History Of Technology Research Paper

1. Defining The History Of Technology

Because technology defies simple definition, its history as a field of study is not easily defined. Editors of the five-volume History of Technology (1954–1958, Oxford University Press, London) broadly define ‘technology’ as ‘how things are commonly done or made … [and] what things are done and made.’ Finding this definition too diffuse, the editors of the two-volume Technology in Western Civilization (1967, Oxford University Press, New York,) reject, as well, the oft-encountered definitions of technology as applied science or as a rational attempt to control nature. They associate technology with human work, ‘with man’s attempts to satisfy his wants by human action on physical objects.’

Technology and its history are as difficult to define as history of politics or history of economics which experienced scholars refuse to define except by countless examples.

It is also hard to characterize a historian of technology. Unlike general historians, who usually have graduate training in history departments, historians interested in technology enter upon the study of its history from a variety of backgrounds, besides graduate study in the history of technology. Persons trained, for example, in engineering, history of science, economic history, general history, and sociology, do outstanding works in the field. Professional writers also contribute works addressed to a general public including essays that appear in widely circulated journals such as the American Heritage of Invention and Technology.

2. Handbooks And Histories Of Invention And Engineering

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars, especially German, nurtured the history of technology by publishing information-rich encyclopedias and handbooks. Franz Marie Feldhaus’s Die Technik der Vorzeit, der Geschichtlichen Zeit und der Natur olker (1914, Englman, Leipzig) and Ludwig Darmstaedter’s Handbuch zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik (1908 Springer, Berlin) continue to be useful sources for the history of invention and discovery.

In the early years, biographies of engineers and histories of engineering appeared alongside histories of invention. Samuel Smiles, a railroad manager and medical doctor, in his influential Lives of the Engineers (1861–2, Murray, London, ) cast problem-solving, project-managing engineers of the British Industrial Revolution in a heroic mold. They surmounted technical, political, economic, and organizational hurdles to transform undeveloped land into industrial regions by means of canals, roads, and improved harbors. In the twentieth century engineers have played a more enigmatic role than did Smiles’s heroes. Karl-Heinz Ludwig in Technik und Ingenieure in Dritten Reich (1979, Princeton University Press, Kronigstein), Kendall Bailes in Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (1978, Harvard University Press, Princeton, NJ), and Loren Graham in The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (1993, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA) follow the tragic path of engineers under totalitarian regimes.

3. Early Monographs

Lewis Mumford, a public intellectual and professional writer, remains a seminal contributor to the field. Painting with broad-brush strokes on a canvas of western history, his approach is imaginatively interdisciplinary as he draws upon secondary works in western history, sociology, and anthropology. Prolific, he appealed to an interested, educated public, and simultaneously influenced the scholarly world with his insightful concepts. Technics and Civilization (1934, Harcourt Brace, New York), his most enduring history of technology, surveys the development of technology from pre-historic to modern times. He acknowledges the deterministic role technology often plays in history, but he also stresses that values shape technology. His later works, including The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (1970, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, NY), lament the rise of megamachines, or large bureaucratic, military, technological systems that deny individual’s freedom and sweep them towards catastrophic wars.

Swiss architect and historian Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (1948, Oxford University Press, New York) ranges from medieval to modern times. A highly original study, it seeks to explain the mechanization of dwellings, food, furniture, and other aspects of everyday life. Anticipating the attitude of post-World War II historians of technology, he laments in particular the way in which mechanization has displaced organic processes and substituted abstract reason for feeling.

Louis C. Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers, an Economic and Technological History (1949, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA), and Lynn White Jr.’s Medie al Technology and Social Change (1962, Clarendon Press, New York) also anticipate the contextual and social history approaches of a later generation of historians of technology. Hunter shows how the natural environment of the Mississippi River shaped the design of nineteenth century steamboats. On the other hand, White believed technology brought manoralism and feudalism.

