Dawn of the electronic age: electrical technologies in the shaping of the modern world, 1914 to 1945

Today in the industrialized world electrical power is supplied to virtually every home and workplace, where it drives electrical and electronic devices performing a multitude of tasks. These homes and workplaces are also part of world-spanning and overlapping networks of communication and control that employ wires, optical fibers, and ground-based and satellite-borne receivers and transmitters of radio waves and microwaves. Computers are now necessary for the normal operation of many machines and most businesses and governments. Much of this infrastructure arose in the period from the outbreak of World War I to the conclusion of World War II. It was in these years that the capabilities of traditional electrical engineering generators, power transmission, motors, electric lighting and heating, home appliances, and so onbecame ubiquitous. Even more importantly, it was in these years that a new type of electrical engineeringelectronicsemerged. Because of its applications in communications (both wire-based and wireless), entertainment (notably radio, the phonograph, and sound movies), industry, science and medicine, and the military, the electronics industry became a major part of the economy. And many other potentialities of electronics, as in computing and television, began their vigorous development. Dawnof the Electronic Age explains how this engineering knowledge and its main applications developed in their scientific, economic, and social contexts, and how these contexts were profoundly affected by electrical technologies. It takes an international perspective and a narrative approach, telling the story chronologically. Though a scholarly study (with sources of information given in endnotes), the book is intended for the general public. There are a few histories of radio, calculating machines, radar, and other parts of this story, but the main storythe development of a new realm of engineering and its widespread applications, all in a remarkable and tragic period of two world wars and the decades in betweenremains untold.

• ISBN: 978-0-470-26065-4
• Editorial: John Wiley & Sons
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 536
• Fecha Publicación: 21/04/2009
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés