So what’s going on? Is it something in the water? Without presuming to identify the motivations of our authors, these articles do resonate powerfully with recent events, as water has been in the news increasingly over the past several years. Indeed, as this issue goes to press, dramatic flooding has affected both the Pearl River in South China and the Mississippi River in the United States, devastating communities large and small on opposite sides of the world; a serious drought threatens famine for the Horn of Africa and serious problems for California; and the city of Barcelona has been forced to ship in drinking water and rests its hopes for the future on a desalinization plant, meant to come online within the next few years. Of course, water is often in the news—it is, after all, crucial to human life. Yet changing climate patterns, mobile and in some places growing populations, the growth of water-hungry industry and agriculture, as well as the desire to expand hydropower have unsettled taken-for-granted sociotechnical systems of water management, putting water squarely at the center of public attention. From humble cisterns to monumental dams, water technologies are under increasing scrutiny, as actors rethink historic commitments, the ethics of water use, and the needs of changing societies. In his introductory essay for this issue, Martin Reuss explores the theme of social negotiation that runs through these articles, comparing the nature and significance of the process across cultures and time periods and encouraging us to think more about the technical expert as negotiator. As we might expect, technical actors and governing authorities play a key role here, but Reuss also shows the role that collective memories of past practices (accurate or not) play in these histories. Remembering the past is a centrally important activity in the social renegotiation of water use.

What is especially striking about July’s articles is their temporal and geographical distribution. The eras examined range from medieval times to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Geographically, the articles examine stories from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, making this very likely the first time that a single issue of Technology and Culture has published articles from four continents. The unplanned nature of this issue highlights an encouraging scholarly trend in the history of technology. As a profession, we have started to address two longstanding historiographic problems: the largely U.S. and European focus of much history of technology (and a fairly small slice of Europe at that) and our collective emphasis on the modern era. The historiography of technology, as rich, vital, and exciting as it is, has never been sufficiently diverse in either time or place to narrate a truly global history of technological change. In recent years, however, this has started to change. As the profession continues to grow and spread, new and expanding scholarship on Africa, Asia, the neglected areas of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and Latin America gives us the opportunity to challenge both the narratives of technological change that inform undergraduate surveys and our own assumptions about what matters. We may find fresh ways to link the modest usefulness of the digging stick to the complexity of the jet engine without doing a disservice to either, incorporating, but not being overwhelmed by, the industrial revolution and European and North American experiments in modernity. We are not suggesting that historians of technology should pursue what Bill Storey once referred to as “weak multiculturalism,” where diversity is an end in itself, and marginalized countries and eras get center stage only as representatives of the marginal. Rather, it is a call to reconsider how we have delineated the “stories that matter” and to consider how to enrich our insight into the complex dynamics of technology in human history—all of human history.

Water is a nearly ideal lens for thinking anew about global narratives in the history of technology. Both its fundamental importance and the profound diversity of technological solutions to water problems embedded in different cultures and ecologies make the study of water an appropriate and useful way to explore technology and culture on a truly global basis. Water is a fundamental requirement for human survival: no human society, no matter how small, can survive without some means of procuring it. The society need not be very large before some social negotiation of water use and distribution becomes important, and sprinkling, spilling, and immersing people in water can carry basic or profound spiritual, ethical, and cultural meanings. Water can be threatening in the form of floods, tsunami, and fast-flowing rivers, while stagnant water provides an ideal breeding ground for parasites and bacteria that can devastate human settlements. However, even beyond the basic need for drinking water, human societies have also found water to be, simply put, useful: water transport is faster and, with the right technology, often easier than going by foot; water, the universal solvent, is enormously useful for flushing away wastes, both human and industrial; and water, properly applied, can dramatically improve agricultural yields. The marvelous, multifaceted usefulness of water is reflected in the multifaceted sociotechnics of water control, distribution, and use, for they embody a culture’s needs, desires, values, and conflicts.

The articles presented here were written without reference to each other, making the parallels and comparisons that leap off the pages even more striking. Taken together, they raise thematic concerns, themselves not new, which may help us to think through global narratives of technology history: the culture and politics of collective memory, the circulation of technical knowledge and technical practitioners, the politics of artifacts, and the artifacts of politics when both surfeit and scarcity are undesirable conditions.

This is indeed a special issue. To make way for this array of articles, we have scaled back our usual complement of essays, essay reviews, and exhibit reviews. Rest assured these will return in the next issue. In the meantime, enjoy this excursion into the global history of water.

