The technical problems confronting different societies and periods and the measures are 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. Volume 27 includes a special issue on "The Professional Identity of Engineers: Historical and Contemporary Issues".

New work on early modern Europe has now opened up the hidden avenues that link changes of technologies with a complex of cognitive, institutional, spatial and cultural elements. It is true that all divisions of history wish to incorporate all other divisions unto themselves, but in the essays of our first collection there are specific cases and analyses clearly delineated to show how technologies and systems for the production, reproduction and representation of technological changes emerged out of fundamental aspects of European society and mentality. The question must be: How far were such fundamental aspects unique (in their entirety and configuration) to Europe? The second collection on patent agency takes the modern industrialization of Europe as its focus, and illustrates the manner in which systems of intellectual property rights generated manifold agencies that acted to both spread and control the use of knowledge in advanced sites. Patent agency has been generally neglected by historians, one reason for this being the difficulty of defining effective agency beyond the obvious confines of those who were actually trained and remunerated as agents of invention. Informal networks or sites may have been crucial in converting general patent systems into local environs of technical advance.

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 - showing how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

Technical standards have received increasing attention in recent years from historians of science and technology, management theorists and economists. Often, inquiry focuses on the emergence of stability, technical closure and culturally uniform modernity. Yet current literature also emphasizes the durability of localism, heterogeneity and user choice. This collection investigates the apparent tension between these trends using case studies from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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The History of Technology" addresses tensions between material standards and process standards, explores the distinction between specifying standards and achieving convergence towards them, and examines some of the discontents generated by the reach of standards into 'everyday life'.
Includes the Special Issue "By whose standards? Standardization, stability and uniformity in the history of information and electrical technologies"

The technical problems confronting different societies in different periods and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. Dealing with the history of technical discovery and change, the volumes in this series explore the relationship of technology to other aspects of life--social, cultural and economic--and show how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it has occurred.

This volume provides an overview of current research in the history of Italian technology in the long run, from the early Middle Ages to the 20th century. The contributors focus on different aspects of Italian creativity in a local, transnational and global dimension, tracing the trajectory from primacy to relative decline. The themes range from the creation and establishment of new technologies in laboratories or enterprises, the processes of learning, diffusion, and copying and the institutions involved in the generation of a national technological capability and innovation system. Comparative studies are included in order to illustrate special features of the Italian case. The industries covered in this volume range from silk, iron and steel production, to electricity generation and telecommunications. Special Issue: Italian Technology from the Renaissance to the 20th Century Edited by Anna Guagnini and Luca Mola Included in this volume: Inventors, Patents and the Market for Innovations in Renaissance Italy The Microcosm: Technological Innovation and the Transfer of Mechanical Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire of the Sixteenth century Diamonds in Early Modern Venice: Technology, Products and International Competition A Global Supremacy. The Worldwide Hegemony of the Piedmontese Reeling Technologies, 1720s-1830s Raw Materials, Transmission of Know-How and Ceramic Techniques in Early Modern Italy: a Mediterranean perspective Anabaptist Migration and the Diffusion of the Maiolica from Faenza to Central Europe A Bold Leap into Electric Light. The Creation of the Societa Italiana Edison, 1880-1886 Keeping Abreast with the Technology of Science. The Economic Life of the Physics Laboratory at the University of Padua, 1847-1857 Mechanics "Made in Italy": Innovation and Expertise Evolution. A Case Study from the Packaging Industry, 1960-98 Telecommunications Italian Style. The shaping of the constitutive choices (1850-1914) Beyond the Myth of the Self-taught Inventor. The Learning Process and Formative Years of Young Guglielmo Marconi Technology Transfer, Economic Strategies and Politics in the Building of the First Italian Submarine Telegraph Lights and Shades: Italian Innovation Across the Centuries European Steel vs Chinese Cast-iron: From Technological Change to Social and Political Choices (4th Century BC-18th Century AD) The Italian National Innovation System. A Long Term Perspective, 1861-2011

While political and social historians have made great progress in trying to understand the making of modern Greece by studying * politics and power struggles, little attention has been given to the co-evolution of the Greek state and the technologies that were developed during this period. This volume helps fills this gap, exploring the formation of the Greek state and the construction of 'modern' Greece through the lens of the history of technology and industry. The contributors look at the role of engineering institutions, the press and of infrastructure technological networks in promoting specific technocratic ideals and legitimizing social roles for the engineers of the period. The volume as a whole offers new insights into the way that engineering culture, institutional reforms and infrastructures contributed to the making of 'modern' Greece. Special Issue: History of Technology in Greece, from the Early 19th to 21st Century Edited by Stathis Arapostathis and Aristotelis Tympas

The rise of Japan as an economic superpower is a remarkable episode in the history of the modern world. This book seeks to explain this phenomenal success by looking at the issues of culture and technology, and making comparison with the experience of the USA, the UK, and Europe as a whole. The relationship between culture and technology lies at the heart of the undoubted market success of Japan, and the development of high technology and the much-lauded "cultural" attributes of Japan have contributed powerfully to national success. These vital issues are examined in detail and include, for example, the relationship between company "culture" and "structure", and the overriding impact of Japanese "national" culture. National cultures in Japan and the West are compared with the consequent effect on entrepreneurial and technological progress.

