What's On Display at Feldberg Library

The changing relationships between science and industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrated by the career of the "father of plastics." The Belgian-born American chemist, inventor, and entrepreneur Leo Baekeland (1863-1944) is best known for his invention of the first synthetic plastic--his near-namesake Bakelite--which had applications ranging from electrical insulators to Art Deco jewelry.

Why the Internet was designed to be the way it is, and how it could be different, now and in the future. How do you design an internet? The architecture of the current Internet is the product of basic design decisions made early in its history. What would an internet look like if it were designed, today, from the ground up? In this book, MIT computer scientist David Clark explains how the Internet is actually put together, what requirements it was designed to meet, and why different design decisions would create different internets.

'Empire of the Air' tells the story of three American visionaries - Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff - whose imagination and dreams turned a hobbyist's toy into radio, launching the modern communications age. Tom Lewis weaves the story of these men and their achievements into a richly detailed and moving narrative that spans the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the American romance with science and technology was at its peak.

This book examines how multinational enterprises and international finance influenced the course of electrification around the world. Multinational enterprises played a crucial role in the spread of electric light and power from the 1870s through the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, their role did not persist, and by 1978 multinational enterprises in this sector had all but disappeared, replaced by electrical utility providers with national business structures. Yet, in recent years, there has been a vigorous revival. This book, a unique cooperative effort by the three authors and a group of experts from many countries, offers a fresh analysis of the history of multinational enterprise. The authors take an integrated approach, not simply comparing national electrification experiences, but supplying a truly global account.

How the computer became universal. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes.

An original investigation into the social and technological history of solar power From the days of Archimedes and Leonardo, the earliest efforts to harness the power of the sun have become the stuff of legend. But it was not until the industrial revolution, with its great demands for fuel, that inventors --like Prometheus carrying fire from Mt. Olympus--began to build machines capable of channeling the sun's rays into usable energy. In The Power of Light, solar energy expert Frank Kryza recounts the dramatic saga of solar invention, from its optimistic dawning in the mid-19th century to its impending triumph today.

A new history of the space race explores the lives of both Soviet and American engineers. At the dawn of the space age, technological breakthroughs in Earth orbit flight were both breathtaking feats of ingenuity and disturbances to a delicate global balance of power. Beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 and closing with the end of the Apollo program in 1972, Launius examines how early space exploration blurred the lines between military and civilian activities, and how key actions led to space firsts as well as crushing failures.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and all sorts of mysteries attaching to them, have intrigued people since the second century BCE. Why were these particular creations chosen and when? And why did the ancients want to draw up such a list in the first place? What were the technical and cultural factors involved in the creation and listing of the Wonders? The Seven Wonders still rival many of the phenomenal products of both nature and mankind in their size, majesty, and beauty. Six of them no longer stand, having been destroyed by natural disaster or by human intervention. From the Pyramids at Giza to the Colossus of Rhodes, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the Lighthouse of Alexandria, from the Temple of Ephesus to the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have never ceased to fascinate down the ages.

Spacecraft Technology: The Early Years charts the early Space Age, including the launch of the first satellites and the landing of man on the Moon. This period of technological development, between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, is one of the most important we have ever known. It is the period in which we learned how to leave our home planet and explore another, entirely separate, planetary body. It represents an outstanding achievement in exploration.

Featuring contributions from 30 global experts involved in the planning and design of the structures covered in this book, Tall and Supertall Buildings describes the technical developments and special design features used for these landmark buildings: Sears Tower, Taipei 101, Burj Khalifa, Petronas Twin Towers, Shanghai Tower, Kingdom Tower. This authoritative resource addresses HVAC systems, sustainability, geotechnical and foundation engineering, wind engineering, and more. Construction photographs and detailed diagrams are included throughout. This is the definitive guide for engineers, architects, project managers, building inspectors, and anyone involved in the planning and design of tall and supertall buildings.

