Presidential address: On not burning bridges. Valuing the passé

Technology and Culture

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 523-530

  Reynolds, Terry S ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 27144502139     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (53)

1. Maurice Daumas, ed., Histoire générale des techniques, 5 vols. (Paris, 1962-1979);
2. Charles Singer et al., eds., A History of Technology, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1954-1984);
3. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (London, 1969);
4. Carroll W. Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore, 1995).
5. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York, 1978),
6. and St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town's Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry (New York, 1987);
7. David P. Billington, Robert Maillart's Bridges (Princeton, N.J., 1979).
8. One of the early issues of T&C was devoted to reviews (generally critical) of this work of Singer and his associates; see Technology and Culture 1 (1959): 299 ff.
9. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).
10. With the notable exception of Edward Constant II, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution (Baltimore, 1980), Kuhn's views have not attracted a wide following in the history of technology.
11. The passenger aircraft serving Houghton are, admittedly, turboprops, rather than traditional propeller-driven aircraft, but traditional propeller-driven aircraft are sometimes still used for small-scale passenger service and dominate recreational flying.
12. "SHOT Meeting and Planning Survey," 1998.
13. See also Alex Roland, "What Hath Kranzberg Wrought? Or, Does the History of Technology Matter?" Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 697, 713.
14. Roland, 703, notes that of the eleven Dexter prize winners between 1986 and 1995, five were not members of SHOT. Wallace, St. Clair (n. 2 above);
15. Claude S. Fisher, American Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
16. Philip Scranton, "Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology: Comment," Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 392, points out that a dozen authors appearing in the issues of T&C between 1987 and 1989 that he reviewed were from other disciplines: economics, sociology, communications, anthropology, and STS.
17. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, introduction to In Context: History and the History of Technology (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 13;
18. Darwin H. Stapleton with Liz Paley, "Its Own Reward: Three Decades of Teaching and Scholarship in the History of Technology," in Cutcliffe and Post, In Context, 208, 214 n. 20.
19. For an example of a prominent SHOT historian's willingness to consider what European social scientists can contribute to the history of technology, see the article by former SHOT secretary and president Alex Roland, "Theories and Models of Technological Change: Semantics and Substance," Science, Technology, and Human Values 17 (1992): 79-100; see also Scranton, 385-93.
20. Much of this transition is documented in John M. Staudenmaier, Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
21. Several scholars, in fact, have recently suggested that SHOT scholars may be too polite to each other in print. See Roland, "What Hath Kranzberg Wrought?" (n. 6 above), 713,
22. and John M. Staudenmaier, "Rationality versus Contingency in the History of Technology," in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 271-72.
23. I have been unable to locate this ad. Even if it did not actually appear, I heard sentiments along these lines expressed on multiple occasions when I first began to be active in SHOT. Staudenmaier, in "Rationality versus Contingency," 264, 267, talks about the "best-recognized intellectual heritage" of internalist historians as including "a half-millennium's hardware catalogues and treatises and a half-century's pious celebrations of engineers, inventors, and their marvelous works."
24. Robert C. Post, "No Mere Technicalities: How Things Work and Why It Matters," Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 611, notes this old put-down.
25. John M. Staudenmaier, "What SHOT Hath Wrought and What SHOT Hath Not: Reflections on Twenty-Five Years of the History of Technology," Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 707-30;
26. John B. Rae, "What Did We Expect SHOT to Wrought?" 731-34;
27. Melvin Kranzberg, "Let's Not Get Wrought Up about It," 735-49.
28. Svante Lindqvist, The Teaching of History of Technology in USA: A Critical Survey in 1978 (Stockholm, 1981), 19-20.
29. For a measured discussion of the importance of artifacts to the history of technology see Brooke Hindle, "Technology Through the 3-D Time Warp," Technology and Culture 24 (1983): 450-64.
30. Lindqvist, 20.
31. Post, 609.
32. The exposition of this approach that first attracted widespread attention within SHOT circles was Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
33. R. A. Buchanan, "Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology," Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 365-76;
34. David A. Hounshell, "Hughesian History of Technology and Chandlerian Business History: Parallels, Departures, and Critics," History and Technology 12 (1995): 205-24, esp. 212ff.
35. In discussing social constructionism and the philosophy of technology, Langdon Winner has suggested that social constructionists have been a bit overeager in calling attention to the inadequacies of their predecessors and in depicting "earlier and contemporary approaches as outmoded or dead"; see "Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology," Science, Technology, and Human Values 18 (1993): 367.
36. Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits, Committee Report, August 2000.
37. George Basalla, "Observations on the Present Status of the History of Science in the United States," Isis 66 (1975): 469.
38. Kranzberg, "At the Start," Technology and Culture 1 (1959): 8-10.
39. David A. Hounshell, "Commentary: On the Discipline of the History of American Technology," Journal of American History 67, no. 4 (March 1981): 654-65.
40. John M. Staudenmaier, "Recent Trends in the History of Technology," American Historical Review 95 (1990): 715 n. 1,
41. and "Rationality versus Contingency" (n. 11 above), 261-62.
42. Roland, "What Hath Kranzberg Wrought?" (n. 6 above), 712-13.
43. Philip Scranton, "Determinism and Indeterminacy in the History of Technology," Technology and Culture, 36, suppl. (1995): S35-36; see also another version of the same article under the same title in Smith and Marx (n. 11 above), 148-49.
44. See Hindle (n. 15 above), 456, on the reliance of archaeologists, art and architectural historians, and material culture studies on artifacts.
45. On SHOT's early ties to the engineering community, see Bruce E. Seely, "SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education," Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 739-72.
46. Seely points out that the story is really more complicated than this.
47. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Technology Is to Science as Female Is to Male: Musings on the History and Character of Our Discipline," Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 577.
48. Kranzberg, "Let's Not Get Wrought Up about It" (n. 14 above), 744.
49. Lars O. Olsson, Undergraduate Teaching of History of Technology: A Survey of the Teaching at Some Universities in the USA in 1993 (Gothenburg, 1995), 23.
50. See, for example, the leading critic of internalist history of technology, John Staudenmaier, in "What SHOT Hath Wrought" (n. 14 above), 708,
51. where he speaks of the "honorable" lineage of internalist history, and in "Rationality versus Contingency" (n. 11 above), 268, where he writes: "Internalist research constitutes one essential element in the profession's contextual equation, and it is respected as such."
52. John Law, "Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology: Response," Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 377-84.
53. Rae (n. 14 above), 734.