In the first writing assignment you will complete a 3 - 5 page paper discussing

Question

In the first writing assignment you will complete a 3 - 5 page paper discussing the following:

Instructions:

Select a technology developed between 1900 and 1920, and then craft a narrative which addresses the following questions:

What is the technology?

What problem does it solve?

Who developed it?

How did this technology influence another technology?

Examples?

Is this technology, or a subset of this technology in use today?

What are some of the social and cultural effects of the technology?

Did it effect society? Was it positive, negative, neutral?

Did the technology create equal opportunities, or were they unequal in distribution or access?

This writing assignment will begin your exploration of technology, investigating effects, influence, use, and adoption. You are writing a story; a story about the technology. It is not meant to be a scientific paper. It may be written in the first person, as you are describing how "you," have understood the technology and how it has influenced society, etc.

You should identify a minimum of 3 references for your paper, and they should be properly cited.

Thank you in advance

Explanation / Answer

Vacuum cleaner [1901, Hubert Booth by James Dyson]

Many inventions have had a Darwinian-like evolution, with rival companies vying to come up with ever-better products, to the benefit of the consumer. But not the vacuum cleaner. For the best part of a century the basic design remained a dinosaur in the technological Lost World.

The first vacuum cleaner was a fairly silly idea cooked up in response to a really silly one. In 1901 a London-based engineer named Hubert Booth saw a new American device for extracting dust from the upholstery of railway carriages. It used compressed air to blast the dust out, which was all very well, except the dust settled straight back on the furniture again.

Booth suggested that perhaps suction might be better, an idea the inventor dismissed as impractical. Booth later decided to put his idea to the test. He put a handkerchief on the floor of his office and sucked hard. The handkerchief was covered with dust. By February 1902, teams of men from Booth's British Vacuum Cleaner Company were turning up at homes with a five-horsepower engine and a huge hose fitted with a filter for cleaning carpets.

Two years later, he introduced an electric-powered machine weighing around 40 kg. Booth's design, with the filter in front of the vacuum section, was not the true ancestor of the conventional vacuum cleaner. That accolade (if such it can be called) goes to James Spangler, an American asthmatic janitor who wanted a way of cleaning that didn't stir up dust and bring on an attack. He came up with a machine with an electric fan that dumped the dust into a pillowcase. In 1908 Spangler sold the rights to a leather and saddle maker looking to diversify. The company's name was Hoover.

Put on the market at $70 (around £800 in today's money), the Hoover upright machine turned vacuum cleaners into a mass-market product. A few tweaks were added to the design: Electrolux introduced the cylinder model with a hose in 1913, followed 23 years later by a Hoover with beater-brushes. But that was pretty much it until 1978, when I found I'd run out of vacuum bags at home.

Fishing the old one out of the bin, I cut it open with the intention of emptying it, only to find it wasn't very full. After I'd scraped it out, and re-fitted it, the vacuum cleaner still had a feeble suction. I was stunned to discover that the walls of the bag were clogged with dust. The airflow was being choked by the bag walls, causing a dramatic loss of suction.

I became determined to come up with a vacuum cleaner with a performance that did not stand or fall by the properties of a paper bag. Inspired by a paint-spraying device I had seen at our Ballbarrow factory, I focused on using centrifugal force to spin dust out of the air. It sounds simple but it took me 14 years and more than 5,000 prototypes to arrive at the final design: a dual cyclone system that accelerates the dust-laden air to high speed, flinging the dirt out of the air-stream. In February 1993, the first Dyson DC01 machines rolled off the production line. Within two years it was the most popular machine in the UK and today Dyson vacuum cleaners are the most popular in western Europe.

Air conditioning [1902, Willis Carrier]

In 1902, a Brooklyn, NY, printer frustrated by the effects that changes of temperature and humidity had on his paper, contracted Willis Haviland Carrier, a local engineer. Carrier's solution was to invent the world's first air-conditioning machinery. It pumped liquid ammonia through a set of evaporation coils. Warm air in the room heated the ammonia which evaporated, absorbing heat and cooling the air until it reached its dew point. The droplets that formed on the coils drained away and a fan returned the cooler, drier air to the printing plant.

