There were frequent showers on the train ride from Zürich Airport to Interlaken, but the sky began to clear as my brother and I approached our destination on the track running along the south shore of Lake Thun. The clouds lifted; a rainbow appeared on the other side of the lake; and then, astonishingly, one end of the arc seemed to leap across the water to our railway car, as if seeking us out. My brother and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. It was too maudlin, too corny for words, but there it was, and we were thinking the same thing: “It’s Mom and Dad!”

Chuck and I had last been in the Bernese Alps on a family vacation in 1959. We were returning in July 2010 in part as an homage to our now-deceased parents, and in part to relive an experience that had been among the most enjoyable and memorable of our lives. It was altogether a personal journey, not a business trip. Yet from the moment it began, I could not avoid some professional musings. What historian of technology could, when modern travel is a vast network of large technological systems? The contrast between those of 1959 and those of today struck me even before leaving Logan Airport in Boston. As the Swissair staff struggled to wedge everyone on the overbooked flight, a frustrated desk clerk muttered, “The loaves and the fishes are nothing compared to this.” I inevitably recalled the smaller, calmer Logan Airport of 1959: no commercial jetliners, true, but also no security checks or jostling for overhead bins.

All during our trip, Chuck and I kept comparing and contrasting technologies then and now. As our journey progressed, we found ourselves also thinking about other less visible stories of technological change, those connected with the larger social, political, and economic history of the cold war—with the context, to use the handy professional term. More layers of historical thinking were added as we contemplated the various ways humans, intentionally or otherwise, have altered even the Alps. Most of all, we became conscious of the connections between lifetime and historical time. Fiftieth anniversaries (fifty-first, in our case: close enough) have emotional and intellectual weight because they mark the threshold where individual memory begins to be transformed into collective memory. When fifty years have passed since an event—whether as personal as marriage, or as public as the end of a war—we humans know the odds are overwhelming that we will not be around for another half century. We think about how events of our lives might be reshaped into shared and therefore more enduring meaning. We try to make connections between personal and historical experience.

The story begins with a well-known, and oft-lamented, chapter in American industrial history: the beginning of the decline of American manufacturing. Our father was a General Electric engineer, and in 1956 the Industry Control department in which he worked had been moved from Schenectady, New York, to Salem, a small town in southwest Virginia near Roanoke. In retrospect we can now see that our family was caught up in the great diaspora of facilities and personnel to areas offering cheaper, nonunionized labor. Today, this is being done globally; at that time, “outsourcing” seemed possible within the United States.

Especially in those early years in Virginia, as Yankees we often had the sense of being strangers in a strange land. My brother and I have not forgotten the shock of stepping off the Norfolk and Western train and entering the Roanoke terminal in 1956 to see the rest room signs prominently labeled Colored and White. Chuck pointed to them, exclaiming, “Look at that!” Our mother later confessed that she was instinctively embarrassed by his outburst, while also sharing his dismay at this public reminder of racial segregation.

Nevertheless, the move had some real advantages, especially for our parents. The weather was milder. Our father enjoyed the small-town friendliness of Salem, and our mother was able to teach math in a local community college without a master’s degree. The Salem schools remained segregated during our years in them, as the Commonwealth of Virginia defied the 1954 Supreme Court ruling through a strategy of “massive resistance.” The schools were not very good, but Chuck and I learned what we could in them and made some close friends.

For our first summer vacation in the South, we took a road trip to the North Carolina mountains and Daytona Beach. After that, we headed elsewhere: to the Colorado Rockies for the second summer (the first time Chuck and I traveled by air), and to New England for the third. In early 1959, considering plans for our fourth summer, Dad learned that the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club was arranging a charter flight for members from Boston to Zürich, leaving in early July and returning three weeks later. He had never been out of the country, but his mother’s family was from Germany, and as an engineer he admired Swiss and German engineering. Mom had been to Europe in 1939, on a bicycling trip in the British Isles, and in 1954 had visited England and the Continent with her own parents. In both cases, she had crossed the Atlantic on Cunard liners. She liked the idea of introducing the whole family to some of the sights and places that had impressed her, especially in Paris.

So our parents signed up the family for the AMC charter flight. The four of us went to the main post office in Roanoke to get a family passport (all four on the same document). Dad arranged to pick up a VW Microbus in Zürich and mapped a roughly oval route for the three weeks we had at our disposal. The plan was to arrive in Zürich on July 6, drive west to the Bernese Alps, then east to Austria and southern Germany, west again via Metz to Paris, and finally eastward back to Zürich. On July 28 we would be ready to fly back to Boston via London and Shannon Airport in Ireland.

