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CREATURES OF THOUGHT

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BRITAIN’S STEAM EMPIRE

June 15, 2023 technicshistoryLeave a comment

The British empire of the nineteenth century dominated the world’s oceans and
much of its landmass: Canada, southern and northeastern Africa, the Indian
subcontinent, and Australia. At its world-straddling Victorian peak, this
political and economic machine ran on the power of coal and steam; the same can
be said of all the other major powers… Continue reading Britain’s Steam Empire →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE BACKBONE – NOW IN BOOK FORM!

May 11, 2023 technicshistory2 Comments

This took much longer than I had expected, but it's finally here. My series “The
Backbone” is now available as a book, in both Kindle and paperback formats. You
can find it at Amazon.com here. The book improves upon the original posts in
many ways: professionally edited text revised to make it flow more smoothly as…
Continue reading The Backbone – Now in Book Form! →

Posted in The Backbone


STEAMSHIPS, PART 2: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL

March 2, 2023 technicshistory5 Comments

Iron Empire As far back as 1832, Macgregor Laird had taken the iron ship
Alburkah to Africa and up the Niger, making it among the first ship of such
construction to take the open sea. But the use of iron hulls in British inland
navigation can be traced decades earlier, beginning with river barges in…
Continue reading Steamships, Part 2: The Further Adventures of Isambard
Kingdom Brunel →

Posted in The Age of Steam


STEAMSHIPS, PART I: CROSSING THE ATLANTIC

January 26, 2023January 26, 2023 technicshistory1 Comment

For much of this story, our attention has focused on events within the isle of
Great Britain, and with good reason: primed by the virtuous cycle of coal, iron,
and steam, the depth and breadth of Britain’s exploitation of steam power far
exceeded that found anywhere else, for roughly 150 years after the groaning,
hissing… Continue reading Steamships, Part I: Crossing the Atlantic →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE RAIL REVOLUTION

November 28, 2022November 29, 2022 technicshistoryLeave a comment

As we noted last time, twenty years elapsed from the time when Trevithick gave
up on the steam locomotive before rails would begin to seriously challenge
canals as major transport arteries for Britain, not mere peripheral capillaries.
To complete that revolution required improvements in locomotives, better rails,
and a new way of thinking about the… Continue reading The Rail Revolution →

Posted in The Age of Steam


HIGH PRESSURE, PART 2: THE FIRST STEAM RAILWAY

October 29, 2022October 30, 2022 technicshistory2 Comments

Railways long predate the steam locomotive. Trackways with grooves to keep a
wheeled cart on a fixed path date back to antiquity (such as the Diolkos, which
could carry a naval vessel across the Isthmus of Corinth on a wheeled truck).
The earliest evidence for carts running atop wooden rails, though, comes from
the mining… Continue reading High Pressure, Part 2: The First Steam Railway →

Posted in The Age of Steam


HIGH-PRESSURE, PART I: THE WESTERN STEAMBOAT

September 13, 2022October 20, 2022 technicshistory2 Comments

The next act of the steamboat lay in the west, on the waters of the Mississippi
basin. The settler population of this vast region—Mark Twain wrote that “the
area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales,
Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and
Turkey”—was already growing rapidly… Continue reading High-Pressure, Part I: The
Western Steamboat →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE STEAMBOAT INVENTORS: THE SECOND GENERATION

April 19, 2022September 2, 2022 technicshistory3 Comments

Robert Livingston’s First Partnership It would take a further twenty years after
the deaths of Fitch and Rumsey before steamboat travel was established on a
permanent basis in the U.S. Several more would-be steamboat inventors came and
went before a partnership between two men drove the development of the steamboat
to its successful conclusion. The… Continue reading The Steamboat Inventors: The
Second Generation →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE STEAMBOAT INVENTORS: THE FIRST GENERATION

March 18, 2022May 10, 2022 technicshistory4 Comments

Program Note: When last I posted, I said I was working on transforming The
Backbone into a book. That work is still ongoing, but it's taking longer than I
expected to hammer the blog posts into a coherent manuscript. After so many
months, I felt I needed to resume the story of the Age of… Continue reading The
Steamboat Inventors: The First Generation →

Posted in The Age of Steam


AGE OF STEAM HIATUS

October 18, 2021 technicshistory4 Comments

I feel I've reached a good stopping point with the Age of Steam, just before the
appearance of the first effective high-pressure steam engines and the first
steam-powered vehicles. Therefore I'm going to put the series on hiatus while I
focus on turning The Backbone series into a book, similar to the one I
published… Continue reading Age of Steam Hiatus →

