The Experts below are selected from a list of 258 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform

Peter Larsen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

David Hemenway - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • accident prone a History of Technology psychology and misfits of the machine age
    Injury Prevention, 2011
    Co-Authors: David Hemenway
    Abstract:

    Edited by John C Burnham, Published by University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, June 2009, pp 336, Cloth. US$40.00; ISBN-13 9780226081175. Historian John C Burnham has written a fascinating book on the origins, rise, and fall of the concept of accident proneness in the United States and elsewhere. From the 1920s to the 1960s, addressing the injury prone individual was a major focus of injury prevention efforts. It had always been commonly acknowledged that some people were more likely to get into accidents than others. Further, statistics showed that accidents were not randomly distributed among the population. Safety experts also came to believe that ‘it has been demonstrated by research that more than 75% of all accidents are caused by the human factor’ (p. 100). The National Safety Council President went even further, stating that …

Per Gyberg - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Technology in the rear-view mirror: how to better incorporate the History of Technology into Technology education
    International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2011
    Co-Authors: Jonas Hallström, Per Gyberg
    Abstract:

    The History of Technology can play an important role in illuminating the fundamentals of technological change, but it is important that Technology teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers and researchers can be provided with good analytical tools for this purpose. In this article, we propose a model of techno-historical interplay, as a help in deciding what historical artefacts and systems should be included in Technology curricula and teaching as well as in analyzing and conveying to students the fundamental issues of technological change. We want to emphasize particularly three points of importance in employing the model as a tool of analysis. First of all, it is crucial to decide what one wants the technologically literate student to know about Technology and technological change. This should include an awareness of the historical and geographical contingency of any Technology. Second, on the basis of this decision one should adapt the model as a tool for selecting relevant technologies. Third, the model should be applied as an instrument of analysis of the History of the selected technological artefacts or systems as well as theories of technological development.

Abid Ali Khan - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • reviving a ghost in the History of Technology the social construction of the recumbent bicycle
    Social Studies of Science, 2015
    Co-Authors: Hassaan Ahmed, Omer Masood Qureshi, Abid Ali Khan
    Abstract:

    Recumbent bicycles have never truly been associated with international cycling. Conventional safety (upright) bicycles have long been at the center of the cycling world, for both sport and transportation. This is despite the fact that recumbent bicycles are faster, more comfortable, and more efficient than the upright bicycles. The aim of this article is to explain the historical and social perspectives that led to the rejection of the recumbent bicycle by utilizing the theory of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Bijker's two power theory, providing a contrast with the adoption of the safety bicycle. Language: en

John M. Staudenmaier - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Rationality, Agency, Contingency: Recent Trends in the History of Technology
    Reviews in American History, 2002
    Co-Authors: John M. Staudenmaier
    Abstract:

    When the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) launched itself in the late 1950s, many U.S. historians found a compelling postwar framework for organizing research around an American consensus. SHOT’s founding generation participated in the scholarly spirit of the time although with its own particular emphases. Cold War ideology and a morally idealistic engineering creed defined Technology, if well funded and unfettered by local political passions, as leading in a clean line toward democratic societies. Apart from this technologically specified version of American hegemonic progress, the received stereotype for technological History in the 1950s was no interpretation at all. Half a millennium of curiosity about artifacts had crystallized in a balkanized landscape, islands of passionate attention to minute changes over time in one’s artifact of choice—clocks, trains, automobiles, machine tools, weapons. An antiquarian paradigm and compelling Cold War urgency marked SHOT’s beginnings as a (barely) visible discipline in 1958. 1 Still, a handful of landmark books had begun to suggest new directions. Lewis Mumford and Siegfried S. Giedion, in particular, achieved an international reputation for major synthetic interpretations of western technological style. Louis Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers and I. B. Holley’s Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapon by the United States During World War One were less broadly known but considered breakthrough works within SHOT, comprehensive histories that situated technologies in the rich economic and political context of their times. 2 The founders understood their journal title as a move from internalism toward the still inchoate approach seen in Mumford, Giedion, Holley, and Hunter. The new journal would emphasize context: Technology and Culture. Two principles more or less defined their emerging methodology. First, every Technology has a context of origin. Historical actors, specific in motive, worldview, and resources, shape technologies, as does the ambient social order. Second, technological actors think distinctively; from the beginning, historians of Technology almost unanimously rejected the received popular notion of Technology as “applied science.” Engineers use science as one

  • Recent Trends in the History of Technology
    The American Historical Review, 1990
    Co-Authors: John M. Staudenmaier
    Abstract:

    THE FIRST RECORDED MEETING of THE Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) took place at the 1957 annual convention of the American Society of Engineering Education at Cornell University. Four members (John Rae, Carl Condit, Thomas Hughes, and Melvin Kranzberg) used the occasion to ask Cornell historian of science Henry Guerlac whether the History of Science Society's journal, Isis, might make room for articles on the History of Technology. According to Kranzberg, the meeting with Guerlac "proved to be a disaster" and led to the formal foundation of SHOT in 1958 and the creation of a separate journal, Technology and Culture. Several decades later, SHOT-now numbering three to four hundred active members-and its journal are still the primary institutional outlets for historians of Technology in the United States and Western Europe. SHOT is a tightly knit organization, and, among its members, the distinction between outsiders and insiders remains highly salient.' In part, SHOT's self-perception of marginality goes back to its origins as an unappreciated rump group within the History of Science Society. Nor is it surprising that a field whose ideological and intellectual limits are difficult to identify and establish should be so concerned about its sociological boundaries. Because of the peculiar nature of the Western world's love affair with progress and its identification of progress with science and Technology, the question of who is best suited to tell the story of technological change has been and continues to be hotly contested by an ideologically diverse array of individuals and institutions.2 That debate is particularly intense within the United States, where interpreters of the History of Technology include museum curators, corporations, and the mass media, as well as academic scholars. Companies such as General Motors and Exxon