David Hochfelder
Biographic Data
| ID | 1467577 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Hochfelder |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Hochfelder |
| SIGNATURE | HOCHFELDER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4129-9363 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Using Urban Renewal Records to Advance Reparative Justice
By describing how the federal urban renewal program harmed displaced tenants and property owners, this article intends to encourage discussion of potential remedies by study groups, commissions, and community activists. In addition to loss of property, these harms include inadequate reimbursement payments, diminished business and rental income, and higher post-relocation housing costs. Using Kingston and Newburgh, New York, and Asheville, North C…
The Kind of Problem a City Is
A Telephone for the World
This is an ambitious book that connects technology, capitalism, and globalization. It is all that more audacious because it uses a failed communications platform and business model to make these connections. Martin Collins tells the story of Iridium, a venture by Motorola, Inc., to provide a telephone service accessible from any point on the globe. Announced in 1990 and opened for service in 1998, Iridium required a constellation of sixty-six sat…
Telegraph
Framing Finance
Reviewed by: Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism David Hochfelder (bio) Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. By Alex Preda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. vii+318. $65/$25. Widely dispersed ownership of financial securities is a fundamental characteristic of modern capitalism. More than half of American households own stocks through retirement plans, mutual funds, or holdi…
Where the Common People Could Speculate
On the morning of August 29, 1887, Abner Wright, president of the Chicago Board of Trade, forcibly removed the instruments of the Postal Telegraph and the Baltimore and Ohio Telegraph companies from the floor of the exchange, literally throwing their equipment out of the building. A few months later, on the night of December 15, Wright discovered some mysterious electrical cables leading out of the basement of the exchange building. Thinking that…
The Second Information Revolution (review)
Reviewed by: The Second Information Revolution David Hochfelder (bio) The Second Information Revolution. By Gerald W. Brock. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. 336. $39.95. Gerald Brock, a leading scholar of telecommunications policy, offers a new interpretation of our current information revolution. He compares the regulated telephone monopoly of AT&T, a key part of the "first information revolution," with the unregulated comp…
Communications
The Papers of Thomas A. Edison
Telegraph Messenger Boys
Thomas Hughes showed us some time ago that technologies are embedded in systems. Gregory Downey reminds us that technological systems depend on labor to function, and that they reorder human geography as a consequence of their functioning. His example is the role of telegraph messenger boys in creating and sustaining a nationwide communications network, and he closely examines "the history of a group of 'system maintainers' at the lowest level of…
Constructing an Industrial Divide
An 1879 contract between Western Union and Bell partitioned the electrical communications industry between the telegraph and telephone markets. Historians typically view this contract as the start of both Western Union's decline and Bell's rise, and they have treated these as largely separate processes. This article argues instead that these processes were linked by a porous and shifting boundary between the two industries. Legal, technical, and …
The Languages of Edison's Light
A Comparison of the Postal Telegraph Movement in Great Britain and the United States, 1866–1900
This article places the British and American postal telegraph movements in the broader context of a transatlantic reform tradition. More specifically, British nationalization in 1870 gave American reformers both a rallying point and a rationale for postalizing the telegraphs. The legacies of both movements were mixed. In Britain, the postal telegraph provided inexpensive and accessible service, but it soon ran a large deficit and retarded the dev…
The Grammar of the Machine
The Grammar of the Machine
Book Reviews The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States. By Edward W. StevensJr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. x+210; figures, tables, notes, in dex. $27.50 (hardcover). As the title suggests, Edward Stevens’s book is an overview of ante bellum technical education. The work covers a good deal ofground, ranging from college natural philosophy courses to science educa tion atw…
Where the Common People Could Speculate
On the morning of August 29, 1887, Abner Wright, president of the Chicago Board of Trade, forcibly removed the instruments of the Postal Telegraph and the Baltimore and Ohio Telegraph companies from the floor of the exchange, literally throwing their equipment out of the building. A few months later, on the night of December 15, Wright discovered some mysterious electrical cables leading out of the basement of the exchange building. Thinking that…
Constructing an Industrial Divide