Electrocardiogram [1903, Willem Einthoven]

It had been known since the 17th century that muscular tissue would conduct electricity, and by the late 19th century, physiologists had investigated the possibility that the human body and heart, too, had electrical potential. Then, in 1895, a brilliant young Dutch physiologist, Willem Einthoven, used a crude electrical sensing apparatus to establish that the beating heart produced four distinct signals, each one corresponding to a different ventricle. He called these distinct signals the "pqrs" factors. However, Einthoven needed an exact way of measuring the minute amounts of current.

In 1897 a French electrical engineer, Clement Ader, invented the "string galvanometer", containing a tensioned string of quartz. In 1903, Einthoven modified Ader's machine, adding electrodes attached to the patient's limbs and thorax. In use, the string was seen to vibrate in time with the patient's heart. The vibrations were recorded photographically.

With his "electrocardiogram" Einthoven was able to look at each of the pqrs signals and diagnose the health of the heart. For his pioneering work, Einthoven was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1924.

Radar [1904, Christian Hülsmeyer by James Dyson]

During the war, my mother worked for Bomber Command, shunting those little flags representing planes around the map of Europe. She could plot things hundreds of miles away thanks to radio detection and ranging, now known as radar.

After discovering radio waves in 1888, the German scientist Heinrich Hertz proved they could be bounced off things. In 1904, the German engineer Christian Hülsmeyer turned this into a patent for a collision warning system for shipping, the first radar system.

Then in 1935, the Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt of the National Physical Laboratory near Slough was asked by the Air Ministry to investigate the possibility of using a beam of radio waves as a death-ray weapon. Watson-Watt found that radio transmitters lacked the power to kill, but that they could trigger echoes from aircraft almost 200 miles away. He was helped by the invention in 1940 of the cavity magnetron, by John Randall and Henry Boot at Birmingham University. This gave a compact, powerful source of short-wave radio waves and thus a means of detecting targets from aircraft at great distances.

Wartime radar experts found their magnetrons could be used as water heaters for their tea. Today magnetrons are the source of heat in microwave ovens.

Colour photography [1904, Auguste and Louis Lumière]

The first photographs, seen in 1839, were greeted with wonder and disappointment. How could a process that recorded nature with such faithful detail fail to record its colours? The search for a method of producing colour pictures became photography's Holy Grail.

In 1904, two Frenchmen, Auguste and Louis Lumière, gave the first public presentation of a colour process they called "autochrome". The brothers had been experimenting with colour for many years and had published an article on the subject in 1895, the year that they invented the cinematographe. Autochrome plates incorporated a filter screen made from transparent grains of potato starch, dyed red, green and blue, the three colours that in 1861, James Clerk Maxwell, a young Scots physicist, had shown could be used to make all colours, a process known as "additive" colour synthesis.

There were about four million microscopic potato starch grains on every square inch of autochrome plate, each of which acted as a tiny coloured filter. The grains combined after processing to produce a full-coloured image. Autochrome plates went into production in 1907 and their success soon prompted the appearance of many similar processes.

At the same time, a number of "subtractive" methods for making colour photographs were under development. These all required negatives to be made through red, green and blue filters. These "colour separation" negatives were then used to make cyan (blue), magenta (red) and yellow prints, which were superimposed to produce a coloured image. Modern colour photography is based on the same concept, but instead of separate negatives, colour film has several layers of emulsion, each of which is sensitive to one of the primary colours.

Kodachrome, the first modern colour film, was invented in America by Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, nicknamed "Man and God". These classically-trained professional musicians carried out photographic experiments in their spare time, often in hotel rooms when they were on tour. Their musical background was useful when they whistled passages of music to gauge development times in the darkroom.

When Kodak heard about the two Leopolds' work, they were persuaded to give up their musical careers to work full time in the Kodak research laboratories. With the support of Kodak's technical and financial resources, they made rapid progress. Kodachrome cine film first went on sale in 1935, followed by 35mm film for still photography the following year. In 1936, Agfa introduced a similar multi-layer film, called Agfacolor.