My own civilian career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirms that engineers often spend more time negotiating than building. In the United States, federal public works negotiations take place in what is loosely called “the planning process,” one that extends from the preparation of feasibility reports, environmental impact statements, cultural resource management studies, and at least preliminary design memoranda to congressional authorization and appropriation. The process usually includes public meetings and scores of smaller discussions with community and political leaders. Similar planning hurdles exist in many other industrialized countries. Obstacles often take years to resolve, if they ever are. Few engineers look forward to this process, which inevitably delays construction and creates new uncertainties, but laws and policy prescribe it and it is ignored at agency peril. Many engineers, and not a few historians, attribute the process to environmental-era legislation and regulations. Quite the contrary, as Paul Dobraszczyk shows in his discussion of Joseph Bazalgette, its roots can easily be seen in mid-nineteenth-century public works planning and certainly go back even further.

Negotiations about public works projects occur regardless of time or place. Exceptions are limited to extremely autocratic regimes, where megalomania is often abundantly evident and the rule of law is not. Even many despotic or totalitarian rulers, however, may invite negotiations within the government and among agencies, but not necessarily with the public or other governments and international organizations (except to obtain funding and technical support). The more transparent and democratic the government, the more likely that negotiations will be comprehensive and protracted. They may embrace government agencies; various levels of government within a country; nations; community, national, and international organizations; and, increasingly, nongovernmental institutions. Negotiations are rarely only about project design or the allocation of administrative authority, but also involve visions of the past and future as expressed in custom, values, and written and oral traditions. This is vividly portrayed in the essays of Heather Hoag and May-Britt Öhman, who examine colonial East Africa; Dianne van Oosterhout, who focuses on colonial Indonesia; and Noyan Dinçkal, who writes about water infrastructure modernization in Istanbul. In all cases, the authors deal with the reconciliation of Western technology and indigenous cultural values. In assessing competing visions, opposing political desires, conflicting science, and often intangible cultural benefits and costs, public works engineers attempt to mediate the incommensurable. Their scale weighs cultural preferences, economic requirements, environmental protection, and various sociopolitical issues at all levels of government. It often requires that the quantitative give way to the qualitative, and the purported objective to the subjective. No wonder that public works engineers find reading the scale difficult and are often accused of tipping it one way or the other. Several of the articles in this issue correctly imply that success in public works requires far more than good engineering; it demands ability to listen, skill to negotiate, capacity for empathy, patience to understand, and willingness to say “no”—both to the government and to the people directly affected.

Broadly speaking, public works are projects that benefit the body politic rather than any one institution, public or private. Before law became so complex, engineering projects so big, and communities so fragmented—in other words, before industrialization—such a definition might have sufficed. In some Western European communities, medieval public works officials may have been simple plumbers who were charged with keeping the hydraulic works functioning, the water free from pollution, and not much more.1 Even this arrangement may have impressed some municipalities as unnecessarily ambitious. Dolly Jørgensen and Esha Shah remind us that public works need not require engineers at all. Jørgensen focuses on maintenance issues in medieval English and Swedish towns. The water technology itself was uncomplicated, and negotiations revolved around the precise responsibilities of the residents and the municipalities to ensure water drainage and waste disposal. These negotiations involved town councilors, homeowners, and perhaps professional pavers, but evidently no engineers. The questions by and large were ones of regulation, not engineering, although clearly the two were, and are, linked. In another part of the world, Shah uses the folk literature of India to show how upper classes negotiated the location of tanks (small irrigation reservoirs), while the lower class Voddas (tank builders) negotiated construction methods among themselves and working conditions with the upper classes and the gods. The Voddas used craft technology—they were artisans, not engineers, yet they built reservoirs that earned plaudits from European engineers centuries later.

During the last two centuries negotiations have become more complicated, as more people and institutions are involved and more demands are made on water infrastructure. As several of the essays show, clashing views over planned projects are rarely confined to questions of technique or effectiveness, but extend to questions regarding whether those who benefit are also those who pay and what the costs, both tangible and intangible, actually are. They also reveal, as Oosterhout and David Biggs suggest, that old cultural baggage is not easily discarded, but often is used—or manipulated—to mobilize support or inspire opposition. Today, in most parts of the world, public works engineers attempt to mediate conflicting views and evidence, and project construction might rest more on negotiating ability than technical proficiency.

