Browse

Illuminations originated in Renaissance Italy and spread to all the courts of Europe more than a century before oil lamps provided the first street lighting. The transition to gas after 1800 and to electricity after 1875 offered new possibilities for public celebrations. Americans rejected monarchical pomp but adapted spectacular lighting to democratic and commercial culture between 1875 and 1915. In the 1880s some cities were evenly lighted by powerful tower arc lights providing the equivalent of bright moonlight. But these towers were soon replaced by more commercial forms of gas and electric lighting. American cities rapidly became the most intensely lighted in the world, as measured by engineers, attested by foreign travellers, and demonstrated at spectacular events such as the Veiled Prophet parades in St. Louis, the Hudson-Fulton celebration, and expositions in New Orleans, Chicago, Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Yet neither moonlight towers nor world’s fairs provided the model for downtown, where shops, theaters, and dance halls adopted electric signs and corporations spotlighted their skyscrapers. Despite opposition from the City Beautiful movement, a heterotopian landscape emerged that changed its appearance at night. This kaleidoscopic cityscape differed radically from Europe, expressing a culture of individualism, competition, private enterprise, and constant change that soon became naturalized. Photographs and postcards celebrated the cubist skyline, as spectacular lighting became emblematic of American culture’s apparent release from the rhythms of nature. Elements of this commercial culture of illumination were adapted to political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and the propaganda of World War I.

The essays in this volume study the creation, adaptation, and use of science and technology in Latin America. They challenge the view that scientific ideas and technology travel unchanged from the global North to the global South—the view of technology as “imported magic.” They describe not only alternate pathways for innovation, invention, and discovery but also how ideas and technologies circulate in Latin American contexts and transnationally. The contributors’ explorations of these issues, and their examination of specific Latin American experiences with science and technology, offer a broader, more nuanced understanding of how science, technology, politics, and power interact in the past and present and further conversations among STS scholars in South America, North America, and Europe. The essays in this book use methods from history and the social sciences to investigate forms of local creation and use of technologies; the circulation of ideas, people, and artifacts in local and global networks; and hybrid technologies and forms of knowledge production. They address such topics as the work of female forensic geneticists in Colombia; the pioneering Argentinean use of fingerprinting technology in the late nineteenth century; athe design, use, and meaning of the XO Laptops created and distributed by the One Laptop per Child Program; and the development of nuclear energy in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile.

This book traces the water that flows into and out from the Panama Canal to explain how global shipping is entangled with Panama’s cultural and physical landscapes. By following container ships as they travel downstream along maritime routes and tracing rivers upstream across the populated watershed that feeds the canal, it explores the politics of environmental management around a waterway that links faraway ports and markets to nearby farms, forests, cities, and rural communities. The book draws on a wide range of ethnographic and archival material to show the social and ecological implications of transportation across Panama. The canal moves ships over an aquatic staircase of locks that demand an enormous amount of fresh water from the surrounding region. Each passing ship drains 52 million gallons out to sea—a volume comparable to the daily water use of half a million Panamanians. The book argues that infrastructures like the Panama Canal do not simply conquer nature; they rework ecologies in ways that serve specific political and economic priorities. Interweaving histories that range from the depopulation of the US Canal Zone a century ago to road construction conflicts and water hyacinth invasions in canal waters, the book illuminates the human and nonhuman actors that have come together at the margins of the famous trade route. Beyond the Big Ditch calls us to consider how infrastructures are simultaneously linked to global networks and embedded in places, giving rise to political ecologies with winners and losers who are connected across great distances.

If everyone now agrees that human traits arise not from nature or nurture but from the interaction of nature and nurture, then why does the “nature versus nurture” debate persist? In Beyond Versus, James Tabery argues that the persistence stems from a century-long struggle to understand the interaction of nature and nurture—a struggle to define what the interaction of nature and nurture is, how it should be investigated, and what counts as evidence for it. Tabery tells the story of the past, takes stock of the present, and considers the future of research on the interaction of nature and nurture. From the eugenics controversy of the 1930s regarding sterilization, to the IQ controversy of the 1970s in behaviour genetics regarding race, to the 21st century debate over the causes of depression, Tabery argues that the polarization in these discussions can be attributed to what he calls an “explanatory divide”—a disagreement over how explanation works in science, which in turn has created two very different concepts of interaction. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of science, Tabery then offers a way to integratively bridge this explanatory divide and integratively bridge these different concepts. Looking to the future, Tabery evaluates the bioethical issues that surround genetic testing (in the form of whole genome sequencing) for genes implicated in interactions of nature and nurture, pointing to what the future does (and does not) hold for a science that continues to make headlines and raise controversy.

By the end of the twentieth century, fiber-optic technology had made possible a worldwide communications system of breathtaking speed and capacity. This network is the latest evolution of communications technologies that began with undersea telegraph cables in the 1850s and continued with coaxial telephone cables a hundred years later. This book traces the development of these technologies and assesses their social, economic, and political effects. If we cannot predict the ultimate consequences of today—s wired world’its impact on economic markets, free expression, and war and peace—or the outcome of the conflict between wired and wireless technology, we can examine how similar issues have been dealt with in the past. The contributors to the book do just that, discussing technical developments in undersea cables (and the development of competing radio and satellite communications technology), management of the cables by private and public interests, and the impact on military and political activities. Chapters cover such topics as the daring group of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs who wove a network of copper wires around the world (and then turned conservative with success); the opening of the telegraphic network to general public use; the government- and industry-forced merger of wireless and cable companies in Britain; and the impact of the cable network on diplomacy during the two world wars.

George Boole (1815–1864), remembered by history as the developer of an eponymous form of algebraic logic, can be considered a pioneer of the information age not only because of the application of Boolean logic to the design of switching circuits but also because of his contributions to the mass distribution of knowledge. In the classroom and the lecture hall, Boole interpreted recent discoveries and debates in a wide range of fields for a general audience. This collection of lectures, many never before published, offers insights into the early thinking of an innovative mathematician and intellectual polymath. Bertrand Russell claimed that “pure mathematics was discovered by Boole,” but before Boole joined a university faculty as professor of mathematics in 1849, advocacy for science and education occupied much of his time. He was deeply committed to the Victorian ideals of social improvement and cooperation, arguing that “the continued exercise of reason” joined all disciplines in a common endeavor. In these talks, Boole discusses the genius of Isaac Newton; ancient mythologies and forms of worship; the possibility of other inhabited planets in the universe; the virtues of free and open access to knowledge; the benefits of leisure; the quality of education; the origin of scientific knowledge; and the fellowship of intellectual culture. The lectures are accompanied by a substantive introduction that supplies biographical and historical context.

In the 20^thcentury, science and technology became central to territorial transformation and in turn to state building. This was no less true for the Francoist regime. Engineers were not just working “under” the dictatorship, but became active participants within it. This book traces concrete material objects in their way from laboratories onto the Spanish landscape. These include a dodecahedral silo for coal storage, a church within a laboratory, rural cities, rice seeds, scale models for dams, and performance standards for concrete. The material history of these projects offers new perspectives on the political, economic, and environmental history of early Francoism.Previous histories of science and technology in the early Francoist regime have stressed repression and censorship. Many scientists and engineers were indeed exiled, imprisoned, or even executed. This book argues, however, that those who remained seized the opportunity of becoming relevant political actors. Paying attention to this process opens up new approaches to topics as far ranging as the Francoist political economy and its industrialization, autarky and corporate unions, National Catholicism, the meanings of totalitarianism, and the technological integration of Europe.Separately, each chapter offers a microhistory that illustrates the coevolution of Francoist science, technology, and politics. Taken together, they reveal networks of people, institutions, knowledge, artifacts, and technological systems woven together to form a new state.

