In this volume, scholars from these two very different traditions are brought together. Never before has a single volume contained such a distinguished and diverse group of historians of technology.

This is the true story of one of the most successful of all United States Navy Fighting Squadrons in World War II. They were the top guns of their day and came to be feared by the Japanese fighter pilots who described them as attacks on us by wolves. Their victorious achievements are as follows: 152 Japanese planes destroyed in the air and two on the ground in only 76 days of combat; five small enemy cargo ships and 17 barges carrying troops and supplies sent to the bottom of the sea. No bomber escorted by them was lost to enemy aircraft and no ship covered by them was ever hit by bomb or aerial torpedo. The squadron had thirteen aces and two more who later went on to become aces with VF-84 (combat veterans of VF-17 composed the nucleus of this squadron). They were the first Navy squadron into combat action with the new Chance Vought Corsair and were instrumental in proving this powerful new fighter to the Navy. VF-17 were known as the Skull and Crossbones squadron and Blackburn's Irregulars - having adopted the old pirates ensign of the Jolly Roger as the squadron insignia; since World War II they have become known as the Jolly Rogers. The Skull and Crossbones Squadron is a mission by mission chronicle of all the squadron's great air battles. Also included are more than 350 photographs and detailed appendices listing all squadron aces, every confirmed victory and war diary.

This second collection of studies by Maurice Crosland has as a first theme the differences in the style and organisation of scientific activity in Britain and France in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Science was more closely controlled in France, notably by the Paris Academy of Sciences, and the work of provincial amateurs much less prominent than in Britain. The most dramatic change in any branch of science during this period was in chemistry, largely through the work of Lavoisier and his colleagues, the focus of several articles here, and the dominance of this group caused considerable resentment outside France, not least by Joseph Priestley. The issue of authority in science emerges again, within France under the rule of Napoleon, in a study of the exceptional power exercised by the great mathematician Laplace both in theoretical science and in academic politics. This exploration of organisation and power is complemented by a comparative study of the practice of early 'physics' and chemistry and their different reliance on laboratories. This raises the question of whether chemistry provided a model for later experimental work in other sciences, both through the construction of pioneering laboratories and in establishing early schools of research.

Used in combat in WWII, the Ar 234 was a major development in aircraft design.

This important volume reviews the history of the telecommunication superhighway pointing out its beginnings in the interactive TV and broadband highway of the wired cities more than two decades ago. It explains the technological uncertainties of the superhighway and many of its futuristic services, and also gives an understandable review of the technological principles behind today's modern telecommunication networks and systems.
Recognizing that technology is only one factor in shaping the future, the author, a well-recognized telecommunications expert, analyzes the financial, policy, business, and consumer issues that undermine the superhighway. The book concludes by showing that today's switched telephone network and CATV systems already form a telecommunication superhighway carrying voice, data, image, and video communication for a wide variety of services that enable us to stay in contact with anyone anywhere on our planet.
"Highway of Dreams" is written clearly with understandable explanations for nonspecialists. It challenges the technological utopia offered by the promoters of the superhighway and suggests that consumer needs, finance, corporate culture, and policy often have far greater impact on the future than technology alone.

