The Life and Legend of James Watt

The Life and Legend of James Watt PDF Author: David Philip Miller
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822945581
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Life and Legend of James Wattoffers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering. But Watt pursued the business of natural philosophy in a way characteristic of his roots in the Scottish “improving” tradition that was in tension with Enlightenment sensibilities. As Miller demonstrates, Watt’s accomplishments relied heavily on collaborations, not always acknowledged, with business partners, employees, philosophical friends, and, not least, his wives, children, and wider family. The legend created in his later years and “afterlife” claimed too much of nineteenth-century technology for Watt, but that legend was, and remains, a powerful cultural force.

The Life and Legend of James Watt

The Life and Legend of James Watt PDF Author: David Philip Miller
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822945581
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
The Life and Legend of James Wattoffers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering. But Watt pursued the business of natural philosophy in a way characteristic of his roots in the Scottish “improving” tradition that was in tension with Enlightenment sensibilities. As Miller demonstrates, Watt’s accomplishments relied heavily on collaborations, not always acknowledged, with business partners, employees, philosophical friends, and, not least, his wives, children, and wider family. The legend created in his later years and “afterlife” claimed too much of nineteenth-century technology for Watt, but that legend was, and remains, a powerful cultural force.

The Life and Legend of James Watt

The Life and Legend of James Watt PDF Author: David Philip Miller
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986795
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
The Life and Legend of James Wattoffers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering. But Watt pursued the business of natural philosophy in a way characteristic of his roots in the Scottish “improving” tradition that was in tension with Enlightenment sensibilities. As Miller demonstrates, Watt’s accomplishments relied heavily on collaborations, not always acknowledged, with business partners, employees, philosophical friends, and, not least, his wives, children, and wider family. The legend created in his later years and “afterlife” claimed too much of nineteenth-century technology for Watt, but that legend was, and remains, a powerful cultural force.

Rebel

Rebel PDF Author: Donald Spoto
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1461741661
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This authoritative biography of film icon James Dean offers a clear-eyed look at the actor who crossed America's cinematic landscape with the brilliance and brevity of a meteor.

James Watt (1736-1819)

James Watt (1736-1819) PDF Author: Malcolm Dick
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789625041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
James Watt is celebrated as the inventor of the energy efficient pumping and rotative steam engines. Studies of Watt have focused on his inventiveness, influence and reputation. This book explores new aspects of his work and places him in family, social and intellectual contexts during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.

Willie Mays

Willie Mays PDF Author: James S. Hirsch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439171653
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
The “enormously entertaining and wide-ranging” (Seattle Times) authorized, definitive, New York Times bestselling biography of Willie Mays, the most complete baseball player of all time. Willie Mays is arguably the greatest player in baseball history, still revered for the passion he brought to the game. He began as a teenager in the Negro Leagues, became a cult hero in New York, and was the headliner in Major League Baseball’s bold expansion to California. He was a blend of power, speed, and stylistic bravado that enraptured fans for more than two decades. Now James Hirsch reveals the man behind the player. Mays was a transcendent figure who received standing ovations in enemy stadiums and who, during the turbulent civil rights era, urged understanding and reconciliation. More than his records, his legacy is defined by the pure joy that he brought to fans and the loving memories that have been passed to future generations so they might know the magic and beauty of the game. With meticulous research and drawing on interviews with Mays himself as well as with close friends, family, and teammates, Hirsch presents a brilliant portrait of one of America’s most significant cultural icons.

Thrifty Science

Thrifty Science PDF Author: Simon Werrett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661025X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
If the twentieth century saw the rise of “Big Science,” then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett’s new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world. Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin’s use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton’s investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that men and women put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. This thriving domestic culture of inquiry was eclipsed by new forms of experimental culture in the nineteenth century, however, culminating in the resource-hungry science of the twentieth. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?

Them

Them PDF Author: James Watts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781953112262
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Deep in the woods, something is stirring. A small Southern town is about to be invaded by something both ancient and evil...beings that take host bodies and feed on humanity-the Odomulites. When his mother becomes a victim, Ray Sanders returns home, not realizing he will soon come face-to-face with the creatures responsible. Little does Ray know his family's relationship with the Odomulites stretches back generations. He is about to find out. Will he survive? Can they be stopped? Or will the Odomulites win the fight?

The Power Makers

The Power Makers PDF Author: Maury Klein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596918349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
Maury Klein is one of America's most acclaimed historians of business and society. In The Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet - the "power revolution" that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century. The steam engine; the incandescent bulb; the electric motor-inventions such as these replaced backbreaking toil with machine labor and changed every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations. The cast of characters includes inventors like James Watt, Elihu Thomson, and Nikola Tesla; entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse; savvy businessmen like J.P. Morgan, Samuel Insull, and Charles Coffin of General Electric. Striding among them like a colossus is the figure of Thomas Edison, who was creative genius and business visionary at once. With consummate skill, Klein recreates their discoveries, their stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and their unceasing, bare-knuckled battles in the marketplace. In Klein's hands, their personalities and discoveries leap off the page. The Power Makers is a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business competition at its most naked and cutthroat--a biography of America in its most astonishing decades.

James Watt, Chemist

James Watt, Chemist PDF Author: David Philip Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317314050
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Miller examines Watt's illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt's conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings.

A Little History of the World

A Little History of the World PDF Author: E. H. Gombrich
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300213972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
E. H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images that may well have been in his mind's eye as he wrote the book. The two hundred illustrations—most of them in full color—are not simple embellishments, though they are beautiful. They emerge from the text, enrich the author's intention, and deepen the pleasure of reading this remarkable work. For this edition the text is reset in a spacious format, flowing around illustrations that range from paintings to line drawings, emblems, motifs, and symbols. The book incorporates freshly drawn maps, a revised preface, and a new index. Blending high-grade design, fine paper, and classic binding, this is both a sumptuous gift book and an enhanced edition of a timeless account of human history.