The annual banquet at the 2000 SHOT conference in Munich provided an evening of memorable juxtapositions. The event took place in a stunning modern airplane hangar, its vast glass doors open to the mid-August sun streaming late across the surrounding Oberschleissheim Airfield. The field, constructed by the Royal Bavarian Flying Corps beginning in 1912, has a rich history. It is now the ideal setting for the superb historic aviation collection of the Deutsches Museum. With old planes all around, it was also an ideal setting for historians of technology to eat, drink, and be merry. But SHOT’s president, Terry Reynolds, had some pretty serious messages to impart in his presidential address. His title was benign enough: “On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé.”1 But his substance was nearly an accusation. In Reynolds’s view, newer analytic frames in technological history had made older approaches appear obsolete. This was a problem, he asserted, because “these approaches may offer better bridges to certain of our external audiences than our most avant-garde scholarship.”2 He counted engineering as one such external audience. Reynolds’s listeners at the banquet appeared to take his remarks as one of those castor-oil moments, despite the impressive setting: whether the medicine was vital or useless, it seemed that most folks disliked the taste and wanted to put it behind them quickly.

We return to it for two reasons—intellectual and institutional. The three articles that follow in this theme cluster all break new ground on an issue of longstanding concern to historians of technology: the evolving nature of engineering education. As Rosalind Williams commented at the 2007 SHOT meeting, work in the history of engineering has paid “a lot of attention” to engineering education, in sharp contrast to concerns within the history of science.4 The extensive historical study of engineering education reflects, in part, a broader focus in histories of engineering generally to highlight the normativities of technical practices. Here we are speaking of fine-grained historical work delineating the ways in which engineers have served specific social agendas as they have reworked the material world. The practitioners of this sociotechnical knowledge have carried different names over time and across differing territories. But in all times and places, engineering has entailed technical work to achieve social ends—both stated and hidden. Edwin Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers is still widely read, according to Ronald Kline, because of its “rich and insightful account of the struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies.”5 David Noble’s America by Design is also still widely read, in part because of its argument that engineers in the United States have been a “domesticated breed” who “in reality served only the dominant class in society.”6 Peter Meiksins challenged Layton’s account by calling attention to the role played by “rank-and-file” engineers who sought to enhance their material welfare by “pursuing a ‘middle way’ between patrician reformers and trade unionism.”7 A host of volumes by Angus Buchanan, Kees Gispen, Ronald Kline, Michal McMahon, Terry Reynolds, Bruce Sinclair, and others have documented the contents and challenges of professionalism in engineering.8 Ruth Oldenziel found the professionalization of engineering to be a project that “turned out to be a thoroughly male and middle-class endeavor.”9 Comparing the drawing practices of mid-nineteenth-century British and American engineers, John K. Brown concluded that their “application of plans (and the drawings themselves) came to reflect and reinforce their host cultures.”10 Comparing engineering building practices in early-nineteenth-century France and the United States, Eda Kranakis maintained that “the difference between the engineering cultures of the two countries was a factor” in their differential technological development during the nineteenth century, making France “less dynamic” industrially than the United States.11 Antoine Picon showed how engineers came to supplant architects in eighteenth-century France as “[t]he accuracy of their calculations . . . bec[a]me synonymous with progress.”12 Engineering is never solely about reworking the material world.

In like fashion, histories of engineering education have frequently described how practices of engineering formation (including variable mixes of informal training and formal education) positioned engineers in relation to larger societal projects. Ken Alder’s Engineering the Revolution showed how instruction in a “middle epistemology” to “describe quantitatively the relationship among measurable quantities . . . [in order] to seek a region of optimal gain” both facilitated the developing autonomy of French artillerists and grounded the later revolutionary movement.13 Through several works, Bruce Seely has reported how by the late 1950s U.S. engineering schools seeking to grow “had to develop graduate programs to support fundamental research, and emphasize engineering science” not to serve industry, but “rather to attract federal research funds.”14 Amy Slaton’s recent Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering examines how specific “conceptions of engineering talent and rigor” have supported racial selectivity in U.S. engineering schools, ranging from formal segregation in the 1940s to the denial of “race-based interventions” in the 1990s.15

Among Continental historians of engineering education, Peter Lundgreen turned to “bureaucracy rather . . . than industrialization” to account for contrasts between training “state engineers” in Continental Europe and training “engineers for the private sector of the economy” in Anglo-America.16 The elite status of state engineers in France, stretching back three centuries, has justified a veritable industry of historical work on engineering education.17 More recent Continental work has examined the travels of “models” of formation, the role of key “reference schools,” and, most recently, the distinctive normativities of schools on the European “periphery” in the context of the ongoing debate on concepts such as transnationality, circulation, and appropriation.18