New perspectives on how envirotech can help us engage with the surrounding world in ways that are more sustainable for humanity-and the planet. Today's scientists, policymakers, and citizens are all confronted by numerous dilemmas at the nexus of technology and the environment. Every day seems to bring new worries about the dangers posed by carcinogens, "superbugs," energy crises, invasive species, genetically modified organisms, groundwater contamination, failing infrastructure, and other troubling issues. In Technology and the Environment in History, Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring adopt an analytical approach to explore current research at the intersection of environmental history and the history of technology-an emerging field known as envirotech. Technology and the Environment in History They discuss the important topics, historical processes, and scholarly concerns that have emerged from recent work in thinking about envirotech. Each chapter focuses on a different urgent topic: * Food and Food Systems: How humans have manipulated organisms and ecosystems to produce nutrients for societies throughout history. * Industrialization: How environmental processes have constrained industrialization and required shifts in the relationships between human and nonhuman nature. * Discards: What we can learn from the multifaceted forms, complex histories, and unexpected possibilities of waste. * Disasters: How disaster, which the authors argue is common in the industrialized world, exposes the fallacy of tidy divisions among nature, technology, and society. * Body: How bodies reveal the porous boundaries among technology, the environment, and the human. * Sensescapes: How environmental and technological change have reshaped humans' (and potentially nonhumans') sensory experiences over time. Using five concepts to understand the historical relationships between technology and the environment-porosity, systems, hybridity, biopolitics, and environmental justice-Pritchard and Zimring propose a chronology of key processes, moments, and periodization in the history of technology and the environment. Ultimately, they assert, envirotechnical perspectives help us engage with the surrounding world in ways that are, we hope, more sustainable and just for both humanity and the planet. Aimed at students and scholars new to environmental history, the history of technology, and their nexus, this impressive synthesis looks outward and forward-identifying promising areas in more formative stages of intellectual development and current synergies with related areas that have emerged in the past few years, including environmental anthropology, discard studies, and posthumanism.

Noted Luftwaffe historians Jochen Prien and Peter Rodeike present in this brand new book the Messerschmitt BF 109F, G and K models. Over 500 photos - most never published and some in rare color - superb line schemes, and detailed text show the late model "109s" development into the superb fighter of legend. Among the details presented are units which used the F, G and K, production numbers, prototypes, unusual markings and camouflage. \nJochen Prien is the author of a three volume study of JG 53 "Pik As." Jochen Prien and Peter Rodeike are renowned historians on the BF 109 and FW 190 and the units that flew them.

This study sets out to provide coverage of the role of indigo in the Arab world, from its earliest history to the present day. It is based on fieldwork in all the principal countries concerned, as well as library and museum research, discussion with those working in related fields and personal experience of dyeing with indigo. The author surveys the story of indigo in antiquity, and then examines the record in the Arab world before Islam, during the Great Age of Islam, and in the subsequent centuries. She looks at all aspects in each period: technical, commercial, economic, and social, with reference to its importance in international trade and the impact of indigo products on Europe. The work covers each stage of indigo production, as well as the botanical and agricultural usages of indigo in the textile industry throughout the whole period, and the sundry purposes outside the field of textiles to which indigo has been put. The study ends with a brief look at indigo's future prospects.

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 Origins of Agriculture in Europe takes a look at current ideas in the light of a considerable mass of literature and archaeological evidence; examining the transition to agriculture through the comparison of social and economic developments across Europe.
In this volume, I.J.Thorpe manages to evaluate various alternative explanations in detailed examples, whilst also succeeding in addressing the broader theoretical questions which form the nucleus of contemporary debates. This clearly written and accessible text is an extremely valuable resource for students of European prehistory.

Conquering the Electron offers readers a true and engaging history of the world of electronics, beginning with the discoveries of static electricity and magnetism and ending with the creation of the smartphone and the iPad. This book shows the interconnection of each advance to the next on the long journey to our modern-day technologies. Exploring the combination of genius, infighting, and luck that powered the creation of today's electronic age, Conquering the Electron debunks the hero worship so often plaguing the stories of great advances. Want to know how AT&T's Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology-and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work-and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place.

This text gathers together examples of the current thinking on methodology and the theoretical perspectives that are increasingly of concern to historians of technology, whilst at the same time presenting other papers which reflect the key areas of historical debate. The volume emphasizes the need both to establish a common forum for theoretical and empirical research and also to delineate the shared concerns of what are often reflected as conflicting rather than mutually supportive approaches to the writing of the history of technology.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation--all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier--but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers.
Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media--including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators--"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.
"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's "Discourse Networks, 1800/1900" (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.

A facsimile reprint of the pilots handbook for the F4U-5, -5N, -5NL, and -5P.