In this issue of Technology and Culture, the authors focus on water. They examine dams, irrigation works, and urban water supply, and they discuss numerous project purposes, including urban and agricultural drainage, hydropower, navigation, and flood control. The challenges of water resources development prevail in other public works programs, but the universal need for water—or for protection from it—raises the stakes and magnifies the issues. Success or failure may spell the difference between life and death. This introduction considers how each article furthers our understanding of the role of negotiation in engineering. The following two sections consider negotiations among people and institutions and among stories and traditions. Each section begins with a project that did not involve engineers, but still required negotiation. From there, we turn to several essays that show how negotiations have expanded and how essential public works engineers are to the process. The final section relates political scientist James Scott’s ideas about high modernism to water resources history and uses the Bonneville Dam article by Abbie Liel and David Billington to touch upon the technical negotiations that public works engineers have with other engineers and experts.2

The Engineer as Negotiator: People and Institutions

Dolly Jørgensen peers into an era when negotiations principally occurred among city officials, and the position of public works engineer did not yet exist. Rather, a cooperative association between town leaders and residents ensured the construction and maintenance of pubic works. Jørgensen examines medieval Coventry, Norwich, and York in England and Stockholm, Sweden, to show us how streets were used both for transportation and for water drainage. Town councils passed laws requiring residents to maintain the area in front of their homes to the middle of the street, where a gutter conveyed wastewater. In some cases, householders paid professional pavers to maintain the street. Jørgensen does not describe the qualifications these pavers had, but the fact that paving emerged as a craft with specified skills and standards is noteworthy. The entire system depended on individual households fulfilling obligations that emerged from negotiations within the town councils and between municipal authorities and residents. We may assume that violations increased as cities grew, necessitating closer control and inspection and perhaps eventually the hiring of a public works official to ensure that maintenance duties were properly executed. The author refutes the common perception that medieval streets were used to convey waste as well as water. Municipal councils often provided carts around the town for the collection of waste, including organic matter. Periodically, the carts would be taken out of town and their contents dumped. Officials even employed street cleaners, taxing the householders for this service. One commendable aspect of Jørgensen’s article is the use of both historical and archaeological resources. Archaeological evidence is especially rich in water resources history and deserves more attention from both historians of technology and environmental historians.3

Paul Dobraszczyk brings us closer to the present with his focus on Joseph Bazalgette and the London drainage system. He considers the role of technical representations—both written and pictorial documents—in the construction of the drainage system. These representations were, and are, contained in contracts, instruments of negotiation that the author closely examines.4 Bazalgette’s contracts prescribed both the design and cost of materials and labor; rather than encouraging innovation and efficiency, his primary concern was uniformity. He expected all the bids to be pretty much within a narrow range in terms of both cost and construction of the project. Wide variations from the government estimate showed a lack of understanding of the process. Cost differences largely related to organizational efficiency, logistics, and experience.

An examination of contracts and drawings is a useful way to analyze the evolution of the engineer as negotiator. After Bazalgette’s time, in the UK and elsewhere, technical negotiation became more important as public works engineers increasingly depended on both the resources and resourcefulness of contractors. To eliminate ambiguities and reduce challenges before and after awarding the contract, many large public works agencies employed lawyers, and all had access to them. Excepting the engineering drawings, legal requirements rather than engineering specifications dominated many public works solicitations for work (requests for proposals), and contracts themselves increasingly became instruments of constraint in the twentieth century. Solicitations carefully described the project and often provided legal and land restrictions, but they left it to the bidder to design the project and to provide a cost estimate after careful analysis of the required labor and materials (keeping in mind any government requirements regarding minimum wage or restrictions on suppliers). Under these circumstances, the low bid could be significantly lower or higher than the government estimate. In case of the latter, the government could either reject the bid or seek additional funds. Since Bazalgette, public works projects have become more negotiable from an engineer’s perspective, but less negotiable from a lawyer’s.

Dobraszczyk discusses Bazalgette’s skillful use of well-drafted, colored maps and illustrations to win over opponents and doubters. Hearings before London’s Metropolitan Board of Works to approve designs became almost pro forma, and Bazalgette’s apparent conflicts of interest and cozy relationships with contractors awaited future examination. The drawings also attracted public interest and support for the project. Bazalgette, however, commissioned few photographs to show construction development. In contrast, his counterpart across the Atlantic, army engineer officer Montgomery Meigs, used cameras to document progress on numerous public works in antebellum Washington, D.C., including the Washington water supply system. Historian Mike Chrimes argues that Meigs’s effort was probably “the earliest example of extensive use of photography to record civil engineering projects.”5 Evidently, Bazalgette saw little need for photography other than to complement the engraved illustrations in the Illustrated London News. He could control drawings but not photographs, and his objective was to persuade, not to preserve a visual record.

