New PDF release: Science and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (The

By Todd Timmons

The nineteenth Century used to be a interval of great swap within the day-by-day lives of the typical american citizens. by no means ahead of had such swap happened so swiftly or and had affected one of these wide variety of individuals. And those alterations have been basically because of the large advances in technological know-how and know-how. a number of the applied sciences that play such an vital function in our everyday life this present day have been first invented in this nice interval of innovation―everything from the railroad to the phone. those innovations have been instrumental within the social and cultural advancements of the time. The Civil battle, Westward enlargement, the growth and fall of slave tradition, the increase of the operating and center sessions and adjustments in gender roles―none of those might have happened as they did had it no longer been for the technology and expertise of the time.

Science and expertise in Nineteenth-Century America chronicles this dating among technology and know-how and the revolutions within the lives of daily american citizens. the quantity contains a dialogue of:

  • Transportation―from the railroad and steamship to the 1st cars showing close to the tip of the century.
  • Communication―including the telegraph, the phone, and the photograph
  • Industrialization― how the growing to be manufacturing unit method impacted the lives of operating males and women
  • Agriculture―how mechanical units akin to the McCormick reaper and purposes of technology perpetually altered how farming used to be performed within the United States
  • Exploration and navigations―the technological know-how and expertise of the age used to be an important to the growth of the rustic that happened within the century, and
The e-book contains a timeline and a bibliography for these attracted to pursuing additional learn, and over dozen interesting images that illustrate the day-by-day lives of usa citizens within the nineteenth Century a part of the lifestyle via background sequence, this identify joins technological know-how and expertise in Colonial the USA in a brand new department of the series-titles particularly taking a look at how technological know-how techniques impacted day-by-day life.

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Get Reconstruction Designs of Lost Ancient Chinese Machinery: 3 PDF

By Hong-Sen Yan

South pointing chariots, strolling machines and the astronomical mechanical clock are all used as illustrated examples during this interesting and specific research of misplaced equipment in historic China. this can be the 1st publication of its style, combining artistic mechanism layout method with mechanical evolution and edition conception to set out how a few old designs could be recreated. additionally the e-book displays on how age-old wisdoms may stimulate wonderful new equipment sooner or later.

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Download e-book for kindle: Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the by Robert Courland,Dennis Smith

By Robert Courland,Dennis Smith

Concrete: We use it for our constructions, bridges, dams, and roads. We stroll on it, force on it, and plenty of people dwell and paintings inside of its partitions. yet only a few people be aware of what it's. We take with no consideration this ubiquitous substance, which either actually and figuratively contains a lot of recent civilization’s built surroundings; but the tale of its production and improvement encompasses a solid of interesting characters and memorable ancient episodes. This ebook delves into this background, commencing readers’ eyes at each turn.

In a full of life narrative peppered with fascinating information, writer Robert Corland describes how essentially the most well-known personalities of historical past grew to become fascinated about the advance and use of concrete—including King Herod the nice of Judea, the Roman emperor Hadrian, Thomas Edison (who as soon as owned the most important concrete cement plant within the world), and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Courland issues to contemporary archaeological facts suggesting that the invention of concrete without delay resulted in the Neolithic Revolution and the increase of the earliest civilizations. a lot later, the Romans reached terribly excessive criteria for concrete creation, showcasing their success in iconic structures just like the Coliseum and the Pantheon. Amazingly, with the autumn of the Roman Empire, the secrets and techniques of concrete production have been misplaced for over a millennium.

The writer explains that once concrete was once rediscovered within the past due eighteenth century it used to be first and foremost seen as an attractive novelty or, at top, a really good construction fabric appropriate just for a slender diversity of purposes. It used to be simply towards the tip of the 19th century that using concrete exploded. in this fast growth, lobbyists attempted to conceal the truth that smooth concrete had definite defects and significant shortcomings. it's now famous that smooth concrete, not like its Roman predecessor, progressively disintegrates with age. Compounding this challenge is one other distressing truth: the manufacture of concrete cement is a huge contributor to international warming.

Concrete Planet is full of remarkable tales, attention-grabbing characters, dazzling proof, and an array of fascinating insights into the construction fabric that varieties the root of the infrastructure on which we depend.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in - download pdf or read online

By Jonathan Reed Winkler

In an illuminating research that blends diplomatic, army, know-how, and company background, Jonathan Reed Winkler exhibits how U.S. officers in the course of international battle i found the big price of worldwide communications.