An 1879 contract between Western Union and Bell partitioned the electrical communications industry between the telegraph and telephone markets. Historians typically view this contract as the start of both Western Union's decline and Bell's rise, and they have treated these as largely separate processes. This article argues instead that these processes were linked by a porous and shifting boundary between the two industries. Legal, technical, and …
A Comparison of the Postal Telegraph Movement in Great Britain and the United States, 1866–1900
This article places the British and American postal telegraph movements in the broader context of a transatlantic reform tradition. More specifically, British nationalization in 1870 gave American reformers both a rallying point and a rationale for postalizing the telegraphs. The legacies of both movements were mixed. In Britain, the postal telegraph provided inexpensive and accessible service, but it soon ran a large deficit and retarded the dev…
The Kind of Problem a City Is
The Grammar of the Machine
The Grammar of the Machine
Book Reviews The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States. By Edward W. StevensJr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. x+210; figures, tables, notes, in dex. $27.50 (hardcover). As the title suggests, Edward Stevens’s book is an overview of ante bellum technical education. The work covers a good deal ofground, ranging from college natural philosophy courses to science educa tion atw…
A Comparison of the Postal Telegraph Movement in Great Britain and the United States, 1866–1900
This article places the British and American postal telegraph movements in the broader context of a transatlantic reform tradition. More specifically, British nationalization in 1870 gave American reformers both a rallying point and a rationale for postalizing the telegraphs. The legacies of both movements were mixed. In Britain, the postal telegraph provided inexpensive and accessible service, but it soon ran a large deficit and retarded the dev…
The Languages of Edison's Light
Constructing an Industrial Divide
An 1879 contract between Western Union and Bell partitioned the electrical communications industry between the telegraph and telephone markets. Historians typically view this contract as the start of both Western Union's decline and Bell's rise, and they have treated these as largely separate processes. This article argues instead that these processes were linked by a porous and shifting boundary between the two industries. Legal, technical, and …
Telegraph Messenger Boys
Thomas Hughes showed us some time ago that technologies are embedded in systems. Gregory Downey reminds us that technological systems depend on labor to function, and that they reorder human geography as a consequence of their functioning. His example is the role of telegraph messenger boys in creating and sustaining a nationwide communications network, and he closely examines "the history of a group of 'system maintainers' at the lowest level of…
The Papers of Thomas A. Edison
The Second Information Revolution (review)
Reviewed by: The Second Information Revolution David Hochfelder (bio) The Second Information Revolution. By Gerald W. Brock. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. 336. $39.95. Gerald Brock, a leading scholar of telecommunications policy, offers a new interpretation of our current information revolution. He compares the regulated telephone monopoly of AT&T, a key part of the "first information revolution," with the unregulated comp…
Communications
Where the Common People Could Speculate
On the morning of August 29, 1887, Abner Wright, president of the Chicago Board of Trade, forcibly removed the instruments of the Postal Telegraph and the Baltimore and Ohio Telegraph companies from the floor of the exchange, literally throwing their equipment out of the building. A few months later, on the night of December 15, Wright discovered some mysterious electrical cables leading out of the basement of the exchange building. Thinking that…
Framing Finance
Reviewed by: Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism David Hochfelder (bio) Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. By Alex Preda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. vii+318. $65/$25. Widely dispersed ownership of financial securities is a fundamental characteristic of modern capitalism. More than half of American households own stocks through retirement plans, mutual funds, or holdi…
Telegraph
A Telephone for the World
This is an ambitious book that connects technology, capitalism, and globalization. It is all that more audacious because it uses a failed communications platform and business model to make these connections. Martin Collins tells the story of Iridium, a venture by Motorola, Inc., to provide a telephone service accessible from any point on the globe. Announced in 1990 and opened for service in 1998, Iridium required a constellation of sixty-six sat…
The Kind of Problem a City Is
Using Urban Renewal Records to Advance Reparative Justice
By describing how the federal urban renewal program harmed displaced tenants and property owners, this article intends to encourage discussion of potential remedies by study groups, commissions, and community activists. In addition to loss of property, these harms include inadequate reimbursement payments, diminished business and rental income, and higher post-relocation housing costs. Using Kingston and Newburgh, New York, and Asheville, North C…
Political science (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Engineering (4 works) · History (4 works) · Market economy (4 works) · Telecommunications (4 works) · Business (3 works)