One fascinating feature of this phenomenon is how much it all sounds like science fiction. The bionic woman, the clone armies, the intelligent robot, the genetic mutant superhero: these images all form part of contemporary culture. And yet, this link with science fiction is potentially misleading. Precisely because we associate human enhancement with the often bizarre futuristic worlds of novels and movies, we tend to dismiss the evidence steadily accumulating around us. Technologies of human enhancement are incrementally becoming a reality in today’s society, but we don’t connect the dots. Each new breakthrough in genetics, robotics, prosthetics, neuroscience, nanotechnology, psychopharmacology, brain-machine interfaces, and similar fields is seen as an isolated, remarkable event occurring in an otherwise unaltered landscape. What we miss, with this fragmentary perspective, is the importance of all these developments, taken together.

The technological watersheds of the past came about gradually, building over centuries. People and social systems had time to adapt. Over time they developed new values, new norms and habits, to accommodate the transformed material conditions. This time around, however, the radical innovations are coming upon us suddenly, in a matter of decades. Contemporary society is unprepared for the dramatic and destabilizing changes it is about to experience, down this road on which it is already advancing at an accelerating pace.{3}

* * *

Let me begin with two brief stories.{4} They are, in a sense, Promethean parables, tales of the human aspiration to rise above earthly limits. But they are also anti-Promethean, in that both begin with tragedy and end on a cautiously hopeful note.

In 1997, a fifty-three-year-old man named Johnny Ray had a massive stroke while talking on the telephone. When he woke up several weeks later, he found himself in a condition so awful that most of us would have a hard time imagining it. It is called “locked-in” syndrome: you are still you, but you have lost all motor control over your body. You can hear and understand what people say around you, but you cannot respond. You have thoughts and feelings but cannot express them. You cannot scream in frustration or despair; you can only lie there. The only way Johnny Ray could communicate was by blinking his eyelids.

In March 1998 two neurologists at Emory University and Georgia Tech inserted a wireless implant into the motor cortex of Ray’s brain. The implant transmitted electrical impulses from Ray’s neurons to a nearby computer, which interpreted the patterns of brain activity and translated them into cursor movements on a video display. After several weeks of training, Ray was able to think “up” and thereby will the cursor to move upward onscreen. After several more months, he was able to manipulate the cursor with sufficient dexterity to type messages. By that point, the brain-computer interface had become so natural to him that using it seemed almost effortless. When the doctors asked him what it felt like to move the cursor, he spelled out, N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Johnny Ray had escaped from his terrible isolation and returned to the rich world of language.

My second story is about a girl named Ashanti DeSilva, born in 1985 with the genetic disorder known as “bubble boy disease.” Her body lacked the gene required for making the protein adenosine deaminase, or ADA. Without it, her immune system was drastically impaired: just about any virus or bacteria she encountered threatened her life. She lived in total isolation at home, kept alive by injections of synthetic ADA. Her parents knew that the effectiveness of the injections would diminish over time, and that their daughter would eventually die of her disease. The only other alternative, a bone-marrow transplant, was impossible, because no compatible donor could be found.

Out of desperation, Ashanti’s parents turned to what was at that time cutting-edge experimental medicine. In 1990, a team of doctors at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Maryland extracted blood cells from her veins, then used a hollowed-out virus vector to insert working copies of the ADA gene into those blood cells. They were, in effect, repairing the deficient gene that had caused her disease. When the modified blood cells were injected back into Ashanti’s body, the results were dramatic. Within six months her immune system became sufficiently active to allow her to go safely out of the house. Within two years she was enrolled in school and began for the first time to experience a normal childhood. Ashanti DeSilva is alive and healthy today, though she still requires periodic renewal of the gene therapy to boost her immune response. Hers is the first case of successful gene therapy on humans.

The stories of Johnny Ray and Ashanti DeSilva have two striking features in common. First, it is remarkable how far the science and technology have come in the short time since these pioneering feats took place. Johnny Ray’s brain implant possessed only a single electrode for linking up with his nervous system. A mere eight years later, an owl monkey at Duke University was equipped with a similar implant containing seven hundred electrodes and a high-bandwidth interface. This far more powerful device allowed the monkey—staring at a video screen, arms dangling motionless at its side—to control the movements of a robot arm in another room by thought alone. The monkey played games using its new arm, and appeared to have seamlessly incorporated this machine appendage into the functioning of its own body. Human trials on this technology are already in the works; more than a dozen universities and private companies are currently in a race to push this line of research still further. Meanwhile, the progress in genetic technologies has been even more dramatic. In 1997 Dolly the sheep became the first successful clone of a mammal; in 2003 the Human Genome Project produced the first complete map of human genetic material; in 2004 there were 987 gene-therapy trials underway around the world.

A second common feature in these two stories is less obvious, but equally important. The same path-breaking techniques that render healing possible usually also render enhancement possible. If I can place a brain implant in Johnny Ray to let him out of his “locked-in” world, I can also use a similar device, down the road, to let healthy people manipulate robotic arms by thought alone. If I can insert new genetic instructions into Ashanti’s blood cells, making them produce ADA, then I can also use a similar procedure, down the road, to make other human cells produce other proteins of my own choosing. The technologies for repairing a malfunctioning human body are inseparable from the technologies that allow us to push human capabilities to ever higher levels. Where we can heal, we can also tweak, boost, reconfigure, redesign.{5}

The implications have not been lost on scientists and technology developers. Large numbers of them are busily at work today, in universities, government labs, and private companies, extending the biotechnologies of healing ever further into the domain of enhancement. They are, in effect, working to build a better human.

Three Major Areas of Enhancement

People are using pharmaceuticals in increasingly sophisticated and powerful ways to reshape their bodies and minds. I need not belabor the highly publicized rise of chemicals such as steroids, which enhance physical traits like speed, strength, and endurance, and have caused major upheavals in the world of competitive athletics. But the realms of human cognition, learning, and emotion are being shaken up in equally profound ways. Behavioral traits such as restlessness and short attention span, formerly viewed as problems of character and will power, are being medicalized, redefined as illnesses treatable with potent drugs like Ritalin. Conditions such as depression, which used to be approached through endless hours on the psychiatrist’s couch, are increasingly being handled through the administration of an ever growing array of neurotransmitters, hormones, and other mood-altering chemicals.

In the process, our society’s sense of what constitutes normal ability and basic mental well-being is being destabilized. As Carl Elliott describes it in his book Better than Well, we are engaged today in a sort of chemical arms race, seeking to push our own physical and mental abilities to ever higher levels. When college students discovered, for example, that certain attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs like Ritalin also enhance the cognitive performance of purportedly normal individuals, the outcome was thoroughly predictable. A black market rapidly developed among healthy students, many of whom reported that the drug helped them think more clearly, concentrate better, and remember new information more accurately than before. The motivation to enhance was strong, given the competitive nature of our educational system and broader society. Moreover, the line between healing and enhancing proved extremely difficult, in practice, to draw.

A second important area of human enhancement lies in the field of neuroscience and its intersection with the technologies of prosthetics, robotics, informatics, and artificial intelligence. As the story of Johnny Ray makes clear, the boundaries between human body and information-processing machine are beginning to blur. Ray became a kind of human-machine hybrid, in the sense that key aspects of his individuality—his ability to communicate in language with other people—came to be linked to the functioning of machine components that he had incorporated into his being. For now, such deliberate blurring of boundaries occurs only in animal experiments or extreme cases like Ray’s. But over coming decades it is likely that such human-machine hybrids will proliferate. We will have the ability to link directly into the human nervous system or sensorium with an increasingly broad array of electromechanical and informatic devices. Within thirty or forty years, some of the blind will see again, some of the deaf will hear again, some of the paralyzed will walk again.

Prosthetic technologies that already exist today are bringing such “futuristic” capabilities closer and closer to reality. In 2002, for example, the brain researcher William Dobelle created a media sensation by partially restoring sight to a fully blind patient. Dobelle implanted electrodes in the man’s visual cortex and linked them through a portable computer to a tiny video camera mounted on the man’s glasses. The result was grainy, blurred vision—but vision nonetheless. Dr. Dobelle’s blind patients could see well enough to drive a car around a parking lot (slowly!) and carry out simple everyday tasks. Equally remarkable advances are taking place with cochlear and brain implants to restore hearing, and with prosthetic devices and neurosurgery to restore motility to paralyzed patients.

Here again, technologies of healing will be inseparable from technologies of enhancing. If I can put a functional artificial eye into a blind patient, then it is but a short step, technologically speaking, to add extra features to the implanted device, such as a telescopic lens or an infrared sensor. The result would be a formerly blind person who not only can see normally, but who can also zoom in clearly on very distant objects and see extremely well at night. She would see, in Carl Elliott’s apt formulation, better than well. It would be remarkable, under such circumstances, if some people with normal vision did not hanker to have their own optical sensorium similarly tweaked, as long as the technology was safe and affordable.

These kinds of developments, not surprisingly, have elicited great interest—and significant funding—from the military. In the United States, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) envisions a battlefield of the not-so-distant future in which enhanced humans and potent machines are deeply interwoven at all levels. Imagine a soldier who can sprint at top speed for five miles with a heavy backpack, yet not get tired, because his blood has been modified to carry oxygen more efficiently. Imagine a soldier who can stay awake and alert for seventy-two hours because his nervous system has been augmented accordingly. Imagine a pilot who controls his aircraft directly through a brain-machine interface. Imagine a flexible, semi-intelligent armature, worn like an exoskeleton, that allows a soldier to lift 250 pounds effortlessly. Even if you are not imagining such things, DARPA is, and it is supplying considerable amounts of money to advance both the basic science and the practical technology for such capabilities.

