Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz visited the Harz Mountains more than thirty times and spent almost three full years there between 1680 and 1686. His aim was to install wind machines for draining the Harz ...silver mines. Despite Leibniz’s best efforts—his commitment bordered on obsession—the enterprise ultimately failed. There is still disagreement about exactly what happened. Biographers and historians have mostly asserted that Leibniz, a universal genius dedicated to the greater good of science and society, was thwarted by stubborn mining officials. Historians of mining, on the other hand, have generally sided with the “professionals” in the Hannoverian mining administration. This essay investigates Leibniz’s wind machine project and the narratives it has spawned. Using both Leibniz’s published correspondence and unpublished memoranda from the Clausthal mining office, it attempts to answer a series of questions: Was Leibniz thwarted by the mining office? Was he an outsider or an insider? An amateur or an expert? Examining the peculiar role played by investors and shareholders in the Harz silver mines provides the beginning of a solution.
This paper traces a deep rift in the historiography of cameralism, demonstrating how historians have systematically separated cameralism writings from the context of the Holy Roman Empire's fiscal ...chambers. Scholarship on the subject has been largely defined by an artificial separation between "cameralists of the book" and "cameralists of the bureau." The author argues that it is time to interrogate this distinction, which is itself a legacy of the nineteenth century. Many of the most powerful officials in Prussia dismissed the cameral sciences as a waste of time, preferring instead the traditional mix of legal study and on-the-job training. Cameralist reformers argued that the oeconomic and cameral sciences would generate profits for the state, that one could educate good cameralists at universities, and that professors of the cameral sciences could be useful. Traditionists, on the other hand, considered the cameral sciences completely useless.
The book "Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance," by Pamela O. Long (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), is reviewed. It ...examines the relationship of craft traditions with the emergence of science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Comment: The California Fires Wakefield, Andre
Technology and culture,
2004, 2004-01-00, 20040101, Volume:
45, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
About a month ago, a wall of fire descended on our town. I found this disconcerting. After all, as one local developer put it, "Claremont is a college town, a tree-lined town, a small town that has ...been planned with real intelligence. It feels the way Southern California is supposed to feel." But in the early morning hours of 26 October, Claremont—now more inferno than paradise—didn't feel like southern California is supposed to feel. A midnight gloom had descended and ash was raining down from the foothills. To the north of town, huge flames consumed the dry chaparral, racing toward cul-de-sacs and palm trees. Coyotes, rodents, and deer ran across suburban lawns, while a few determined homeowners trained garden hoses at trees and roofs. The fire, now creating its own wind, propelled large embers down wind-tunnel streets. These landed in eaves and trees and shrubs, igniting some houses and sparing others.
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