Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> History

What is the least we need to achieve the most? With this question in mind, MIT graduate Eric Brende flipped the switch on technology. He and his wife, Mary, ditched their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water, and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid," and spent eighteen months living in a remote community so primitive in its technology that even the Amish consider it antiquated.

Better Off is the story of their real-life experiment to see whether our cell phones, wide-screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier -- or whether...

One of the most exhilarating true adventures in history, the race into space was marked by courage, duplicity, political paranoia, astonishing technological feats, and unbelievable triumphs in the face of overwhelming adversity. It is the story of an unparalleled rivalry between superpowers and of the two remarkable men at the center of the conflict. On the American side was Wernher von Braun, the camera-friendly former Nazi scientist, who was granted hero status and almost unlimited resources by a government panicked at the thought of the Cold War enemy taking the lead. The Soviet program...

Just as America's domestic and international policies became inextricably linked during the Cold War, so did the nation's public and private technologies. The spread of the suburbs fed into demands for an interstate...

This collection explores how technologies become forms of power, how people embed their authority in technological systems, and how the machines and the knowledge that make up technical systems strengthen or reshape social, political, and cultural power. The authors suggest ways in which a more nuanced investigation of technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the changing meanings of modernity. They consider the relationship among the state, expertise, and authority; the construction of national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of labor; political...

The Haidao Suanjing or Sea Island Mathematical Manual, is one of the "Ten Classics" of traditional Chinese mathematics, and its contents demonstrate the high standards of theoretical and mathematical sophistication present in early Chinese surveying theory. The Haidao composed in A.D. 263 by Liu Hui, established the mathematical procedures for much of East Asian surveying activity for the next one thousand years. The contents of the Haidao also testify to the ability of the Chinese to systematize mathematics and hint at the use of proof in Chinese...

This book tells the story of the scientific talent and technological prowess of two nations that joined forces to connect themselves with a communications cable that would change the world. In 1855 an American visionary named Cyrus West Field, who knew nothing about telegraphy, sought to establish a monopoly on telegraphic revenues between North America and Europe. Field and the wealthy New Yorkers who formed the first Atlantic cable-laying company never suspected that spanning the vast and stormy Atlantic would require 11 years of frustration and horrific financial sacrifice. The...

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge: the United States would land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. It seemed like an impossible task and one that the Russians--who had launched the first satellite and put the first man into Earth orbit--would surely perform before us. The ingenuity, passion, and sacrifice of thousands of ordinary men and women, from all walks of life, enabled the space program to meet this extraordinary goal. In all, six crews would land on the moon before Congress withdrew financial backing for the program....