History

Patrick M. Malone demonstrates how innovative engineering helped make Lowell, Massachusetts, a potent symbol of American industrial prowess in the 19th century. Waterpower spurred the industrialization of the early United States and was the principal...

Before the hydrogen bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many chemists, physicians, botanists, and geneticists believed that radium might hold the secret to life. Physicists and chemists early on described the wondrous new element in...

This book is the first substantial study in any language of one of revolutionary Russia's most distinguished and controversial engineers - Iurii Vladimirovich Lomonosov (1876-1952). Not only does it provide an outline of his remarkable life and career,...

Agusti Nieto-Galan argues that chemistry in the twentieth century was deeply and profoundly political. Far from existing in a distinct public sphere, chemical knowledge was applied in ways that created strong links with industrial and military projects,...

The industrial gases industry originated in 1886, when a London-based company began producing high-purity oxygen. Initially, purified oxygen was a solution in search of a problem, but demand for it soared early in the twentieth century with the emergence...

The Royal Society is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious scientific bodies, but what has it done in recent decades? Increasingly marginalised by postwar developments and the reforms of civil science in the 1960s, the Society was at risk of...

In this major study, the history of the French and British trading empires in the early modern Mediterranean is used as a setting to test a new approach to the history of ignorance: how can we understand the very act of ignoring - in political, economic,...

An international community of specialists reinvented the propeller during the Aeronautical Revolution, a vibrant period of innovation in North America and Europe from World War I to the end of World War II. They experienced both success and failure as...

Now in its third edition, The Rise of Early Modern Science argues that to understand why modern science arose in the West it is essential to study not only the technical aspects of scientific thought but also the religious, legal and institutional...

In this innovative and engaging history of homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, those who died violently or under...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781926592176Author Derek WebberFormat PaperbackPage Count 168Imprint Apogee BooksPublisher Collector's Guide PublishingWeight(grams) 290g

Was it coincidence that the modern state and modern science arose at the same time? This overview of the relations of science and state from the Scientific Revolution to World War II explores this issue, synthesising a range of approaches from history...

Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates...

Milan has played an important role in the Italian country since the Roman period. This importance is reflected also by the diffusion of stone architecture: a persisting trait of Milan architecture was the use of different stones in the same building...

Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys...

Recasting the Machine Age recounts the history of Henry Ford's efforts to shift the production of Ford cars and trucks from the large-scale factories he had pioneered in the Detroit area to nineteen decentralized, small-scale plants within sixty miles of...

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262048101Author Konstantinos ChatzisFormat PaperbackPage Count 416Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

It may sound simple. Fashion a set of blades, attach them to a generator, set the machine on top of a tower, and let the wind do the work of creating electricity. Not so. Most of these attempts fail, even with the availability of the latest technologies...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783838212449Author Nina SelbstFormat PaperbackPage Count 420Imprint ibidem-Verlag, Jessica Haunschild u Christian SchonPublisher ibidem-Verlag, Jessica...

The Invisible Bicycle brings together different insights into the social, cultural and economic history of the bicycle and cycling in historical eras of ubiquitous bicycle use that have remained relatively invisible in bicycle history. It revisits the...

Communications: An international history of the formative years traces the evolution of communications from 500 BC, when fire beacons were used for signalling, to the 1940s, when high definition television systems were developed for the entertainment,...

In the early 1970s, a German study estimated that women expended as many calories cleaning their coal-mining husbands' work clothes as their husbands did working below ground, arguably making the home as much a site of industrialized work as factories...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262542586Author Eric S. HintzFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262693264Author Bruce SterlingFormat PaperbackPage Count 152Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm) 191mm * 140mm * 6mm

When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch-it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world.The word "glitch" implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism,...

Humans have been preserving food for millennia, but the refrigerator is a relatively new addition to our homes. Just before the Second World War, only 3 per cent of British households had one. In the interim years the fridge has become accepted as a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781393924012Author Russell McGuireFormat PaperbackPage Count 86Imprint Sdg Strategy, LLCPublisher Sdg Strategy, LLCWeight(grams) 118gDimensions(mm) 216mm *...

Superlatives tend to fail in describing Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior-that being said, it stands as one of the most extravagant feats in the history of mapmaking. The original Latin edition, completed in 1665, was the largest and most expensive book to be...

An engrossing origin story for the personal computer-showing how the Apple II's software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists' plaything to essential home appliance. Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple...

Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise history of the Industrial Revolution places the eighteenth-century British Industrial Revolution in global context, locating its causes in government protection, global competition, and...

The rise of artificial intelligence has rekindled a long-standing debate regarding the impact of technology on employment. This is just one of many areas where exponential advances in technology signal both hope and fear, leading to public controversy...

The design processes behind a giant leap for mankind.Neil Armstrong in a space suit on the moon remains an iconic representation of America's technological ingenuity. Few know that the Model A-7L pressure suit worn by the Apollo 11 astronauts, and the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262546065Author Audrey WattersFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

Fifty years ago, a UCLA computer science professor and his student sent the first electronic message over a network called ARPANET, a predecessor to the Internet. The intended message, the word "login", was truncated in a computer crash to "lo." Digital...

Trading Territories tells the compelling story of maps and geographical knowledge in the early modern world from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. Examining how European geographers mapped the territories of the Old World -Africa and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062845900Author Author and Historian Simon WinchesterFormat PaperbackPage Count 592Imprint HarperLuxePublisher HarperLuxeWeight(grams) 590g

First published in 1863, this is a first-hand account of Henry Walter Bates' eleven-year expedition to the river Amazon in 1848, during which he discovered some eight thousand species unknown to the natural sciences. Written in the first person, it...

The Canal du Midi, which threads through southwestern France and links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was an astonishing feat of seventeenth-century engineering--in fact, it was technically impossible according to the standards of its day. Impossible...