Originally published in 1965. Charles Wheatstone collaborated with William Cooke in the invention and early exploitation of the Electric Telegraph. This was the first long distance, faster-than-a-horse messenger. This volume gives an account of the earlier work on which the English invention was founded, and the curious route by which it came to England. It discusses the way in which two such antagonistic men were driven into collaboration and sets out the history of the early telegraph lines, including work on the London and Birmingham Railway and the Great Western Railway.

This book explores how a long-term innovation can take place based on historical analyses of the development of reverse osmosis (RO) membrane from the early 1950s to the mid-2010s. The RO membrane is a critical material for desalination that is a key to solve water shortages becoming serious in many places of the world. The authors conducted in-depth field studies as well as analyses of rich archival data to demonstrate how researchers, engineers, managers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers interacted each other for this material innovation to be realized. A series of historical analyses in this book uncovered that initial government supports, strategic niche markets, emergence of breakthrough technology, and company-specific rationales played significant roles for companies to overcome four types of uncertainty, technological, market, competition, and social/organizational ones, and enabled the companies to persistently invest in the development and commercialization of the RO membrane. This book depicts that innovation does not arise on a sudden, but that it is actualized through long lasting process with turns and twists, which is driven by many non-economic rationales beyond economic motives.

This book investigates the science of electricity in the long eighteenth century and its textual life in literary and political writings. Electricity was celebrated as a symbol of enlightened progress, but its operation and its utility were unsettlingly obscure. As a result, debates about the nature of electricity dovetailed with discussions of the relation between body and soul, the nature of sexual attraction, the properties of revolutionary communication and the mysteries of vitality. This study explores the complex textual manifestations of electricity between 1740 and 1840, in which commentators describe it both as a material force and as a purely figurative one. The book analyses attempts by both elite and popular practitioners of electricity to elucidate the mysteries of electricity, and traces the figurative uses of electrical language in the works of writers including Mary Robinson, Edmund Burke, Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall, Mary Shelley and Richard Carlile.

"Blurb & Contents" "Copies of Onnes's or Meissner's lab notebooks--this is the stuff of science. This book is truly a tour de force. I cannot think of a single person working in the area of superconductivity who would not be totally absorbed by it." Materials & Design The first truly comprehensive history of superconductivity, from the first studies in the late 19th century to the present. It delves deeply into a largely undocumented early history, marked by H. Kamerlingh Onnes's first successes with mercury in 1911 and extending to the onset of World War II. Also encompasses materials development of the fifties, the work that culminated in the BCS theory of the early sixties, and the important recent application of ceramic oxides.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, typical households were equipped with a landline telephone, a desktop computer connected to a dial-up modem, and a shared television set. Television, radio and newspapers were the dominant mass media. Today, homes are now network hubs for all manner of digital technologies, from mobile devices littering lounge rooms to Bluetooth toothbrushes in bathrooms-and tomorrow, these too will be replaced with objects once inconceivable. Tracing the origins of these digital developments, Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, and Rowan Wilken advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home. The book locates digital domesticity through phases of adoption and dwelling, to management and housekeeping, to obsolescence and disposal. The authors synthesize household interviews, technology tours, remote data collection via mobile applications, and more to offer readers groundbreaking insight into domestic media consumption. Chapters use original case studies to empirically trace the adoption, use, and disposal of technology by individuals and families within their homes. The book unearths social and material accounts of media technologies, offering insight into family negotiations regarding technology usage in such a way that puts technology in the context of recent developments of digital infrastructure, devices, and software-all of which are now woven into the domestic fabric of the modern household.

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.

This book reflects the many changes that computer graphics technology has under gone in my working life time. I graduated from a teachers college in 1963. There was not a computer of any kind on campus, imagine my shock when my very first college employer (Omaha University) required me to know something about an IBM 1620 and a key punch machine The first part of this book is an account of that experience at Omaha University and later the Nebraska of Nebraska at Omaha. When I moved to Clemson University in 1976, they had a computer and a large Calcomp Plotter but nothing else in the way of computer graphics hardware or software. So, except for a few short sections in chapter one, this history begins with the events of 1963 and proceeds to document what happened to computer graphics for engineering design and manufacturing as practiced by an engineer or technician at Clemson University. The next section of the book contains my experiences as a self-employed consultant (1993-present), my consulting started in 1984 after I completed a PhD in Data Systems Engineering. In 1993, I left full time teaching and became Professor Emeritus at Clemson University. I wanted to start my own consulting company, DLR Associates. Oddly enough, most of my first consulting in computer graphics took place in the Omaha and Pennsylvania areas - not South Carolina. My contacts came from my paper presentations at various ASEE meetings and the annual national distance learning conferences held at the University of Maine. I took a year off to accept a Fulbright Scholarship Nomination from the University of Rookee, India. I was listed as an international member in the Who's Who Directory of the computer graphics industry. In a nut shell, that is who I am. Why, then, did I decide to write this book?

