This article examines the process of naming the World Wide Web that took place at CERN between 1989 and 1996 to argue that naming was not a secondary act of branding or representation but a constitutive part of technological development. Drawing on archival records, press coverage, and interviews with early web actors, it reconstructs how a nameless internal project evolved through provisional, contested, and unstable designations before "World Wide Web" emerged as a workable compromise. The article shows that naming functioned as an enabling practice: it made the project discussable in meetings, recognizable within CERN's organizational culture, and legible to funding structures and public discourse. At the same time, failed attempts to standardize spellings, abbreviations, and trademarks exposed the limits of institutional control over emerging digital technologies. By foregrounding naming as a material and organizational process, the article reframes how technologies acquire visibility, legitimacy, and stability within the history of computing and communications.
This article challenges the dominant interpretation of early twentieth-century vibrators as inherently sexual objects. Rather than reading vibrators retrospectively through the lens of the modern sex toy industry, it examines hand-cranked and early electric devices from the perspective of design, use, and medical context. Drawing on artifacts, manuals, advertisements, and medical literature from Britain and the United States, the article argues that early vibrators were shaped primarily by therapeutic and cosmetic practices linked to massage medicine, gynecological therapy, and orificial philosophy. Attachments later interpreted as "phallic" or sexually suggestive emerged from clinical assumptions about circulation, nerve stimulation, and rectal or vaginal treatment rather than from explicit erotic design. By foregrounding design logic over retrospective meaning, the article reframes the vibrator as a medical and consumer technology whose sexual associations developed historically rather than existing from the outset. In doing so, it argues for a more historically grounded approach to technologies whose meanings shifted over time.
This article reinterprets telegraphy in colonial Nigeria not as a precursor to modern communications but as a media infrastructure that reshaped how news circulated, authority operated, and publics formed. Histories of African media have largely overlooked the telegraph, leaving the relationship between telecommunications and mass communication underexamined. Drawing on archival and press sources, the article traces how submarine, inland, and wireless telegraph networks became intertwined with newspapers, radio broadcasting, commercial information, and anti-colonial politics. Rather than treating the telegraph as a singular imperial technology, it approaches telegraphy as a technology-in-use whose meanings emerged through everyday practices, institutional conflicts, material breakdowns, and struggles over access and control. By foregrounding African journalists, technicians, readers, and political actors, the study challenges diffusionist histories of communications technology and argues that colonial media infrastructures were coproduced through imperial ambitions and African forms of appropriation, negotiation, and resistance.
This article introduces the concept of mobility-Orientalism to explain how Western models of automobilism shaped both the discourse and infrastructure of global mobility. Extending Edward Said's critique of Orientalism into the history of technology, it argues that road safety policies exported from Europe and North America reproduced assumptions about Western modernity while treating mobility practices in the Global South as backward, inefficient, or unsafe. Using the global history of road safety as a case study, the article shows that safety regimes designed for car-centered societies often failed in contexts characterized by layered traffic, informal mobility systems, and different patterns of risk. In many cases, imported policies intensified rather than reduced inequalities and violence on the road. By foregrounding perspectives from the Global South, the article challenges the presumed universality of Western mobility expertise and argues for a planetary history of automobilism attentive to infrastructural asymmetries, local knowledge, and alternative mobility futures.
This article examines the emergence of hand replantation surgery in socialist China to rethink the relationship between industrialization, medicine, and Cold War technopolitics. Developed in response to rising workplace amputations during the Great Leap Forward, hand replantation became more than a surgical technique confined to the operating room. Drawing on medical journals, propaganda materials, and municipal archives, the article argues that replantation functioned as a "remediating" practice that repaired injured bodies while mediating the social ruptures of accelerated industrialization. Surgeons, workers, transportation systems, and improvised materials formed "chains of rescue" linking bodily trauma to socialist ideals of labor protection and collective mobilization. Hand replantation also crossed geopolitical divides-shifting from the Sino-Soviet split to Third World medical aid and Sino-U.S. scientific exchange. By tracing surgery across bodily, social, and geopolitical scales, the article argues that technopolitics emerged through situated technical practices as much as through state systems and ideology.