Nowadays a vacation trip to the European heartland for an American family has become routine. It was not so in 1959. For Chuck and me, the trip did much more than lift us out of a small town in southwest Virginia for a few weeks. For him, the trip encouraged a lifetime of hiking and similar outdoors adventures, culminating in his completion of the Appalachian Trail in three summers from 2006 to 2008. For me, it led to an academic career in the cultural history of technology, focused on Europe.

While technology is an essential ingredient in the sound of rock and roll, its presence in the museum is muted. The museum’s collection and exhibits are dominated by rock-star stage garb, electric guitars, photographs, assorted documents, ephemera, videos, and numerous listening kiosks and interactive exhibits. However, one small exhibit hall on the second floor, a newly reopened and expanded exhibit building on the original installation, features a timeline of audio technology and displays devoted to three individuals whose contributions were bound up in the technology of radio, recording, and performance.

A red-and-blue neon sign marks the entrance to “The Architects of Rock and Roll,” which profiles Les Paul, Alan Freed, and Sam Phillips as “the creative individuals behind the musicians” who exemplify the “technical innovators, mass communicators, sympathetic ears [who were] vital in getting music from the mind of a musician to the audience.” Given the museum’s predominant focus on rock stars, this recognition of those whose contributions have been less celebrated is a welcome addition and hopefully will inspire more attention to the many recording engineers, producers, and technicians who had so much to do with the sound of rock and roll. The term “architect” should be taken in the broadest sense here, but it aptly describes the contributions of these three, as each in his own fashion helped shape the music in some way.

Visitors first encounter Alan Freed, the disc jockey who first named the music “rock and roll” on his radio show in 1951. He went on to organize the first rock and roll concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena in 1952. Peter Hastings’s black-and-white photograph taken from the back of the hall captured the mayhem of that night. Concert promoters sold 20,000 tickets for a hall that seated 10,000, and most concert-goers could barely see or hear what was happening onstage. Freed hosted more Moondog shows and promoted and starred in movies like “Don’t Knock the Rock” and “Mr. Rock and Roll”—posters for these and others paper the exhibit’s walls. Soon Freed was lured to New York and WINS radio, where he dropped the Moondog moniker after being sued by street-musician Louis Hardin, who had gone by the name “Moondog” for years. The urn with Freed’s ashes sits in a glass-covered niche in the wall, a free-standing display case features letters and other documents, and a video tells the story of his career from enthusiastic promoter of the music he believed in despite criticism to the career-ending payola scandal and his early death. Although I thought I knew the story of Freed’s rise and fall, the video enlightened this visitor about his passion and influence. While he was not the only disc jockey in America spinning these records, he was indeed the first to bring this music to a wider, and white, audience. Freed’s passion for the music is evident in the story of how he beat on a telephone book along to the music while broadcasting over WJW radio, purposely leaving the studio microphone on for listeners to hear. I was also fascinated to learn how the audience reacted at his first Moondog concert. Because he had only been heard on radio and not seen, the predominantly black audience at the arena went wild with applause as he and his blonde wife came onstage.

The next stop, “Listen to the Music: Rock and Roll and the Evolution of Audio Technology,” displays artifacts related to sound recording and reproduction in a semi-circular hallway off of the Freed exhibit. Running along the back wall of the glass-fronted display is a timeline in white lettering on black plaques, underneath which sit artifacts ranging from a black-wax Edison cylinder to a white-plastic Apple iPod, representing the range of listening devices from 1877 to the present. The Bell and Tainter Graphophone, Emile Berliner’s flat disc and the mass production of records, Valdemar Poulsen’s Telegraphone, Guglielmo Marconi, and Edwin Armstrong are all either represented or mentioned. But an early phonograph with integral horn and tone arm is mistakenly labeled “Victor Talking Head Machine & Horn 1906” and described as having an enclosed floating horn—an obvious mistake, since the horn is neither enclosed nor floating. Nor, for that matter, is it a Victor, according to two early phonograph experts I consulted. But for the most part, the timeline offers visitors who are unfamiliar with the history of audio technology a reasonable introduction to the range of devices over the first century and a half of recorded sound. Early radios, record players, eight-track players, stereo amplifiers, tape decks, and more recent formats like CD and MP3 players are featured along with photographs, advertisements, and other attempts at contextualizing the artifacts.

