This book addresses the global history of technology, warfare and state formation from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Using a combination of top-down and bottom-up methodologies, it examines both interstate and intrastate conflicts with a focus on Eurasian technology and warfare. It shows how human agency and structural factors have intertwined, creating a complex web of technology and warfare. It also explores the interplay between technological and non-technological factors to chart the evolution of warfare from its origins to the present day, arguing that the interactions between civilian and military sectors have shaped the use of technology in warfare. Given its scope and depth, it is a valuable resource for researchers in fields such as world history, history of science and technology, history of warfare and imperialism and international relations.

This book provides a detailed history of the United States National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNC/TAM) of the US National Academies, the relationship between the USNC/TAM and IUTAM, and a review of the many mechanicians who developed the field over time. It emphasizes the birth and growth of USNC/TAM, the birth and growth of the larger International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM), and explores the work of mechanics from Aristotle to the present. Written by the former Secretary of USNC/TAM, Dr. Carl T. Herakovich of the University of Virginia, the book profiles luminaries of mechanics including Galileo, Newton, Bernoulli, Euler, Cauchy, Prandtl, Einstein, von Karman, Timoshenko, and in so doing provides insight into centuries of scientific and technologic advance.

The Pre-Industrial Cities Reader is designed to be used on its own or as a companion volume to the accompanying Pre-Industrial Cities: Open University textbook, in the same series. Compiled as a reference source for students, this reader is divided into three main sections, presenting key readings on: Ancient Cities, Medieval and Early Modern Cities, and Pre-Industrial Cities in China and Africa. Among the technologies discussed are: agricaultural innovations such as the heavy plough, water transport, the medieval road revolution, the first urban public transport, aqueducts, building materials such as brick and Roman concrete, weaponry and fortifications, water clocks, street lighting, and fire-fighting. Among the cities covered are: Uruk, Babylon, Thebes, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Siena, Florence, Antwerp, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Hangzhou, Beijing and Hankou.

This Biographical Dictionary seeks to put the world of technology in the context of those who have made the most important contribution to it.
For the first time information has been gathered on the people who have made the most significant advances in technology. From ancient times to the present day, the major inventors, discoverers and entrepreneurs from around the world are profiled, and their contribution to society explained and assessed.

Structure
The Dictionary presents descriptive and analytical biographies of its subjects in alphabetical order for ease of reference. Each entry provides detailed information on the individual's life, work and relevance to their particular field.
* in the first part of the entry, the information will include the dates and places of the subject's birth and death, together with their nationality and their field of activity
* in the main body of the entry there follows an account of their principal achievements and their significance in the history of technology, along with full details of appointments and honours
* finally an annotated bibliography will direct the reader to the subject's principal writings and publications and to the most important secondary works which the reader can consult for further information.

Special Features:

* The first work in existence to examine technologists in detail
* Contains over 1,500 entries giving detailed information
* Extensive cross-references enable the reader to compare subjects and build up a picture of technological advance^ * Figures drawn from fields such as Aeronautics, Telecommunications, Architecture, Photography and Textiles

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This book is a study of how scientific computation developed in British universities, the scientific civil service, and the armed services during the period 1900-1950. It describes the emergence of computing laboratories in Britain, along with the machines and personalities involved. British computational work is examined from an organizational perspective and the concept of centralized computing power is discussed. Computing methods used up to the 1950s ranged from the use of mathematical tables, via slide rules and other mathematical instruments, to desk calculating machines, accounting machines, differential analysers, and early computers.

This book is a unique attempt to capture the growing societal experience of living in an age unlike anything the world has ever seen. Fueled by the perception of acquiring unprecedented powers through technologies that entangle the human and the natural worlds, human beings have become agents of a new kind of transformative event. The ongoing sixth mass extinction of species, the prospect of a technological singularity, and the potential crossing of planetary boundaries are expected to trigger transformations on a planetary scale that we deem catastrophic and try to avoid. In making sense of these prospects, Simon's book sketches the rise of a new epochal thinking, introduces the epochal event as an emerging category of a renewed historical thought, and makes the case for the necessity of bringing together the work of the human and the natural sciences in developing knowledge of a more-than-human world.

"Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. His greatness appeared in every phase of the problem. No one equaled him in power to draw new recruits to the cause; no one equaled him in fullness and dearness of understanding of the principles of flight; no one did so much to convince the world of the advantages of curved wing surfaces; and no one did so much to transfer the problem of human flight to the open air where it belonged." These words were spoken by Wilbur Wright, who successfully accomplished the first powered flight together with his brother Orville in 1903 on the sand dunes of the Outer Banks off the coast of North Carolina. Wilbur was talking about the most important of their predecessors, Otto Lilienthal. Lilienthal attracted worldwide attention due to the spectacular photographs showing him in flight, made possible by technology that had only just been developed by him. This fortuitous union between a pioneer of aviation and the pioneers of so-called "instantaneous photography" is responsible for the immense contemporary popularity of Lilienthal's flights around the globe, the first ever free flights performed by man. This book traces the life of the German aviation pioneer, focusing on the designs of his many aircraft and the photographic documentation that has survived. The presentation ends with a remarkable research project conducted by one of the authors, right up to and including his own training exercises with Lilienthal's "normal soaring apparatus" and "large biplane". This project offered new insight into Lilienthal's work, and also led to a spectacular aerial meeting of Lilienthal's 1895 biplane and the Wright brothers' 1902 biplane at a historic location on the Outer Banks. The book provides access to video material, largely stemming from this project.

A compelling biography of Mark Weiser, a pioneering innovator whose legacy looms over the tech industry’s quest to connect everything—and who hoped for something better. When developers and critics trace the roots of today’s Internet of Things—our smart gadgets and smart cities—they may single out the same creative source: Mark Weiser (1952–99), the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so-called “father of ubiquitous computing.� But Weiser, who died young at age 46 in 1999, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. As John Tinnell shows in this thought-provoking narrative, Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley. A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy, he relished debates about the machine’s ultimate purpose. Good technology, Weiser argued, should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention; rather, it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world.   Informed by deep archival research and interviews with Weiser’s family and colleagues, The Philosopher of Palo Alto chronicles Weiser’s struggle to initiate a new era of computing. Working in the shadows of the dot-com boom, Weiser and his collaborators made Xerox PARC headquarters the site of a grand experiment. Throughout the building, they embedded software into all sorts of objects—coffeepots, pens, energy systems, ID badges—imbuing them with interactive features. Their push to integrate the digital and the physical soon caught on. Microsoft’s Bill Gates flagged Weiser’s Scientific American article “The Computer for the 21st Century� as a must-read. Yet, as more tech leaders warmed to his vision, Weiser grew alarmed about where they wished to take it.    In this fascinating story of an innovator and a big idea, Tinnell crafts a poignant and critical history of today’s Internet of Things. At the heart of the narrative is Weiser’s desire for deeper connection, which animated his life and inspired his notion of what technology at its best could be.  

Entre Meeanique et Arehiteeture: e'est-a-dire, entre les proeedes teehniques qui, depuis des temps immemoriaux eonforment l'art et la scienee de la eonstruetion au developpement de la scienee physique et mathematique la plus generale et, peut-etre, la plus abstraite, subalternata tanturn geometriae et philosophiae naturalis, eomme le disait Tartaglia, bien que liee aux faits les plus farniliers: la statique et la meeanique des mareriaux et des struetures. Le theme qui nous eoneeme est done la relation entre la technique et la scienee dans son exemple le plus important, je crois, du point de vue historiographique mais aussi epistemologique: a savoir, la relation entre le savoir faire, qui se eonforme a la norme, en respeetant une determination et une eongruenee parfaites avee son objectif, et la theorie, qui eonfirme la norme et temoigne la neeessite de la determiner eongrfiment avec les lois de la nature. Avee une extreme perspieaeite, quelque peu offusquee par une frivolite erudite, l' Abbe Franeeseo Maria Franeesehinis, mathematieien et adepte de la philosophie des lurnieres, se peneha sur la question dans un bref traite qu'il publia a Padoue en 1808 sous 1 le titre Des Mathematiques appliquees , soutenant la nouvelle tendanee didaetique introduite a l'Universite de Padoue par l'ephemere Regne d'Italie. Simulant un eonflit entre plusieurs auteurs, Franeesehinis exposait une premiere these dans un Discours inaugural qu'il reeita peut-etre reellement en 1807, lorsqu'il devint titulaire de la Chaire de Mathematiques appliquees.

This book is the first in English to survey indigenous knowledge of seasonal, astronomical, and agricultural information in Arab Gulf almanacs. It provides an extensive analysis of the traditional information available, based on local almanacs, Arabic texts and poetry by Gulf individuals, ethnographic interviews, and online forums. A major feature of the book is tracing the history of terms and concepts in the local seasonal knowledge of the Gulf, including an important genre about weather stars, stemming back to the ninth century CE. Also covered are pearl diving, fishing, seafaring, and pastoral activities. This book will be of interest to scholars who study the entire Arab region, since much of the lore was shared and continues through the present. It will also be of value to scholars who work on the Indian Ocean and Red Sea Trade Network, as well as the history of folk astronomy in the Arab World.

