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Bezig met laden... Dawn of the electronic age : electrical technologies in the shaping of the modern world, 1914 to 1945 (editie 2009)door Frederik Nebeker
Informatie over het werkDawn of the Electronic Age: Electrical Technologies in the Shaping of the Modern World, 1914 to 1945 door Frederik Nebeker
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"Much of the infrastructure of today's industrialized world arose in the period from the outbreak of World War I to the conclusion of World War II. It was during these years that the capabilities of traditional electrical engineering--generators, power transmission, motors, electric lighting and heating, home appliances, and so on--became ubiquitous. Even more importantly, it was during this time that a new type of electrical engineering--electronics--emerged. Because of its applications in communications (both wire-based and wireless), entertainment (notably radio, the phonograph, and sound movies), industry, science and medicine, and the military, the electronics industry became a major part of the economy. Dawn of the Electronic Age explores how this engineering knowledge and its main applications developed in various scientific, economic, and social contexts, and explains how each was profoundly affected by electrical technologies. It takes an international perspective and a narrative approach, unfolding the story chronologically."--P. 4 of cover. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)621.309041Technology Engineering and allied operations Applied physics Electrical, magnetic, optical, communications, computer engineering; electronics, lighting Electric power plant Biography; History By PlaceLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Along the way, we also saw the creation of permanent R&D establishments in both government and industry, with targeted research programmes. And electrical and electronic engineering became professional disciplines with their own qualifications, teaching programmes, professional bodies, standards committees, and all the rest (even in-house historians!).
In principle, the story of how this happened and how it changed the way we live is a fascinating one, but because electricity appears in so many different applications and contexts, it turns out that you can't really disentangle it from all the other things that were going on between 1914 and 1945. Lenin was obsessed with the electrification of the Soviet Union, whilst Hitler and Mussolini both owed a lot of their success to effective manipulation of new technologies like p.a. systems, cinema films and radio broadcasts, but how meaningful is it to focus on that one aspect of their careers in a book that also has to cover the construction of hydroelectric schemes, the development of radar, the social effects of broadcast radio, telephones, and refrigerators; the role of the telephone operator, the early days of medical imaging; the automobile self-starter, and a thousand other trivial and not-so-trivial applications of electricity? Nebeker often seems to get lost along the way, and it becomes quite hard to see any kind of plan or analytical insight in the book. It's never quite analytical enough to be social history, but it's rarely quite specific enough to be technical history either: Nebeker's explanations of developments in electronics are often hair-raisingly imprecise.
It doesn't help that the IEEE obviously didn't put more than the minimum of funds into the project, and that clearly wasn't enough to pay for any kind of editing. The book is a mess, even by the standards of 21st century technical books, full of grammatical errors, unintended repetitions, and minor inconsistencies — Nebeker seems to be a specialist in quoting two different but quite similar statistics for the same thing in different parts of the book, for example. And the picture editing was clearly even more on-the-cheap than the text. It doesn't look as though they allowed him to use anything that wasn't royalty-free. ( )