Bazalgette’s undeniable expertise, organizational ability, political judgment, and institutional connections gained him independence and influence in public and private engineering circles alike. His career shows the public works engineer negotiating with municipal authority, various contractors, interested parties, and the general public. David Biggs’s revealing essay on the Plain of Reeds in Vietnam illustrates a different side of the engineer as negotiator. Biggs analyzes the engineer as a middleman among governments, and between governments and communities. He provocatively suggests that a local mentality heavily shaped by the colonial past subverted the best of American intentions. But the story is complicated and often involves language more than action. “Intermediaries” in Bruno Latour’s sense of the word—people and things that transform meaning as they convey it—take concepts and values with very specific definitions and over time pass these to multiple levels of society. As they do, description often becomes less precise and language more ambiguous.

In Biggs’s narrative, colonial and postcolonial administrations attempted to develop the Plain of Reeds in the Mekong Delta. Before World War II, the French envisioned the relocation of landless peasants to the Plain of Reeds, where they would live in casiers, agricultural settlements surrounded by flood dikes. War and then insurgency put these plans on hold, and in the years following the division of Vietnam in 1954, South Vietnamese president Ngô Æçnh Di¨m increasingly linked economic development to military security, finally coming out with plans to turn casiers into “strategic hamlets.” Meanwhile, American and remaining French engineers used dredges and other expensive equipment, rather than less sophisticated methods, to clear waterways and reclaim land. The costly equipment became a problem because of maintenance and logistics issues and lack of security. In the 1960s, American plans resurrected the earlier, French idea of casiers, but they also displayed sensitivity to local ecosystems and recognized that the development of the Plain of Reeds must be integrated with river basin development along the entire lower Mekong River. Many American engineers and politicians hoped for an American “TVA” in Southeast Asia. This, of course, did not happen. Still, the French casiers concept heavily influenced postcolonial plans, and it continues to do so to the present day. In this way, engineers and institutions put old ideas into new bottles. The theme resonates in other articles in this issue.

Biggs looks at the Plain of Reeds in terms of engineering expertise and political judgment; his focus is local, although he shows how differing local and foreign cultures affect engineering approaches and objectives. What remains is to place the story in the larger framework of development in Southeast Asia. International efforts to develop the Mekong River stretch back at least to just after the end of World War II. Among the institutions involved are the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). An examination of the documents in the French, U.S., and UN archives will allow us to evaluate more accurately the use of engineering expertise at all levels of government. Clearly, insecure governments prize and often try to monopolize professional expertise. Sometimes the motivation is simply to retain in-house expertise not subject to outside influences. Such internal expertise allows governments to lay claim to objectivity, even in instances where the engineering numbers and scientific evidence are contentious. The hope may be that this objectivity will win over public works opponents, who often have their own data. More often, however, public works engineers find that a satisfactory outcome emerges only through protracted negotiations that emphasize the cultural over the technical.

Like Biggs, Heather Hoag and May-Britt Öhman tell a story that bridges colonial and postcolonial administrations. Their essay examines water development in East Africa’s Rufiji River Basin. Here, too, the data collected by British engineers in the colonial period heavily influenced the economic development plans of Tanzania’s new, independent government. Later, national and international aid organizations provided conflicting plans, which sometimes proved seriously inadequate and even professionally suspect. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s dependence on aerial surveys precluded any detailed understanding of basin ecology, and a Swedish study used insufficient hydrological data and analysis. In some cases, the engineers viewed the people and landscape through their own cultural lens, which resulted in inferences at odds with indigenous knowledge and environmental conditions. Through their reports, they served as intermediaries, both transmitting and transforming information. Clearly, a number of engineers failed to appreciate the tenacity of tradition in East Africa or that the fundamental issue in the era of independence was not industrialization (Westernization), but political and cultural sovereignty. Perhaps most important, international development agencies and even the Tanzanian government failed to grasp the fundamental point that indigenous culture and tradition, not foreign values, legitimize change. The studies described by Hoag and Öhman suggest another engineering role: the engineer as historian. Engineers like Alexander Telford and Clement Gillman investigated both social behavior and physical phenomena and often were the first to publish fundamental investigations into both the peoples and natural world of a river basin. In the United States, the so-called 308 Reports produced by the Army Corps of Engineers similarly provided reams of data on both the social and physical characteristics of scores of river basins. These investigations often serve as the starting points for historical research and, in the absence of any anthropological and scientific investigations, may prove critical. The ability to integrate disparate lines of inquiry into a narrative history thus becomes another useful analytical skill for engineers, one that unfortunately is little appreciated.

