Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-ray
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.19 (970 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0156032449 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 368 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-10-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Simon is an English professor at Skidmore College and biographer of such literary figures as William James, and her literary background is both a strength and a weakness. From Publishers Weekly This, well, illuminating social history of the introduction of electric power in 19th-century America illustrates a thesis that has resonance today: that the introduction of any potentially transforming technology creates a tension between desirable changes in day-to-day life and the anxiety that follows any step into the unknown. On the other hand, Morse's development
Good but not great, your experience may differ Dean Georgacopoulos It's hard not to learn something from a book like this and there is some interesting info but felt she spends too much time on these long ramblings that are peripheral to the subject like the three chapters she spends just on mesmerism.. When Electricity Was Scary Today we worry about stem cell research, and cloning, and viruses that shut down computers. They are technological and scientific problems that we are trying to grope our way around because we have never had to face them before. We all take electricity for granted now, but a hundred years ago, electricity and the electrification of businesses and homes were scary new worlds. In _Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-ray_ (Harcourt), Linda Simon has written a social history of t. Atheen said Superb. Dark Light is a surprising book. Although not a professor of history, Linda Simon is associate professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and it shows. The book is well researched and very informative, but more importantly, it's very readable.I have to admit it took me a while to figure where we were going in the enterprise. At first the book seems like a biography of Edison. This would hardly be surprising given the subtitle of the book: Electricity and Anxiety from the Tel
Meanwhile, electrotherapy emerged as a popular medical treatment for everything from depression to digestive problems. Forty years after Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, only 20 percent of American families had wired their homes. Why did Americans welcome electricity into their bodies even as they kept it from their homes? And what does their reaction to technological innovation then have to teach us about our reaction to it today? In Dark Light, Linda Simon offers the first cultural history that delves into those questions, using newspapers, novels, and other primary sources. But in 1879 Americans reacted to the advent of electrification with suspicion and fear. The modern world imagines that the invention of electricity was greeted with great enthusiasm. Tracing fifty years of technological transformation, from Morse's invention of the t