Stefan Krebs - Böcker

Do you enjoy listening to music while driving? Do you find radio traffic information indispensable? Do you appreciate the moments of your drive in which you can listen to or sing along with whatever you like?This book shows how we created auditory privacy in cars, making them feel sound and safe, even though automobiles were highly noisy things at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains how engineers in the automotive industry found pride in making car engines quieter once they realized that noise stood for inefficiency. It follows them as they struggle against sounds audible within the car after the automobile had become a closed vehicle. It tells how noise-induced fatigue became an issue once the car became a mass means for touring across the country. It unravels the initial societal concerns about the dangers of car radio and what it did to drivers' attention span. It explores how car drivers listened to their cars' engines to diagnose car problems, and appreciated radio traffic information for avoiding traffic jams. And it suggests that their disdain for the ever-expanding number of roadside noise barriers made them long for new forms of in-car audio entertainment. This book also allows you to peep behind the scenes of international standardization committees and automotive test benches. What did and does the automotive industry to secure the sounds characteristic for their makes? Drawing on archives, interviews, beautiful automotive ads, and literature from the fields of cultural history, science and technology studies, sound and sensory studies, this book unveils the history of an everyday phenomenon. It is about the sounds of car engines, tires, wipers, blinkers, warning signals, in-car audio systems and, ultimately, about how we became used to listen while driving.

This volume reflects the latest historiographical discussion about the decline, transformation, heritagisation, and re-invention of industrial cities in Europe during the late 20th century.It argues that the notion of “mediation” as it has been used in the history of technology helps to shed new light on the processes of understanding changes of industrial cities before, during, and after the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. The contributors investigate how different actor groups, such as scientists, union members, journalists, politicians, artists, and historians, mediated the understanding of decline, the anticipated future, and the heritage of industrial cities. The authors look at a wide range of European cities during different phases of decline and transformation.The book is aimed at scholars of urban history and industrial history, as well as contemporary European history, the history of technology, and deindustrialisation studies. The contributions also resonate with discussion in neighbouring fields such as urban studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, and digital history.

Repair, reuse and disposal are closely interlinked phenomena related to the service lives and persistence of technologies. When technical artefacts become old and worn out, decisions have to be taken: is it necessary, worthwhile or even possible to maintain and repair, reuse or dismantle them – or must they be discarded? These decisions depend on factors such as the availability of second-hand markets, repair infrastructures and dismantling or disposal facilities. In telling the stories of China's power grid, Canadian telephones, German automobiles and India's shipbreaking business, among others, the contributions in this volume highlight the persistence of technologies and show that maintenance and repair are not obsolete in modern industries and consumer societies.