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

这个项目旨在研究活跃的业余实验文化，用新技术的人工制品——主要是照相机、汽车和无线电视——在二十世纪之交扎根。它试图为关于技术与性别之间关系的史学辩论提供一种新的视角，以及关于现代英国技术的“驯化”。通过这样做，它希望更广泛地提供对英国现代性文化的见解。通过探索早期修理汽车、收音机和照相机的文化，这项研究希望提供一种新技术的解释，强调人与机器之间关系的丰富性。它试图摆脱一种历史编纂倾向，即突出新技术的生产、“传播”和表现，而是观察演员创造性地参与其中。人们希望，这也将提供一种思考这些技术被“驯化”的过程的新方式。研究以男性为主的实用力学追求的另一个目的，是为了深入了解这一时期中产阶级、男性化的“技术”身份的出现。再一次，这将试图纠正一种史学倾向，即描述或假设这种身份，而不问它是如何或为什么产生的。因此，这项研究的重点将放在演员在摆弄机器时的自我塑造方式上。

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.