Posted in The Switch


THE STEAM REVOLUTION

October 10, 2021October 14, 2021 technicshistory4 Comments

[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] Up until the 1780s, steam engines were used
almost exclusively for pumping water. To the extent that they drove industrial
machinery, it was almost always indirectly, by lifting water uphill from whence
it could run back down and turn a waterwheel. Industry thus remained dispersed
in villages… Continue reading The Steam Revolution →

Posted in The Age of Steam


JAMES WATT, INSTRUMENT MAKER

August 22, 2021October 12, 2021 technicshistoryLeave a comment

[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] A New Synthesis In the eighteenth century,
new lines of communication and new alliances were forming between the world of
the artisan and craftsman on the one hand, and the world of the “schoolmen,” the
university scholars, steeped in abstract knowledge, on the other. This
convergence arguably… Continue reading James Watt, Instrument Maker →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE TRIUMVIRATE: COAL, IRON, AND STEAM

July 13, 2021October 12, 2021 technicshistory3 Comments

[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] The steam engine might have amounted to
relatively little if not for its two compatriots, coal and iron. Together they
formed a kind of triumvirate, ruling over an industrial empire. Or perhaps an
ecological metaphor is more appropriate – a symbiosis among three species, each
nourishing one… Continue reading The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE SWITCH – NOW IN BOOK FORM!

May 22, 2021 technicshistory2 Comments

My series "The Switch" is now available as a book, in both Kindle and paperback
formats. You can find it at Amazon.com here. The book improves upon the original
posts in several ways: I have re-edited the entire text (with professional help)
to make it flow more smoothly as a book, and to improve correctness… Continue
reading The Switch – Now in Book Form! →

Posted in The Switch


THE PUMPING ENGINE

May 5, 2021October 12, 2021 technicshistory1 Comment

[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] In the early years of the eighteenth
century, Thomas Newcomen devised the first practical engine for pumping water
out of a mine. His engine condensed steam to generate power from the weight of
the air, relying on the new scientific knowledge developed by Torricelli,
Pascal, von Guericke,… Continue reading The Pumping Engine →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE WEIGHT OF THE AIR

March 11, 2021October 12, 2021 technicshistory2 Comments

[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] The miners of Renaissance Europe, digging
ever deeper into the earth in the search of ore, invariably found another, less
welcome substance – water. Everywhere they dug, it found them, seeping into
tunnels and shafts. If it could not be removed at least as quickly as it…
Continue reading The Weight of the Air →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE AGE OF STEAM: INTRODUCTION

February 18, 2021October 12, 2021 technicshistory3 Comments

[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] The most striking feature of the
engineering quad of my alma mater, Rice University, are the three massive slabs
of granite erected on large plinths at its center, each canted at a different
angle: 45, 90, and 180 degrees. Less remarked upon, but more significant to my…
Continue reading The Age of Steam: Introduction →

Posted in The Age of Steam


THE BACKBONE: CONCLUSION

November 13, 2020 technicshistory2 Comments

And so we reach the conclusion of “The Backbone,” my story of the origins of the
Internet1. We have seen the basic arc of the Internet’s development from the
1960s to the 1990s - nurtured in its youth by the government, given room to grow
to fruition by the unravelling of the power of the… Continue reading The
Backbone: Conclusion →

Posted in The Backbone


INTERNET ASCENDANT, PART 2: GOING PRIVATE AND GOING PUBLIC

October 22, 2020November 13, 2020 technicshistory1 Comment

In the summer of 1986, Senator Al Gore, Jr., of Tennessee introduced an
amendment to the Congressional Act that authorized the  budget of the National
Science Foundation (NSF). He called for the federal government to study the
possibilities for “communications networks for supercomputers at universities
and Federal research facilities.” To explain the purpose of this… Continue
reading Internet Ascendant, Part 2: Going Private and Going Public →

Posted in The Backbone


INTERNET ASCENDANT, PART 1: EXPONENTIAL GROWTH

September 1, 2020October 22, 2020 technicshistory5 Comments

In 1990, John Quarterman, a networking consultant and UNIX expert, published a
comprehensive survey of the state of computer networks. In a brief section on
the potential future for computing, he predicted the appearance of a single
global network for "electronic mail, conferencing, file transfer, and remote
login, just as there is now one worldwide… Continue reading Internet Ascendant,
Part 1: Exponential Growth →

Posted in The Backbone


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