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 ......
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.
