| Abstrakt: |
The subject of chapter 6 is the New York Crystal Palace exhibition of 1853, which sought to replicate on American soil the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, where Europeans first experienced the emerging capacity of American manufacturers. Susan Branson's I Scientific Americans i is a somewhat idiosyncratic cultural history of the United States that seeks to explain how science and technology became essential to American identity before the Civil War. The first third of chapter 3, which focuses on mechanical and steam technology, is devoted to fraudulent claims of perpetual motion machines, which, as with balloons, suggest that many Americans reacted to new technologies indiscriminately. [Extracted from the article] |