4. General Histories Of Technology

The publication of the information-rich A History of Technology (1954–8, Oxford University Press, London) edited by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor Williams gave the field substantial scholarly credentials. Museum curators, engineers, and natural scientists figure prominently among the authors of the more than 100 chapters that tell of the development of technology from its beginnings to 1900. The authors do not integrate political, social, and economic history into their deterministic account of a nature-mastering, society-shaping, western technology that, they believe, had become science-based by 1900.

Published about a decade later, Technology in Western Civilization (1967, Oxford University Press, New York), another collective work, differs notably in approach from A History of Technology. Trained in general history before turning to history of technology, editors Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell, Jr., in contrast to the editors of A History of Technology, urged their 34 authors to integrate history of technology with social, economic, and political history. The majority are historians of science, historians of technology, and economic historians, and they tend to take a contextual approach and to focus upon the British and American industrial revolutions. By stressing the interplay of technological and social factors, Kranzberg and Pursell move away from technological determinism encountered in A History of Technology.

Kranzberg and Pursell anticipate the recent trend among historians of technology to emphasize the interaction of technology and the natural environment by including three chapters on land use and resources. In a concluding chapter about the challenge of technology for the future, they also take a more critical view of the interaction of technology and culture than did the editors of A History of Technology.

Other broad ranging histories of technology have emerged from several national sources. Under the general editorship of Maurice Daumas, Histoire Generale des Technique appeared between 1962 and 1979 (Paris). Propylaen Technikgeschichte (Berlin 1990–1992), a German collective survey under the general editorship of Professor Wolfgang Konig, also moves from ancient times into the twentieth century. A. A. Sworykin, N. I. Osmova, W. I. Tschernyschew, and J. W. Schuchardin published a Soviet version of the general history of technology translated into German as Geschichte der Technik (Leipzig 1964).

Recognized as a major scholarly achievement, Joseph Needham’s multivolume Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, UK, 1954) integrates from a Marxist perspective the history of medicine, technology, and science in a non-Western civilization. Among national histories of technology is Geschiedenis an de Techniek in Nederland: de Wording an een moderne Samenleving, 1800–1890 (Zutphen 1992–1993) under the general editorship of Harry W. Lintsen.

5. Society For The History Of Technology

The year of 1958 brought a turning point in the development of the history of technology with the establishment of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and its journal Technology and Culture (T&C ). Earlier, in 1920, the British Newcomen Society for the Study of the History of Engineering and Technology began publishing The Transactions which attracted, in particular, engineers interested in the history of their profession. The influential French journal, Les Annales, occasionally carried articles about the history of technology, and in 1935 published a special issue on the subject with a wide-ranging article on the history of water mills by its distinguished editor Marc Bloch.

Originally edited by Kranzberg and subsequently by Robert Post and John Staudenmaier, Technology and Culture attracts essays and readers from history of science, technology, and economics. The annual Bibliography: of the history of technology prepared initially by Eugene Ferguson proved especially valuable for researchers in the field. Within a few years, SHOT and Technology and Culture became the primary organizational framework for historians of technology in the USA and Western Europe. With several thousand individual members, SHOT includes non-US members on its governing committees and regularly has annual meetings in Western Europe. The International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) provides through its colloquia and publications, a forum not only for US and Western European historians of technology, but also those from Eastern Europe, Russia, and elsewhere.

6. Graduate Programs In The History Of Technology

Not only did SHOT and Technology and Culture provide an institutional framework for the history of technology, but the establishment of several graduate programs did as well. In 1954 the Eleutherian MillsHagley Foundation of Wilmington, Delaware with its archives, library, and museum, concentrating on history of technology and business organized, in conjunction with the University of Delaware, a graduate program for historians of technology. In 1973 the University of Pennsylvania initiated a doctoral program for the history of technology within its History and Sociology of Science Department. Other US universities followed suit, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Europe, Svante Lindqvist founded a history of technology and science program at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm which has become a model for other institutions of higher learning in Western Europe. The research centers at Munich’s Deutsches Museum and London’s Imperial College also cultivate graduate training in the field.

