Showing papers in "Technology and Culture in 2016"

Confronting the Second Deep Transition through the Historical Imagination.

Abstract: technology studies, transport history, Dutch history, history of Europe, a bit of global history, sustainable development studies, to mobility studies. I also worked with policymakers and other stakeholders in fields such as innovation policy, technology assessment, and greening of industry. Yet my home is history, in particular history of technology, and the Society for the History of Technology provides the space where I can meet friends driven by a similar love for the history of technology. I feel therefore privileged and honored to be awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. It feels like a recognition from my soul mates, which is important precisely because I so often travel far away from my roots, and then wonder whether historians of technology will still accept me when I come back. Why is history of technology my home? The short answer is that I value the historical imagination beyond anything else. As I will argue below, it is this imagination that is crucially important for many actors in the world confronting the next Deep Transition. Here I am building on the notion of the Great Transformation, a phrase made famous by Karl Polanyi to describe the social and political changes that occurred with the rise of a market economy.1 History allows me to travel through time and space to new worlds and the enjoyment of often amazing experiences. There is no

Technological Innovation: On the Origins and Development of an Inclusive Concept.

Abstract: Over the last several decades, many students of technology have tried to make sense of the concept of technology and its origins. However, nothing similar exists in the literature on “technological innovation,” a phrase that emerged after World War II. This paper suggests that technological innovation is a counter-concept to science—and more particularly to basic research—as a dominant cultural value of the twentieth century. Technological innovation emerged as a phrase or concept because in discourse, action, and policy, it was useful to include in understandings of economic growth a larger number of people than just scientists and more activities than just science or basic research. Technological innovation is a total process. “It integrates what would otherwise be separate activities and inquiries in order to redraw the intellectual world that society adopts” (Roy Harris, The Semantics of Science, [p. xi]).

Proximal Design: Users as Designers of Mobility in the Russian North

Abstract: By examining mobility in remote Arctic areas, we analyze how challenging environmental conditions, while affecting technology performance, evoke people’s creativity and efforts as technology users. Based on historical materials and ethnographic observations of user inventiveness in the transport sector in the Russian North, we define and document a phenomenon of “proximal design” in three different modes: the proximal complementation of “distant design” machines (trucks and military equipment) to ascertain their reliability; the emergence of a new type of homemade all-terrain vehicle called a “karakat,” made from salvaged parts to specialize in times and locations where other vehicles turn unreliable; and the traditional craft of sledge-making by nomadic reindeer herders of the Yamal area, where even materials are proximally collected and shaped. Our main argument is that continuous tuning, modification, and redesign of technology carried out by immediate users in situ make it possible for humans and machines to function in extreme settings and that this can lead also to emergence of enduring design principles. We outline key characteristics of proximal design such as constraining environment, inventiveness by necessity, flexible construction, personalization and symbolic meaning, and social embeddedness of making/maintaining practices.

Engineering Philosophy: Theories of Technology, German Idealism, and Social Order in High-Industrial Germany.

Abstract: During the so-called "Second Industrial Revolution," engineers were constituting themselves as a new social and professional group, and found themselves in often fierce competition with existing elites-the military, the nobility, and educated bourgeois mandarins-whose roots went back to medieval and early modern pre-industrial social orders. During that same time, engineers also discovered the discipline of philosophy: as a means to express their intellectual and social agendas, and to theorize technology and its relationship to art, history, culture, philosophy, and the state. This article analyzes engineers' own philosophical writings about technology as well as the institutions in which they composed them in 1910s and 1920s Germany. It emphasizes engineers' contributions to well-known discourses founded by canonical philosophers, the role of preindustrial economies and their imagination in such philosophies, and the role of both the history and the philosophy of technology in engineers' desire for upward social mobility.

Standard Cocoa: Transnational Networks and Technoscientific Regimes in West African Plantations.

