Otto Mayr (technology historian)

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Otto Mayr (* 1930 in Essen ) is a German technical historian.

Life

After graduating from the Technical University of Munich in 1956 with a Dipl.-Ing. for mechanical engineering had become, he spent a year as a research assistant at the Heat Power Laboratory of MIT . He then worked for the Sulzer brothers in Switzerland. In 1960 he went back to the USA and worked at the Taylor Instrument Companies in Rochester (New York) in the Control Instruments Division . In 1962 he became a lecturer and later assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology .

In 1965 he went to the German Museum in Munich as a research assistant , where he worked at the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology.

The Technical University of Munich awarded him his doctorate (Dr. rer. Nat.) In 1968 for his work on the early history of technical regulations . 

He went back to the United States at the National Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History ) of the Smithsonian Institution , where he worked as a consultant, curator and chairman of the Department of History of Science and Technology . In 1983 he followed the call to Munich as General Director of the Deutsches Museum, where he stayed until his retirement in 1992. In 1988 he received the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the year of his retirement, Mayr was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal , the prestigious prize for the history of technology from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) founded by Melvin Kranzberg .

Books

  • On the early history of technical regulations . Munich: Oldenbourg, 1969. - English translation: Origins of Feedback Control. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1970.
  • Feedback Mechanisms in the Historical Collections of the National Museum of History and Technology . Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971.
  • (as editor): Philosophers and Machines: Selections from Isis . New York: Science History Publ., 1976.
  • (as editor, with Klaus Maurice): The Clockwork Universe: German Clocks and Automata 1550–1650 . New York: Neale Watson, 1980. - German translation: The world as a clock . Munich: German art publisher. 1980.
    • as arranged with Klaus Maurice: Silvio A. Bedini: The mechanical clock and the scientific revolution. In: The world as a clock. German clocks and automata 1550–1650. Exhibition catalog Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich 1980, pp. 21–29.
  • (as editor, with Robert C. Post): Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufacture . Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981 (translated into Japanese).
  • Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. - German translation: Clockwork and Scales: Authority, Freedom and Technical Systems in the Early Modern Era . Munich: CH Beck, 1987. Italian translation: La bilancia e I'orologio: Libertà e autorità nel pensiero politico dell'Europa moderna . Bologna: il Mulino, 1988. Japanese translation: Tokyo: Heibonsha Ltd., 1997. Spanish translation: Autoridad, libertad y maquinaria automática en la primera modernidad europea. Barcelona: Acantilado, 2012.
  • (as editor): Deutsches Museum (in series: Museums of the World). London and Munich: CH Beck and Scala, 1990. - English translation: The Deutsches Museum. London: Scala, 1990.
  • Reconstruction: The German Museum 1945–1970 . Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2003.
  • Mayr's family history . 2 volumes. Snake Hill, Virginia: private print, 2008
  • The Swedish siege of the imperial city of Lindau in 1647: The Thirty Years War on Lake Constance and in Upper Swabia (= Historischer Verein Lindau: Neujahrsblatt. Vol. 53). Munich: Allitera, 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Mayr: On the early history of technical regulations . R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1969, ISBN 3-486-38221-7 .
  2. ^ Otto Mayr: The Origins of Feedback Control . MIT, Cambridge MA.
  3. ^ Society for the History of Technology ( Memento of the original of July 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The Leonardo da Vinci Medal, description and list of the winners @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.historyoftechnology.org
personal data
SURNAME Mayr, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German technical historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH eat