By David Edgerton
Publish yr note: First released in 2006
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From the books of H.G. Wells to the click releases of NASA, we're awash in cliched claims approximately excessive technology's skill to alter the process background. Now, in The surprise of the Old, David Edgerton deals a startling new and clean frame of mind concerning the background of expertise, noticeably revising our rules concerning the interplay of know-how and society long ago and within the current. He demanding situations us to view the historical past of know-how when it comes to what daily humans have really used-and proceed to use-rather than simply subtle innovations.
Indeed, many hugely touted applied sciences, from the V-2 rocket to the Concorde jet, were expensive disasters, whereas many mundane discoveries, like corrugated iron, turn into highly very important all over the world. Edgerton reassesses the importance of such acclaimed innovations because the capsule and data know-how, and underscores the ongoing value of unheralded know-how, debunking many notions concerning the implications of the "information age."
A provocative historical past, The surprise of the Old presents a completely new manner of having a look traditionally on the dating among invention and innovation."
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9 billion in 1981 to 12 billion per annum in the mid-1990s. There was, as one might expect, technological innovation in condoms, with the first anatomically shaped one produced in 1969, the spermicide-lubricated in 1974, and more since. In 2004 the Durex brand celebrated seventy-five years of history with the slogan ‘75 years of great sex’. Malaria The control of malaria, like birth control, has been done in many different ways. As in the case of the Pill, the significance of any particular method needs to be looked at in relation to other methods, not a hypothetical world where malaria was uncontrollable.
43 Britain already had the most ambitious civil nuclear power plans in the world, and would generate more nuclear power than any other country for the next decade. The first British programme was based on the Magnox reactors. Some are still in operation today, with the last due to close in 2010, giving these machines lives of around forty years. As early as 1965 a decision had to be taken on the next generation of reactors, and the advanced gas-cooled reactor was chosen. Construction started in the 1960s; the first was completed in 1976, the last in 1989.
Spin-off One of the most common responses to claims that a particular technology has not had the powerful positive effect it was claimed to have has been to suggest that there have been significant secondary effects not captured by the direct assessment. Thus one response to the claim that railways were not that important to economic development was to point to the stimulating effect they had on other industries such as engineering, iron and steel, and telegraphy. The term ‘spin-off ’ is used to describe this effect.