Technology and Culture最新文献

In the nineteenth century, the process of creating standards became part of a burgeoning engineering print culture. Long before their institutionalization in standards institutes in the early twentieth century, standards evolved into a print genre-one that has remained largely invisible in historical accounts. This article recovers this print history of standards. I argue that in Joseph Whitworth's On an Uniform System of Screw Threads (1841) the genre coalesces dialogically. It descended from eighteenth-century engineering reports that documented completed works, and it contended with contemporary engineering papers that conveyed experimental results or derived best practices. In proposing a potential consensus for manufacturing screws to uniform specifications, the genre assumed the print dissemination of a standard could serve as a collective and public path towards a standard. At the same time, its rhetorical structure aimed to present the standard not as a prescription but as a record of existing practice.

This article explores the development of AstroTurf in postwar North America as a case study in "augmented nature," where technologies simulate and redefine elements of the natural world. The plastic substitute for natural grass embodied a broader cultural commitment to suburban lawn aesthetics and exemplified a "break-it-and-fix-it" approach to ecological challenges. By analyzing AstroTurf's marketing-particularly its showcase at Montreal's Expo '67-the article introduces the concept of augmented nature and examines its role in reshaping mid-century understandings of nature, technology, and environmental problem-solving. In so doing, it offers new insights into the cultural significance of domestic green spaces, aesthetic ideals, and the role of synthetic materials in manipulating perceptions of the natural world.

How do humans engage with infrastructure whose major components are invisible and poorly understood? While many studies assume that infrastructure's materiality is known and stable, early twentieth-century radio communication presented a striking exception: radio waves were new and possessed properties beyond human knowledge. The limited frequencies available for medium- and long-wave wireless transmission sparked anxieties over international competition, while growing reliance on shortwave communication raised the stakes for understanding how radio waves behaved, especially in relation to the ionosphere. Focusing on Japan, a late-industrializing country, this article shows how shifting knowledge of materiality-shaped by political, scientific, and industrial contexts-profoundly shaped infrastructure development. Because much of the physical world remains unknown and human knowledge constantly evolves, this study underscores the mediated nature of materiality in all infrastructure.

This article combines infrastructure history with a residual materialist approach to trace the history of creosote-a toxic coal tar oil used to impregnate wooden railroad ties. Once an unwanted by-product of coal gasification, creosote became a valued industrial fluid through state and corporate interventions. Focusing on Germany and Austro-Hungary from the 1880s to the interwar period, its study highlights the central role of actors like the Rütgers company in this transformation. It examines the scientification of wood impregnation, the rivalry between creosote-treated wooden ties and iron alternatives, and the influence of maintainers in shaping material preferences. By investigating creosote's "unruliness"-its toxic effects and unpredictable material behaviors, from molecular interactions to transnational flows-the article reveals the entangled impacts of industrial materials on infrastructure, human health, and the environment. In doing so, it underlines the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds in the Anthropocene.

This article examines air-raid shelters in Barcelona and London during the late 1930s as architectural embodiments of political ideologies and social dynamics. During the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona became a huge laboratory to test not only new means of destruction but also of protection for the coming World War: a city of shelters emerged underground, mobilizing nature, knowledge, expertise, and community networks. In London, the heated debate on civil defense was informed by the experiments held in Barcelona. Focusing on three types of shelters and the politics that they reflected, the study reveals how wartime protection technologies mirrored the conflicts and hierarchies of the societies they served. By situating these shelters within broader wartime technopolitics, the article highlights the interplay between technological landscapes, social networks, gender constructs, and political ideologies during moments of crisis.

This article challenges the prevailing historiography, which asserts that painting with indigo on cotton was technically impossible until the British innovation with arsenic trisulphide in the 1730s. By reconstructing the Indian indigo painting process from the Beaulieu manuscript, the study demonstrates that European dismissal of fermented coconut sap as a viable technique stemmed from a lack of understanding and the incompatibility of the Indian technique with capital-intensive production models. Painting with indigo was not a technical impossibility but an economic and artisanal problem, requiring specialized knowledge of fermented coconut sap's properties. The study argues that successful knowledge transfer depends on adaptability to environmental and structural conditions, advancing a broader definition of "useful knowledge" in global economic and technological history-one not limited by immediate economic applicability.

During the Cold War, the European Regional Committee (ERC) of the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind sought to use assistive technologies as neutral tools for fostering depoliticized cooperation across the East-West ideological divide. This article examines the ERC's collaborative projects during the 1970s, arguing that although they facilitated connections between research centers and manufacturers across geopolitical borders, they were ultimately constrained by both activists' conflicting approaches to disability and Cold War political realities. By analyzing the intersections of disability, technology, and geopolitics, the article contributes to our understanding of how global technological collaboration was both enabled and restricted by broader political and cultural forces.

This article examines the contested adoption of cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders ("black boxes") in aviation. It uses the 1971 collision between two airliners in Sydney, Australia, as a case study. Australia, the first country to mandate cockpit voice recording for large, jet-powered airliners, encountered resistance due to the poor performance of early recorders and pushback from pilots through industrial action. The analysis reveals how technical, political, legal, and financial factors shaped air safety investigations and debates over evidence use. It also explores tensions between legal frameworks of admissibility, liability, and restitution and aviation's "just culture," which encourages open admission of errors to prevent future incidents. The article argues for integrating judicial and technological perspectives to better understand aviation safety and risk epistemologies.

For Polish-American women, household appliances-promoted in Polish-language magazines in the United States in 1930s-were not merely labor-saving tools, but symbols of Americanization and social mobility. Revisiting Ruth Schwartz Cowan's argument that the domestic technological revolution primarily benefited middle-class women, this article examines the experiences of immigrant and second-generation Polish-American women in early twentieth-century and interwar Chicago. While Cowan highlights the increased expectations these technologies imposed on women, this article demonstrates how they facilitated Polish-American women's integration into American consumer culture and adaptation of American values. Drawing on oral histories and advertisements, this article explores the intersection of gender, class, and ethnicity in shaping immigrant women's interactions with modern domestic technology.

How might forces and interactions at the surface of sand particles contribute to material agency with tangible impact on human life? This article explores the multiscale materiality of a technological model and how it catalyzed social action and influenced the development of larger-scale municipal infrastructure systems. It focuses on a demonstration sand filter constructed through civic engagement in Pittsburgh in 1895. This locally embedded community technology, situated in international networks of scientific knowledge, served as a practical "object lesson" in abstract principles of sanitation engineering-publicly demonstrating and validating the counterintuitive ability of local sand and gravel to purify city water. By bridging materials science and engineering with histories of technology, this study contributes to discourses on new materialism by identifying nonhuman agency at the nano- and micrometer scale and tracing its implications for public health, civic identity, and infrastructure design.