Carlson presents an obituary for historian Thomas Parke Hughes. Involved with the creation of the Society for the History of Technology in the late 1950s, an active scholar who published twelve books ...in the field, and the mentor of two dozen Ph.D. students, Hughes shaped--and reshaped--the field for forty years. Trained first as an engineer and then as a European diplomatic historian, Hughes defined the vocabulary of the history of technology, introducing key concepts such as technological momentum, styles of invention, systems, and social construction.
Russell et al discusses the nature of power in relation with the history of technology and environmental history. Here, they have suggested that the study of energy and power offers a rich common ...ground for the history of technology, environmental history, and science and technology studies. A simple observation makes this intersection possible: all power derives from energy--it is energy put to work.
Tesla Carlson, W. Bernard
2013., 20130507, 2013, 2013-06-30
eBook
Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the twentieth century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of ...modern AC electricity, and contributed to the development of radio and television. Like his competitor Thomas Edison, Tesla was one of America's first celebrity scientists, enjoying the company of New York high society and dazzling the likes of Mark Twain with his electrical demonstrations. An astute self-promoter and gifted showman, he cultivated a public image of the eccentric genius. Even at the end of his life when he was living in poverty, Tesla still attracted reporters to his annual birthday interview, regaling them with claims that he had invented a particle-beam weapon capable of bringing down enemy aircraft.
Plenty of biographies glamorize Tesla and his eccentricities, but until now none has carefully examined what, how, and why he invented. In this groundbreaking book, W. Bernard Carlson demystifies the legendary inventor, placing him within the cultural and technological context of his time, and focusing on his inventions themselves as well as the creation and maintenance of his celebrity. Drawing on original documents from Tesla's private and public life, Carlson shows how he was an "idealist" inventor who sought the perfect experimental realization of a great idea or principle, and who skillfully sold his inventions to the public through mythmaking and illusion.
This major biography sheds new light on Tesla's visionary approach to invention and the business strategies behind his most important technological breakthroughs.
Tissue-engineered grafts for tissue regeneration include either mature or progenitor cells seeded onto biomatrices that provide shape and support for developing tissue. Popular biomaterials used in ...orthopaedic surgery include collagen type I, hyaluronic acid, hydroxyapatite, and polylactic polyglycolic acid (PLGA). Biomatrices with bacteriostatic properties may be beneficial in promoting tissue-engineered graft survival in patients susceptible to infection. We evaluated the bacteriostatic effects of these biomaterials on the growth of the four most common orthopaedic bacterial pathogens:
Staphylococcus aureus,
Staphylococcus epidermidis, β-hemolytic
Streptococcus, and
Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Hyaluronic acid demonstrated the largest bacteriostatic effect on these pathogens by inhibiting bacterial growth by an average of 76.8% (
p
=
0.0005). Hydroxyapatite and collagen inhibited growth on average by 49.7% (
p
=
0.011) and 37.5% (
p
=
0.102), respectively. PLGA exhibited the least bacteriostasis with an average inhibition of 9.8% (NS) and actually accelerated the growth of β-hemolytic
Streptococcus and
P. aeruginosa.
Pitching and catching knowledge Carlson, W. Bernard
Management & organizational history : M&OH,
04/2018, Letnik:
13, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In commenting on two special issues from History and Technology and Management and Organizational History, this essay advances several themes about the current scholarship on academic ...entrepreneurship.First, as scholars continue to investigate academic entrepreneurship, they will need to pay attention to both what the academics are pitching but also the businesspeople who are catching and integrating that knowledge into products and enterprises. Second, while we tend to imagine entrepreneurs as "lone wolves," entrepreneurship is actually a team sport in which academic entrepreneurs engage with a variety of stakeholders in order to create long-lasting institutions. And third, scholars should be mindful of how the actions of academic entrepreneurs often reify selected values from their culture and that their actions can have both positive and negative consequences.This last point is especially important as we draw lessons from historical cases in order to educate the next generation of academic entrepreneurs-those scientists and engineers who will connect new discoveries with the most pressing needs of humanity.
Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where ...children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.
A fictionalized ethnographic study of development aid in sub-Saharan Africa that focuses on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development banks, international experts, and local ...managers.
In 1996, the sub-Saharan African country of Ruritania launched a massive waterworks improvement project, funded by the Normesian Development Bank, headquartered in Urbania, Normland, and with the guidance of Shilling & Partner, a consulting firm in Mercatoria, Normland. Far-Fetched Facts tells the story of this project, as narrated by anthropologists Edward B. Drotlevski and Samuel A. Martonosi. Their account of the Ruritanian waterworks project views the problems of development from a new perspective, focusing on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development bank, international experts, and local managers. This development project is fictionalized, of course, although based closely on author Richard Rottenburg's experiences working on and observing different development projects in the 1990s. Rottenburg uses the case of the Ruritanian waterworks project to examine issues of standardization, database building, documentation, calculation, and territory mapping. The techniques and technologies of the representational practices of documentation are crucial, Rottenburg argues, both to day-to-day management of the project and to the demonstration of the project's legitimacy. Five decades of development aid (or “development cooperation,” as it is now sometimes known) have yielded disappointing results. Rottenburg looks in particular at the role of the development consultant (often called upon to act as mediator between the other actors) and at the interstitial spaces where developmental cooperation actually occurs. He argues that both critics and practitioners of development often misconstrue the grounds of cooperation—which, he claims, are moral, legal, and political rather than techno-scientific or epistemological.
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