This book explores the conception, design, construction, use, and afterlife of ENIAC, the first general purpose digital electronic computer. ENIAC was created and tested at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1946, then used at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland until 1955. Unlike most discussion of early computers, this book focuses on ways in which ENIAC was used, and the relationship of its design to computational practice, particularly its use between 1948 and 1950 to conduct the first computerized Monte Caro simulations for Los Alamos. ENIAC’s first team of operators were all women, and the book probes their contribution to the machine’s achievements and the development of computer programming practice. ENIAC’s users changed its hardware and transformed its configuration over time, so that it eventually became the first computer to execute a modern program, defined by the authors as one following the “modern code paradigm” introduced in John von Neumann’s seminal 1945 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” They draw on new archival evidence to document the development of this idea and its relationship to work on ENIAC. They also use ENIAC to probe the construction of historical memory, looking at ways in which a bitter succession of legal battles around patent rights shaped later perceptions.

Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” This book argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, the book states, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. It describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. The book examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” It considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. The book finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.

This book uses the story of the CCR5 gene to investigate the interrelationships among science, technology, and society. Mapping the varied ‘genealogy’ of CCR5- intellectual property, natural selection, Big and Small Pharma, human diversity studies, personalized medicine, ancestry studies, and race and genomics, this historical study links a myriad of diverse topics. The history of CCR5 from the 1990s to the present offers a vivid illustration of how intellectual property law has changed the conduct and content of scientific knowledge, and the social, political, and ethical implications of such a transformation. Because this gene codes for the HIV-co-receptor, this account explores how Big and Small Pharma alike drew upon state-of-the-art research to come up with a new form of HIV/AIDS treatment. An important mutation of the gene renders its fortunate possesses by and large immune to AIDS. Since this mutation is found in some populations with a much greater frequency than others, the gene also serves as a prime example of how molecular biology has been drawn into debates about race. Finally, this book discusses the relevance of history of science to current science policy issues.

The German translation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1860, just months after the original, thanks to Heinrich Georg Bronn, a distinguished German paleontologist whose work in some ways paralleled Darwin’s. Bronn’s version of the book (with his own notes and commentary appended) did much to determine how Darwin’s theory was understood and applied by German biologists, for the translation process involved more than the mere substitution of German words for English. This book tells the story of how On the Origin of Species came to be translated into German, how it served Bronn’s purposes as well as Darwin’s, and how it challenged German scholars to think in new ways about morphology, systematics, paleontology, and other biological disciplines. It traces Bronn’s influence on German Darwinism through the early career of Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s most famous nineteenth-century proponent and popularizer in Germany, who learned his Darwinism from the Bronn translation. The book argues, contrary to most interpretations, that the German authors were not attempting to “tame” Darwin or assimilate him to outmoded systems of romantic Naturphilosophie. Rather, Bronn and Haeckel were participants in Darwin’s project of revolutionizing biology. We should not, the book cautions, read pre-Darwinian meanings into Bronn’s and Haeckel’s Darwinian words. The book describes interpretive problems faced by Bronn and Haeckel that range from the verbal (how to express Darwin’s ideas in the existing German technical vocabulary) to the conceptual.

International expositions, with their massive assembling of exhibits and audiences, were the media events of their time. In transmitting a new culture of visibility that merged information, entertainment, and commerce, they provided a unique opportunity for the public to become aware of various social and technological advances. This book offers an examination of how international expositions, through their exhibits and infrastructures, sought to demonstrate innovations in applied health and medical practice. It investigates not only how exhibits translated health and medical information into visual form but also how exposition sites in urban settings (an exposition was “a city within a city” sometimes in conflict with municipal authorities) provided emergency medical treatment, access to safe water, and protection against infectious diseases. The book looks at four expositions held in Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, and St. Louis between 1876 and 1904, spanning the Gilded Age and the early reform years of the Progressive Era. It describes the 1904 St. Louis exposition in particular detail, looking closely at the sites and services as well as selected exhibits (including a working model playground, live X-ray demonstrations, and a rescue film by the U.S. Navy). Many illustrations demonstrate the role that these exhibitions played in framing and shaping health issues for their audiences.