We live in an age in which one can easily think that our generation has invented and discovered almost everything; but the truth is quite the opposite. Progress cannot be considered as sudden unexpected spurts of individual brains: such a genius, the inventor of everything, has never existed in the history of humanity. What did exist was a limitless procession of experiments made by men who did not waver when faced with defeat, but were inspired by the rare successes that have led to our modern comfortable reality.

A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape--the U.S. interstate system changed the face of our country.The Big Roads charts the creation of these essential American highways. From the turn-of-the-century car racing entrepreneur who spurred the citizen-led "Good Roads" movement, to the handful of driven engineers who conceived of the interstates and how they would work--years before President Eisenhower knew the plans existed--to the protests that erupted across the nation when highways reached the cities and found people unwilling to be uprooted in the name of progress, Swift followsa winding, fascinating route through twentieth-century American life. 

The great cathedrals and churches of the medieval West continue to awe. How were they built, and why do they remain standing? What did their builders know about what they were doing? These questions have given rise to considerable controversy, which is fully reflected in the papers selected here. The first section of the book is concerned with the medieval builders and their design methods; the second focuses on engineering issues in the context of the infamous collapse of the choir at Beauvais in 1284. The following papers extend the analysis into the 15th century, looking for example at Brunelleschi's dome for Florence Cathedral, and deal with the often neglected structures of roofs, towers and spires.

Recent advances in genome editing tools using endonucleases such as TALENs, ZFNs, and CRISPRs, combined with genomic engineering technologies, have opened up a wide range of opportunities from applications in the basic sciences and disease biology research, to the potential for clinical applications and the development of new diagnostic tools. This complete guide to endonuclease-based genomic engineering gives readers a thorough understanding of this rapidly expanding field.

A reissue with a foreword and supplement, of a modern classic published in 1960. The invention of the mechanical clock was one of the most important turning points in the history of science and technology. This study revealed six centuries of mechanical clockwork preceding the first mechanical escapement clocks of the West of about AD 1300. Detailed and fully illustrated accounts of elaborate Chinese clocks are accompanied by a discussion of the social context of the Chinese inventions and an assessment of their possible transmission to medieval Europe. For this revised edition, Dr Joseph Needham has contributed a new foreword on recent research and perceptions. In a supplement John H. Combridge details a modern reconstruction of Su Sung's timekeeping device, which together with textual studies modifies our understanding of this important early technology.

Trained as an architect, Woollett documented the building of the Hoover Dam in a series of etchings and lithographs.

The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first "dotcom."Depicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape's Marc Andreessen and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet's rise.

If all measures of human advancement in the last hundred centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost perfectly flat line--until the eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution would cause the line to shoot straight up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress. William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it--the steam engine.

This is a vivid portrayal of the complexities of quadripartite decision-making (two countries, plus the public and private sectors), revealing new insights into the role of the British and French Governments in the process. The building of the Channel Tunnel has been one of Europe's major projects and a testimony to British-French and public-private sector collaboration. However, Eurotunnel's current financial crisis provides a sobering backcloth for an examination of the British Government's long-term flirtation with the project.

This unique ready-reference source is the first to cover hundreds of achievements in civil engineering that literally altered the course of history. The book describes a wide variety of engineering feats such as the Alaska Highway, the English Chunnel, and the Grosbois Dam in France. Each entry describes the landmark's physical dimensions, who built what and why, as well as when it was built.

A political and social reformer, Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) was also a noted biographer in the Victorian period. Following the engineer's death in 1848, Smiles published his highly successful Life of George Stephenson in 1857 (also reissued in this series). His interest in engineering evolved and he began working on biographies of Britain's most notable engineers from the Roman to the Victorian era. Originally published in three volumes between 1861 and 1862, this work contains detailed and lively accounts of the educations, careers and pioneering work of seven of Britain's most accomplished engineers.

Few were ready when a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in Wuhan, China in January 2020. Politicians, government officials, business leaders, and public-health professionals were unprepared for the most devastating pandemic in a century. Many of the world's biggest drug and vaccine makers were slow to react or couldn't muster an effective response.   It was up to a small group of unlikely and untested scientists and executives to save civilization.