Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th-Century America

ISBN-13: 9780521646536 / Angielski / Miękka / 1999 / 228 str.

David C. Mowery; Nathan Rosenberg

Opis

The first digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was over 100 feet long, with 18,000 simultaneously functioning vacuum tubes. Now virtually every business and home in America has its own compact PC. In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane, held together with baling wire and glue, traveled a couple hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people per day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering and improvements and adaptations. This is the world David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, a tour of the intersecting routes of the technological.

Recenzje

"Rosenberg and Mowery are among the nation's premier historians of technical change. They relate the sagas of four technologies--the internal combustion engine, the chemical industry, electric power, and the electronics revolution that followed the invention of the transistor in 1947--and look for patterns that repeat among the details that do not." Boston Globe

Spis treści

1. Introduction; 2. The organization and institutionalization of innovation, 1900–1940; 3. The internal combustion engine; 4. Chemicals; 5. Electric power; 6 The electronics revolution, 1947–1990; 8. Concluding observations.