Historians of mathematics have devoted considerable attention to Isaac Newton’s work on algebra, series, fluxions, quadratures, and geometry. This book examines a critical aspect of Newton’s work that has not been tightly connected to his actual practice: His philosophy of mathematics. Newton aimed to inject certainty into natural philosophy by deploying mathematical reasoning (titling his main work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy most probably to highlight a stark contrast to Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy). To that end he paid concerted attention to method, particularly in relation to the issue of certainty, participating in contemporary debates on the subject and elaborating his own answers. The author shows how Newton carefully positioned himself against two giants in the “common” and “new” analysis, Descartes and Leibniz. Although his work was in many ways disconnected from the traditions of Greek geometry, Newton portrayed himself as antiquity’s legitimate heir, thereby distancing himself from the moderns. The author reconstructs Newton’s own method by extracting it from his concrete practice and not solely by examining his broader statements about such matters. He examines the full range of Newton’s works, from his early treatises on series and fluxions to the late writings, which were produced in direct opposition to Leibniz. The complex interactions between Newton’s understanding of method and his mathematical work then reveal themselves through the author’s analysis of selected examples. The book uncovers what mathematics was for Newton, and what being a mathematician meant to him.

The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. This book describes the practices of an activist organization focused on LPFM during this era. Despite its origins as a pirate broadcasting collective, the group eventually shifted toward building and expanding regulatory access to new, licensed stations. These radio activists consciously cast radio as an alternative to digital utopianism, promoting an understanding of electronic media that emphasizes the local community rather than a global audience of Internet users. The book focuses on how these radio activists impute emancipatory politics to the “old” medium of radio technology by promoting the idea that “microradio” broadcasting holds the potential to empower ordinary people at the local community level. The group’s methods combine political advocacy with a rare commitment to hands-on technical work with radio hardware, although the activists’ hands-on, inclusive ethos was hampered by persistent issues of race, class, and gender. This study of activism around an “old” medium offers broader lessons about how political beliefs are expressed through engagement with specific technologies.

This is the first full-length biography of the prolific inventor Stanford R. Ovshinsky (1922-2012). Ovshinsky’s discoveries led to the creation of many important information and energy technologies, from phase-change electronic memories and rewritable CDs and DVDs to nickel metal hydride batteries, thin-film solar panels, and flat panel displays. In the process, his work helped open a new scientific research area centered on amorphous and disordered materials. A brilliant, self-educated pioneer of materials science, Ovshinsky began his career as a machinist and toolmaker before becoming an independent inventor and later the charismatic director of his own substantial research and development laboratory, Energy Conversion Devices (ECD). Guided by the social democratic values of his youth, he worked for nearly half a century with his partner and second wife Iris, eventually with hundreds of collaborators, to address important social problems like climate change. At the same time, their progressive values shaped the culture of the ECD community as a model egalitarian organization. Ovshinsky’s important contributions include his alternative energy technologies, with which he aimed to reduce and eventually eliminate dependence on fossil fuels. Increasingly important are the semiconductor devices based on his discovery of the Ovshinsky switching effect, which are becoming the basis of new information technologies.

People have had trouble adapting to new technology ever since (perhaps) the inventor of the wheel had to explain that a wheelbarrow could carry more than a person. This little book describes how we learn to live and work with innovation. It considers, among other things, the three stages of users' resistance to change: ignoring it, rational rebuttal, and name-calling. It recounts the illustrative anecdote of the World War II artillerymen who stood still to hold the horses despite the fact that the guns were now hitched to trucks—reassuring those of us who have trouble with a new interface or a software upgrade that we are not the first to encounter such problems. The book offers an entertaining series of historical accounts to highlight this major theme: the nature of technological change and society's reaction to that change. It begins with resistance to innovation in the U.S. Navy following an officer's discovery of a more accurate way to fire a gun at sea; continues with thoughts about bureaucracy, paper work, and card files; touches on rumble seats, the ghost in Hamlet, and computers; tells the strange history of a new model steamship in the 1860s; and describes the development of the Bessemer steel process. Each instance teaches a lesson about the more profound and current problem of how to organize and manage systems of ideas, energies, and machinery so that it will conform to the human dimension.

