![]() ![]() ![]() Everyone knows, of course, that trains still operate and are in many ways as important as ever. ![]() Here we see the workings of the "space age" depending on a technology that had long ago "disappeared," at least from the standard accounts of the history of technology. ![]() The CNN.com headline nicely illustrates this coming and going. An obsession with "innovation" leads to a tidy timeline of progress, focusing on iconic machines, but an investigation of "technology in use" reveals that some "things" appear, disappear, and reappear-often resulting in hybrid forms which he calls "Creole" technologies. In his important and convincing book The Shock of the Old, Edgerton attempts to undermine simplistic understandings of technology and the way it changes by looking at what technologies are actually being used (and by whom) at any one time. On, CNN.com carried the headline "Train Carrying Shuttle Rockets Derails." Such a juxtaposition of Robert Stephenson and Robert Goddard would probably appeal to David Edgerton. ![]()
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