In this dissertation, I present my study of the history of the relationship between electrification and computation from the 1880s to the 1960s. I am specifically interested in the computation of the transmission part of an electric power network, which was the defining component of what came to be known as ‘power analysis’. Power analysis was determined by the tradeoff between the pursuit of increased social profit by the lengthening and interconnection of transmission lines and the corresponding decrease of technical instability. I divide the period under consideration into three sub-periods: 1880s–World War I, World War I to World War II, World War II–1960s. The history of computing the stability of electric power transmission during each of these sub-periods was marked by the development and use of the artificial line, the network analyzer, and the mainframe electronic computer respectively. But many other computing artifacts were used in power analysis, some quite extensively (slide rules), others relatively little (calculating-tabulating machines). I here present my findings in regards to calculating-tabulating machines and tables, slide rules, various analyzers, and graphs.; I divide the history of the electrification-computation relationship into three sub-periods in order to show that the pattern of the break between my second and my third sub-period was no different than the pattern of the break between the first and the second sub-period, i.e., that there was a continuity of breaks which suggests that there was no break at all. Within a scheme of expanded reproduction of the capitalist mode of computing production, I find that there existed continuity—ideological, political, and economic—during the transition from local to regional and from regional to interregional electric power networks.
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