Daniel R. Headrick: Technology: A World History (2009)

Today technology has created a world of dazzling progress, growing disparities of wealth and poverty, and looming threats to the environment. Technology: A World History offers an illuminating backdrop to our present moment–a brilliant history of invention around the globe. Historian Daniel R. Headrick ranges from the Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution and the electronic revolution of the recent past. In tracing the growing power of humans over nature through increasingly powerful innovations, he compares the evolution of technology in different parts of the world, providing a much broader account than is found in other histories of technology. We also discover how small changes sometimes have dramatic results–how, for instance, the stirrup revolutionized war and gave the Mongols a deadly advantage over the Chinese. And how the nailed horseshoe was a pivotal breakthrough for western farmers. Enlivened with many illustrations, Technology offers a fascinating look at the spread of inventions around the world, both as boons for humanity and as weapons of destruction.

Published by Oxford University Press US, 2009
ISBN 0195338219, 9780195338218
208 pages

Key terms:
China, Homo erectus, Mesopotamia, Neolithic, chinampas, Eurasia, Middle East, Han dynasty, Industrial Revolution, waterwheels, Song dynasty, India, Australopithecines, Columbian exchange, Mongols, Yongle emperor, Homo habilis, Egypt, Japan, central Asia

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Slava Gerovitch: From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2004)

“In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science.

The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev’s political “thaw,” however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as “science in the service of communism,” but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into “CyberNewspeak.””

Published by MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262572257, 9780262572255
383 pages

Key terms:
newspeak, Norbert Wiener, dialectical materialism, Soviet Union, machine translation, Moscow University, John von Neumann, structural linguistics, Stalin, Stalinist, information theory, Roman Jakobson, servomechanisms, Andrei Markov, Cold War, Andrei Kolmogorov, Liapunov, entropy, Pavlovian, BESM

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Roger B. Lazarus: Computing at LASL in the 1940s and 1950s (1978)

The Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories have been important sponsors of, and customers for, supercomputers-high-performance scientific computers. The laboratories played an important part in establishing speed of floating-point arithmetic (rather than, say, at logical operations) as the performance criterion defining supercomputing. But their more specific influence on the evolution of computer architecture has been limited by the diversity and classified nature of their central computational tasks, together with the expansion of supercomputer use elsewhere.

The report is part of FAS’s Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications collection:

In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science and technology as well as other historical and policy-related publications that had formerly been available on the Lab’s web site as part of its Library Without Walls initiative.

Fortunately, almost all of the withdrawn reports were acquired and preserved in the public domain by researchers Gregory Walker and Carey Sublette. The document titles are indexed in four parts

Publisher: Washington: Dept. of Energy ; Springfield, Va. : For sale by the National Technical Information Service, 1978.

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