1856 började Statens Järnvägar med gods- och persontrafik och någon gång under början av 1860-talet så uppstod önskemålet att ha uppvärmning i förstaklasskupéer under de kalla vintermånaderna. Därmed så infördes den första uppvärmningen i personvagnar. Systemet som infördes köptes in från företaget Lauenstein & Co, Hamburg, där man även köpte in de första personvagnarna till Statens Järnvägar. Värmesystemet etablerades i de svenska personvagnarna under det tidiga 1860-talet och kom senare att utvecklas för att bättre passa det skandinaviska klimatet.   Värmesystemet som kom att bli det svenska systemet var i stället för att vara baserat på varmvatten, som i andra delar av Centraleuropa, baserad på uppvärmning av sand. Det kom att kallas för sandvärmesystemet. Cylindrar fylldes med uppvärmd sand som sedan placerades under sofforna i så kallade blecklådor. På utvalda stationer så fanns det ugnar och personal för att hantera uppvärmningen och utbyte av cylindrarna. Värmesystemet var i bruk under cirka ett årtionde innan det sedan byttes ut mot ångvärmen under 1870-talet. Eftersom det skrotades ifrån Statens Järnvägar under det tidiga 1870-talet så är det väldigt lite som eventuellt har överlevt och finns bevarat idag i de museala samlingarna. / In 1856, the State Railways began transporting goods and passengers and sometime in the early 1860s, the desire arose to have heating in first class compartments during the cold winter months. Therefore, the first heating system was introduced in passenger carriages. The system that was introduced was purchased from the company Lauenstein & Co, Hamburg, where the first passenger coaches for the State Railways were also purchased. The heating system was established in the Swedish passenger carriages in the early 1860s and was over time developed to better suit the Scandinavian climate.    The heating system that became the Swedish system, instead of being based on hot water as used in other parts of central Europe, was instead based on heated sand. It came to be called the sand heating system. Cylinders were filled with heated sand which was then placed under the sofas in so-called tin boxes. At selected stations there were ovens and staff to manage the heating and replacement of the cylinders. The heating system was in use for about a decade before being replaced by steam heating in the 1870s. Since it was scrapped from the State Railways in the early 1870s, very little has actually survived and is preserved today in the museum collections.

The Meiji Restoration was the revolution that overthrew the feudal regime of the Tokugawa period in late nineteenth-century Japan. It was also the time of the opening of the country to the rest of the world, and Japan had to confront with Western powers. The Meiji government boldly accepted the new technologies from the West, and succeeded in swiftly industrializing the nation. However, this same government had been aggressive exclusionists and ultra-nationalists before the Restoration. In light of this fact, I investigate how national identity is linked to engineering education in Japan. My focus is on the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE), or Kobu-daigakko, in Tokyo during the late nineteenth century. The ICE was at the forefront of Westernization in the Meiji government. I specifically examine Yozo Yamao and Hirobumi Ito, who studied in Britain and were the co-founders of the college; Henry Dyer, the first principal; and the students of the ICE. As a result of the investigation, I conclude that the spirit of samurai (former warriors) was the ethos for Westernization at the ICE. They followed ethical code for the samurai, the essence of which was lordly pride as a ruling class. They upheld their ethical standard after the Meiji Restoration. Their spirit of rivalry and loyalty urged Yamao, Ito, and the students to emulate Western technology for ensuring the independence of Japan. The course of the ICE's development reveals that non-engineering motivations shared a mutual relationship with the engineering education of those at the ICE. / Master of Science

<p>The empirical focus of this study is the contemporary transition of the industrial area Koppardalen, situated in Avesta in the middle of Sweden. Koppardalen (literary translated “The Copper Valley”) got its name in 1987 when the Avesta municipality bought the area from an iron and steel company. For a century the Koppardalen area, or Norra verken which was its name before 1987, housed production of iron and steel and at its peak employed more than 2000 men.</p><p>In the beginning of the 1980s, iron and steel production had moved out and left the area almost abandoned. When the Avesta municipality became the new owner of Koppardalen it was part of a strategy to transform the area to make it more attractive to light industry and by doing so provide Avesta with new employment opportunities. These plans failed and what happened instead is the object of my analysis.</p><p>The overall purpose of the thesis is to describe and analyse the place of history in the transition process of the Koppardalen industrial area between 1987 and 2003. More specifically, the aim is to answer the two questions: What does the place of history look like? What does the place of history mean?</p><p>My basic theoretical inspiration comes from the French philosopher and critical hermeneuticer Paul Ricoeur and his reasoning about the logic of explanation and understanding. As an operative theoretical tool I use four fundamental historical tropes in order to analyse the place of history in the transition process.</p><p>I have chosen three physical and clearly visible changes in Koppardalen that each constitute one chapter in the study. The first change concerns the old blast furnace, which has been renovated and used for art exhibitions, museum installations and other cultural purposes. The second change concerns two former rolling mills, which have been partly torn down and partly rebuilt into a sports arena and office spaces. The third change concerns a new built bridge for pedestrians and bicyclists that connects the Koppardalen area with Avesta city centre. These two parts had earlier been separated from each other, physically as well as mentally.</p><p>By analysing these three changes I conclude that the most dominant historical trope to be found in Koppardalen is the story about “the foreign country”. The past becomes a different and thrilling contrast that could be used in the effort to make the former industrial area a beautiful, interesting and attractive place. Beside the trope of the foreign country, the story of similarity through history is also present in Koppardalen. Here, the past is compared with today’s situation and periods of change in the past are put into parallel with contemporary challenges of the post-industrial society. Both these tropes, the one of history as a foreign country and the one of history as a parallel of today, paradoxically strengthen the transition process and the power of those actors who work to transform the Koppardalen area.</p><p>One surprising element is the lack of the historical trope of a lost golden age. The proud and prosperous past in the sense of a lost golden age is not to be found in Koppardalen, or at least not in the rhetoric of the politicians and white-collar workers who are the driving forces in the process. In sum, the study shows how the place of history in a contemporary transition process contains a great variety of simultaneously occurring, non-competing historical tropes.</p><p>Key words: industrial history, history of technology, cultural heritage, place of history, use of history, re-use of industrial buildings, urban transition, Sweden, Bergslagen, Avesta.</p>

