1st Edition

Spaces of Inquiry Making Science and Technology in the Modern World

328 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book traces the historical development of key sites of knowledge creation in science and technology and the robust traditions of scholarship around their origins, exploring commonalities, divergences, and transnational features of knowledge-making cultures from the 18th century to the present. The “space of inquiry” is a meeting of knowledge, labor, and public policy that explodes beyond... Read more

Prologue: Spaces of Inquiry

1. The Laboratory, the Studio, and the Clinic
Robert H. Kargon and Stuart W. Leslie

2. “Hallway Conversations about the Silicon Valley Phenomenon”: Bob Kargon and Bill Leslie’s Spaces of Inquiry
Scott Gabriel Knowles and David P.D. Munns

Bibliography of Works by Robert Kargon and Stuart W. “Bill” Leslie

Part 1: Laboratory Spaces Reconsidered

3. Light and Lighting along Cleveland's Euclid Avenue: A Transportation Scape and a Linear “Space of Inquiry” During the Second Industrial Revolution
Thomas D. Cornell

4. Organism X and the Oyster Commons: The Chesapeake MSX Disease Crisis as a Space of Inquiry for Advancing Laboratory-Based Aquaculture, 1959–69
Christine Keiner

5. Spatial History of the Kamiokande Observatory: Masatoshi Koshiba, His Cosmic Ray Research, and the Creation of Observational Neutrino Astrophysics
Takehiko Hashimoto

6. Nuclear Gerontology: Maintenance as Expertise
Michael Aaron Dennis

7. Screens, Models, and Offices: The National Weather Center as a Space of Inquiry
Hunter Heyck

Part 2: Imperial and Decolonized Spaces

8. Making (and Using) Ohms: Laboratories and Testing Rooms
Bruce J. Hunt

9. Ships as Spaces of Inquiry in Nineteenth-Century Ocean Science
Penelope K. Hardy

10. Innovative Spaces in Mussolini's Italy
Arthur Molella

11. Is There Life Beyond Paradigm?: Max Marwick’s Epistemological Journey
Morris Berman

Part 3: Labs Without Walls

12. “Enquire Within upon Everything”: World's Fairs, Museums, and Progressive Development
Miriam R. Levin

13. “$50,000 of Free Advertising for MIT”: Selling Science, Technology, and Universities at the Century of Progress
Amy Sue Bix

14. Garages and Other Domestic Spaces of Inquiry
Eric C. Nystrom and Andrew L. Russell

15. Space for Play: Inspiring the Next Generation of STEM Workers at Space Camp
Emily A. Margolis

16. Theater as a Space of Inquiry
Robert Marc Friedman

Part 4: Spaces for Education

17. Improving the Best: The International Education Board in Copenhagen in the 1920s
Finn Aaserud

18. The Charm School: A Summer Research Experience for Undergraduate Women in the 1940s
Joanna Behrman

19. The Temple, the Phoenix and the Heavy-Water Pot: Teaching Reactors as Spaces of
Inquiry
David P.D. Munns

20. “The Summer Writing Group: Creating a Fruitful Space for Curriculum Development in the “New Math” Era
David Lindsay Roberts

21. Campus Career Courses as Spaces of Technological Inquiry
Greg Downey

Biography

Amy Sue Bix, Distinguished Professor of History at Iowa State University, won the History of Science Society’s Margaret Rossiter Prize for her 2013 book ‘Girls Coming to Tech!’: A History of American Engineering Education for Women. Her current research examines advocacy for girls in STEM.

Penelope K. Hardy is an historian of ocean science and technology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her 2021 article “Finding the History of the World at the Bottom of the Ocean” received the Charles Dana Gibson Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History.

Bruce J. Hunt is a historian of science and technology at the University of Texas. His book Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire appeared in 2021 and he is now at work on a biography of James Clerk Maxwell.

Scott Gabriel Knowles is Research Faculty in History and Senior Research Director for the Defense Industrial Base Institute at Northeastern University. His work focuses on the history of disasters worldwide. He published “Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene: A Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula” in 2020.