Not all this research will bear fruit, of course. But that should not obscure the broader point. We are gaining an ever more sophisticated understanding of how the human brain works, how the nervous system and sensory organs function. We are building ever more powerful robotic and informatic devices. And, most significantly, we are getting better and better at linking these two realms, human and machine, and teaching them to work as one. Over the next few decades, these functional hybrids will become more and more a part of our lives.

Direct intervention at the level of the human genome is potentially the most powerful form of enhancement, because it can modify not just a single individual in the here and now, but entire lineages of humans down through the generations. No one knows for sure today how great a role genes play in making us who we are, how each of us is shaped by inherited genetic predispositions, and to what extent our personalities and capabilities are the result of nongenetic factors in our upbringing and life experience. But we do know a lot more than we did a mere ten or twenty years ago. Moreover, with the decoding of the entire human genome in 2003, we possess powerful tools for learning more quickly. Breakthroughs in genetics come almost every month.

Three basic principles undergird genetic intervention. First, some diseases are caused by malfunctions in a mere one or two genes. Fixing the gene removes the disease. Second, some intangible human traits, such as intelligence or shyness, are probably linked to complex systems of genes rather than to isolated genes. To adopt a musical metaphor, they depend not on single notes but on chords or even symphonies. Third, by altering individual components in certain systems of genes, we can directly affect complex and intangible traits in predictable ways.

In 1999, for example, a Princeton biologist, Joe Tsien, modified a single gene in laboratory mice that controls production of a chemical known as nerve growth factor (NGF). To his astonishment, the NGF-enhanced mice performed up to five times better than normal mice in tests of memory, learning, and intelligence. Other biologists, such as Eric Kandel and Tim Tully, have tinkered with a different gene, responsible for the production of a chemical that strengthens brain synapses. Through manipulation of a single gene, they have significantly boosted the learning abilities of mice, fruit flies, and sea slugs.

Let me be clear: this does not mean that genetic enhancement of human intelligence is just around the corner. But it does point to a conclusion that should get our full attention: genetic enhancement of basic human traits is no longer a topic of fantasy. The pieces of the scientific and technological puzzle are coming together, in real developments happening today. Neuroscience and psychology are telling us more and more about the electrochemical basis of how brains function and produce specific states of mind. Genetics is telling us more and more about how particular genes regulate the production of certain chemicals. Our technological ability to modify individual genes is growing rapidly.

Taken together, these elements form a recipe for powerful genetic interventions to redesign human bodies and minds. The time frame, depending on which expert you consult, is probably a matter of three to five decades. Within the lifetime of today’s college seniors, our society is going to face some very tough choices about whether to use, and how to use, these extraordinary genetic powers.

* * *

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a majority of U.S. citizens were to decide today that human enhancement is a bad road, and that we should refuse to go down it.{6} Could we stop this process? What would that entail?

The answer is sobering. Bringing the enterprise of human enhancement to a halt would require a vast, draconian system of surveillance and regulation. Precisely because the technologies of healing and the technologies of enhancement are intrinsically connected, a ban on enhancement would prove ineffectual unless it severely curtailed research in such areas as computers and informatics, genetics, robotics, neuroscience, nanotechnology, cognitive psychology, pharmaceuticals, and many fields of contemporary medicine. Moreover, it would require that this highly restrictive system be imposed with equal rigor in all the world’s nations at the same time, to prevent the research and innovation from simply migrating overseas to the least-regulated regions of the planet. The chances of such a coordinated global relinquishment are small indeed.

Nevertheless, to admit that we cannot ban enhancement technologies outright is not to say that we are powerless to exert any control at all over the situation. I believe the history of the environmental movement offers a useful model in this regard. Here, too, humankind faced a similarly daunting challenge: reorienting the totality of our economic system by profoundly changing not only products, laws, and industrial practices but also consumer habits and mentalities. A mere forty-five years ago, in the early 1960s, almost no one even knew there was such a thing as “the environment,” much less a serious set of problems associated with it. In the decades since, humankind has become aware of the crisis and mobilized to shift economies and habits toward ecological sustainability. We remain far indeed from reaching that goal, but it would be foolish to deny the substantial progress that has been made in less than half a century.{7}

The green movement is particularly instructive because it has made a significant impact despite vehement disagreement about the nature of the ecological crisis and the best ways to deal with it. There was never any point at which a straightforward consensus developed in the population at large; rather, the terms of debate gradually became clearer and more concrete. Can a factory run cleanly and still turn a profit? Can we find economically viable alternatives to fossil-fuel energy? Animated by pragmatic questions like these, public opinion slowly shifted, incrementally incorporating ideas that had once seemed marginal or downright radical. Ultimately, the overall trajectory of social practices was successfully deflected down a new course. Humanity saw the problem and partially changed direction.

There is hope in this green story. It offers reasonable grounds for optimism that humankind may be able, in a similar fashion, to exert some measure of control over the immense social and economic forces involved in human enhancement. We are not helpless before these technological changes; we can have some say in how they transform our lives. In particular, I see four main issues that these accelerating developments will compel us to confront.

The Challenges We Face

Human enhancement is going to be very hard to resist, once you and I personally are offered it. It not only taps into our instinct for self-preservation, but also draws upon our concern for those we love. Most parents go to extreme lengths to give their children the greatest possible chance of leading healthy, educated, fulfilling lives. If biotechnology safely increases that chance, or appears to do so, how many will be able to resist? This pressure will ratchet up even further as parents see their children competing with others whose capabilities have been augmented in various ways. We have here, in short, a classic case of a slippery slope.

Biotechnological modifications are likely to come in discrete, incremental packages, each offering a slight improvement in some aspect of our bodies or minds, along a steadily increasing gradient of potency and sophistication, as the science and technology advance each year. Over decades these increments will add up to significant qualitative changes in our physical and mental makeup, but at any given moment they will seem like small, sensible extensions of capabilities we already possess. The net result will be a social context in which the very meaning of the word “normal” is constantly shifting. What was normal last year becomes slightly subpar this year; what was normal ten years ago is completely obsolete today. Once enhancement technologies become widespread, people will have to accept a continual, unending process of upgrades and boosts, simply to keep up with the ever-shifting baseline of normal human performance.

A second challenge of the enhanced future will stem from the sheer outlandishness of the traits and capabilities that many citizens of that era will be able to choose for themselves. Popular science fiction has not been much help in this regard. From Star Trek to Star Wars, we see a lot of strange critters running around: intelligent robots, not-so-intelligent robots, bizarre species from galaxies far, far away. But these aliens exist alongside perfectly ordinary-looking human beings. For the most part, the only humans who are profoundly modified are the evil ones, like Darth Vader in Star Wars or the Borg in Star Trek.

This is a telling point: it indicates that we are psychologically unprepared for what is actually far more likely to happen. Over the coming century, some of us—perhaps many of us—will be increasingly merging with our machines, while at the same time modifying our own biology in ever deeper ways. By the year 2050, our society is likely to include a wide variety of truly hybrid beings, part genetically-modified human, part machine. To be sure, some individuals, and some entire family lines, will no doubt follow a conservative path, rejecting major modifications. But others will push their enhancement possibilities to the limit. No one can foresee what those more aggressively modified people will look or act like. But it is probable that, from today’s standpoint, they will be deeply unsettling to behold, both when they are at rest and when they do the things they do. Many of their behaviors will lie well beyond the range of current human capabilities.

A skeptic might argue that humans have been enhancing both their abilities and their appearances for centuries, if not millennia, and that most societies have adapted rapidly and seamlessly to such innovation. How long did it take, for example, for people to accept the wearing of eyeglasses as perfectly normal, or to consider an airplane flight across the Atlantic routine? Might not the myriad enhancements of the mid-twenty-first century find a similarly swift and easy embrace? What many would consider a freak today might seem utterly mundane tomorrow.

This is a valid point, but it should be qualified in two important respects. The enhancements of the mid-twenty-first century will be far more potent than anything witnessed thus far in human history. They will affect the qualities we deem most centrally and deeply human. Personality, emotions, cognitive ability, talents, memory, perception, physical sensation, the boundaries between one person and another—all these will be subject to deliberate manipulation. It is hard to see how such an unrelenting succession of profound changes would not produce a disorientation—a continually destabilized identity—among the citizenry of the coming era.

It is also worth noting how much of today’s economic activity and technology are oriented toward fashion performance, entertainment, embellishment, or sexual behavior. What will be the equivalent of cosmetics, body piercings, tattoos, botox, and Viagra for the people of 2050? What will take the place of recreational drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy? What will the people of that era do to their bodies and minds for the simple purpose of signaling their individuality, or experiencing a new form of erotic pleasure? The mind boggles. We should not underestimate the sheer strangeness of the future that awaits us, just a few decades down the road.

A third key issue confronting us in that future will be the socially disruptive potential of enhancement technologies. They hold out the possibility of liberating humans from many of their constraints and afflictions, but also of dividing humankind more profoundly than at any time in recorded history. It is not at all clear whether a population of highly enhanced humans can coexist peacefully alongside a population of unmodified humans. There will be plenty of opportunities for prejudice, resentment, and dehumanizing stereotypes—going both ways. Within the population of the enhanced, moreover, we are also likely to see ever growing levels of heterogeneity. The people of that era will not only look far more different from each other than we do today, they will also possess a much wider variety of physical and mental capabilities, arrayed in all manner of combinations. Diversity, in such a context, will be based on varying biologies, dissimilar machine components, sharply contrasting abilities. Can our culture absorb such a riotous level of heterogeneity? The historical track record in this regard is not very promising.