With the perfection of dye-based multi-layer films such as Kodachrome and Agfacolor a new era of colour photography had arrived. All colour film in use today evolved from these pioneering products.

Vacuum diode [1904, John Ambrose Fleming]

The first electronic device was the vacuum diode, a sealed air-evacuated tube with two metal electrodes, invented by Sir John Ambrose Fleming, professor of electrical engineering at University College, London.

In 1883, Thomas Edison sealed a metal wire inside a light bulb and discovered that a bluish glow could be seen between it and the nearby filament. He had neither explanation nor use for it, but in 1897 Joseph John Thomson, an English physicist, worked out that the glow was due to the passage of tiny particles carrying a negative charge; he had discovered the electron.

In 1904, Fleming substituted a metal plate for Edison's wire and discovered that the electrons travelled to the plate only when it was carrying a positive charge. It meant that the device converted (or rectified) alternating current to direct current. Fleming called his two-electrode device ("diode") a thermionic valve, as it allowed current to flow only in one direction, a characteristic that enabled it to detect radio waves.

In 1906, Lee De Forest, an American inventor, added a grid of fine wire between the filament and plate to invent the triode. He found a small charge on the grid could be used to amplify or reduce a large flow of electrons between the other two electrodes. This was the first amplifier.

Vacuum tube diodes and triodes were at the heart of thousands of electronic devices that followed, such as radios, amplifiers, televisions, long-distance telephony and the first digital electronic computers, until they were replaced in the 1950s by the transistor.

Windscreen wipers [1905, Mary Anderson]

A standard fixture on all cars today, the wiper blade wasn't invented until 20 years after the motor car, perhaps because many early vehicles were open-topped, so drivers didn't go out much in bad weather.

On a trip to New York City, Mary Anderson of Alabama noticed how her driver struggled to remove the snow and ice from his windscreen. She came up with the idea of a wiper operated via a lever inside the car, and patented the device in 1905. She never went into production with it but by 1913 it was standard on American cars.

Electric washing machine [1907, Alva Fisher by James Dyson]

Doing the week's washing used to be a major event for my parents' generation, taking up the best part of a day. I can remember the hard physical effort, lifting heavy, sodden clothes with wooden tongs, wringing them out, steering them through a mangle and finally hanging them out to dry, British weather permitting, of course.

Designers of the modern washing machines faced two key problems. First, the density of water (a sink-full weighs more than 20 kg) means that the machines have to be pretty powerful, especially if the water is going to be extracted by spinning. Then there is the huge heat capacity of water, which means that several kilowatts of power are needed to heat enough to wash a single load of washing in a reasonable time.

The American engineer Alva Fisher is generally credited with making the world's first electric washing machine, the Thor, in 1907, while the American inventor Vincent Bendix claims credit for the first automatic washing machine, which washed, rinsed and dried without much outside intervention.

These machines didn't really take off until the 1960s, first in the form of "twin tubs", which were then eclipsed by automatics. Since then, washing machines have been growing in sophistication, able to give decent results at the lower washing temperatures that environmental regulations demand of manufacturers. Spin driers develop hundreds of g-force to dry clothes, and the whole operation is controlled by microprocessors.

The general view is that washing machines have freed us from drudgery, but by the time you have sorted the washing, put it in, taken it out, hung it up, ironed and folded it, it's tempting to think we'd be better off handing it to a laundry.

Caterpillar tracks [1907, England]

Several patents were registered for caterpillar tracks long before anybody constructed a vehicle that could run on a continuous belted tread. The earliest, for "a portable railway, or artificial road, to move along with any carriage to which it is applied", was filed in 1770 in England by a Richard Edgeworth.

Benjamin Holt, the owner of a California heavy-equipment company that later became the Caterpillar Tractor Company, is often credited with making the first caterpillar tractor in 1904, but all he did was to attach tracks, in distinct blocks, to the rear wheels of his steam tractor.

