Culture’s Engine: Inside Science and Technology

Acknowledgements
Contents
1: Introduction
2: The Odd Couple
	Chicken and Egg and Chicken Again
	Doxastic Delivers
	Mysteries of the Craft
3: Why Are Humans Different?
	The Great Discontinuity
4: Three Flavours of Technology
	The Technology of Matter
	But Energy Was Not Far Behind
	The Wonders of Steam
	If I Only Had Wings
	The First Passenger-Carrying Airline
	Information, the Technology of Feeble Electric Currents
	Godalming, Cradle of Worldwide Electrical Power
5: Subtle Subversives
	Small Is Beautiful
	Going Cordless
	Power for Free
	Lighten Our Darkness
	Less Ambitious Information Technology
	The Small Revolutions
6: The Active Elements Appear
	The Edison Effect
	Silicon’s Tanks on the Vacuum Lawn
7: Drivers of Technology
	Politics Is a Funny Old Game
8: Technology’s Other Half
	How to Sponsor a Design
	Failed Designs
	Learning Design the Hard Way
	Competing Designs
	Wholly Rational Is Unattainable
	Coping with the Irrational
	Design Begins
9: Talk the Talk
	From Dissenting to Canonical and Contrariwise
	Multiple Canonical Designs
	Canonical and Dissenting Processes and Services
	Design by Evolution
	Revolutionary Designs
	The Quest for Perfection—A Deadly Trap
10: Patterns of Innovation
	More of the Same
	Passing Over of Quantity into Quality1
	The Knight’s Move
	The Prophetic Role of Precursors
	Lucretia, Dead and Buried
	The Analogue Era
	The Honourable Failures
	Precursors Now?
11: Invention Push and Market Pull
	Charm
	Perceived Feasibility
	Perceived Market
	From Push to Pull
	Design Too Has a Natural History
	Complications
	Sailing-Ship Effect
12: Deep Design
	Can Something Come from Nothing?
	Metaphor Plays Its Part
	How Does Creativity Operate in Practice?
	Can It Be Made or Put Together?
	The Role of the Model
	Abstract Models
	The Visuals
	Patterns of Interconnection
	Topology to Reality: The Preternatural Chip
	The Confidence to Go On
13: A Hazardous Business
	Control in Design
	Perfect Information?
	Tragedy Following a Moving Target
	The Prospect of Failure
	Risk and Irrationality
14: Will Anyone Want It?
	The Adoption Environment
	Tawell the Quaker Murderer
	Conflict over Innovation
	It Won’t Work and We Don’t Need It
	A Case History: Adoption of the Telegraph
	It’s for Real Now
	Surprise, Surprise!
15: Failure Foreseen
	Anticipation of Failure
	A Disaster of Major Proportions
	What Happens If the Pumps Fail?
	What Are the Lessons to Be Learned?
	The Day I Wrecked a Nuclear Submarine
	Designing for Failure
	When the Party Is Over
	A Happy Ending
16: Can Machines Think?
	Computers: The Successive Generations
	The Universal Computer Culture
	What Happened to the IBM PC?
17: Lady Lovelace’s Revenge
	How Things Began
	Pretty as a Picture
	A Courtesy to Apple
	Why Did Computers Evolve That Way?
	The Social Role of the Versatile Digital Machine
	A Voice Without Influence?
18: The Dark Side
	No Return Ticket
	Dislike of the Incomprehensible
	The Fear of Enslavement
	Information Explosions
	The Monstrous and the Damaging
	Neo-Luddism
19: Be Careful What You Wish For
	War in the Air
	The Doomsday Machine
	The Captains and the Kings Depart
20: Past, Present, Future
	Two Altogether Different Types of Evolution
	Evolutionary Failures
	Could Technology be a Dead-End?
21: Technology and Dreaming
	The Victorian Computer
	Humanity’s Missed Chances
	The Influence of Culture
	Optional Futures
Appendix: A Clutch of Designers
Index