Finally, what happens to the moral ideals of equality and human dignity in such a world? By the concept of “human dignity” we usually mean a quality of intrinsic and absolute value that all humans possess in the same measure—whether a tiny baby, a genius, or a mentally handicapped person. It is the quality that leads us, for example, to consider murder an equally serious crime regardless of the victim’s personal characteristics.

The technologies of enhancement threaten human dignity precisely because they tempt us to think of a person as an entity that can be “improved.” To take this step is to break down human personhood into a series of quantifiable traits—resistance to disease, intelligence, and so forth—that are subject to augmentation or alteration. The danger in doing this lies in reducing individuals to the status of products, artifacts to be modified and reshaped according to our own preferences, like any other commodity. In this act, inevitably, we risk losing touch with the quality of intrinsic value that all humans share equally, no matter what their traits may be. In this sense, the well-intentioned effort to enhance a person can result in treating them as a mere thing.

The eugenics movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed us where such dehumanizing lines of thought can lead. One place they did lead was to Auschwitz. A central moral challenge of the coming decades will be to prevent the technologies of enhancement from eroding the foundations of equality and human dignity on which our political and social systems rest.

* * *

None of us has a crystal ball, of course. We cannot know with any precision what shape the civilization of enhancement will take. Nevertheless, the broad outlines of what is coming are already clear enough: enhancement of human bodies and minds will become a defining feature of our society, whether we as individuals approve of it or not. Even if this future takes twice as long as anticipated to arrive—say, eighty years instead of forty—we are still speaking here of one of the great disjunctions in human history.

To some, putting the matter this way may smack of technological determinism. Ultimately, they would say, it is humans who make technology, and therefore it is up to humans to choose whether or not to go down this road. This is undoubtedly true. I have argued, however, that the very nature of these technologies will make many people want to have them, and that the collective impact of those desires, expressed as social and economic forces, will exert tremendous pressure to bring these technologies into being. Short of a cataclysmic war or ecological collapse, and short of a radical transformation in the basic profile of human aspirations and needs, the overall “parallelogram of forces” (to use Engels’s artful formulation) will propel industrial civilization down this path.

It will be up to us as citizens and as consumers, of course, to decide just how, and at what pace, and in what configurations and distributions, these enhancements enter our lives. That is most certainly not predetermined. Our responsibility as citizens, therefore, requires that we start preparing ourselves as best we can today to make those decisions.

This will demand a great deal from us as individuals. It will require that we educate ourselves about the underlying science, and monitor closely the ongoing developments in the many areas of innovation I have described. Most importantly, it will require that we clarify in our own minds the basic social, political, and moral values we wish to defend during this period of swift technological change.

It will also demand a great deal from us as a society. Our government will need to address basic issues of safety, devising effective ways to regulate new enhancement technologies without stifling scientific innovation in the process. This will not be an easy balance to strike.{8} Equally important will be the question of fairness: ensuring that opportunities for enhancement do not become the exclusive prerogative of a select few. If we fail in this, and the rich gain preferential access to the most potent enhancements, we will witness a further widening of the already cruel gap that separates people into haves and have-nots. This time around, however, that gap will not merely be expressed outwardly in social status and power: it will be written in biology itself.

Finally, we will need to create a civic culture that can deal constructively with ever-deepening diversity among the citizenry. In the end, this will probably require nothing less than a new ethics of personhood—an expanded conception of human dignity, a more generous understanding of the word “us.” I will need to be able to stand before you, acknowledge how radically different you are from me—in looks, perceptions, abilities—and still feel that, underneath it all, we are members of a common family of beings.

Safety, fairness, social solidarity: these are not new moral imperatives in the history of human society. But the advent of enhancement technologies casts ancient social and political challenges in a particularly urgent light. We face a situation akin to the one lamented by atomic scientists like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard in the late 1940s, as they contemplated the predicament of a nuclear-armed humanity. The invention of these radical new weapons, as these scientists saw it, confronted humankind with a basic choice: either to find a way, once and for all, to resolve international conflicts through peaceful means, or to face eventual annihilation in a final world war.

Enhancement technologies may well force a similar moral reckoning over the coming decades. Either human beings will learn how to reconfigure their societies along more equitable and civically inclusive lines, or the dehumanizing tendencies, identity tensions, and centrifugal forces unleashed by these technologies will risk tearing their societies apart. As with nuclear weapons, these devices confront humankind with the fateful disparity that Einstein repeatedly underscored in the last years of his life: the gap between human power and human wisdom, between our extraordinary technological mastery and our still primitive capacity for just coexistence. The innovations have gone on accelerating in the years since Einstein’s death, and today we encounter a paradox that might have astonished even him: it is not just our weaponry that threatens us, but our technologies of healing as well. Our inventions have reached a degree of such potency that, turned back upon humans themselves, even the most seemingly benign of them risk turning our world inside-out.

{1} The scholarly and popular literature on human biological enhancement is voluminous and growing rapidly. For a bibliography (presently comprising some 260 titles and counting), see my project web site at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/michaelbess/Currentbookprojects (accessed 14 November 2007).

{2} Some authors argue that the biotechnology revolution will be rivaled in its transformative social impact by concurrent revolutions in nanotechnology, informatics, and robotics. They maintain that, rather than think of the mid-twenty-first century as being defined primarily by biotechnology, we should conceive of it as a period of conjoined and intertwined innovations: the nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) era. This makes good sense at one level, because it is undoubtedly true that human enhancement technologies will be partly a result of, and deeply imbricated with, radical new capabilities in these other areas. But I believe the defining feature of the era will still be the technologies of human enhancement. It is one thing to alter the nature of the objects and devices with which we surround ourselves, and quite another to alter fundamentally our own bodies and minds. In one case we are reshaping our tools; in the other we are reshaping ourselves. Of the two, it is the latter change that cuts deeper qualitatively, and that will, I think, come to be seen as the more important transformation. See Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge, eds., Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science (Dordrecht, 2003), and Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York, 2005).

{3} The discussion that follows focuses on the United States, but the gist of my argument applies to most other industrialized nations as well—despite the significant differences in culture, institutions, and traditions of science and technology policy that apply in individual countries. The importance of cross-national variation should not be underestimated, of course. For example, the average Western European citizen today faces a quite different array of health policy options than the average American, and over the coming decades this disparity will probably translate into similarly divergent possibilities for human enhancement. Nevertheless, such dissimilarities should not obscure the underlying fundamentals that all the industrialized nations share in common. A banking crisis or an oil spill might well produce different responses in France than in the United States, but the basic features of such a crisis—its causes and extent, and the range of possible solutions—will be determined by the many underlying social, technological, and economic factors that clearly characterize both nations. In a similar way, the basic tectonics of the coming civilization of human enhancement will possess fundamental common features across national boundaries, despite important differences from country to country.

{4} For the illustrative anecdotes in this essay, I draw extensively from the excellent book by Ramez Naam, More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (New York, 2005).

{5} This point is forcefully made in Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means to Be Human (New York, 2004), and in James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). Hughes is one of the leading figures in the World Transhumanist Association, an international body devoted to promoting human enhancement; see http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/index/ (accessed October 2007).

{6} Three thoughtful advocates of this position (albeit from sharply differing ideological backgrounds) are: Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York, 2003); Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York, 2002); and Leon Kass, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco, 2002).

{7} See Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago, 2003).

{8} Both McKibben and Fukuyama propose concrete political and legislative measures that they believe could be taken today to bring the forces of enhancement under greater control. It remains unclear, however, whether the measures they advocate would suffice to rein in the broader social and economic processes propelling enhancement forward.

Michael Bess is Chancellor’s Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of three books: Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (2006); The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (2003), which won the George Perkins Marsh prize of the American Society for Environmental History; and Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945–1989 (1993). This essay was supported in part by the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Program on Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (grant no. RO3HG003298-01A1), the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University, and the endowment of the Chancellor’s Chair in History at Vanderbilt.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

Condit was a transdisciplinary scholar. After receiving his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Purdue in 1936, he followed with an M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Cincinnati in 1939 and 1941. He taught mathematics and mechanics during World War II and then became an assistant design engineer with the New York Central Railroad’s Building Department in Cincinnati. When the war ended, he was hired by Northwestern to teach English. During the late 1940s, he published several articles, including “The Chicago School and the Modern Movement in Architecture.”{2} Then, in 1951–52, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant that supported him as a postdoctoral fellow in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin. While at Wisconsin on leave from Northwestern, Condit was able to complete The Rise of the Skyscraper.

While it may not have been Condit’s only intention, he popularized Giedion’s usage of “the Chicago School” and thus strengthened the links among Chicago’s commercial buildings, Prairie School architecture, and the modernist work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other European émigré-architects.

In the years between The Rise of the Skyscraper and The Chicago School, Condit published much else, including his two-volume American Building Art and an article in the very first issue of Technology and Culture.{3} He also inaugurated the history of science program at Northwestern and, as Mel Kranzberg wrote in the special issue of Technology and Culture that I edited in Condit’s honor, “introduced courses in the history of building technology and the history of urban form.” Kranzberg continued: “These were among the first of their kind, if not the very first, at any American university. There were few textbooks and precedents to follow, so Condit’s own research provided much of the substance for the students who took these courses.”{4}

Preservation and Polemics

I have written before about Condit’s contributions to historical scholarship.{5} Here I want to consider the milieu in which The Chicago School was published and some of the ideas that have coalesced since then that have stimulated my own thinking. But first, a few words about the word “polemics” in the heading. Condit used polemics strategically to advance his case that architecture should be an art in which modern structural techniques predominantly shaped form. He defended his strongly held position by using generalizations that often reduced complex situations to either/or stances and by glossing over nuances and distinctions that made these either/or positions difficult to maintain. In the last section of this essay, I introduce some ideas about “performance.” Rather than offering “performance” as a counterpolemic to Condit’s argument, I hope to suggest—in keeping with the performative—that there is room for movement, for shifting interpretations, for recentering our investigations around different constituencies. My stance is polemical to the extent that I firmly believe this recentering is long overdue and urgently needed.

