The relationship between art and technology in the late nineteenth century was contested but increasingly characterized by a harmonious integration that reflected a progressive and optimistic view of technological innovation. This cover essay examines an advertising poster designed by the German-Italian commercial artist Adolfo Hohenstein for a public exhibition of infants in incubators, which opened in Paris in 1896. Hohenstein's poster for the Maternité Lion, with its distinctive and innovative use of an art nouveau style, captures the widespread enthusiasm for the new technologies and industries that characterized the art nouveau movement. The aesthetics of art nouveau expressed a broader cultural optimism about modernity and progress around the turn of the twentieth century. Hohenstein's poster exemplifies this by providing an aestheticized and exhibitory framework for introducing the incubator as a new technology, specifically to appeal to women.

On the occasion of the award of the author's da Vinci Medal in 2022, this article sketches a perspective, material political economy, employed by the author, explaining it by drawing on Marc Bloch's classic account of the dispute in European feudalism between milling grain on watermills or windmills controlled by feudal superiors, who could exact fees, and common people's use of hand mills. It considers the material political economy aspects of two modern technologies. The first is automated high-frequency trading in finance, where there are typically conflicts with incumbents and material efforts to favor "market-making" over "aggressive" algorithms. The second is the automated auctioning of digital display advertising opportunities, showing tension between two forms of these auctions' material organization: centralized auctioning via Google's systems and decentralized "header bidding."

For the first four decades of the twentieth century, premature babies in the United States were primarily treated in infant incubators not in hospitals, but in a public setting-at the Coney Island amusement park. Although incubators are now an indispensable medical device, their origins lie in public exhibitions rather than a professional medical environment. This article uncovers the longer history behind this unusual episode in neonatal care and technology. Offering the first comprehensive account of the early history of the infant incubator, it traces how these devices were first developed and showcased at exhibition sites across Europe in the 1890s. A comparative study of these exhibitions in Europe and the United States from 1890 to 1943 highlights significant differences in how industry, science, education, and spectacle interacted in each country. Moreover, it examines the changing relationship between public displays and professional medicine during this period, illustrating how technology developed in public spaces before transitioning into the professional medical domain.

Regulating the circulation of technology is a powerful weapon to exercise global power. In August 2022, U.S. president Joe Biden moved to strangle China's high-end semiconductor industry by imposing a swath of export controls aimed at restricting the country's access to global semiconductor supply chains. While this chip war is usually framed as a bilateral conflict between Washington and Beijing, the success of the U.S. strategy depends on the active cooperation of allied firms and governments. This article fills a critical gap in the standard narrative. It describes how the U.S. government has constructed an empire by regulation, leveraging its global political and economic power to impose extraterritorial export controls on allied trade. By seeking to regulate the flow of technology, knowledge, people, and foreign investment into China, the U.S. risks alienating traditional allies and has triggered China to seek self-sufficiency in the production of advanced semiconductors for civilian and military applications.

Using scrapbooks created by members of the Women's Institute in England in 1965, this article offers a rare insight into women's lived experience and interaction with new technologies and services, in domestic and communal spaces, which show how rural women diligently recorded the new behaviors, emotions, and challenges surrounding rural life. Scrapbookers show multiple and sometimes contradictory attitudes, representing themselves as modern housewives proficient with new consumer durables, while also critiquing the inequalities heralded by new goods and services. Rural women were not simply bystanders to technological change but represented themselves as both consumers and producers of new forms of knowledge, through their use of material culture. Scrapbookers used their creations to archive the emotional labor they performed in their homes and communities, illuminating an important but often overlooked component of consumption.

Metropa, an "art and peace project" by artist and musician Stefan Frankenberger, envisions a future European railroad network through the visual metaphor of an urban subway map, offering both an infrastructural and a political proposal for the future of the European continent. This essay explores Frankenberger's vision from a historical perspective, tracing the origins of the its visual language, its relationship with past trans-European railway projects, and its political implications. The article concludes that, although metropa's technical and political ambitions are deeply connected to the present, its visual appeal and references to historical precedents enhance its affective and political impact.

