A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Notes

1. David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001) may have shocked some of the art world in its claims concerning the use of the camera obscura in Renaissance art practice, but historians of technology had been familiar with this fact as a commonplace for decades.

2. Lenses for uses in eyeglasses were common in Europe by the thirteenth century and, similarly, were also in use in China.

3. An interdisciplinary group located at the Free University of Berlin produced a major study of instruments in both art and science in the seventeenth century; see Ludgar Schwarte, Helmar Schrum and Walther Lazarzig, Instrumente in Kunst und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Walter de Greuter, 2006).

4. Joseph Niepce had used silver salts to fix photographic images before Daguerre, but Daguerre perfected the process and published his results in 1869 – photography as a technology was immediately adopted in the industrial world of the time and its use in science through connecting a photographic camera to both standard and spectroscopic telescopes occurred within a year of Daguerre’s publication.

5. A full account of medical imaging, from the X-ray on, may be found in Betty Ann Kevles, Naked to the Bone (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1998).

6. See Nigel Henbest and Michael Marten, The New Astronomy, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The new astronomy is a term applied to EMS frequencies beyond the optical spectrum. ...