The three articles in this cluster extend this interest in relationships among the contents of engineering education and larger-scale social projects in three different ways. Matthew Wisnioski’s “‘Liberal Education Has Failed’: Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America” hews closely to the link between engineering and technology in a cautionary tale for historians of technology and other would-be liberal educators of engineers. He examines how engineering educators in the 1960s coped with a “broad . . . conceptual breakdown” in the “technological foundations of modernity” by attempting to appropriate critical insights from the humanities and social sciences.19 Ideological debates over the nature and control of technology offered concepts, asserts Wisnioski, that “provided commonality among the countercultural, environmental, civil rights, and antiwar movements” and “challenged engineers’ self-image as creative individuals responsible for technological progress.”20

Wisnioski examines three approaches engineering educators took to wielding liberal education and social theory as tools to reassert that engineering served as a beneficent force in society. One approach to control involved telling students technology had adversely affected civilization and attempting to develop a new applied humanities to produce “expert managers of the public good.”21 Another approach resisted dramatic curricular change by granting social scientists both the resources to develop fundamental theory about technology and society and the curricular responsibility to create “expert policymakers.”22 A third effort involved producing “introspective” engineers who would “draw on” the humanities and social sciences just as they currently drew on mathematics and the basic sciences of chemistry and physics.23 Wisnioski also recounts how historians of technology helped “enhance engineering’s luster” by becoming “embedded participants in engineering culture” who “assimilated the humanities and social sciences to engineers’ sensibilities” as “humanist mediators.”24 Although most of these programs did not last, what did endure was an emergent “ideology of technological change” that preserved “existing managerial relations” by casting technological change as autonomous and accelerating, and by assigning to engineers the responsibility for managing it.25

Wisnioski concludes with a worry that the apparent receptivity of contemporary engineering educators to liberal educators constitutes yet another attempt to essentially co-opt the humanities and social sciences, “this time to redefine who engineers should be in a global economy.”26 Echoing Langdon Winner, Wisnioski cautions that participants in engineering education must replace problem sets with question sets. Those who fail to make this transition risk “acced[ing] to the longevity of feigned innocence” exhibited by too many of their forebearers.27

Ross Bassett’s “Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States” examines how Indian technical elites used strategic international alignments in engineering education as a vehicle for acquiring powerful technologies for the new country—and to advance their own professional aspirations. Following independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru strongly advocated scientific and technological development as a pathway toward unity and international strength. The greatest “national enthusiasm toward technology” focused on atomic power, steel mills, and hydroelectric dams.28 Embracing a report written before independence, Nehru also endorsed the establishment of five advanced technological institutes. The first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was formed in 1951 at Kharagpur with multinational support. But each of the other four institutes, established between 1958 and 1961, aligned to a separate partner: the USSR, West Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Bassett follows how the establishment of electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur provided the broad community of engineers across India with access to advanced IBM computers and to the American educational system. Bassett’s analysis builds on postcolonial studies, rejecting the old metropoleperiphery distinction to see agency in a new light. His narrative shows how Indian technical elites strategically aligned themselves with the United States—even at moments when bilateral relations between the two nations’ political elites had soured—in order to fulfill localized agendas.

This study ably demonstrates how histories of technology can provide revisionist frameworks by viewing historical contingencies and emergences through the lens of technological developments, thus disrupting standard narratives of political, economic, and social history. In this case, the diplomatic history of post-independence India has tended to focus on the twin “bipoles” of India versus Pakistan and the U.S. versus the USSR Bassett shows, however, that even “near the peak of anti-American sentiment in India” in 1972, a faculty committee at IIT Bombay, an institution formally aligned with the USSR, proposed a series of educational reforms “whose overall effect was to bring the curriculum more in line with American engineering-education standards.”29 Strategic alignment differs sharply from the transfer (and presumed reproduction) of educational “models” from one country to another.30 Prior to independence, engineering colleges established by the British had a “circumscribed role” to “prepare Indians to work in subsidiary positions under British rule.”31 But after independence, education in controls engineering was a means for acquiring computers and advancing Indian capabilities in the “regulation of systems.”32 The key points of reference were the aspirations and massive challenges in the new country, not simply a potentially replicable model elsewhere. The first director of IIT Kanpur in 1968 gave a talk in the United States on “The Role of the Professional as an Agent of Political, Economic, and Social Change in Low-Income Countries.”33 And notably, Bassett reports, “mass education did not receive the same priority” at the highest echelons of Indian government as did the IITs.34 The focus was on technical elites. Nehru’s legacy thus includes “low levels of education and persistent poverty” as well as the large-scale science and technology projects so often linked to his name.35

