Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> History

While the glories and tragedies of the space shuttle make headlines and move the nation, the story of the shuttle forms an inseparabe part of a lesser-known but no less important drama--the search for a reusable single-stage-to-orbit rocket. Here an award-winning student of space science, Andrew J. Butrica, examines the long and tangled history of this ambitious concept, from it first glimmerings in the 1920s, when technicians dismissed it as unfeasible, to its highly expensive heyday in the midst of the Cold War, when conservative-backed government programs struggled to produce an...

In Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program, Howard E. McCurdy examines NASA's recent efforts to save money while improving mission frequency and performance. McCurdy details the sixteen missions undertaken during the 1990s--including an orbit of the moon, deployment of three space telescopes, four Earth-orbiting satellites, two rendezvous with comets and asteroids, and a test of an ion propulsion engine--which cost less than the sum traditionally spent on a single, conventionally planned planetary mission. He shows how these missions employed smaller...

In 1926, the Carriage Builders' National Association met for the last time, signaling the automobile's final triumph over the horse-drawn carriage. Only a decade earlier, carriages and wagons were still a common sight on every Main Street in America. In the previous century, carriage-building had been one of the largest and most dynamic industries in the country. In this sweeping study of a forgotten trade, Thomas A. Kinney extends our understanding of nineteenth-century American industrialization far beyond the steel mill and railroad. The legendary Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing...

-The cotton gin animates the American imagination in unique ways. It evokes no images of antique machinery or fluffy fiber but rather scenes of victimized slaves and battlefield dead. It provokes the suspicion that had Eli Whitney never invented the gin, United States history would have been somehow different. Yet cotton gins existed for centuries before Whitney invented his gin in 1794. Nineteenth-century scholars overlooked them as well as gins made by southern--and northern--mechanics, in order to create a history meant to chasten some southerners and demean others. Using the gin as...

How did one of the great inventions of the nineteenth century--Thomas Edison's phonograph--eventually lead to one of the most culturally and economically significant technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Sound Recording traces the history of the business boom and the cultural revolution that Edison's invention made possible.

Recorded sound has pervaded nearly every facet of modern life--not just popular music, but also mundane office dictation machines, radio and television programs, and even telephone answering machines. Just as styles of music have...

Ingenium is medieval English vernacular for -an ingenious contrivance.- In this fascinating book, physicist Mark Denny considers five such contrivances--the bow and arrow, the waterwheel, the counterpoise siege engine (including the trebuchet), the pendulum clock anchor escapement, and the centrifugal governor--and demonstrates how they literally changed the world. Interweaving an entertaining narrative with diagrams, equations, and drawings, Denny shares the history of each device, explains the physics behind it, and describes how it was used, how it evolved, and why it is...

The metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor is the fundamental element of digital electronics. The tens of millions of transistors in a typical home--in personal computers, automobiles, appliances, and toys--are almost all derive from MOS transistors. To the Digital Age examines for the first time the history of this remarkable device, which overthrew the previously dominant bipolar transistor and made digital electronics ubiquitous. Combining technological with corporate history, To the Digital Age examines the breakthroughs of individual innovators as well as the...

Beginning with World War II, missiles transformed the art of war. For the first time, cities of warring nations were vulnerable to sudden, unannounced, long-distance attacks. At the same time, rockets made possible one of the great triumphs of the modern age--the exploration of space. Beginning with the origins of rocketry in medieval and early modern Asia, Rockets and Missiles traces the history of the technology that led to both the great fear of global warfare and the great excitement of the Space Age.

This volume focuses on rocketry in late-twentieth-century Western...

'Many years ago, I decided to write a book about the Rideau Canal. It is, therefore, with mixed feelings that I see that Robert Legget has beaten me to the tape. He is to be congratulated ... The definitive work on the Rideau has been written, and I shall value my copy.' Eric Arthur

Since the publication of the first edition in 1955, Rideau Waterway has informed and delighted readers, among them historians, engineers, and vacationers. First revised in 1972, this classic guide has once again been brought up to date in a new edition.

Robert Legget offers a rich history of the...

"A classic study of the moon rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts on their voyages of discovery." Roger Launius, chief historian, National Air and Space Museum"This volume is just one of the many excellent histories produced by government and contract historians for the NASA History Office. . . . Roger Bilstein gracefully wends his way through a maze of technical documentation to reveal the important themes of this story. Rarely has such a nuts-and-bolts tale been so gracefully told." Air University Review
"Easily the best book of the NASA History Series. . . . Starting with the...

Access -- no single word better describes the primary concern of the exploration and development of space. Every participant in space activities -- civil, military, scientific, or commercial -- needs affordable, reliable, frequent, and flexible access to space. To Reach the High Frontier details the histories of the various space access vehicles developed in the United States since the birth of the space age in 1957. Each case study has been written by a specialist knowledgeable about the vehicle described and places each system in the larger context of the history of spaceflight....

Dishwashers, electric light bulbs, gramophones, motion picture cameras, radios, roller skates, typewriters. While these inventions seem to speak of the 20th century, they all in fact date from the 19th century.

The Victorian age (1837-1901) was a period of enormous technological progress in communications, transport, and many other areas of life. Illustrated by the original patent drawings from The British Library's extensive collection, this attractive book chronicles the history of the one hundred most important, innovative, and memorable inventions of the 19th century. The vivid...

Dishwashers, electric light bulbs, gramophones, motion picture cameras, radios, roller skates, typewriters. While these inventions seem to speak of the 20th century, they all in fact date from the 19th century.

The Victorian age (1837-1901) was a period of enormous technological progress in communications, transport, and many other areas of life. Illustrated by the original patent drawings from The British Library's extensive collection, this attractive book chronicles the history of the one hundred most important, innovative, and memorable inventions of the 19th century. The vivid...

Imagine your average day without zippers, airplanes or vacuum cleaners, without your clock radio or your personal stereo, without photocopiers. All of these devices were invented within the last hundred years and have since transformed our daily landscape.

Drawing on The British Library's vast and comprehensive collection of patents, this handsomely illustrated book recounts the history of 100 of the most significant inventions of the century, decade by decade.

From the photocopier to the Slinky, from genetic fingerprinting to the Lava Lamp, from the ballpoint pen to the...

Timothy C. Campbell demonstrates that Marconi's invention of the wireless telegraph was not simply a...

In the 1950s, Soviet nuclear scientists and leaders imagined a stunning future when giant reactors would generate energy quickly and cheaply, nuclear engines would power cars, ships, and airplanes, and peaceful nuclear explosions would transform the landscape. Driven by the energy of the atom, the dream of communism would become a powerful reality. Thirty years later, that dream died in Chernobyl. What went wrong? Based on exhaustive archival research and interviews, Red Atom takes a behind-the-scenes look at the history of the Soviet Union's peaceful use of nuclear power. It...

The Story of Corn is a unique compendium, drawing upon history and mythology, science and art, anecdote and image, personal narrative and epic to tell the extraordinary story of the grain that built the New World. Corn transformed the way the entire world eats, providing a hardy, inexpensive alternative to rice or wheat and cheap fodder for livestock and finding its way into everything from explosives to embalming fluid.

Betty Fussell has given us a true American saga, interweaving the histories of the indigenous peoples who first cultivated the grain and the European...

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. It deals with the history of technical discovery and change and explores the relationship of technology to other aspects of life - social, cultural and economic - and shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

Volume 27 includes a special issue on The Professional Identity of Engineers: Historical and Contemporary Issues.