Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Regulating Railroad Innovation
Efforts to create and mould new technologies have been a central, recurrent feature of the American experience since at least the time of the Revolution. In Regulating Railroad Innovation, historian Steven Usselman brings this neglected aspect of American history to light. For nearly a century, railroad technology persistently posed novel challenges for Americans, prompting them to re-examine their most cherished institutions and beliefs. Business managers, inventors, consumers, and politicians all strained to contain the forces of innovation and to channel technical change toward the ends they desired. Moving through time from the first experimental lines through the polished but troubled railroad machines of the early twentieth century, Usselman examines diverse forums ranging from legislatures, and evolving corporate bureaucracies to laboratories, engineering societies, and world's fairs. In the process, his book situates technology within the dynamic history of an emergent industrial nation and elucidates its enduring place in American society.
The Battle Over Patents
This essay is the introduction to a book of the same title, forthcoming in summer of 2021 from Oxford University Press. The purpose is to document the ways in which patent systems are products of battles over the economic surplus from innovation. The features of these systems take shape as interests at different points in the production chain seek advantage in any way they can, and consequently, they are riven with imperfections. The interesting historical question is why US-style patent systems with all their imperfections have come to dominate other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The essays in the book suggest that the creation of a tradable but temporary property right facilitates the transfer of technological knowledge and thus fosters a highly productive decentralized ecology of inventors and firms.
The People's Network
The Bell System dominated telecommunications in the United States and Canada for most of the twentieth century, but its monopoly was not inevitable. In the decades around 1900, ordinary citizens—farmers, doctors, small-town entrepreneurs—established tens of thousands of independent telephone systems, stringing their own wires to bring this new technology to the people. Managed by opportunists and idealists alike, these small businesses were motivated not only by profit but also by the promise of open communication as a weapon against monopoly capital and for protection of regional autonomy. As the Bell empire grew, independents fought fiercely to retain control of their local networks an...
Invented by Law
Christopher Beauchamp debunks the myth of Alexander Graham Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers during fiercely contested battles for patent monopoly. The courts anointed Bell father of the telephone—likely the most consequential intellectual property right ever granted.
To the Digital Age
The metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor is the fundamental element of digital electronics. The tens of millions of transistors in a typical home -- in personal computers, automobiles, appliances, and toys -- are almost all derive from MOS transistors. To the Digital Age examines for the first time the history of this remarkable device, which overthrew the previously dominant bipolar transistor and made digital electronics ubiquitous. Combining technological with corporate history, To the Digital Age examines the breakthroughs of individual innovators as well as the research and development power (and problems) of large companies such as IBM, Intel, and Fairchild. Bassett discusses how...
Constructing Iron Europe
Conventional histories portray the development of railway infrastructures as a tool to build empires and nation states. Recent scholarship however, has stressed the importance of a transnational perspective beyond an exclusive focus on the nation state. The new perspective enriches both the history of modern Europe and European integration. Constructing Iron Europe demonstrates how during the interwar years key players saw railroads as instruments for building a transnational European community. Based on new archival research, Anastasiadou not only sheds light on patterns of internationalization of railways, but also explores the co-construction of the national and the European in the case of the Greek railways in the Interbellum period. Foundation for the History of Technology & Amsterdam University Press Technology and European History Series (TEHS)
Dream Car
Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth. Written as an “open road,” the book invites readers to travel a narrative arc that unfolds chronologically and thematically. Dream Car’s seven chapters have been structured so that they can be read in any order, determined by whichever theme each reader finds most interesting. The book also includes a musical playlist of car songs from the era and songs about the SV1 itself.
Sovereign Skies
"This work is a history of US aviation regulation in the interwar period of the early twentieth century. The author presents the Air Commerce Act as the institutionalization of a specific American regulatory ideology that arose in response to the technological nature of the airplane, the US Constitution, and the Paris Convention of 1919"--
American Patent Law
Students and established scholars of intellectual property law often look for historical context when trying to understand the development and present-day contours of IP rules and systems. American Patent Law supplies this context, offering readers a comprehensive account of the evolution of the US patent system and patent doctrine beginning in 1790. From the technologies for harvesting wood and shoemaking in the earliest periods to computer software and biotechnology of the present, each chapter of the book covers the characteristic technologies of each historical era. The book also describes how businesspeople in each era acquired and enforced patents and used patents as the foundation of various business arrangements. This book is a landmark in the history of technologies, the US patent system, and the way private actors have deployed patents across American history.
From Steam to Diesel
This overview of the leading locomotive producers in the United States during the twentieth century shows how they responded to a radical technological change: the replacement of steam locomotives by diesels. The locomotive industry provides a valuable case study of business practices and dramatic shifts in innovation patterns, since two companies--General Motors and General Electric--that had no traditional ties to locomotive production demolished established steam locomotive manufacturers. Albert Churella uses many previously untapped sources to illustrate how producers responded to technological change, particularly between the 1920s and the 1960s. Companies discussed include the American...
