ONE OF AMAZON'S TOP 100 BOOKS OF 2014 Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Paabo's mission to answer this question: what can we learn from the genomes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, Neanderthal Man describes the events, intrigues, failures, and triumphs of these scientifically rich years through the lens of the pioneer and inventor of the field of ancient DNA. We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominid relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. Paabo's findings have not only redrawn our family tree, but recast the fundamentals of human history,the biological beginnings of fully modern Homo sapiens , the direct ancestors of all people alive today.

This book examines the remarkable Velestino hoard, found in Thessaly in the 1920s, and analyses the light that this collection of artifacts sheds on a poorly studied period of Byzantine history, and on largely neglected aspects of Byzantine civilization. Many collections of Byzantine gold- and silverware, such as Vrap and Seuso, have been surrounded by controversy. None, however, has been under more suspicion than the Velestino hoard, particularly with regards to its authenticity. The hoard contains no gold and no silver, and is in fact a collection of bronze and leaden plaques, some with human, and others with animal or geometric representations. The authors examine three distinct aspects of the hoard: the iconography of its components, the method of its production, and the function of those components. The conclusions that they reached provide valuable new insights into eighth-century Byzantine culture. The book explores the Byzantine cultural and political context of the Velestino hoard and will appeal to historians and art historians of early Byzantium, as well as archaeologists and historians of early medieval technologies.

The untold story of the power industry's efforts to electrify growing numbers of farms in the years before the creation of Depression-era government programs. Even after decades of retelling, the story of rural electrification in the United States remains dramatic and affecting. As textbooks and popular histories inform us, farmers obtained electric service only because a compassionate federal government established the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The agencies' success in raising the standard of living for millions of Americans contrasted with the failure of the greedy big-city utility companies, which showed little interest in the apparently unprofitable nonurban market. Traditional accounts often describe the nation's population as split in two, separated by access to a magical form of energy: just past cities' limits, a bleak, preindustrial class of citizens endured, literally in near darkness at night and envious of their urban cousins, who enjoyed electrically operated lights, refrigerators, radios, and labor-saving appliances. In Powering American Farms, Richard F. Hirsh challenges the notion that electric utilities neglected rural customers in the years before government intervention. Drawing on previously unexamined resources, Hirsh demonstrates that power firms quadrupled the number of farms obtaining electricity in the years between 1923 and 1933, for example. Though not all corporate managers thought much of the farm business, a cadre of rural electrification advocates established the knowledge base and social infrastructure upon which New Deal organizations later capitalized. The book also suggests that the conventional storyline of rural electrification remains popular because it contains a colorful hero, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and villainous utility magnates, such as Samuel Insull, who make for an engaging-but distorted-narrative. Hirsh describes the evolution of power company managers' thinking in the 1920s and early 1930s-from believing that rural electrification made no economic sense to realizing that serving farmers could mitigate industry-wide problems. This transformation occurred as agricultural engineers in land-grant universities, supported by utilities, demonstrated productive electrical technologies that yielded healthy profits to farmers and companies alike. Gaining confidence in the value of rural electrification, private firms strung wires to more farms than did the REA until 1950, a fact conveniently omitted in conventional accounts. Powering American Farms will interest academic and lay readers of New Deal history, the history of technology, and revisionist historiography.

In the concluding chapters of this book the author introduces GIM, the Global Intelligent Machine. GIM is a huge global hybrid machine, a combination of production machinery, information machinery and mechanized networks. In the future it may very well encompass all machinery on the globe. The author discusses the development of machines from the Stone Age until the present and pays particular attention to the rise of the science of machines and the development of the relationship between science and technology. The first production and information tools were invented in the Stone Age. In the Agricultural empires tools and machinery became more complex. During and after the Industrial Revolution the pace of innovation accelerated. In the 20th century the mechanization of production, information processing and networks became increasingly sophisticated. GIM is the culmination of this development. GIM is no science fiction. GIM exists and is growing and getting smarter and smarter. Individuals and institutions are trying to control parts of this giant global robot. By looking at its history and by putting GIM in the context of the current developments, this book seeks to reach a fuller understanding of this phenomenon.

