Technology and Culture

Robert C. Post

“[A] seeking mind always filled with new projects”—so wrote Silvio Bedini in his T&C memorial for Bern Dibner, who died in 1988 at the age of ninety. Exactly the same might be said of Silvio, who died at ninety on 14 November 2007. Bedini was present at the creation of an institution and an organization central to establishing the history of technology as a scholarly discipline: the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of History and Technology and Mel Kranzberg’s Society for the History of Technology. But like many of his closest MHT and SHOT friends, starting with Dibner and including Derek Price (whose T&C memorial he wrote also), Eugene Ferguson, Robert Multhauf, Brooke Hindle, and of course Mel himself—all da Vinci Medalists eventually—he came to the field by a route that was, to say the least, roundabout.

Silvio Bedini’s birthday was the same as Benjamin Franklin’s, 17 January. He was born on a farm near the village of Ridgefield, Connecticut, the second son of Vincent and Cesira Stefanelli Bedini, who had emigrated from the Italian province of Ancona four years before. In a reminiscence published in 1989 in American Heritage, Silvio wrote that, for him, growing up was “a lonely experience.” His brother Ferdinand, four years older, “had his own world.” He lived more than five miles from the village and three miles from all but one of his schoolmates (the son of Eugene O’Neill, as it happened). Perhaps this helps explain why he was so curious about faraway places. He was captivated by the swashbuckling “collector of wild animals,” Frank “Bring ’em Back Alive” Buck. He loved history and biography, and in 1935 he enrolled at Columbia University to major in comparative literature. Before graduating, however, he volunteered for the U.S. Army and was assigned to Westover Field, an airbase in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. But one of Silvio’s youthful enthusiasms—at the age of nine he had won a prize for solving a coded puzzle in the local newspaper—was about to land him with G-2, military intelligence, and a top-secret job with a unit in Fairfax County, Virginia, known only as “1142” (a post office box number in Alexandria).

At 1142, German prisoners of war were interrogated, 3,400 of them all told, but 1142 was also the site of an agency known as MIS-X. There, in a building called “the creamery,” escape and evasion (E&E) aids for American POWs were concealed in parcels of food and clothing, in shaving brushes, and in “recreational devices” (Ping-Pong paddles, decks of cards, checkerboards) whose reciprocal transfer was assured by the Geneva Convention. And there, too, techniques were devised for enabling Allied POWs to get coded messages to the outside world. Any letter posted from a German stalag would be intercepted to determine whether it had come from a code user (CU) trained at MIS-X to conceal vital information from Nazi censors. If so, it was immediately routed to the creamery, where it would be steamed open and decoded before it was slipped back into the postal system for normal delivery. Fourteen cryptanalysts decoded incoming mail and also wrote coded letters to POW CUs, pretending to be parents, wives, lovers, or siblings. By 1943, Silvio had advanced from buck private to master sergeant and was the creamery’s chief cryptanalyst. By 1945 he was a chief MIS-X liaison with the Pentagon. Although this dramatic chapter in Bedini’s life came to an end with V-E day, his son and daughter, Peter and Leandra, recall their dad’s everlasting fascination with secret codes and classic spy-thriller devices.{1}

When Bedini was discharged from the army at age twenty-eight, he expected to return to Columbia. But his father was in failing health and wanted his sons to take over his contracting business, the Bedini Company. Once notable for its expansive estates, Ridgefield was being transformed into a suburb for New York commuters, and there was plenty to occupy such a firm. Silvio’s specialty was landscaping, but as the years went by he began to spend as much time reading history in the evenings as he spent on his day job. He also began writing. He wrote for encyclopedias and for what were called “true science” comics, which, like “classic comics,” were designed to spice up elementary school curricula. (In the online Index to Comic Art Collecting, one can still find references to Bedini’s contributions during the late 1940s to Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact: among others, “The Case of the Twitching Legs” [about Galvani and Volta], “Start the Music” [about the invention of musical instruments], “Fleas on the Floor” [about the invention of the microscope], “Words without Wires” [about radiotelegraphy], and “Crazy Kelly: The Beginning of Modern Steelmaking.”

And so, like many others, Silvio was edging rather than striding into a career as a historian of technology. After acquiring (for $20) an antique wooden clock with a brass movement and a Latin inscription, he edged further—now into the realm of antiquarian horology. In the early 1950s he began contributing a monthly feature on clocks and watches for the magazine Hobbies, and he also began writing for a periodical aimed at serious collectors, the Bulletin of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors. He wrote a book as well, 410 pages about his hometown on its 250th anniversary, Ridgefield in Review. His partner in research was his wife Gale, and there was a laudatory introduction by the Columbia historian Allan Nevins, who had himself written a small book about Ridgefield and was likely impressed by Silvio’s opening with a quote from Thucydides.