A second contribution of this study, especially for audiences of engineers and others beyond the history of technology, is its account of the role played by graduates of IIT Kanpur in the rise of the information technology industry in India and the United States. The millions of readers of journalist Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century can describe the role played in the industrial development of Bangalore by inexpensive communication across unusually cheap (devalued, really) fiber-optic cable.36 Indeed, Bassett reports that the Indian IT industry is not one that makes sense within Indian boundaries, for “twothirds of its business comes from the United States.”37 But while Friedman’s account sinks into ethnocentric xenophobia about new Indian (and Chinese) threats to the United States,38 Bassett maps the operations of a “transnational elite” that has provided “critical intermediaries between the two societies.”39

In “Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887–1972,” Andrés Valderrama and his five coauthors (Juan Camargo, Idelman Mejía, Antonio Mejía, Ernesto Lleras, and Antonio García) locate technology in the background of an account of the role of engineering education “in defining the evolving identities of engineers in Colombia.”40 In a rare Technology and Culture article on a topic in Latin America, Valderrama et al. describe “interdependence” in the “stabilizations” of both engineers and the country itself.41 Colombian history differed markedly from the pattern of other Latin American nations, such as Argentina, Peru, and Mexico—where economic and political authority centered on the capital and reached out to shape the periphery. The emergence of Colombia is an account of regional competition to define the whole. In regional differences lay contrasting images of progress and contrasting trajectories for the formation of engineers at engineering education institutions.

Like Bassett’s case of Indian technical elites, the Colombian engineers Valderrama et al. follow “partially co-invented” the educational practices they advocated and constructed. The Facultad de Ingeniería, building on the Colegio Militar, looked to France in emphasizing mathematics-intensive instruction “for the development of the country’s infrastructure.”42 Like elite French institutions, it was located in the capital city, Bogotá, whose leaders desired for it the centrality long performed by Paris. In contrast, the Escuela de Minas established a “longstanding position” that engineers “should serve as entrepreneurs and managers in [private] companies.”43 It was located in Medellín, a “commercial and industrial center that dominated the [country’s] most important export product of the time, coffee.”44

The dominant narrative in this account is the reconciliation of these two approaches to engineering education in a country-wide structure that ultimately vested the highest authority in Universidad Nacional—to which Facultad de Ingeniería belonged. After 1945, however, that reconciliation was challenged and displaced by a new regime of progress built on the image of development. This emergent image of progress legitimized the development of private-sector institutions, most especially the Universidad de los Andes. While Bassett’s account of engineering institutions in India emphasizes a disconnect between technological and diplomatic histories, for Valderrama et al., the founding of Universidad de los Andes and realignments in older public institutions signaled a convergence of technological and diplomatic histories around explicit alignment with the United States. Although such alignment met with significant, sometimes fierce, resistance, its success also indicated dominance of the “faith in science and technology as vehicles for development” that was “sought and maintained” by both Colombian and American engineers.45

Valderrama et al.’s account has particular significance for Latin American engineering educators today who are attempting to emulate the regional collaboration under way in Europe under the label “the Bologna process.” A contemporary competition exists, for example, between two distinct strategies for collaboration in engineering education.46 On the one side are organizations that align Latin American engineering education with initiatives in Spain and Portugal (e.g, the Iberoamerican Society of Engineering Education). On the other are organizations that frame engineering education in Latin America as “capacity building” in conjunction with multinational corporations based in the United States (e.g., the Engineering for the Americas project).

Taken together, the three contributors to this cluster advance research in the history of engineering education by investigating new normativities. It is especially notable that these articles also have the potential to speak to audiences beyond the readership of Technology and Culture—beyond the membership of SHOT.

This returns us to Terry Reynolds’s concern that the history of technology has become less relevant to external audiences. Another way to think of this: how well do its topics and methods speak to the needs and goals of the scholars, readers, and “users”—beyond regular history departments—that the field needs to sustain its health over the long haul? Reynolds focused on industrial archaeology. Other neighboring arenas making use of work in the history of technology include museums and graduate programs in museum studies and public history. More relevant in the context of this issue of T&C are engineering schools and the engineering professional societies. Such varied users of the history of technology are vital to the ultimate health of the field. On this count, there is cause for concern.

