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A tale of two telegraphs: Cooke and Wheatstone’s differing visions of electric telegraphy
William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone were two of the most recognised figures behind the Victorian telegraph. Their conflicting visions of telegraphy provoked an acrimonious dispute between them. The paper explores this dispute’s impact on the development of telegraphic instruments.
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Adapting to the emergence of the automobile: a case study of Manchester coachbuilder Joseph Cockshoot and Co. 1896–1939
This paper will analyse the relationship between the horse-drawn and the motorised vehicle in the UK. It argues that the emergence of the automobile was not a simple matter of technological progress, but involved complex relationships between manufacturers, coachbuilders and customers.
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Capturing the song of the nightingale
An article exploring the effects of the first ever broadcast from a natural location made by the British Broadcasting Company – the famous Nightingale broadcast of 19 May 1924, and the role of the innovative microphone that made it possible.
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Collecting the personal: stories of domestic energy and everyday life at the National Museum of Scotland
The Energise gallery at the National Museum of Scotland explores the sources, generation, distribution and use of energy and questions how science and technology transform how we power our lives. This article details three objects around which a focus on personal stories was adopted.
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Energy/Culture: a reading guide for historical literature
This reading guide maps the existing literature on energy history by focusing on changes in the scholarly understandings of the relationship between energy and culture. It aims to provide an entry point for thinking about energy’s past, present and future.
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Information age? The challenges of displaying information and communication technologies
This article explores the challenges of displaying the history of information and communications in a museum environment, based on Information Age, the Science Museum’s new permanent gallery.
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Review: The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: the (mostly) true story of the first computer, by Sydney Padua
A review of the popular, comic-style illustrated book by Sydney Padua that fictionalises the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and their invention of the first computer.
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Making Material and Cultural Connections: the fluid meaning of ‘Living Electrically’ in Japan and Canada 1920–1960
This article explores how the process of aligning material and cultural ‘connections’ was crucial to defining different historical trajectories of domestic electrification in Canada and Japan. Detailing how connections were made and modified reveals the divergent and fluid meaning of living electrically across space and time.
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Networks of knowledge and power: working collaboratively on the HoNESt project
This article outlines some of the considerations, challenges, conflicts and opportunities offered by undertaking research as part of a pan-European and interdisciplinary research project. New working methods and considerations led to new conclusions on the History of Nuclear Energy and Society (HoNESt) project.
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‘Not one voice speaking to many’: E C Large, wireless, and science fiction fans in the mid-twentieth century
This article analyses E C Large’s novel Dawn in Andromeda (1956), using it to explore the cultural history of the wireless. In the 1930s, the wireless figured as an instrument of fannish participation alongside participatory writing practices. By the 1950s it had become a disappointment.