By the time Bedini’s book was published in 1958, he was seeing a lot of both Price and Dibner, and he had become a frequent visitor to both Yale’s Beinecke Library in New Haven and Dibner’s magnificent but then still-private library in Norwalk. Dibner, he recalled,

plied me with favorite books from the bottomless treasure-trove of his library, volumes that featured Renaissance engineers and other men of ingenuity. These helped to channel my interest back through the centuries to the works of early writers on mechanics and horology, including Leonardo da Vinci. . . . In due course my research brought me to Galileo . . . whose work I was able to study in abundance in Bern’s library, and so it was that the seventeenth century became my major playground.

Much as his research brought him to Galileo and to several publications, it also brought him to the attention of Robert P. Multhauf, who had been recruiting for the Museum of History and Technology, then under construction on the Washington Mall. Most of the men that Multhauf hired as curators in the middle and late 1950s would stay on at the museum for their entire career: best known in SHOT precincts are Robert Vogel and Jack White. But one other did not, and this was much to Multhauf’s regret, for the one who departed was Eugene Ferguson, the learned and imaginative creator of the museum’s Hall of Tools. Ferguson joined the curatorial staff in April 1958, but left scarcely three years later for an academic post.

What to do? Multhauf immediately sought the advice of Price, who was newly hired by Yale as professor of the history of science but was also his primary consultant in the development of exhibits in the physical sciences. The specifics of their conversation are not recorded, but it is safe to infer that Price told Multhauf something like this: “Bob, I know the ideal replacement for Gene—Silvio Bedini, a neighbor of mine in Connecticut who is passionate about technological artifacts and writes quite a bit; Mel Kranzberg must have mentioned the very smart paper on water clocks that Silvio submitted for publication in his new journal.” Indeed, as a T&C advisory editor, Price had been Mel’s referee for “The Compartmented Cylindrical Clepsydra” and on 20 January 1960 had sent him a report:

I believe this to be an important paper embodying a great deal of original research that is fundamental to the history of horology and has implications at several points to the history of machines and other technological devices. In my opinion it deserves publication in Technology and Culture and I support it strongly.

Price added that he had suggestions about pruning and about improving the translations from Italian and Latin, and that he had taken the liberty “of asking Mr. Bedini, who lives nearby, to call and see me and discuss the matter.” Silvio had agreed to everything, and Price urged Mel to publish the revised version at once, even in two parts if it were still too long (it ultimately appeared in the spring 1962 issue of T&C, forty-eight pages including a twenty-two page glossy insert for the thirty figures depicting water clocks across the centuries). Here was a quintessential internalist narrative that also embodied a fascinating problematic: How was it that a device of this sort could appear in various countries over a span of many centuries, “yet apparently with little or no relation between these appearances?”

On 3 July 1961, Kranzberg sent Bedini a letter that—as his letters so often did—addressed several distinct topics, often connected with the phrase “turning to another matter. . . .” He informed Bedini that his manuscript was slated for immediate publication. He also informed him of his appointment to SHOT’s museum committee (which does not seem to have existed theretofore), and as the society’s representative to the Conference on Science Manuscripts and also to the “Committee on Cooperation with Industry.” And he offered congratulations . . .

upon your new position at the Smithsonian Institution. Your outstanding work in the history of technology certainly qualifies you for your new post, and the Smithsonian is lucky to get someone who has made, and will continue to make, significant contributions to our understanding of technological developments. You are fortunate too in having the opportunity to work with Dr. Robert P. Multhauf. I have known Dr. Multhauf ever since the foundation of the Society for the History of Technology, and I have nothing but admiration for him as a scholar and a person. I am sure that you will enjoy working with him and will share his enthusiasm for the scholarly development of our field of interest.

Here was a glimpse of Mel Kranzberg’s style at age forty-four, just getting up to full speed as the engine for a new discipline and an academic entrepreneur par excellence. And here was Silvio Bedini, likewise forty-four, but only starting a career. It was a career for which he now seemed predestined, however, and he rose rapidly. Four years later, Multhauf promoted him to assistant director, and not long after that Multhauf’s successor Daniel Boorstin would make him his deputy. (In his curatorial position Bedini was succeeded by Monte Calvert, then Otto Mayr, David Noble, and Steve Lubar.) During two sabbaticals that Multhauf took in the latter 1960s, Bedini served as acting director, as he did during the lengthy interval between Boorstin’s resignation in 1972 and the appointment of Brooke Hindle to the directorship in 1974.

