Two decades after the American Civil War, no name was more closely associated with the nation's inventive and entrepreneurial spirit than that of Thomas Edison. The restless changes of those years were reflected in the life of America's foremost inventor. Having cemented his reputation with his electric lighting system, Edison had decided to ......
Tracing the relationship between science and technology from the dawn of civilization to the early twenty-first century, James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorns bestselling book argues that technology as 'applied science' emerged relatively recently, as industry and governments began funding scientific research that would lead directly to new or ......
Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP
In Chasing Sound, Susan Schmidt Horning traces the cultural and technological evolution of recording studios in the United States from the first practical devices to the modern multi-track studios of the analog era. Charting the technical development of studio equipment, the professionalization of recording engineers, and the growing collaboration ......
Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South
When the paper industry moved into the South in the 1930s, it confronted a region in the midst of an economic and environmental crisis. Entrenched poverty, stunted labor markets, vast stretches of cutover lands, and severe soil erosion prevailed across the southern states. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, pine trees had become the ......
Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science
Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, 'high modern' social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behaviour and to remake the world in the image of their new model man.In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social ......
Cybernetics the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic anti-aircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of ......
In 1974, not long after developing the first universal optical character recognition technology, Raymond Kurzweil struck up a conversation with a blind man on a flight. Kurzweil explained that he was searching for a use for his new software. The blind man expressed interest: One of the frustrating obstacles that blind people grappled with, he ......
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars
Although the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has become synonymous with the United States planetary exploration during the past half century, its most recent focus has been on Mars. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the Mars Phoenix mission of 2007, JPL led the way in engineering an impressive, rapidly evolving ......
Faxed is the first history of the facsimile machinethe most famous recent example of a tool made obsolete by relentless technological innovation. Jonathan Coopersmith recounts the multigenerational, multinational history of that device from its origins to its workplace glory days, in the process revealing how it helped create the accelerated ......