When planes crash, bridges collapse, and automobile gas tanks explode, we are quick to blame poor design. But Henry Petroski says we must look beyond design for causes and corrections. Known for his masterly explanations of engineering successes and failures, Petroski here takes his analysis a step further, to consider the larger context in which accidents occur. In To Forgive Design he surveys some of the most infamous failures of our time, from the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse and the toppling of a massive Shanghai apartment building in 2009 to Boston's prolonged Big Dig and the 2010 Gulf oil spill. These avoidable disasters reveal the interdependency of people and machines within systems whose complex behavior was undreamt of by their designers, until it was too late. Petroski shows that even the simplest technology is embedded in cultural and socioeconomic constraints, complications, and contradictions. Failure to imagine the possibility of failure is the most profound mistake engineers can make. Software developers realized this early on and looked outside their young field, to structural engineering, as they sought a historical perspective to help them identify their own potential mistakes. By explaining the interconnectedness of technology and culture and the dangers that can emerge from complexity, Petroski demonstrates that we would all do well to follow their lead.

In the second half of the twentieth century, new sounds began to reverberate across the United States. The voices of African-Americans as well as of women, Latinx, queer, and trans people broke through in social movements, street protests, and in media stories of political and social disruption. Postwar America literally sounded different. This book argues that new technologies and new mobilities sharpened American attention to these audibly coded identities, on the radio, on the streets and highways, in new music, and on television. Covering the Puerto Rican migration to New York in the 1950s, the varying uses of CB radio by white and African American citizens in the 1970s, and the emergence of audible queerness, Art M. Blake attunes us to the sounds of race, mobility, and audible difference. As he argues, marginalized groups disrupted the postwar machine age by using new media technologies to make themselves heard.

Sir Tony Hoare has had an enormous influence on computer science, from the Quicksort algorithm to the science of software development, concurrency and program verification. His contributions have been widely recognised: He was awarded the ACM's Turing Award in 1980, the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation in 2000, and was knighted for "services to education and computer science" by Queen Elizabeth II of England in 2000. This book presents the essence of his various works-the quest for effective abstractions-both in his own words as well as chapters written by leading experts in the field, including many of his research collaborators. In addition, this volume contains biographical material, his Turing award lecture, the transcript of an interview and some of his seminal papers. Hoare's foundational paper "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming", presented his approach, commonly known as Hoare Logic, for proving the correctness of programs by using logical assertions. Hoare Logic and subsequent developments have formed the basis of a wide variety of software verification efforts. Hoare was instrumental in proposing the Verified Software Initiative, a cooperative international project directed at the scientific challenges of large-scale software verification, encompassing theories, tools and experiments. Tony Hoare's contributions to the theory and practice of concurrent software systems are equally impressive. The process algebra called Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) has been one of the fundamental paradigms, both as a mathematical theory to reason about concurrent computation as well as the basis for the programming language occam. CSP served as a framework for exploring several ideas in denotational semantics such as powerdomains, as well as notions of abstraction and refinement. It is the basis for a series of industrial-strength tools which have been employed in a wide range of applications. This book also presents Hoare's work in the last few decades. These works include a rigorous approach to specifications in software engineering practice, including procedural and data abstractions, data refinement, and a modular theory of designs. More recently, he has worked with collaborators to develop Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP). Their goal is to identify the common algebraic theories that lie at the core of sequential, concurrent, reactive and cyber-physical computations.

This engaging book places Leonardo da Vinci's scientific achievements within the wider context of the rapid development that occurred during the Renaissance. It demonstrates how his contributions were not in fact born of isolated genius, but rather part of a rich period of collective advancement in science and technology, which began at least 50 years prior to his birth. Readers will discover a very special moment in history, when creativity and imagination were changing the future-shaping our present. They will be amazed to discover how many technological inventions had already been conceived or even designed by the engineers and inventors who preceded Leonardo, such as Francesco di Giorgio and Taccola, the so-called Siena engineers. This engaging volume features a wealth of illustrations from a variety of original sources, such as manuscripts and codices, enabling the reader to see and judge for him or herself the influence that other Renaissance engineers and inventors had on Leonardo.

This unique two-part discussion of foxglove--the herb from which digitalis is derived--features a facsimile of William Withering's classic "An Account of Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses," complete with explanatory notes interpreting this eighteenth century text for the modern reader. The second part of the book, written by J.K. Aronson, co-author of the Oxford Textbook of Clinical Pharmacology, includes an introduction to the botany and pharmacology of foxgloves, their therapeutic uses before Withering, a short biography of Withering, an account of 18th century medical practices, and finally a review of the uses of digitalis in modern medicine.