Fifty years ago, engineering amounted to a parent of the nascent SHOT, not merely a neighbor. The first conversations among the cadre of people who would establish SHOT took place at the 1957 conference of the American Society for Engineering Education at Cornell. On page one of the first issue of Technology and Culture, Mel Kranzberg wrote of his aspirations for the journal—“to bring together the engineer, the scientist, the industrialist, the social scientist, and the humanist.”47 In the early years, non-historians published half the articles in T&C, and “the early bias toward engineering and science was even more pronounced than this evidence suggests,” according to John Staudenmaier’s analysis.48 But by the 1970s, historians penned 72 percent of T&C articles.49 For a society of historians this was clearly good news, evidence that the field had advanced far in its professional aspirations. The methodological frames of the 1970s and 1980s— contextualism, Hughesian systems, and social construction—were further evidence of a confident and advancing field. The articles in this theme cluster are all by historians as well, but historians affiliated with academic institutions dominated by engineering. Surely all this is good news, evidence of real strength. So what is the problem?

All is not well in the history of technology—and for that matter in the engineering profession—at least in Europe and the United States.50 Now, more than ever, the two fields need each other. Like all historical subfields that grew up in and after the 1960s, the history of technology clamored for decades to gain currency among “mainstream” history, only to discover that the center had melted away—if it had ever existed.51 For at least fifteen years, the academic job market for fresh Ph.D.s in the field has been tough, even in the (rare) good years for hiring overall. Increasingly, bad years have become the norm, as American higher education undergoes a broad retrenching. A vibrant, international community comes together for SHOT’s annual conferences, but Reynolds was right. Success as an academic discipline of historians has meant the loss of that ecumenical quality that SHOT’s founders sought, achieved, and maintained for decades.52

Trying to counter that trend, a new SHOT special interest group formed after the Munich meeting. Founded by an author and an editor of the present issue (Bassett and Brown), the Prometheans builds bridges between the history of technology generally (SHOT specifically) and various constituencies in engineering. The group has created paper sessions at SHOT on such topics as “History Informing Practice: Using the History of Technology in Engineering” (Washington, D.C., 2007). Thanks particularly to the dedicated work of Atsushi Akera (another historian in an engineering-dominated institution), the Prometheans also sponsor sessions on engineering history at SHOT’s annual conferences. SHOT’s president and secretary have targeted practicing engineers for special introductory invitations to SHOT meetings. All this is merely a start, a sketch of possibilities. Consider it as well an invitation for further initiatives and collaborations by all SHOT members, historians and engineers.

In recent decades, the engineering profession(s) have also struggled. Their challenges lie in such areas as membership, funding, societal roles, and self-identity. In the past half-century, engineering has splintered further, with new specialties in systems, nuclear, computer science, computer engineering, environmental, and biomedical—to name just the major additions among academic degree programs. Rosalind Williams has described this process as the “expansive disintegration” of engineering.53 These new specialties have made it more difficult for engineers to claim “jurisdication” over technology.54 They have also made it harder for engineers—and the general public—to derive a clear sense of whether engineering plays any social role beyond the twinned determinisms of advancing autonomous technical change and serving the profit motive. As we know from Edwin Layton and David Noble, American engineers always had divided loyalties between their employers and their professional colleagues and institutions.55 Less well known is that during the post-1945 heyday of American manufacturing, the big U.S. corporations played major roles in sustaining and funding the activities of the engineering professional societies.56 In recent decades, those supports eroded as the “American century” ended amid a dramatic international reorganization of industrial production. Engineering design work has shrunken in its scale—whether the field is digital, nano, genetic, or biomedical—even as societal dependence on technology has deepened across much of the world. As its scale shrinks, the nature of engineering work becomes increasingly opaque to young people, making it harder to attract their interest in pursuing engineering careers.

These trends may also help explain why interest in technological history has apparently waned among engineers and engineering educators. At a fascinating lunch discussion at SHOT 2007 on the “role of history within engineering,” many SHOT members chimed in with accounts of persistent disinterest in history by engineering students, engineering educators, and working engineers.57 Many agreed that rapid growth in the engineering sciences during the 1960s “killed interest in history.” Textbooks no longer had historical introductions, and the “few efforts to reintroduce history in the seventies and eighties were utter failures.” Suggestions for reinvigorating historical work within engineering ranged from developing case studies that would be useful in engineering courses to insisting on continuing to “mess up the minds” of engineering students by introducing them to “questions that cannot be answered” and teaching them “to appreciate complexity.”

