Rescuing Prometheus
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Rescuing Prometheus
"A rare insight into industrial planning on a huge scale...Excellent." --The Economist Rescuing Prometheus is an eye-opening and marvelously informative look at some of the technological projects that helped shape the modern world. Thomas P. Hughes focuses on four postwar projects whose vastness and complexity inspired new technology, new organizations, and new management styles. The first use of computers to run systems was developed for the SAGE air defense project. The Atlas missile project was so complicated it required the development of systems engineering in order to complete it. The Boston Central Artery/Tunnel Project tested systems engineering in the complex crucible of a large scale civilian roadway. And finally, the origins of the Internet fostered the collegial management style that later would take over Silicon Valley and define the modern computer industry. With keen insight, Hughes tells these fascinating stories while providing a riveting history of modern technology and the management systems that made it possible.
The Bomb and America's Missile Age
How nuclear weapons helped drive the United States into the missile age. The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), designed to quickly deliver thermonuclear weapons to distant targets, was the central weapons system of the Cold War. ICBMs also carried the first astronauts and cosmonauts into orbit. More than a generation later, we are still living with the political, technological, and scientific effects of the space race, while nuclear-armed ICBMs remain on alert and in the headlines around the world. In The Bomb and America’s Missile Age, Christopher Gainor explores the US Air Force’s (USAF) decision, in March 1954, to build the Atlas, America’s first ICBM. Beginning with the story of the guided missiles that were created before and during World War II, Gainor describes how the early Soviet and American rocket programs evolved over the course of the following decade. He argues that the USAF was wrongly criticized for unduly delaying the start of its ICBM program, endangering national security, and causing America embarrassment when a Soviet ICBM successfully put Sputnik into orbit ahead of any American satellite. Shedding fresh light on the roots of America’s space program and the development of US strategic forces, The Bomb and America’s Missile Age uses evidence uncovered in the past few decades to set the creation of the Atlas ICBM in its true context—not only in the America of the postwar years but also in comparison with the real story of the Soviet missiles that propelled the space race and the Cold War. Aimed at readers interested in the history of the Cold War and of space exploration, the book makes a major contribution to the history of rocket development and the nuclear age.
Technology in Postwar America
Author: Carroll Pursell
language: en
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Release Date: 2007-06-29
Carroll Pursell tells the story of the evolution of American technology since World War II. His fascinating and surprising history links pop culture icons with landmarks in technological innovation and shows how postwar politics left their mark on everything from television, automobiles, and genetically engineered crops to contraceptives, Tupperware, and the Veg-O-Matic. Just as America's domestic and international policies became inextricably linked during the Cold War, so did the nation's public and private technologies. The spread of the suburbs fed into demands for an interstate highway system, which itself became implicated in urban renewal projects. Fear of slipping into a postwar economic depression was offset by the creation of "a consumers' republic" in which buying and using consumer goods became the ultimate act of citizenship and a symbol of an "American Way of Life." Pursell begins with the events of World War II and the increasing belief that technological progress and the science that supported it held the key to a stronger, richer, and happier America. He looks at the effect of returning American servicemen and servicewomen and the Marshall Plan, which sought to integrate Western Europe into America's economic, business, and technological structure. He considers the accumulating "problems" associated with American technological supremacy, which, by the end of the 1960s, led to a crisis of confidence. Pursell concludes with an analysis of how consumer technologies create a cultural understanding that makes political technologies acceptable and even seem inevitable, while those same political technologies provide both form and content for the technologies found at home and at work. By understanding this history, Pursell hopes to advance a better understanding of the postwar American self.