All is not well in the history of technology—or, for that matter, in the engineering profession, at least in Europe and the United States. Now, more than ever, the two fields need each other. An introduction to the October 2009 special issue on the evolving nature of engineering education.

Why are we no longer drawn to be photographed next to the disastrous failures of man-made structures?

Energy in Nature and Society is not a work of history or of thermodynamics, or a blueprint for dealing with the problems of energy use in the twenty-first century, but rather a work of philosophy, a way of contemplating the interconnectedness of the world.

The idea of contingency resonates in historical literature, and historians of technology have a good case near to hand. To be sure, had Mel Kranzberg not put this new discipline in academic cloaks and secured its institutional foundations, there would probably still be a collaborative effort among scholars concerned with technology in historic perspective, but its intellectual ambience would hardly be the same. Fifty years after its founding, we see SHOT as the cornerstone of his legacy. And yet Kranzberg might have lived quite a different life, never to have become the inventor and entrepreneur whose results are epitomized in this journal.

John Rae’s writings on automobile history are now by and large ignored—relegated to the status of deep-background reference in new scholarship. They deserve closer attention.

The Cité du Train in Mulhouse and the Nederlands Spoorwegmuseum in Utrecht (pictured at left) have dramatically reinvented themselves.