Dissertation Research: Behind the Box: Science, Technology, and the Television Industry, 1920-1970

本研究以电视为个案，有助于更广泛地理解二十世纪美国技术与社会之间的复杂关系。它关注电视的技术和组织发展，从20世纪头几十年的实验室实验开始，到战后几年作为一个大型技术系统的成熟。参与电视业务的电子公司的研究和商业战略从战前到战后发生了根本性的变化。因此，电视是一个案例，研究一个行业、其研究结构和一个复杂的技术系统如何随着第二次世界大战和冷战的深刻变革而发生变化。这项研究从广泛的文献资料来源出发，分析了20世纪大部分时间里电视的庞大技术体系。它是由一系列问题驱动的，其中许多问题嵌入了关于美国技术、工业研究和冷战科学技术的广泛历史文献中。独立发明家和公司发明者是如何定义、处理和解决1930年代S所说的电视的“问题”的？第二次世界大战对电视技术和美国电子公司的研究管理方式有什么影响？冷战对战后消费电子产品的发展产生了怎样的影响？电视是如何应用于军事项目的？

Using television as a case study, this study contributes to the broad understanding of the complex relationship between technology and society in twentieth century America. It focuses on the technological and organizational development of television from its beginnings as a laboratory experiment in the first decades of the twentieth century to its maturity as a large technological system in the postwar years. The research and business strategy of the electronics firms involved in television changed fundamentally from the prewar to the postwar period. As such, television serves as a case study of how an industry, its research structure, and a complex technological system changed in response to the profound transformations of World War II and the Cold War. Drawing from a wide range of documentary sources, the study analyzes the large technological system of television through much of the twentieth century. It is driven by a series of questions, much of which are embedded in the broad historical literatures on American technology, industrial research, and Cold War science and technology. How did independent and corporate inventors define, approach, and solve the `problem` of television in the 1930's? What were the implications of WWII for the technology of television and for the ways in which research was managed at U.S. electronic firms? How did the Cold War influence the development of consumer electronics in the postwar years? In what ways was television applied to military projects?