Bedini’s administrative dexterity was legendary—like Mel Kranzberg, he kept two secretaries fully occupied, but, unlike Mel, he often typed his own correspondence (his Royal manual was instantly recognizable), and he never went home at night without having cleared off his desk. At home, he would typically take a short nap after dinner and then turn to his current work-in-progress for several hours. He had boundless charm and savoir faire, and a boundless supply of good stories: a story about how he found an equatorial sundial from the Ming dynasty in a junk heap behind a California auto repair shop; a story about wangling his way into the archives where Christopher Columbus’s correspondence was held, something that not even the most illustrious scholars had ever managed; a story about exploring tunnels beneath the Vatican and coming upon the burial place of the white elephant kept by Pope Leo X (whose extravagance so offended Martin Luther) as a pet. Word quickly got around the Washington press corps that Bedini was the museum’s “best interview,” and features would appear in the Post with titles like “The Great Bedini’s Rare Gifts.” Would he have relished the director’s job that he never got permanently? Maybe, though he might have been concerned about the responsibilities taking time from his research. And maybe the job would never have gone to a man without a college degree, anyway, no matter his experience, his scholarship, and the range of his accomplishments.

And yet the range! Silvio’s years of service to SHOT may conveniently be bounded by his two major awards: the Abbott Payson Usher Prize (the second) in 1962, and the Leonardo da Vinci Medal (the thirty-ninth) in 2000.{2} In between, he served on the executive council and accepted many special assignments, he became one of SHOT’s must enthusiastic boosters, and he published more in T&C than all but a handful of others. There were exhibition catalogs and hundreds of articles for both popular and scholarly audiences. (Thirteen of the latter, representative of Bedini’s work in his “major playground,” were reprinted by Ashgate in 1999 as Patrons, Artisans, and Instruments of Science, 1600–1750.) And there were nearly two dozen books and monographs, published by Simon & Schuster, Scribner’s, Macmillan, and Knopf, as well as by the Smithsonian. (Here, one can get a pretty good idea of the range by browsing his entry in Wikipedia.) In nearly every one of these publications, one finds evidence of what Ferguson called Bedini’s “uncanny ability to spot unlikely and obscure relationships.”

But many of us write, and some of us can sometimes spot obscure relationships. What was different about Silvio was that he was a connoisseur and collector as well as a writer, and as an administrator he was not merely reactive, as so many are. At the museum, his responsibilities included oversight of both the exhibition and publication programs. His initiatives included the establishment of a peer review system virtually unique among museums and a successful effort to persuade Secretary S. Dillon Ripley to fund The Smithsonian Journal of History, an illustrated (but sadly short-lived) quarterly of the highest quality. He was directly responsible for several high-profile exhibitions, including The Unknown Leonardo in 1974, Colón y su tiempo in 1976, and Jefferson and Science in 1981, but every one of the special exhibitions staged around the time of the American bicentennial in 1976 was enhanced by his knowledge of the collections and his wealth of important contacts. (Silvio coauthored a book with Wernher von Braun, who was instrumental in sending men to the Moon, and for years he never missed his Friday luncheon date with Mike Collins, who had been there.) And yet his office door was always open, and I am far from alone in remembering him as a kindly mentor to younger colleagues at the museum. He was exceedingly gracious to a succession of visiting fellows and graduate students. (John Staudenmaier recalls that “Silvio was wonderful to me as a grad student, very kind and very fun and very smart.” He recalls further that Bedini later sent him a copy of The Pope’s Elephant, which John “loaned out to a number of people as one of the best reads of sixteenth-century Europe: hilarious and scandalous at the same time.”)

Perhaps most important, Bedini was responsible for the negotiations with his dear friend Bern Dibner that resulted in the establishment of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, the jewel in the museum’s research collection since 1975. After he gave up his administrative duties in 1979, he served for a decade as the Smithsonian’s Keeper of the Rare Books, and never did he truly retire in any ordinary sense of the word. Until he was well into his eighties he still drove down from his home in northwest Washington to his office, always impeccably dressed (he favored French cuffs and silk ties), keeping up with an extensive correspondence.{3} Rarely did a week go by that he was not seen wandering through the stacks in the library or engaged in hallway conversation with old friends and new.

