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13588 results in History of science and technology

Page 208 of 680

  • Reinventing machines: the transmission history of the Leibniz calculator

  • FLORIN-STEFAN MORAR
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 48 / Issue 1 / March 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 July 2014, pp. 123-146
    Print publication:
    March 2015

  • This paper argues that we should take into account the process of historical transmission to enrich our understanding of material culture. More specifically, I want to show how the rewriting of history and the invention of tradition impact material objects and our beliefs about them. I focus here on the transmission history of the mechanical calculator invented by the German savant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz repeatedly described his machine as functional and wonderfully useful, but in reality it was never finished and didn't fully work. Its internal structure also remained unknown. In 1879, however, the machine re-emerged and was reinvented as the origin of all later calculating machines based on the stepped drum, to protect the priority of the German Leibniz against the Frenchman Thomas de Colmar as the father of mechanical calculation. The calculator was later replicated to demonstrate that it could function ‘after all’, in an effort to deepen this narrative and further enhance Leibniz's computing acumen.

Science and Religion
  • Some Historical Perspectives
  • John Hedley Brooke
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    15 May 2014
  • John Hedley Brooke offers an introduction and critical guide to one of the most fascinating and enduring issues in the development of the modern world: the relationship between scientific thought and religious belief. It is common knowledge that in western societies there have been periods of crisis when new science has threatened established authority. The trial of Galileo in 1633 and the uproar caused by Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) are two of the most famous examples. Taking account of recent scholarship in the history of science, Brooke takes a fresh look at these and similar episodes, showing that science and religion have been mutually relevant in so rich a variety of ways that no simple generalizations are possible.

The Autobiography of Samuel Smiles, LL.D.
  • Samuel Smiles
  • Edited by Thomas Mackay
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    06 May 2013
    First published in:
    1905
  • One of the most popular Victorian writers, Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) made his name in 1859 with the original self-improvement manual Self-Help. His highly successful multi-volume Lives of the Engineers (also reissued in this series) contained biographies of men who had, like him, achieved greatness not through privilege but through hard work. Left incomplete at his death, edited by the social theorist Thomas Mackay (1849–1912) and first published in 1905, his autobiography opens with a vivid description of the Scottish garrison town of his birth during the Napoleonic wars. In his later years he was a vocal supporter of state education, and the value of education was a constant theme throughout his life. He remembers his schooldays here with clarity, writing that 'a good education is equivalent to a good fortune'. Straightforward and unpretentious, this book will be of interest to historians and readers fascinated by the Victorian drive for self-improvement.

Open Standards and the Digital Age
  • History, Ideology, and Networks
  • Andrew L. Russell
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    28 April 2014
  • How did openness become a foundational value for the networks of the twenty-first century? Open Standards and the Digital Age answers this question through an interdisciplinary history of information networks that pays close attention to the politics of standardization. For much of the twentieth century, information networks such as the monopoly Bell System and the American military's Arpanet were closed systems subject to centralized control. In the 1970s and 1980s however, engineers in the United States and Europe experimented with design strategies to create new digital networks. In the process, they embraced discourses of 'openness' to describe their ideological commitments to entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and participatory democracy. The rhetoric of openness has flourished - for example, in movements for open government, open source software, and open access publishing - but such rhetoric also obscures the ways the Internet and other 'open' systems still depend heavily on hierarchical forms of control.

Feeding France
  • New Sciences of Food, 1760–1815
  • E. C. Spary
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    20 May 2014
  • Feeding France is the first comprehensive study of the French food industry in the decades surrounding the French Revolution of 1789. Though the history of gastronomy and the restaurant have been explored by scholars, few are aware that France was also one of the first nations to produce industrial foods. In this time of political and social upheaval, chemists managed to succeed both as public food experts and as industrial food manufacturers. This book explores the intersection between knowledge, practice and commerce which made this new food expertise possible, and the institutional and experimental culture which housed it. Ranging from the exigencies of Old Regime bread-making to the industrial showcasing of gelatine manufacture, E. C. Spary rewrites the history of the French relationship with food to show that industrialisation and patrimonialism were intimately intertwined.

Page 208 of 680