At the outbreak of conflict in 1914, British regulate of the cable community affected the american citizens’ skill to speak the world over, and the improvement of radio frightened the military approximately hemispheric safety. the advantages of a U.S. community turned glaring through the struggle, specifically within the collecting of intelligence. This ended in the production of a peacetime intelligence operation, later termed the “Black Chamber,” that used to be the forerunner of the nationwide safeguard Agency.

After the conflict, U.S. businesses labored to extend community provider world wide yet confronted business boundaries. excited by safeguard matters, the Wilson management objected to any collaboration with British businesses that would alleviate this challenge. certainly, they went as far as to create a radio monopoly and use warships to dam the touchdown of a cable at Miami.

These efforts set vital precedents for later advancements in telephony, shortwave radio, satellites—even the web. during this soaking up heritage, Winkler sheds gentle at the early phases of the worldwide infrastructure that helped release the USA because the main energy of the century.

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Read e-book online Doolittle: Aerospace Visionary (Military Profiles) PDF

By Dik Alan Daso

On April 18, 1942, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle led a flight of 16 B-25 bombers off the flight deck of the USS Hornet on some of the most bold raids in U.S. army heritage, a low-level strike on Tokyo and different eastern towns. For this heroic act, he got the Medal of Honor. yet, as Dik Alan Daso convincingly argues, James H. Doolittle can be remembered as even more than a recognized strive against pilot. With a doctorate in aeronautics from MIT, he committed his lifestyles to gaining knowledge of the technical and functional intricacies of the main notable new invention of his time, the aircraft. In 1922, Doolittle turned the 1st individual to accomplish a transcontinental flight around the usa in one twenty-four-hour interval. Later he labored with the Shell Oil corporation to advance high-octane aviation gasoline to augment airplane functionality. He additionally gained a number of trophies for his record-breaking high-speed flights, and he constructed new instrumentation to help pilots whilst flying “blind” in terrible climate. In jet age parlance, Doolittle consistently “pushed the envelope.” After preserving a number of significant strive against instructions in the course of international conflict II, he used to be appointed a unique assistant to the Air strength leader of employees in 1951 and served as a civilian adviser in medical concerns, together with the improvement of ballistic missiles and the fledgling area application. From the early days of aviation to the distance age, Daso offers a concise yet expansive evaluation of the speedily constructing box of aviation and chronicles a pioneer’s tireless efforts to be a visionary for the hot era.

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Read e-book online Radium and the Secret of Life PDF

By Luis A. Campos

Before the hydrogen bomb indelibly linked radioactivity with demise, many chemists, physicians, botanists, and geneticists believed that radium may well carry the key to existence. Physicists and chemists early on defined the wondrous new point in real looking phrases corresponding to “decay” and “half-life,” and made common references to the “natural choice” and “evolution” of the weather. in the meantime, biologists of the interval used radium in experiments geared toward elucidating probably the most simple phenomena of lifestyles, together with metabolism and mutation.

From the production of half-living microbes within the try out tube to charting the earliest histories of genetic engineering, Radium and the key of Life highlights formerly unknown interconnections among the background of the early radioactive sciences and the sciences of heredity. Equating the transmutation of radium with the organic transmutation of residing species, biologists observed in metabolism and mutation homes that reminded them of the recent aspect. those in the beginning provocative metaphoric hyperlinks among radium and existence proved remarkably efficient and finally resulted in key organic insights into the beginning of existence, the character of heredity, and the constitution of the gene. Radium and the key of Life recovers a forgotten heritage of the connections among radioactivity and the lifestyles sciences that existed lengthy sooner than the sunrise of molecular biology.