However, the inaccuracies, omissions, and unbalanced display will leave those who know something about audio history unimpressed. An example of the skewed representation is the preponderance of Eveready battery displays and an RCA Victor album demonstrating the New Orthophonic recording titled “Hearing Is Believing,” released in 1954 yet oddly placed between Eveready batteries of the 1920s and a Tom Thumb radio of the 1940s. The Tom Thumb radio description claims that “subminiature tube technology was an after-effect of vacuum-tube technology developed during WWII for Allied forces radar equipment.” In fact, subminiature tubes had already been developed for hearing aids in the 1930s and were being produced by Raytheon before World War II, at which point they became a critical component of proximity fuzes, not radar systems. An Ampex portable tape recorder from 1954 is mistakenly identified with a lengthy numerical title and misdated as “ca. 1940s,” although the actual model name “Ampex 600” is clearly visible on the front of the machine. This recorder was commonly referred to as the “suitcase,” because of its casing and portability, and it was the first portable professional unit Ampex produced. It became an important tool for quality location recording, but none of this is mentioned in the display. Another claim on the timeline, that in “1954 Ampex introduces the first multi-track tape recorder,” is at best semi-accurate and misleading. Ampex was producing stereo and three-channel recorders in the early 1950s, but the first true multi-track recorder was delivered to Les Paul in 1956, a fact highlighted just steps away in the adjoining exhibit, “Les Paul—The New Sound.” These inaccuracies distort the history of the evolution of audio technology for unsuspecting visitors, and they undermine the integrity of the exhibit for those who know something about the subject.

The Sam Phillips portion of the exhibit is limited to a recreation of the control room and a small corner of the studio of his Memphis Recording Service (fig. 2). It displays the spinet piano used by Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and other musicians whom Phillips first recorded. Some of the equipment on display is not what Phillips actually used, a fact clearly stated in the description printed on the glass wall enclosing the display. Here, a bit more description would offer museum-goers who have never seen the inside of a studio, much less one with analog- and disc-recording technology, a greater appreciation for how records were made in the pre-digital era. As I stood taking notes, several people wondered if the “turntable” was used to play records. I pointed out that it was a cutting lathe used to cut recordings directly to a disc from the taped performance. Explanations like the use of the lathe, along with the limitations of the four-channel mixing console, and Phillips’s ability to adapt to unforeseen problems in recording would add to the significance of his status as an architect of rock and roll. Much has been written about his contribution in giving untried talent the opportunity to record and his keen sense of how to coax the best performances out of inexperienced musicians, but one sees little of that reflected in the exhibit. Peter Guralnick, late-journalist Robert Palmer, and this author are just a few who have written about Phillips.¹ The studio setup is simply too sterile to convey the kind of excitement that must have taken place when Phillips recorded Elvis doing “Blue Suede Shoes” and Ike Turner’s band cutting “Rocket ‘88’”—the song many consider to be rock and roll’s first.

Something to liven up this corner and fill out the picture on Phillips would make a huge difference to visitors unfamiliar with him and with how the 1950s recording studio worked. The electric guitars displayed along the back wall to the left of the studio would be of interest to guitar aficionados and perhaps fans of the musicians who owned them, but they tell little about the architects of rock and roll, even of the musician whose name each guitar bears, Les Paul. The space may have been better used to expand on the significance of Phillips as a disc jockey, recording engineer, and producer.

The “Les Paul—The New Sound” display features the guitarist’s instruments, as well as recording devices and the huge amplifier that was modified to become the “Les Paulverizer” in his stage performances (figs. 3 and 4). An old television constantly plays segments from the Les Paul and Mary Ford Show, a short-format television show syndicated widely during the mid-1950s that involved the husband-and-wife duo playing one or two of their hit songs, such as “Vaya con Dios” and “How High the Moon.” Photographs of Paul in his early radio career and his early electric-guitar experiments, as well as the wall of Les Paul guitars that face the display give a sense of this innovative musician. Correspondence between Paul and the Ampex Corporation regarding the design, delivery, and modification of his eight-channel recorder outfitted with “simul-sync,” the earliest attempt at multi-tracking, as opposed to sound-on-sound, is displayed though hard to read because of its distance from the glass. Although some very interesting artifacts document Paul’s innovations, this portion of the exhibit misses the more complex story behind the invention, innovation, and collaboration of artist and manufacturer that surrounded the eight-track and its influence on subsequent recording practice. Paul has often been credited as the inventor of multi-track recording, but it was Ampex engineers who made his vision a reality, and the letters displayed probably convey some indication of the obstacles they had to overcome.

