History and Technology最新文献

{"title":"Illuminating the streets, alleys, parks and suburbs of the American City: non-networked technologies, 1870-1920","authors":"J. Tarr","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1739816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1739816","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT During the nineteenth century American cities transitioned from offering minimal services to providing services through networked infrastructures. Among these were street lights fueled largely by coal gas produced by manufactured gas plants and distributed by pipe line and later by electricity, both arc and incandescent. Because of fuel and construction costs, manufactured gas was expensive and uneven, and gas networks were confined to business sectors and affluent neighborhoods. To provide light to dark neighborhoods and suburbs, off-grid stand-alone technologies unconnected to a piped or wired network often supplied illumination. The most common of these were fueled by gasoline and naphtha, byproducts of petroleum distillation aiming primarily to produce kerosene. This pattern was present in many American cities and towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, the case of stand-alone gasoline and naphtha street lights presents an important variation to the advance of the networked city.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"22 1","pages":"105 - 128"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83210587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making DNA and its becoming an experimental commodity","authors":"Dominic J. Berry","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1694125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1694125","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper pursues the history of biology and technology in tandem. It focuses on DNA’s materiality regardless of informational properties. My emphasis on ‘making’ integrates attention to cultures of work in material histories of biology with analyses of the development of technical apparatuses and machines. When it comes to the history of DNA synthesis our materials are as much chemical as they are biological, which means that there is really a third history present, one that also needs to be drawn in, but on its own terms. I demonstrate the ways in which different chemistries have been combined with different technologies, all together affording different arrangements of personnel and biological science. It is a history of how synthesised DNA first came to be, became desired, and became a commodity, available for inclusion in a wide variety of experiments and experimental systems. This method could be replicated for other ‘experimental commodities’.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"110 1","pages":"374 - 404"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79262703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wild toxicity, cultivated safety: aflatoxin and kōji classification as knowledge infrastructure","authors":"Victoria Lee","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1694127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1694127","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1960, the trajectory of aflatoxin as one of the earliest and best studied cases of a naturally occurring carcinogen in food intersected with the trajectory of an industrial microbe known in the Japanese vernacular as kōji, used for centuries in Japan to make sake, soy sauce, and miso. Over about two decades, the aflatoxin crisis spurred the emergence of a new evolutionary narrative of kōji, Aspergillus oryzae, as a domesticated, non-toxigenic species unique to the Japanese brewery that was clearly distinguishable from its wild, commonly found in nature, and aflatoxin-producing close relative, Aspergillus flavus. It was a shift that came hand-in-hand with the reconstruction of kōji classification. This essay examines the challenges of microbial classification after 1960. By asking how mycologists made a scientific narrative that originated in the interests of Japanese national industries convincing internationally, it explores the knowledge infrastructure that underlay both manufacturing issues and knowledge in microbiology.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"84 1","pages":"405 - 424"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86905241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A different kind of synthesis: artificial synthesis of insulin in socialist China","authors":"Vivian Ling, Lijing Jiang","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1694124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1694124","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the 1950s, the studies of proteins through their synthesis captured the attention of a number of biochemists. Among teams that set out to chemically synthesize the protein insulin, a large team in the People’s Republic of China achieved success in 1966, months before the Cultural Revolution. By focusing on the ideological refashioning, material arrangement, and organizational style of the project, this paper addresses the political and material dimensions of the project, especially how it was reconstructed as an engineering project in-between biology and chemistry for the young republic. This case was different from the design rationales demonstrated in both American and German cases, in which insulin synthesis was viewed as either a challenging problem for biochemistry or primary research toward making synthetic fibers. The process reveals a fluid topography of the material, social, and political space that a group of biochemists could work with in socialist China.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"202 1","pages":"453 - 480"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74327285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to the special issue Biology and Technology Reframed: historiographical reflections and opportunities","authors":"K. Rader","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1694259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1694259","url":null,"abstract":"My first book, Making Mice,1 chronicled the development of the genetically standardized mouse – and in its title, the use of the word ‘making’ was deliberate. Not only did it fulfill my publisher’s...","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"6 1","pages":"366 - 373"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81690598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editors’ note","authors":"A. Slaton, Tiago Saraiva","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1695444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1695444","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue represents the first half of a collaboration between History+Technology and the Journal of the History of Biology. JHB co-editor Karen Rader has guest edited this issue of H + T, and in the coming months we will in turn present a set of articles in a special issue of JHB. The editors of both journals are excited to test the possibility that challenging familiar topical commitments can bring new criticality to all. As we see it, this collaboration does more than historicize the engineering/science binary. Rather, it suggests that these two categories themselves enact historical projects like resource extraction, capitalism, socialism, the making of states, the making of life. When practical endeavors generally seen as ‘engineering’ are demarcated analytically from conceptual processes seen as ‘scientific discovery’ or ‘-research’ those historical projects, and their social origins and impacts, are easily obscured. To make histories of technology and biology–in all their institutional, political, material and corporeal expressions–accountable to one another is, we think, to make them accountable to history more generally. Finally, not least among our reasons for swapping editorial labor in this way: we are thrilled to bring the readers of H + T a sampling of JHB’s ambitious analytical reach, and later, to introduce JHB readers to the historiographic aims, and disruptions, ofH + T. We hope to see these two special issues shared widely within and beyond their familiar disciplinary homes, yielding new audiences, and new questions, for both.