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 ......
To many people in the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph were powerful, transformative forces, ones that seemed to work closely together to shape the economy, society, and politics of the United States. However, the perception'both popular and scholarly'of the intrinsic connections between these two institutions has largely ......
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 ......
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 ......
For the past 450 years, tree-like branching diagrams have been created to show the complex and surprising interrelationships of organisms, both living and fossil, from viruses and bacteria to birds and mammals.
How do you trap someone in a lie? For centuries, all manner of truth-seekers have used the lie detector. In this eye-opening book, Geoffrey C. Bunn unpacks the history of this device and explores the interesting and often surprising connection between technology and popular culture.The lie detector figures prominently in many headline-producing ......
Technological choices depend on, and are part of, contests over political power, as the history of mass transit vividly illustrates. From horsedrawn omnibuses to subways to light rail, this volume highlights the technological and social struggles that have accompanied urbanization and the need for an efficient and costeffective means of ......
Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers
We've all been there. Seduced by the sleek designs and smart capabilities of the newest gadgets, we end up stumped by their complicated set-up instructions and exasperating error messages. In this fascinating history, Joseph J. Corn maps two centuries of consumer frustration and struggle with personal technologies.Aggravation with the new machines ......
The "conflict thesis"-the idea that an inevitable and irreconcilable conflict exists between science and religion-has long been part of popular imagination. In The Warfare between Science and Religion, Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley have assembled a group of distinguished historians who explore the ......
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' ......
Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America
Patrick M. Malone demonstrates how innovative engineering helped make Lowell, Massachusetts, a potent symbol of American industrial prowess in the 19th century. Waterpower spurred the industrialization of the early United States and was the principal power for textile manufacturing until well after the Civil War. Industrial cities therefore grew ......
Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America
Patrick M. Malone demonstrates how innovative engineering helped make Lowell, Massachusetts, a potent symbol of American industrial prowess in the 19th century. Waterpower spurred the industrialization of the early United States and was the principal power for textile manufacturing until well after the Civil War. Industrial cities therefore grew ......
All Species of Opinion from Scientists, Sages, Friends, and Enemies Who Met, Read, and Discussed the Naturalist Who Changed the World
Charles Darwin and his revolutionary ideas inspired pundits the world over to put pen to paper. In this unique dictionary of quotations, Darwin scholar Thomas Glick presents fascinating observations about Darwin and his ideas from such notable figures as P. T. Barnum, Anton Chekhov, Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Jung, Martin Luther King, Mao Tsetung, Pius ......
''The biggest contribution of Vincenti's splendidly crafted book may well be that it offers us a believably human image of the engineer.''--Technology Review.Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology.Merritt Roe Smith, Series Editor.
Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife
American wildlife biologists first began fitting animals with radio transmitters in the 1950s. By the 1980s the practice had proven so useful to scientists and nonscientists alike that it became global. Wired Wilderness is the first booklength study of the origin, evolution, use, and impact of these nowcommonplace tracking technologies.Combining ......
The third volume of Margaret W. Rossiter's landmark survey of the history of American women scientists focuses on the pioneering efforts and contributions of these women from 1972 to the present. Central to this story are the struggles and successes of women scientists in the era of affirmative action. Scores of previously isolated women ......
The third volume of Margaret W. Rossiter's landmark survey of the history of American women scientists focuses on the pioneering efforts and contributions of these women from 1972 to the present. Central to this story are the struggles and successes of women scientists in the era of affirmative action. Scores of previously isolated women ......
''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 ......
''A splendid book . . . Rossiter's tone in recounting [the struggle of women scientists] is never strident. A clear enough case emerges from the sources that she skillfully weaves into a tapestry of social trends and individual experience.''New York Times In this landmark study, Margaret Rossiter describes the activities and personalities of the ......
A comprehensive account of the methods of knowledge production throughout human history and across the globe.
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns ......
Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917--1989
After visiting Russia in 1921, the journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared, ""I have seen the future, and it works."" Steffens referred to the social experiment of technological utopianism he found in the Soviet Union, where subway cars and farm tractors would carry the worker and peasantfiguratively and literallyinto the twentieth ......
Enormous skyscrapers will house residents and workers who happily go ''for weeks'' without setting foot on the ground. Streamlined, ''hurricane-proof'' houses will pivot on their foundations like weather vanes. The family car will turn into an airplane so easily that ''a woman can do it in five minutes.'' Our wars will be fought by robots. And our ......