Dedicated to documenting “the history and continuing significance of rock and roll music,” the museum has pursued a strong educational mission, but until now has lacked any scholarly research component, partly because of insufficient space, but also because the curatorial staff had to build a collection. But in 2012 the Rock Hall Library and Archives will officially open to scholars, students, educators, the media, and the general public. Its 22,500 square foot, state-of-the-art facility shares a building with the Center for Creative Arts located on the campus of Cuyahoga Community College, which is about two miles from the museum. In April I attended a conference that held its plenary session in the Rock Hall’s Foster Theater, where library and archives staff members presented a visual preview of the new facility and described the collection, which will be “the world’s most comprehensive repository of written and audiovisual materials relating to the history of rock and roll.” No doubt this will be welcome news to historians of music, popular culture, musicologists, cultural critics, and others who study rock and roll. For historians of technology researching the technological aspects of music—a specialty that those associated with T&C have only fairly recently begun exploring and one that holds enormous promise for further study²—it is unclear how well this collection will be of use until it opens. Books, periodicals, journals, correspondence, business records, artists’ personal collections, and film and videotape are some of the items that will be available to researchers. The Museum’s collection of three-dimensional artifacts (clothing, instruments, etc.) will remain at the Museum, while all archival materials owned by the Rock Hall (documents, photographs, audio, video, etc.) will be housed at the Library and Archives and will be made available for research when not on exhibit. The head archivist announced that they have created very detailed and user-friendly finding aids, which will hopefully be available before the Rock Hall Library and Archives formally opens. Based on the museum’s current displays and its focus on material culture, with little interpretation or deeper interrogation, one can only hope that the opening of the library and archives may encourage a more scholarly approach to analyzing the historical significance of the museum’s wealth of artifacts.

1. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (New York, 1994); Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York, 1981); Susan Schmidt Horning, “Recording: The Search for the Sound,” in The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon, ed. André Millard (Baltimore, 2004), 105–22; and Colin Escott, with Martin Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York, 1991) offers a comprehensive history of Phillips’s career, the technology of his studio, and his method of working with musicians.

2. Hans-Joachim Braun, ed., Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 2002); Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, eds., “Special Issue on Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” Social Studies of Science 34 (2004); Kieran Downes, “‘Perfect Sound Forever’: Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Re-making of Compact Disc Playback,” Technology and Culture 51 (2010): 305–31; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley, Calif., 2004); James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore, 1996); Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005); David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (Piscataway, N.J., 2000); Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); and Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording in America (forthcoming).

Susan Schmidt Horning is an assistant professor of history at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is a cultural historian of the twentieth-century United States, American technology, and sound studies, with particular interest in media, the arts, and popular culture. Her work has appeared in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (2002), The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon (2004), and Social Studies of Science (2004). Her forthcoming book, Chasing Sound, charts the technical evolution of recording studios and the interplay between musical culture and audio engineering during the first century of sound recording.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Moreover, Simon Werrett carries his narrative of the interaction of the pyrotechnic craftsmen and natural philosophers (and the impact of pyrotechnics on experimental science) from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In particular, Werrett considers comparatively the role of pyrotechny in three different eighteenth-century sites: Saint Petersburg, Paris, and London. In so doing, he highlights a second theme of the book, the importance of what might be termed “sociocultural geography” (my neologism). By this I mean that Werrett investigates regional states of affairs with respect to the relations and interactions of artisans, artists, and savants and their impact on the deployment and the scientific import of pyrotechny for each site.

The first part of the book focuses on the role of “gunners,” the fabricators of gunpowder and firearms in the development of fireworks for spectacles to accompany church and courtly festivals. The use of fireworks followed quite rapidly on the introduction of gunpowder itself into Europe. Firework spectacles get vivid treatment both in text and illustrations but Werrett is more interested in detailing how the gunners extended the domain of their craft toward the socially and intellectually more lofty realms of the sciences and the humanities. Some of this followed naturally on the kinds of spectacular items produced in firework displays—particularly celestial ones such as stars and meteors. Alchemy was one such realm, whose idiom the gunners themselves employed to explain the nature and effects of pyrotechny. More particularly, Werrett argues that, in order to “raise the status of their labors during this period” (p. 35), gunners appealed to various domains of the liberal arts and the new humanism: geometry, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as to a distinguished classical origin (the activities of Archimedes). These attributions appeared in treatises on pyrotechny.

This is an extremely interesting section. However, this reader was frustrated by a certain casualness in the accounting of who wrote what and for what purpose. Many of the cited authors, such as Vannoccio Biringuccio and Niccolò Tartaglia were not primarily gunners, although the former published one of the first treatises on “pirotechnia” and the latter wrote on gunnery. There are some treatises by authors who were clearly gunners (such as John Babington, author of a Pyrotechnia of 1633) but we learn little about who he or other gunners were or how they were trained and organized. This is probably not surprising for such artisans, but more attention to the contexts in which authors who were not gunners wrote in elevated language on pyrotechny would have gone a long way to elucidating Werrett’s version of the Zilsel thesis.

