Notes
1Quoted in Sarah S. B. Yule, Borrowings (Boston, 1889), 49.
2Respectively: Robert Friedel, Pioneer Plastic: The Making and Selling of Celluloid (Madison, WI, 1983); Robert Friedel and Paul Israel with Bernard S. Finn, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention (New Brunswick, NJ, 1986); Robert Friedel, Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty (New York, 1994).
3For an engaging and effective summary of the issues raised in this literature, see David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, MA, 2006).
4Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
5Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996).
6Two texts in this genre with particular relevance to Friedel's project are Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth, UK, 1992), and David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, 1998).