Bruce Epperson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1466740 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce Epperson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce |
| FAMILY NAME | Epperson |
| SIGNATURE | EPPERSON B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Film Independent |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A New Class of Cyclists: Banham's Bicycle and the Two-wheeled World it didn't Create
While not uncommon for innovator and innovation to merge into a single identity, it is more unusual for this to occur between object and critic. But it did happen in the 1960's with a novel small-wheeled bicycle, the Moulton, and the British architecture and design critic Reyner Banham. Banham believed the Moulton would give rise to a new generation of middle-class urban radical cyclists who would eventually come to rely on bicycles for their tra…
The finances stagger these fellows’: The Great American Bicycle Trust, 1899–1903
Between 1895 and 1904, over 1,800 separate businesses merged into approximately 150 ‘trusts’, most of them simple horizontal combinations. Less than a third succeeded. One of the more spectacular failures was the American Bicycle Company. Formed by combining 45 bicycle and cycle-parts makers, it lasted less than three years. Various theories have been advanced to explain this abysmal performance, but there appears to have been no single determini…
Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (review)
Reviewed by: Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City Bruce Epperson (bio) Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. By Peter D. Norton. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp ix+396. $35. In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton extends Clay Mc Shane’s Down the Asphalt Path (1994), an examination of how social and technical forces at the close of the nineteenth century changed urban streets from generalize…
Fighting Traffic
Fighting Traffic Peter D. Norton (bio) and Bruce Epperson (bio) To the Editor I have no wish to question Bruce Epperson's overall assessment of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (January 2009, pp. 235–37), but I believe readers of Technology and Culture deserve corrections of three important errors in Mr. Epperson's review. First, the reviewer alleges that the book attributes the transformation of the city street "t…
Eminence Domain: Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses
Eminence Domain:Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses Bruce Epperson (bio) Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. Robert Caro's 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York cemented in place a reputation for abuse of power that remained largely intact for decades. Largely, but not entirely. Now a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination wit…
Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again (review)
Reviewed by: Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again Bruce Epperson (bio) Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again. By Bruce Abramson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. xii+361. $34.95. What do the Microsoft antitrust trial, the music industry's suppression of the music file–sharing company Napster, and the tech-stock meltdown of 2000 all have in common? Nothi…
Is Form Destiny? Technologies of Personal Security
Is Form Destiny?Technologies of Personal Security Bruce Epperson (bio) Early on the morning of 22 August 2003, someone broke into a car dealership in West Covina, California, and torched twenty Hummer H2s, the look-alike replica of the Humvee military vehicle. Graffiti left at the scene linked the attack to a fifty-million-dollar fire at an unfinished residential complex in suburban San Diego earlier in the month. A militant environmental group, …
Framing Production: Technology, Culture, and Change in the British Bicycle Industry (review)
Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869-1900 (review)
Glen Norcliffe sets out to meet two goals connected by a common theme. The theme is the adoption of modernity, with an emphasis "on practical matters of innovation, design, mass production, mass consumption, improved infrastructure and social practices in Canada" (p. 247). His first goal is to use the bicycle as a case study to evaluate a proposed model of sociotechnical development. His second is to create a vivid history of the bicycle in Canad…
Does SCOT Answer? A Comment
To model or not to model? That appears to be the underlying question addressed in the debate between Mr. Clayton and Drs. Pinch and Bijker. Can the evolution of individual artifacts be synthesized into a coherent and meaningful theory of technological development? Should we even try? I am somewhat reluctant to wade into the whirlpool of the debate because Clayton is a friend and colleague, while my own research on the American bicycle industry ha…
Failed Colossus: Strategic Error at the Pope Manufacturing Company, 1878-1900
In business, failure is normal. The shuttered storefront, the vacant lot, the empty factory bear silent witness to the difficulty of succeeding in any capitalistic venture. This is particularly true of firms trying to master an emerging technology. To succeed, the right innovation must be combined with the means to profitably produce, sell, and service it. When success proves elusive, it is often hard to determine whether technological design or …
Eminence Domain: Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses
Eminence Domain:Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses Bruce Epperson (bio) Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. Robert Caro's 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York cemented in place a reputation for abuse of power that remained largely intact for decades. Largely, but not entirely. Now a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination wit…
Does SCOT Answer? A Comment
To model or not to model? That appears to be the underlying question addressed in the debate between Mr. Clayton and Drs. Pinch and Bijker. Can the evolution of individual artifacts be synthesized into a coherent and meaningful theory of technological development? Should we even try? I am somewhat reluctant to wade into the whirlpool of the debate because Clayton is a friend and colleague, while my own research on the American bicycle industry ha…
Failed Colossus: Strategic Error at the Pope Manufacturing Company, 1878-1900
In business, failure is normal. The shuttered storefront, the vacant lot, the empty factory bear silent witness to the difficulty of succeeding in any capitalistic venture. This is particularly true of firms trying to master an emerging technology. To succeed, the right innovation must be combined with the means to profitably produce, sell, and service it. When success proves elusive, it is often hard to determine whether technological design or …
Failed Colossus: Strategic Error at the Pope Manufacturing Company, 1878-1900
In business, failure is normal. The shuttered storefront, the vacant lot, the empty factory bear silent witness to the difficulty of succeeding in any capitalistic venture. This is particularly true of firms trying to master an emerging technology. To succeed, the right innovation must be combined with the means to profitably produce, sell, and service it. When success proves elusive, it is often hard to determine whether technological design or …
Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869-1900 (review)
Glen Norcliffe sets out to meet two goals connected by a common theme. The theme is the adoption of modernity, with an emphasis "on practical matters of innovation, design, mass production, mass consumption, improved infrastructure and social practices in Canada" (p. 247). His first goal is to use the bicycle as a case study to evaluate a proposed model of sociotechnical development. His second is to create a vivid history of the bicycle in Canad…
Does SCOT Answer? A Comment
To model or not to model? That appears to be the underlying question addressed in the debate between Mr. Clayton and Drs. Pinch and Bijker. Can the evolution of individual artifacts be synthesized into a coherent and meaningful theory of technological development? Should we even try? I am somewhat reluctant to wade into the whirlpool of the debate because Clayton is a friend and colleague, while my own research on the American bicycle industry ha…
Framing Production: Technology, Culture, and Change in the British Bicycle Industry (review)
Is Form Destiny? Technologies of Personal Security
Is Form Destiny?Technologies of Personal Security Bruce Epperson (bio) Early on the morning of 22 August 2003, someone broke into a car dealership in West Covina, California, and torched twenty Hummer H2s, the look-alike replica of the Humvee military vehicle. Graffiti left at the scene linked the attack to a fifty-million-dollar fire at an unfinished residential complex in suburban San Diego earlier in the month. A militant environmental group, …
Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again (review)
Reviewed by: Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again Bruce Epperson (bio) Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again. By Bruce Abramson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. xii+361. $34.95. What do the Microsoft antitrust trial, the music industry's suppression of the music file–sharing company Napster, and the tech-stock meltdown of 2000 all have in common? Nothi…
Eminence Domain: Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses
Eminence Domain:Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses Bruce Epperson (bio) Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. Robert Caro's 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York cemented in place a reputation for abuse of power that remained largely intact for decades. Largely, but not entirely. Now a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination wit…
Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (review)
Reviewed by: Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City Bruce Epperson (bio) Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. By Peter D. Norton. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp ix+396. $35. In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton extends Clay Mc Shane’s Down the Asphalt Path (1994), an examination of how social and technical forces at the close of the nineteenth century changed urban streets from generalize…
Fighting Traffic
Fighting Traffic Peter D. Norton (bio) and Bruce Epperson (bio) To the Editor I have no wish to question Bruce Epperson's overall assessment of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (January 2009, pp. 235–37), but I believe readers of Technology and Culture deserve corrections of three important errors in Mr. Epperson's review. First, the reviewer alleges that the book attributes the transformation of the city street "t…
The finances stagger these fellows’: The Great American Bicycle Trust, 1899–1903
Between 1895 and 1904, over 1,800 separate businesses merged into approximately 150 ‘trusts’, most of them simple horizontal combinations. Less than a third succeeded. One of the more spectacular failures was the American Bicycle Company. Formed by combining 45 bicycle and cycle-parts makers, it lasted less than three years. Various theories have been advanced to explain this abysmal performance, but there appears to have been no single determini…
A New Class of Cyclists: Banham's Bicycle and the Two-wheeled World it didn't Create
While not uncommon for innovator and innovation to merge into a single identity, it is more unusual for this to occur between object and critic. But it did happen in the 1960's with a novel small-wheeled bicycle, the Moulton, and the British architecture and design critic Reyner Banham. Banham believed the Moulton would give rise to a new generation of middle-class urban radical cyclists who would eventually come to rely on bicycles for their tra…
Sociology (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Management (4 works) · Art (3 works) · Business (3 works) · History (3 works)