Abstract: In the early 1900s, an obscure Portuguese colony in the equatorial Atlantic rose as the world’s leading cocoa producer. Cocoa from the island of Sao Tome was grown on large plantations with indentured labor and high technological inputs. This technoscientific system, to control both plants and people, became the model for making an industry-suited cocoa, and the material evidence of the moral and economic virtues of the colonial plantation. Experts played a crucial role in building and putting into circulation such a system. Sao Tome’s cocoa expertise, along with its labor and racial relations, landscape patterns, and imperial imaginaries, contributed to the colonization of other African territories, namely the German Cameroons. This article agues that commodities and their technological histories can help bring to light the transnational and transcolonial features that are embedded at the core of empire building.

Détente from the Air: Monitoring Air Pollution during the Cold War.

Abstract: During the period of detente in the 1970s, a Norwegian proposal to construct an air pollution monitoring network for the European continent resulted in the first concrete collaboration between the communist and capitalist blocs after the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Known as the "European-wide monitoring programme" or EMEP, the network earned considerable praise from diplomats for facilitating cooperation across the Iron Curtain. Yet as this article argues, EMEP was strongly influenced by the politics of detente and the constraints of the Cold War even as it helped to decrease tensions. Concerns about national security and sharing data with the enemy shaped both the construction of the monitoring network and the modeling of pollution transport. The article also proposes that environmental monitoring systems like EMEP reveal the ways in which observational technologies can affect conceptions of the natural world and the role of science in public policy.

Contested Waterlines: The Wave-Line Theory and Shipbuilding in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Ship hydrodynamics in the nineteenth century was dominated by John Scott Russell’s wave-line theory. Russell, a prominent British shipbuilder and scientist, argued that wavemaking was the primary source of resistance for ships, and that by designing ships according to trigonometric curves and proportions (the wave line) this resistance could effectively be eliminated. From the 1840s to the 1880s, shipbuilders such as John Willis Griffiths, Donald McKay and George Steers designed their clipper ships (like Sea Witch and Flying Cloud ) and yachts ( America ) with wave-line hulls, while authors like Jules Verne referenced Russell’s theory. The wave line slowly faded after William Froude developed his laws of ship resistance. The article examines how Russell’s theory became accepted by technical experts and the wider public to become the most widely known ship hydrodynamic theory of the 1800s—a reminder of how a persuasive idea can take hold of an entire profession, and even the public, for a long time.

From Cabling the Atlantic to Wiring the World: A Review Essay on the 150th Anniversary of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1866

Abstract: The year 2016 witnesses the 150th anniversary of laying the first successful transatlantic telegraph cables. This review essay offers a critical rereading of existing scholarship while simultaneously suggesting new perspectives for research. Telegraphy = globalization, the history of wiring the world commencing with the Atlantic cable of 1866 seems to suggest. At the same time, this essay argues, this equation should make scholars uneasy and cautious of a possible technological determinism retracing its steps back into the middle of scholarly debates on globalization. More attention needs to be paid to whose globalization we are talking about, what the globalization of politics, markets, and media means in connection to communication, and whether the cables really started something radically new. 150 years after laying the “first” Atlantic cable, there is still room for research. New spaces, theories, and methodologies, as well as alternate user groups including women and subalterns, offer avenues to test established scholarship on global communications.

"When Does It Stop Being Peanut Butter?": FDA Food Standards of Identity, Ruth Desmond, and the Shifting Politics of Consumer Activism, 1960s–1970s

Abstract: This article uses a historical controversy over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's standard of identity for peanut butter as a site for investigating three topics of high importance for historians of technology, consumption, and food activism: how new industrial food-processing technologies have become regulatory problems; how government, industry, and consumer actors negotiate standards development; and how laypeople try to shape technological artifacts in spaces dominated by experts. It examines the trajectory of consumer activist Ruth Desmond, co-founder of the organization the Federation of Homemakers. By following Desmond's evolving strategies, the article shows how the broader currents of the 1960s-70s consumer movement played out in a particular case. Initially Desmond used a traditional style that heavily emphasized her gendered identity, working within a grassroots organization to promote legislative and regulatory reforms. Later, she moved to a more modern advocacy approach, using adversarial legal methods to fight for consumer protections.