In 1930s Americans were so surprised if not to say shocked by Chkalov's and Gromov's Non-stop Transpolar flight. In addition to them, there were other aviators, now almost forgotten. We would like to preserve their memory.

What is mechanical engineering? What a mechanical engineering does? How did the mechanical engineering change through ages? What is the future of mechanical engineering? This book answers these questions in a lucid manner. It also provides a brief chronological history of landmark events and answers questions such as: When was steam engine invented? Where was first CNC machine developed? When did the era of additive manufacturing start? When did the marriage of mechanical and electronics give birth to discipline of mechatronics? This book informs and create interest on mechanical engineering in the general public and particular in students. It also helps to sensitize the engineering fraternity about the historical aspects of engineering. At the same time, it provides a common sense knowledge of mechanical engineering in a handy manner.

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the world became aware of the destructiveness of nuclear energy when the U.S. Army Air Corps dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even before the bombs were detonated, though, President Harry Truman had directed his thoughts toward non-military uses of the atom, recognizing that the atomic bomb had given man a new understanding of the forces of nature. This book examines the history and development of nuclear power from the perspective of the U.S. Army's nuclear power program, telling its story from the creation of the Office of Research and Development through the program's days of growth,and on to its eventual decline. This history examines the development of the United States Army's nuclear power program from its inception, through the development and operation of six small nuclear power plants throughout the Western Hemisphere, to its evolution into a military support agency. The Manhattan Project District Engineer, General Kenneth Nichols, who generated the idea for the program, worked for the development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. From the initial plans to develop nuclear power plants at remote bases, the book traces the path the Army took in getting its proposals approved by the Atomic Energy Commission, formally organizing the nuclear program, and building a prototype of a nuclear power plant. Separate chapters are devoted to Fort Greely, the nuclear program at the height of its success and accomplishment, and its subsequent decline and transitional period. With its list of suggestions for further reading and a comprehensive index, this volume will be a valuable resource for courses in military history, energy issues, and the development of atomic power. It will also represent an important addition to college, university, and public libraries.

What made it possible for the human species to conquer the world, build a global digital economy, and still want more? What drives technological progress and economic growth in the long run and on a global scale? And how will technological progress, economic growth, and the overall prosperity of human civilization unfold in the future? This book sheds new light on these big questions by incorporating findings from physics, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, and computer science in a brand-new theory of economic growth. Looking back across the millennia, it identifies five major technological revolutions which have transformed humankind's capacity to process energy and information-the cognitive, agricultural, scientific, industrial, and digital revolutions-and characterizes the new avenues of economic development which they have opened while also exponentially accelerating growth.

A biographical history of Francis E. Stanley and Freelan O. Stanley, identical twins from Kingfield, Maine, and inventors and manufacturers of the Stanley Steamer, the Stanley Dry Plate, and numerous other inventions and works of fine craftsmanship, including violins. This book focuses on the lives of the brothers and their families in Newton, Massachusetts, while it explores the social and manufacturing history of one of Boston's most notable suburbs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The project to create a ‘New Man’ and ‘New Woman’ initiated in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc constituted one of the most extensive efforts to remake human psychophysiology in modern history. Playing on the different meanings of the word ‘technology’ — as practice, knowledge and artefact — this edited volume brings together scholarship from across a range of fields to shed light on the ways in which socialist regimes in the Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe sought to transform and revolutionise human capacities. From external, state-driven techniques of social control and bodily management, through institutional practices of transformation, to strategies of self-fashioning, Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc probes how individuals and collectives engaged with — or resisted — the transformative imperatives of the Soviet experiment. The volume’s broad scope covers topics including the theory and practice of revolutionary embodiment; the practice of expert knowledge and disciplinary power in psychotherapy and criminology; the representation and transformation of ideal bodies through mass media and culture; and the place of disabled bodies in the context of socialist transformational experiments. The book brings the history of human ‘re-making’ and the history of Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialism into conversation in a way that will have broad and lasting resonance.

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.