Associate Professor (1986)

Member of Committe on the History of Environment and Technology

History of American Technology and Business

Office Hours: Thurs. 12:30-2:00

Office: A220 Thornton Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6113

Fax: (434) 924-4306

Email: wc4pvirginia.edu

Education

A.B. Holy Cross College 1977
M.A. Univ. of Pennsylvania 1981
Ph.D. Univ. of Pennsylvania 1984

Publications, Awards, and Activities

Publications

Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

"The Telephone as Political Instrument: Gardiner Hubbard and the Political Construction of the Telephone, 1875-1880." in M. Allen and G. Hecht, Eds., Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 25-55.

"Tesla, Motors, and Myths." Phlogiston (Serbian journal of the history of science) 5:77-102 (2000).

"Alternating Current Comes to America: Edison, Thomson, and Tesla" Proceedings of the International Symposium on Galileo Ferraris and the Conversion of Energy: Developments of Electrical Engineering over a Century (Turin: Istituto Elettrotecnico Nazionale Galileo Ferraris, 2000), 143-78.

"Invention and Evolution: The Case of Edison's Sketches of the Telephone," in J. Ziman, Ed., Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 137-58.

"Electrical Inventions and Cultural Traumas: The Telephone in America and Germany, 1860-1880," in K. Plitzner, Ed., Elektriztat in der Geisteschichte (Bassum, Austria: Verlag fur Geschichte de Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, 1998), 143-54.

"Innovation and the Modern Corporation: From Heroic Invention to Industrial Science" in J. Krige and D. Pestre, Eds., Science in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), 203-26.

"Artifacts and Frames of Meaning: Thomas A. Edison, His Managers, and the Cultural Construction of Motion Pictures" in W. E. Bijker and J. Law, Eds., Shaping Technology, Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 175-198.

With Michael E. Gorman, "Understanding Invention as a Cognitive Process: The Case of Thomas Edison and Early Motion Pictures, 1888-1891." Social Studies of Science 20:387-430 (August 1990).

"Academic Entrepreneurship and Engineering Education: Dugald C. Jackson and the MIT-GE Cooperative Engineering Course, 1907-1932." Technology and Culture 29:536-567 (July 1988). Reprinted in The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture, ed. T. S. Reynolds (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 367-398.

Awards

Research Grant from the Sloan Foundation to write a biography of Nikola Tesla, 1997-2000.

Research grant from the Bankard Fund for Political Economy, University of Virginia, for "Understanding the Conservative Introduction of Network Technologies: Tesla, Marconi, and the Development of Radio," 1998.

Summer Research Grant in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Virginia, 1996.

Newcomen Fellow in Business History, Harvard Business School, 1988-1989.

Activities

Co-Editor, MIT Press book series, "Inside Technology: New Social and Historical Approaches to Technology," with Wiebe Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch. Since 1987. Eighteen books published.

Society for the History of Technology, Dexter Book Prize Committee, 2000-2002

Trustee, Newcomen Society of the United States, since 1990.

Trustee, Business History Conference, 1999-2001.

Current Research

Ideal and Illusion: A Life of Nikola Tesla. Under contract to Princeton University Press.

General author and editor, Technology in World History. A six-volume history of technology from the stone age to the twentieth century. Under development with Andromeda Oxford, Ltd. and to be published by Oxford University Press.