One catalyst for Condit’s revision of The Rise of the Skyscraper was the demolition of so much of Chicago’s commercial architecture in the dozen years between 1952 and 1964. As Condit told the history of tall office buildings in Chicago, he simultaneously noted how many of the buildings had met the wrecking ball since his original publication: seventeen by my count.{6} One strategy to try and prevent further destruction of a historic heritage is to unify threatened buildings into a “school” or other grouping that would amplify the importance of single buildings by categorizing them under a label of significance. To do this, Condit recruited the work of art historian Sigfried Giedion, whose highly polemical and influential Space, Time, and Architecture was published in 1941 and issued in many subsequent editions.{7} Condit adopted a term from Giedion, “the Chicago School,” that had also been used with respect to writers, sociologists, or designers of residential architecture (the latter more commonly known now as the Prairie School).{8}

While it may not have been Condit’s only intention, he popularized Giedion’s usage of “the Chicago School” and thus strengthened the links among Chicago’s commercial buildings, Prairie School architecture, and the modernist work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other European émigré-architects. It was a clever way to make a declaration of importance. For example, taking off from Giedion, Condit connected the commercial buildings built in the 1890s by the firm of Holabird and Roche to Chicago designs by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “An unbroken if irregular line extends from the mature buildings of Holabird and Roche through the concrete structures of Richard Schmidt [Montgomery Ward Warehouse, 1908] and the [1922] Tribune project of Gropius and Meyer to this apartment tower [the Promontory Apartments in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe, 1948–50].” And again, Condit wrote of an 1895 design by D. H. Burnham and Company: “One short step further in the design of the Reliance [Building] and he [chief designer Charles Atwood] would have produced the transparent tower that Mies van der Rohe imagined in his Berlin project of 1919” (TCS, 218, 110).{9}

This argument went both ways. Robert Bruegmann pointed out in his 1991 critique of the term “the Chicago School” that the modernist designs were claimed by critics to be in line with buildings of 1890s Chicago, lending the former a historical pedigree and legitimating them in some circles. Condit, he noted, aligned himself with European critics by making the connections that they did as well: “Throughout the 1920s, pictures of American engineering works and utilitarian buildings, primarily industrial structures but also Chicago office buildings from the 1880s and 1890s, appeared in the pages of the books and magazines published by avant-garde architects.”{10} That a U.S. wholesale store and a French apartment block had different contexts, uses, and ownership did not enter into the argument. Condit asserted: “The new architecture has come full circle, without quite realizing what it was doing, from Chicago through France and Germany and back to its native home” (TCS, 147). This interest in “formal analysis,” an in-depth discussion of the aesthetic qualities of an artifact, was commonplace in art history at mid-century.

In hindsight, Condit’s 1960s writings seem to be a valiant attempt to create a sort of textual utopia, a totalizing explanation that could withstand the “tide of new construction” as well as so many uncertainties of the atomic age. He eloquently argued that “[t]he most destructive consequence of a consumers’ economy resting on a militaristic basis, other than war itself, is that works of art may be consumed like the most ephemeral of material goods”

Throughout The Chicago School, Condit revealed his sympathies with Giedion. Both scholars disdained the eclecticism of much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture in Europe and the United States, dismissing building ornamentation in no uncertain terms. Condit claimed that architect Louis Sullivan had a “capriciously experimental temperament in ornamentation” that obscured the form and “produces an effect of shallowness and indecisiveness” (TCS, 38–39). The firm of Holabird and Roche exhibited a “misguided traditionalism” on the Marquette Building, and its Old Colony Building had a “ridiculous colonnade” (TCS, 122, 124). Several other passages provide evidence of Condit’s modernist preference for austerity: He praised the “inherent power that the unadorned building possessed,” while the Woman’s Temple (Burnham and Root, 1891–92), commissioned by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, was an “excursion into the romantic. . . . It was florid work—arty and feminine, perhaps,” according to Condit (TCS, 101, 103, 104). This was not praise, but a sort of gender essentialism, not surprising in an era when Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had just been published to wide notoriety.

In contrast to Giedion, however, Condit focused on Chicago buildings and was far more specific about construction, patronage, and other contributors to the creation and execution of the buildings. Being a Chicagoan himself, Condit was rather boosterish about his hometown, insisting on the late-nineteenth-century sophistication of his city.{11} Like the anonymous authors of Industrial Chicago (1891), he praised “the structural-utilitarian-aesthetic unity of the best Chicago buildings” (TCS, 12). He also believed at this point in his career that the “transmutation of vernacular building . . . into a genuine architectural style was in part the product of a relatively long theoretical preparation” (TCS, 9). Tracing what he viewed to be the theoretical bases of the Chicago School was another strategy to give the commercial buildings a historical lineage. Condit thus went beyond formal analysis to discuss concepts of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Horatio Greenough, for example.{12}

Condit’s book argued for understanding nineteenth-century vernacular urban commercial buildings because of their role in providing “ultimate meaning for the architecture of our own day” (TCS, v). The effort to link modernist architecture to that of vernacular buildings of the late nineteenth century was two-pronged and reciprocal on Condit’s part: to highlight a neglected and increasingly threatened type of building and to defend the spare, abstract designs of European and U.S. modernism.{13} One part of the historic fabric was sewn to another, if you will, to strengthen both. In hindsight, Condit’s 1960s writings seem to be a valiant attempt to create a sort of textual utopia, a totalizing explanation that could withstand the “tide of new construction” as well as so many uncertainties of the atomic age. He eloquently argued that “[t]he most destructive consequence of a consumers’ economy resting on a militaristic basis, other than war itself, is that works of art may be consumed like the most ephemeral of material goods” (TCS, 134).

Preserving Polemics

Condit seemingly willed Chicago architecture to achieve what he valued: “[Charles] Atwood succeeded in developing almost to its ultimate refinement the modern dematerialized curtain wall and thus made the building a direct forerunner of the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in the 1920’s,” so that architecture, once again, was what he believed it was intended to be: a structural art. (TCS, 110, 2). Condit sought a “true standard in architecture—that is, a basic norm or type exactly developed to fit a particular set of conditions and repeated wherever those conditions exist. Radical deviations for a formula that represents an adequate generalization would be mere caprice or illogicality.” He supported this idea by citing Alfred North Whitehead: “Imagination and individual expression are vital to a living culture, but we should remember with Whitehead that ‘civilization [also] advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’”{14}

Architects John Wellborn Root and Louis Henri Sullivan did not fit so easily into Condit’s “school.” Condit wrote: “For Sullivan, the potential aesthetic quality of the tall building lay in its unusual height, and it was this that he seized on to provide the expression of his intense personal feeling” (TCS, 128). The same might be said of Condit in the sense that tall buildings for him, too, provided a “technical-aesthetic synthesis that makes it possible for the world of technology to enter into the domain of feeling and morality” (TCS, 4). Of Sullivan writing about the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Condit exhorted:

On a deeper level . . . one is compelled to reflect on the fact that Sullivan identified the Field building with the man who created it [Henry Hobson Richardson in 1887], or transformed it into a man. The imagery is entirely associated with masculine energy and potency, sheer creative vitality in its basic physical sense. When one considers this along with the ascription of a Dionysiac quality to the tall building, the essential meaning becomes inescapable. For Sullivan the creation of a building is equivalent to the biological act of man recreating himself, as he does when he begets a child, the emphasis, however, being exclusively masculine (TCS, 167–68).

While I believe that this analysis contradicts Condit’s commitment to architecture as (solely) a structural art, Condit’s prose is surely a “proud and soaring thing,” to use Sullivan’s phrase.{15}

Despite myself, I admire the certainty and seamlessness of this book. Condit started right out with the claim that “the architectural and technical achievement of the Chicago school marked the establishment of a new style of architecture” that was also “the culmination of structural evolution that extended over” the nineteenth century. “Style in architecture,” he stated,

represents or stands for those essential characteristics of construction, form, ornament and detail that are common to all the important structures of any definable period in history. But it also stands for those technical and aesthetic qualities of the artistic product that grow directly and organically out of the conditions of human existence and out of the aspirations and powers of human beings. We rightly feel that the buildings of a certain style—if it is a genuine style—symbolize in their form the realities of man’s experience and the attempt to master and give adequate emotional expression to those realities. These buildings are constituent facts of man’s history, and their revelation is a part of truth itself (TCS, 1).

Man. Master. Truth. These words sound dated and quaint, I hope, in their self-assurance and use of gendered possessives. But Condit continued: “Within a few years the exploitation of these technical factors [iron framing, fireproofing, vertical transportation] brought about the revolution in form and construction that became the basis of a fully modern architecture, emancipated from the last vestige of dependence on the past” (TCS, 25). Here he seems to contradict his strategy of giving modernism a past; instead he rejects its sources. Condit brought together construction technologies with the forms that they helped make possible, both in the late-nineteenth-century commercial buildings and the postwar modernist structures. By conflating these, he scripted a history that discouraged inquiry into the forms and techniques as independent variables operating in a complex urban environment over time.

The Glasgow-based architect and educator Thomas A. Markus remarked recently on the “fragmentation of architectural discourse.” “There are no inherent connections between form, function and space,” Markus wrote.{16} Again and again in scholarship from the mid-twentieth century—primarily in scholarship of and about modernism—there was a tendency to deduce social and political meanings from form, to posit inherent connections between function (in a broad sense) and form. When Condit wrote that these “buildings of a certain style . . . symbolize in their form the realities of man’s experience,” he assumed too much, reducing history to a single strand. By the 1980s, scholars like Alan Colquhoun were arguing for a conception of “the city as historically as well as spatially continuous—capable of being read as a palimpsest. In the early-twentieth century avant-garde, the city was seen diachronically, as a linear development over time, each period canceling the ones before in the name of the unity of the Zeitgeist.”{17}

In drawing a line, however crooked, between structures that resembled each other stylistically and technically, Condit created an illustrated narrative that ignored the simultaneous existence in the same territory of other layers and other priorities. Assuredly, his interest was the “contradiction in the United States between the aims of commercial enterprise and the values of aesthetic achievement” and in constructing The Chicago School, he attempted to bring these opposites into alignment (TCS, 134). In the final section of this essay, I want to gesture toward some different scholarly goals.

Palimpsest, Performance, and Power

Synchronicity, then (along with the overused “palimpsest”), to an extent has supplanted the “linear development over time” in history-writing that Colquhoun described. Already in 1964, architect Bernard Rudofsky noted that “the discriminative approach of the historian is mostly due to his parochialism. . . . [A]rchitectural history as we know it is equally biased on the social plane. It amounts to little more than a who’s who of architects who commemorated power and wealth; an anthology of buildings of, by, and for the privileged.”{18} Once the boundaries of what should be appreciated and preserved expanded to include the ordinary and the vernacular, historians brought many more players onto the playing field, including contractors, engineers, and real estate agents.

At the same time that Condit attempted to preserve commercial structures, he recognized that his own methods of study—discussing vernacular building, real estate, engineering, and infrastructure along with the architecture—were undermining the priority previously given by historians to Masters and Monuments. “The union of architecture and engineering demanded by the philosophy of the modern movement has achieved the ironic result of contracting the architect’s role to a minority status in the creation of a finished building” (TCS, 51, n. 31). Almost as a way of compensating for the diminished role of the architect and, to some extent, undermining his own argument, Condit elevated Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root to masterly status. By examining the works of these men in more depth, he inadvertently suggested new directions for research—precisely those aspects of architecture and urbanism that “the Chicago School” did not adequately accommodate but at which Sullivan and Root excelled—ornament and variation, for example.

In an essay titled “The Politics of Successful Technologies,” John Staudenmaier argued for a “contextual approach to the history of technology . . . [that situates] technical design decisions within the public fabric of societal decision making.”{19} Condit provided a context for the buildings he considered by examining real estate, construction, and infrastructure issues along with the individual architectural works. The context of history has broadened since the mid-1960s, however, along with what is “public.” Staudenmaier noted that “context is under construction every bit as much as the artifact in question.”{20} Thus the historian is challenged to focus on an ever-shifting set of considerations. In Technology’s Storytellers, Staudenmaier elucidated a constituency model that helps analyze technological history: design, maintenance, and impact constituencies are groups affected differently by changes in technology.{21} In brief, the design constituencies are “[t]he people and institutions with access to the venture capital that new technologies always require [and] ordinarily hold cultural hegemony in their society.”{22} Maintenance constituencies include those who “had all come to benefit from and depend upon” a certain new technology, such as automobiles. Finally, there are two segments of the impact constituency: “people and institutions who lose because of the design of the new technology” and “those who share the costs of a technology without receiving its benefits.”{23} Condit primarily examined design constituencies in the history of tall buildings, but he also considered maintenance constituencies, including steelworkers, tenants, and legislators. He minimally recognized impact constituencies.{24} While a focus on impact constituencies is crucial for a fuller understanding of historical change, taking into account impact constituencies also has added new dimensions to our knowledge of design and maintenance constituencies by underscoring the societal costs and the relationships among constituencies.

A few pages back, I wrote that I would turn to the idea of performance toward the end of this essay. Imagine now Carl Condit making a show of opening a door, as he surely did for me and other women when we entered a building together. Metaphorically, Condit’s certainty, I think, opened the door for others to examine his assumptions. How could he be so sure of himself? His polemical stance prodded me (at least) to skepticism. Others, too, have shifted away from Condit’s surefooted storytelling. While some scholars like Bruegmann have been quite polemical themselves, other writers have stressed the communicative aspects of technological activities.

Adapting some of Staudenmaier’s ideas, Bryan Pfaffenberger wrote about “a full range of technological activities, such as user appropriation, user modifications, sabotage, and revolutionary alterations . . . as a process of technological communication.”{25} This communication was “reciprocal and recursive,” with interactions among technological artifacts, people, and value systems producing outcomes.{26} Architectural historian Diane Ghirardo sought to “uncover spaces, spatial practices and histories that concern women above all, with the argument, following from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, that through social practice, spaces are both configured and acquire meaning.” Further, she argued that this analysis “represents resistance to totalizing interpretations, or metanarratives, and, more specifically, allows us to recover the histories not only of some exceptional buildings, but also, insofar as possible, structures and histories that have not been preserved precisely because of their associations with women.”{27} Historians are investigating reciprocal relationships of space and social relations, since their (our) own contexts have changed.{28}

“The artifact embodies political intentions,” Pfaffenberger wrote, “but these intentions do not come to life in the absence of ritual.” The example he used to explain this activation of an artifact was the Victorian hallway bench and its varied meanings to different constituencies. “[T]he ornate mirror and the hard, plain bench both represented and constructed the Victorian class system” by providing an uncomfortable place for the servant to sit and an elaborate mirror to literally reflect the opulence of the upper-class visitor.{29} I have tried to push my own work in the direction of examining both formalized rituals and performances (broadly construed) of social interactions in and around buildings. By focusing on “in-between conditions”—what happens between bodies and artifacts or buildings—I hope to shed light on some of the reciprocal and recursive ways that people and building technologies produce urban environments.{30} Staudenmaier’s concept of “impact constituencies” has helped frame my considerations of those who have been harmed by (say) skyscraper development. Also crucial to my way of thinking has been feminist theorization of “intersectionality”—the ways in which gender, class, and race intersect.{31}

“Palimpsest,” the word used by Colquhoun to describe “the city as historically as well as spatially continuous,” fails to describe power relationships in the various layers of a city; intersectionality stresses multiple oppressions as well as the varied strategies to resist those oppressions. According to the editors of the book Embodied Utopias, “Spatial boundaries become psychologically coded barriers: walls, gates, one-way and dead-end streets, decaying buildings, parts of the city where ‘you’ (normative subject) ‘don’t go.’”{32} In his essay for Embodied Utopias, Thomas Markus stressed that “[a]ll built space inevitably structures social relationships, by creating ‘insides’ and ‘outsides,’ categories of ‘inhabitants,’ ‘visitors,’ and ‘strangers,’ and it separates those with power from those who lack power.”{33} But in an essay on Hull House in that same volume, Sharon Haar blurred some of these distinctions about urban spaces. In introducing Haar’s article, philosopher Peg Birmingham noted that Hull House reformers “grasp[ed] the public space of the city as a set of myriad, material lived practices with a life of its own, beyond the attempts at rational organization in which everything has its proper place and function.”{34}

Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

In order to capture these “material lived practices” I have used the concept of performance, in all its senses. People’s actions—embodied performances—are constantly shifting and thus affecting the processes of spatial and technological creation as they are also affected by them. The implicit motion—moving toward or away from—animates physical spaces as well as any institutional structures that (attempt to) organize people. New media consultant Jon McKenzie divided performance into three categories: cultural, organizational, and technological. In his words, his book “Perform or Else initiates a challenge, one that links the performances of artists and activists with those of workers and executives, as well as computers and missile systems.”{35} His tripartite definition of performance dovetails with Pfaffenberger’s “technological dramas” that

emphasize the performative nature of technological “statements” and “counterstatements,” which involved the creation of scenes (contexts) in which actors (designers, artifacts, and users) play out their fabricated roles with regard to a set of envisioned purposes (and before an audience), and it is also to emphasize that discourse involved is not the argumentative and academic discourse of a text but the symbolic media of myth (in which skepticism is suspended) and ritual (in which human actions are mythically patterned in controlled social spaces).{36}

In other words, Pfaffenberger tried to dramatize technological change by providing contexts for the varied constituencies that individually and collectively animated the settings and the artifacts under consideration. This “animation” takes place on several levels, including myth and ritual, but also in less formalized ways.

