TECHNOLOGY IN AUSTRALIA 1788 - 1988 - GREAT PRICE!

Don't miss this wonderful opportunity to pick up a copy of this expensive book at a very cheap price!

A condensed history of Austrlaian technological innovation and adaptation during the first two hundred years.

Compiled by Fellows of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

This history of science has been well documented because the great leaps forward of scientific minds can be isolated as individual achievements.  Technology - the application of these scientific advances to man's economic advancement - has been less well documented because its advances have tended to be cumulative and collective rather than dramatic and individual.  Yet all sciences have developed from techniques: mathematics from measuring in the market place and construction, mechanics and physics from craftsmen working with wood and metals, chemistry from smelting, brewing and distilling.  The technologists have always had to solve practical problems.  During the Dark Ages the great scientific advances made by the Greeks and Arabs were almost lost, but technology continued to develop and when man's physical needs enlarged ways were found to meet them by empirical and experimental methods rather than scientific ones.

This Bicentenary study by the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering is an account how men and women who had been set down by force majeure in a remote, strange and often hostile environment were driven by necessity to combine the resources of science and technology brought with them from their former homes to create in a brief two hundred years a community as technologically advanced as any in the world.

In seperate chapters distinguished Fellows of the Academy, assisted by many co-authors and advisers, have recorded the ways in which successive generations have absorbed and modified the knowledge and technologies of the Old World and from this springboard created their own brilliant advances and innovations.  Many of these were taken up overseas but others lay idle for long periods or even failed, some because of the handicaps of a small domestic market and long lines of transport, and others because of failure of institutions - in the private and in the public sector - to recognise and grasp the opportunities.

The book is the inside story of Australian technology written by those who in recent decades have been personally involved in Australia's technological emancipation.

On the balance the book portrays, for the first time in an authoritative manner, the immense contribution which technology - both technology-creation and technology-transfer - has made to man's conquest of this vast and arid continent.  It brings home the fact so often overlooked  in contemporary historic treatment, that without technology Australia would not have become the hospitable, prosperous and fortunate country that it now is.

No comprehensive summary of Australia's technological development has previously been published.  This book, accompanied by found hundred informative illustrations, provides a unique record of Australia's achievement.  Its straightforward style and ample illustrations make it accessible to a wide readership and as a record of Australian achievement it must surely be unique.

This 1017 page hardcover is illustrated with black and white photographs.  This book is ex-library and as such has all the usual stamps and stickers internally and externally, however it has come from the Reference Section and has only had very little, very light use.  There is minimal edgewear to dustjacket.  Internally there is also a texta mark covering price, but it is otherwise in an excellent, tight, clean condition. 

This is a heavy book and postage quoted is for within Australia. Overseas customers should email me for a postage quote before bidding. Local Pick-up is not available.

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