Werrett demonstrates convincingly that pyrotechny became a resource for early-seventeenth-century formulators of the new natural philosophical enterprise, such as Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon and, at the end of that century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. However, there appears to be a limitation in pyrotechny’s exemplification of the Zilsel thesis: no scientific “advance” (to use a Whiggish term) seems to have been directly brought about through pyrotechnical activities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The remainder of the book focuses on the second theme outlined above: the comparative account of the differing local circumstances under which pyrotechny was practiced and in which it interacted with natural philosophy. In late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century England (London), there was great ambivalence as to whether pyrotechny should be regarded as public spectacle or as subject for natural philosophical investigation (or both). In the interregnum, the alchemical orientation of many of the radicals lent support to the alchemical connotations and implications of pyrotechny (George Starkey, made famous in recent decades through the scholarship of William Newman and Lawrence Principe, appears here as the author of Pyrotechny Asserted [1658]). But after the Restoration, the old ambivalence asserted itself, particularly in reaction to the perceived Catholic and absolutist implications of spectacular and seemingly miraculous fireworks displays. The Royal Society of London, for one, distanced itself from pyrotechnical experiments. However, by the turn of the eighteenth century, pyrotechny acquired a new practical cachet suited to the growing power of British commerce and empire. These valuations did not come from gunners but rather from those of a more philosophical disposition, such as the theologian William Whiston.

Conversely, in early-eighteenth-century Russia, it was the natural philosophical enterprise of the newly organized Saint Petersburg Academy of Science that evoked ambivalence and suspicion; the savants here utilized the design of pyrotechnical displays for imperial dynastic celebrations to convey the importance and ingenuity of science. In Paris, finally, the context of pyrotechny had important literary dimensions. One of the interesting developments of the eighteenth century was the movement of Italian pyrotechny experts to other parts of Europe. This was particularly marked in Paris, where perhaps the most celebrated of all pyrotechnical families— Italians named Ruggieri—settled in Paris in the eighteenth century and rapidly established their primacy as pyrotechnic artificers.

The activities of Italians inspired a number of fireworks treatises. Werrett contrasts two of these. That by a French artisanal artificer, Jean-Charles Perrinet d’Orval, purported to reveal the “secrets” of the Ruggieris’ skill in pyrotechny, and the other, actually written early in the century by a “learned engineer,” Amédée-François Frézier, attempted to place the subject in more elevated literary and philosophical form. Finally, in mid-century, pyrotechny received treatment in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, in which both Perrinet’s and Frézier’s treatises were utilized by the article’s literary author, Louis de Cahusac.

One of the most interesting sections of this book is the narrative of the role that pyrotechny played in eighteenth-century experimental philosophy. Werrett details how “philosophical fireworks” were deployed in “pleasure gardens” in London and Paris. A changing society and social role for fireworks provided the context: the rise of a commercial middle class, literate and curious. More particularly, fireworks became associated both in popular middle-class culture and in the more specialized scientific culture, with the spread of experimental philosophy, particularly with the dramatic and fashionable electrical experiments of the mid- and late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, pyrotechny received what was its ultimate scientific cachet, association with the new chemistry of Lavoisier. Claude-Fortuné Ruggieri, for example, raised the status of the pyrotechnist, according to Werrett, to that of “an artist skilled in ‘applied chemistry,’ while fireworks recipes appeared in books of ‘chemical technology’” (p. 233).

This exposition of the book hardly begins to do justice to the fascinating observations and insights contained in it. However, I must say that I came away from Fireworks with a feeling of frustration over the nature and role of the fireworks artificers. Although Werrett gives considerable attention to their relative status compared to architects and natural philosophers, I still had little sense of who they were. By the eighteenth century, they clearly were no longer “gunners” as in earlier periods, but we are given very little indication of how (and why) their craft location changed—particularly how it related to the increasingly state-regulated munitions makers and professionalized artillerists of the eighteenth century. I think that it is telling in this connection that Werrett says nothing about who the post-1800 “pyrotechnists” were once they received their scientific cachet.

Werrett recognizes that there is a problem with the end of his narrative, which he styles “Gone in a Flash: The Disappearing History of Fireworks” (pp. 243–47). He suggests a variety of reasons for this, which would take too long to elaborate here. But we are still left somewhat in the dark regarding the transformation and/or disappearance of those managing fireworks, who had figured so prominently earlier.

Notwithstanding this criticism, I found the book fascinating, sophisticated, and highly enlightening. It adds considerably to our already rich scholarly literature on early modern science, technology, society, and culture—if indeed the boundaries implied by these terms have not been made obsolete by this literature.

Seymour Mauskopf received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in the history of science. His fields of research interest are the history of chemistry [Crystals and Compounds, 1976, Chemical Sciences in the Modern World, 1993] and the history of marginal science (parapsychology) [The Elusive Science, with Michael R. McVaugh, 1980]. Currently, he is working on a book on Alfred Nobel’s interactions with British munitions scientists in the late nineteenth century. He is also co-editing two other books: Integrating History and Philosophy of Science (with Tad Schmaltz) in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science series and Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (with William Newman and Matthew Eddy) in the History of Science Society Osiris series. In 1998, he received the Dexter Award for Outstanding Contributions to the History of Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. He taught history of science at Duke University since 1964 and retired at the end of 2010.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

From this perspective, the “go-between” assumes almost revelatory significance. No single definition of the type is used throughout these essays, but in broad terms the go-between was a mediator between cultures, a broker who brought together by translating between what would otherwise remain separate, or unproductively conflicting, realms. Though usually an individual, the “go-between” is sometimes an object. For example, Juan Pimentel characterizes the bones of what Georges Cuvier named Megatherium americanum (the giant American ground sloth) as a “go-between” in “pursuing the connected stories of human and non-human players” (p. 351). For my money, though, the term is best restricted to human agents.

