The seminar will deal with the question: Which technologies are the object of the history of technology in the 20th century, and what does this mean for the technology and for history of the 20th century?

Already 16 years ago, Peter Thiel said: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” (Cato Unbound, April 2009)One might dismiss this sentence as the seemingly simple anti-democratic statement of a lone entrepreneur. Yet it appears to conceal a political programme, which this seminar will examine from both a historical and a philosophical perspective.

MasterWebclass is an introductory course to the history of technology. The students are challenged to discover how technological innovations occur within complex economical, political, and cultural contexts. They are introduced to basic theories and practices of the field.

This seminar deals with the role of technology in a wide range of movies of the 1950s. Technology as a means of salvation and of enhancement, technology as a source of disturbance and of disaster. Which patterns can be observed in different genres, and how do they relate to a cultural history of technology of the 1950s?

The seminar examines the powerful effects of emptiness. We want to understand the materiality, the production and the (industrial) effects of the liminal space called “vacuum", on which scientists and engineers worked in the 20th century. We observe pumps, coating systems, rockets and thin films in essays and catalogs, at exhibitions and in patents.

The recording studio creates sounds that stay. It caters for musical experimentation, shapes careers and leads to interactions between sounds, technologies and talents. The recording studio joins musical creativity with commercial production, it is an interface between instruments and recordings, from Glenn Gould to Abba, from Detroit to Hanover, from the synthesizer to the symphony orchestra.

Ph.D. students and members of staff report on their research.

The seminar is working with recent approaches of the history of science in order to do preliminary research on the history of the ETH.

Universities are institutions that produce, offer and delete knowledge. Wikipedia pursues similar goals. The seminar aims to intensify communication between the two infrastructures of knowledge. To this end, recent publications on the history of technology will be selected and curated for the editing of Wikipedia articles.

The seminar is the second part of a course given under the same title in the summer 2002 and intents to discuss the students work. Schedule: December 5, 6, 12 and 13.

This reading course uses an unusual view of the history of technology: instead of development, diffusion, and impact, the focus is on the disappearance of technology. Where does technology go when it becomes obsolete? Can it be decontextualized and disposed of by breaking the chains of association? The seminar research will bring to light many forms of disappearance.

The seminar focuses on the strategies which 19th and 20th century Switzerland adopted to map, naturalise or exploit the Alps economically, culturally and scientifically.

The topic of this term's Webclass advanced course is "technology and nature". The course is composed of five tutorials and four online lessons. To qualify for the advanced course you must have passed the Webclass basic course or have similar previous knowledge.