Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> History

By 1897 Guglielmo Marconi had transformed James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves into a workable wireless telegraphy system, and by 1907 Lee de Forest had invented the Audion, a feedback amplifier and oscillator that opened the way to practical radio transmission. Fifteen years after Marconi's invention, wireless had become an essential means of communication, as well as a hobby for many.

This book offers a new perspective on the early days of wireless communication. Drawing on previously untapped archival evidence and recent work in the history and sociology of...

There is no more fundamental resource than water. The basis of all life, water is fast becoming a key issue in today s world, as well as a source of conflict. This fascinating book, which sets out many of the ingenious methods by which ancient societies gathered, transported and stored water, is a timely publication as overextraction and profligacy threaten the existence of aquifers and watercourses that have supplied our needs for millennia.

It provides an overview of the water technologies developed by a number of ancient civilizations, from those of Mesopotamia and the Indus...

In the nineteenth century, science and technology developed a close and continuing relationship. The most important advancements in physics--the science of energy and the theory of the electromagnetic field--were deeply rooted in the new technologies of the steam engine, the telegraph, and electric power and light. Bruce J. Hunt here explores how the leading technologies of the industrial age helped reshape modern physics.

This period marked a watershed in how human beings exerted power over the world around them. Sweeping changes in manufacturing, transportation, and communications...

The world's output of metals during the period of 1863-1963 was greater than in all the previous years of man's history. In the nineteenth century the only metals available to industry were cast and wrought iron and a few non-ferrous metals and their alloys; by the latter part of the twentieth century, steel and aluminum dominated the world, and metals that were mere laboratory curiosities provided the basis for the technology of nuclear energy and space travel. This book records the extraordinary history of metallurgical progress, in which metal art was replaced by metal science.

After covering the environment and energy beat for more than a decade, columnist Amanda Little decided that the only way to fully understand America's energy crisis was to travel into the heart of it. So she embarked on a daring, cross-country power trip to the most extreme and exciting frontiers of our energy landscape.

In Power Trip, we accompany her to a deep-sea oil rig, the cornfields of Kansas, the catacombs of the Pentagon, the Talladega Superspeedway, and inside New York City's electrical grid. We visit laboratories creating the innovations that will carry us into a...

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton--better known today as the robot--has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity.

Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient...

The first video cassette recorders were promoted in the 1970s as an extension of broadcast television technology -- a time-shifting device, a way to tape TV shows. Early advertising for Sony's Betamax told potential purchasers "You don't have to miss Kojak because you're watching Columbo." But within a few years, the VCR had been transformed from a machine that recorded television into an extension of the movie theater into the home. This was less a physical transformation than a change in perception, but one that relied on the very tangible construction of a network of...