John McDermott’s 1969 essay “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” was once part of the history of technology canon. Revisiting it offers one measure of how far the field has traveled in four decades—and where it might go.

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.

Appearing almost a decade after the founding of SHOT, these two volumes, edited by the founder of the society and his colleague Carroll Pursell, deeply influenced the character of the history of technology as an academic field of study.

Roger Burlingame’s optimism may seem somewhat naive and romantic today, but he made pioneering contributions to both this journal and the history of technology—or, in his apt words, “the Hardware of Culture.”

Harold Innis introduced his major contributions to communication scholarship gradually, perhaps not even realizing until near the end of his life that he even had ideas to contribute to this nascent field. Yet the conditions he identified as key to the success and longevity of empires define twenty-first-century life.

Edwin Layton’s pathbreaking and still widely read Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession is a rich and insightful account of the struggles between “progressive” and “conservative” engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies.

In 1974 Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York debuted to the applause and acclaim of those fed up with the superhighway and slum-clearance policies of the recent past. The massive book portrayed Moses as an arrogant bastard who wreaked irreparable damage on the city and precipitated its fall from glory and transformation into a bankrupt, decaying hulk. In 2007, however, a Columbia University exhibition and symposium on Moses forced a reconsideration of his character and his legacy. But Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology.

Carl Condit’s The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925 deeply influenced the history of building technology and the history of urban form—so deeply that his midcentury interpretations have been frustratingly long-lived. Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

It is the rare scholar of American transportation history who has not used George Rogers Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution as the launchpad for his or her own research, and it remains a classic work of technological history.

It is fifty years since the publication of A. Hunter Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities. No one would attempt such a project today, but after half a century the book still speaks to the present.