Malleability and Machines: Glenn Gould and the Technological Self.

Abstract: The Pianist Glenn Gould has often been portrayed as a musical idealist who embraced mundane recording media as a way of escaping the anxiety of the concert hall. In pursuing his musical ideals, however, Gould obsessed over material objects—the qualities of a chair, the action of piano keys, the placement of splices in magnetic tape. This paper argues that for him, the detailed properties of machines and electronic media were crucial, not just as tools for pursuing disembodied aesthetic aims, but as instruments and material sites for a moral project. Locating Gould’s concerns among the techniques and technologies that inspired him, the concert hall he despised, and the jazz and chance music he tolerated, the paper explores how Gould’s famed philosophy of technology was rooted in a “technological self” that tied morality and aesthetics, and intimacy and isolation, to concrete ideals for the kinds of people we ought to be.

Domestic Appliances and Industrial Design: The Italian White-Goods Industry during the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract: The white-goods sector was one of the industries that led economic development in Italy following World War II and featured companies that achieved notable results in foreign markets. According to the literature on the subject, price competitiveness generated mainly by the lower cost of labor was the key to this success. This article explores the as-yet unstudied role played by industrial design, and not only for its ability to significantly facilitate the reduction of production costs. It shows how industrial design played a wider and more decisive role in reinventing Italian white goods by differentiating the products of Italian producers from those of their main foreign competitors. Therefore the article contributes to understanding how and why certain products and technologies are reworked, assimilated, and diffused in the ways they are.

Technology Commercialization as University Mission: Early Historical Developments at the University of Toronto.

Abstract: Canadian universities are perceived as less vibrant and engaged generators of technologies with commercial value than their American counterparts, and such perceptions have driven science policy for decades. This paper shows that contrary to these prevailing views, Canada’s largest university has a long history of experience in dealing with the technological gaps in national industry and in attempting to work with domestic firms. Three historical periods, particularly critical in shaping these interactions, are identified and discussed. By the time policy initiatives began emphasizing university-industry relationships, the university had already built essential organizational underpinnings for the commercialization of technologies.

Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Western Forestry Systems and Soviet Engineers, 1955–1964

Abstract: This article examines the transfer of technology from Finnish enterprises to Soviet industry during the USSR's period of technological modernization between 1955 and 1964. It centers on the forestry sector, which was a particular focus of modernization programs and a key area for the transfer of foreign techniques and expertise. The aim of the article is to investigate the role of trips made by Soviet specialists to foreign (primarily Finnish) enterprises in order to illustrate the nontechnological influences that occurred during the transfer of technologies across the cold war border. To do so, the article is divided into two parts: the first presents a general analysis of technology transfer from a micro-level perspective, while the second investigates the cultural influences behind technological transfer in the Soviet-Finnish case. This study contends that although the Soviet government expected its specialists to import advanced foreign technical experience, they brought not only the technologies and expertise needed for modernizing the industry, but also a changed view on Soviet workplace management and everyday practices.

From Natural Monopoly to Public Utility: Technological Determinism and the Political Economy of Infrastructure in Progressive-Era America

Abstract: In present-day debates regarding telecommunication policy, one frequently hears the terms natural monopoly and public utility. This article investigates the origins of these ideas, finding that Richard T. Ely-a celebrated American economist of the late nineteenth century-embedded in the term "natural monopoly" a narrative of technological determinism. By arguing that certain services had monopolizing tendencies hardwired into them, Ely argued for their regulation. Ely's theory of natural monopoly formed the basis of Wisconsin's 1907 public utilities law, which served as a model for many other states' regulatory policies. The modern notion of public utility thus carries with it the technological determinism of Ely's natural monopoly idea. By tracing the lineage of these two terms, this article recaptures the influence that activists and progressive politicians exercised over the formation of large technological systems during the Second Industrial Revolution.

