Patent Law and the Materiality of Inventions in the California Oil Industry: The Story of Halliburton v. Walker, 1935–1946

This article examines a patenting conflict between the Halliburton Oil Well and Cementing Company and an independent inventor named Cranford Walker. It argues that Halliburton’s effort to lower the barriers to entry into the oil well depth measurement industry facilitated the re-emergence of materiality as a pre-condition for the patent eligibility of inventive processes. In 1941, Walker sued Halliburton for infringement of three of his patents, and Halliburton responded with an aggressive defense aimed at invalidating them. Over the next five years, the courts handling this conflict adopted very narrow legal theories developed during the Second Industrial Revolution to assess the patent eligibility of inventions that involved mental steps—processes such as mathematical computations, which people can perform in their minds. The resulting legal precedent cleared the path for Halliburton’s short-term industrial goals and continued to shape patent law for the rest of the century.

Psychoanalysis, thermodynamics and the matter of scarcity: A genealogy of Freud's death drive hypothesis

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the death drive hypothesis, according to which “the aim of all life is death”. I trace the genealogy of this hypothesis in order to understand it as a moment in the history of modern Western societies. First, I present Freud's metapsychology, and in particular its “economic” dimension, the death drive being central to this dimension. Secondly, I retrace the history of the concept of energy and of the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. Energetics and thermodynamics are shown to have been important to the Freudian economic dimension. Further, I show that for nineteenth-century scientists, the concern for energy reflected a socio-economic preoccupation with the matter of scarcity. Lastly, I argue that Freud's relationship to energy, as expressed in the death drive hypothesis, also reflected a certain relationship of Western countries to scarcity in the era of the second industrial revolution.<br>

Psychoanalysis, thermodynamics and the matter of scarcity: A genealogy of Freud's death drive hypothesis

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the death drive hypothesis, according to which “the aim of all life is death”. I trace the genealogy of this hypothesis in order to understand it as a moment in the history of modern Western societies. First, I present Freud's metapsychology, and in particular its “economic” dimension, the death drive being central to this dimension. Secondly, I retrace the history of the concept of energy and of the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. Energetics and thermodynamics are shown to have been important to the Freudian economic dimension. Further, I show that for nineteenth-century scientists, the concern for energy reflected a socio-economic preoccupation with the matter of scarcity. Lastly, I argue that Freud's relationship to energy, as expressed in the death drive hypothesis, also reflected a certain relationship of Western countries to scarcity in the era of the second industrial revolution.<br>

Solar Reflections: On the Sun Mirror in Rjukan

The Sun Mirror (2013) by Martin Andersen is a mirror machine placed upon a mountain top. It reflects sunlight down to the town square in Rjukan, a small Norwegian town that is located in the shade for almost six months each year. Based on a century-old idea, the mirror realised the dream of Rjukan’s inhabitants to see the sun in wintertime. What makes the idea of a man-made sun mirror still relevant in the 21st Century, 100 years after its first mention in the heyday of the Second Industrial Revolution? This chapter contextualises the Sun Mirror by discussing ecological aesthetics and argues that despite its technological structure, the mirror opposes treating nature as a recourse for human exploitation. Rather it makes visible the properties of the sun (the sun’s temporality and rhythm) and promotes the sun in itself as life-giving and vital for us humans.

Features and problems in the construction of the postunitary Italian banking system

The study of the evolution of Italian economy experienced, in recent years, new interpretive hypotheses, themselves based on the use of more updated series of historical data, The latter have brought scholars to reconsider, especially taking long-term viewpoints into account, the path Italy followed in joining the global economic system. Therefore, both Italian and international historiography have striven to highlight the most favorable elements, as well as the limits and the contradictions accompanying the nevertheless robust growth Italy experienced during the last 150 years. All this began for Italy as it joined, during the later 1800s, the productive mechanisms of the Second Industrial Revolution, fully maturing during the Golden Age. To fully understand such a path it is necessary to integrate, following a comparative, systemic and interdisciplinary approach, the behavioral analysis of some specific industrial sectors with the so-called system prerequisites to development including, and in an important position at that, the construction of the financial market and the shaping of the banking system. Within such a context, studying the period between the Unification of Italy and the “end of the century crisis” appears particularly important, as it is during this phase that some of the lines through which the model Italy used to join the process of the Second Industrial Revolution were shaped. Such a situation will challenge the future reforms, themselves a prelude to the takeoff Italy experienced during the Giolitti era.This contribution intends to highlight some features of the buildup of the Italian banking system within the framework of Italian nation building, between 1861 and 1893. In order to do that, besides offering an analysis of the political, economic and financial situation of the time, it examines the path, the uses and the crossings of capital which, starting with the financial movements recorded between the end of the 1860s and the beginning of the 1870s between the Centre-North of Italy, Germany and Austria and then pouring into the activities of the Banca Tiberina, based in Rome and one of the main protagonists of the growing phenomenon joining banks and companies during that time. Therefore, this work of mine does not only focus on the descending parable the Banca Tiberina experienced (something well known in economic historiography, especially when examining the end of the century crisis) but rather more on the whole three previous decades, from the beginning to the expansion phase.Therefore, a composite framework emerges, striving to keep the features of the political, social and economic features of Italy with those events being only apparently local and between these and the evolution of the banking system after the Italian Unification.

What Were World’s Fairs for? Catalysts for Trade-Based Urban Development in the Second Industrial Revolution

This essay proposes a new approach to world’s fairs. Local elites, representing manufacturing, banking, transportation, merchandizing, and commercial interests, organized pre–World War I expositions to create urban settings supporting trade and cultivating innovation on a long-term basis. These stimuli came in the form of systematized infrastructure and environmental improvements, resources for training technical workforce, educating public taste, and reputation building. Most historically important, the result was to constitute the public facet of the second industrial revolution, identified on the business side with new energy sources, integration of industrial production and consumption, transportation, and institutionalization of research allied with industry based on official reports and documents.