This collection of case studies, focusing on British scientific culture during the first industrial revolution, explores the social basis of science in the period and asks why such an extraordinarily rich variety of cultural-scientific experience should have flourished at the time. The book analyses science and scientific culture in their local contexts, both metropolitan and provincial, examining where possibel the relations between the two, and emphasizing the range of scientific associations in London, to individual savants in the provinces. This book was first published in 1983.

Japan's escape from colonialism and its subsequent industrialisation has taken it to the point where its economy is second only to that of the US. This comprehensive volume examines how this rapid change of fortunes occurred, and the impact it has had on East Asia and the world at large. Taking a wide range and focus, Inkster looks at the history of Japan's industrial development in a social and cultural context.

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 - showing how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

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 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.

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.

Despite having undergone major advances in recent years, the history of technology in Latin America is still an understudied topic. This is the first English-language volume to bring together a variety of critical perspectives on the history of technology in Latin America from the early-19th century through to the present day. This special issue, assembled by guest editor David Pretel, brings together a range of experts to explore a plethora of topics in Latin America's technological history. Papers include a study of rural telephony in in 20th-century Latin America; the rise of the 'Techno-class' in modern Brazil; an analysis of the rise and fall of three Caribbean commodities; the history of educational technology in Latin America, and science and technology in Cold War Chile. Special Issue: Technology in Latin American History Edited by David Pretel (Colegio de Mexico, Mexico) and Helge Wendt (Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Germany)

This book reveals that the manipulation of culture was of more importance than the character of the original cultural stock in explaining Japan's modern industrialization. Thus the features of private enterprise culture that are so often isolated as keys to the nation's historical competitiveness may have been only temporary reflections of this wider process of cultural engineering: a necessary input into the program of technology transfer and late development.
This book provides a highly reliable guide to the industrial economy and history and covers a wide ground; it will be of great interest to those involved in Asian studies, Japanese studies, plus economists and professionals in business and enterprise culture.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203472047

This collection of case studies, focusing on British scientific culture during the first industrial revolution, explores the social basis of science in the period and asks why such an extraordinarily rich variety of cultural-scientific experience should have flourished at the time. The book analyses science and scientific culture in their local contexts, both metropolitan and provincial, examining where possibel the relations between the two, and emphasizing the range of scientific associations in London, to individual savants in the provinces. This book was first published in 1983.

Ian Inkster's intent in these studies is to move beyond the high culture and expertise of science towards the construction of the culture of urban communities. The work draws on a mass of detailed research and focuses on Britain's social and cultural advantages over other industrialising nations in the years prior to the Great Exhibition of 1851, an advantage which was not created by any single decision, nor by any explicit investment effect. Out of urban culture emerged a public sphere and an information system within which class divisions were abrogated; at the same time the relations between information and technique became complex and decidedly non-linear. So was created a social asset drawn upon by business interests, technicians, tinkerers and inventors throughout the period, and for some considerable time beyond it. Industrial Britain was made from diverse materials, amongst which were those fabricated in the course of cultural dissent and social ambition.

Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sustained study of a Dissenting family - the Aikins - from the 1740s to the 1860s. Essays by literary critics, historians of religion and science, and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this remarkable family, including John Aikin senior, tutor at the celebrated Warrington Academy, and his children, poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter's children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early Victorian era. This study provides new perspectives on the social and cultural importance of the family and their circle - an untold story of collaboration and exchange, and a narrative which breaks down period boundaries to set Enlightenment and Victorian culture in dialogue.

Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sustained study of a Dissenting family - the Aikins - from the 1740s to the 1860s. Essays by literary critics, historians of religion and science, and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this remarkable family, including John Aikin senior, tutor at the celebrated Warrington Academy, and his children, poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter's children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early Victorian era. This study provides new perspectives on the social and cultural importance of the family and their circle - an untold story of collaboration and exchange, and a narrative which breaks down period boundaries to set Enlightenment and Victorian culture in dialogue.