7. Emerging Themes

7.1 Technology–Science Relationship

Since its founding, the pages of Technology and Culture express thematic concerns of scholars publishing and teaching in the field. In the 1960s, they often explored the relationship between technology and science. Motivation for this interest came in part from their wish to establish an identity for their subject other than as the history of applied science, a linear model often adopted by historians of science and science policy makers. Historians of technology point out how often scientific theory rationalizes earlier technological practice.

Historian of technology Edwin Layton argued cogently in the 1970s that engineers develop their own applicable theoretical structures from practical experience and experimentation. Recently Walter Vincenti, eminent aeronautical engineer and historian of technology, has expounded this position persuasively in What Engineers Know and How They Know It (1990, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD).

Besides writing biographies of Thomas Edison and other independent inventors who experimented beyond scientific frontiers, historians of technology and science publish works about industrial research. John Beer provided a model for such studies with his essay on [German] ‘Coal Tar Dye Manufacture and the Origins of the Modern Industrial Research Laboratory,’ ISIS 49, (1958). Histories of the General Electric, Bell, and other major industrial laboratories followed. In these, fundamental research, in contrast with pure research, brings improvements in existing technology such as the three-element vacuum tube and incandescent lamp filaments.

7.2 Invention, Development, And Innovation

Technological change and creativity, a perennially intriguing human activity, became another early thematic concentration of historians of technology, especially those interested in economic and business history who see innovation as a source of economic development. After World War II, The Sources of Invention (Jeukes et al., 1969, W.W. Norton, London), which includes more than 50 case histories, stimulated a shared discourse about invention, as did historian Abbott Payson Usher’s A History of Mechanical Invention (Cambridge, MA, 1954) and sociologist S. Colum Gilfillan’s Supplement to the Sociology of Invention (San Francisco, 1971). Sociologist of science Robert K. Merton’s seminal study, Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York, 1970), broadens the discourse by demonstrating that attitudes and values stimulate technological innovation which in turn stimulates the search for underlying scientific knowledge.

The shared discourse usually defined technological creativity as consisting of three phases: invention, development, and innovation. Professional inventors and researchers in industrial laboratories were seen as presiding over the process of invention from a concept to a physical model. Development, a collective venture, moved the simple model through testing stages until a full-scale version could be tested. Innovation brought the device, process, or system into use. Technology and Culture authors usually situated the three-phase process in an economic, political, and social context. The ongoing publication of the extensive Thomas Edison papers, along with Paul Israel’s Edison, a Life (2000, New York) based on these, provides historians with an unprecedented rich source of information on a master of invention, development and innovation.

7.3 Industrial Revolutions, Systems, And Management

Industrialization also stimulated research and teaching among historians of technology. The rise of the USA to a position of preeminence among industrial nations raised questions about the nature of the industrialization process, especially as embodied in putative industrial revolutions in the UK and the USA.

Influential scholars exploring the process tend to see it as systematic. In Das Kapital (1867), Karl Marx portrays a factory as a system of textile machines driven by a single steam engine. Widening his perspective, he insightfully understands that textile factories interact with transportation, energy, and other systems to produce an industrial revolution, one scholars now label the ‘British Industrial Revolution.’

David Landes an American economic historian, in The Unbound Prometheus (1972, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), writes of an interrelated succession of technological changes culminating after 1750 in the British Industrial Revolution and its spread throughout Western Europe. He shows how the coming of the steam engine, for example, depended upon developments in coal mining, iron manufacture, and railroad transportation. Ken Alder discusses the systematic interaction of military culture, industrialization, and politics in Engineering the Revolution: Arms and the Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (1997, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ). Histoire des Techniques (Paris, 1978), edited and mostly written by Bertrand Gille, presents a history of successive technological systems and industrial revolutions from the earliest times into the twentieth century.

