The Technical Transformation of the Late Nineteenth-Century Gas Industry

1987 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 967-980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Technological Transformation ◽  
Gas Industry ◽  
Coal Gas ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Firm Model ◽  
The Cost

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.

Dazzling the Multitude Original Media Spectacles

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Point To Point

Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.

Directors/Directing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Switzky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Electric Light

Although some official has organized the acting and scenery in theatrical performances since ancient Greece, the director only emerged as a significant creative figure in the late nineteenth century. Directors introduced innovative acting methods, modernized staging through new technologies such as electric light and mechanized scenery, proposed theories about the function of the theater in social and political life, and provided unified interpretations of complex plays. As the self-designated authors of productions, directors often competed with playwrights and actors for artistic control, a tension that continues to characterize the division of labor in theaters.

Famine and disease in the history of Angola c. 1830–1930

1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill R. Dias
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gradual Decline ◽  
Cash Crops ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Rural Depopulation

In Angola, climatic instability contributed to maintaining a precarious balance between food resources, population and disease long before the nineteenth century. Periods of exceptionally irregular rainfall, lasting several years, were preceded or accompanied by plagues of locusts which caused famines at least once every decade. The coastal lowland and the extreme south were especially vulnerable. Prolonged hunger crises led to malnutrition, lowered resistance to disease and epidemic outbreaks, especially of smallpox. A rhythm of drought and smallpox can be discerned in Angola, at least since the seventeeth century. From the 1830s the gradual decline of the overseas slave trade and rise of commerce in raw materials and cash crops brought important demographic changes. These contributed to the worsening famines and epidemic crises of the late nineteenth century. Commercial instability and rural depopulation hindered the growth of Portuguese plantation prosperity. Soon after, however, similar crises aided Portuguese military conquest in Angola by weakening African ability to mobilize effective resistance. In the twentieth century malnutrition continued to be the most widespread problem of Angola's Africans and on occasion it drove them to revolt.

scholarly journals Dance and Interactivity

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Birringer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Motion Capture ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
International Community ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Motion Studies

A growing number of practitioners in the international community of choreographers and performers has begun to experiment with computer-assisted work linking dance and new technologies. This hardly comes as a surprise, since dance-on-film and videodance had already attracted considerable attention, at least since the 1980s. Earlier experiments, such as the astonishing films by Maya Deren, take us back to the 1940s, and today's motion capture-based animations find their historical roots in late nineteenth century motion studies in chronophotography and early cinema (Muybridge, Marey, Méliès). Furthermore, dancemakers, researchers, and teachers have used film or video as a vital means of documenting or analyzing existing choreographies. Some scholars and software programmers published tools (LabanWriter, LifeForms) that attracted attention in the field of dance notation and preservation as well as among choreographers (e.g., Merce Cunningham) who wanted to utilize the computer for the invention and visualization of new movement possibilities.

Political Economy for Workers: A. N. Bakh’s Tsar-Golod

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Pearl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Cost

“There’s a tsar in the world, a merciless tsar; / His name is—hunger!” These lines, taken from Nikolai A. Nekrasov’s poem “Zheleznaia doroga” (1864), serve as the epigraph for one of the most popular works of Russian revolutionary propaganda literature of the late nineteenth century, the pamphlet Tsar-golod by Aleksei Nikolaevich Bakh, a People’s Will activist of the early 1880s. Nekrasov’s poem vividly depicts the cost in human suffering of the construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad. As with other works by Nekrasov, the poem arouses the reader’s sympathy for Russian common folk and outrage at their plight. Bakh, when faced with the task of devising lessons for workers’ propaganda circles, picked up the striking image of Tsar Hunger, driving workers to labor and often to death, and used it as a recurring theme, while he transformed the message. Bakh’s brochure, a dissection and analysis of the capitalist system, leaves behind the world of poetry for that of cold reality. The author’s purpose is not simply to inspire sympathy for the people’s suffering, but also to lead his worker audience to understand the economic system that exploited them and to recognize the urgent need for revolution.

City-Hinterland Relations and the Development of a Regional Elite in Nineteenth Century Bombay

1974 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen McDonald Gumperz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
World Market ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Administrative Organization ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Geographical Scope

Historians of India often write as if India, at the end of the nineteenth century, had only four cities: Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Poona. Several elements contribute to this perspective: Indian historians' own predominant interest in the development of nationalist politics in late nineteenth century India naturally leads them to concentrate on these four urban centers, the birthplaces of such politics1. But the structure of late nineteenth century politics in India itself mirrored more fundamental aspects of the administrative organization and social structure of the country. Administratively, the country was organized in a hierarchy of authorities of descending prestige and geographical scope, with authorities of greatest power centered in the three port cities, and authorities of least power, at the taluka and village levels in the hinterlands. This structure decisively established the political predominance of the port cities and assured a flow of potential recruits for government service and the white collar professions out of the countryside and into the Presidency headquarters towns. At the same time, India's status as a raw-materials exporting colony of an industrial mother country, and the increasing penetration of the world market economy, required that business and industry be increasingly concentrated in and about the port cities.

scholarly journals Sociocultural Aspects of Technological Change: The Rise of the Swiss Electricity Supply Economy

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gugerli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Water Supply ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Electricity Supply ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Swiss Society ◽  
Social Shaping ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The ArgumentThe impressive growth of the Swiss electricity supply industry in the late nineteenth cestury has usually been explained by Switzerland's abundant waterpower resouces, its well-equipped financial markets, and the mechanical skills of its Swiss workers and engineers. This article does not aim to deny the importance of these factors. Rather it seeks to explain how they developed synergetic effects and how they were knit together. The argument is put forward in three steps: First, I show the importance of the new technology's discursive integration, arguing that the development of specialized electric discourse led to a social shaping of technology that was highly compatible with generalized cultural patterns of late nineteenth-century Swiss society. The expressive dispositions and instituted means of expression that constitiute the elextric discourse were constantly pursuing and achieving effective resonances in other discursive fields. This allowed for a solid integration of the electrotechnical discourse in late nineteenth-century Swiss society.Second, I argue that electrotechnology was modeled in such a way that it became coupled with existing technological (and scientific) practices, such as the national mapping endeavor, the urban gas and water supply, the sewer system, and the telegraphic networks. It is noteworthy that making electrotechnology compatible with other technological practices led not only to similar patterns in the design and management of both the old and the new technologies but also to operated with the existing water supply station.Using the example of the electrification of Zurich, I then, in a third step, combine the two elements – discursive accommodation and practical assimilation – to demonstrate their effects on the selection and construction of technology. The article's somewhat complex argumentative strategy allows for a differentiated interpretation of the phenomenon and shows the importance of taking into consideration the sociocultural dimension of economic growth that had its roots in the diffusion of a new technology

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