Cobra! is a comprehensive, meticulously researched and fully documented history of Bell Aircraft Corporation and their piston engine fighters built during the Great Depression and through World War II. While the story centers on techincal aspects of the various fighters, significant attention is also devoted to those key individuals who conceived, built and flew these innovative designs. In addition to aircraft development, Cobra! surveys the combat use of the P-39 and P-63 fighters in the hands of American, French, Italian, and Soviet pilots. The story continues after World War II when a number of Bell surplus fighters were successfully modified for air racing. Birch Matthews is also the author of Wet Wings & Drop Tanks: Recollection of American Transcontinental Air Racing 1928-1970, and Mustang: The Racing Thoroughbred(with Dustin W. Carter). Both books are available from Schiffer Publishing Ltd.).

In 1859, 100,000 folks started the journey to the Pikes Peak goldfields, but only 50,000 completed the trip. An additional 25,000 soon gave up and went back home. The remainder not only brought statehood to the central Rocky Mountains, but they also brought the industrial world to isolated areas in the high mountains, where they mined mineral deposits for gold, silver, lead, zinc, and copper, among others. This book, Historic Photos of Colorado Mining, provides an introduction to Colorado's mining history through photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accompanying captions provide specific contexts for the photos and tell the story of the prospectors, miners, engineers, teamsters, railroaders, and townspeople who served as entrepreneurs and workers in industrializing the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Many ruins from the mining days are now recognized as historic landmarks. But the stories behind the ruins are often as fascinating as the ruins themselves—the struggle to survive and thrive in the wilderness is always a compelling tale.

While so many books on technology look at new advances and digital technologies, The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence looks back at analog technologies that are disappearing, considering their demise and what it says about media history, pop culture, and the nature of nostalgia. From card catalogs and typewriters to stock tickers and cathode ray tubes, contributors examine the legacy of analog technologies, including those, like vinyl records, that may be experiencing a resurgency. Each essay includes a brief history of the technology leading up to its peak, an analysis of the reasons for its decline, and a discussion of its influence on newer technologies.

Recipient of the 2020 IISE Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Joint Publishers Book-of-the-Year Award Industrial engineering is the profession dedicated to making collective systems function better with less waste, better quality, and fewer resources, to serve the needs of society more efficiently and more effectively. This book uses a story-telling approach to advocate and elaborate the fundamental principles of industrial engineering in a simple, interesting, and engaging format. It will stimulate interest in industrial engineering by exploring how the tools and techniques of the discipline can be relevant to a broad spectrum of applications in business, industry, engineering, education, government, and the military. Features Covers the origin of industrial engineering Discusses the early pioneers and profiles the evolution of the profession Presents offshoot branches of industrial engineering Illustrates specific areas of performance measurement and human factors Links industrial engineering to the emergence of digital engineering Uses the author's personal experience to illustrate his advocacy and interest in the profession

This study explores the shared history of the French empire from the perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of colonial, Creole, and indigenous agency in the construction of imperial spaces. The decentred approach to a global history of the French colonial realm allows a new understanding of power relations in different locales. Providing case studies from four parts of the French empire, the book draws on illustrative evidence from the French archives in Aix-en-Provence and Paris as well as local archives in each colonial location. The case studies, in the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and India, each examine building projects to show the mixed group of planners, experts, and workers, the composite nature of building materials, and elements of different 'glocal' styles that give the empire its concrete manifestation. -- .

In 1885, Thomas Edison, age thirty-nine and already a world-famous inventor, met the two great loves of his life: Mina Miller and Fort Myers, Florida. Mina soon became his second wife, and Fort Myers--a remote, almost inaccessible, village on Florida's southwest coast--became their winter home.

Other tomes tell the global account of Thomas Edison, the American icon named by Life magazine as the "Man of the Millennium." This book offers a look at his life in his tropical retreat, his "jungle," where for forty-six years he and his bride sought refuge from the cold winters and the demanding lifestyle of his New Jersey home, laboratory, and business complex.

While in Fort Myers he watched over his extensive botanical gardens, fished from both his boat and his long dock, interacted with the locals, and labored for many hours in his laboratory. Henry Ford and his family lived nextdoor and many dignitaries came to visit, including President-elect Hoover and Harvey Firestone.
The Edisons became an essential part of the Fort Myers story. They made lifelong friendships with townsfolk and joined in local activities until the love affair of the Edisons was cut short by the death of Thomas in 1931. Mina continued to live out her love for Fort Myers and its people until her death in 1947. She gave their winter estate, Seminole Lodge (Thomas's "jungle"), to the grateful citizens of Fort Myers.