Historians customarily deal with the industrialization of the USA in the early nineteenth century as the spreading of the British Industrial Revolution by technology transfer and adaptation. David Hounshell in From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (1984, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore) challenges this interpretation by stressing the originality of the American system of production that developed in the nineteenth century and reached its apogee in the Ford system of mass production. Historian of technology Merritt Roe Smith in Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (1977, Ithaca, NJ) sees the early nineteenth century American system as both a technical and managerial enterprise, and places it within a shaping community, or social, context.

Only a relatively few historians explore a second Industrial Revolution in the USA and Germany after 1870 with its technical core of electrical and internal combustion technology. Hugh G. J. Aitken surveys the spread of radio in The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900–1932 (1985, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) and Susan Douglas amplifies the story in Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (1987, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD). Within the frame of a Second Industrial Revolution, Leslie Hannah gives the history of electrical supply in the UK in Electricity before Nationalisation (1973, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD). Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (1983, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD) by Thomas P. Hughes gives a history of electric power systems since 1880 in major urban centers in the USA, the UK and Germany. He defines systems as embo-organizational components and follows their development through stages characterized respectively and successively by the problem solving of inventive, managerial, and financial political system builders. Hughes’s methodology has spread among historians and sociologists who characterize it as a pragmatic, systems approach.

US historian of management Alfred D. Chandler in his seminal work The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977, Cambridge, MA) stimulated a number of historians of technology interested in a Second Industrial Revolution to con- sider his proposition that innovative management since the late nineteenth century has done more to increase productivity than technical advances. Jurgen Kocka describes in a broad context large-scale, enterprise management at the Siemens company during German industrialization in Unternehmens erwaltung und Angestelltenschaft am Beispiel Siemens, 1847–1914 (1969, Stuttgart), James R. Beniger in The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (1986, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA) moves from a second to an information revolution.

David Noble in America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977, Alfred A. Knopf, New York) takes a strikingly different approach from Chandler on the rise of modern management. Reasoning from a Marxist perspective, Noble contends that US corporate culture represented by engineers and industrial scientists coopted invention, research, and technical education in the interest of capitalism. Philip Scranton, a historian of technology and labor, offers in Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (1997, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) a correction to both Chandler and Noble by pointing out that small-scale, proprietary management and batch production continued to flourish in the era usually associated with large-scale mass production.

Military technology has been a constituent factor of modern history, especially during and since the Second Industrial Revolution. William H. McNeill in The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (1982, University of Chicago Press, Chicago) integrates military technology into general history. Technological developments during World War II and after, are described in Edward W. Constant’s The Origins of the Turboiet Revolution (1980, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD). Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr. provide a detailed account of wartime atomic energy in A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission: The New World, 1939 1946 (1962, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA) and Richard Rhodes dramatizes the story effectively in The Making of the Atom Bomb (1986, Simon and Schuster, New York). Walter A. McDougall The Heavens and the Earth (1985, Basic Books, New York) places space technology in a political context.

Donald MacKenzie in Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (1991, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) and Gabrielle Hecht in The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (1998, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) place political decision-making in the shaping context of evolving nuclear technology. A number of historians are exploring the recent history of the computer and biotechnology, but the definitive history has not yet appeared. Paul Edwards The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) goes beyond narrative history to suggest that information systems are increasingly the shaping context within which military and political decisions are made.

7.4 Environment: Natural And Built

During the 1990s, the history of technology and environmental history intersected in the works of a number of historians. Earlier Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964, Oxford University Press, New York) discussed the ideas of early American visionaries, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson who envisioned the harmonization of nature and technology in a pastoral landscape. In Nature’s Metropolis (1991, W.W. Norton, New York). William Cronon describes the way in which Chicago’s transportation and manufacturing technologies interacted seamlessly with the exploitation of the hinterland’s natural resources to produce enormous quantities of marketable goods and nurture the enormous growth of Chicago.

