeolithic age to the Roman Empire round out the work, making this an ideal reference source for understanding the tools of the ancient world.

These essays offer scholars, teachers, and students a new basis for discussing attitudes toward, and technological expertise concerning, water in antiquity through the early Modern period, and they examine historical water use and ideology both diachronically and cross regionally. Topics include gender roles and water usage; attitudes, practices, and innovations in baths and bathing; water and the formation of identity and policy; ancient and medieval water sources and resources; and religious and literary water imagery. The authors describe how ideas about the nature and function of water created and shaped social relationships, and how religion, politics, and science transformed, and were themselves transformed by, the manipulation of, uses of, and disputes over water in daily life, ceremonies, and literature. Contributors are Rabun Taylor, Sandra Lucore, Robert F. Sutton, Jr., Cynthia K Kosso, Kevin Lawton, Evy Johanne Haland, Helene Cazes, Alexandra Cuffel, Mark Munn, Brenda Longfellow, Gretchen Meyers, Sara Saba, Scott John McDonough, Etienne Dunant, E. J. Owens , Mehmet Taslialan, Deborah Chatr Aryamontri, John Stephenson, Lin A. Ferrand, Paul Trio, Anne Scott, Misty Rae Urban, Ruth Stevenson, Charles Connell, Alyce Jordan, Ronald Cooley, and Irene Matthews.

This contributed volume provides 11 illustrative case studies of technological transformation in the global pulp and paper industry from the inception of mechanical papermaking in early nineteenth century Europe until its recent developments in today's business environment with rapidly changing market dynamics and consumer behaviour. It deals with the relationships between technology transfer, technology leadership, raw material dependence, and product variety on a global scale. The study itemises the main drivers in technology transfer that affected this process, including the availability of technology, knowledge, investments and raw materials on the one hand, and demand characteristics on the other hand, within regional, national and transnational organisational frameworks. The volume is intended as a basic introduction to the history of papermaking technology, and it is aimed at students and teachers as course material and as a handbook for professionals working in either industry, research centres or universities. It caters to graduate audiences in forestry, business, technical sciences, and history.