Title: Accident prone : a history of technology, psychology, and misfits of the machine age /
Authors: Burnham, John C. 1929-
Publisher: University of Chicago Press,
Year: 2009
Subjects: Accidents History.; Accidents Psychological aspects; Accidents Prevention; Technology Social aspects; Industrial safety; System safety; Safety education; Accident Prevention history; Accidents psychology; History, 20th Century; Technology history
Abstract: Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines- death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example -developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to is disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, Accident Prone offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences.--Book jacket.
Contents: Before accident proneness -- German origins -- British origins -- Preparing the way: transport operators -- The streams come together in the late 1920s and early 1930s -- Consolidation and development, 1930s-World War II -- How psychiatrists did not adopt and medicalize accident proneness -- The mid-twentieth-century high point -- Eclipse of the idea among experts -- Bypassing accident proneness with engineering.