Incendiary Cities: Fire and Technology in Germany and the United States, 1840 – 1900
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last decades, historians of risk and disaster have demonstrated that landscapes of risk are socially constructed. Technology looms large over such histories, both causing and mitigating disasters. Despite recent publications that invite historians of technology to contribute to histories of risk, studies that employ the methods of the history of technology are still rare. My study of the design, use, and proliferation of technologies of fire response provides new insights into the relation between society, technology, and risk. It presents material evidence for how societal values find their way into risk management. This dissertation analyzes fire response and technology in Germany and the United States between 1840 and 1900. During this period, fire services became the dominant force in urban emergency response. Whereas fire departments were novelties at the beginning of the century, they were ubiquitous around 1900. This thesis shows how the history of fire and technology was driven by infrastructure provision, the desire to protect property, and urban authorities’ quest for social order. Extensive archival research in Germany and the United States reveals that technologies of fire response mirrored interests and shaped the norms that guided society’s response to risk. Fire alarm telegraph networks, for instance, privileged house owners and the police. Their design materialized authorities’ distrust of the common population and allowed for the control of urban space. The development of technologies of risk response was also guided by the interests of manufacturers. It did not simply follow a logic of the best available equipment. As the century progressed, fire services became spheres of masculinity and militarism. Municipal authorities employed firefighters to disperse riots and to break strikes. Fire departments and the technologies they employed shaped the urban space and the modern approach to risk. My dissertation shows that the primary object of fire response was not to protect the individual, but rather to ensure the smooth functioning of the networked metropolis of the nineteenth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".