The He 111 flew over every front from the first day of the Second World War to the last and was among the most produced aircraft of the Luftwaffe. Aerodynamically a very clean aircraft, it was a superior bomber during the first two years of the war. This volume is dedicated to this aircraft.

This book focuses on the development of four key issues in the development of modern Spain; knowledge, manufacturing, energy and telecommunications, and public works. If technology transfer from advanced nations to less developed systems always worked, then the whole world would now be rich. That this is not the case is so obvious, we might well expect that the history of the processes, successes and failures of technology transfer across nations would be a very well-established field of enquiry. In fact, the theme is still a developing one, and the present Special Issue centres on the case of Spain as exemplary in many respects. The collected essays focus upon the four major themes of knowledge, manufacturing, energy, and telecommunications and public works. Essays range in time from the 18th century to the present time, from studies of espionage and early links between craftsmen and savants, to the institutions of technology (from training systems, to private enterprise activity, or patents), to case-studies of silk manufacture, shipbuilding, mining, paper-making, and pharmaceuticals. Each essay offers a broad variety of material to bring to bear on a major problem of world development, past, present, and future.

This open access edited collection brings together established and new perspectives on Cold War civil defence in Western Europe within a common analytical framework that also facilitates comparative and transnational dimensions. The current interest in creating disaster-resilient societies demands new histories of civil defence. Historical contextualization is essential in order to understand what is at stake in preparing, devising, and implementing forms of preparedness, protection, and security that are specifically targeted at societies and citizens. Applying the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to civil defence history, the chapters of this volume cover a range of new themes, from technology and materiality to media, memory, and everyday experience. The book underlines the social embeddedness of civil defence by detailing how it both prompted new forms of social interaction and reflected norms and visions of the 'good society' in an age where nuclear technology seemed to hold the key to both doom and salvation.

Video recording has recently become an important phenomenon. Although the majority of American homes have at least one video recording set, not much is known about video recording's past and about its continual effect on affiliated industries. This text documents the history of magnetic recording, stressing its importance in consumer as well as commercial applications from the advent of magnetism through the invention of such new technologies as Digital Audio Tape (DAT), High Definition Television (HDTV), and a multitude of sophisicated Digital Video Cassette Recorders.

This book offers a new way of looking at Chinese history through their technological advances. 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 relationship 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.

Using such terms as science and technology, which have been relatively - cently adopted, to write about situations and events that occurred 2,500 years ago, may be a paradox. The Homeric Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, refer to the Mycenean Era, a civilisation that ?ourished from the 16th to 12th c- tury BCE. The seeming paradox ceases to be one when modern specialists, searching through the ancients texts, discover knowledge and applications so advanced, that can be termed as scienti?c or technological in the modern sense of the words. The present book is based on extensive research performed by the author and his associates at the University of Patras, along with the presentations of other researchers at two international symposia, which he organized in 1 Ancient Olympia. It consists of ?ve parts, of which Part I is introductory, including such chapters as Homer and Homeric Epics, Troy and the mythological causes of the War, Achilles and his wrath, the siege and fall of Troy, Odysseus' long way home, the Trojan war and the cultural tradition, scienti?c knowledge in the Homeric Epics and ?nally an account on science and technology. Part II includes three chapters on applications of principles of natural s- ence, including chariot racing and the laws of curvilinear motion, creep in wood and hydrodynamics of vortices and the gravitational sling.

This book represents an original study of long term patterns in technological development and innovation in large corporations. The author is primarily concerned with understanding open-ended transformation processes in the evolution of industrialised societies. US patent data from 1890 to 1990 is employed within an evolutionary framework. The book offers an overview of an intellectual agenda associated with a highly important and pervasive set of phenomena and challenges several dogmas currently alive within economic reasoning including: * technological paradigms governing trajectories of opportunity * the S-shaped image of the technological growth cycle and technological dynamics * long waves * industrial dynamics * the variety of firms' technological profiles and corporate trajectories * corporate technological leadership * socio-economic transformation processes and underpinning 'rules'. Technological Change and the Evolution of Corporate Innovation details historically how the innovative and competitive landscapes within industrialised societies have become increasingly complex. This book will appeal to industrial and business economists, technology historians, researchers, students, policymakers and business analysts.

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. A child prodigy, he mastered calculus by the age of eight, and in high school made lasting contributions to mathematics. In Germany, where he helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and later at Princeton, von Neumann's colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet-bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and the design of the atom bomb; he helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory; he created the first ever programmable digital computer; he prophesized the potential of nanotechnology; and, from his deathbed, he expounded on the limits of brains and computers-and how they might be overcome. Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through a stunningly diverse array of fields, sparking revolutions wherever he went. The Man from the Future is an insightful and thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.