Browsing by Subject "History of Science and Technology"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    An arc across fields of study: electricity in Physics and Chemistry (1751-1807)
    (2010-10) Fisher, Amy Alice
    Electricity does not obey disciplinary boundaries, yet its history is dominated by stories of heroic physicists and engineers. These histories do not reflect its dynamic nature. My dissertation analyzes how the concept ‘electricity’ evolved from a material fluid to a force as scientists’ chemical concepts changed. By analyzing the history of electricity from a chemical perspective, my dissertation demonstrates that the study of electrical phenomena played an important role in the emerging field of chemistry. It focuses on the period between 1751, when Benjamin Franklin published Experiments and Observations on Electricity, and 1807, when Humphry Davy published On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity.
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    Chicago's Botanic Garden: Translating Horticulture into Community Action
    (2020-01) Luiken, Reba
    In 1972 when the Chicago Botanic Garden opened to the public, it introduced the nation’s “second city” to its new botanic garden. Just one of a proliferation of new museums in the second half of the twentieth century, the botanic garden would become a national leader of in community work as museums and public gardens focused on local community engagement. From its inception, CBG aspired to join the most well-established botanic gardens in the United States. This dissertation documents the financial, social, and personal influences that shaped programs that were innovative and effective. As the Chicago Botanic Garden developed, its leaders strove to meet the tripartite goals of the field—scientific inquiry, education, and landscape cultivation. They proved to be particularly successful in the area of education and, specifically, community horticulture. Encompassing programs like horticultural therapy, community gardening, and environmental and science education in local schools, community horticulture programs became centers of expertise at the garden. Given CBG’s origin in the Chicago Horticultural Society, staff and board members at the botanic garden already had a vested interest in ongoing programs in the field, and this led them to concentrate resources there, often at the expense of research development. Dedicated leadership at the executive level succeeded in creating a striking physical landscape, even as they balanced the goal of reaching central areas of the city of Chicago. The public, private foundations, and governmental funders demanded increased relevance and accountability. As a suburban garden funded in large part by urban tax revenue and a young museum without an established scientific reputation or broad philanthropic base, garden leaders and staff worked hard to meet sponsors’ expectations. Ultimately, CBG did provide an impressive number of widely recognized programs by the end of the century. In significant ways its community horticulture accomplishments relied on the expertise of long-tenured employees who built an environmentally just community infrastructure through personal relationships and strategic funding strategies.
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    History of science and technology.
    (2012-02) Zepcevski, Joline
    Changes in computer programming methods were responses to specific stimuli, and that (contrary to much existing analyses) the development of programming methods does not fit an ideal of "progress." I focus on the rise of two fundamental computing problems: complexity, or the proliferation of people and methods; and verification, which is the (in)ability to verify that a program functions as intended. Complexity and verification were the catalyst for the development of automatic coding systems but also increased exponentially as a result of automatic coding systems like FORTRAN and COBOL. These systems have English-like commands that simplify programming. The adoption of automatic coding systems opened up the programming field to more software engineers and allowed the creation of more elaborate software systems, creating ever more complexity in the discipline. I argue that since the introduction of automatic coding systems in the 1950s, methodological changes and new programming languages have been attempts to solve long standing problems faced by programmers. Not, as the traditional insider narrative suggests, a steady evolution based on a better understanding of programming. In this dissertation, I focus on the changes motivated by two stimuli -- complexity and verification.
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    A natural laboratory, a National Monument: carving out a place for science in Glacier Bay, Alaska, 1879-1959.
