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The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics
This Oxford Handbook brings together contributions by leading authorities on key areas of the history of physics since the seventeenth century. In a single volume, it offers a comprehensive introduction to scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the student or general reader.
Invented by Law
Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876 stands as one of the great touchstones of American technological achievement. Bringing a new perspective to this history, Invented by Law examines the legal battles that raged over Bell’s telephone patent, likely the most consequential patent right ever granted. To a surprising extent, Christopher Beauchamp shows, the telephone was as much a creation of American law as of scientific innovation. Beauchamp reconstructs the world of nineteenth-century patent law, replete with inventors, capitalists, and charlatans, where rival claimants and political maneuvering loomed large in the contests that erupted over new technologies. He cha...
History of Technology Volume 28
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'. Includes the Special Issue "By whose standards? Standardization, stability and uniformity in the history of information and electrical technologies"
Fascist Pigs
How the breeding of new animals and plants was central to fascist regimes in Italy, Portugal, and Germany and to their imperial expansion. In the fascist regimes of Mussolini's Italy, Salazar's Portugal, and Hitler's Germany, the first mass mobilizations involved wheat engineered to take advantage of chemical fertilizers, potatoes resistant to late blight, and pigs that thrived on national produce. Food independence was an early goal of fascism; indeed, as Tiago Saraiva writes in Fascist Pigs, fascists were obsessed with projects to feed the national body from the national soil. Saraiva shows how such technoscientific organisms as specially bred wheat and pigs became important elements in th...
The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain
This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between the National Birth Control Association, later the Family Planning Association, and contraceptive science and technology in the pre-Pill era. It explores the Association’s role in designing and supporting scientific research, employment of scientists, engagement with manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, and use of its facilities, patients, staff, medical, scientific, and political networks to standardise and guarantee contraceptive technology it prescribed and produced. By taking a micro-history approach to the archives of the Association, this book highlights the importance of this organisation to the history of science, technology, and medicine in twentieth-century Britain. It examines the Association’s participation within Western family planning networks, working particularly closely with its American counterparts to develop chemical and biological means of testing contraception for efficacy, quality, and safety.
Bad Call
How technologies can get it wrong in sports, and what the consequences are—referees undermined, fans heartbroken, and the illusion of perfect accuracy maintained. Good call or bad call, referees and umpires have always had the final say in sports. Bad calls are more visible: plays are televised backward and forward and in slow motion. New technologies—the Hawk-Eye system used in tennis and cricket, for example, and the goal-line technology used in English football—introduced to correct bad calls sometimes get it right and sometimes get it wrong, but always undermine the authority of referees and umpires. Bad Call looks at the technologies used to make refereeing decisions in sports, an...
Listening in the Field
The transformation of sound recording into a scientific technique in the study of birdsong, as biologists turned wildlife sounds into scientific objects. Scientific observation and representation tend to be seen as exclusively visual affairs. But scientists have often drawn on sensory experiences other than the visual. Since the end of the nineteenth century, biologists have used a variety of techniques to register wildlife sounds. In this book, Joeri Bruyninckx describes the evolution of sound recording into a scientific technique for studying the songs and calls of wild birds and asks, what it means to listen to animal voices as a scientist. The practice of recording birdsong took shape at...
Intellectual Property and the Design of Nature
Intellectual Property and the Design of Nature brings together scholars from different disciplines to reflect on the historical connections between intellectual property law and nature. It casts a new light on this relationship and demonstrates the central position nature occupies across the whole discipline.
Relocating the History of Science
This volume is put together in honor of a distinguished historian of science, Kostas Gavroglu, whose work has won international acclaim, and has been pivotal in establishing the discipline of history of science in Greece, its consolidation in other countries of the European Periphery, and the constructive dialogue of these emerging communities with an extended community of international scholars. The papers in the volume reflect Gavroglu’s broad range of intellectual interests and touch upon significant themes in recent history and philosophy of science. They include topics in the history of modern physical sciences, science and technology in the European periphery, integrated history and philosophy of science, historiographical considerations, and intersections with the history of mathematics, technology and contemporary issues. They are authored by eminent scholars whose academic and personal trajectories crossed with Gavroglu’s. The book will interest historians and philosophers of science and technology alike, as well as science studies scholars, and generally readers interested in the role of the sciences in the past in various geographical contexts.
Arguments that Count
How differing assessments of risk by physicists and computer scientists have influenced public debate over nuclear defense. In a rapidly changing world, we rely upon experts to assess the promise and risks of new technology. But how do these experts make sense of a highly uncertain future? In Arguments that Count, Rebecca Slayton offers an important new perspective. Drawing on new historical documents and interviews as well as perspectives in science and technology studies, she provides an original account of how scientists came to terms with the unprecedented threat of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). She compares how two different professional communities—physic...