A Vertical Empire provides a description of the British rocketry and space programme from the 1950s to 1970s, detailing the Medium Range Ballistic Missile Blue Streak and its conversion to a satellite launcher as part of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). This extensively revised second edition includes material only made available in the past ten years and the text is supplemented by numerous photographs, sketches and statistics. The all-British satellite Black Arrow is described, as well as the research rocket Black Knight, the Blue Steel missile and the rocket powered interceptor aircraft.

In the early twentieth century, the magic of radio was new, revolutionary, and poorly understood. A powerful symbol of modernity, radio was a site where individuals wrestled and came to terms with an often frightening wave of new mass technologies. Radio was the object of scientific investigation, but more importantly, it was the domain of tinkerers, "hackers," citizen scientists, and hobbyists. This book shows how this wild and mysterious technology was appropriated by ordinary individuals in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century as a leisure activity. Clubs and hobby organizations became the locus of this process, providing many of the social structures within which individuals could come to grips with radio, apart from any media institution or government framework. In so doing, this book uncovers the vital but often overlooked social context in which technological revolutions unfold.

This is the proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms that was held in Beijing, China, in September 2018. The Symposium provided an international forum for presenting and discussing historical developments in the field of Machine and Mechanism Science (MMS). Special sections focused on the following topics: . modern reviews of past works * engineers in history, and their works * direct memories of the recent past * the development of theories * the history of the design of machines and mechanisms * development of automation and robots * the development of teaching of MMS * the schools and institutes of mechanical engineering * the heritage of machines and mechanisms

Phantom in Combat puts you in the cockpit with the missile-age aces as they fight for their lives in the skies of Vietnam and the Middle East.\nStarting with a brief account of the forging of this deadly weapon, Phantom in Combat moves to the wars, campaigns and single engagements in which it was used to such telling effect. Leading USAF ace Steve Ritchie speaks more in sorrow than anger of the politically inspired rules that so frustrated him and his comrades in Vietnam. The story of the gruelling dogfight that made Randy Cunningham and Willie Driscoll the U.S. Navys only aces is redolent of the sweat, toil and terror of high-speed air fighting. And combat reports from some of Israels anonymous aces speak laconically of victories, losses, hairs-breadth escapes, and, above all, the Phantoms ability to give and take enormous punishment.\nProviding a rich background to this testimony is a wealth of rare material, including:\n- Battle-damage and gun-camera photographs\n- Recently declassified U.S. Navy tactical diagrams\n- Photo-sequence showing the destruction of an F-4 by a North Vietnamese missile.\n- Official analysis of the USAFs most successful MiG-trapping operation, led by the famous General Robin Olds.\n- Complete listing of USAF and USN air-to-air victories in Vietnam.\nHere is the human face of modern air warfare, described by the commanders and crews who earned for the Phantom its reputation as the worlds finest fighting aircraft.

Full color photo history of the early USAF covers the great variety of fighters, bombers, transport, helicopters and many other aircraft in use during this period.

With 1,093 U.S. patents to his credit, Thomas Edison was one of history's most prolific and influential inventors. His Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, laboratories pioneered industrial research and produced the first phonograph, practical incandescent electric lamp, and motion picture camera. Edison was also an entrepreneur who created dozens of companies to market his inventions, and he played important roles in the creation of the electric power, sound recording, and motion picture industries. Edison was also one of the first modern celebrities. The 200 photographs in this book, selected from the Edison National Historic Site archives, portray Edison's long career, from his earliest experiences as a railroad newspaper vendor and telegrapher in the 1860s to his last important research project in the late 1920s, a search for domestic sources of natural rubber. These photographs provide revealing glimpses as well of his family life and personal friendships.

During the first fifty years of the twentieth century, ham radio went from being an experiment to virtually an art form. Because of the few government restrictions and the low monetary investment required, the concept of ham radio appealed to various people. More than just a simple hobby, however, ham radio required its operators to understand radio theory, be able to trace a schematic and know how to build a transmitter and receiver with whatever material they might have available. With the advent of World War II and the increased need for cutting-edge communications, the United States government drew upon the considerable knowledge and skill of these amateur ham radio operators, validating the fact that ham radio was here to stay. This book explores the history of ham radio operators, emphasizing their social history and their many contributions to the technological development of worldwide communications. It traces the concept of relays, including the American Radio Relay League, from contacts as close as 25 miles apart to operators anywhere in the world. The book highlights the part played by ham radio in many of the headlined events of the half century, especially exploration and aviation ""firsts"". The ways in which these primarily amateur operators assisted in times of disaster including such events as the sinking of the Titanic and the 1937 Ohio River flood, are also examined.