Friday, 10 February 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Jonathan Coopersmith, Texas A&M University

 

“Forging the Fax: How Fax Machines Helped Create ‘Alternative Facts'”

John Perry Barlow’s bold 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace epitomized the optimism, excitement—and naivete—of the Internet for promoting communications, political action, and sharing information. But the Internet and now social media have also, as the last election has shown, enabled a post-modern reality of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” dissembling chatbots, leaked information, massive electronic attacks against individuals, spamming, and other discordant challenges to visions of an information utopia. This paper examines how such hopes and dystopic applications also accompanied the rise of faxing.

The evolution of the fax machine and the Internet reflects larger changes in communications based on decreasing barriers to entry, the democratization of production, and automation. One result is a communications version of Gresham’s law, “bad pseudo-data drives out good information.”

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Jonathan Coopersmith teaches the history of technology at Texas A&M University. His latest book, Faxed. The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) is a co-recipient of the 2016 Business History Conference Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. Currently he is researching the importance of frothy and fraudulent firms in emerging technologies.

Monday, 6 February 2017 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100 — joint meeting with the Institute for Historical Studies

Alberto A. Martínez, UT

“Roasted and Broiled Alive: The Inquisition, Bruno, Galileo, and the Spirit that Moves the Earth”

In 1600, Giordano Bruno was condemned by the Inquisition in Rome and was burned alive for heretical beliefs, including his belief that the Holy Spirit is a universal spirit that vivifies, nourishes, and moves the Earth. Galileo secretly held a similar belief. I discuss how the advocates of Copernicus linked the Earth’s motion to the ancient pagan belief in the universal spirit. In a manuscript that remains unpublished, Melchior Inchofer, the Jesuit who wrote the most damning reports against Galileo, leading to his condemnation in 1633, accused the Copernicans of the heresy of the universal spirit.

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Dr. Martínez is a professor of history of science at UT Austin. After earning a Master’s degree at NYU, he earned his Ph.D. in History of Science at the University of Minnesota in 2001. He has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, the Dibner Institute at MIT, the Center for Einstein Studies at Boston University, and Caltech. His most recent book is The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), on the evolution of myths in the history of mathematics.