History of Technology Volume 1: Volume 1, 1976

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 Title Copyright Contents Preface Thermodynamics and Practical Engineering in the Nineteenth Century Notes Couplet's Engineering Memoirs, 1726—33 Claude-Antoine Couplet Pierre Couplet The Mémoires on earth pressure 1726,1727,1728 The Mémoires on arch thrust 1729,1730 The Mémoire on mansard roofs, 1731 The Mémoire on water flow, 1732 The Mémoire on the haulage of carts and sledges, 1733 Scolie Notes Attitudes to Roman Engineering and the Question of the Inverted Siphon I. A general introduction II. Roman inverted siphons Five conclusions Notes The Promethean Revolution: Science, Technology and History Notes The History of Technology: its Aims, its Limits, its Methods. Translated and introduced by A. RUPERT HALL Notes Electromagnetic Telegraphy: Early Ideas, Proposals and Apparatus Notes The Strange Case of Aluminium Notes Leads and Lags in late Seventeenth-Century English Technology Notes The Contributors