    (2009-08) Rumore, Gina Maria
    Beginning with John Muir's "discovery" in 1879, Glacier Bay has become a place constructed in the American imagination. In this construction of place, no single group played a more important role than scientists. While other national parks--e.g. Yellowstone and Yosemite--were greatly the products of commercial lobbies and political maneuverings, Glacier Bay National Monument (later National Park) grew out of a grass roots lobbying effort by the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Since 1879, Glacier Bay has an unbroken history of scientific study: from 1879 forward its glaciers have been regularly mapped, and from 1916 its ecological patterns have been persistently studied. Because of this long, continuous history of scientific study, Glacier Bay serves as an ideal case for the study of the interaction between place and the field sciences. This study analyzes the role played by Glacier Bay in shaping scientific practice and theory in ecology and glaciology between 1879 and 1959. At the same time, it also analyzes the impact scientists and scientific theory had on the place - defined both by physical location and by constructed social spaces. Within the overarching argument about the agency of place in shaping scientific theory, practice, and community, this dissertation makes several arguments that challenge and enhance the standing historiography on American ecology and glaciology: (1) It problematizes and challenges the standard story of the history of ecology in America told over the past quarter century, offering a more continuous view of ecological theory and practice. (2) It works toward a better understanding of field practices and how scientists defined their goals and successes in the early years of ecology and glaciology in the American context. (3) It explores the role of scientists as activists and argues that, over the period under consideration, ecologists' understanding of their role as activists was closely tied to how they thought ecology should be studied. (4) It analyzes how ecologists and glaciologists working in Glacier Bay understood the placedness of their work and how changes in their understanding of place interacted with their understanding of local versus universal knowledge.
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    The Nature of Defense: Coevolutionary studies, ecological interaction, and the evolution of 'natural insecticides,' 1959-1983
    (2009-11) Mason Dentinger, Rachel Natalie
    The field of "coevolutionary studies" became a vigorous domain of discovery in the 1960s, and its practitioners were direct inheritors of the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1940s. They were also direct inheritors of a natural environment that seemed increasingly on the decline, thanks primarily to the destructive actions of humans. Thus, in my account, knowing--the pursuit of knowledge about the natural world--is inextricably interwoven with doing--the practical business of interacting with and altering the natural world, for better or worse. In the case of coevolutionary studies, the act of changing nature through technological intervention with chemical insecticides profoundly changed the way that biologists understood the natural world and the way that humans understood our own place in the natural world. In building this argument, I draw from the work of a variety of science studies scholars, especially environmental historians and historians of science who have examined the boundary between nature and technology, and so-called "basic" and "applied" sciences. I find that the values of control and intervention that are implicit in the applied sciences can have a direct, substantive effect on shaping the direction and form that basic science assumes. As a result, coevolutionary theory was, to a large extent, predicated on the role of humans as participants--interactors--in the very natural systems that coevolutionists strove to understand. To understand this dynamic, I analyze how methods, metaphors, and materials derived from the applied sciences of economic entomology and agronomy formed a foundation for coevolutionary studies. It is no coincidence that most of the scientists in this narrative were disciplinarily rooted in entomology or insect physiology, two fields where potent toxins aimed at destroying insects were of significant importance. These insect scientists were intimately familiar with the methods, metaphors, and materials used to intervene technologically in the operation of nature. Moreover, the model of chemical activity, of the causal agency of potent molecular tools, which dominated both insect physiology and economic entomology, shaped the model of biochemical interaction that drove early coevolutionary studies.
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    Refiguring old age: shaping scientific research on senescence, 1900-1960.
    (2009-07) Park, Hyung Wook
    This dissertation traces the origin and the development of gerontology, the science of aging, in the United States and the United Kingdom. I argue that gerontology began to be formed as a multidisciplinary scientific field in the two countries from the 1900s to the 1950s. Unlike earlier scholars who had thought that the aging of the whole body was caused by the inevitable decline of an unknown critical factor, such as "vital heat," gerontologists of the twentieth century conceived aging as a contigent phenomenon whose rate and mode differed in distinct portions of the body. They also introduced systematic experimental approaches in their investigation which had seldom been employed in the study of aging before the twentieth century. Furthermore, with these new ideas and methodologies, gerontologists established their research field in which scholars from diverse disciplines could work in a cooperative manner, including biologists, physicians, psychologists, and social scientists. Amid the Great Depression, which threatened the very survival of the elderly, these multidisciplinary scholars formed professional societies and research institutes for more organized study of aging. But gerontology followed different paths of development in America and Britain due to their distinctive political and cultural conditions, academic traditions, and leading scholars' social and academic status. While British scientists of aging were struggling with various problems related to funding, professional recognition, and the recruitment of scholars interested in aging, American gerontologists came to have relatively ample and stable sources of financial support and an expanding network of national and local organizations. By analyzing this difference and tracing the beginnings of the new concepts and approaches, this dissertation aims at explaining the birth of a multidisciplinary scientific field within historical contexts.