Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition PDF Author: Elting E. Morison
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262336596
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
An engaging look at how we have learned to live with innovation and new technologies through history. People have had trouble adapting to new technology ever since (perhaps) the inventor of the wheel had to explain that a wheelbarrow could carry more than a person. This little book by a celebrated MIT professor—the fiftieth anniversary edition of a classic—describes how we learn to live and work with innovation. Elting Morison considers, among other things, the three stages of users' resistance to change: ignoring it; rational rebuttal; and name-calling. He recounts the illustrative anecdote of the World War II artillerymen who stood still to hold the horses despite the fact that the guns were now hitched to trucks—reassuring those of us who have trouble with a new interface or a software upgrade that we are not the first to encounter such problems. Morison offers an entertaining series of historical accounts to highlight his major theme: the nature of technological change and society's reaction to that change. He begins with resistance to innovation in the U.S. Navy following an officer's discovery of a more accurate way to fire a gun at sea; continues with thoughts about bureaucracy, paperwork, and card files; touches on rumble seats, the ghost in Hamlet, and computers; tells the strange history of a new model steamship in the 1860s; and describes the development of the Bessemer steel process. Each instance teaches a lesson about the more profound and current problem of how to organize and manage systems of ideas, energies, and machinery so that it will conform to the human dimension.

Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition PDF Author: Elting E. Morison
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262336596
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
An engaging look at how we have learned to live with innovation and new technologies through history. People have had trouble adapting to new technology ever since (perhaps) the inventor of the wheel had to explain that a wheelbarrow could carry more than a person. This little book by a celebrated MIT professor—the fiftieth anniversary edition of a classic—describes how we learn to live and work with innovation. Elting Morison considers, among other things, the three stages of users' resistance to change: ignoring it; rational rebuttal; and name-calling. He recounts the illustrative anecdote of the World War II artillerymen who stood still to hold the horses despite the fact that the guns were now hitched to trucks—reassuring those of us who have trouble with a new interface or a software upgrade that we are not the first to encounter such problems. Morison offers an entertaining series of historical accounts to highlight his major theme: the nature of technological change and society's reaction to that change. He begins with resistance to innovation in the U.S. Navy following an officer's discovery of a more accurate way to fire a gun at sea; continues with thoughts about bureaucracy, paperwork, and card files; touches on rumble seats, the ghost in Hamlet, and computers; tells the strange history of a new model steamship in the 1860s; and describes the development of the Bessemer steel process. Each instance teaches a lesson about the more profound and current problem of how to organize and manage systems of ideas, energies, and machinery so that it will conform to the human dimension.

Men, Machines, and Modern Times

Men, Machines, and Modern Times PDF Author: Elting Elmore Morison
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262630184
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Men, Machines, and Modern Times, though ultimately concerned with a positive alternative to an Orwellian 1984, offers an entertaining series of historical accounts taken from the nineteenth century to highlight a main theme: the nature of technological change, the fission brought about in society by such change, and society's reaction to that change. Beginning with a remarkable illustration of resistance to innovation in the U.S. Navy following an officer's discovery of a more accurate way to fire a gun at sea, Elting Morison goes on to narrate the strange history of the new model steamship, the Wapanoag, in the 1860s. He then continues with the difficulties confronting the introduction of the pasteurization process for milk; he traces the development of the Bessemer process; and finally, he considers the computer. While the discussions are liberally sprinkled with amusing examples and anecdotes, all are related to the more profound and current problem of how to organize and manage system of ideas, energies, and machinery so that it will conform to the human dimension.

Men, Machines, and Modern Times

Men, Machines, and Modern Times PDF Author: Elting E. Morison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description


Men, Machines, and Modern Times

Men, Machines, and Modern Times PDF Author: Elting Elmore Morison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description


The Evolution of Technology

The Evolution of Technology PDF Author: George Basalla
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316101584
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book presents an evolutionary theory of technological change based upon recent scholarship in the history of technology and upon relevant material drawn from economic history and anthropology. It challenges the popular notion that technology advances by the efforts of a few heroic individuals who produce a series of revolutionary inventions owing little or nothing to the technological past. Therefore, the book's argument is shaped by analogies taken selectively from the theory of organic evolution, and not from the theory and practice of political revolution. Three themes appear, and reappear with variations, throughout the study. The first is diversity: an acknowledgment of the vast numbers of different kinds of made things (artifacts) that have long been available to humanity; the second is necessity: the belief that humans are driven to invent new artifacts in order to meet basic biological requirements such as food, shelter, and defense; and the third is technological evolution: an organic analogy that explains both the emergence of novel artifacts and their subsequent selection by society for incorporation into its material life without invoking either biological necessity or technological progress. Although the book is not intended to provide a strict chronological account of the development of technology, historical examples - including many of the major achievements of Western technology: the waterwheel, the printing press, the steam engine, automobiles and trucks, and the transistor - are used extensively to support its theoretical framework. The Evolution of Techology will be of interest to all readers seeking to learn how and why technology changes, including both students and specialists in the history of technology and science.

Men, Machines, and Modern Times

Men, Machines, and Modern Times PDF Author: Elting Elmore Morison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780262336581
Category : Inventions
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
People have had trouble adapting to new technology ever since (perhaps) the inventor of the wheel had to explain that a wheelbarrow could carry more than a person. This text describes how we learn to live and work with innovation. It considers, among other things, the three stages of users' resistance to change: ignoring it, rational rebuttal, and name-calling.

Bobcat Fifty Years

Bobcat Fifty Years PDF Author: Marty Padgett
Publisher: MotorBooks International
ISBN: 9781610608336
Category : Motor vehicles
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Marking the 50th anniversary of an icon of American industry, this book celebrates a half-century of Bobcat with brilliant images of these quintessentially American machines at work, including historical photographs and diagrams, alongside the full story of the only compact machines that have ever mattered. Often imitated but never equaled, the Bobcat skid-steer loader was born when some hardy souls in the Northern Plains needed a new way to get work done. The pictures in these pages show how the Bobcat loader has been moving American industry ever since, joined over the years by Bobcat excavators and trenchers, utility trucks and more. Bobcat Fifty Years chronicles the changes and innovations that have kept the company at the forefront of the nation’s compact machinery makers--from the invention of the Bob-Tach quick-change attachment system to the introduction of the Big Bob, the Mini-Bob, and the M-700, the first hydrostatic loader of its size. Here, again and again, is evidence of why Fortune Magazine named the Bobcat one of “America’s best”--one of the 100 American-made products that represent the best of their kind, anywhere in the world.

Prodigal Soldiers

Prodigal Soldiers PDF Author: James Kitfield
Publisher: Potomac Books Incorporated
ISBN: 9781574881233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
In Prodigal Soldiers, James Kitfield chronicles that remarkable revitalization of the military by following the lives of a unique generation of officers.

Dog Company Six

Dog Company Six PDF Author: Edwin Howard Simmons
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612511600
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
A Marine who wielded both pen and sword in a long, distinguished career captures the heroism and horror of the early days of the Korean War in this gripping novel. As a young man—with his own experiences in the war still vivid in his mind—Simmons wrote of the complex gamut of emotions and experiences that made this bloody encounter between East and West so unique. He kept the manuscript to himself until the war's fiftieth anniversary, when it was published to critical acclaim. Lauded for bringing a psychological intensity and realism to the war, the novel tells the story of a Marine reserve captain abruptly recalled to active duty to lead a company of Marines in a series of battles from the mud flats of Inchon to the frozen wasteland of the Chosin reservoir.

Aluminum Upcycled

Aluminum Upcycled PDF Author: Carl A. Zimring
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421421860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Tracing the benefits—and limitations—of repurposing aluminum. Besides being the right thing to do for Mother Earth, recycling can also make money—particularly when it comes to upcycling, a zero waste practice where discarded materials are fashioned into goods of greater economic or cultural value. In Upcycling Aluminum, Carl A. Zimring explores how the metal’s abundance after World War II—coupled with the significant economic and environmental costs of smelting it from bauxite ore—led to the industrial production of valuable durable goods from salvaged aluminum. Beginning in 1886 with the discovery of how to mass produce aluminum, the book examines the essential part the metal played in early aviation and the world wars, as well as the troubling expansion of aluminum as a material of mass disposal. Recognizing that scrap aluminum was as good as virgin material and much more affordable than newly engineered metal, designers in the postwar era used aluminum to manufacture highly prized artifacts. Zimring takes us on a tour of post-1940s design, examining the use of aluminum in cars, trucks, airplanes, furniture, and musical instruments from 1945 to 2015. By viewing upcycling through the lens of one material, Zimring deepens our understanding of the history of recycling in industrial society. He also provides a historical perspective on contemporary sustainable design practices. Along the way, he challenges common assumptions about upcycling’s merits and adds a new dimension to recycling as a form of environmental absolution for the waste-related sins of the modern world. Raising fascinating questions of consumption, environment, and desire, Upcycling Aluminum is for anyone interested in industrial and environmental history, discard studies, engineering, product design, music history, or antiques.