A historian of technology by training (D.Phil, Oxford University, 1985), he written The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926 (Cornell, 1992) and FAXED. The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Johns Hopkins, 2015), both of which cover the important military contributions to those technologies. He writes a blog on the history of technology, Infinity Limited, for the History News Network (http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/author/42).