You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
This is the untold story of the earliest days of coin operated devices which ultimately resulted in today's internet. It rewrites the history of Victorian technology. Many of the devices now claimed as the earliest or the first in fact were not. The supposed low brow technology used by the masses, hitherto deemed by the mainstream as not worth recording as history actually led directly to today's world. It ultimately succeeded in the late 1800s because it attracted some very high brow and highly influential money men as backers following the commercial success of a female patentee in the 1870s. Ironically the technology spread to America in the way that it did in the early 1880s because a young randy man couldn't keep his trousers on and had to be got out of the way for the sake of maintaining the respectability of members of Queen Victoria's household! Nic Costa is the acknowledged expert in the field, author of the best selling Automatic Pleasures
Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection Fly-Catchers, while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a Quarry, and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his Philosophical Miscellany. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship...