Robert Moses and the Modern City already appears to be touching off one of the most spirited historical debates since the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit of 1995. It may be that the greatest legacy that Moses will leave in New York City is not the eponymous edifice he so badly wanted, but his name itself and the image of his scowling visage—the very personification of the benefits, the pain, the almost incalculable windfalls and wipeouts, and above all the clash of contending forces that make up the process of urban redevelopment in a city that is itself a cultural icon.

Born into affluence, Moses received degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Columbia but then languished for a decade as a midlevel bureaucrat until he was taken under the wing of New York Governor Al Smith, who appointed him head of the Long Island State Parks Authority in 1924. He soon perfected the art of using of the autonomous, quasi-public agency to centralize control and limit public and legislative scrutiny. In 1934 he added the New York City Parks Commission and the Triborough Bridge Authority to his portfolio, and continued on that aggrandizing path until at one point he simultaneously held twelve separate state, city, and regional offices. As Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson observe in the introduction to Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, the catalog mentioned earlier, “Moses’s public works . . . are so indispensable it is impossible to imagine New York without them.”{1} In 1929 he built Jones Beach on Long Island and two parkways to connect it to the light- and air-starved masses of Gotham. He was directly responsible for the construction of the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, the Marine Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, the Long Island Expressway, the Cross-Island Parkway, Orchard Beach, Jacob Riis Beach, New Rockaway Beach, Bethpage State Park, Sunken Meadows State Park, Marine Park, Pelham Bay Park, five hundred playgrounds, seventeen swimming pools, and the 1964 Worlds Fair. He played a major role in the development of Lincoln Center, the United Nations complex, Shea Stadium, and a dozen major housing projects. He assembled and cleared land for the Manhattan campuses of Fordham, New York University, and the Julliard School, and in Brooklyn for the Pratt Institute and Long Island University.

Fig. 1 McCarren Pool, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (Photo copyright Andrew Moore, reproduced with permission.)

In a paper read on the first day of the symposium, the urban historian Robert Fishman argued that the beginning of the end for Moses came in 1952, with his plan to extend Fifth Avenue south under the Washington Square arch, across the park, and on downtown as a broad new urban arterial.{2} Residents objected, only to be denounced as malcontents, radicals, and subversives. The “Battle of Washington Square” lasted until 1958, when the city killed the project and closed the park to traffic. The conflict galvanized one of the locals, a minor figure identified in news accounts as Mrs. James Jacobs; three years later her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities would set the consensus view of cities and planning, embodied by Moses and his great public works, on its head. Moses did successfully build his most notorious project, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, in the 1950s and early 1960s, but two even more ambitious schemes, the Mid-Manhattan and Lower Manhattan Expressways, were never started. In 1968 Governor Nelson Rockefeller removed Moses from his last remaining post, as director of the Triborough Bridge Authority, and he withdrew into a resentful retirement made even more bitter by Caro’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book. He made an effort to counter his declining fortunes in a 1970 autobiography titled Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, but the book was as dry and detached as the man himself and sold poorly. He died in 1981, leaving an estate worth less than fifty thousand dollars.

The symposium, organized by Columbia professors Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, was as much a reappraisal of Caro’s biography as an assessment of Moses’ forty-year career. A constant refrain was that while Moses was indeed a powerful figure and an astoundingly abrasive individual, he was less omnipotent and omniscient than Caro asserted, more a highly talented and astute administrator finely tuned to the shifting winds of financial opportunity. The Long Island parks and parkways of the 1920s used land stockpiled decades before for water reserves and made obsolete by newer aqueducts. The roads and playgrounds of the 1930s were built with Works Progress Administration dollars—in 1936 New York received one out of every seven WPA dollars spent nationwide—and in the 1950s his great expressways were paid for with federal highway funds allocated on a 90/10 matching basis. The feds had money and needed projects to spend it on. Moses provided the projects—the plans, the surveys, the blueprints, the local government approvals, the seed money, all the things Washington was prohibited by law from supplying, but that other cities couldn’t seem to cough up.

Fig. 2 Betsy Head Pool, Brownsville, Brooklyn. (Photo copyright Andrew Moore, reproduced with permission.)

Of the three interlocking exhibits, Remaking the Metropolis, at the Museum of the City of New York, was the most successful.{3} Confined to a restricted gallery space, the exhibit still thought big, tipping visitors back on their heels with artifacts of Moses’s most spectacular successes and most colossal defeats. Its centerpiece was a thirty-foot long model of a road that never was: the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, slashing across town at a fourth-floor height from the Hudson to the East River at Thirtieth Street. An only slightly smaller model of the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge dominated the exhibit’s entry. That idea was killed by Moses’ nemesis Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 in favor of the current tunnel. These models and others were clearly the stars of the show, and it is ironic that nearly all illustrated abandoned projects. (Most had also been in badly deteriorated condition and needed extensive restoration; the preservation of these invaluable relics itself might have adequately justified the exhibits.)

Moses’s completed projects were represented through various wall hangings, including period photographs and documents and a series of new photos taken by Andrew Moore on commission for the exhibits; Moore’s photos are reproduced in the exhibit catalog as well. One noteworthy set in particular, a series of day and night scenes of the infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway, lends support to the contention of the symposium’s most astringent participant, SUNY-Buffalo’s Ray Bromley, that Caro’s extended story of the impact of the Cross-Bronx on the East Tremont neighborhood was selective and distorted. Caro describes an almost postapocalyptic scene, but East Tremont housing was already receiving the lowest possible rating from the federal Home Owner’s Loan Corporation before the highway started, and the neighborhood experienced a cycle of distress and revival in the forty years after construction comparable to others in the South Bronx much farther from the highway. Far from a Moses creation, the Cross-Bronx was first laid out in the 1929 Regional Plan for New York, and “from 1931 [when it was opened] on the George Washington Bridge was like an enormous cannon pointed at the mid-Bronx.” Had Moses not happened, Bromley concluded, the fate of both the expressway and the South Bronx neighborhoods would have been largely the same.

In some ways the Road to Recreation, at the Queens Museum of Art, was the most disappointing of the exhibits. Where the City Museum was cramped for space, Queens had room to spare, yet used it to little advantage. Everything, save for two small video monitors and one model, was hung on the walls. The numerous small photographs of small playgrounds were swallowed up by the huge expanses of wall. The only model, of the unbuilt Long Island Sound Bridge from Oyster Bay to Rye, was shunted off to a dim gallery that otherwise contained only a rather small and desultory display of roads and bridges out of sync with the show’s bright emphasis on beaches, pools, and playgrounds.

Fig. 3 Silver Towers and 110 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan. (Photo copyright Andrew Moore, reproduced with permission.)

The Queens exhibit appeared to be the loser in a thematic tug-of-war over what should be shown where. The official explanation was that the City Museum exhibit covered Moses’ early career while Queens presented his later works, but I saw no evidence of this; rather, the spoils appeared to have been divided according to a mishmash of theme, geographic interest, and available floor space. The development of playgrounds was presented at Queens, but a display of Moses’s sometimes radical efforts to alter Central Park was placed at the City Museum, as was his still-unrealized attempt to turn Wards Island and Randalls Island into a “Central Park for the Twentieth Century.” The development of Long Island’s Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was discussed at Queens, but the construction of the United Nations Manhattan complex, which Moses originally wanted to put on a 310-acre campus in Flushing Meadows, was covered at the City Museum in a small display. It did include a bronze casting of a breathtakingly innovative playground by sculptor and landscape artist Isamu Noguchi that was favored by Secretary General Trygve Lie but vetoed by Moses in favor of a boilerplate parks department design. Had it been displayed at Queens, in juxtaposition to his creative 1930s playgrounds, Noguchi’s model would have provided stark testimony to the ossification of Moses’ later years.

It is likely that the decision to allocate most of the models to the City Museum came about because Queens already housed the grandest Moses model of them all: the New York Panorama, a basketball court–sized diorama of the five boroughs built for the 1964 Worlds Fair. (The building now housing the Queens Museum was the New York City Pavilion.) Moses, the fair director, ordered each of its bridges cast slightly oversize to make them appear more imposing, and his parks were painted florescent green and his housing projects brick red to make them stand out. The Panorama would have been the perfect tool to show how all the far-flung Moses creations evolved, over forty years, into a network of infrastructure that implemented his unique vision of the modern city, for better or worse. Inexplicably, the Panorama, a permanent exhibit, was completely divorced from the Moses show, with no references in one to the other. Lacking its orientation, the wall exhibits started to blur together.

In what I admit is a contradiction, this weakness is the catalog’s strength. Over half of its 336-page length is taken up by an illustrated portfolio of Moses’ parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, roads, bridges, and housing projects in the city. Presented as a row of pictures and labels on the wall, one after the other, they make the head swim, but laid out in a book according to a logical typology with a clear table of contents they comprise an invaluable reference and justify the claim of the curators that when it comes to Robert Moses the focus should be on the works, not the man. Let us hope that a companion portfolio of Moses projects outside of New York City, on Long Island and upstate, is somewhere in the works.

Of the three exhibits, Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution was the most self contained, the most technical, and the most revisionist. Moses’s work as chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance has widely been perceived as a failure, a conclusion the exhibit and the corresponding catalog essay by Ballon take issue with. Using funds provided through Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, Moses and his selected private developers cleared 314 acres and built over twenty-eight thousand middle-class apartments and co-ops, all of which continue to flourish. (Subsidized public housing was built directly by the New York City Housing Authority—NYCHA—under Title III of the act.) Although many of the high-rises were architecturally bland, others featured innovative designs by I. M. Pei, George Shimamoto, and Paul Lester Wiener. Moses warned that New York was becoming a divided city of the rich and poor, and Title I successfully provided housing for a broad middle class of blue-collar workers, municipal employees, and clerks.

On the other hand, it was beset by problems, many of which the exhibit touches on only lightly. Just fifteen percent of those displaced by the slum clearance program were relocated in the Title I or Title III units intended to replace the lost housing. Moses initially favored consortiums of small private developers, who often failed miserably, and it was the big players, such as William Zeckendorf and Herbert Greenwald, who eventually pulled the program out of trouble. Title I was not primarily a housing program; it was for slum clearance, and it was often used to clear land for university buildings and cultural amenities for the wealthy. The program was not race neutral. Although the extent of Moses’s racial feelings were the subject of considerable debate at the symposium, it is clear that he did not strongly object as the NYCHA and his private developers systematically denied applications from single-parent households and the dependent poor, and that he embraced a “separate but equal” doctrine by using two middle-class Harlem projects, Lennox Terrace and Delano Village, to meet federal fair-housing requirements.

When asked at a panel discussion if Columbia’s own recent plans for a large development in West Harlem influenced its decision to sponsor the Moses exhibits, Kenneth Jackson responded dismissively that “those decisions were made long before the Manhattanville project was announced.” This seemed somewhat disingenuous given that Columbia, reportedly the owner of 70 percent of the land in the area, has been quietly assembling parcels for years. Hilary Ballon was more philosophical, pointing out that for all the dislocation the Title I projects caused they led to “a renaissance in the academic life of the city, and the new in-town campuses acted as engines of revitalization for the neighborhoods around them.” One only has to walk around the campus of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to see proof of this. Circling the restored main building, it is easy to forget that that project, mired in mismanagement, financial irregularities, and massive relocation abuse, helped force Moses’s resignation as Title I director in 1960.

Although three parks, two bridges, a dam, a highway, a power plant, a middle school, and other monuments carry his name, the only public work carrying Robert Moses’s name within New York City itself is a tiny dog run south of the United Nations that, by the time you read this, will likely have been razed for an office building. (Fordham, a private university, named a small plaza at its Lincoln Center campus in his honor in 1970.) Robert Moses and the Modern City already appears to be touching off one of the most spirited historical debates since the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit of 1995. It may be that the greatest legacy that “Big Bob the Builder” will leave in his adopted hometown is not the eponymous edifice he so badly wanted, but his name itself and the image of his scowling visage—the very personification of the benefits, the pain, the almost incalculable windfalls and wipeouts, and above all the clash of contending forces that make up the process of urban redevelopment in a city that is itself a cultural icon.

{3} The three exhibits: Remaking the Metropolis, at the Museum of the City of New York, 1 February to 28 May 2007; The Road to Recreation, Queens Museum of Art, 28 January to 27 May; and Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 31 January to 14 April.

Bruce Epperson is an urban planner, land use attorney, and independent scholar who lives and works in the Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area. He is a frequent contributor to T&C.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

The Transportation Revolution appeared as volume 4 in a series, The Economic History of the United States, edited by Henry David, Harold Faulkner, Louis Hacker, Curtis Nettels, and Fred Shannon. Eight of the nine volumes originally projected were published, and several served the precise purpose of the editors—namely, that of synthesizing the existing scholarship on the developing American economy. At least two other titles in the series were widely read and exercised significant influence on multiple generations of students and scholars: Paul Gates’s The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860, and Edward Kirkland’s Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860–1897.{2} These three volumes reflected the intense interest among postwar economic historians in nineteenth-century American economic growth. Prime evidence of this is Harvard’s Center for Research in Entrepreneurial History, which flourished through the efforts of such scholars as Arthur Cole, Joseph Schumpeter, Fritz Redlich, and Hugh Aitken.{3} But Taylor’s approach in The Transportation Revolution is especially emblematic.

Born in the small central Wisconsin town of Beaver Dam, Taylor earned his initial degree in economics at the University of Chicago in 1921. His first position at Earlham College in 1923 was followed a year later by an appointment at Amherst. He earned his doctorate at Chicago in 1929 with a thesis on agrarian discontent in the Mississippi Valley preceding the war of 1812, and he spent nearly his entire career at Amherst, the last twenty-six years as George D. Olds Professor. His research included the role of tariffs and the development of banking, and he also edited the Problems in American Civilization series that Amherst’s American civilization department developed and that Heath published and distributed widely. In 1965, he moved to the position of senior resident scholar at the Eleutherian Mills– Hagley Foundation. While there, he published a seminal two-part article on “The Beginnings of Mass Transportation in Urban America” and edited, with Lucius Ellsworth, a compilation of papers titled Approaches to American Economic History.{4}

Yet, all his other work notwithstanding, Taylor’s reputation rests upon The Transportation Revolution. This 400-page study manages to cover a complicated era of economic and technological development with wonderful ease and beautifully clear writing. After opening with a short chapter on the nature of merchant capitalism in the young republic, he devoted six chapters to transportation: five examined roads and bridges, canals, steamboats, railroads, and the merchant marine, with another reviewing the changes in cost and speed of transportation. But these took Taylor less than halfway through his study. The next two chapters focused on domestic trade (surveying not just the patterns and volume of trade, but also the comparative advantages of the different modes of transportation) and foreign trade. Then Taylor turned to manufacturing for two chapters, one of which was devoted to the factory system; and then to workers for another two chapters, in which he discussed the emergence of wage labor. The final chapters covered banks and financial institutions, money and prices, and the role of government. A concluding section reviewed the national economy that had begun to develop by 1860. Taylor noted that the economic axis of the country exhibited a “new orientation,” one in which “the great cities of the East no longer faced the sea and gave their chief attention to shipping and foreign trade. Their commerce centered increasingly now at the railroad stations rather than at the docks . . .” (p. 398). A fully national structure was not completely in place, but huge strides had been taken in all key areas of the economy.

The Transportation Revolution is clearly the work of an economic historian, as evidenced by the appendix of statistics on various aspects of economic activity—and many of the subjects Taylor dealt with remain central concerns for those working in these fields. Yet it is also apparent that Taylor was interested in questions of wider interest to other sorts of historians, including those studying technology. In that sense, this book demonstrates one of the principal academic influences that helped shape the history of technology as it formally emerged after 1955: scholarship in economic history. Taylor was more interested in the consequences of technology than in its origins, and he measured many of those consequences in economic terms, using very solid research. Yet we do not find a deterministic account in Taylor. And his book seems to recognize the significance of technological change as a subject worthy of attention.{5}

For historians of technology, Taylor’s discussion of transportation, and the priority he ascribes to it, best reflects this outlook. His decision to structure the book as he did sent a signal that reached beyond the ranks of specialists in transportation history. Indeed, this emphasis on transportation constituted an important and original contribution by Taylor to the literature on economic and (as it would turn out) technological history. He set forth the argument that the economic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century were tied to the development of internal transport, and then he demonstrated the revolutionary or transformational consequences of those changes. While he examined the basic technological developments related to the growth of each mode of transport, his main goal was to show how newfound capabilities for moving people and goods proved pivotal for the development of the economy.

This idea hardly seems earth-shattering now—and it was not completely unknown before Taylor—but neither was it self-evident. In a review in Pennsylvania History, for example, historian Louis Hunter observed that

the distinctive feature of Professor Taylor’s treatment is the emphasis on the development of transportation, to which approximately one-third of the text is devoted. In his preface the author defends this emphasis on the grounds that “transportation developments were so revolutionary and . . . so fundamental to the economic growth of the country.” Yet one can argue with equal force that developments in manufacturing during these decades were hardly less revolution-ary and fundamental. To have allotted six chapters to the one theme and but two to the other seems to me a little extreme, but since Professor Taylor handles the two on manufacturing with such skill I shall not press my complaint unduly.{6}

The point is, however, that Taylor believed that the changes in transportation were the key feature of economic development during this forty-five-year period, thereby elevating the significance of technology in accounts of economic change. It is important to realize that Taylor’s book appeared before publication of many of the specialized studies that raised our estimation of the role of transportation in the history of economic and technological development. True, Taylor could draw upon the handful of solid histories of individual railroad companies by authors such as Edward Hungerford, Paul Gates, and Edward Mott; he also had Robert Albion’s works on maritime history and Hunter’s own classic account, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technical History (Taylor thanked Hunter in the acknowledgments).{7} And as the notes and bibliography demonstrate, Taylor utilized a solid base of books and articles by many others. But many now-standard works had not yet been written: John Stover’s and Robert Fogel’s studies of railroads, Carter Goodrich’s on canals, Harry Scheiber’s books and articles on internal improvements, and Alfred Chandler’s initial articles and book on the role of railroads in the nation’s business and economic history all were in the future.{8} Certainly, Taylor’s argument concerning the essential importance of transportation to economic growth provided a necessary foundation for the many scholarly studies of transportation that emerged from the mid-1950s onward.

Hunter’s comment also draws attention to the portions of Taylor’s study that were not focused on transportation. It is easy to forget that Taylor opened his book with chapters on transportation in order to emphasize his point, but then explored topics that moved in other directions; he was interested in the much wider question of the overall pattern of economic development during these early decades of the U.S. industrial revolution. And several points can be made about his efforts. First, he sought to highlight patterns and connections. Thus Taylor was concerned not only with the interrelatedness of transportation and manufacturing, but also with the interconnection of capital and workers and with the overall linkage of the government with the economy. He made the last point in a number of places throughout the book by highlighting the ways in which government activities shaped all manner of economic activities. For those who harbored a nostalgic affection for a time when government did not interfere with business, he noted that “the following pages which describe the actual practice of governmental intervention lend no support to those who place the heyday of laissez faire in the United States during the period of this study” (p. 354).

The Transportation Revolution also foreshadowed the ways in which historians of technology would eventually attempt to analyze and understand the changes taking place in the United States after 1800. This is most apparent in Taylor’s discussion of the factory system. His account is perhaps not as nuanced as we would now offer, given several generations of additional scholarship. Not surprisingly, he adopted the classic account of Eli Whitney’s role in the American system of manufactures—Robert Woodbury’s correction came later.{9} And in his discussion of labor, he followed John R. Commons’s approach to workers and unions. Today, we would be more inclined to ask about those who used the technology—factory workers as well as those citizens who relied upon the transportation system—and less inclined to focus on the supply of innovations. But in more general terms, Taylor’s analysis of the factory system and of most of his other subjects stands the test of time. Subsequent scholars have fleshed out the details, but the outline still holds.

Without intending to do so, Taylor presented aspects of the process of economic development between 1815 and 1860 in ways that set the stage for the central concerns of historians of technology. This is not surprising, perhaps, since he examined those pivotal years in which the momentum of industrial and technological change grew into a process that was seemingly permanent. And within that process, transport and manufacturing became two of the enduring issues for technological historians. Agriculture only was not addressed in Taylor’s volume, but that omission is a product of the structure of the series itself, which featured a separate volume on the subject. Thus we find in Taylor’s book attention to the factory, to innovations in textile technology, and to the workforce—topics that under the umbrella of the American system of manufactures animated so many of SHOT’s members and so much of Technology and Culture‘s audience during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, one also finds in Taylor’s work comments and analysis that align with later scholarly developments; for example, his attention to the role of public policy resonates as an increasingly significant thematic focus among present-day historians of technology. Taylor’s reference to alternative ways of organizing corporate manufacturing enterprises foreshadowed the findings of Philip Scranton, while his discussion of the importance of state and local governments in the development of transportation opened the door for the ideas developed by Colleen Dunlavy and William Childs.{10}

But perhaps most importantly, Taylor presented his analysis of transportation and economic development against a broader context that included social as well as economic factors. As he described the nation’s situation in his final chapter,

Americans of that age, especially in the northern states, met the rapidly developing opportunities for material gain with unusual energy and enthusiasm. The spirit of adventure, aggressiveness, and willingness to make sacrifices in the hope of economic advantage, which characterized American merchants in the foreign trade and drove settlers to develop the West so rapidly despite all obstacles and uncertainties, also dominated the businessmen who played so active a part in planning, organizing, financing, and managing the new ventures in transportation and manufacturing. (p. 394)

This description is not only reminiscent of the views of nineteenth-century America developed by economic historian Thomas Cochran and social historian Daniel Boorstin, but it also anticipated Eugene Ferguson’s discussion of the technological community of the mid-Atlantic region during these years. All of these scholars shared an interest in the way that values and outlooks helped drive economic and technological developments.{11}

Overall, Taylor’s analysis has held up amazingly well; in fact, few historical studies have possessed such staying power. The durability of this book merits special recognition, as others have also noted. In another retrospective essay published in Business History Review thirty years ago, Harry Scheiber and Stephen Salsbury—themselves noted scholars of American transportation history—correctly remarked that “few scholarly works have defined an era and provided a conceptual framework for its analysis more successfully than Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860.”{12} This still holds true. One reason is Taylor’s impressively accurate and careful research and his grasp of the literature of his field as of 1950. Writing in American Economic Review, John Hutchins remarked that he had “found very few statements of fact or of interpretation with which to quarrel.”{13} Certainly, recent scholarship has altered some of Taylor’s interpretations, refined some of his statistical analysis, and clarified certain of the events he examined, yet the general conclusions underlying his study remain impressively useful. Indeed, a review of Taylor’s fifty-page bibliography and careful footnotes helps us to appreciate both the volume and the type of research that had already touched upon technological topics at mid-century, and upon which the modern historiography of technology would build after 1960. Taylor’s work, in the end, laid out many of the topics that would attract the attention of historians of technology during SHOT’s formative period. For this and many other reasons, it remains a classic in our field.

13. John G. B. Hutchins, review of The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, by George Rogers Taylor, American Economic Review 42 (1952): 622–23.

Dr. Seely, professor of history and chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University, is a former secretary of SHOT. His scholarly interests have included American transportation and the history of engineering education.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

Not a terribly effective countermeasure? Probably not, although it was better than nothing at all to protect a building quite vulnerable to fire. Inside there was an 85-horsepower Corliss steam engine, a maze of winding machinery (of the sort familiar to anyone who has visited the cable railway powerhouse in San Francisco), tanks of fuel oil, oily rags everywhere, fire hazards galore. As far as we know from the archives of the local newspapers, however, the ladder-and-water-barrel system was never put to the test during the sixteen years that the powerhouse remained in operation, from 14 July 1886 until 22 October 1902.

So, back to the Temple Street Cable Railway, and a little prehistory. In 1867, a London-born inventor named Andrew Hallidie had patented a system for hauling ore out of mines by means of an endless “wire rope.” His subsequent application of the “Hallidie ropeway” to impelling urban streetcars is an oft-told tale that is recounted definitively in George Hilton’s The Cable Car in America (1971). Cable cars operated first (and last) in San Francisco, but there were lines in twenty-seven other American cities, from San Diego to Providence. And there were some very extensive networks, notably in Chicago, where for most of the 1890s the Chicago City Railway operated several hundred trains (a grip car and one or more trailers) to accommodate morning and evening commuters. Cable railways were largely a U.S. phenomenon, there being only a handful of systems elsewhere—six in the British Isles, two in Australia, and one each in Lisbon, Paris, and Dunedin, New Zealand. Best adapted to wide streets with long tangents (more than half the lines were in new, rapidly growing cities west of the Mississippi), they outperformed streetcars drawn by horses or mules in several important respects: speed, safety, and cleanliness.

Fig. 1 Frederick Wood and John Fowler pose with a section of track and cable conduit, which would normally be underground. Here it rests on the surface in order to reveal the workings of their new system for gripping the cable from the side rather than from the top. While this had marked advantages, it was nowhere near capable of saving their Temple Street Cable Railway from ultimate extinction. (Author’s collection.)

Although cable railways eventually proved uneconomical compared to electric trolleys, which came to dominate urban transit during the first half of the twentieth century, for about two decades after their advent in San Francisco in 1873 they were an attractive option in places where land developers (often the leading players in the development of street railways) confronted steep hills. Hilltops could more appealingly be termed “the heights,” a potential location of upscale residential neighborhoods. Los Angeles was still quite a small town in the mid-1880s, but it was on the verge of the first of its many land booms, which would double its population from 25,000 to 50,000 in five years. The surrounding terrain was mostly flat and readily subdivided, except immediately to the west of the civic center, where Bunker Hill loomed, and beyond that was a neighborhood called Angeleno Heights. These western hills were still sparsely populated in late 1884, when a representative of Hallidie’s Pacific Cable Railway Company opened an office in L.A. and set about consolidating the energies and finances of locals aiming to transform Angeleno Heights into a streetcar suburb. Temple Street was the one main thoroughfare heading westerly, but its gradients were unsuited to horsecars. Practical electric trolleys were as yet an unrealized dream. Cable cars seemed ideal.

When construction of the line began in December 1885, the Bank of California in San Francisco held the mortgage, and there was a credible claim that engineering standards would be “superior to any outside San Francisco” (construction of a nearby line on West Second Street had been quick-and-dirty, and it was put out of business after only a short time by a washout). The new line eventually stretched a little over three miles between the intersection of Spring and Main streets in downtown Los Angeles and Hoover Street at the western city limits, where it made a connection with a steam railway to Coleville that was owned by the scion of a New York publishing fortune, James McLaughlin (Coleville was later known as Hollywood). Residential development along the cable car line was in the hands of a syndicate controlled by two men, Walter Maxwell and Prudent Beaudry. Maxwell had married local money in the 1870s; one of the best downtown business addresses was the Lanfranco Building, and Maxwell’s wife’s maiden name was Amelia Lanfranco. Beaudry was an old-timer, having emigrated from Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, in 1852; he later served a term as mayor. When it came to promoting real estate, both men knew the tricks of a trade that would flourish in Los Angeles. One of their circulars read so:

Bear in mind that this property is in the Hills
And on the line of the Cable Railway System
Have a house in the Hills!
Stop paying rent in the valleys!

By 1890, ten trains, each comprising a grip car and trailer, were providing transit not only for new residents in the hills but also for excursionists headed toward Coleville, and for a time the Temple Street Cable Railway was the best patronized streetcar line in town. Business fell off after the Los Angeles Cable Railway (LACR) completed a line on West Seventh Street that terminated at Westlake Park and cut into the excursion business. But the Temple Street line would remain a solid proposition overall, certainly in comparison to the Second Street line and even in comparison to the LACR, which was overbuilt in the interest of the construction companies that were involved and would be out of business by 1896, after only seven years of operation.

Which brings us back to the photo. While the LACR was chronically mismanaged, the Temple Street line was in the hands of experts. In 1892, the year the picture was taken, Frederick Wood (at left) published a remarkable technical treatise titled On the Temple Street Cable Railway in Los Angeles California, replete with illustrations of various devices he had designed along with John Fowler, including a wheel-operated double-jaw side grip that was different from what Andrew Hallidie had devised for San Francisco and obviated the need for a turntable at each end of the line. When they had the photo taken, Wood and Fowler were demonstrating how their system worked, with its cable slot offset to one side, evidently trying to interest some visiting street railway entrepreneurs in adopting their new design. But, alas, no matter how capable and ingenious these two men may have been, by 1892 they were on the verge of being cast into a backwater by devices that would overcome the last remaining problems with Frank Sprague’s electric streetcars, with their spring-loaded trolley pole underrunning an overhead wire. Hilton dedicates his book to Sprague with a quote from Lewis Carroll:

“It’s very rude of him,” she said,
“to come and spoil the fun.”

An ironic facet of Wood’s treatise was the spotlight it cast on the heavy expense of cable railway engineering—apparent in many ways, but most obviously in the necessity for a conduit set below grade with cast-iron yokes to carry the cable over and around a complex array of pulleys and sheaves, all requiring hand maintenance via access hatches in the pavement. With the development, actually the perfection, of trolleys equipped with General Electric controllers and Westinghouse motors—whose rails could merely be spiked to ties lined up along a dirt street—the economics of cable railways became impossible.

Trackage for trolley cars cost as little as $10,000 per mile. The investment in the Temple Street line’s three miles exceeded $300,000, including six-inch redwood planks for lining the conduit, six thousand 200-pound yokes, and two prodigiously heavy cables running in each direction from the powerhouse near the midpoint of the line—one 12,388 feet long, the other more than 20,000 feet. These had a life expectancy of less than two years, and nearly every element of the winding machinery—which was ponderous and delicate at the same time—likewise wore out quickly. Then there was the startling loss of efficiency in the transmission of power: the machinery and weight of the cables alone consumed 84 percent of the energy produced by that Corliss engine, with only 16 percent actually serving the purpose of impelling streetcars. No wonder the search for something better never flagged, even when Hallidie’s first cable cars proved themselves on Clay Street in San Francisco, then on Sutter, California, Geary, and Market.

Each of these lines was a success initially, and so was the Temple Street line in Los Angeles. Wood and Fowler had reason to feel rather proud of what they had accomplished. Bankruptcies and reorganizations became a way of life for urban railways generally, and no less so in L.A. than any other place. The $2.5 million invested in the LACR had to be completely written off as the system gave way to trolleys before any of the construction debt was amortized. Financial failure awaited the Temple Street Cable Railway, too, but not until it had turned a nice profit for several years. The company defaulted on its bonded indebtedness in 1897, however, and then went into receivership three years later. Shortly, the foreclosed property was acquired by Henry Edwards Huntington, who ultimately would monopolize all of the city’s street railways, and in 1902 it became the last of L.A.’s former horse- and cable-car lines to be electrified.

And forty-four years after that, it was also one of the first electric trolley car lines to be abandoned in favor of diesel buses, in 1946, a year after Huntington’s heirs sold his Los Angeles Railway to a syndicate called National City Lines. That transaction spawned one of the most durable of all urban myths, a myth perpetuated in myriad forms but perhaps most famously in the storyline for the prizewinning 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—in which the dastardly Judge Doom, who could just as well have been named General Motors, reveals his “epic plan” for motorizing metropolitan Los Angeles even though it meant wrecking “the best transportation system in the world,” as Doom’s adversary Eddie Valiant puts it. But that’s another story.

This photo tells a story of two men who were enthusiasts for a transportation technology that they had capably refined. Did they suspect, even in 1892, that it might have a limited future? Maybe. They are not smiling. But, as Hilton has pointed out, people involved with technologies that are facing decline—be it cut nails or cable cars—are most often in a state of denial. One wonders whether the men at General Motors who have filled their basket with so many eggs bearing names like Suburban, Escalade, and Hummer have a sense of apprehension as the company looks toward its centennial in 2008.

Bob Post was born during “Transportation Week,” so proclaimed by the mayor of Los Angeles in honor of the arrival of the city’s first PCC cars, the modernistic design that enthusiasts for street railways believed would be their salvation. His books include Street Railways and the Growth of Los Angeles (1989) and Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology (2006). He tells the other story mentioned in the next-to-last paragraph in “The Myth behind the Streetcar Revival,” which appeared in the May 1998 issue of American Heritage.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

[E]ither numerous sheets of white paper that have been stitched together in such a way that they can be filled with writing; or, a highly useful and convenient instrument constructed of printed sheets variously bound in cardboard, paper, vellum, leather, etc. for presenting the truth to another in such a way that it can be conveniently read and recognized. Many people work on this ware before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the papermaker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the bookbinder, sometimes even the gilder and the brass-worker, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture.{1}

It is worth pondering how such a definition would have to be modified in the face of the current trend toward electronic publication. This is no idle thought. “E-books” are increasingly common, and scholars are being encouraged—sometimes strongly encouraged—to publish electronically. Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Gutenberg-e, 2006) is a case in point. Lowengard’s dissertation was one of a handful to receive a Gutenberg-e prize from the American Historical Association between 1999 and 2004, to support its conversion into “an electronic monograph.” The prize, underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was “not intended simply to reward excellence in scholarship with yet another prestigious prize but rather to use prestige—the bluest of ribbons awarded by the grandest of juries with the full authority of the AHA behind it—to set a high standard for electronic publishing. By legitimizing electronic publishing, the AHA hopes to change attitudes of academics toward e-books. By making the most of the new media, the program may also contribute to a new conception of the book itself as a vehicle of knowledge.”{2}

The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe is only available electronically (through http://www.gutenberg-e.org, the Gutenberg-e site set up by the AHA and its partner in the project, Columbia University Press), but other publishers are experimenting with other distribution models. For example, Edita, the in-house publisher for the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, distributes print versions of books in its History of Science series worldwide through the University of Chicago Press and places electronic versions (with “space” for added content not included in the book) on its website, where they may be downloaded for free.{3} I am no expert in the field of electronic publication, so I will leave it to others to consider what the larger impact of these developments might be. As an experienced reader, however, I have much to say about my encounter with this particular e-book.

It is interesting to note, first of all, that one cannot separate the question of form from content. I would submit that such is always the case, but here it results from the quite conscious design of the author. Though her project originated in a doctoral dissertation, Lowengard’s plan was not to begin the publication process with a traditional manuscript to which electronic features could be added. Rather, the book’s very composition was determined by her vision of what the experience of e-reading (if I might be allowed to coin this term) should entail. Lowengard writes that she “wished to produce a book that is not value-enhanced by the possibilities an electronic medium offers, but one that clearly loses value when it is removed from that medium.”

The book, consequently, is a surfer’s paradise. A core section charts the terrain of the study’s subject, and the remainder of the work is composed largely of a collection of semiautonomous vignettes connected to each other (and to the core section) by internal and external links. The text is frequently punctuated by the appearance of the word “reference” (which I found distracting, as it breaks the flow of the narrative). Clicking on the word transports the reader to another “location” that somehow relates to what one was reading, though the connection is not always obvious and the way back to one’s original place is sometimes treacherous.

As a former real-life surfer, I should appreciate this. Part of the charge of surfing is not knowing whether you will be able to ride the next wave. Will you make it back to shore in a state of physical exhilaration or be sent crashing down by the force of the wave? But there is a difference between reading a scholarly book and surfing, and I would hate to think that the one is going to be eclipsed by the other. The essence of a good scholarly book, it seems to me, is that it presents a well-argued and sustained analysis. It is composed so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in an analytical sense. The Creation of Color attempts to substitute for this an open-ended experience. One can’t speak of the relation of the parts to the whole in the same way, because it is not predetermined how many parts a reader will encounter or in what order, and so it is impossible to manage what the whole is or can be. As attractive as this might sound as a method of facilitating associative discovery, it comes at the expense of a well-crafted, unitary historical argument. Much is hinted at, but the reader is not presented with an analytically coherent whole.

There are two reasons for this. One is the form. The other has to do with content, to which I direct the rest of this review. Let me begin by saying that Lowengard has chosen a wonderful topic, one that opens up to an examination of the broader relationships between science and technology during an intellectually and materially productive period. The Creation of Color introduces us to historical actors ranging from some of the century’s most famous chemists to artisans so obscure that we can’t be sure of their true names. We are invited to (virtually) enter locations as different as the famous but previously understudied Gobelin tapestry works on one hand and nameless dye houses on the other, with many points between. And we are treated to excerpts from treatises running the gamut from the century’s epoch-making encyclopedias to obscure tracts whose purposes and meaning were only clear to their now-forgotten authors. The book presents a tantalizing buffet of activities and ideas, culled from sources including published pamphlets, unpublished correspondence, contemporary illustrations, still-extant artifacts, and the author’s own familiarity with the arts of making and applying color in various media.

The Creation of Color is beset, however, with a number of problems. First, Lowengard equates “science” (a highly problematic, anachronistic term for the eighteenth century in any event) with ideas and “theories” (I will return to this term in a moment) and identifies technology and art with practice. This threatens the success of her project from the start, as it creates a historically false matrix on which to chart actors’ identities and activities. Especially given her interest in relating elements of work within and associations among various institutions, workplaces, media, and social realms, it would have been more revealing to focus on the institutional, social, and market-oriented characteristics that delineated the actions and identities of what Lowengard calls science and scientists, on one hand, and art and artisans on the other. Instead, her historically artificial division of mental and manual labor stands in the way of understanding how colors were actually produced, analyzed, and used and of comprehending the interactions between the individuals and institutions engaged in these activities. The Academic chemists Pierre Joseph Macquer and Claude-Louis Bertholet’s connection with Gobelin, for example, surely involved more than contemplation, as Lowengard herself makes clear. These men, like so many others mentioned in this book, were hybrid characters whose careers encompassed research (in pursuit of both knowledge and more materially tangible ends), administration, tinkering, commercial negotiation, and writing. What does it mean to call them “scientists”? The reader would come away from this book with a richer understanding of the landscape of material and knowledge production in the eighteenth century had Lowengard not held on to such a priori categories.

Not so different is a problem regarding the complex implications of “physics” and “chemistry” in the production, use, and analysis of color. Lowengard repeatedly states that these categories cannot be mapped onto the disciplinary contours that define them today. But she does not explain what they did take in. Identifying the eighteenth-century “physics” of color with Newton, for example, doesn’t really help; too many studies have demonstrated that “Newton” and “Newtonian”—terms invested then as now with myriad meanings—were often rhetorical labels rather than specific references to something written by the great man. Dividing chemistry into “philosophical” and “practical” without comment is not particularly revealing either, as the boundary between the two is difficult to trace. An examination of eighteenth-century textbooks, as well as of the curricula of courses such as the enormously popular series given by Gillaume-François Rouelle at the Jardin du Roi in Paris for twenty-five years (1743–68), demonstrates just how artificial such a division is. While Rouelle, the most famous and influential French chemistry teacher of his day, certainly did not shy away from making statements about the fundamental composition of nature, much more of his course was taken up with discussions and demonstrations of how to develop sensible, analytical acuity when engaging in chemical work.

Had Lowengard attended more to the highly innovative character of chemical education in Germany, the hybrid nature of eighteenth-century chemistry would have become even clearer. One result of such an analysis would have been a more nuanced usage of the term “theory,” which historical actors used to cover at least two definitional spheres: explanatory claims regarding the composition and activities of nature, and generalized statements regarding a class of chemical operations. Here again we see the importance of tracing the complicated history that linked the work of the hand with the work of the mind, not only in eighteenth-century chemistry but across the field of contemporary natural inquiry and invention.

I fear that this review sounds harsher than I would have wanted, so let me reiterate that Lowengard discusses a number of highly interesting episodes and raises important questions regarding how we need to approach topics that so clearly extend beyond the easily drawn boundaries of a single discipline, set of practices, or institution. But this is perhaps also the source of her book’s difficulties. Such a demanding and ambitious project requires a choice between a carefully argued overview and an equally carefully crafted case study. I do not use the term “case study” here to mean a single episode, but rather a more delineated area of research. It might have been more rewarding to relate this book’s insightful questions to an in-depth analysis of what went on in and around the Gobelin factory, for example, or at least to narrow its geographical ambitions. The Creation of Color stretches too broadly in geographical terms, and the resulting unevenness is not clearly explained or justified. It also jumps among examples, leaving the reader with the sense that their inclusion sometimes reflects little more than the author’s serendipitous encounters in various archives. Unfortunately, to return to the issue of form, this problem is strengthened rather than mitigated by the book’s electronic structure. While surfing might be good for a “wiki” (quick) rush, scholarly reading yearns for the slower, contemplative joy drawn from savoring a well-constructed and detailed argument.

{1} Georg Heinrich Zincke, Allgemeines Oeconomisches Lexicon, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1753), trans. Martha Woodmansee. See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/92wood.html#03 (accessed 11 July 2007).

{2} Emphasis added. See http://www.historians.org/prizes/gutenberg/index.cfm (accessed 11 July 2007), which also features a lively essay by Robert Darnton titled “A Historian of Books, Lost and Found in Cyberspace.”

{3} See http://www.knaw.nl/publicaties/gwn.html (accessed 11 July 2007).

Lissa Roberts heads the “long-term development of science and technology” research cluster at the Centre for Science, Technology, Health, and Policy Studies at the University of Twente. Her most recent publication is The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (Amsterdam and Chicago, 2007), which she coedited with Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

Given such a broad canvas, it is not surprising that Kamil crosses over a variety of historical specialties. In fact he offers some significant reinterpretations for the political and economic history of Atlantic states, the history of science and technology, and art history and connoisseurship. This is so not only in regard to the specifics of the events and objects Kamil elucidates, but also more broadly in historical perspective. Fortress of the Soul asks us to think about power and assimilation in a new way, at least as appertains to Protestant Europe and colonial America. The book does not explore structures of domination and appropriation, but uncovers strategies for safety, resistance, and covert interpretation among Huguenot survivors of the wars of religion. Fortress follows these strategies into a new vision of identity and assimilation in the new “Babel” of the New World.

Of particular interest to historians of technology is the argument most fully articulated by the potter Bernard Palissy: No faith can be put in the technologies of conventional military resistance such as fortresses and cannon (as later borne out by the tragic collapse of La Rochelle during Richelieu’s final siege in 1628); the Protestant cause in Catholic France will be maintained by artisans who can carry the tools of their trade on their backs. Like the snail, the Protestant commoner should remain small, hidden, and mobile, and present the appearance of assimilation in his hostile environment. The power of these small, politically insignificant artisans is that they create material objects, not that they destroy them. This material production on the one hand serves the worldly desires of dominant political masters, but on the other manifests the artisans’ own spiritual discipline.

It is through intensive examination of material artifacts that Kamil builds out the artisanal networks that created them and reconstructs the mental, spiritual worldview they were meant to convey. At the outset, Kamil claims that “Material things were silent extensions of an entire cosmos of Huguenot artisanal discourse, mediating, like the refugees themselves, among different Protestant groups, as well as vis-à-vis their intractable enemies” (p. xix). Palissy’s pottery, Hogarth’s art, Long Island furniture: all have been seen in terms of their popularity as commodities, but all are connected to Huguenot communities and a sinuous aesthetic that according to Kamil must be followed through winding paths. Kamil takes his readers on just such winding journeys. He traces Palissian figures to “rustic” motifs, alchemical symbology, and Jean de Léry’s history of Brazil; he connects the signs of a Hogarth painting to Huguenot artisans in London, Robert Fludd’s magical arts, and popular stories of biblical characters; he draws the similarities between the front stretcher of a chair turned in Long Island, the architecture of a French Protestant church, and the printer’s device in a Protestant reader.

Kamil argues that these sinuous connections are necessary to a community that learned to dissimulate in order to avoid assimilation, or even annihilation. If safety for Huguenots was to be found in dissimulation, assimilation in appearance only, then resistance and identity could be maintained by alternative modes of apprehending appearances. The cosmic significance of a platter or an armchair would be clear to co-religionists, if not to the average consumer—or for that matter to the average historian.

Many historians put the objects of their inquiry in context of war and violence, but for Kamil violence actually constitutes the creative processes that gave rise to the material world of Huguenot artisans. His almost palpable descriptions of religious violence are integral to his reading of artisanal artifacts and belief, and are related through alchemical reference. He gives equal weight to the subjects of his subtitle: violence, metaphysics, and material objects. Alchemy, the art that applies violence in the creation of material effects within a metaphysical explanatory framework, forms the connective tissue among them. Kamil takes alchemical-political interpretation into the realm of lived experience, and insists that we recognize that events such as Palissy’s development of a white translucent glaze or John Winthrop’s forays into Long Island politics and real estate are in fact personal alchemical quests in the face of military or political disappointment. We are told that “In the secret world of alchemy, personal and collective histories of violence were artfully synthesized” (p. 681). Alchemy makes understandable transformation by fire; it signifies the violence and torture that gives rise to reformations, both on the macrocosmic-social and microcosmic-personal levels.

Alchemy also provides a model for hopes to claim the New World for Huguenot society, where the rustic naturalism of America itself would be rehabilitated. Importantly, Kamil claims that a vision for Protestant hopes in the New World began in sixteenth-century France. Palissy’s “alchemical theater of the torture and execution of the first [French Huguenot] leaders” (p. 219) would be succeeded in the 1650s by the alchemical physician’s chair of John Winthrop Jr., governor of Connecticut. That chair would seat the adept himself, and express his North American quest for the philosopher’s stone. (Here the plot begins to be even more complicated by Kamil’s persuasive argument that the “philosopher’s stone” for Winthrop was the Northwest Passage, and his less persuasive attempt to maintain a crossover between alchemy and geomancy [the magical art of reading earthen formations] throughout the book.)

In America, apocalyptic waiting would continue to be expressed through material objects and the salubrious labor that fashioned them. During his 1703 imprisonment in Flushing, New York, the Quaker preacher John Bownas would find “refuge in artisanal production” (p. 837). Hybridization between Huguenot and other quietist reformers would result in hybridized craft traditions. Threat of violence and suppression gave Huguenots common cause with other quietist, politically unempowered groups, and these groups shared a common idiom in the objects they made.

It is perhaps Kamil’s use of the alchemical tradition that will raise the most concern on the part of historians of science and technology. Fortress is not about alchemy. Rather it uses alchemical literature as a kind of Rosetta stone that decodes meanings lying in the shadows of Huguenot artifacts. However, Kamil draws a very straight, almost unmediated line between Renaissance Neoplatonism, Paracelsian alchemy, and Robert Fludd’s work (on the one hand), and his reading of a large variety of Protestant artisanal experience and production (on the other). In its bold connections among texts, events, and objects, Fortress is reminiscent of the work of Dame Frances Yates, which in fact Kamil employs unproblematically. For Kamil, interest in Paracelsian alchemy leads not to questions of epistemology or approach to nature (questions we are now so comfortable with), but rather to the deciphering of a covert language of spirituality and politics (a project with a checkered past). His use of alchemical literature as a code for political and millenarian Protestant hopes will no doubt raise flags. Readers who despise such works as The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) are likely to have difficulty with Fortress of the Soul. However, just as Dame Yates opened up whole new materials, connections, and avenues of research, Kamil’s work is bound to do so, even on a belligerent read. Fortress is rich in historical detail and detective work; it presents an extraordinary moving interactive picture of the great and little worlds of Huguenot life over two centuries, and its intellectual ambition, even if sometimes overwrought, is always intriguing.

Fortress is not about alchemy, but it is certainly about interpretation; it is a masterwork exercise in the ways in which objects can be read. This is clear from the very first chapter, in which Kamil explores the meaning of a silver basin presented to the Catholic King Charles IX by Protestant subjects of La Rochelle, to the final chapter, in which Kamil examines the providential significance of sundials and beakers within a prerevolutionary discourse of (English) royal prerogative. Interpretation for Kamil is not merely an academic exercise for historians, but the subject of history. In this way, Fortress represents the ultimate project of cultural history.

Many will object to specifics of Kamil’s interpretation, perhaps even to his underlying insistence that an alchemical-German spiritual-Neoplatonic worldview holds the key to the meanings embedded secretively into Huguenot arts. However, all this will only point up the core assumption of this work: true power is found in the control over meaning, and, as successive administrative authorities found, “private messages could not be controlled” (p. 921). Kamil has made it his herculean task to discover and make public a great number of the private and collective messages from the Huguenot past; he draws them into a compelling story of survival and hope among a community torn by violence and persecution.

Mary Henninger-Voss is an independent scholar. Her essays have explored the relationship between the new technologies of the early modern era and print culture.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

When we were asked to write this review of Tom Tits for Technology and Culture, however, we wondered at first how a hands-on science center managed to capture a prize intended for museums—that is, we wondered whether “science centers” actually count as proper “museums.” But as the nestor of museology who founded the European Museum Forum, Kenneth Hudson, once wrote, it is “almost impossible to define a museum in a way which is universally acceptable.” For as society itself has evolved, so too has the concept of the museum.{2} Today, in fact, the International Council of Museums, which is closely related to UNESCO, officially recognizes science centers as legitimate museums.{3}

Museum professionals may not agree with this, of course. But if we take a longer view of the situation, we find that science centers, natural history museums, and museums of science and technology have shared a great deal in common in recent decades. During the late 1960s, when a number of large science centers were founded in North America—the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for example, and the Ontario Science Centre in London—they drew much of their inspiration from experiments carried out at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and at the Science Museum in London.{4} Today, according to the European Network of Science Centres and Museums, the situation is reversed, and museums of natural history and museums of science and technology now regularly look to science centers for inspiration.{5}

Museums and science centers are also alike in that both serve as informal educational institutions. Since its inception in 1977, the European Museum Forum has consistently worked to improve the quality of the museum experience by embracing visitor-friendly and interactive educational features, and this is why Tom Tits won the forum’s 2006 award. The official motto of Tom Tits Experiment is “experiment as methodology,” and in its prize citation, the forum emphasized the pedagogical value of the center’s stated goal: to explain basic scientific principles in a manner that is easily accessible to the visiting public, particularly younger visitors who might be inspired to continue to explore the world of science.

Our Experiment

Tom Tits Experiment is located in an old Alfa-Laval factory that was, at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest employer in Södertälje (fig. 1). The center’s name dates to the nineteenth century as well, when the French magazine L’Illustration published a series of articles describing do-it-yourself scientific experiments for children. Pseudonymously written by “Tom Tit,” these articles were published in a volume titled La Science Amusante (1890), which was quickly translated into several languages. When the center itself was established in 1987, its educational ambitions seemed to resonate with those of L’Illustration’s fictional author. Hence the unusual name.{6}

Fig. 1 Tom Tits Experiment is located in an old industrial building in Södertälje, Sweden, just south of Stockholm. (Author photo.)

We went to Tom Tits on a Friday afternoon in early January 2007, and to find out if it lives up to its pedagogical goals, we brought along a test panel consisting of three girls, twins the age of six and a three year old. The children in our test panel were of course too young to truly grasp the underlying principles of many of the experiments at the center. But nearly everything at Tom Tits fascinated them, and at times it was difficult to steer them along from station to station.

Tom Tits consists of four floors filled with hundreds of experiment stations, as well as a large garden (which is closed during the winter). A floor plan available at the entrance is an invaluable guide to the center’s many features. One can also purchase or borrow a large catalog containing detailed descriptions of each of the experiments. This catalog is useful, particularly since there are no printed panels or other explanations of the experiments at any of the stations, but it cannot replace the simpler floor plan as a navigational aid. Lockers are available at the entrance as well, and there is also a small area near the front doors where visitors can eat what they have brought along. A larger cafeteria lies on the second floor, adjacent to a gift shop selling brainteasers and replicas of the center’s experiments along with puzzles, books, postcards, and other standard museum souvenirs.

The experiments themselves are organized thematically, although the themes are not always transparent to visitors. The most obvious of them is the body, which is featured in a spacious room on the top floor. There, our panel was able to explore the different parts of the brain; remove and replace the internal organs of a full-scale human model (fig. 2); discover where new teeth are hidden on a six year old; and learn to their amazement that their dad actually contains two large demijohns of water!

Fig. 2 What parts do we consist of and where do they fit? (Author photo.)

The most notable attraction on the third floor was the section on chemistry. Here, Tom Tits regularly holds lectures for children on field trips in a small auditorium in which every chair represents an element on the periodic table. Schools can also arrange for the center to conduct chemical demonstrations and other experiments in this area. Next to this periodic-table room lies a thematic cluster on optics and optical illusions; however, the passive, hands-off nature of this section meant that our panel simply walked through and glanced at its colorful illustrations.

One of the most attractive thematic sections for our young panel was a station on the second floor that dealt with the properties of water. Here, the concept of surface tension was displayed in a cupola fountain (a large example of which one can enter during the summer); the inertia of a mass in motion was illustrated by a vortex of swirling water; and the principle of siphoning was demonstrated with a pair of cylinders and a tube. Children flocked to this section like bees to honey, and every parent there was grateful for the aprons provided for them.

A large aquarium filled with all sorts of fish is also located on the second floor of the center, not far from the section on water, and it features a central viewing area that is accessible to those small enough to crawl into it. Nearby, a section on mathematics features an oversized table and chairs (to remind adults of the way their children experience kitchen furniture and to teach their kids about the concept of scale), as well as a set of marbles on a tilted plane (to demonstrate the principle of the normal or Gaussian distribution).

A popular attraction on the first floor was a large bubble-maker, which is used to illustrate the reflection and refraction of light (fig. 3). Equally popular was a station designed to demonstrate energy-state changes by way of a marble that runs along a wooden track. A separate room on the first floor housed the most technologically oriented stations at Tom Tits, including a gear demonstration using cogs from an actual truck, as well as one in which visitors can test their wooden block–placing skills against those of a block-placing robot. In the center of this technology cluster stood the front cabin of a large truck, and our three-year-old panel member would have been content to spend the rest of the afternoon playing with its steering wheel and fiddling with its switches and dials.

Fig. 3 One of our panel members plays with the bubble generator, which illustrates the reflection and refraction of light. (Author photo.)

As previously mentioned, there are no explanatory panels or posters next to the experiments themselves, but detailed descriptions of each of them do appear in the center’s printed catalog. This catalog occasionally mentions the first person to have described and/or explained a certain phenomenon. For example, it explains that it was Bernoulli who first discovered that a ball placed just outside of a vertical stream of air will be pulled back into the stream. Fortunately for us grown-ups, the station demonstrating this was strategically located next to the cafeteria, allowing us to enjoy a cup of coffee while our test panel repeatedly tested the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle.

The citations in this catalog do not appear to celebrate humankind’s ingenuity, however, for they are more or less factual in character and seem to be designed to convey a timeless sense of curiosity over the principles of nature rather than a narrative of progress. Unfortunately, its detached tone and lack of contextual material also means that the catalog does not highlight any of the adverse consequences of scientific and technological change. One exception occurs in the center’s section on ecology, which draws attention to the ways in which hydroelectric power generation can interfere with the migrations of salmon.{7}

Tom Tits features very few computers and other multimedia installations to guide one’s movements through the stations. Instead, the individual experiments are simple, hands-on, intuitive, and can be explored in any order. For our panel, it was a joy to learn that they were actually expected to touch and play with everything. Hopefully, they and the other children who explore the center will remember what they have learned and will be inspired to help shape the scientific and technological decisions of tomorrow.

For the time being, though, our test panel remembers Tom Tits as a wonderful place to play, inquire, interact, and learn, and they have declared unanimously that they wish to return in the near future. The reviewers will be delighted to join them.

{1} European Museum of the Year Award: The Awards, 2006 (brochure); European Museum of the Year Award: The Candidates, 2006 (brochure).

{2} Kenneth Hudson, The European Museum of the Year Award, 1977–1997: A Mirror and a Catalyst of European Museum Change and Development. Available online at http://www.europeanmuseumforum.org (accessed 23 March 2007), p. 3 (quote).

{3} Ibid.

{4} Exploratorium, http://www.exploratorium.edu (accessed 23 March 2007).

{5} The European Network of Science Centres and Museums, http://www.ecsite.net (accessed 23 March 2007).

{6} Tom Tits Experiment, http://www.tomtit.se (accessed 23 March 2007).

{7} An alternative framework is favored at a smaller science center called Teknorama, which was inaugurated in 1985 (and is thus approximately the same age as Tom Tits); Teknorama is located at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. At Teknorama, the experiments are historically situated and the museum emphasizes the importance of placing science and technology into a wider context in order to “understand the consequences of technological development for people and our society—past, present, and future” (National Museum of Science and Technology in Sweden, http://www.tekniskamuseet.se [accessed 23 March 2007]).

Anna Storm, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is writing a dissertation about the reinterpretation and reuse of industrial areas. Nina Wormbs is an assistant professor in the same department and is working on media history and frequency allocation processes.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

What was left of the Ottoman Empire after World War I became today’s Republic of Turkey in 1923 following a difficult war of independence led by Mustafa Kemal, later called Atatürk, the republic’s founding father and first president (1923–38). Unceasing conflict had left the country impoverished and greatly reduced in territory and population, with all of its institutions in dire need of reorganization. A French-inspired model that the “Young Turks” had been designing for the disintegrating Ottoman Empire since the late nineteenth century began to take shape under the leadership of Atatürk. He envisioned a nation-state based not on religion or ethnicity but on “science” and positivist philosophy. The caliphate was abolished in 1924 and four years later the Latin alphabet was adopted to replace the Arabic script. Turkey’s new secular laws and dress codes emulated Western European models.

To help with this modernization effort and in particular with university and educational reforms, Atatürk’s government invited European experts to Turkey and also sent a large number of students to Europe for academic training beginning in 1927. Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, all professors of Jewish ancestry were dismissed, and Austria followed suit after its annexation by Germany. Atatürk’s government opened Turkey to these academics, offering them the best positions in Turkey’s few fledgling colleges at a time when Jews were elsewhere refused not only jobs but even visas. This intellectual influx suited Atatürk’s aims well and was particularly important to his radical program for reforming higher education on the European university model. In 1933, the old Istanbul Darülfünun was renamed Istanbul University, signifying its transformation from the “madrassa”-based system to the modern university.

In autumn that year, the first group of more than thirty professors arrived to start teaching at Istanbul University, among them pathology professor Philipp Schwartz, who, on behalf of a new organization established to help dismissed German professors find employment abroad, had negotiated an agreement with the Turkish government that was hailed as “the German-Turk miracle” (p. 9). Even Albert Einstein is believed to have been considering the Turkey option as he was waiting to hear from Princeton, which he had been told “would not hire a Jew” (pp. 318–20). Led by émigré professors, Istanbul University earned the rank of “the best German university” of the time, an official German document of 1939 describing it as having “turned Jewish” (p. 279). Indeed, the overwhelming majority of these “German professors”—as they were called in Turkey—were Jewish, although there were also a good number of non-Jewish anti-Nazi intellectuals and political dissidents, including Ernest Reuter, who became Berlin’s mayor after the war.

Turkish contracts and invitations even brought some out of concentration camps. When a son of chemistry professor Fritz Arndt was caught fighting the Germans during their invasion of Poland, the Turkish government intervened and got him to safety in Istanbul. But nothing was automatic: the deals had to be negotiated with and approved by the German government. Germany tried to persuade Turkey to employ only members of the National Socialist Party, but strong economic ties and Germany’s desire to secure an alliance made it possible for Turkey to bargain about such matters.

Apart from positions at Istanbul University, the émigré professors were also given posts at what became Istanbul Technical University (1944) and Ankara University (1946), as well as other public institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts. The School of Language, History, and Geography (Ankara, 1935) could hardly be imagined without émigré professors such as Assyriologist Benno Landsberger, Hittiotologist Hans Gustav Güterbock, Sinologist Wolfram Eberhard, and Indologist Walter Ruben, who not only established these disciplines there but also became world-regarded authorities.

Reisman puts the number of these émigrés at “approximately 300 academicians and 50 technicians and supporting staff” (p. 9), or more than 1,000 men and women with their families. The émigré professors were offered high salaries, with many being honored as “ordinarius” or distinguished professor, and the list is very long: Erich Auerbach, who wrote his much-acclaimed literary critique Mimesis while in Turkey; philosopher-mathematicians Hans Reichenbach and Richard von Mises, two prominent figures of the “Berlin Group”; philosopher and Diderot expert Herbert Dieckmann; Orientalist Helmut Ritter; law scholars Ernst H. Hirsch and Andreas Schwarz; economists Alexander Rüstow, Alfred Isaac, and Wilhelm Röpke; biochemist Felix Haurowitz; botanist Alfred Heilbronn; physicist Arthur von Hippel; astrophysicist E. Finlay Freundlich; pediatrician Albert Eckstein; surgeon Rudolf Nissen; ophthalmologist Joseph Igersheimer; architect Clemens Holzmeister; opera director Carl Ebert; conductor Ernst Praetorius; composer Paul Hindemith. Among the women were applied mathematician Hilda Geiringer (von Mises) and architect and designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Reisman contrasts the egalitarian attitude toward women in Turkey (and Europe) with the situation in the United States, where he contends that sexual bias coupled with racial bias later made it difficult for these female émigrés to find tenured faculty positions.

Although conditions in Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s were not sufficiently ripe for reaping the full benefits of this émigré bonanza, as Reisman notes, its profound influence is still alive in Turkey, especially in the formation of its universities and the shaping of its higher educational programs. Émigré professors helped Atatürk and his modernizing elite define the foundations of a “modern society.” It is no exaggeration to say that they stimulated in Turkey an educational and intellectual renaissance that invigorated its institutions, from education to music, science and medicine to archaeology, architecture to urban planning, conservation to preventive health, and they promoted the establishment of libraries, theaters, and music halls.

The death of “the émigrés champion” Atatürk in late 1938 deeply saddened the newcomers. Ismet Inönü, the next president, continued Atatürk’s policy, but with a less charismatic leadership. When war broke out in 1939, Turkey resisted pressure from both sides to get involved. The German occupation of Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece terrified the émigrés, and Miriam Schmidt, at the time the teenage daughter of medical professor Karl Hellmann, recollects having “packed backpacks under our beds, in case the Germans came to Istanbul and we would have to flee to Anatolia” (pp. 396–7). Turkey’s government itself felt no less vulnerable. Although it managed to remain neutral, Turkey suffered economically. Serious inflation set in and by the end of the war food was rationed. Even highly paid professors felt the hardship, and after 1945 most of these refugee academics secured positions at the best colleges in the United States. Others left for Palestine (later Israel); some returned to Germany. After 1949, only a small number of them remained in Turkey, the departure of the others hastened not only by economic conditions but also by jealousies on the part of some Turkish professors and the opposition of Turkish nationalists to the renewal of their contracts.

The bulk of Reisman’s book is devoted to describing the background and personal stories of a large number of the émigrés, and their work and experience in Turkey. He draws on oral histories, personal correspondence with colleagues and friends (as many as seventeen of them corresponded with Albert Einstein), and memoirs, both published and unpublished, as well as his own correspondence with their descendants and students. Only in the last chapter does he depart from the main story, offering some insights into Turkey’s technological and industrial development by comparing it with Israel and India. His most valuable observation is that Turkish universities have until recently lacked a link to industry, perhaps primarily because funding has been provided exclusively by the state. But he does not tell whether this lack of cooperation with industry and other characteristics of Turkey’s current university system have anything to do with the German émigré legacy.

A number of minor shortcomings should be noted. Pages 397 and 399 have been transposed. Footnotes and references show imperfections, and online sources in particular are not fully digested. The book on the whole book could have been further refined, and the brief section on “Music and Islam” is too opinionated, especially relative to Iran and more particularly to the “expert” Reisman consulted there. The idea of “modernity” that emerges is simplistic, implying nothing less than a total assimilation to whatever is “Western.” But such flaws are trivial if not entirely irrelevant to the larger story.

Turkey’s Modernization ends with a quote from economist Fritz Neumark, an émigré who stayed in Istanbul until his retirement in 1953, expressing the “admiration and gratitude” toward Turkey on the part of “German scientists, politicians and artists who looked for and found shelter along the Bosporus during [a] difficult time” (p. 465). Reisman deserves the highest praise for shedding light on a major intellectual exodus of the twentieth century, especially because this aspect has drawn little attention in English. Although the role of émigré scientists and intellectuals in the transformation of other areas is well known, the story of Turkey’s experience deserves further study. This book stimulates such an endeavor and provides an excellent start.

Yakup Bektas, a graduate of the School of Language, History, and Geography in Ankara, is now with the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology