This paper examines 19th century English inventor Charles Babbage’s paradoxical standing among historians of technology and computing. In the 1830s he designed a purely mechanical, general purpose, programmable calculating device he dubbed the Analytical Engine. In its logical design and general capabilities it is nearly identical to the modern computer. Thus Babbage is described by [...]

The authors of this paper focus on key concepts that they believe must be appreciated in order for government-funded research to effectively spur technological innovation in the energy sector. They note that energy technology innovation is particularly complex and nonlinear. Energy technologies are often large-scale, must compete with incumbent technological systems (and thus must fight [...]

Newell here analyzes the the market difficulties that act as barriers to climate change mitigation, along with the role played by science and technology innovation in the U.S., and outlines a plan to optimize federal investments in basic and applied research. Newell’s plan is fiscal in nature; he focuses directly on the question of how [...]

Christopher Newfield reports his thoughts on the Tomorrow’s People Conference at Oxford in March 2006, focusing on “enhancement of the human” through future technological advances, particularly in the field of nanotechnology. Newfield notes that while many scholars presented well-developed scientific narratives of transhumanism, they largely failed to provide sufficiently robust social narratives to complement them. [...]

Book Edgerton’s basic historiographic thesis in “The Shock of the Old” is that innovation-centric accounts of the history of technology give us a very distorted understanding of technology’s effects on society and society’s effects on technology—an understanding that can be corrected only by looking at the history of technology in use. Edgerton’s book is an [...]

BeamerTour-1

Report on “Tomorrow’s People” Conference

Newfield here explores how narratives of public funding function within public and political spheres, while at the same time analyzing the role that public funding plays in technological innovation networks. He articulates the interplay between the two and tracks changes in each over the past thirty years through his own narrative device: a multi-generational extension [...]

Staudenmaier, writing in 1990, reflects on the status of the history of technology as a field. He notes that internalists (historians focused primarily on the detailed inner workings of technology and technological systems), contextualists (those focused on how social changes determine the forms and inner workings of technology), and externalists (those focused not on the [...]

Writing in 1981, Hounshell identifies the discipline of the history of technology as being at a crossroads: either technological historians will broaden their inquiries into the greater sociological discourse, examining technology as a social phenomenon, or they will focus ever more narrowly on microhistories of technology, which are particularly and mostly concerned with the how [...]