Technology and nation: Learning from the periphery

Abstract: This essay explores the role of technology in building nations as material and cultural artifacts from two peripheral perspectives. First, it brings to the fore what we call epistemic peripheries in the history of technology, be they objects or actors usually neglected when studying the interplay between technology and the nation. Second, it deals with geographic peripheries by focusing on connections, networks, and circulation processes far beyond linear and static core-periphery relations. We claim that one cannot properly understand how technological national identities were created if national boundaries are taken as strict analytical frameworks. In this sense, the essay advocates a transnational history with a wider empirical focus.

The Anthropocene as a History of Technology : Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands, Deutsches Museum, Munich

Abstract: The Anthropocene as a History of Technology : Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands, Deutsches Museum, Munich

Education and Textbooks.

Abstract: Education and textbooks have traditionally been standard objects of research in the history of science, technology, and medicine. However, they have often remained marginal in the formulation of large historiographical questions. In the last decades, the work of some historians of science has challenged this state of affairs. STEP has promoted a distinctive focus on education and textbooks, compared to other scholarship cultures such as the Anglo-American. This essay reviews its work in this field and stresses the potential of education and textbooks to produce interdisciplinary research in local, national, and international perspective.

Popularization of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the "Periphery": A Step Further?

Abstract: Based on the research that has been carried out within STEP, this essay suggests an integrative approach for the study of science, technology and medicine popularization in the European periphery during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Such an approach can be a privileged tool not only for examining the complex processes of institutionalization and specialization of STM in peripheral countries, but also for exploring the interplay of STM in the making of modernity, since popularization seemed to have deep political implications in the implementation of modernization programs and the construction of national and professional identities in the European periphery.

Richard Byrd, Technological Explorer: Polar Exploration, the Machine, and Heroic Masculinity in Interwar America

Abstract: In May 1926, U.S. newspapers were full of the story that Richard Byrd, an American aviator, had become the first person to reach the North Pole by air. The announcement triggered patriotic outpourings across the country and Byrd was widely hailed as a national hero. The young aviator's flight was part of a burgeoning interwar expeditionary practice that placed machines at the heart of new modes of exploration. This development, however, challenged preexisting notions of masculine heroism and threatened to undercut the explorer's heroic status. How then, could Byrd become a national hero? This article analyzes his depiction in the press as a means of exploring interwar Americans' efforts to renegotiate their notions of heroic masculinity in a way that could accommodate the machine without threatening the hero's status. In the process, it argues, these narratives and images defined a new sort of popular hero: the technological explorer.

The Text in the Machine: American Copyright Law and the Many Natures of Software, 1974-1978.

Abstract: This article is a case study in the history of software copyright in the United States from 1974 to 1978. It focuses on the work of a group called the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works. CONTU, as this group was known, faced the problem of choosing which ontology of software—by which I mean a conception of the nature of software as an invention—should serve as the conceptual underpinning for the law of software copyright. In particular, the commissioners needed to decide whether computer programs are texts, machines, means to communicate with machines, or many of these things at once. CONTU’s history shows how the discursive emergence of software as a new technology has been shaped by the convergence of commercial interests, the transmission of technical knowledge to lay audiences, and idiosyncratic views on the nature of information technology and human creativity.

Experts and Peripheries: Ongoing Research and Future Challenges.

Abstract: Based on existing research on Spain and Greece, the essay is focused upon the activity of experts in criminal courts and advisory committees. Following the experts in these settings, we offer examples of their roles in governing techno-sciences in societies of the European periphery. We highlight the tensions between the creative powers of localities and the movement of expert knowledge in a world marked by striking inequalities concerning economic, political and academic power. We claim that a comparative study of these movements will be refine the historical understanding of experts and expertise.

Engineers Attack the "No. One Killer" in Coal Mining: The Bureau of Mines and the Promotion of Roof Bolting, 1947–1969

Abstract: In 1948 roof falls were the number one killer of coal miners in America. While the Bureau of Mines had been formed in 1910 to improve coalmine safety, it had largely focused on explosions, for which technological solutions appeared to exist. Roof falls, by contrast, were not amenable to a technical fix. Beginning in 1948, however, the Bureau discovered roof bolting, which it promoted as a safer technology that might yield dramatic benefits. The new approach spread rapidly, yet fatality rates from roof falls failed to decline for nearly two decades. This lag reflected the need for organizational learning, while companies also traded safety for productivity. Finally, only larger mines employed bolting and its impact was masked by a growth in the employment share of small companies. After 1965, as the expansion of small mines ended and organizational learning continued, fatality rates began a long decline.

How to Write an Urban History of STM on the "Periphery"

Abstract: Within the STEP research agenda there has never been an explicit focus on the city as a central place for knowledge production. Scholars of the urban history of science tend to concentrate on the metropolis and have not looked in any systematic way at the scientific culture in "peripheral" urban contexts. To fill this gap, this essay proposes to focus on: (1) the role of science, technology and medicine in everyday life and the experiences of the citizens; (2) the plurality of the often conflicting notions of urban modernity; (3) the complex networks of interurban connections between the "peripheries."

Mining Cultures and Mary Cults: Where the Sacred and Profane Meet

Abstract: Our Lady of the Rockies (OLR) is a ninety-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary overlooking Butte, Montana, from its perch high atop the Continental Divide. In the popularized account, OLR is a uniquely local undertaking reflecting the community's character and pride. Yet OLR is far more than this, for it taps into a rich vein of cultural and spiritual tradition. As Mircea Eliade pointed out, the notion of the earth as female pervaded early Western civilizations. Mines were like the vagina of the earth, leading to the womb where metallic ores waxed like embryos. Accordingly, miners purified themselves through various rites to amend their violation. OLR began as a plan for a small, private altar. With the collapse of Butte's copper mining economy, unemployed miners rallied around the idea of building a major shrine to the Virgin Mary that would help restore the city's culture and economy.

An Architecture for the Electronic Church: Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Abstract: More than a university, Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was also the headquarters for evangelist Oral Roberts's electronic church. The electronic church in America, dominated by Christian evangelicals, used technology to spread the Gospel over radio airways and television signals to a dispersed audience. Yet evangelicals like Roberts also constructed ambitious campuses in real space and time. The architecture of Oral Roberts University visualized a modern and "populuxe" image for the electronic church in the 1960s and 1970s. The university's Prayer Tower purposely alluded to the Seattle Space Needle, aligning religion and the Space Age, and the campus's white, gold, and black color palette on late modern buildings created an image of aspirational luxury, conveying Roberts's health and wealth gospel. Oral Roberts University served as a sound stage for Roberts's radio and television shows, a pilgrimage point for his audience, and a university dedicated to training evangelicals in the electronic church.

STEP Matters: Historiographical Considerations.

Abstract: In this introduction, we revisit major discussions around historical themes and historiographical issues that took place during the fifteen-year life of STEP (Science and Technology at the European Periphery). We will attempt to draw the profile of STEP, and put forth some concrete proposals as to its prospects of collaboration with other groups and societies. We also elaborate on the rationale behind the selection of topics presented in this issue, analyse questions posed and challenges faced, and offer some historiographical comments on the potential of the STEP perspective in the context of international scholarship.

Beyond Fixed Geographies: Moving Localities and the Making of Knowledge.

Abstract: In recent historiography the notion of circulation serves as a basis for weaving together global narratives of the history of science. However, the emphasis placed by such narratives on the impact of European science should not overshadow the fact that the making of knowledge in Europe is a dynamic and multi-layered process that cannot be reduced to simple models of knowledge circulation among fixed localities. In order to develop this perspective, the authors introduce the notion of "moving localities," as a means to depict the mutually transformative encounters that shaped the notion of European science and technology.