It is clear that Carl Condit recognized and described aspects of urban drama. For example, he imbued some of the buildings he analyzed with multisensory qualities. About Sullivan’s design for the Carson, Pirie, Scott store, Condit noted that its “thrust and counterthrust, tension and compression, give rise to powerful kinesthetic images in the observer” (TCS, 165).{37} But Condit was unable to reconcile this embodied response with his then-modernist predilections. Instead he belittled it, feminized it, and dismissed it. That he did so made him a man of a particular social and historic location. It is hardly a crime to be of one’s time and place, and Condit did it so well and so seamlessly that his midcentury interpretations have been frustratingly long-lived. The myth of the Chicago School continues, most recently in the two-volume work The Skyscraper and the City, where William Le Baron Jenney is still referred to as the “father of the skyscraper.”{38} Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

Roberta Moudry’s edited volume and the forthcoming book by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury are excellent contributions to the history of tall buildings, promising new frameworks.{39} The essays compiled by Moudry explore “the engagement of the skyscraper with the experience and meaning of city life.”{40} Both Moudry and Merwood-Salisbury honor historians like Condit who have gone before by moving beyond them, asking different questions—putting issues of racialization and gender at the center of their inquiries, for example. Condit’s hesitant and tepid investigations into kinesthetics and emotions have been invigorated by this recent scholarship. The sooner we recognize “that we [must] constantly shift the center of analysis to multiple perspectives to ensure that we are developing a holistic strategy,” writes Andrea Smith, the sooner we will write histories that include more people’s lives.{41} Staudenmaier’s “impact constituencies” need to tell their own stories, and to add their histories to those of the design and maintenance constituencies. I think Condit would agree: in addition to being an influential scholar, he was a generous man.

{3} American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York, 1960); American Building Art: The Twentieth Century (New York, 1961); “Sullivan’s Skyscrapers as the Expression of Nineteenth Century Technology,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 78–83. Condit was one of the founders of the Society for the History of Technology, serving on the Executive Council from 1959 to 1963. Between 1962 and 1970, he served as coeditor with Eugene Ferguson of Technology and Culture. In 1968 he was awarded the Abbott Payson Usher Prize, and in 1973 the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Between 1966 and 1972 he was professor of art and history of science at Northwestern, and then, after that, professor of history, art history, and urban affairs. On Condit’s role in SHOT, see Robert C. Post, “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg,” Invention and Technology 4 (Winter 1989): 34–39, and “Looking Back: Primary Sources” at http://shotnews.net/fiftieth (accessed 26 October 2007). In the index to Technology and Culture’s first twenty-five volumes, Condit’s entries take up nearly four entire columns, the longest by far of anybody who ever published in the journal. Robert Post has been indefatigable in documenting the early history of SHOT and Technology and Culture; thanks to him for adding many of the details here.

{4} Melvin Kranzberg, “A Tribute to Carl W. Condit,” Technology and Culture 30 (April 1989): 256.

{5} Sharon Irish, “Essays in Honor of Carl W. Condit,” Technology and Culture 30 (April 1989): 249–54; and Irish, “Memorial: Carl W. Condit (1914–1997),” Technology and Culture 38 (October 1997): 1026–30.

{6} These buildings discussed by Condit were demolished in the following years: the Bailey and Born buildings (1952–53); Walker Warehouse (1953); the Lakota (1959); Phoenix Building (1959); Cable Building (1960–61); Unitarian Church of Evanston (1960); Dexter Building (1961); Great Northern Theater (1961); Majestic Hotel (1961); Republic Building (1961); Garrick Theater/Schiller Building (1961); Victoria Hotel (1961); Bauer and Black Building (1962); Hyde Park Hotel (1963); Lind Block (1963). Hull House was threatened with demolition in 1961; after extensive protests, the house itself was preserved, but nine other buildings in the complex were torn down. See The Chicago School, 206–07.

{7} Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th edition, revised and enlarged (Cambridge, Mass., 1967 [1941]). See Arthur P. Molella, “Classics Revisited—Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command,” Technology and Culture 43 (April 2002): 374–89 (thanks to Robert Post for alerting me to Molella’s essay).

{8} All these are discussed in Robert Bruegmann’s article, “Myth of the Chicago School,” first published in 1991, but recently reprinted in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, ed. Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray (Chicago, 2005), 15–29. According to Bruegmann, William Dean Howells used the phrase “Chicago school” in 1903 to describe certain writers. The Chicago school of sociology centered around Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century, and architect Thomas Tallmadge applied the term in 1908 to residential designs by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and George Maher. Another source for the historiography of the term is H. Allen Brooks, “Chicago School: Metamorphosis of a Term,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 25 (May 1966): 115–18.

{9} Giedion previously had made the same Reliance/Miesian glass tower comparison in Space, Time, and Architecture, 386–87.

{10} Bruegmann, “Myth of the Chicago School,” 16.

{11} In The Chicago School (p. 95), Condit wrote that: “The last decade of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of the civic and cultural spirit in Chicago. It was marked by creative public enterprise on the highest and most effective level, and it led to an intellectual and civic renaissance unparalleled in the history of American municipalities.”

{12} Giedion pointed the way in this, referencing Viollet-le-Duc as a theoretical father of the skyscraper. See Space, Time, and Architecture, 206.

{13} In another example of this linkage, in The Chicago School (p. 139), Condit wrote of the Prudential Building (Adler and Sullivan, 1895): “The cylindrical column envelopes of the first story and the bay-wide windows of the second open the base to such an extent as to suggest an anticipation of Le Corbusier’s pilotis.”

{14} Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (New York, 1948), 42, quoted in The Chicago School, 126. On type, see an important essay by Georges Teyssot, “Norm and Type: Variations on a Theme,” in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, eds. Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (New York, 2003).

{15} Of the tall office building, Sullivan declared in 1896: “It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.” Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Building Artistically Considered,” Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York, 1979), 206.

{16} Thomas A. Markus, “Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?” in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach (London and New York, 2002), 17.

{17} Alan Colquhoun, “Twentieth Century Concepts of Urban Space,” Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays, 1980–1987 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 232–33. This essay was originally published in 1985.

{18} Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), [n.p., but on first page of preface].

{19} John M. Staudenmaier, “The Politics of Successful Technologies,” in In Context: History and the History of Technology—Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 151.

{20} John M. Staudenmaier, “Problematic Stimulation: Historians and Sociologists Constructing Technology Studies,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 15 (1995), 97. John Staudenmaier has been a generous correspondent over the years, sending me copies of the invaluable article cited here as well as the one in note 19, among others.

{21} John M. Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 192–201.

{22} Staudenmaier, “Politics of Successful Technologies,” 154.

{23} Ibid., 156.

{24} In The Chicago School, labor is mentioned, but race is invisible, and women nearly so. Condit does mention child care (p. 151), department store shopping (p. 164), and the architect Marion Mahony (pp. 203, 210), as well as Jane Addams (p. 206).

{25} Bryan Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 17 (Summer 1992): 285. I am grateful to Rayvon Fouché for alerting me to this article, as well as another one that considers the “performance of technoscience”: Warwick Anderson, “Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 5/6 (2002): 644.

{26} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” 288 and 290.

{27} Diane Ghirardo, “Cherchez la Femme: Where Are the Women in Architectural Studies?” in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary, ed. Katerina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Duncan McCorquodale (London, 1996), 159.

{28} Certainly I have been influenced by the work of Henri Lefebvre, especially The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass., 1991 [1974, 1984]), and Edward W. Soja’s publications, such as Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, Mass., 1996). About the time that I first read Carl Condit’s work (1978), I also read Michel Foucault for the first time: Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” trans. Mark Seem, Semiotext(e) 3:2 (1978), 6–19.

{29} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” 294.

{30} My book manuscript, Spaces Between: The Art of Suzanne Lacy, is currently under consideration. Articles that explore aspects of this performative approach include Nicholas Brown, Ryan Griffis, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, and Sarah Kanouse, “What Makes Justice Spatial? What Makes Spaces Just? Three Interviews on the Concept of Spatial Justice,” Critical Planning 14 (Summer 2007), 6–28; and Sharon Irish, “Shadows in the Garden: ‘The Dark Madonna’ Project by Suzanne Lacy,” Landscape Journal 26 (Spring 2007): 98–115.

{31} Joan Kelly, “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Women, History, Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 1–18. Foundational texts about intersectionality include: “The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York, 1978), 362–72; and Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Radical Teacher 7 (March 1978), 20–27. Another more recent work by María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, Md., 2003), is a vital contribution on intersectionality.

{32} Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach, “Embodied Utopia: Introduction,” Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach (London and New York, 2002), 4.

{33} Markus, “Is There a Built Form?” (n. 16 above).

{34} Peg Birmingham, “At Home in Public,” in Embodied Utopias, 95.

{35} Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London, 2001), 3.

{36} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas” (n. 25 above), 286.

{37} David Van Zanten examined several facets of Louis Sullivan—architectural, biographical, and poetic—in his book Sullivan’s City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan (New York, 2000), and suggested “a parallel conception of ornament evolved as an honest emancipation of the material and structure of the surfaces it articulated” (p. 9). According to Van Zanten, the “three cities” of Sullivan were, first, “the Chicago of 1890”; second, “the city in which Sullivan around 1900 documented his presence, when his ornament left the building surfaces and proclaimed itself as the reflection of a separate, powerful personality. . . . The third, secret city of his last years appeared when ornament and plan combined” (p. 153).

{38} Lynn S. Beedle, Mir Ali, and Paul Armstrong, The Skyscraper and the City: Design, Technology, and Innovation (Lewiston, N.Y., 2007), 118.

{39} Roberta Moudry, ed., The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (New York, 2005); Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper as Urban Solution (Chicago, 2009).

{40} Moudry, 3.

{41} Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 153.

Dr. Irish is research scholar in the School of Architecture, and project coordinator for the Community Informatics Initiative, School of Library and Information Science, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

Berube’s is an important study about a significant subject. Since the human genome project in the 1980s, large-scale science and technology research initiatives by the federal government have required attention to the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of emergent fields. NNI borrowed explicitly from the genome project in establishing such a requirement as a very visible element of its research program, in part to limit the type of resistance that surrounded recombinant DNA research and the commercialization of genetically modified organisms. Berube discusses all of this and much more; indeed, he provides the first detailed study specifically concerned with the societal implications of nanotechnology, including the challenges and obstacles facing societal-implications scholarship.

