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Cyclones and Earthquakes
How is scientific knowledge produced in a colonial context? Furthermore, how is it possible that two colonies such as Cuba and the Philippines could have among the most notable scientific achievements in the history of nineteenth-century Spain? Finally, what happens when these achievements were driven by a religious order like the Society of Jesus? Why and what kinds of interests were at stake? This book is an original, rigorous and well-documented study of how two central fields of scientific prevention--cyclone prediction and earthquake resistant construction--have their roots in the commercial, military, and educational context of late-nineteenth-century Spanish insular possessions.
The Unreliable Nation
An examination of how technological failures defined nature and national identity in Cold War Canada. Throughout the modern period, nations defined themselves through the relationship between nature and machines. Many cast themselves as a triumph of technology over the forces of climate, geography, and environment. Some, however, crafted a powerful alternative identity: they defined themselves not through the triumph of machines over nature, but through technological failures and the distinctive natural orders that caused them. In The Unreliable Nation, Edward Jones-Imhotep examines one instance in this larger history: the Cold War–era project to extend reliable radio communications to the...
Probing the Sky with Radio Waves
By the late nineteenth century, engineers and experimental scientists generally knew how radio waves behaved, and by 1901 scientists were able to manipulate them to transmit messages across long distances. What no one could understand, however, was why radio waves followed the curvature of the Earth. Theorists puzzled over this for nearly twenty years before physicists confirmed the zig-zag theory, a solution that led to the discovery of a layer in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that bounces radio waves earthward—the ionosphere. In Probing the Sky with Radio Waves, Chen-Pang Yeang documents this monumental discovery and the advances in radio ionospheric propagation research that occurred i...
Hooch and Hard Liquor in East Asia
Liquor has become a “party” in East Asia – a beverage phenomenon popular among countries throughout the region. But, in fact, each country of East Asia has experienced a different evolution of spirits. Indeed, there is a liquor idiosyncrasy to each country of East Asia. Moreover, hooch is the popular alcoholic beverage for the lower classes while more sophisticated spirits are exclusive to the higher classes. The book examines liquor: moonshine and retail liquor in East Asia. It analyzes the following questions as to why liquor is becoming so popular in East Asia. Why is production of liquor in East Asia becoming so financially lucrative? Why has the production of hooch (moonshine) become so lucrative? In fact, the production and consumption of liquor in East Asian have become crucial as East Asia enters a period of craft liquor. A valuable resource for academics, students, and professionals interested in public policy, history, political economy, consumer goods in East Asia, and the evolution of hooch and hard liquor in East Asia.
Geophysics, Realism, and Industry
Did industry and commerce affect the concepts, values and epistemic foundations of different sciences? If so, how and to what extent? This book suggests that the most significant influence of industry on science in the two case studies treated here had to do with the issue of realism. Using wave propagation as the common thread, this is the first book to simultaneously analyse the emergence of realist attitudes towards the entities of the ionosphere and of the earth's crust. However, what led physicists and engineers to adopt realist attitudes? This book suggests that a new kind of realism --a realism of social and cultural origins- is the answer: a preliminary, entity realism responding to specific commercial and engineering interests, and a realism that was neither strictly instrumental nor exclusively operational. The book has two parts: while Part I focuses on the study of the ionosphere and how the British radio industry affected ionospheric physics, Part II focuses on the study of the Earth's crust and how the American oil industry affected crustal seismology.
The Peregrine Profession
In The Peregrine Profession Per-Olof Grönberg offers an account of the pre-1930 transnational mobility of engineers and architects educated in the Nordic countries 1880-1919. Outlining a system where learning mobility was more important than labour market mobility, the author shows that more than every second graduate went abroad. Transnational mobility was stronger from Finland and Norway than from Denmark and Sweden, partly because of slower industrialisation and deficiencies in the domestic technical education. This mobility included all parts of the world but concentrated on the leading industrial countries in German speaking Europe and North America. Significant majorities returned and became agents of technology transfer and technical change. Thereby, these mobile graduates also became important for Nordic industrialisation
Wireless and Empire
Although the product of consensus politics, the British Empire was based on communications supremacy and the knowledge of the atmosphere. Focusing on science, industry, government, the military, and education, this book studies the relationship between wireless and Empire throughout the interwar period.
The Age of Electroacoustics
The transformation of acoustics into electro-acoustics, a field at the intersection of science and technology, guided by electrical engineering, industry, and the military. At the end of the nineteenth century, acoustics was a science of musical sounds; the musically trained ear was the ultimate reference. Just a few decades into the twentieth century, acoustics had undergone a transformation from a scientific field based on the understanding of classical music to one guided by electrical engineering, with industrial and military applications. In this book, Roland Wittje traces this transition, from the late nineteenth-century work of Hermann Helmholtz to the militarized research of World Wa...
Politics, Statistics and Weather Forecasting, 1840-1910
Weather forecasting is the most visible branch of meteorology and has its modern roots in the nineteenth century when scientists redefined meteorology in the way weather forecasts were made, developing maps of isobars, or lines of equal atmospheric pressure, as the main forecasting tool. This book is the history of how weather forecasting was moulded and modelled by the processes of nation-state building and statistics in the Western world.
New Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Also available online as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library under the title Complete dictionary of scientific biography.
