Victorian physicists and speed regulation: An encounter between science and technology

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Abstract
The technology of speed regulation in the nineteenth century, from an economic or industrial point of view a minor speciality of mechanical engineering, has recently received increasing attention, for conceptually it contains the origins of modern control engineering (1). This episode in the history of technology is remarkable for a social phenomenon: among its participants we find not only countless engineers whose names are now forgotten, but also illustrious physical scientists like Airy, Foucault, Kelvin, Maxwell, and Gibbs, men whom one would have expected to incline toward the ‘pure’ side of science.

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