But presenting recent developments entirely as a tale of troubles distorts the full complexity of the picture and ignores the opportunities of complexity. In 2004, the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES) formed in an effort to dramatically expand scholarly investigations into “knowledge and service,”58 with research built around the following question: “What are the relationships among the technical and the nontechnical dimensions of engineering practices, and how have these relationships evolved over time?” In addition, Network participants acknowledge that “[a]ddressing and providing answers to this question can sometimes involve researchers as critical participants in the practices they study, including, for example, modes of engineering formation.”59 In 2009, INES launched its journal, Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies, with the threefold mission: “(a) to advance research in historical, social, cultural, philosophical, rhetorical, and organizational studies of engineers and engineering; (b) to help build and serve diverse communities of researchers interested in engineering studies; and (c) to facilitate contributions from scholarly work in engineering studies to broader discussions and debates about engineering education, research, practice, policy, and representation.”60 The three articles in this cluster originated at the first INES international workshop, “Locating Engineers: Education, Knowledge, Desire,” held at Virginia Tech in 2006. Six additional articles from that INES Blacksburg workshop have been published in Engineering Studies.61 The editorial staff of the journal includes eleven historians of technology.62

The shifting nature and challenges of modern engineering also offer real opportunities to historians of technology (SHOT members specifically) who are willing to embrace new relationships, new goals, and new kinds of research and writing. Histories for engineers can come in different forms. In the inaugural Morison Prize Lecture in 2000, Thomas Hughes offered “A Usable History for Engineers” focused on “drawing analogies from the past to envision future scenarios.”63 Maintaining that “history tends to repeat itself in broad patterns, if not in details,” he made the case that “the future of the Internet will be analogous to the history of electric power systems.”64 In discussions at the 2007 SHOT conference, David Mindell pointed out in reference to the NASA Apollo project that there are “things we did forty years ago that we can’t do today.” “There really is a role for historians,” he continued, in that good history of technology “belies a notion of linear progress” commonly assumed by engineers and “helps provide a sense of humility.”65 History of technology can help prevent or overcome hubris among engineers.

All the engineering professional societies work hard to develop materials—aimed mostly at high-school students—to explain the nature, creativity, and social worth of engineering work. Short and accessible case studies, drawn from history, could make important contributions to this work. If their authors heed Wisnioski’s concern about appropriation, these cases would also bring critical historical analysis to bear in engineering education and practice, in short “messing with their minds” in ways that can improve students’ working lives in engineering. All engineering degree programs must, under accrediting rules, offer coursework in ethics. Here too, historians of technology have already done the work in primary sources. What remains is drafting cases in applied ethics on diverse topics that could range from the collapse of the Quebec Bridge to the legal and ethical ramifications of engineered organisms.66 The engineering societies struggle with their own self-identity: are they still independent professional societies? Or does their search for revenues drive them to become hybrid trade organizations? Advocates for the first view have often turned to history to show the mutual shaping of society and their engineering discipline.67 SHOT members who see a role for themselves in these activities will likely need to hone their skills in grantsmanship, with proposals aimed at the technical societies or sympathetic foundations like Sloan. But they can also work through the history and heritage committees of the professional societies.68 The engineers who staff these committees may have little interest in historiography, but they embrace history, respect rigorous research and knowledge, and can value an academic perspective.69

In considering engineers as users for the history of technology, the biggest challenge—and the biggest opportunity—lies in the accrediting standards that govern the undergraduate engineering curricula in the United States. For many decades, those rules specified that roughly oneeighth of student coursework be taken in “social-humanistic subjects.”70 Critics denounced the formula as “beancounting,” but this requirement did at least assure that students in every engineering program took courses in such fields as ethics and history. Under this accrediting system, the history of technology had a logical appeal to students, engineering deans and faculty, and historians—whether affiliated with history departments or engineering schools.

Beginning in 2000 the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology revamped almost entirely its approach to accreditation.71 Instead of counting off the courses required of students, ABET’s new EC 2000 standards enumerated a list of specific outcomes in student learning, ranging from the obvious (ability to apply math, science, and engineering) to the innovative (examining engineering in its global and social contexts).72 The methodology—to measure results, not just inputs—is itself innovative, as is ABET’s clear goal that schools integrate its required skills and subjects. The EC 2000 guidelines appear to require wide-ranging roles for educators in the “liberal studies” fields, such as history, ethics, STS, and writing. Of the eleven mandated outcomes, liberal studies (as distinguished from traditional engineering subjects) should play a major role in seven areas and a supporting role in all of them.73

