Technology and Culture最新文献

By the 1930s, the once flourishing salmon fishing industry on the Rhine River ended. Concerns about decimating salmon stocks since 1850 had led to regulation efforts by riparian states, based on the assumption that overfishing was the chief culprit. While governments advocated the latest salmon science from Britain, the new industrial-scale salmon fisheries around Rotterdam challenged such policies. Their intervention halted the Dutch parliament's attempt at an international salmon treaty in 1870 and with it regulatory protection for the fish. Salmon fishers supported a techno-solutionist workaround. By the late nineteenth century, neither regulation nor restocking were working. Yet economic gain served to distract fishermen from the ecological state of the river. Reconstructing competing scientific and technological visions, this article reveals how the modernization of the Rhine as a transport artery and industrial waterway erased an ecological system once central to European food and culture.

Pewter was widely used in Chinese daily life, yet it features in few studies. This article examines technological change and stylistic innovation in China's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pewter making to reveal how maritime connections shaped local craft traditions. The high-quality tin that Chinese miners extracted in Southeast Asia provided artisans with superior material, leading to the development of a new tin-based alloy. Simultaneously, China's flourishing export industry inspired pewter artisans to incorporate European designs, establishing Chaozhou Prefecture in Guangdong Province as a center of pewter innovation. By tracing these intertwined material, aesthetic, and technological exchanges, this article argues that pewter production exemplifies how global trade and migration transmitted technologies that were then reinterpreted through local craftsmanship. By integrating perspectives from technological history, migration studies, global trade, and art history, this article demonstrates how global exchanges transformed metalworking technologies, artistic styles, and consumer culture in the maritime world of South China.

Tracing the history of Japan's electrification prior to the 1930s reveals how energy infrastructure expanded under the logic of fossil capitalism. Under market logic, privately owned utilities converted abundant coal and hydropower resources into electrical energy and sold it as a commodity. The rapid expansion of these utilities and accompanying fierce competition gave rise to novel financial instruments. The Japanese state supported fossil capitalism: centrally, it adopted a noninterventionist stance on price regulation, yet it implemented policies that leveraged market mechanisms to promote electrification. At the local level, public ownership and regulatory oversight remained weak. With the Japanese case, this article underscores the heterogeneity of electrification processes in Asia and demonstrates how Japan's early electrification linked fossil fuels, finance, and technological modernity.

This essay discusses the history of technology in Russia, focusing on several major developments. Its twofold aim is to provide insights into the current state of research, with a brief reference to the technological history that evolved during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, and to offer an overview of recent Russian-language publications for an international readership. It focuses on enviro-tech as a prominent research direction in Russia that highlights the ongoing changes in institutional landscapes and thematic priorities. The essay demonstrates that the history of technology in Russia has yet to develop into a fully coherent field of research or education. Research on past technologies has evolved along two still-coexisting paths: a primarily engineering-focused history rooted in traditions of the Soviet period and a more recent interdisciplinary approach situated at the intersection of environmental history, the history of science, and related fields.

At the turn of the twentieth century, rapid technological change impacted urban and rural areas in different yet interconnected ways. By comparing how electricity affected Finnish and English inhabitants through essays collected between 1958 and 1964, this article examines how rural populations addressed, negotiated, and expressed technological change at both individual and communal levels. Scrutinizing electric lighting illustrates how cultural and societal contexts shaped early responses to electrification and the challenges it posed to rural life. The main findings show that English writers expressed nostalgia for the pre-electrification rituals such as lighting the oil lamp, while Finnish writers described international tensions surrounding new lighting practices. Unpacking these narratives reveals how people intertwine technology with their lives. By foregrounding emotion as a historical category, this article shows that nostalgia was not just simply resistance to change but a means of coping with modernity's social and moral disruptions.

In the early 1960s, global actors and international organizations embraced desalination as a promising development tool and a fresh expression of technology's power to control nature. Amid postwar reconstruction, decolonization, and Cold War tensions, desalination symbolized progress and promised equitable, universally accessible fresh water. Yet, despite its compelling appeal, desalination was prohibitively expensive compared to existing sources of water, with numerous technical and economic uncertainties remaining unresolved. By looking at the cases of Tunisia and Chile, this article explores the techno-political mismatch between utopian visions of desalination solving water scarcity across any geography and the political, financial, and environmental realities of implementation. As a form of hope and aspiration, desalination demonstrates how high-modernist ideals materialized unevenly, shaped by diverse and contested global contexts. By tracing this transnational pursuit, the article foregrounds a significant yet relatively unknown global history of technological optimism and shows how universalist visions ran up against local geographies and postcolonial development agendas.

This article argues that the endurance of Arnold Kegel's name derives not from his exercises but from his device-the perineometer-a 1940s vaginal pressure gauge that transformed ideas of sexual health and disability in postwar America. By situating the perineometer within cultures of rehabilitation medicine, consumer fitness, and Cold War domesticity, the article shows how it reframed vaginal weakness from a psychological problem into a physical disability curable through self-discipline and technological self-monitoring. Kegel's device embodied postwar technocratic optimism, promising women measurable self-control and marital fulfillment through bodily regulation. Integrating disability and sexuality studies with the history of medical instrumentation, the study reveals how a technology designed to "cure" frigidity reinforced ableist and heteronormative ideals of womanhood, while making visible the techno-scientific production of gendered bodies. It concludes by tracing how Kegel's device and discourse continue to shape twenty-first-century pelvic fitness culture and biomedical understandings of female embodiment.

Traffic congestion and disruptions caused by mass motorization posed a huge challenge for transportation in Europe by the 1970s. One of the earliest responses was traffic radio, which became a key feature of public broadcasting during the 1960s. However, traffic warnings remained restricted and varied significantly across countries. This article analyzes the harmonization of Europe's traffic information systems. The main focus is the "Radio Data System" and "Traffic Message Channel" standard developed by a consortium of national broadcasters, the European Broadcasting Union, and the radio industry, and subsequently sponsored by the European Community. Early digital technologies played a pivotal role in merging national traffic information into a common European Community system and helped address the shortcomings of earlier, local analog systems. By tracing how engineers, policymakers, and broadcasters collaborated across national borders, the article situates traffic data harmonization within the history of European integration and the rise of networked information infrastructures.

While radio was central to Cold War conflicts between Western democracies and communist regimes, it largely escaped the period's familiar visual iconography due to the medium's acoustic and clandestine nature. This essay examines over two hundred photographs from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that document the interaction between employees and technical equipment. It argues that images of the "radio war" require analysis on two levels: reconstructing their producers' rhetorical strategies and reading visual details that reveal unintended meanings, particularly the technological constraints shaping daily practice. In this way, a photograph capturing the process of radio technical monitoring on this issue's cover becomes a point of departure for historical inquiry at the intersection of technology, politics, and sound.

Technical monitoring-the routine assessment of radio signal quality-gained unexpected significance during the Cold War. In an era marked by unreliable sources and propaganda, quantifiable technical data became especially valuable. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a major Western broadcaster subject to deliberate interference by communist states, regularly measured the audibility of its jammed signal. These recordings went beyond technical concerns: acoustic categories became tools for studying closed societies during political crises. Meanwhile, technicians across the Iron Curtain provided party officials with statistics indicating who was winning the radio war. Acoustic data thus crossed geographical, ideological, and professional boundaries. This article examines how such technical monitoring transformed sound into data, bridging engineering, intelligence, and political communication. It also situates these practices within the wider history of Cold War media and the origins of datafication, inviting parallels to today's surveillance regimes.