How we arrived at a capacity for taking cold, hard looks at the facts of natureand whether we ever truly have done soare questions that continue to engage both historians of science and students of culture. Historians of modern European intellectual history commonly credit Francis Bacon with laying the groundwork for a mode of study that ......
From about 1600 to 1800 scientists and mariners made increasingly sophisticated attempts to understand the earth's magnetic field and use it in navigation. Europeans had long understood the difference between magnetic and true north, but why did it vary as one traversed the sea? Could this variation be used to pinpoint longitude? Drawing on a ......
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics--forerunner of today's NASA--emerged in 1915, when airplanes were curiosities made of wood and canvas and held together with yards of baling wire. At the time an unusual example of government intrusion (and foresight, given the importance of aviation to national military concerns), the committee ......
Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (POD)
In the nineteenth century, philologyespecially comparative philologymade impressive gains as a discipline, thus laying the foundation for the modern field of linguistics. In Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, Stephen G. Alter examines how comparative philology provided a genealogical model of language that Darwin, as well as other scientists ......
Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production (POD)
Searching for a ''rational'' workplace, turn-of-the-century engineers and industrial architects recast the factory itself in the image of the machine. Indeed, they considered the factory building the ''master machine,'' containing and coordinating all of the machinery within. Such rational factory planning improved production speed and the ......
Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (POD)
Laundries were once ubiquitous in British and American citiesproducts of the same historical process that created steel mills and railroads. Unlike the more familiar examples of industrialization, these cleanliness factories remained powerfully identified with domesticity. In Steam Laundries, Arwen Mohun explores broader issues of how gender has ......
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 ......
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 ......