In all, the EC 2000 criteria appear to open up a broad entrée to the liberal studies in engineering education. Given their many ties to engineering, historians of technology seem well positioned among the liberal-studies disciplines to capitalize on this opportunity. But historians of technology must undertake deliberate efforts—as individuals and as a society—to build these bridges while preserving the critical analysis that is central to the humanities, and often in tension with engineering’s normativities. Given those caveats, historians in mainline history departments could find real value in understanding the EC 2000 standards and in seeking out collaborations with their colleagues across campus on engineering faculties. It is one thing for the Accreditation Board to desire certain skills and perspectives. It is an entirely different matter for engineering deans, chairs, and faculty to really understand how they can integrate rigorous humanistic knowledge and critical analysis into their curricula. Historians of technology can help. Offering help may open employment doors for graduate students and novel avenues to disseminate research. It can also make history matter in very real ways.

As an organization, SHOT too can play a key role in building bridges for the field. EC 2000 changed most of the rules in accrediting engineering programs in the United States—except in one key area. Accreditors still represent the separate professional societies. After making site visits and reviewing assessment materials, they accredit individual degree programs, not schools as a whole.74 This process has two unfortunate effects for the liberal studies. First, it means that individual departments often develop ad hoc approaches to achieving outcomes dependent on liberal-studies disciplines, to the detriment of real rigor and thorough integration. More problematic, the accreditors who pass judgment on this degree program in Aerospace Engineering or that program in Civil Engineering are well trained in those disciplines and essentially untrained in understanding or assessing the liberal studies.75 If historians of technology want engineering educators to preserve—let alone expand—a substantive role for the field, then the discipline must take the responsibility of showing those educators how historical knowledge and modes of critical inquiry are essential to the education of capable and insightful engineers.76

As editors of this cluster, we are well aware that this introduction appears to stray from tradition, veering from an overview of the historiography to a consideration of the uses of history. But questions of use and audience are—or should be—essential matters for all historians. Anyone who teaches history of technology deals with this duality all the time. Engineering educators pride themselves on viewing their fields as forwardlooking. But as shown in the articles that follow, history always influences engineering formation and its evolving incarnations and concerns.

1 Terry S. Reynolds, “On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 523–30.

2 Ibid., 523.

3 Ibid., 525.

4 Quoted from Gary Downey’s “SHOT 2007 notes” file, typed during the meeting.

5 Ronald R. Kline, “From Progressivism to Engineering Studies: Edwin T. Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers,” Technology and Culture 49 (October 2008): 1019–20.

6 David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977), 323 and 324.

7 Peter Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” Technology and Culture 29 (April 1988): 238.

8 R. A. Buchanan, The Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London, 1989); Kees Gispen, New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815–1914 (Cambridge, 1989); Ronald Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, 1992); A. Michal McMahon, The Making of a Profession: A Century of Electrical Engineering in America (New York, 1984); Terry S. Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress: A History of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, 1908–1983 (New York, 1983); and Bruce Sinclair and J. P. Hull, A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880–1980 (Toronto, 1980). There are a significant number of European national studies on this topic written in local languages.

9 Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America 1870–1945 (Amsterdam, 1999), 168.

10 John K. Brown, “Design Plans, Working Drawing, National Styles: Engineering Practice in Great Britain and the United States, 1775–1945,” Technology and Culture 41 (April 2000): 196.

11 Eda Kranakis, Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-Century France and America (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 304.

12 Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1992), 10. While one can find normativities in Walter Vincenti’s historical case studies, his explicit interests were philosophical and focused on epistemology. See Peter Meiksins and Chris Smith, Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective (London, 1996), and Walter G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore, 1990).

13 Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), 60.

14 Bruce E. Seely, “The Other Re-Engineering of Engineering Education, 1900–1965,” Journal of Engineering Education 88 (July 1999): 291.

15 Amy Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), conclusion, p. 5.

16 Peter Lundgreen, “Engineering Education in Europe and the U.S.A., 1750–1930: The Rise to Dominance of School Culture and the Engineering Profession,” Annals of Science 47 (1990): 33.

17 Some key entry points include Bruno Belhoste, La Formation d’une technocratie: L’École Polytechnique et ses élèves de la Révolution au Second Empire (Paris, 2003); André Grelon, ed., Les Ingénieurs de la crise: Titre et profession entre les deux guerres (Paris, 1986); and Antoine Picon, L’invention de l’ingenieur moderne: L’École des ponts et chaussées, 1747–1851 (Paris, 1992).