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"30 1","pages":"365 - 365"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73343430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trypanosomiasis, tropical medicine, and the practices of inter-colonial research at Lake Victoria, 1902-07","authors":"M. Webel","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680151","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As sleeping sickness appeared in epidemics across Africa c. 1900, it stimulated a race among colonial medical personnel and Europe-based scientists to discover its causative pathogen, its mode of transmission, and, ideally, a cure. Scientists circulated between hubs of research in Europe and key field sites in Africa, monitoring each other’s progress and often maintaining long-term relationships colored by collaboration and competition. The Lake Victoria littoral was an epicenter of both significant mortality and important research before WWI. This article explores the intellectual implications of colonial connectivity at local scale, focusing on changing ideas about sleeping sickness, the communication of research strategies and methods, and the circumstances of life and research in this imperial hinterland and colonial borderland in eastern Africa. Exploring research dynamics around Lake Victoria illuminates the inadequacies of colonial scientific and medical capabilities and both the generative and limiting aspects that the contingencies of colonial research created.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"54 1","pages":"266 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90827345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prison, plantation, and peninsula: colonial knowledge and experimental technique in the post-war Bataan Rice Enrichment Project, 1910–1950","authors":"T. Ventura","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680153","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 1946 Bataan Rice Enrichment Project illuminates the intimate connections between Euro-American empire, scientific nationalism, and post-war demonstration in the Philippines. The project was conducted by former American colonial chemist turned philanthropist Robert R. Williams, who sought to prove the efficacy of synthetic-thiamine fortified rice in the fight against beriberi. Yet by willfully exposing half of Bataan’s food scarce residents to beriberi, Williams effectively recreated the prisons and asylums that Euro-American researchers had used as living laboratories to induce beriberi in unwilling subjects. These ‘carceral laboratories’ were highly contested by the people imprisoned within and by nationalist Philippine physicians who understood deficiency disease as a symptom of colonialism. Returning the carceral laboratory to the making of nutritional science explains the post-war Philippine rejection of mandatory rice fortification and is a reminder that the Asian countryside was a creation of colonial modernity and a contested space long before the Cold War.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"15 1","pages":"293 - 315"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90756356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empires of knowledge: introduction","authors":"A. Jansen, J. Krige, Jessica Wang","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680141","url":null,"abstract":"From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the mobilization of knowledge as an adjunct to modern state power became essential to imperial projects worldwide. As traditional empires consolidated colonial rule by backing administrative legal structures with coercive policing and military force, they found that legitimacy also called for legibility. The gathering and creation of information about local custom and habit, indigenous structures of power and productive practices that could be ‘improved’, resources that could be exploited – such forms of knowledge facilitated governance, whether by engaging local elites in the colonial project, displacing and supplanting existing structures of political authority, extending systems of surveillance and control, or otherwise expanding the reach of imperial rule. Empires combined hard with soft power, producing a cohort of trained imperial agents in metropolitan institutions – universities, foundations, and, in the post-WorldWar II period, international organizations, think tanks –whose fieldwork aided the projection of power abroad. Our mutual interests in science, nation-building, the movement of knowledge, and the global dimensions of power (whether in national or colonial contexts, or the blurred boundaries between the two) have brought the editors of this special issue together to reflect upon the twentieth-century history of knowledge and empire. In particular, we take inter-imperial collaboration as our organizing theme, in order to explore the extent to which the global project of empire rested upon, and even required, interchange and joint action among colonial powers. As Anne L. Foster has noted, studies of imperialism have generally confined themselves to the colonizer-colonized dyad, and the scholarly literature has only just begun to consider the forms of collaboration between empires that shaped the age of high imperialism. This volume foregrounds inter-imperial relations as a framework for understanding global movements of science, technology, and expertise. It moves beyond our earlier concerns with nineteenth-century US nation-building, and twentieth-century nation-building worldwide, to engage in an ongoing reassessment of the place of the Cold War in our historical imagination, this time focused on the production, circulation, and inter-imperial sharing of expert knowledge at diverse sites from the late nineteenth century into the 1960s. Multiple forms of inter-imperial collaboration operated in tandem with the political rivalries that so often marked the Age of Empire. Imperial governments found that they","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"37 1","pages":"195 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86145816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Advance agent of expanding empires: George F. Becker and mineral exploration in South Africa and the Philippines","authors":"Mark Hendrickson","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680148","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, American mining engineers and geologists fanned out to potential or existing mines around the world. This paper examines the work of George F. Becker—a forty-year veteran of the United States Geological Survey—in South Africa and the Philippines during the 1890s. Becker’s work on the world above and below ground provided a diverse audience with direct observations of attempted empire building underway and helped to reorganize the world of American imperial imagination in a way that used British experience in South Africa to explain and justify U.S. efforts to displace Spain in the Philippines. He derived his authority both from the knowledge he generated about minerals and geological formations underground and from the experience he garnered as one of the only Americans to observe these two empire building projects underway on two continents in this critical period of economic, political and foreign policy upheaval.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"7 1","pages":"237 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78569978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}