The essays are a miscellaneous bunch both geographically and topically. An instructive pairing are those on India by Kapil Raj, who provides an overview of how British and South Asian “go-betweens” in Calcutta mediated within the Anglo-Indian world, and by Simon Schaffer, who uncovers how histories of astronomy by British and local scholars rooted Newton within ancient astronomical tradition. That process was both scholarly and of practical significance in “naturalizing” the science through which the survey and control of India was being conducted.

A number of the essays deal with networks of natural historical commerce with a view to elucidating the role of the “go-between.” Margaret Meredith illustrates her astute theorization of the moral economy of communication and friendship in eighteenth-century natural history with the example of Petrus Camper’s investigation of the fossil elephant. In that economy the primary means, and measure, of communication were channels of personal acquaintance and correspondence. Every member of a network of natural historical knowledge exchange was a go-between. Distance was more a function of the channels created by contact through war and commerce than it was of physical separation. Neil Safier examines the botanical and entomological espionage of Hipólito José da Costa, a Luso-Brazilian envoy to the United States in 1798–1800 who was charged with capturing resources of value to Portuguese agriculture. His primary target was living specimens of the cochineal insect and its host cactus. We learn about the extensive instructions issued to Hipólito, his collection of texts and, less successfully, of specimens. A severe shortage of funds drove him on occasion to fabricate journeys that were never undertaken. A Creole collector, Pedro Franco Dávila, is one focus of Juan Pimentel’s contribution. Dávila’s collection of curiosities was purchased by the Spanish crown and became the basis for the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid. Dávila and the non-human go-between already mentioned are considered in relation to, and as agents of, the major shifts in earth and life sciences of the period. While this is a fascinating case study, I would have welcomed a more measured analysis of its significance for the portentous developments with which Pimentel associates it. Emma Spary adds a vital ingredient to our understanding of natural historical travel and collection by examining the sustenance of the bodies of European travelers. She argues convincingly that breaking down the historian’s slavery to the conception of the European as a wandering eye feasting on the Other requires attention to the sustenance of the embodied traveler.

More restricted in its geographical scope is Lissa Roberts’s depiction of the dense undergrowth of steam engineering projects in Europe in this period. She challenges histories of steam that concentrate on the achievements of a few big names and fail to appreciate the crucial contributions of an extended cast of characters who have been written out of the picture. Roberts also questions the Anglocentricity of much steam history, and argues that the Watt engine did not carry all before it. A great diversity of steam devices, Savery-style pumps as much as beam engines, were adopted and adapted by a wide array of practitioners able to mediate between technological development, local circumstances, and the requirements of their clients.

Besides Schaffer’s paper, the standout essays are those by James Delbourgo and David Turnbull. Delbourgo examines the exploits of Edward Bancroft, perhaps the most intriguing, accomplished, and controversial go-between we encounter in these pages. Delbourgo states his aim clearly: “Instead of isolating [Bancroft’s] careers as diplomat, spy, pamphleteer, novelist, natural historian and chemist, the aim . . . has been to take a traveller in the age of revolutions who moved repeatedly between cultures, allegiances and regimes of scientific authority, and examine how techniques of self-translation worked across genres and settings” (p. 317). The point is that Bancroft appeared in all these guises and yet maintained, most of the time, trust and credibility as broker. The clarity of Delbourgo’s theoretical framing would have been welcome in some of the other essays.

David Turnbull is another consummate theoretician, indeed a founding one, of the brokered world. He recounts the stories of four men active in early European settlement of the Australian colonies who neatly exemplify the character of the go-between. He shows how identities and knowledge were created during the process of encounter. Bennelong, of the Eora tribe, was a famous intermediary between his people and the members of the First Fleet, a friend and aide to Governor Arthur Phillip, but also implicated in the governor’s spearing. Through Bennelong many aspects of the tense relations of Europeans and original inhabitants were negotiated. Bungaree was another Aboriginal go-between, whose complex and important role—for example, he assisted Matthew Flinders in the first circumnavigation of Australia—is less well-remembered than the famous portrayal of him barefoot in naval uniform. As Turnbull explains, the latter portrayal lent itself, from the European perspective, to a “simplistic othering” process (p. 423).

