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Acknowledgments

This book originated as a presentation in the fabled colloquium of Hans-Joerg Rheinberger’s Abteilung II at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 2003. It was revived for a fellowship at the Institut für Kulturforschung in Vienna in 2006, where the director, Hans Belting, was a champion of the project and Ed Dimendberg first proposed to include it in the FlashPoints series. Most of the research was completed during a fellowship at the Getty Research Center 2007–8 with the help of its magnificent library staff. Correspondence, and finally a meeting in March 2009, with Francis Moon, the spiritus rector of KMODDL, the kinematics research group at Cornell, and the best expert of Franz Reuleaux’s work, pushed the project toward completion. A Kayden Grant from the University of Colorado at Boulder helped defray the cost of image rights.

For anyone searching for an infallible means of testing who your real friends are, I recommend subjecting them, with no end in sight, to incessant talk of cylinders, rotation, and kinematics. Those who years later will still speak to you either have great patience or great powers of feigning interest, both excellent character traits in one’s friends.

Among those who survived the ordeal and who supported the project in its various stages I want to mention in particular Marshall Brown, Robert Buch, Ruediger Campe, Tom Cummins, Heinrich Detering, Eric Downing, Peter Galison, Michael Gamper, Peter Geimer, Eva Geulen, Anthony Grafton, Sepp Gumbrecht, Michael Hagner, Deborah Hodges Maschietto, Michael Hutter, Albrecht Koschorke, Karen Lang, Elmer Lewis, David Maisel, Ethel Matala de Mazza, Charlotte Metcalf, Gloria Meynen, Bob Pippin, Lois Renner, Simon Schaffer, Henning Schmidgen, Anette Schwarz, Mark Seltzer, Bernhard Siegert, Davide Stimilli, Ralph Ubl, Joseph Vogl, David Wellbery, Christopher Wild, Carsten Zelle.

Moving to the University of Colorado at Boulder not only has placed me in a physical environment in which one of the key concepts of this book, torque, can be experienced on rides up Lefthand Canyon but also has given me new friends, colleagues, and interlocutors: Adam Bradley, Chris Braider, Jeff Cox, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Anne Schmiesing, John Stevenson, Davide Stimilli, and Paul Youngquist. My assistant at the Center for Humanities and the Arts, Paula Anderson, has helped greatly with the last versions of the manuscript (and assorted emergencies). Ed Dimendberg has accompanied this project with unfailing kindness, professionalism, and intellectual guidance.