The book’s title identifies Berube’s organizing theme for exploring the societal implications of research related to exploiting nature at the nano scale (10-9 meters); it is his principal concern. Correctly observing that hype has been a pervasive feature of this rapidly growing research arena, he examines the various reasons that supporters of the NNI and nanotechnology have used to justify the massive commitment of funds: enormous economic payoffs in the form of new technologies; fundamental transformations in the nature of science and technology itself; the insuring of national competitiveness and national security. Indeed, some promoters of nanotechnology promise that it will change everything. They consider it to be the most important development since the Industrial Revolution, since printing, or even since the development of agriculture. Hype indeed! Historians of technology and science inevitably question such claims, and Berube seeks to examine why so very much is claimed for this emerging field. He finds first of all that the development of nanotechnology research has rested to a significant degree on uncritical assertions, on salesmanship, on hype, and his book performs a valuable service in opening to view and studying this phenomenon.

But it is also significant that Berube aims to provide more than a detailed review of the societal implications of nanotechnology. As he states early on, “My goal is to provide the reader with a better understanding of how nanotechnology has been communicated to the many audiences willing, sometimes even anxious, to listen” (p. 23). In fact, this volume amounts to a primer that identifies many of the actors involved in the process of developing nanotechnology. After an opening section that specifically reviews the question of hyping nanotechnology, Berube offers chapters on the agencies and officials concerned with nanotechnology, on the governmental initiatives (U.S. and otherwise) funding it, on the promotional reports behind it, and on NGOs. In addition, there are chapters on likely fields of application and on nanohazards and nanotoxicology. The two concluding chapters return to the societal-implications question and to the role of the public in the decision-making process. Thus the book attempts to survey a very broad area.

In general it achieves its goals, addressing both the specific question of the place of hype in nanotechnology and the wider attempt to present a snapshot of the entire field at this early stage of its development. But there are some issues worth raising, for—as Berube is well aware—it matters that this first STS review of nanotechnology get things right. The book rests on an immense research effort that has provided the author with a handle on the key people and developments in this realm, especially in matters of policy, direction, funding, societal implications, and (to a lesser extent) the science itself. But the sheer scale of the task, the task of conveying comprehensive information about the entire field of nanoscale science and engineering, results in a compendium, a very dense book with an enormous amount of detail. This is not easy to read, in part because the book sometimes loses its narrative line. The idea of hype largely recedes into the background in many of the chapters devoted to identifying the key people and organizations involved in moving nano research forward. Yet the rapidity with which the field is changing would threaten anyone’s ability to provide comprehensive coverage, and Berube often finds himself limited to summarizing and reporting on the events, actions, programs, and agencies involved in nanotechnology, rather than providing analysis of what it all means.

Moreover, the author’s stylistic approach introduces additional difficulties in making sense of the subject. Berube prefers to summarize the views of the many authors, researchers, and policymakers in their own words. The result is a blizzard of quotations. A lot of them are short and carefully chosen, but this choice leaves a jumpy and awkward narrative. Somewhat more disconcerting, the use of so many quotes can make it difficult to discern the author’s voice among the others present. Even more troubling, though, is Berube’s perhaps unconscious assumption that readers are already familiar with the main contours of the nano field and its primary figures and institutions. He himself possesses a command of the landscape, but many readers will be seeking that background and may not easily keep track of all the people and agencies. The first chapter exposes this problem most directly, for without much introduction Berube dives into a discussion about hype and many of the leaders and organizations that are the subjects of subsequent chapters. Indeed, he seems so eager to get to the vital core question of hype that he is unable to hold that subject for later chapters. At the risk of describing the book I would have written, I wonder if it might have been better to first offer some analytical and historical background and context so that the issue of hype could be explored from a more solid foundation.

Nevertheless, Nano-Hype is a significant contribution. Most important, it differs from the flood of introductory books on nanotechnology that seek to show why this field of scientific and engineering research is receiving such high priority from every industrialized country of the world. There is a great deal of information here for STS scholars interested in nano and societal implications, for Berube provides a guide to such primary issues as public acceptance of and resistance to nanotechnology, and the wider societal implications of its development. His emphasis on hype highlights a key feature of nanotechnology science policy and begins to balance some of the least critical promoters of nanotechnology. All of this is important, to be sure. Yet in the end, I realized that I had hoped for both more and less: a little more analysis and discussion; a little less reporting; a little more orderly argument. Berube is quite correct that we need to think carefully about where nanotechnology is going. His study certainly begins that process from the viewpoint of historians and other scholars working in science and technology studies.

Dr. Seely is professor of history and department chair for social sciences at Michigan Technological University. As program director for Science and Technology Studies at the National Science Foundation from 2000–02, he served as the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate’s representative to the NSF’s nanotechnology working group. He has since remained interested in the question of the societal implications of nanotechnology and is involved in nanotechnology undergraduate education activities on the Michigan Tech campus.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

I first visited the ship’s museum ten years ago and have been back many times since. The quality of its presentation has improved steadily over the years, but I have always felt that it had yet to realize its full potential. Happily, this is no longer the case: after thirty-six years of continuous refinement, the SS Great Britain Museum now offers an experience that is quite extraordinary. This is due in part to the ship’s imaginative new setting, completed in 2005, which cleverly encloses its climate-controlled dry dock beneath a thin layer of water and glass. The visual impact of this new arrangement is stunning, for the ship appears to be floating on water, with its stern towering above the waterline in all its restored glory.

Visitors can walk around part of this new dock when they enter the museum, but they cannot access the ship from this point. Instead, they are ushered into a new exhibition gallery located in one of the historic buildings that flank the ship. Once inside, a multitude of displays on several floors tells the story of the ship, providing visitors with an understanding of the historical context of the SS Great Britain before they reach the main attraction, the ship itself (this approach echoes that of the Mary Rose in Portsmouth). The exhibition building is long and narrow, and the main route through it is via a ramp that runs along the length of the space and gradually rises to the second floor, where the entrance to the ship is. There is also an elevator, which helps to ensure that this second-floor entrance is accessible to all visitors.

Fig. 1 So how do you get fresh milk on a voyage across the Atlantic? The cow on the deck of the SS Great Britain. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

Within the exhibition building, the story of the ship begins with its service on the Falkland Islands, its salvage, and its long journey back to Bristol, illustrated with original footage from a television documentary projected onto a large screen. I found this to be one of the most interesting aspects of the ship’s history, and the fact that the SS Great Britain survived for so long as a coal hulk makes its restoration story even more impressive. However, this part of the display is located close to the building’s entrance, and at the time of my visit the crowds of people entering the gallery made it difficult to watch the film. Judging by the popularity of this part of the exhibit, its placement should be reconsidered.

The remainder of the indoor exhibition consists of traditional graphic and text panels displayed along the length of the ramp. These panels focus on the key stages of the ship’s history, from luxury Atlantic liner to emigrant clipper, troop ship to windjammer, and finally to its days as a coal hulk. During the ship’s first couple of years of service she crossed the Atlantic several times until she ran aground on the sands of Dundrum Bay in Northern Ireland. Having suffered little damage to her hull, the ship was eventually refloated and, in 1852, was fitted with a new 500-horsepower Penn engine, a 300-foot-long deck, and new passenger accommodations. From 1852 to 1876 the ship served as an emigrant clipper and frequently traveled to Australia, South Africa, and New York. During the Crimean War, in 1855, she was chartered by the British government and became a troop ship. Then, in 1882, the vessel was converted into a fast three-masted sailing ship, and in this guise she became a cargo-hauling windjammer. In 1886, she was damaged rounding the Cape and forced to put to shelter in the Falkland Islands. The cost of repairs was deemed too great so she was eventually sold as a storage hulk in Port Stanley. After several decades the ship ceased to be watertight and was therefore towed a short distance from Port Stanley, skippered in shallow water, and abandoned to the elements. In 1970, the ship was finally refloated as part of a dynamic salvage attempt and returned to Bristol on a barge.

Fig. 2 One of the scenes illustrating life onboard the SS Great Britain. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

The panels along the ramp are lively and to the point, successfully presenting key aspects of the ship’s story to a broad audience of nonspecialists. Complementing the panels’ interpretive text are an array of original objects that illustrate the ship’s many voyages and, more importantly, the experiences of some of the people who lived and traveled on it. The overall pace of the indoor exhibition is good, although the flow of visitors moving up the ramp can make it difficult to dwell in one place to study a particular display.

There are also a number of large interactive mechanical displays within the exhibition building. The most imposing of these demonstrates how the ship’s propeller could be disengaged from the driveshaft and lifted out of the water. The instructions are confusing, but in the end a joint effort with several other visitors enabled me to complete the sequence of lifting the propeller and re-engaging it. Other interactive elements are geared toward a younger audience. These include a dressing-up box, which contains a number of reproduction costume items for visitors to try on, as well as a facsimile of the ship’s wheel, where one can pretend to steer the ship on a westerly course. The building also houses a display of some of the ship’s REVIEW original masts and hull plates, which are arrayed along the walls or suspended from above. The panels that accompany these original parts use them both to explain the archaeology of the ship and to remind visitors of its condition when it arrived in Bristol in 1970.

