Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #8)

Otto Mayr

$34.00

Publication Date: August 1st, 1989

Publisher:

Johns Hopkins University Press

ISBN:

9780801839399

Pages:

288

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Description

Perhaps never in history has society been so fascinated with a single machine as when, in early modern Europe, the clock evolved into a major cultural image, widely used in literature, science, and especially Cartesian philosophy. Yet in England, there was greater interest in a different class of technology-the feedback device, such as the safety valve on a steam engine, that could control itself internally;self-regulating systems were hallmarks not only of practical technology but also of the abstract theories of Newton and Adam Smith.

Otto Mayr, the director of Germany's leading technological museum, explores the relationship between machinery, technological thought, and culture. Contrasting England and the Continent, particularly in the eighteenth century, he uncovers a stikring pattern of technological metaphors applied to political systems-and lays the foundations of a new intellectual history of technology

About the Author

Ottor Mayr is director of the Deutsches Museum in Munich and former curator and acting director of the National Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Origins of Feedback Control and Feedback Mechanism and the editor of Philosophers and Machines, The Clockwork Universe, and Yankee Enterprise.

Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #8)

Description

About the Author

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Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #8)

Description

About the Author

Other Books in Series

The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Revised) (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #24)

Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #7)

Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #25)

Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #9)

Edison and the Business of Innovation (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #10)

The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

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What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #11)

The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

Fastlane: Managing Science in the Internet World (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

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To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-Up Companies, and the Rise of Mos Technology (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

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