This case study demonstrates how an analysis grounded in sound studies, rather than visual studies, reveals a different technological outcome in the development of coastal navigation systems. In the late nineteenth century, engineers at Scotland's Northern Lighthouse Board developed and managed a growing network of sound-based fog signals, primarily using steam-powered sirens. Despite the prevailing perception that sound signaling was more unreliable and risky than lighthouses for coastal navigation, engineers focused on maximizing the loudness of these devices to address the uncertainty of sound transmission. By prioritizing the siren and narrowing the system's goals to warning sailors about imminent danger, the engineers created a system with fundamentally different aims, implementation methods, and design priorities than those of visually-based lighthouse technology. This sound-based analysis uncovers how sensory hierarchies shaped technological decisions, leading to a unique and distinct approach to coastal navigation.

This study considers the broad implications of white technological modernity as a mode of symbolic and systemic exclusion. The visual absence of Black telephone users in mass-market advertising-and the struggle to make them visible-underscores the exclusionary power of technological whiteness and its lasting effects on conceptions of Black technology users, communities, and innovation. In the first half of the twentieth century, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) tirelessly promoted its national telephone network as a model of technological progress and universal service, but this vision did not include African Americans. This article examines the historical exclusion of African Americans in Bell System advertising and the emergence of Black telephone users in advertising imagery during the 1950s and 1960s, drawing attention to the civil rights work of Ramon S. Scruggs, the first African American to rise to Bell System upper management.

Biorefineries are often lauded as revolutionary, sustainable new sources of power. This article critically examines biorefineries from historical and environmentalist perspectives, highlighting flaws such narratives. It proposes an alternative to the biorefinery paradigm that draws on critical environmentalist scholarship, French political ecology and the German tradition of sanfte Chemie (soft chemistry). History, the article argues, is crucial for identifying technological dead ends.

This study challenges the conventional Cold War narrative that portrays cybernetics as inherently opposed to communist authoritarianism and the perception of cybernetic control as a mechanism of liberal governmentality. It analyzes the introduction of cybernetics into the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) during the Cold War. Previous studies about cybernetics in the socialist world have described how the discipline's emphasis on objectivity and decentralization clashed with orthodox political economists and Stalinist science and led to liberal reforms. Yet in the DPRK, the introduction of cybernetics was followed by an increase in authoritarianism.

This section of Public History explores "infrastructural imaginaries"-shared visions of future infrastructure that are collectively held and either publicly enacted or resisted. These imaginaries are deeply rooted in both present realities and past dreams of what could have been. For historians of technology, understanding who imagines this infrastructure, the impacts of these imaginings, and the emotional forces driving these processes is essential. The contributions in this section explore artistic interventions that blend utopian ideas, visual languages, political ambitions, and radical actions. These interventions challenge us to rethink the contours of our infrastructure-dominated world and invite further historical analysis in these public discourses.

This essay reviews the 2022 American film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, examining its significance for historians of technology. The film highlights do-it-yourself technologies, the experiences of marginalized technology users, and the environmental consequences of infrastructures. Central to the discussion is the film's dystopian portrayal of infrastructure, which drives the characters to take extreme measures, such as the bombing of an oil pipeline, to raise awareness about climate change. While the film might seem to advocate for radical action, this review suggests that it offers historians an opportunity to engage with broader social issues and reflect on the methodological challenges within the history of technology.

This review essay examines an art exhibition that envisions the future infrastructure of quantum computing and the sociopolitical and aesthetic visions it might bring about. Visitors are encouraged to reflect on past concepts of computing and the transformative power of technology. The exhibit tackles the challenge that computer-based infrastructures-the infrastructure of infrastructures-poses for the historiography of computing. This review places the exhibit's perspective of quantum computing infrastructures within the broader context of computing and information history.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology marks the maturity of the philosophy of technology, which has lagged behind the history of technology as a distinct field. The book's thirty-two chapters span almost seven hundred pages, written by thirty-four authors from twelve countries. Shannon Vallor, professor of philosophy at University of Edinburgh, edited the volume and wrote its excellent introduction, which provides a historical framing that is largely absent from the rest of the volume. Although many of the remaining chapters are quite strong, the volume as a whole suffers from an unevenness that reflects the conceptual disunity of the field. Nevertheless, the volume shows the value of this field for historians of technology, especially as an alternative to the stale STS theories that many historians of technology draw on.

This article discusses how the notion of "diffusionism" has functioned as a straw man in the history of technology. This has prevented it from becoming fully global and symmetrical. In contrast, the second section of this article offers an example of what a symmetrical account of the global history of technology might look like, using the case of chlorination in the early twentieth century. Focusing on London, Bogotá, and Jersey City, it shows that chlorination was initially rejected in each of these places but was later adopted in all of them for economic reasons after discussions that took the same form. It concludes by suggesting that global histories of technology must treat North and South, East and West, center and periphery, and metropole and colony symmetrically, drawing out similarities and differences based on the available evidence without assuming them in advance.

Diagnostic ultrasound visualization was initially developed and introduced as a more benign alternative to X-rays and is today established as a harmless routine procedure and tool for risk management, but as this article shows, it took several decades to overcome the popular notion that ultrasound itself was a high-risk technology, a potentially deadly weapon. Swedish newspaper material provides a window into internationally circulated narratives portraying ultrasound as both a frightening and promising phenomenon. These ideas also constituted an important context for risk assessment during the early adoption and development of obstetrical ultrasound imaging, as shown by the case of Lund, Sweden, where the still-experimental technology was first imported from Scotland in the early 1960s. The article repositions ultrasound in the history of risk and risk management in modern societies and also sheds new light on the history of ultrasound visualization by situating it in a broader context of media culture.

The emergence of new surveillance practices is not solely a matter of technological and political developments. It is also intertwined with the production of scientific knowledge. This article traces how scientists in the 1960s developed some of the earliest computerized facial recognition techniques while covertly sponsored by a U.S. intelligence agency. The article situates their project within approaches from the technical field of pattern recognition. It demonstrates how the scientists, especially amid unsteady patronage relationships, reinforced a key assumption: that recognizing identity could be reduced to classifying specific features within a set of existing examples. As their ambitions grew over six years, the scientists transformed human identity into a scientific object tailored to their recognition techniques. How this transformation occurred foregrounds the epistemic underpinnings of surveillance technologies.

With more leisure time in the early to mid-twentieth century, more people in industrialized countries took up hobbies. One hobby-woodworking-became a favorite among men, especially homeowners. Beyond the familiar "do-it-yourselfers" there was an audience eager to learn about woodworking, and magazine publishers encouraged them to acquire new skills and home machinery. American publishers led the way, but workshop converts in English-speaking countries like Canada and the United Kingdom got the magazines and the message. The promise of creative leisure at home did not democratize the hobby. Monthly features and awards praising accomplished amateurs did not challenge social and economic norms but defined leisure success in conventional terms. Those with the income and space to maintain a hobby served as models for others whose circumstances were less ideal. Through its flagship publication, a machine manufacturer often acquiesced to the industrial-era pressures that hobbies sought to alleviate.

Soldiers were not the only victims of chemical warfare in the twentieth century; the workers who produced these weapons also risked injury and death. Focusing on British chemical weapons factories during both world wars, this article advances our understanding of the human costs not only of war but also of the preparation for war. Technologies such as physical barriers, ventilation systems, protective equipment, and detection systems mitigated some hazards to workers, but financial constraints, wartime pressures, and limited knowledge of the damage caused by prolonged exposure to low levels of chemical weapons resulted in serious damage to workers' bodies.

Only a few decades after its introduction to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, the house sparrow was considered a pest that drove away native birds. Its downfall is representative of a story familiar to scholars of animals and technology who have studied the methods used to control or exclude unwanted species from both rural and urban areas. The case of the house sparrow, however, differs in a crucial respect: the birds made their homes in bird boxes, built technologies designed to attract avian species and bring them closer to humans. This article documents how bird boxes were used as tools to regulate avian life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and argues that they should be seen as a technology that mediates and regulates our relationship with nature by promoting or controlling certain aspects of living organisms.

This revision of the da Vinci Medal Address, delivered at SHOT's annual meeting in Los Angeles on October 28, 2023, presents two valedictories. The first reviews fifty years in SHOT studying and teaching the history of technology and warfare. It argues that not only is technology a particularly useful category of analysis for understanding change in warfare over the course of human history, but warfare is an equally useful category of analysis for studying technological change. The second valedictory invites SHOT members to clarify what they mean by the term "technology." There is no need for a single definition, but the term is so widely and loosely used in contemporary discourse that it behooves SHOT members to explain what they mean by it.