Scientific American inventions and discoveries: all the milestones in ingenuity

514 Pages·2004·4.408 MB·English

by  Rodney Carlisle, Scientific American

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Scientific American
INVENTIONS
AND
DISCOVERIES
All the Milestones in Ingenuity—
from the Discovery of Fire to the
Invention of the Microwave Oven
R C
ODNEY ARLISLE
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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11164Carlisle_ffirs.m.qxd5/26/049:58AMPagei
Scientific American
INVENTIONS
AND
DISCOVERIES
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Scientific American
INVENTIONS
AND
DISCOVERIES
All the Milestones in Ingenuity—
from the Discovery of Fire to the
Invention of the Microwave Oven
R C
ODNEY ARLISLE
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
11164Carlisle_ffirs.m.qxd5/26/049:58AMPageiv
This book is printed on acid-free paper. ●∞
Copyright © 2004 by Rodney Carlisle. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Carlisle, Rodney P.
Scientific American inventions and discoveries : all the milestones in ingenuity—from the discovery of fire to
the invention of the microwave oven / Rodney Carlisle.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-471-24410-4 (Cloth)
1. Inventions—History—Encyclopedias. 2. Inventions—United States—Encyclopedias. 3. Technology—
History—Encyclopedias. 4. Technological innovations—Encyclopedias. I. Title.
T15 .C378 2004
609—dc22 2003023258
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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C
ONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
General Introduction 1
Part I The Ancient World through Classical Antiquity, 8000 B.C. to A.D. 330 9
Part II The Middle Ages through 1599 81
Part III The Age of Scientific Revolution, 1600 to 1790 149
Part IV The Industrial Revolution, 1791 to 1890 223
Part V The Electrical Age, 1891 to 1934 319
Part VI The Atomic and Electronic Age, 1935 into the 21st Century 397
Index 481
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A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing the essays for this encyclopedia has provided me with an
opportunity to bring together thoughts, information, and ideas
that drew from many sources, both literary and personal, to which I
have been exposed over many years.
My interest in the history of technology was stimulated by a course
taken as a freshman at Harvard that was taught by Professor Leonard K.
Nash. As I recall, Natural Sciences 4 or “Nat Sci Four” was suggested
by other students and advisers as the appropriate course for a history
major to take to meet the college’s general education requirements. I did
not realize it at the time, but the course had been established by James
B.ConantandwaslatercotaughtbyThomasS.Kuhn,whowouldpub-
lishTheStructureofScientificRevolutions.ProfessorNashandThomas
Kuhn developed many of the ideas together that would later appear in
Kuhn’spathbreakingwork,includingafocusonthescientificrevolution
initiatedbyCopernicusandexpoundedbyGalileo.
In later decades, as I was teaching in the History Department at Rut-
gers University in Camden, our college adopted a similar approach to
general education requirements as that established by Conant. To pro-
vide a course titled “Science, Technology, and Society,” I approached a
colleague in the Chemistry Department, Professor Sidney Katz, and
together we offered a sweeping history of science and technology, which
we often taught in summer sessions, reflecting Thomas Kuhn’s focus on
the revolutions in scientific thought, as well as investigations into the
social impact of innovation.
Of course, a great deal has happened in the disciplines of the history
of science and technology over the past decades, and our readings in the
subject took us to a finer appreciation of the complex crosscurrents
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viii Acknowledgments
between these two progressing fields. As Derek de Solla Price has
remarked, the two fields are sister disciplines, each progressing some-
times independently, sometimes one helping the other. Although it
became fashionable among government policymakers after World War
II to believe that technology sprang from the advances of science, his-
torical studies had shown a much more complex interweaving of the
two fields over the centuries.
My debts of gratitude include not only those to Professor Nash for
teaching the course at Harvard, taken nearly half a century ago as an
undergraduate, and to Professor Katz at Rutgers for coteaching with
me but also to the many students who took our own course in recent
years. Although some faculty are loath to admit it, it is often the case
that teachers learn more by attempting to answer the questions posed
by students than they have gained by preparing their lecture notes.
Often what has puzzled students about the subject can lead into the
most fruitful courses of scholarly inquiry. More than once the questions
they asked led to thought-provoking discussions between Professor
Katz and myself over coffee in his laboratory-office. The collaboration
of Professor Katz and myself was so interesting and we both learned so
much that we looked forward to the courses with pleasurable anticipa-
tion. Later, Professor Katz made a number of contributions to my Ency-
clopedia of the Atomic Age. Using ideas we had honed in discussion, I
later individually taught a course, “Galileo and Oppenheimer,” that
again led to new insights from students.
Surprisingly, it was a much older book that I found in a used-book
store, Lewis Mumford’s 1934 study Technics and Civilization, that
helped formulate my thinking about the relationship of science and
technology. I had the opportunity to work with the ideas stimulated by
reading that work when, through a contract at History Associates
Incorporated of Rockville, Maryland, I produced a study for the Navy
Laboratory/Center Coordinating Group. Due to the wisdom of How-
ard Law, who served as the executive of that group, I was commis-
sioned to produce a small bibliographic work evaluating more than 150
books and articles in the fields of science and technology. Our intent
was to bring many of the insights and perspectives of historians of both
fields to the community of naval researchers and science and technol-
ogy managers.
Working on other studies for the U.S. Navy through History Associ-
ates Incorporated contracts helped hone my thinking about the com-
plex interplays among the disciplines of science, engineering, and
technology more generally. My studies of the history of naval science