The first caterpillar tractor to use a continuous series of separate links joined by lubricated pins was invented by David Roberts and built by the firm of Ruston Hornsby and Sons. This petrol-driven tractor was demonstrated to the War Office in 1907 but they showed no interest. Hornsby sold the patent rights to Holt and the caterpillar was forgotten until it re-emerged on the tank towards the end of the First World War.

Armour had been fixed to trains by the time of the Boer War when the War Office considered armoured tractors for use as "mechanical horses". In 1900 the first armoured car was built. Twelve years later De la Mole, an Australian inventor, submitted to the War Office a design for an armoured vehicle with caterpillar tracks. It was rejected. But by 1915 the Great War had become bogged down.

What was wanted was something that could crush obstacles, cross trenches and protect the troops. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, realised that some form of armoured vehicle was the answer and set up the Landships Committee to examine ideas. In July 1915 an armoured car body was fitted on to the chassis of a tractor. It was not a success in trials, but Churchill pressed ahead.

The first tank, called "Little Willie", designed by Major W.G. Wilson of the Royal Naval Air Service and William Tritton, an engineer from Lincoln, was top heavy and its length was insufficient to cross a German trench. Wilson and Tritton then came up with the classic lozenge-shaped caterpillar track on Big Willie, or Mother as it was later called, and the British Army ordered 1,000.

To disguise their identity, the vehicles were shipped to France described as "tanks", and the name stuck. There were two versions, one with two six-pounder guns, the other with machine guns. The first time tanks showed their worth was in the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, when nearly 400 of them led two platoons of infantry on a six-mile front that penetrated further than any previous attack, taking 7,500 prisoners and 120 guns.

The obvious advantages of the tank were seen by other countries and there were great developments before the Second World War, when the German Panzers demonstrated how effective tanks could be when used in conjunction with aircraft.

Coffee filter [1908, Berlin]

Europeans knew nothing about the intoxicating pleasures of drinking coffee until the 16th century. For the next 300 years, coffee fanatics - J. S. Bach and Immanuel Kant among them - would find their enjoyment tainted by a thick, gritty residue in their final sips.

The gritty coffee-drinking experience was revolutionised on July 8 1908, when the Berlin Patent Office received a registration from a Dresden housewife. Melitta Bentz had invented a prototype for the first coffee filter, with the aid of a piece of her son's blotting paper and a perforated tin can. With her husband, Bentz set up a company, called Melitta, devoted to the filter's development, and in 1936 patented the conical filter that is still used today.

The short, sharp hit of the espresso had its origins some 200 years earlier in metal jugs that, when heated on a stove, forced boiling water through ground coffee, but it took a succession of false starts for a mechanical espresso maker to be successful.

At the Paris Exposition in 1855, Edward de Santais showed a complicated prototype espresso machine with four chambers that forced steam and hot water through ground coffee. An Italian, Luigi Bezzera, patented the first commercial espresso machine, based on de Santais's design, in 1901. Bezzera was an inept businessman and his rights were bought in 1903 by Desiderio Pavoni, who produced the espresso machine in quantity from 1905 in his factory in Italy.

The best espresso was found to be made at a temperature of 90C and a pressure of about 150 psi (between nine and 10 times atmospheric pressure). In 1938, M. Cremonesi, another Italian, designed a piston-type pump which forced hot, but not boiling water through the coffee. This was installed in Achille Gaggia's coffee bar in Italy. Gaggia saw the value of the design and set up in business in 1946 selling his own version of the Cremonesi machine, called the Gaggia, with great and continuing success.

Neon lamp [1910, Georges Claude]

The vivid red glow of neon energised with a strong electrical current was a sensation at its first public showing, the Paris Motor Show in 1910. It had been discovered eight years earlier by the French engineer Georges Claude, who was the first to try the inert gas in a lamp.

Claude set up a company, Claude Neon, to market the invention around the world. Advertisers soon realised that the light was highly visible during the day, and the glass tubes could be shaped to form words and pictures.

The vibrant night landscapes of American cities were first lit by neon in 1923, when Claude started exporting his tubes. By using different gases more than 150 different colours can be produced.

