History of Engineering & Technology

Victorian Britain was the world’s industrial powerhouse. Its factories, mills and foundries supplied a global demand for manufactured goods. As Bri...

Until the nineteenth century all time was local time. On foot or on horseback, it was impossible to travel fast enough to care that noon was a few ...

This study explores the shared history of the French empire from the perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of c...

The invention of the airplane ushered in the modern age—a new era of global commerce, revolutionary technologies, and total war. Whatever the pract...

Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national...

In science and technology, the images used to depict ideas, data, and reactions can be as striking and explosive as the concepts and processes they...

In the 1850s, American entrepreneur Perry M. Collins envisioned a world connected by an overland telegraph line. Western Union shared his vision, a...

Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876 stands as one of the great touchstones of American technological achievement. Bringing a...

Genetic engineering, nanotechnology, astrophysics, particle physics: We live in an engineered world, one where the distinctions between science and...

Few scenes capture the American experience so eloquently as that of a lonely train chugging across the vastness of the Great Plains, or snaking thr...

Why have cesarean sections become so commonplace in the United States?Between 1965 and 1987, the cesarean section rate in the United States rose pr...

In this original examination of alcohol production in early America, Sarah Hand Meacham uncovers the crucial role women played in cidering and dist...

In 1900, Paris had no skyscrapers, no tourist helicopters, no drones. Yet well before aviation made aerial views more accessible, those who sought ...

In the 1880s photographers and sports enthusiasts confidently declared the end of dead heats in sporting competition. Reflecting a broader social b...

How the internet's memory infrastructure developed—averting a "digital dark age"—and introduced a golden age of historical memory.In early 1996, th...

Since ancient times, men and women have dreamed of soaring among the stars, but only in this century has that dream been realized. In Rockets into ...

The expansion of the Paris sewer system during the Second Empire and Third Republic was both a technological and political triumph. The sewers them...

Along with the political and economic reforms that have characterized the post-Mao era in China there has been a potentially revolutionary change i...

In his classic book, J. G. Landels describes the technological advances of the Greeks and Romans with erudition and enthusiasm. He provides an impo...

California is the nation's great vineyard, supplying grapes for most of the wine produced in the United States. The state is home to more than 700 ...

On December 16, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, physicists at Bell Laboratories, jabbed two electrodes into a sliver of germanium. The powe...