The automobile continues to be the privileged product of the culture of mass consumption, yet there has been little scholarly attention to what concerns consumers most-- the appearance of cars. "Auto-Opium" is the first comprehensive history of the profession and aesthetics of American automobile design. David Gartman reveals how the appearance of vehicles became an integral part of the system of mass production and mass consumption forged in the struggles of American society.
The book traces the development of automobile design, from the first utilitarian cars around the turn of the century to the most modern of symbol-laden cultural icons. The author shows that the aesthetic qualities of vehicles were shaped by the social conflicts generated by the process of mass production. These conflicts became channeled into the realm of mass consumption, where working Americans demanded beautiful, stylish, and constantly improving cars to compensate them for the deprivations of mass production. Combining a unique blend of business, social, and cultural history, "Auto-Opium" connects the social struggles of designers within firms and the marketplace struggles between auto firms.

This much needed book is the first to provide a comprehensive history of the profession and aesthetics of American automobile design. The author reveals how the appearance of the automobile was shaped by the social conflicts arising from America's mass production system. He connects the social struggles of American society with the organizational struggles of designers to create symbol-laden substitutes for the American dream. Theoretically sophisticated, lucid and compelling, Auto-Opium will appeal to all interested in the American obsession with the car.

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.

This book delivers an in-depth analysis of Hercule Florence, who is virtually unknown despite being among the world's photographic pioneers. Based on the texts of various manuscripts, letters, diaries, notes, and advertisements, this book answers numerous questions surrounding Florence's work, including the materials, methods, and techniques he employed and why it took more than a century for his discovery to come to light. Kossoy's groundbreaking research establishes Florence's use of "photographie" to describe the product of his experiments, half a decade before Sir John Herschel recommended "photography" to Henry Fox Talbot. This book aims to change the fact that despite its cultural and historical importance, Florence's photographic breakthrough remains largely unknown in the English-speaking world.

Dr Chaloner considers economic history to be a branch of what the French call the historical sciences and believes that it is impossible to treat usefully of the rise, decline and metamorphosis of industries and economics without some consideration of the part played by the efforts of individual men and women in these processes. In this collection of essays, first published in 1963, he provides biographies of certain entrepreneurs, inventors and engineers together with historical surveys of some vital industries.

This highly acclaimed study approaches the space race as a problem in comparative public policy. Drawing on published literature, archival sources in both the United States and Europe, interviews with many of the key participants, and important declassified material, such as the National Security Council's first policy paper on space, McDougall examines U.S., European, and Soviet space programs and their politics. Opening with a short account of Nikolai Kibalchich, a late nineteenth-century Russian rocketry theoretician, McDougall argues that the Soviet Union made its way into space first because it was the world's first "technocracy"--which he defines as "the institutionalization of technological change for state purpose." He also explores the growth of a political economy of technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States.

This book presents a critical examination of conversations between engineering, social sciences, and the humanities asking whether their conversations have come of age. These conversations are important because ultimately their outcome have real world consequences in engineering education and practice, and for the social and material world we inhabit. Taken together the 21 chapters provide scholarly-argued responses to the following questions. Why are these conversations important for engineering, for social sciences, and for the humanities? Are there key places in practice, in the curriculum, and in institutions where these conversations can develop best? What are the barriers to successful conversations? What proposals can be made for deepening these conversations for the future? How would we know that the conversations have come of age, and who gets to decide? The book appeals to scholarly audiences that come together through their work in engineering education and practice. The chapters of the book probes and access the meetings and conversations, and they explore new avenues for strengthening dialogues that transcend narrow disciplinary confines and divisions. "The volume offers a rich collection of descriptive resources and theoretical tools that will be useful for researchers of engineering practices, and for those aiming to reshape the engineering lifeworld through new policies. The book depicts the current state of the art of the most visible SSH contributions to shaping engineering practices, as well as a map of research gaps and policy problems that still need to be explored." - Dr. Ir. Lavinia Marin, TU Delft, Electrical Engineering and Philosophy

The 8th fought the best Zero pilots, and took the war to the enemy with P-38s over Rabaul and Hollandia.

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.