This thesis explores how the complex interplay between gender and technology significantly shaped the popularization of commercial aviation in the United States during the 1920s and 30s. As technological innovations improved both the safety and efficiency of airplanes during the early part of the twentieth century, commercial aviation industries increasingly worked to position flight as a viable means of mass transportation. In order to win the trust and money of potential passengers, however, industry proponents recognized the need to separate flight from its initial association with danger and masculine strength by convincing the general public of aviation’s safety and reliability. My work examines the efforts made by industry executives, pilots, and popular news sources to remake the public image of flight by specifically positioning women—as pilots, wives, and mothers—as central to the popularization of commercial aviation. More specifically, this thesis investigates the ways in which female popularizers of commercial aviation effectively mediated the boundaries between technologies and society, and how women’s positions as technological boundary workers often required them to redefine the social meanings and expectations of their gender.

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Around the turn of the twenty-first century, universities in the United States extended their longstanding history of cross-border activities by not only moving professors, students, and scholarship abroad but programs and campuses, as well. This trend towards transnationalization has especially involved polytechnics due to international demand for American technoscientific higher education driven by markets that favor its perceived socioeconomic utility. Using a method called "focal point analysis" that builds on the approaches of microhistory, the dissertation argues that these transnational polytechnics are globally traded commodities as well as international sociotechnical systems. They involve diversely situated users who co-configure these systems and the cultural, economic, and scientific flows moving through them. By analyzing historical moments tied to four trans/national locations (China, Ireland, India, and UAE) and institutions (MIT, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and NYIT) using a variety of online and offline archives, the dissertation shows how these users reengineer these contexts as well as globalization, the knowledge economy, and academic capitalism. as individual and group users reimagine their identities through engagement with transnational polytechnics, they also reconfigure the identities of these institutions and their contexts. The dissertation concludes that these trans/national users have blurred the national identity, financial imperatives, and scientific logics of the exported American polytechnic through stabilizing and destabilizing cultural configurations.

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This paper examines the education, events, and experiences of the Wright brothers in order to determine how they developed the necessary skills to engineer the first viable aircraft. Without high school diplomas, and with no advanced formal education, the Wright brothers were able to develop aircraft that far exceeded the capabilities of aircraft designed and built by professional engineers that had worked on the problem of flight for much longer and with substantially larger research budgets. I argue that the Wright brothers’ success resulted from their experiences in the printing and bicycle industries as well as their formal and informal educations at school and in the home. In the printing business it was their experiences designing and building printing presses, printing newspapers, and operating a job printing shop that taught them how to build machinery and work efficiently and methodically. These same skills were perfected as the Wright brothers managed their second business venture: The Wright Cycle Exchange.While working at the bicycle shop the Wrights learned to be proficient machinists as well as expert mechanics and frame builders. This industry provided them with many skills such as brazing and machining that would be directly applicable to aircraft fabrication. In addition to these skills, building bicycle frames and wheels taught them practical material limits and structural design that informed their aircraft design decisions. Moreover, bicycle design influenced their approach to aircraft control and aerodynamic theory that gave them an edge over other aeronautical experimenters in their race to the sky. When these skills were combined with their rigid religious upbringing, the Wright brothers were uniquely prepared to solve the complex problem of practical human flight. It was the combination of their fabrication skills, understanding of material limits, dogged determination, methodical testing procedures, and their unique approach to aircraft control that was informed by their experiences with bicycles that made them the first in flight.

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We think of the lobotomy as utterly primitive and brutal; we shudder at the idea of it. The archetypal image of creepiness, violence, and unnecessary brutality was expressed in the book and movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This procedure weighs heavy on America’s conscience but in 1945 the procedure was characterized as being as gentle as ‘cutting through butter’ and the therapeutic effect was described as ‘cutting out worry’. How did the lobotomy gain such widespread acceptance? One part of the answer is that Walter Freeman advocated for it not just among his colleagues, but through the popular media outlets of his day as well. In this thesis I will claim that, starting in 1936, Walter Freeman influenced the positive portrayal of lobotomies in the American press. He participated in visual culture that promoted a convergence between medical culture and the popular press by cultivating a representation of the procedure that could appeal to both. His tools included narrative accounts, images, and a public dramatization of himself that was hard to resist. I will show how these efforts were quite successful in the beginning, but that by 1947 he started to lose control of the perceptions and narrative he had worked so hard to construct.

This thesis explores changes in experimental reporting during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In particular, I examine and compare some of the works of Count Lorenzo Magalotti, namely the Saggi di Naturali Esperienza or Essays on Natural Experiments and the Relazione d'Inghilterra. In 1667, as secretary of the Accademia del Cimento – the Tuscan experimental academy founded in 1657 – Magalotti (1637-1712) authored the Saggi, a collection of experimental reports. These reports included extensive written descriptions of experiments along with dozens of engravings depicting the instruments custom-made for the experiments. Magalotti also served as ambassador and agent of the Tuscan court and in the same year he traveled to England to offer a copy of the Saggi to King Charles II. While in England, Magalotti corresponded extensively with Prince Leopold and with the future grand duke, Cosimo III, reporting his observations of the English court: descriptions of political, military, and intellectual life at the court of Charles II. Magalotti’s account of his experience was compiled as Relazione d'Inghilterra in 1669. My work shows that the Saggi and the Relazione, although different in their content, emerged from the same historical context. I argue that the way information was conceived and organized, whether it originated from experimental practices (Saggi) or diplomatic actions (Relazione), changed over the course of the seventeenth century. Experimental reporting, like political reporting, became parceled into small, discrete units suited for high rates of information exchange.