Friday, March 24th

9:00 - Coffee/light brunch

9:30 - John Weinstock

Opening Remarks:

University of Texas Vice President and Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson

United States Ambassador to Sweden Lyndon Olson

Swedish Ambassador to the United States Rolf Ekéus

10:10 - Lars Gustafsson: Eulogy for Gad Rausing

10:30 - Michael Lindgren (Halmstad): Christopher Polhem: Inventor, Innovator and Entrepreneur

12:00 - Lunch

1:30 - Sven Widmalm (Uppsala): Wizards in Context: The Creative Milieu of Herman Nilsson-Ehle, Manne Siegbahn and The Svedberg

2:30 - Anders Lundgren (Uppsala): Blood Plasma and Local Anaesthetics: The Scientific Background to Two Swedish Pharmaceutical Inventions During the 1940's

3:30 - Coffee

4:00 - Panel discussion: Writing the Inventions: Methods and Problems in the History of Technology, chaired by Bengt-Arne Vedin (Stockholm)

Saturday, March 25th

9:00 - Bengt-Arne Vedin (Stockholm): Learning From Double Failure the Way to Success: the Route to the World's Bestselling Telephone Switch

10:00 - Coffee

10:30 - Sverker Sörlin (Umeå): Technology from Universities in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Swedish-American Comparison

11:45 - Lunch

1:00 - Hans Weinberger (Royal Institute of Technology): Losing Patronage: The Decline of the Independent Inventor and the Rise of Organized Creativity

2:00 - Sören Törnkvist (Stockholm/Dar es Salaam): Learning to Be Creative?

3:00 - Coffee

3:30 - Panel discussion: The Sources of Creativity, chaired by Dr. James Truchard (National Instruments)

Sponsored by

The Swedish Studies Excellence Endowment
The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Excellence Endowment
TetraPak Corporation and ABB
in cooperation with the Scandinavian Program in the Germanic Studies Department,
College of Liberal Arts, The University of Texas at Austin

• Michael Lindgren is professor at Högskolan i Halmstad - Halmstad University.

   

• Sverker Sörlin is a professor of history of environmentalism at Centrum för regionalvetenskap at University of Umeå.

   

• Hans Weinberger is acting associate professor in the Department of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology.

   

• Sven Widmalm is a professor of the history of science at Institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria (the history of ideas and learning) at the University of Uppsala.

   

• Bengt-Arne Vedin is a consultant, lecturer, and writer currently with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

   

• Anders Lundgren is professor of intellectual history at Institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria at the University of Uppsala.

   

• Sören Törnkvist is at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and is currently attached to the Swedish Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

   

• James Truchard is a UT-trained physicist and co-founder of National Instruments-a virtual instrument company, using software that converts a PC into instruments such as oscillosopes, waveform generators, and digital multimeters used in electronics testing and production lines.