The tsetse fly is a pan-African insect that bites an infective forest animal and ingests blood filled with invisible parasites, which it carries and transmits into cattle and people as it bites them, leading to n'gana (animal trypanosomiasis) and sleeping sickness. This book examines how the presence of the tsetse fly turned the forests of Zimbabwe and southern Africa into an open laboratory where African knowledge formed the basis of colonial tsetse control policies. The book traces the pestiferous work that an indefatigable, mobile insect does through its movements, and the work done by humans to control it. The book restores the central role not just of African labor but of African intellect in the production of knowledge about the tsetse fly. It describes how European colonizers built on and beyond this knowledge toward destructive and toxic methods, including cutting down entire forests, forced “prophylactic” resettlement, massive destruction of wild animals, and extensive spraying of organochlorine pesticides. Throughout, the book uses African terms to describe the African experience, taking vernacular concepts as starting points in writing a narrative of ruzivo (knowledge) rather than viewing Africa through foreign keywords.

Quantum chemistry—a discipline that is not quite physics, not quite chemistry, and not quite applied mathematics—emerged as a field of study in the 1920s. It was referred to by such terms as mathematical chemistry, subatomic theoretical chemistry, molecular quantum mechanics, and chemical physics until the community agreed on the designation of quantum chemistry. This book examines the evolution of quantum chemistry into an autonomous discipline, tracing its development from the publication of early papers in the 1920s to the dramatic changes brought about by the use of computers in the 1970s. The book focuses on the culture that emerged from the creative synthesis of the various traditions of chemistry, physics, and mathematics. It examines the concepts, practices, languages, and institutions of this new culture as well as the people who established it, from such pioneers as Walter Heitler and Fritz London, Linus Pauling, and Robert Sanderson Mulliken, to later figures including Charles Alfred Coulson, Raymond Daudel, and Per-Olov Löwdin. Throughout, the book emphasizes six themes: epistemic aspects and the dilemmas caused by multiple approaches; social issues, including academic politics, the impact of textbooks, and the forging of alliances; the contingencies that arose at every stage of the developments in quantum chemistry; the changes in the field when computers were available to perform the extraordinarily cumbersome calculations required; issues in the philosophy of science; and different styles of reasoning.

The nuclear winter phenomenon burst upon the public’s consciousness in 1983. Added to the horror of a nuclear war’s immediate effects was the fear that the smoke from fires ignited by the explosions would block the sun, creating an extended “winter” that might kill more people worldwide than the initial nuclear strikes. This book maps the rise and fall of the science of nuclear winter, examining research activity, the popularization of the concept, and the Reagan-era politics that combined to influence policy and public opinion. It traces the several sciences (including studies of volcanic eruptions, ozone depletion, and dinosaur extinction) that merged to allow computer modeling of nuclear winter and its development as a scientific specialty. It places this in the political context of the Reagan years, discussing congressional interest, media attention, the administration’s plans for a research program, and the Department of Defense’s claims that the arms buildup underway would prevent nuclear war, and thus nuclear winter. The book provides an illustration of the complex relationship between science and society. It examines the behavior of scientists in the public arena and in the scientific community, and raises questions about the problems faced by scientific Cassandras, the implications when scientists go public with worst-case scenarios, and the timing of government reaction to startling scientific findings.

Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. This book traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars. The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange as desired. In the late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian’s answer to the threat of information overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, business adopted the technology of the card catalog as a bookkeeping tool. The book explores this conceptual development and casts the card file as a “universal paper machine” that accomplishes the basic operations of Turing’s universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In telling this story, the book travels on a number of detours, telling us, for example, that the card catalog and the numbered street address emerged at the same time in the same city (Vienna); that Harvard University’s home-grown cataloging system grew out of a librarian’s laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technology transfer of card files to business.