ABSTRACT
Of all the changes, political, economic, military, colonial, spiritual, aesthetic, scientific and social that marked the nineteenth century, the developments in technology must have been among the most noticeable to those living through these decades. Michael Faraday, for example, experimented with making different types of optical glass and with the problem of storing electricity in battery form, which would be useful in many different contexts. This chapter organizes technologies by their broad purpose: power (primarily steam power in transport and industry), light (gas and electricity), communication, sanitation and the observing and recording technologies. Electricity also powered new forms of communication, in particular the telegraph and telephone. Nineteenth-century communication technologies and the networks they created, given their relevance to the history and theory of texts, print culture and reading, have inspired a rich array of scholarly and critical works. The new recording devices of the nineteenth century can also claim an influence on modern culture.