Richard White, a social and environmental historian, further explores the seamless web theme in an imaginatively titled book The Organic Machine (1995, Hill and Wang, New York). It tells of the transformation of the Columbia River Basin in the states of Oregon and Washington into an artifact blending the natural and human built. White believes that the history of technology and the history of the environment can no more be told separately than the story of a marriage.

7.5 Gender, Race, And Technology

In the 1990s historians also began to explore assiduously the mutual shaping of gender and technology. ‘Gender Analysis and the History of Technology,’ a bibliographic essay in a special issue of Technology and Culture 38 (1997) documents the extensive literature emerging in the field. Ruth Schwartz Cowan in More Work for Mother: the Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983, Basic Books, New York) demonstrates that the household is a context within which factory-produced goods and consumption interact. Other historians further develop the consumption junction theme by showing that consumers, male and female, are not simply passive users of technology, but shape artifacts through their consumption preferences.

Judith McGaw opens another area of gender studies in Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making 1801–1885 (1987, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) in which she demonstrates that women have gendered niches in the workplace which often perpetuate inequalities. Other historians argue similarly that some technological developments are shaped by ideas about racial differences and conversely that technology often defines racial roles, especially in colonial and developing areas. Michael Adas in Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1989, Cornell University Press, Ithaca) demonstrates that nineteenth century colonial ideology associated technological progress, or the lack of it, with racial characteristics.

8. Methodology: Social Construction And Actor Networks

Until the 1980s histories of technology were generally written as narratives with little formal analysis. Then, European sociologists and anthropologists began shaping the field through the introduction of social construction and actor network methodologies. French sociologist Michel Callon in several influential articles including ‘The State and Technical Innovation: A Case Study of the Electrical Vehicle in France,’ Research Policy, 9 (1980) presents an actor network model. It draws upon, but differs from, the Hughes systems approach previously described.

Callon uses an abstract concept ‘actor’ to signify— without distinguishing between—animate and inanimate components in a network. An actor-network creates and sustains a complex technological artifact such as an electric automobile. French professor of sociology Bruno Latour in Aramis, ou l’Amour des Techniques (1993, Paris) utilizes actor-network theory to present the history of a failed effort to introduce a radically new subway system in Paris. Deploying relativist sociology, Latour lets the actors, animate and inanimate, speak for themselves and offer conflicting, but equally valid, accounts of the evolution of a fluid project characterized by conflicting visions and policies.

Together with the systems and actor-network, the social construction approach of Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker became a widely adopted methodology among historians and sociologists of technology in Europe and the USA. Influenced by the sociology of scientific knowledge cultivated at the University of Edinburgh, Pinch and Bijker offer a seminal example of social construction in an essay entitled ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,’ Social Studies of Science, 14 (1984). They demonstrate that social environments shape the technical characteristics of an artifact, in this case the late nineteenth century bicycle. Social groups of varying class and different gender pursuing their interests and values define and determine the solution of bicycle-development problems thus embodying meaning in bicycle design.

Essays by Pinch and Bijker, Hughes, Callon, John Law (‘Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: the Case of Portuguese Expansion’), Donald MacKenzie (‘Missile Accuracy: A Case Study in the Social Processes of Technological Change’), and by others are collected in The Social Construction of Technological Systems; New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (1989, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). From this volume a language of analysis has spread, a language which includes ‘seamless web,’ ‘systems,’ ‘actors,’ ‘network,’ ‘closure,’ ‘stabilization,’ ‘conservative and radical innovation,’ ‘technological momentum,’ ‘system builder,’ ‘heterogeneous engineer,’ ‘reverse salients,’ ‘interpretive flexibility,’ ‘translation,’ and ‘black box.’ The Social Shaping of Technology (1998, Milton Keynes), edited by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, also explores methodological and social construction themes. These concepts and the new approaches to the history of technology did much to discredit technological determinism so widely accepted among the laity, so persuasively argued by Karl Marx, and so eloquently enunciated by White in Medie al Technology and Social Change.

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