18 See Ana Cardoso de Matos, Maria Paula Diogo, Irena Gouzévich, and André Grelon, eds., Les Enjeux identitaires des ingénieurs: Entre la formation et l’action (Lisbon, 2009), and André Grelon, Anousheh Karvar, and Irina Gouzévich, La Formation des ingénieurs en perspective: Modèles de références et réseaux de médiation, XVIIIème–XXème siècles (Rennes, 2004). Another useful entry point is Melvin Kranzberg, ed., Technological Education—Technological Style (San Francisco, 1986).

19 Matthew Wisnioski, “‘Liberal Education Has Failed’: Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 757.

20 Ibid., 758 and 756.

21 Ibid., 777.

22 Ibid., 772.

23 Ibid., 777 and 773.

24 Ibid., 755 and 763.

25 Ibid., 777 and 778.

26 Ibid., 779.

27 Ibid., 781.

28 Ross Bassett, “Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 798.

29 Ibid.

30 For discussion of the dangers of positing transferable “models” in engineering education, see Gary Lee Downey, “Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress,” History and Technology 22, no. 3 (2007): 293.

31 Bassett, 786.

32 Ibid., 791.

33 Ibid., 794.

34 Ibid., 809.

35 Ibid.

36 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005).

37 Bassett (n. 28 above), 809.

38 See also Thomas L. Friedman, “It’s a Flat World, after All,” New York Times Magazine, 3 April 2005, available online at (accessed 27 April 2008).

39 Bassett, 786 and 808.

40 Andrés Valderrama et al., “Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887–1972,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 811.

41 Ibid., 837.

42 Ibid., 829.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 837.

45 Ibid., 835 and 836.

46 For an overview, see Juan C. Lucena et al., “Competencies Beyond Countries: The Re-Organization of Engineering Education in the United States, Europe, and Latin America,” Journal of Engineering Education 97, no. 4 (2008): 433–47.

47 Melvin Kranzberg, “At the Start,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 1–10. For more on SHOT’s early ties to ASEE, see Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.

48 John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 3.

49 Ibid., 4.

50 Rosalind Williams, another SHOT president with deep expertise at the intersection of engineering and technological history, has raised similar concerns in an insightful account of the challenges that grew to confront orthodoxies in engineering and in the history of technology over the past four decades. Her essay “All That Is Solid Melts into Air” also details the widening gap that has come to separate those fields (Technology and Culture 41 [October 2000]: 641–68).

51 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: “The Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), chaps. 15–16.

52 As Wisnioski (n. 19 above, p. 780 n92) says: “STS, history of science, and technology programs still pursue liberal learning for engineers, but often at cross-purposes with their own academization. For a survey, see Stephen H. Cutcliffe, ‘The STS Curriculum: What Have We Learned in Twenty Years?’ Science, Technology, and Human Values 15, no. 3 (1990): 360–72.”

53 Rosalind H. Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

54 Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988); Gary Lee Downey, “Are Engineers Losing Control of Technology? From ‘Problem Solving’ to ‘Problem Definition and Solution’ in Engineering Education,” Chemical Engineering Research and Design 83, no. A8 (2005): 584; André Grelon, “French Engineers: Between Unity and Heterogeneity,” History of Technology 27 (2006): 107.

55 See Kline, “From Progressivism to Engineering Studies” (n. 5 above) and Noble (n. 6 above).

56 Corporations often looked to engineering groups like the Society for Automotive Engineers to resolve technical matters and set industry-wide standards. Major corporations like General Motors or General Electric also subsidized the engineering professional societies by paying the membership dues of their employees and compensating them for time spent on society business—such as attending the annual meeting. These two practices are rare today.

57 Quoted from Downey, “SHOT 2007 notes” (n. 4 above).

58 Gary Lee Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies For? Dominant Practices and Scalable Scholarship,” Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 58.

59 See (accessed 12 August 2009).

60 See (accessed 12 August 2009).

61 Konstantinos Chatzis, “Coping with the Second Industrial Revolution: Fragmentation of the French Engineering Education System, 1870s to the Present,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 79–99; Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies For?”; Vivian Lagesen and Knut Sørensen, “Walking the Line? The Enactment of the Social/Technical Binary in Software Engineering,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 129–49; Juan Lucena, “Imagining Nation, Envisioning Progress: Emperor, Agricultural Elites, and Imperial Ministers in Search of Engineers in 19th Century Brazil,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 3 (2009, forthcoming); Lisa McLoughlin, “Success, Recruitment, and Retention of Academically Elite Women Students without STEM Backgrounds in U.S. Undergraduate Engineering Education,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 151–68; and Carroll Seron and Susan S. Silbey, “The Dialectic between Expert Knowledge and Professional Discretion: Accreditation, Social Control, and the Limits of Instrumental Logic,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 101–27.

