Technoscience avant la lettre

Klein, Ursula

doi:10.1162/106361405774270557

Cited by 30 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Technology changes in history, and so do the artifacts and techniques studied in the technological sciences. Chemistry has long been both a science and an art or technology (see Klein 2005). Today, chemistry is institutionally divided into many specialized fields, ranging from university-based chemistry, to chemical engineering, to industrial chemical research and development.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Objects of inquiry in classical chemistry: material substances

Klein

2011

Found Chem

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I argue in the paper that classical chemistry is a science predominantly concerned with material substances, both useful materials and pure chemical substances restricted to scientific laboratory studies. The central epistemological and methodological status of material substances corresponds with the material productivity of classical chemistry and its way of producing experimental traces. I further argue that chemist's 'pure substances' have a history, conceptually and materially, and I follow their conceptual history from the Paracelsian concept of purity to the modern concept of pure stoichiometric compounds. The history of the concept of 'pure substances' shows that modern chemists' concept of purity abstracted from usefulness rather than being opposed to it. Thus modern chemists' interest in pure chemical substances does not presuppose a concept of pure science.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Objects of inquiry in classical chemistry: material substances

Klein

2011

Found Chem

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“…She argued that because chemical operations manipulated and transformed materials, any speculative activity that had some relation to experimentation could be useful in an industrial or practical context as well because of knowledge gained of the materials produced. 59 Technical artisanal skills have repeatedly been mentioned as a factor sustaining technological development, with possible roots in existing industries including instrument making, maritime trade and metallurgy. 60 The number of close investigations of this issue remains limited, but David Mitch has argued that the contribution of specific educational institutions to technological creativity has been difficult to determine.…”

Section: Sources Of Innovationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Technology in the British Industrial Revolution

Tomory

2016

History Compass

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Technology and technological innovation has been one of the crucial features of the historiography of the Industrial Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, this focus on the “machinery question”, or the effects that machines had on the condition of labourer. Around 1900 academic historians began to explore the nature and causes of technological innovation, with Max Weber's thesis being the most influential. In the postwar period, optimistic assessment saw the technological creativity of the Industrial Revolution as crucial turning point in the history of Western economic growth. The period after 1970 has seen much broader fields of inquiry, including in product innovation, proto‐industrialization, and in industries outside the canonical group of cotton, iron, and steam engines.

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“…III, pl.CX, after p.788, Wellcome Library, London connections between science and technology were, in the words of Ursula Klein, 'entrenched in a shared material culture', exchanging knowledge, skill and instruments. 70 Yet such a relationship had been shaped by social, political and cultural conditions surrounding burning-glasses for at least a hundred years. At the close of the eighteenth century, large burning lenses were for Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816) and Humphry Davy (1778-1829) instrumental in their discoveries that diamond and charcoal were each made of pure carbon.…”

Section: Demonstration Delight and Discoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Bundling up the Sun‐Beams': Burning Mirrors in Eighteenth‐Century Knowledge and Culture

Lynall¹

2013

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an array of optical inventions appeared that could be employed to generate intense heat from the sun's rays. This article explores the dissemination and appropriation of these burning devices, particularly in literary and visual cultures. In so doing, it argues that the symbolic power of scientific objects can contribute to both the social circulation of natural knowledge and the act of knowledge‐making itself.

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Technoscience avant la lettre

Cited by 30 publications

References 22 publications

Objects of inquiry in classical chemistry: material substances

Objects of inquiry in classical chemistry: material substances

Technology in the British Industrial Revolution

‘Bundling up the Sun‐Beams': Burning Mirrors in Eighteenth‐Century Knowledge and Culture

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