She first learned about the Ford Motor Co.’s unlikely involvement in basic superconductivity research while writing a paper on the origins of nanotechnology. She’s no stranger to the automotive industry, however. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on the invention of car antilock braking systems; it later became the book Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2009). The research for this article was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.