ABSTRACT
Over the course of the twentieth century, an ever proliferating array of sensors made it possible to convert practically any kind of physical stimulus – be it electromagnetic, acoustic, chemical, or whatever – into an electric charge or current. The devices formed part of longer standing traditions in graphical methods, electrical standardization, and the electronic manipulation of information applied across a wide range of fields. One consequence was that scientific instrumentation was increasingly understood as consisting of a domain-specific front end and a universal back end: the former transducing energy into an electronic signal and the latter a general-purpose data processing system. Another consequence was that the sensation, perception, and action of humans and other animals came to be described in terms of energy transduction, facilitating comparison of physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems under the rubric of cybernetics and systems theory. Once transduced, electronic signals could be amplified, recorded, replayed, manipulated, transmitted, and endlessly mediated, traveling arbitrarily far from the circumstances under which sensing originally occurred. Drawing both on episodes in the history of science and technology and on recent work in digital history, we provide a perspective on how electronic transducers shape our sense of the possibilities of perceiving, experiencing, interpreting, or remembering various pasts, whether real, recreated, or fabricated.
