Reiner, Martha
Asia-Pacific Transnational and Inter-regional Contexts of Scientific Enterprise Development Martha L. Reiner Ph.D. business and public policy University of California at Berkeley, M.A. English Florida International University, graduate study in history College of William and Mary, A.B. history Duke University This study explores transnational and inter-regional parallels and connections in basic science, technological innovation and commercialization, scientific and technological expertise formations, and technologically based development in the Asia-Pacific region during the early and mid 20th century, also considering late 19th century situations. Path dependence and discontinuities, institutional change and organizational development including patent and securities systems and medical, scientific, and engineering publishing are of interest, along with technological innovation and market development linkages, geographic contexts and demographic change, and individual and institutional leadership. East-west linkages in the late 19th century occurred around developments including the Yugoslavian Nicola Tesla’s wireless wave transmission and Thomas Edison’s electrical generator and distribution systems, as uranium mining developed in the western United States and South Africa, as X-ray science and technology developed. Westinghouse, a competitor of GE’s, gained rights to Tesla’s alternating current motor technology, a technology apparently referred to, likely along with high-energy detonation, in New York Times stories about technology diffusion during the 1884 Philadelphia Electrical Exhibition, as the Sino-France conflict developed.1 The Paris 1 Michael Aaron Dennis, “Accounting for Research: New Histories of Corporate Laboratories and the Social History of American Science,” Social Studies of Science 17.3 (August 1987), 483. Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was adopted in 1883.
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