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No activity more characterizes the American
spirit than invention. Practical ingenuity has enabled Americans
of every generation to transform this nation's wilderness
into a building site. In no period of our history were the
spirit and impact of invention greater than in the century
from 1870 to 1970, years that witnessed the invention not
only of the incandescent light, the radio, the airplane,
the gyro-compass, the gasoline-powered automobile, but also
of sophisticated technological systems for producing and
using automobiles, for generating and distributing electric
power, for establishing telephone and wireless networks
-- systems that would in turn lead to greater, more ambitious
projects: the TVA, the Manhattan Project, and NASA's space
program.
In American Genesis, Thomas P. Hughes
offers a history of the American genius for invention and
technology, and argues that inventors, industrial scientists,
engineers, and designers have been the makers of modern
America -- the creators of the first technological nation.
Hughes traces the evolution of invention, how its practice
changed as its locale shifted -- from inventor's workshop
to industrial research laboratory, business corporation,
and the military-industrial complex. Hughes explores as
well the culture of technology: how order, system, and control
-- embedded in machines, devices, and processes -- have
become values whose influence now extends far beyond technology
to business and politics, architecture and art.
At once a powerful and dramatic story of
how American society was transformed by technology, American
Genesis is as well a portrait of a world in which technological
forces shape our lives more intimately and more lastingly
than even political and economic forces.
Thomas P. Hughes is the Mellon Professor
of the History and Sociology of Science at the University
of Pennsylvania, holds the Torsten Althin Chair at the Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications
include two books about the nature of technological and
social change: Networks of Power: Electrification in
Western Society (1880-1930) and Elmer Sperry: Inventor
and Engineer, each of which was awarded the Dexter Prize
for the outstanding book in the history of technology. He
lives with his wife in Philadelphia.
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