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Technology

1951

American Small Sailing Craft: Their Design, Development and Construction

boat-building

maritime

sailing

bob-s-books

Howard Irving Chapelle - 1951

American Small Sailing Craft (originally published 1951) is considered the classic among small-boat builders and historians.

In it Chapelle has documented many fast-vanishing working boats, making this the authoritative history of a passing maritime fleet.

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

Marshall McLuhan - 1951

This is the devastating book which first established Marshall McLuhan's reputation as the foremost (and the wittiest) critic of modern mass communications.The Mechanical Bride is vintage McLuhan -- so aptly illustrated by dozens of examples from ads, comic strips, columnists, etc., that those who were stung by McLuhan were hard put for rebuttals.

It shows how sex was first used to sell industrial hardware, how Orphan Annie still keeps the world on track, and how an Arabian Nights wonderland of mass entertainment and suggestion makes information irrelevant, and sends us to bed at night too dazed to question whether we're happy or not. We live in an age in which legions of highly educated professionals dedicate themselves to the task of getting inside the collective public mind with the object of manipulating, exploiting and controlling.

The Internet and Everyone

J. Christopher Jones - 1951

In this extraordinary book, a series of letters written at the beginning of an era in which the book has lost the significance it had and in which electronic correspondence, in which anyone may join, becomes the medium of the moment', John Chris Jones explores the potential of the internet as the instigator of a new kind of life.The book is in fact a record of an electronic text, an attempt to find a new form of writing which acknowledges the significance of the connectedness and immediacy of computer networks.

In the author's words, it is 'a record of trying to think some of the unthinkables that our technologies have brought before us in this pause before the post-industrial breakfast ... '. Based on an analysis of automation (the replacement of human skills by machines, as industrialisation was the replacement of human effort), the possibilities opened up by the transmission of information by electricity, and a refuel to accept that the virtual' world is in any sense less real than the world excluding computers, Jones sees the internet as making possible an awakening from the 'frozen dreaming' of industrial life.

Handbook of Dangerous Materials

N. Irving Sax - 1951

A fore-runner to some of his later titles, listing many nasties and yielding some interestiong insights to a more innocent era..