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The idea of "understanding the present through its history" is based on two insights. First, it helps to know where a technology comes from: what were its predecessors, how did they evolve as a result of the continuous efforts to solve theoretical and practical problems, who were crucial in their emergence, and which cultural differences made them develop into divergent families of artifacts? Second, and closely related to the first insight, how does a certain technology or system fit into its societal context, its culture of mobility, its engineering culture, its culture of car driving, its alternatives, its opponents? Only thus, by studying its prehistory and its socio-cultural context, can we acquire a true 'grasp' of a technology.
The Evolution of Automotive Technology: A Handbook, Second Edition covers one and a quarter century of the automobile, conceived as a cultural history of its technology, aimed at engineering students and all those who wish to have a concise introduction into the basics of automotive technology and its long-term development.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
For nearly two decades Dr. Ing. Gijs Mom taught at Eindhoven University of Technology. A long-term SAE International member, he has been educated as a literary historian and an automotive engineer. After having briefly worked at Renault, Paris (engine development), he turned to the history of technology with a doctoral dissertation (1997, published in translation in 2004 by Johns Hopkins University Press), "The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age." For this book, he received the ASME Engineer-Historian Award as well as the Best Book Award from the Society of Automotive Historians. Dr. Mom is the (co)founder of the Netherlands Center for Automotive History (NCAD) and the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M), of which he was the first president. He also initiated the journal Transfers, Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, and was its first editor. He recently finished his trilogy on the world history of automobilism (Atlantic Automobilism; Globalizing Automobilism; Pacific Automobilism, all published by Berghahn Books), of which the third part appeared in 2022. The second part won the best book awards for 2021 from the Society for the History of Technology and the World History Association.
