Michael B. Schiffer: Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1800s, electricity, electromagnetism, history of technology, light, technology
In 1882, Thomas Edison and his Edison Electric Light Company unveiled the first large-scale electrical system in the world to light a stretch of offices in a city. This was a monumental achievement, but it was not the beginning of the electrical age. The first electric generators were built in the 1830s, the earliest commercial lighting systems before 1860, and the first commercial application of generator-powered lights (in lighthouses) in the early 1860s. In Power Struggles, Michael Brian Schiffer examines some of these earlier efforts (both successful and unsuccessful) that paved the way for Edison.
After laying out a unified theoretical framework for understanding technological change, Schiffer presents a series of fascinating case studies of pre-Edison electrical technologies, including Volta’s electrochemical battery, Thomas Davenport’s electric motor, the first mechanical generators, Morse’s telegraph, the Atlantic cable, and the lighting of the dome of the U.S. Capitol. Schiffer discusses claims of “practicality” and “impracticality” (sometimes hotly contested) made for these technologies, and examines the central role of the scientific authority—in particular, the activities of Joseph Henry, mid-nineteenth-century America’s foremost scientist—in determining the fate of particular technologies.
These emerging electrical technologies formed the foundation of the modern industrial world. Schiffer shows how and why they became commercial products in the context of an evolving corporate capitalism in which conflicting judgments of practicality sometimes turned into power struggles.
Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation Series
ISBN 0262195828, 9780262195829
420 pages
Cabinet (2000–)
Filed under magazine | Tags: · animal, art, chance, culture, design, dust, electricity, evil, friendship, history, language, literature, magic, mapping, nature, property, science, underground, weather
“Cabinet is a quarterly, Brooklyn, New York-based, non-profit art & culture periodical launched in 2000. Cabinet also operates an event and exhibition space in Brooklyn.
Cabinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Like the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as its center. Presenting wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet‘s hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet‘s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous models of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine for the intellectually curious reader of the future.”
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