62 Atsushi Akera, Maria Paula Diogo, Ann Johnson, Scott Knowles, Ronald Kline, Eda Kranakis, Antoine Picon, Bruce Seely, Amy Slaton, Rosalind Williams, and Matthew Wisnioski.

63 Thomas P. Hughes, “A Usable History for Engineers: The First Morison Prize Lecture,” in Working Papers, Program in Science, Technology, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 3. Thanks to Matt Wisnioski for calling this lecture to our attention.

64 Ibid., 2 and 3.

65 Gary Downey, “SHOT 2007 notes” (n. 4 above), 2.

66 Longtime SHOT stalwart Eugene Ferguson showed one model for this kind of writing in “How Engineers Lose Touch,” American Heritage of Invention and Technology 8 (winter 1993): 16–24—an article widely assigned in engineering design coursework. Two fine sources that explore the ethics of design failure are: Eda Kranakis, “Fixing the Blame: Organizational Culture and the Quebec Bridge Collapse,” Technology and Culture 45 (July 2004): 487–518, and William D. Middleton, The Bridge at Quebec (Bloomington, 2001). For some of the ethical challenges of modern bioengineering, see Michael Bess, “Icarus 2.0: A Historian’s Perspective on Human Biological Enhancement,” Technology and Culture 49 (January 2008): 114–26. Some of these fine studies can work well in the engineering classroom, but others would need reworking to condense historical detail while bringing hard analytic questions to the fore. John Staudenmaier has done this work in his textbook for the University of Detroit Mercy, The Politics and Ethics of Engineering (1998), funded by the Greenfield Coalition for New Manufacturing Education, National Science Foundation, E.E.C. 9630951.

67 McMahon (n. 8 above); Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress (n. 8 above); Sinclair and Hull (n. 8 above).

68 Among U.S.-based organizations, IEEE has the most active role in sponsoring historical awareness and publications through its History Center. But ASCE, ASME, AIAA, and most other engineering societies also see value in history-related activities that mix celebration, public relations, historical awareness, and professional consciousness.

69 These remarks are based on Jack Brown’s service (2000–present) on the History and Heritage Committee of ASME, where he has served alongside another SHOT member, Robert Friedel. The distinguished and prolific engineer/historian Henry Petroski chairs the ASCE’s History and Heritage Committee. Among their many activities, these committees often have a celebratory mission that is alien to academic history, but they also seek legitimacy as sponsors of historical awareness.

70 Dan H. Pletta, The Engineering Profession: Its Heritage and Its Emerging Public Purpose (Lanham, Md., 1984), 127.

71 For a history and overview of ABET, see (accessed 4 June 2009).

72 The criteria can be found at (accessed 4 June 2009).

73 The eleven outcomes are: (A) Ability to apply knowledge of math, science, and engineering; (B) Ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data; (C) Ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs; (D) Ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams; (E) Ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems; (F) An understanding of professional and ethical responsibility; (G) Ability to communicate effectively; (H) The broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context (“economic and environmental” added in 2004); (I) Recognition of the need for, and an ability to, engage in life-long learning; (J) Knowledge of contemporary issues; (K) Ability to use the skills, techniques, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice. The seven areas in which liberal studies are essential are outcomes D through J.

74 A given engineering school undergoes a full assessment and (re)accrediting process once every six years. The professional societies—such as IEEE and ASME—train the accreditors, as ABET itself is a small organization with limited resources. Then the accreditors in turn conduct their campus visit as a team, although each degree program is reviewed separately (albeit concurrently) and accredited individually.

75 ABET has an interest in gauging the effectiveness of its EC 2000 approach, andit commissioned a study that showed overall improvements in student learning. See http://www.ed.psu.edu/educ/ec2000 (accessed 4 June 2009). Liberal studies educators, however, who met at a 2002 conference on EC 2000 at the University of Virginia (funded by the National Science Foundation) had a more nuanced view of the problems and opportunities for liberal studies in the new accrediting system. See (accessed 4 June 2009).

76 One specific proposal: SHOT, in company with other societies including the Liberal Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education, could offer a summer institute to train accreditors to recognize best practices in the uses of history in engineering education.

John K. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. Gary Lee Downey is alumni distinguished professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. Maria Paula Diogo is associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Science and Technology at New University of Lisbon, Portugal.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 50 No. 4 (October 2009)