26 – 30 July, 2016. Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, Porto (Portugal)
The meeting’s logo – a today’s sketch of the D. Maria iron bridge – is a homage to European engineering. Authored by Eiffel’s atelier, the D. Maria bridge was built of wrought iron to carry the railway across the River Douro a height of 60 meters above the river. Its two-hinged crescent arch was, at the time, the longest single-arch span in the world. Its construction started on January 5th, 1876 and was completed on October 1st, 1877; the bridge was opened on November 4th, 1877 by King Luís I of Portugal and named after his queen, Maria Pia. The Portuguese community of historians of technology has already been responsible for the 25th ICOHTEC Annual Meeting, which was held in Lisbon back in 1998, and hosted the 1st Kranzberg Memorial Lecture. Portugal had then an enthusiastic, albeit very small and inexperienced group of young historians of technology, who regarded the organization of ICOHTEC 1998 as a sign of trust by its peers. From then on, the community of Portuguese historians of technology has grown and asserted itself both nationally and internationally. We would like to pay tribute to Professor Robert Angus Buchanan and Professor Carroll Pursell for their strong and disinterested encouragement.
We are now, once again, proud to receive in Portugal our fellow historians of technology. Additionally, and for the first time, the ICOHTEC meeting will be preceded by a Summer School, which aims at bringing together young apprentices.
Although some of us are now more mature and experienced, a new generation of very promising young scholars has meanwhile joined us and we are all as enthusiastic as before. We thus hope that the 43rd ICOHTEC Annual Meeting will be both scientifically challenging and socially memorable.
Conference website: http://www.icohtec.org/porto2016/