Turnbull also considers Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer whose observatory became a place for the study of Aboriginal languages and translation between knowledge systems, especially in the study of the weather. Dawes was not the “meteorologist” that he is often anachronistically characterized as, and was open to hybrid knowledges of such phenomena. The other European go-between, William Buckley, was an escaped convict who had turned native in 1804 and in 1835 walked unannounced into the camp of another landing party. The Europeans saw Buckley as curiously in-between, but essentially a native. His mediation attempts were stymied by the Europeans’ plans of appropriation, which descended into massacre. Buckley abandoned his role.

Importantly, this volume reveals the limitations of Eurocentric, diffusionist approaches to the emergence of modernity. Ironically, it tends to overvalorize, or give antiheroic status to, the “go-between,” both substantively and theoretically. Sanjay Subrahmanyam warns in his afterthoughts that focus on go-betweens can lead us to neglect the larger forces within which they operated, especially if we concentrate on their actions without due regard to outcomes or lack of them. It is easy, in our fascination with these colorful, puzzling, often outrageous characters, to overestimate their agency. Our frantically busy go-betweens operated in the interstices of longer-term, secular economic and cultural change, which constrained their actions. The editors recognize this in their introduction, but the insight is rarely returned to in the body of the work.

The capacious concept of the “go-between” can be applied to almost any historical actor, including the heroes of more conventional accounts. Thus, historians have not ignored go-betweens, but rather selected some for treatment over others. Selection is unavoidable, but what are the criteria for selection—charm, color, or perhaps significance, however we might interpret that? The extent to which go-betweens were also “tricksters” should also give pause for thought. The trickster is often effective and productive by virtue of sleights of hand and mind. But the trickster is also a con man, worth understanding historically, but also worth treating with caution in his claims to be an agent of historical change. These cautions once granted, however, The Brokered World is a most welcome addition to the literature, and its historiographical thrust demands the attention of all concerned with the production of knowledge and technique in the modern world.

Dr. Miller is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of New South Wales and most recently author of James Watt, Chemist (2009).

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Since the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet space program has conjured images of scientific planning, enormous budgets, and a gargantuan, methodical, and conservative military-industrial complex. Walter McDougall cast it as a saga of technocratic ascendance. Siddiqi demolishes the myth that Sputnik resulted from careful long-term planning or guided R&D. He demonstrates that even in the secretive, stodgy, bureaucratic USSR, rocket enthusiasts could develop informal networks to realize their dreams. This is a story of human agency producing a space race. Without mass enthusiasm and public support, the Soviet Union would not have reached the cosmos.

Most accounts of the Soviet space program have focused on the consequences following the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957. While some have provided background for English-language readers on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Russian fascination with spaceflight, Siddiqi’s book is the definitive work on the topic. He chronicles the science fiction writers, science popularizers, and rocket enthusiasts who in unexpected ways kept the passion for space alive in the USSR. But he goes further, exploring the ways independent initiative interacted with government programs to produce Soviet successes during 1957–61.

Some of the material about the 1940s and 1950s was covered in Siddiqi’s earlier, massive Challenge to Apollo (2000). This latest book adds new archival material and extends the story back to the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, Siddiqi alters our understanding of how science was done in the Soviet Union. He demonstrates agency on the part of key individuals, informal groups, and the broader society. The Soviet leadership evinced minimal interest in space until the mid-1950s. Enthusiasts kept the dream of cosmic exploration alive until it could be joined with security needs and Soviet thirst for prestige to create a major program. Ironically, as Challenge to Apollo suggests, once it became a state program Soviet cosmonautics was less successful.

The early chapters of Red Rockets’ Glare tell the story of Tsiolkovskii and other enthusiasts, leading to the “space fad” of the 1920s. This is the most thorough, balanced, and empathetic treatment of Tsiolkovskii we are likely to get. Siddiqi explores Tsiolkovskii’s science fiction and popular science writings, showing that his treatises on rocketry, including his mathematical model demonstrating that rocket flight was possible, provided both evidence and aura, inspiring Russian engineers for decades. Siddiqi does not ignore the less-appealing elements of Tsiolkovskii’s views, including his embrace of eugenics. Tsiolkovskii, the self-educated cosmonautics pioneer, demonstrates the more positive side of Bolshevik egalitarianism and distrust of specialists, even if he was arrested and his pension was paid irregularly. With understated irony, Siddiqi describes how the father of space flight did not want to travel from Kaluga to Moscow for a celebration of his work in 1932 (though he did make the trip later).

