Like many apparently simple devices, the vertical water wheel has been around for so long that it is taken for granted. Yet this ''picturesque artifact'' was for centuries man's primary mechanical source of power and was the foundation upon which mills and other industries developed. Stronger than a Hundred Men explores the development of the ......
This history of the thermometer includes controversy about its invention, the story of different scales, Fahrenheit and centigrade, and the history of the gradual scientific then popular understanding of the concept of temperature. Not until 1800 did people interested in thermometers begin to see clearly what they were measuring, and the impetus ......
For two centuries the barometer has been an indispensable laboratory instrument. Yet, despite its revolutionary influence on science, W. E. Knowles Middleton here offers the first complete history of the barometer as a scientific tool. Middleton relies on research from Western European documents and manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth ......
Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics
Today, we associate the relationship between feedback, control, and computing with Norbert Wiener's 1948 formulation of cybernetics. But the theoretical and practical foundations for cybernetics, control engineering, and digital computing were laid earlier, between the two world wars. In Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing ......
Technology has always been inseparable from the development of music. But in the twentieth century a rapid acceleration took place: a new ""machine music"" came into existence, electronic musical instruments appeared, and composers sometimes seemed more like sound technicians than musicians. In this book Hans-Joachim Braun and his co-authors ......
Explains the concepts of physical chemistry by telling the story of the geniuses and eccentrics who made groundbreaking discoveries in this field that bridges chemistry, physics, and mathematics. This book presents a tale about the colourful varieties of human character, and the struggles to understand the workings of the material world.
Brings together profiles of the more than 450 scientists who have won the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, or medicine/physiology. This resource illustrates, through the extraordinary contributions of the scientists profiled, the phenomenal growth of science and technology.
Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology
The metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor is the fundamental element of digital electronics. The tens of millions of transistors in the home of a typical Americanin personal computers, automobiles, appliances, and toysare almost all MOS transistors. To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology is ......
It's the perfect gift book for every inventor and tinker in your life!Remarkable . . . get the book for yourself. It'll hold you for many hours. (Wall Street Journal)A fascinating compendium for trivia seekers. (Publishers Weekly)>Highly entertaining . . . (Boston Globe)
In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta's Grande Ménagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor--in all, forty-two live animals. In Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, Louise Robbins explains that exotic animals from around the world were common in ......
Americans today often associate scientific and technological change with progress and personal well-being. Yet underneath our confident assumptions lie serious questions. In Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? Amy Sue Bix locates the origins of this confusion in the Great Depression, when social and economic crisis forced many Americans to re-examine ......
Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire
Focusing attention on gravity-fed water-flow systems in medieval cities and monasteries, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire challenges the view that hydraulic engineering died with the Romans and remained moribund until the Renaissance. Roberta Magnusson explores the systems' ......
Space exploration has always been one of the country's most expensive undertakings. The first moon landing cost $21 billion in 1969 dollars. The International Space Station currently under construction will cost at least $65 billion by the time it is finished. A single flight of the reusable space shuttle costs $400 million. In Faster, Better, ......
A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball
Chemistry explores the way atoms interact, the constitution of the stars, and the human genome. Knowledge of chemistry makes it possible for us to manufacture dyes and antibiotics, metallic alloys, and other materials that contribute to the necessities and luxuries of human life. In Transforming Matter, noted historian Trevor H. Levere emphasizes ......
Roger E. Bilstein's Flight in America has won acclaim as the foremost history of one of the twentieth century's landmark achievements--human flight. In this revised and expanded third edition, Bilstein chronicles changes in military, commercial, and space aviation in the 1990s. He offers a glimpse of the developments one might expect in the new ......
Science, Risk, and the Politics of Hazard Mitigation
In 1906, after an earthquake wiped out much of San Francisco, leading California officials and scientists described the disaster as a one-time occurrence and assured the public that it had nothing to worry about. California Earthquakes explains how, over time, this attitude changed, and Californians came to accept earthquakes as a significant ......
'Hysteria,' the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction
From the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, massaging female patients to orgasm was a staple of medical practice among Western physicians in the treatment of ''hysteria,'' an ailment once considered both common and chronic in women. Doctors loathed this time-consuming procedure and for centuries relied on midwives. Later, they substituted the ......
Railroads, Engineering, and Architecture in New York City
Grand Central Terminal, one of New York City's preeminent buildings, stands as a magnificent Beaux-Arts monument to America's Railway Age, and it remains a vital part of city life today. Completed in 1913 after ten years of construction, the terminal became the city's most important transportation hub, linking long-distance and commuter trains to ......
The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority
Thomas L. Haskell's The Emergence of Professional Social Science signaled the beginning of his distinguished career as a historian of ideas and critic of historical logic. His first book, now available in this paperback edition with a new preface by the author, explores the background and premises of the American Social Science Association ......
