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This book looks at how hearing loss among adults was experienced, viewed and treated in Britain before the National Health Service. We explore the changing status of 'hard of hearing' people during the nineteenth century as categorized among diverse and changing categories of 'deafness'. Then we explore the advisory literature for managing hearing loss, and techniques for communicating with hearing aids, lip-reading and correspondence networks. From surveying the commercial selling and daily use of hearing aids, we see how adverse developments in eugenics prompted otologists to focus primarily on the prevention of deafness. The final chapter shows how hearing loss among First World War combatants prompted hearing specialists to take a more supportive approach, while it fell to the National Institute for the Deaf, formed in 1924, to defend hard of hearing people against unscrupulous hearing aid vendors. This book is suitable for both academic audiences and the general reading public. All royalties from sale of this book will be given to Action on Hearing Loss and the National Deaf Children's Society.

Traditional energy histories have treated electrification as an inevitability: the assumption has been that making cheap energy supply readily available for the masses required the energy efficiency uniquely attainable by large-scale networked electricity grids. While our account does not question that assumption, such a rationale can only explain the onset of electrification for contexts in which large scale electricity grids are already accessible to all. It cannot explain the earliest phase of electrification: what motivated the take up of electricity before such grids and their attendant economics actually existed to make it affordable and indeed competitive? We focus on the case of England before its National Grid was launched in 1926, a time when such alternatives as coal or its by-product coal-gas offered energy in a form that was cheaper or more convenient than stand-alone electrical installations and highly localised electricity infrastructures. Our initial aim is to survey a range of cultural rather than technocratic reasons for the early take-up of electricity in the 1880s to 1890s, treating it then as a luxury rather than a commonplace utility. In doing so, we return to Thomas Hughes' seminal Networks of Power (1983) to examine how far the growth of electrical power supply was shaped not just by engineers and politicians that predominate in his account, but by old-money inherited aristocracy that Hughes touches upon only briefly. Specifically we investigate how the nascent electrical industry looked to these powerful wealthy aristocratic technophiles, male and female, to serve as 'influencers' to help broaden the appeal of domestic electricity as essential to a desirable life-style of glamorous modernity.

The need for improved abatement of agricultural diffuse water pollution represents cause for concern throughout the world. A critical aspect in the design of on-farm intervention programmes concerns the potential technical cost-effectiveness of packages of control measures. The European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) calls for Programmes of Measures (PoMs) to protect freshwater environments and these comprise 'basic' (mandatory) and 'supplementary' (incentivised) options. Recent work has used measure review, elicitation of stakeholder attitudes and a process-based modelling framework to identify a new alternative set of 'basic' agricultural sector control measures for nutrient and sediment abatement across England. Following an initial scientific review of 708 measures, 90 were identified for further consideration at an industry workshop and 63 had industry support. Optimisation modelling was undertaken to identify a shortlist of measures using the Demonstration Test Catchments as sentinel agricultural landscapes. Optimisation selected 12 measures relevant to livestock or arable systems. Model simulations of 95% implementation of these 12 candidate 'basic' measures, in addition to business-as-usual, suggested reductions in the national agricultural nitrate load of 2.5%, whilst corresponding reductions in phosphorus and sediment were 11.9% and 5.6%, respectively. The total cost of applying the candidate 'basic' measures across the whole of England was estimated to be £450 million per annum, which is equivalent to £52 per hectare of agricultural land. This work contributed to a public consultation in 2016.