The author resuscitates the “space fad” of the 1920s, when Sergei Korolev and other key figures in Soviet cosmonautics developed the networks that underlay subsequent success. He then turns to the Soviet rocket program in the 1930s, and its demise with the loss of Mikhail Tukhachevskii’s patronage and then of Tukhachevskii himself in the purges. Here the story takes an unexpected turn: although the Soviet state abandoned rocketry before World War II and, except for the famous Katiushas, did not explore possibilities during the war, individuals and small groups kept rocketry work alive. At the center of the story is Korolev, the glider pilot who became one of the most dedicated advocates of rocket development and space flight. Lacking garages, the Soviet amateurs used an old church and worked out of private apartments before converting an abandoned wine cellar as their research headquarters. Siddiqi makes it clear that the key to eventual success was symbiosis: the amateurs needed state resources; the state needed their “expertise and innovative ideas” (p. 154).

Siddiqi’s treatment of the purges is a masterful combination of social history, including the role of epistemic communities, with the history of technology. It overturns the Stalin-centric explanations that prevailed both in the Soviet era and during glasnost. Siddiqi recounts the absurdity of Valentin Glushko being sentenced to the camps for favoring “Trotskyite nitrogen” over “Bolshevik oxygen” as a rocket fuel, while demonstrating how individual decisions to politicize scientific and technical differences intensified the terror. Korolev’s fate shows how close the USSR came to losing the man most responsible for its success in the space race. Sentenced to the camps during the Yezhovshchina, Korolev’s case was selected for review when Lavrentii Beria took over. Bad luck caused him to be already en route to Kolyma when the decision to review his case was taken. He finally was summoned to Moscow. Walking and hitching to Magadan, he arrived too late to embark for Moscow. The ship he would have taken ran aground, killing hundreds. The seriously ill Korolev was tended by a physician and finally reached Moscow on a later boat, only to have his eight-year sentence reaffirmed. Before he could be sent back to Kolyma, he was saved by assignment to Tupolev’s sharashka (research institute for imprisoned specialists) in Kazan. Reunited with the cream of the country’s surviving aviation designers, Korolev was in a position to join the teams sent to Germany after the war.

Following victory over Germany, the USSR sought reparations in the form of both hardware and know-how. The story of how groups of Soviet engineers and officers in Germany developed an informal network that became the core of the Soviet space program again demonstrates the absence of an official project and the key role of social actors. Stalin’s mania for control frequently produced administrative gridlock, making informal networks crucial to achievements in science and technology.

The final three chapters describe the ways the military’s interest in developing ICBMs was married to the enthusiasts’ dreams of space flight. Siddiqi shows how missile designers were able to translate the nativism of the Andrei Zhdanov era into glorification of Tsiolkovskii and Russia’s role in space science. Accident was as important as design. In 1953, Andrei Sakharov badly miscalculated what a thermonuclear charge would weigh. As a consequence, Soviet rocket design focused on a much heaver payload than proved necessary for a nuclear device. But it meant that Soviet ICBMs were well suited to launching satellites and eventually human payloads (pp. 273– 74). Only after Korolev’s team convinced the USSR’s leaders to launch a satellite did the Soviet propaganda apparatus create the now-familiar narrative of long-term development under the party’s astute tutelage. Siddiqi shows that Stalin cared about nuclear weapons and delivery systems, not satellites or space flight. Khrushchev did not pay attention to the cosmos before 1955, and was shocked at the Western response to Sputnik. He was, however, clever enough to take advantage once he comprehended its impact.

Reviewers are “paid” to quibble. Siddiqi’s excellent prose is sometimes marred by editing that is poor for a major university press book. His account of Korolev’s surprise when Sputnik provoked a global media frenzy is difficult to square with Korolev’s emphasis on the importance of being first; his criticism of a worker for not polishing the satellite, given that it would eventually be on exhibit in a museum (recounted in Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo, p. 163); or the chief designer’s insistence that the satellite be visible as well as audible while in orbit. The final chapter buries an important change from the Stalin years in a quotation (p. 344): that the repeated R-7 missile launch failures in the summer of 1957 did not result in purges and punishments represented a significant alteration of the climate for priority projects. In this case, tolerating setbacks preserved the team that went on to launch Sputnik. In the longer term, it may have contained the seeds of stagnation: abandoning sticks, the Soviet system proved incapable of providing sufficient carrots. Siddiqi’s previous work shows that once the state “owned” the space program, cosmonautics suffered from the flaws familiar to students of the Soviet system. But that story goes well beyond Siddiqi’s outstanding contribution in this volume. Red Rockets’ Glare is mandatory reading for historians of technology and of Russia.

Given that “We launched Sputnik” is the stock reply by Russian officials when the decline of their science and education systems is discussed, Russian readers are not going to welcome a concluding chapter that begins, “Sputnik was not a triumph of Soviet science.” This is precisely why they need to read Siddiqi’s superb monograph. That the Soviet Union’s most famous technological accomplishment was not a product of a top-down state program is the most important lesson in a book full of valuable insights and challenges to conventional wisdoms.

Harley Balzer is an associate professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University. In 1992–93 he served as executive director of the International Science Foundation for the former Soviet Union and Baltic States.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.