History of Technology Volume 6: Volume 6, 1981

Description

Technical standards have received increasing attention in recent years from historians of science and technology, management theorists and economists. Often, inquiry focuses on the emergence of stability, technical closure and culturally uniform modernity. Yet current literature also emphasizes the durability of localism, heterogeneity and user choice. This collection investigates the apparent tension between these trends using case studies from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The History of Technology addresses tensions between material standards and process standards, explores the distinction between specifying standards and achieving convergence towards them, and examines some of the discontents generated by the reach of standards into ‘everyday life’. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Preface Moving Ahead with the Fifteenth Century: New Ideas in Bridge Construction at Orleans Appendix Notes Hand-Cranking in Egyptian Antiquity Appendix: Conditions of Mechanical Equilibrium of the Saqqara Drill During Uniform Rotation Notes The Invention of Computed Tomography The Inventor The Firm The Invention The Champion The Product Apotheosis Notes Early Locomotive Building near Manchester The Earliest Locomotives of the Region Manchester: Sharp Roberts & Co Liverpool: Edward Bury Bolton: Benjamin Hick Other Engine Contracts Notes The Artefact as Historical Document. Part 1: The Fine Platinum Wires of W.H. Wollaston Introduction The Production of Fine Platinum Wires Analysis of Wollaston's Fine Platinum Wires Conclusion Notes What about the Fulling-Mill? Notes Technik: Or Mumford Reconsidered Technology or Technics? The Idea of Technik A Discontinuity: Machines and Scholarship A Story about Science Conclusion Notes The Contributors Contents of Former Volumes