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Article ID: CBB230972077

Heavy Snowfall, Elephants, Sabotage and other little incidents: The Role of Incident-innovations for the Evolution of the German Telephone System (2007)

Icon: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology
Volume: 13
Pages: 35-49
Publication date: 2007
Language: English

URI: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23787002

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Telephones Electrical engineering Cable, submarine Telegraphs; telephones Technological innovation Communications Equipment Telecommunications Social Engineering 20th century 19th century Germany

This paper will give some investigations in the process of innovation as a result of incidents and learning from these incidents. The telegraph and telephone system is a good example for showing some aspects which can be named incident innovations because the telephone system is a complex socio-technical system with a wide field of possible errors, failures, incidents, accidents and perhaps catastrophes. And telegraph and telephone are "normal" systems: that means they are not high risk technologies like the nuclear energy system, where we can find a very high attention to safety in the public and in the community of the technical experts. This article will give only a few typical examples for some incidents in the telecommunication system of the German Empire to draw some common conclusions at the end.

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