Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> History

When the Soviet Union launched the first orbital satellite, Sputnik I, Americans panicked. The Soviets had nuclear weapons, the Cold War was underway, and now the USSR had taken the lead in the space race. Members of Congress and the press called for an all-out effort to launch a satellite into orbit. With dire...

Throughout his career, Alexander Graham Bell, one of the world's most famous inventors, was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone. While researching at MIT, science journalist Seth Shulman scrutinized Bell's journals and within them found the smoking gun: a hint of deeply buried historical deception. Delving further into Bell's life, Shulman unearthed the surprising story behind the telephone, a tale of romance, corruption, and unchecked ambition.

In the Homeric Epics, important references to specific autonomous systems and mechanisms of very advanced technology, such as automata and artificial intelligence, as well as to almost modern methods of design and production are included. Even if those features of Homeric science were just poetic concepts (which on many occasions does not explain the astonishing details of design and manufacture, like the ones included in the present volume), they seem to prove that these achievements were well within human capability. In addition, the substantial development of machine theory during the...

The first edition of The Sources of Invention, published in 1958, has been described as "a classic in science policy which has had a very considerable influence on both economists and scientists in Europe and in the United States." The authors set out to study the causes and consequences of industrial innovation--one, if not the main, spring of economic progress. They examined the important inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to discover just how far recent inventions have emerged from conditions different from those of the past. The evidence collected...

In High-Speed Dreams, Erik M. Conway constructs an insightful history that focuses primarily on the political and commercial factors responsible for the rise and fall of American supersonic transport research programs. Conway charts commercial supersonic research efforts through the changing relationships between international and domestic politicians, military/NASA contractors, private investors, and environmentalists. He documents post-World War II efforts at the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics and the Defense Department to generate supersonic flight technologies, the...

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 not only began the space age, it also showed that Soviet rockets were more powerful than American ones. Within months, the US Air Force hired Rocketdyne for a feasibility study of an engine capable of delivering at least 1 million pounds of thrust. Later, NASA ran the development of this F-1 engine in order to use it to power the first stage of the Saturn V rocket that would send Apollo missions to the Moon. It is no exaggeration to say that without the F-1 engine NASA would not have been able to achieve President Kennedy's 1961 challenge to his nation to land...

Much of the infrastructure of today's industrialized world arose in the period from the outbreak of World War I to the conclusion of World War II. It was during these years that the capabilities of traditional electrical engineering--generators, power transmission, motors, electric lighting and heating, home appliances, and so on--became ubiquitous. Even more importantly, it was during this time that a new type of electrical engineering--electronics--emerged. Because of its applications in communications (both...