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From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention - download pdf or read online

By Joshua M. Greenberg

The first video cassette recorders have been promoted within the Seventies as an extension of broadcast tv know-how -- a time-shifting machine, how to tape television exhibits. Early ads for Sony's Betamax informed strength buyers "You shouldn't have to overlook Kojak because you are watching Columbo." yet inside many years, the VCR have been reworked from a computing device that recorded tv into an extension of the movie show into the house. This was once much less a actual transformation than a transformation in belief, yet person who trusted the very tangible development of a community of social associations to aid this new market for video clips. In From Betamax to Blockbuster, Joshua Greenberg explains how the mix of local video shops and the VCR created a global during which videos grew to become tangible shopper items. Greenberg charts a trajectory from early "videophile" groups to the increase of the video shop -- entire with theater marquee lighting, motion picture posters, popcorn, and clerks who provided specialist recommendation on which video clips to hire. the outcome used to be greater than a brand new undefined; by way of putting video clips on cassette within the palms (and keep watch over) of customers, video condominium and sale resulted in a renegotiation of the boundary among medium and message, and eventually a brand new courting among audiences and flicks. finally, Blockbuster's top-down franchise shop version crowded neighborhood video shops out of the marketplace, however the fresh upward push of Netflix, iTunes, and different applied sciences have reopened previous questions on what a film is and the way (and the place) it needs to be watched. by means of concentrating on the "spaces in among" brands and shoppers, Greenberg's account bargains a clean standpoint on shopper expertise, illustrating how the preliminary transformation of flicks from event into commodity begun now not from the head down or the ground up, yet from the center of the burgeoning out.

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Sublime Dreams of Living Machines by Minsoo Kang PDF

By Minsoo Kang

Kang’s principal competition is that the automaton, a computer which can circulation on its own (better recognized at the present time because the robot), is among the crucial principles with which individuals within the West have contemplated the very nature of humanity itself. In Kang’s telling, automata are mirrors of the tips, fears, and anxieties of a given period, in that attitudes in the direction of the machines have continually been indicative of a moment’s zeitgeist. The ebook is traditionally sweeping, yet no longer finished; the point of interest is on what Kang takes to be key adjustments within the representations of and responses to automata. His major curiosity is on how Europeans in several sessions of the earlier considered the very concept of a self-moving desktop that acted as though it have been alive and the way they used it for varied symbolic and highbrow purposes.

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Download e-book for iPad: The Development of Propulsion Technology for U.S. by J. D. Hunley

By J. D. Hunley

In this definitive research, J. D. Hunley lines the program’s improvement from Goddard’s early rockets (and the German V-2 missile) throughout the Titan IVA and the gap go back and forth, with a spotlight on space-launch autos. for the reason that those rockets usually developed from early missiles, he will pay substantial consciousness to missile know-how, now not as an result in itself, yet as a contributor to launch-vehicle technology.

Focusing particularly at the engineering tradition of this system, Hunley communicates this very human aspect of technological improvement via anecdotes, personality sketches, and case reviews of difficulties confronted by way of rocket engineers. He exhibits how this type of hugely adaptive procedure enabled the evolution of a highly advanced expertise that used to be impressive—but decidedly no longer rocket science.

exact in its single-volume insurance of the evolution of launch-vehicle know-how from 1926 to 1991, this meticulously researched paintings will tell students and engineers attracted to the background of know-how and innovation, in addition to these focusing on the background of area flight.

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Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile - download pdf or read online

By Rebecca Slayton

In a speedily altering global, we depend upon specialists to evaluate the promise and hazards of recent know-how. yet how do those specialists make experience of a hugely doubtful destiny? In Arguments that Count, Rebecca Slayton deals a tremendous new standpoint. Drawing on new ancient records and interviews in addition to views in technological know-how and know-how reviews, she offers an unique account of ways scientists got here to phrases with the unheard of probability of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). She compares how diverse expert groups -- physicists and laptop scientists -- developed arguments in regards to the dangers of missile protection, and the way those arguments replaced through the years. Slayton exhibits that our figuring out of technological dangers is formed by means of disciplinary repertoires -- the codified wisdom and mathematical principles that specialists use to border new demanding situations. And, considerably, a brand new repertoire can convey long-neglected dangers into transparent view.In the Nineteen Fifties, scientists famous that high-speed pcs will be had to do something about the extraordinary pace of ICBMs. however the nation's elite technological know-how advisors had no option to learn the dangers of desktops so used physics to evaluate what they can: radar and missile functionality. basically a long time later, after setting up computing as a technology, have been advisors capable of study authoritatively the dangers linked to complicated software program -- so much significantly, the danger of a catastrophic failure. As we proceed to confront new threats, together with that of cyber assault, Slayton bargains worthy perception into how other kinds of workmanship can restrict or extend our capability to deal with novel technological risks.

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