@SocHistTech
☰ Menu
Article
In a two-minute clip from the docuseries Moon Machines, two women in white smocks pass a needle back and forth through a matrix of eyelet openings.[1] Sitting under task lamps in a Raytheon facility outside of Boston, they are making “core memory” for the Apollo Guidance Computer. They thread the wire through the ferrite cores…
More Info
Article
Walking the streets of Madrid at dusk is a splendid occasion to encounter the dazzling night life of a European capital that never sleeps. However, I found it particularly striking to stumble across a tiny chapel hiding in a corner of one of the main shopping boulevards of the city, otherwise dominated by cafes, restaurants…
More Info
Article
It’s half past 8 on a Friday morning and I’m walking up the hill to work. As I look up, I see the buildings of the university campus ahead of me. The sky is a clear, crisp, wintry blue, and the traffic is heading past me up the one-way street. The environment is highly designed…
More Info
Article
In the fall of 1944, John Lucian Savage, the American dam builder from the Bureau of Reclamation, arrived in China to survey the Yangtze Gorges. After cursory surveys upstream from the proposed site of the dam, Savage drafted a report proposing the construction of a dam 738 feet high straddling the Yangtze River at Yichang,…
More Info
Article
War, the pursuit of power through conflict, needs ways to ‘see’ an enemy, even if that enemy is beyond visual range, or is invisible due to night or bad weather. After 1935, those constraints began to be overcome in real-time by radar [1]. This posed two inter-related challenges; scientifically, the design of a radar display…
More Info
Article
‘The people were out late that night, and indeed, it was pleasant to be out. Not as yet were there any of those street lamps along the road which now make all nights alike dingy; but one felt as if walking into the unspoiled country. For though it was after ten, and the sky…
More Info
Article
Energy supply, like home design, in nineteenth century England was traditionally considered a decision for the “master” of the house. Yet a look at Mrs Haweis’ The Art of Decoration (1881), which includes one of the earliest print recommendations for the use of electricity to light the home, offers us a different vantage point. When…
More Info