At the top of the ramp visitors board the ship itself. A choice of audio guides is available at this point, each of which enables guests to tour the ship from one of four distinctive points of view: that of first-class passengers on their way to Australia; that of third-class passengers making the same journey; that of the ship’s cat (an audio guide to the ship for children); and, finally, that of a maritime expert who takes visitors on a technical tour. But I decided to go it alone and began my tour on the ship’s main deck. Vast and uncluttered, the deck of the SS Great Britain is a perfect place to take in views of Bristol’s famous waterfront. As I strolled along the deck, however, I was surprised to hear the faint sound of a mooing cow. Curious, I traced its source to one of the deckhouses, where I was presented with a display featuring a full-size model of the ship’s cow. A simple but effective trigger causes the cow to moo each time someone walks past (during my visit, this was popular with children and adults alike). Next to the display, an interpretive panel clearly explains the need for and supply of fresh milk on a four-month journey (fig. 1).

FIG. 3 A view of the ship’s corroded hull from beneath the glass canopy. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

From the deck, visitors enter the ship at one of two points and are then free to wander around its cabins, all of which have been restored to show what they would have looked like when the ship was in her prime. Although the cabins’ furnishings are clearly new, they effectively convey a sense of what conditions would have been like during a voyage—depending on the passenger or crew member’s status, of course. Indeed, the marked difference between the experiences of first- and third-class passengers is dramatically illustrated within the cabins by way of tableau scenes complete with full-sized figures, sounds, and even smells. Some of these scenes convey the less savory realities of a long journey, such as sea sickness, the presence of rats, and the difficulties associated with giving birth onboard (fig. 2); others use humor to make a point, such as that which aurally depicts a passenger rudely occupying one of the latrines.{2}

One of the most dramatic features of the restored ship is a replica of the engine used to drive its propeller. The original engine was an enormous 1,000-horsepower, cross-wise, double-diagonal, two-crank machine with two cylinders. The replica of this engine occupies a space inside the ship three stories high. Its designers have cleverly reproduced the form and bulk of the original engine without replicating its weight, and because the engine rotates, it helps to convey a sense of the scale and power of the original.
Toward the front of the ship, visitors are led along a mezzanine walkway into a part of the ship that is totally unrestored and without decks. This stands in marked contrast to the way the rest of the ship is presented, and it dramatically illustrates the sheer size of the hull, its volume, and, most importantly, its construction. This enables visitors to more fully appreciate not only what the ship was like before its decks were restored, but also the extent to which its hull is now corroded.

FIG. 4 A typical interpretive panel explaining the long-term challenge of preserving the hull of the ship. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

After I explored the interior of the ship I went through a portal that led me down inside its dry dock and under its hull. This is truly a magical space—and warm, too, for the canopy of rippling water and glass panels that encloses the dock seems to produce a greenhouse effect (fig. 3). On closer inspection, I found that the higher temperature was actually the work of the dry dock’s climate-control plant. Housed in a large container along one of the dock’s walls and fully explained in a series of panels, this system also reduces the chamber’s humidity to prevent further corrosion of the hull (fig. 4). In addition, double doors at the entrance serve as an airlock to help maintain the dock’s environment. By enclosing the ship’s dry dock in this dramatic fashion, the museum has hit upon a truly elegant solution to a complex set of problems: from below, the canopy of water and glass protects the hull of the ship from further corrosion, and from above, it makes for a dramatic presentation of the ship as a whole.

It is easy to see why the new SS Great Britain Museum won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries in 2006, as well as the European Museum Foundation’s Micheletti Prize in 2007. The secret of its success rests in the way it combines a fabulous artifact with an engaging narrative through sensitive and simple interpretations that foster an understanding of why the ship is important and what life onboard was like. What most impressed me about the museum was how it managed to create something new and engaging with relatively simple, tried-and-true display techniques. In a world in which sophisticated mechanical and software-based interactive displays are fast becoming the norm in museums across the United Kingdom, the SS Great Britain Museum stands as a refreshing alternative. In this case, less is definitely more.

Stephen Richards is head of Creative Development at the National Railway Museum in York.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

Herrera starts with a solid understanding of the similarities and differences of “constructivism” in recent work in international relations and in technology studies, and he has a promising plan to bring them together. He clearly summarizes the key insights of constructivist approaches in technology studies, with their emphasis on the social forces that shape the emergence of technology and their relative disregard of the social effects of technologies. Here he is drawing on the basic insights of the contextual history of technology with appropriate citations to key works in the debates on technological determinism (including awareness of the critical literature surrounding Langdon Winner’s well-cited article on Robert Moses’s bus-blocking Long Island bridges) in international relations, by comparison, focuses on the construction and evolution of social identities and the dynamic interplay between such identities and the process of institutional change. (This point is best elaborated on page 23, and on page 217, note 45). As such it differs sharply from the prevailing “neorealist” and “neoliberal” traditions in international relations, traditions that each take the identities and interests of social actors as pre-theoretic givens, that presume rational actors, and that typically prefer quasi-static or schematic models in accounting for change. Leading authors in each of these traditions affirm some version of a technological-determinist stance which posits that “the underlying technological environment determines [sic] the nature of political authority” and that “alterations in the material forces of destruction . . . largely lie outside the control of humans” (p. 29).

Mounting his own critique of technological determinism, Herrera convincingly shows the strengths of constructivist approaches in international relations and argues that they can be augmented by “moving technology inside our theoretical conception of the international system” (p. 26). Through his extended case studies on the railroad and the atom bomb, he observes that certain technologies—mature, large technical systems in Tom Hughes’s sense—will have direct consequences for the international system, and yet that these are also products of the international system and therefore do not have one-way impacts on it. His is a flexible, interactive, contextualized, and fundamentally historical approach. “The best studies of the history of technology show how technology and politics are mutually constitutive,” he writes. “Technology is both a social product and an important independent force because it confronts actors as a real resource or impediment” (p. 7). There is obviously a lot to like here.

Herrera clearly specifies a two-part argument and carefully builds his two case studies around it. His first aim is to show that technologies developed into complex large-scale technological systems in a transnational setting, not just a local or national one, while his second aim is to show that the resulting complex technological systems “significantly altered” what he terms the “interaction capacity” of the international system. Interaction capacity is a widely used concept in international relations. The key point is that in all social systems the capacity of social actors to interact with one another, through technologies or other means, is a capacity of the system as a whole (not solely of the individual actors) and that such interaction can and does shape the nature and evolution of sociotechnical systems. Herrera suggests the (hypothetical) example of two otherwise identical international systems differing only in that communication in one depends on horses and sailing vessels and in the other on global computer networks; obviously the two international systems as well as their respective interaction capacities would differ dramatically. Since technologies are involved in altering the available means for communications, trading, transportation, and violence, they have consequences for the international system.

This mutual shaping or co-construction of international systems and complex technological systems is what Herrera aims to demonstrate with his two case studies. It is easy for him to show that the railroad system in the nineteenth century was a product of state initiatives (as well as professional engineering and private entrepreneurship) and that the atom bomb depended on the massive emigration of European physicists to the United States. It is also easy to construct a case that railroads dramatically altered the interaction capacity of the (European-centered) international system—by facilitating the effective mobilization of much larger armies, by making two-front wars feasible rather than suicidal, and by rewarding the states that were able to build and manage them as well as integrate them into military planning. Prussia looms large, with its railroad activities in the 1840s and 1850s leading to its military victories over Austria and France and its rapid industrialization after 1871. The section concludes with a survey of colonial railroads in China, India, and Africa, and the argument that they were “a necessary part of late-nineteenth-century colonial expansion” (p. 111).

Herrera’s treatment of the atomic bomb likewise proceeds in well-ordered steps. There is ample discussion of the German university system that nurtured so many of the leading atomic physicists, the Nazi-era turmoil that drove them out, and the American philanthropic foundations that brought them to the United States, where many played key roles in the Manhattan Project. And while he highlights the famous physicists, Herrera is well aware of the industrial, managerial, and technological components of the Manhattan Project such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and Du-Pont. “The bomb emerged out of this symbiosis of science, industry, government, and foreign borrowings,” he writes, “and transformed the international system” (p. 183). While few historians of technology would dispute this sensible conclusion, specialists among us will cringe at numerous errors. The assumption that there was a unitary “atom bomb” entirely trips up his discussion of the gun vs. implosion bomb designs (p. 181). Britain’s bomb work simply drops out. And while the narrative focuses squarely on the U.S. atomic bomb effort through 1945, the conclusion is that “nuclear weapons transformed the international system” (p. 120). Indeed, “nuclear” and “atomic” bombs are deployed in the text as if they were synonymous.

My hunch is that Herrera’s work will be used in two ways. Because his overall framing is so obviously attractive, historians can use his chapters for preparing lectures on technology and the international political system (easily correcting the errors). Most of us would enthusiastically embrace his argument that “technological change can induce changes in the nature and distribution of power within the [international] system, but systemic level and state level factors shape technological change” (p. 195). Teachers who are not historically grounded may even find Herrera’s core case studies adequate. But I doubt that Americanists will be satisfied with the atomic bomb chapter, or German historians with his railroad chapter (based largely on pre-1980 sources, while Colleen Dunlavy’s Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia [1994] receives merely a perfunctory citation). Narrative-minded readers may also be put off by Herrera’s structured style of exposition, with its “factors” and “stages” and quasi-imperative language. Still, even if it is not the final word, Technology and International Transformation deserves praise as a thoroughly interdisciplinary and theoretically minded effort to bring international relations REVIEWS into dialogue with the history of technology.

{1}Geoffrey L. Herrera, Technology and International Transformation: The Railroad, the Atom Bomb, and the Politics of Technological Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, pp. ix+265, $65).

Dr. Misa directs the University of Minnesota’s Charles Babbage Institute. His coedited volume, with Mikael Hård, Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in 2008.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology