By Laura Christine Otis
This compelling interdisciplinary learn investigates the clinical and cultural roots of latest conceptions of the community, together with computing device details structures, the human frightened process, and communications know-how, demonstrating that identical to the community is absolutely centuries outdated. Networking locations present comparisons of nerve and computing device networks in viewpoint, exploring early analogies linking nerves and telegraphs and demonstrating how 19th-century neurobiologists, engineers, and fiction writers prompted each one other’s principles approximately communication.The interdisciplinary sweep of neuroscientist and literary student Laura Otis’s e-book is striking, focusing concurrently on literary works by means of such authors as George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Henry James, and Mark Twain and at the medical and technological achievements of such pioneers as Luigi Galvani, Hermann von Helmholtz, Charles Babbage, Samuel Morse, and Werner von Siemens. Networking will attract basic readers in addition to to students within the fields of interdisciplinary experiences, 19th-century literature, and the historical past of technological know-how and know-how. The paperback variation of the publication has been up to date with a preface through the author.“A refined yet jargon-free research of the ways that clinical and technological rules created novel explanatory metaphors that still turned robust instruments for realizing social and usual systems.”—Technology and tradition
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Extra resources for Networking: communicating with bodies and machines in the nineteenth century
Example text
A nerve impulse, on the other hand, looked pretty much the same in every nerve, for every type of stimulus, and bore no mimetic relationship to the event that had inspired it. During the second-and successful-attempt to lay a transatlantic cable in the 1860s, physicist William Thomson (1824-1907) repeated~ common eighteenth-century galvanic experiment by applying the telegraph wires to his own tongue.
A] hundred-year-old dream ... the identity ofthe nerve substance with electricity" (Clarke andjacyna 183). · The neuroplasm, he believed, consisted of a series of "electro-motive molecules," elementary. particles with one positive and one negative side. These particles could change their orientation according to their electrochemical environment (DuBois-Reymond, "On the Time Required" 132). When a srimulus excited rhe nerve, it was not creating or destroying any electromotive elements; it was polarizing the particles, inducing a temporary electrical change by flipping their oriemation.
By referring to the better-known automata, which could perform patterns of physical motion but could not "decide" which motions to make, Menabrea hoped to convey the engine's ability to perform mental operations without judging which calculations to do. " He reassured readers that "the engine cannot reason, nor does it in any way encroach upon the functions of the human understanding, its office is to execute the conceptions of the mind" (160, 166). Babbage himself saw his engines as pitifully crude in comparison to the living mind.