Practical mechanics, domestic technology, and the culture of modernity in Britain, c. 1870- 1940

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This project aims to examine the vibrant culture of amateur experimentation with new technological artefacts - principallycameras, automobiles, and wireless sets - which took root at the turn of the twentieth century. It seeks to provide a newoptic on historiographical debates about the relationships between technology and gender, and about the 'domestication'of technology in modern Britain. In doing so it hopes to provide insights into the culture of modernity in Britain morebroadly. By exploring the early culture of tinkering with cars, radios and cameras, this research hopes to provide anaccount of new technology which stresses the richness of the relationships between humans and machines. It seeks tomove away from a historiographical tendency to foreground the production, 'diffusion', and representation of newtechnologies, and instead observe actors as they creatively engaged with them. This will also, it is hoped, provide a newway of thinking about the processes by which those technologies became 'domesticated'. A further aim of studying thelargely male pursuit of practical mechanics is to provide an insight into the emergence of middle-class, masculine'technical' identities across this period. Again this will seek to correct a historiographical tendency to describe or assumethis identity without asking how or why it came into being. The emphasis in this research will thus be on the ways inwhich actors made themselves as they tinkered with machines.