This research looks at questions of power and expression as they are composed in various ways within networked and computationally-informed situations of the present. Drawing from the term as it is originally invoked in practices of computing, the research puts forward execution as a central conceptual framework for its investigations. In a computer program, a program becomes executable when it is able to execute a set of procedures within a designated set of relations and affordances. Similarly, the concept of execution developed here looks at the ongoing negotiations of various formative relations and affordances (technical, cultural, material, political) in practices of execution, describing certain notable techniques applied towards the task of making things executable. The examples looked at include several dominant media and technology practices of the present, as well as several alternative practices that point to other possible modes of execution. In doing so, the research highlights certain politically-orientated issues involved in questions of execution, working to further develop specific approaches aimed at describing, questioning and intervening into practices of execution as they occur in the world.

The empirical focus of this study is the contemporary transition of the industrial area Koppardalen, situated in Avesta in the middle of Sweden. Koppardalen (literary translated “The Copper Valley”) got its name in 1987 when the Avesta municipality bought the area from an iron and steel company. For a century the Koppardalen area, or Norra verken which was its name before 1987, housed production of iron and steel and at its peak employed more than 2000 men. In the beginning of the 1980s, iron and steel production had moved out and left the area almost abandoned. When the Avesta municipality became the new owner of Koppardalen it was part of a strategy to transform the area to make it more attractive to light industry and by doing so provide Avesta with new employment opportunities. These plans failed and what happened instead is the object of my analysis. The overall purpose of the thesis is to describe and analyse the place of history in the transition process of the Koppardalen industrial area between 1987 and 2003. More specifically, the aim is to answer the two questions: What does the place of history look like? What does the place of history mean? My basic theoretical inspiration comes from the French philosopher and critical hermeneuticer Paul Ricoeur and his reasoning about the logic of explanation and understanding. As an operative theoretical tool I use four fundamental historical tropes in order to analyse the place of history in the transition process. I have chosen three physical and clearly visible changes in Koppardalen that each constitute one chapter in the study. The first change concerns the old blast furnace, which has been renovated and used for art exhibitions, museum installations and other cultural purposes. The second change concerns two former rolling mills, which have been partly torn down and partly rebuilt into a sports arena and office spaces. The third change concerns a new built bridge for pedestrians and bicyclists that connects the Koppardalen area with Avesta city centre. These two parts had earlier been separated from each other, physically as well as mentally. By analysing these three changes I conclude that the most dominant historical trope to be found in Koppardalen is the story about “the foreign country”. The past becomes a different and thrilling contrast that could be used in the effort to make the former industrial area a beautiful, interesting and attractive place. Beside the trope of the foreign country, the story of similarity through history is also present in Koppardalen. Here, the past is compared with today’s situation and periods of change in the past are put into parallel with contemporary challenges of the post-industrial society. Both these tropes, the one of history as a foreign country and the one of history as a parallel of today, paradoxically strengthen the transition process and the power of those actors who work to transform the Koppardalen area. One surprising element is the lack of the historical trope of a lost golden age. The proud and prosperous past in the sense of a lost golden age is not to be found in Koppardalen, or at least not in the rhetoric of the politicians and white-collar workers who are the driving forces in the process. In sum, the study shows how the place of history in a contemporary transition process contains a great variety of simultaneously occurring, non-competing historical tropes. / QC 20101221

The medical imaging technology called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) stems from a blind measurement technology which was further developed in research and practice to enable seeing into the inner body. Vision with MRI was open-ended, and it was developed and tamed in a context of fragmented medical perspectives on the body and on technology. "Technomedical Visions" addresses the formation of MRI’s specific visualities in the first decade of its introduction in Sweden. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how vision with MRI has been constructed in practice in relation to existing ways of knowing the body within medicine. Dussauge investigates first the early decisions that led to a national evaluation of MRI technology in the mid-1980s in Sweden. Then she addresses the shaping of MRI’s quantitative visuality in the practices of radiology, psychiatry and the laboratory, with focus on microhistories at St. Göran’s Hospital, Karolinska Institutet, Uppsala University Hospital, and Lund University. Dussauge shows that whereas authorities’ early decisions momentarily defined MRI as a radiological tool for immediate clinical use and evaluation, a crucial part of MRI’s introduction was the work conducted by MRI-users. These researchers from a range of scientific and medical disciplines performed, over time, a multitude of shapings of MRI’s vision. This studies shows how MRI was made congruent with existing technomedical gazes. The novel MRI gaze was made intelligible within cross-referential networks, and researchers reproduced technomedicine’s existing gazes both in the production, optimization and interpretation of MRI representations. Technomedical time frames, epistemologies and definitions of the normal and the pathological were reproduced and sometimes, re-cast, in the shaping of MRI in practice. This study also demonstrates that anatomy recurrently worked as an underlying frame for the exploration and production of MRI visions. Anatomy’s material visuality provided a site for the production of novel facts at the intersection of existing gazes. Through the practices of shaping MRI gazes, anatomy was systematically remediated, reproduced and reconfigured. / QC 20100714

Industrial society has changed thoroughly during the last half a century. In many Western cities and towns, new patterns of production and consumption entailed that centrally located industrial areas became redundant. The once lively workplace and urban core became silent and abandoned, gradually falling into decay. In recent decades, the former industrial built environment was reinterpreted and reused as apartments, offices, heritage sites, stages for artistic installations and destinations for cultural tourism. Companies and former workers, heritage and planning professionals, as well as artists and urban explorers, were some of the actors involved in the process. The overall aim of the study is to contribute to an understanding of this transformation, and hence it addresses questions about what happened to the industrial places that lost their original function and significance. How were they understood and used? Who engaged in their future? What were the visions and what was achieved? Three former industrial areas are examined from a historic perspective and with a critical hermeneutic approach: Koppardalen in Avesta, Sweden, the Ironbridge Gorge Museum in Britain, and Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in the Ruhr district of Germany. Included in the results that challenge previous research, the study claims that the key figures were often newcomers to the place, and white-collar professionals, rather than former workers asserting a historic perspective from below on the basis of a crisis experience. In general, the study shows how the redundant industrial place became an arena for visions of the future in a local community, and, furthermore, how it was being turned into a commodity in a complex gentrification process. The place was given new value by being regarded as an expression of the overall phenomenon of reused industrial buildings, and, simultaneously, as a unique and authentic entity. In the conversion of the physical environment, the industrial past became relatively harmless to many people, because the dark and difficult aspects were defused in different ways. Instead, the industrial place was understood in terms of adventure, beauty and spectacle, which included rust from the past as well as hope for the future. / QC 20100910

QC 20101118

In the decades following the Revolution, government officials and industrialists attempted to strike a balance between preserving a unique national identity and asserting Mexico's place in global affairs as a competitive, modern nation. Veneration of the aviators' bravery and technological mastery cut across political and cultural boundaries, setting standards for the model citizen of a modern world. The symbolic figure of the pilot proved an adept vessel for disseminating the values championed by the country's ruling party. Aviators validated the technological determinism that underpinned the government's development philosophy to domestic audiences, while projecting an image of strength abroad. This study explores the spectacle of aviation in cultural events including film, airshows, goodwill flights, and state-sponsored funerals, connecting the history of aviation to often-conflicting discourses of Revolutionary nationalism and modern cosmopolitanism that were espoused by both national and regional elites.

Ein wichtiges gesellschaftliches Integrationsmittel in der Hochmoderne (ca. 1880–1970) bildete das Versprechen einer besseren Zukunft durch technischen Fortschritt. Im Zuge technischer „Errungenschaften“ wuchs das Vertrauen in die Potenziale einer verwissenschaftlichten Technik, soziale und kulturelle Probleme lösen zu können. Besonders neue Technologien wurden zu Sinnbildern des Fortschritts. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg spielte die Automatisierung als Produktions- und Informationstechnik eine zentrale Rolle für das technisierte Fortschrittsversprechen: Sie wurde in beiden deutschen Staaten als revolutionär eingeschätzt und avancierte während des Kalten Krieges zu einem zentralen Thema des Systemwettstreites auf technisch-wissenschaftlichem Gebiet. Während jedoch in der Bundesrepublik um die Interpretation einer vermeintlichen „zweiten industriellen Revolution“ gerungen wurde, war man in der DDR überzeugt, dass die „wissenschaftlich-technische Revolution“ als „Werkzeug der Geschichte“ die kapitalistische Produktion überwinden werde. Die Arbeit fragt dementsprechend nach den historischen Ursachen der Vorstellung unbegrenzter Steigerungsfähigkeit der für das Gemeinwohl einsetzbaren technischen Mittel, welche mit der Automatisierung einen neuerlichen Höhepunkt und eine nahezu singuläre Symbolisierung fand.