Navies have always been technologically sophisticated, from the ancient world's trireme galleys and the Age of Sail's ships-of-the-line to the dreadnoughts of World War I and today's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. Yet each large technical innovation has met with resistance and even hostility from those officers who, adhering to ......
Distinguished French immunologist and physician Patrice Debré offers an extensive, balanced, and detailed account of Louis Pasteur's life, struggles, and contributions. Drawing heavily on Pasteur's own scientific notebooks and writings, Debré presents a complete critical account of his discoveries and the controversies they raised with other ......
Few federal agencies have more extensive ties to the private sector than NASA. NASA's relationships with its many aerospace industry suppliers of rocket engines, computers, electronics, gauges, valves, O-rings, and other materials have often been described as ''partnerships.'' These have produced a few memorable catastrophes, but mostly technical ......
n describing the origins of modern ''science,'' historians often fail to appreciate or misread how the ancients understood and used significant expressions of ''natural knowledge.'' Few read the story of the cyclops, for example, as useful advice about where to travel and settle -- and where not to. Others search for ''lost Egyptian wisdom'' ......
The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson
Since emerging as a discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, natural history has been at the heart of the life sciences. It gave rise to the major organizing theory of life--evolution--and continues to be a vital science with impressive practical value. Central to advanced work in ecology, agriculture, medicine, and environmental ......
As any American who has traveled abroad knows, the American home contains more, and more elaborate, plumbing than any other in the world. Indeed, Americans are renowned for their obsession with cleanliness. Although plumbing has occupied a central position in American life since the mid-nineteenth century, little scholarly attention has been paid ......
The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-1955 (POD)
Studies of American industry frequently cite Lowell, Massachusetts, as an early model for business practices. Scholars have sought to explain the city's rise to prominence, the impact of its textile mills on workers and on commerce, and its part in regional development and American prosperity. Laurence Gross looks beyond these issues. Focusing on ......
Between 1800 and 1870 meteorology emerged as both a legitimate science and a government service in America. Challenging the widely held assumption that meteorologists were mere ''data-gatherers'' and that U.S. scientists were inferior to their European counterparts, James Rodger Fleming shows how the 1840s debate over the nature and causes of ......
Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (POD)
Over the course of several decades, the Pentagon's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) helped transform computing from a cumbersome enterprise based on batch processing to the instantly interactive, graphically rich, highly intelligent computing of today. With the purpose of improving command and control systems for the military, IPTO ......
These talks outline the subtle changes in our ideas and feelings in relation to the development of natural science. Through this, Steiner shows the significance of scientific research and the mode of thinking that goes with it.
For nearly 600 years, from the battles of the early fourteenth century to the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, firearms derived from gunpowder and other chemicals defined the frightful extent of war. The apparatus and materials used in World War I would have been familiar to our remote ancestors. In this classic work, first published in ......
''Highly readable and exquisitely informative. Rossiter's documentation of this gloomy chapter in the history of women striving to make a place for themselves in science serves as a pungent antidote for questions concerning the fairness of affirmative action.''Journal of American History''What we have here is a remarkable example of historian as ......
Awarded the Dexter Prize for Best Book in the History of Technology ''This truly outstanding book will become required reading in the history of technology. The story of steel is important in its own right, and Thomas Misa writes with remarkable clarity and succinctness . . . The emphasis upon user-producer interactions allows Misa to focus on the ......
A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, vol. 1
The first volume of Cosmos, his five-volume survey of the universe, appeared in 1845, though Humboldt had labored on the entire work for nearly half a century. He scrupulously sent sections of the work to other experts for suggestions and corrections. The last volume, put together from his notes after his death, appeared in 1861. The volumes were ......
On Science and American Social Thought, revised and expanded edition
''More than anyone else, [Rosenberg] has moved medicine from the periphery of the historical enterprise to a position much nearer the center. Around the world he is recognized as the leading medical historian of the late twentieth century.''Ronald L. Numbers, Isis In its original edition, No Other Gods offered a pioneering and influential ......
The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline, 1760-1850
Discovering Birds, Paul Lawrence Farber rejects the view that eighteenth-century natural history disappeared with the rise of nineteenth-century biology. In this penetrating case study of the history of ornithology, Farber demonstrates interesting continuities: as natural history evolved into individual sciences (botany, geology, and zoology) and ......
From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century
From King Solomon's collections of ''apes and peacocks'' to the menageries of English and Hapsburg monarchs, the display of exotic animals has delighted and amazed observers for centuries. Originally prized as symbols of elite wealth and power, such collections have been dramatically transformed since 1800--particularly in terms of audience and ......