Over a period of sixty years, Bedini’s passion and curiosity led him from clocks to clockmakers to the makers of scientific instruments and thence to the work of obscure or even anonymous cartographers and surveyors and mathematical practitioners, the “little men” so often ignored, especially by historians of science preoccupied with giants and their shoulders. Though much of his research was concerned with Renaissance and early-modern Italy, arguably his most durable scholarly contributions are his biography of the African American philomath Benjamin Banneker, and his Thinkers and Tinkers, a comprehensive survey of American mathematical practitioners (and titled, one may be certain, with an eye to a dismissive remark about “tinkers” attributed to George Sarton). Toward the end of his life Silvio was increasingly absorbed with the history of surveying.{4} While his memberships in addition to SHOT included what one might expect—the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and so on—one can guess that he was most proud of the D.C. Association of Land Surveyors, which extended him an honorary membership in 2003. And one may imagine that his interest in the accomplishments of surveyors and other sorts of practitioners was stirred to some degree by his own experience as a workingman used to getting mud on his boots who interacted for so many years with people whose natural habitat was the ivory tower. This is only speculation, of course, but one may wonder. One may also wonder whether Silvio might have likened what happened to Ridgefield after World War II to the transformation of the manorial system during the Renaissance and (as he put it in the essay coauthored with Price for Mel Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell’s Technology in Western Civilization) the “considerable influence” this had on the practice of surveying with the development of instruments such as the theodolite.

Up to his last hospitalization, Silvio continued to work with three-ring binders and surrounded with books, finalizing details of his biography of Giuseppe Campani, an Italian clockmaker about whom he had first written in 1961—the year he came to the Smithsonian—in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences and in his Usher Prize article. Silvio’s fellow da Vinci Medalist Bruce Sinclair celebrates the “more innocent times” when he was hired, “untroubled by search committees and starchy guidelines.” T&C’s former managing editor Joan Mentzer recalls him as a good pal whose footfall in the corridor coming toward her office always lifted her spirits. Ben Lawless, who was the museum’s assistant director for exhibits during Silvio’s tenure, recalls that “without any scholarly credentials he wrote more and better than just about anyone else,” but also that he was “really sweet through and through.” Most touching is a remark Leandra made at his service: “In recent years, when Dad was still ambulatory but dependent on oxygen and clearly weaker and unsteady, I would come to D.C. every spring and help him plant impatiens, geraniums, pansies, and various creations around the pond in the backyard . . . . He was the brains and I was the brawn.”

Silvio’s bookplate was an engraving by Gustave Doré of a man absorbed in his books, along with the words Satis Temporis Non Est Nobis (For us, there is not enough time). So many new projects. His wife of fifty-six  years, Gale, passed away in the winter of 2008. Silvio and Gale are survived by Leandra, a professor in the School of Health and Human Performance at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and Peter, a program manager in the Space Department of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

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{1} Although virtually all MIS-X records were destroyed after the war, in the late 1980s Bedini helped Lloyd R. Shoemaker, another creamery veteran, piece together the narrative for a book titled The Escape Factory: The Story of MIS-X, the Super-Secret U.S. Agency behind World War II’s Greatest Escapes (New York, 1990). In October 2007 about two dozen men who had been assigned to 1142 gathered for a reunion. Silvio was unable to attend, but Peter and Leandra accepted a medal on his behalf. See Petula Dvorak, “Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII,” Washington Post, 6 October 2007, A1.

{2} For details, the reader is referred to Bedini’s informative but admirably modest da Vinci Medal remarks in the July 2001 issue of T&C: “The Hardware of History” (pp. 540–44). These were reprinted in December 2001 in Professional Surveyor, the periodical in which his regular “History Corner” column appeared for many years.

{3} A guide to Bedini’s papers and correspondence, 1952–96 (accession 02-187 and 05-115), is available online from the Smithsonian Institution Archives. In the papers of Daniel Boorstin as Librarian of Congress, Bedini is listed among “the more significant and frequent correspondents,” along with the likes of Helen Hayes, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ronald Reagan, Barbara Tuchman, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

{4} In the movie Celebrating a Century that Smithsonian filmmaker Karen Loveland produced to accompany the museum’s 1876 exhibition, Silvio was cast as a surveyor in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, where the Centennial Exposition was staged. A photo of him in period costume is among a selection that may be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/amerisurv (accessed 9 January 2008).

Bob Post is fortunate to have become Silvio Bedini’s colleague at the National Museum of History and Technology in the 1970s.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.