Kitchen mixer [1910, Hamilton, Beach and Osius]

The first patent known to have been made for a mixer belongs to L.H. Hamilton, Chester Beach and Fred Osius. In 1910 the trio formed the Hamilton Beach Manufacturing Company to make a mixer that looked similar to machines used to make milk shakes today.

The first domestic version of a multi-purpose mixer with several attachments is said to be the KitchenAid, invented by Herbert Johnson, an engineer, and sold to the US Navy in 1916 for kneading dough. It was the first mixer in which the beater and the bowl rotated in opposite directions, and it sold for $189.50 for home use from 1919. A more affordable and portable version was introduced in the 1920s and has since become a "design classic".

In 1922, Stephen J. Poplawski invented the blender, when he became the first to put a spinning blade at the bottom of a container. Poplawski, a drugstore owner, used his invented appliance to make soda-fountain drinks. In 1935, Fred Waring collaborated with Fred Osius to improve on Poplawski's idea to make the Waring Blender, which is still sold today.

Stenotype machine [1911, Ward Stone Ireland]

The problem of how to record speech in courtrooms and conferences quickly, quietly and accurately taxed engineers and inventors throughout the latter part of the 19th century.

Ward Stone Ireland, an American court reporter and shorthand enthusiast, came up with a machine in 1911. He called it the Ireland Stenotype Shorthand Machine and it was an instant success. Weighing in at five kilograms, it had a fully depressible keyboard, making it possible for typists to record whole words and numbers at a stroke and in tests it was proved faster than the most accomplished shorthand writers of the day.

Ireland founded the Universal Stenotype Company, which went on to improve the machine, making thousands of models for the American government during the First World War. But the government didn't pay for the Stenotypes that they ordered and the company was bankrupted.

Stenotype machines now used have 22 keys (some letters are represented by combinations of keys) that print on to a thin strip of paper. By using abbreviations, stenographers can type up to three words in a single stroke.

Brassière [1913, Mary Phelps Jacob]

For centuries the female breast has endured discomfort in the pursuit of the changing fashions for an ideal silhouette.

A "breast supporter" was patented in 1893 by Marie Tucek, a device involving separate pockets for the breasts and straps with hook and eye closures. It did not catch on.

The first practical, popular brassière to receive a patent was invented by the New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob in 1913. Jacob had bought a sheer silk dress and didn't want to wear the whalebone-stuffed corset of the period beneath it.

She came up with an alternative: two silk handkerchiefs joined with pink ribbon. It freed a generation of women from the confines of the corset, which had reigned supreme since Catherine de Medici's ban on thick waists at the court of her husband, Henri II of France, in the mid-16th century.

Jacob patented the invention in 1914 and went on to sell it under the name Caresse Crosby. It didn't make her fortune: her business collapsed and she sold the rights on to Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Over the following 30 years they made $15 million from the New York woman's inspired improvisation.

In 1928, when flappers' fashion dictated that women should be flat-chested, Ida Rosenthal, a Russian immigrant, came up with the idea for grouping women into alphabetical categories according to cup size.

Ecstasy [1913, Merck]

When the German pharmaceutical giant Merck registered the patent for 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine (mdma) in 1913, its destiny as the signature drug for the "Ecstasy Generation" 70 years later was impossible to predict. Merck decided against marketing the drug, developed primarily as an appetite suppressant.

In 1967 the fringe biologist Alexander Shulgin, fascinated by the power of mind-altering chemicals after receiving morphine for a hand injury, rediscovered mdma. Shulgin was the first known human to have tried it, recording its effects - along with 179 other psychoactive drugs - in his landmark publication pihkal (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved). Entry 109, mdma, was described as the closest to his expectations of the perfect therapeutic drug.

MDMA works by inhibiting the uptake of the serotonin, a brain chemical that helps control depression, anxiety, memory disturbance and other psychiatric disorders. Derived from an organic compound, Ecstasy can be made only in the laboratory in a complex process. It acts as an empathogen-entactogen, increasing communication and empathy and promoting a sense of well-being. Between 1977 and 1985, when it was outlawed by the US Drug Enforcement Agency , mdma was used experimentally on as many as half a million people to treat clinical depression, schizophrenia and even in marriage guidance.

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