Dr. Robert MacDougall

Rob MacDougall is a historian of technology and business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a special interest in the pre-history of computing and the information networks of Gilded Age North America. His book manuscript, <i>The People's Telephone</i>, is a comparative history of the telephone industry in the United States and Canada from the 1870s through the 1920s, and the way the dueling networks of that era embodied competing arguments about the economy and society. He is also interested in the history of crank inventors and pseudoscience in America, and blogs informally at <a href="Rob MacDougall is a historian of technology and business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a special interest in the pre-history of computing and the information networks of Gilded Age North America. His book manuscript, The People's Telephone, is a comparative history of the telephone industry in the United States and Canada from the 1870s through the 1920s, and the way the dueling networks of that era embodied competing arguments about the economy and society. He is also interested in the history of crank inventors and pseudoscience in America, and blogs informally at <a href="http://www.robmacdougall.org">www.robmacdougall.org</a&gt;.