The essay by Hoag and Öhman complements Biggs’s. In both cases, colonial and postcolonial engineers communicate between the authorities and the local population. Hoag and Öhman implicitly raise, but do not answer, questions dealing with coordination within the independent Tanzanian bureaucracy. A study of internal discussions among the Rufiji Basin Development Authority, the Tanzanian Water Development and Irrigation Division (Ministry of Agriculture), and the Ministry of Water and Mineral Resources might give us a more nuanced view of the Tanzanian response to Western engineering plans. While both articles primarily reveal the engineer as a negotiator among people and institutions, they also uncover the engineer as negotiator among stories and traditions. This latter theme is more explicitly treated in the articles by Shah, Dinçkal, and Oosterhout, to which we now turn.

The Engineer as Negotiator: Stories and Traditions

As with Dolly Jørgensen, Esha Shah brings us back to preindustrial times. She argues that precolonial scientific and technological knowledge in India cannot be reduced to simplistic contextual comparisons with European, especially British colonial, knowledge. Rather, traditional folk literature, temple inscriptions, and other textual evidence illuminate past social activities, including her focus, the construction of Indian tanks (small irrigation reservoirs behind earthen embankments), beginning in the first centuries CE. Her sources are not modern planning reports, policy statements, and blueprints. Instead, she relies on oral tradition, songs, and written folktales replete with human sacrifice, gods, and various monsters. The Voddas (tank builders), a lower caste, constructed the tanks. They were skilled artisans, but not engineers, and it is difficult to know how much actual engineering occurred in the abstract, Western sense—possibly none. Instead, the laborers worked from memory, practical experience, and knowledge of the land. The number of tanks grew exponentially as more land came under cultivation. Higher-caste leaders and priests chose the locations, oversaw the work, and paid the workers. Here, negotiations occurred among castes, within separate castes, and between castes and priests and, according to folk traditions, castes and gods.

Folk literature provides much evidence about how the tanks were constructed, for what purpose, and with what limitations. The tales and songs do not always agree, as one might expect when some stories come from the Voddas and others from the higher castes. Nevertheless, they serve as important sources for the history of the tanks. British engineer W. G. Bligh inspected the tanks in the early twentieth century and confirmed the essential soundness of their construction as revealed in the folk literature. Archaeologist Kathleen Morrison reached the same conclusion at the end of the century. Shah suggests that the literature is unclear about the level of coercion applied to the Voddas or whether their grievances over pay were justified or not. What is clear is that values congenial to a stratified and often violent society are embedded in the history of the tank system. Moreover, the folktales that transmit so much of the history mix the secular and the spiritual. One can hardly avoid comparing this literature with the biblical description of the Hebrews building the monuments of ancient Egypt. Shah’s effort encourages a closer look at what folk literature may tell us about technology—and what anthropology has to offer to historians of technology. While space prohibits any comparison here, an analysis of the ways in which modern-day engineers bear some of the same negotiating burdens as premodern artisans opens the door to an exploration of the ways that technical expertise is disseminated, exploited, and acquired in human communities.

David Nye’s work suggests another promising way to look at the Indian folk literature. His insights about“Second Creation” technological narratives in the United States perhaps can be applied to what might be called “technotales”—folk stories about work and technology.6 For instance, in what ways, if any, did these Indian folktales explain the assimilation of nature into a technological system, and to what end did the system exist? What cultural values did they convey and what, if any, developmental process did they explain? In what way did they conflate the spiritual and the secular to explain technological advance? It may be that many of these tales lack the optimism essential to Nye’s technological narratives, but that should not preclude assessing their value in establishing the degree and purpose of human (including engineering) intervention in the natural world. Cultural conflict is a recurring theme in folktales, and as Noyan Dinçkal discusses in his article on the Istanbul water system, it is also a theme in technological history. In this case, Western engineers played the contradictory role of transferring a self-consciously European water technology to Istanbul while also ensuring the continuance of the city’s traditional public fountains. With funding provided by charitable endowments, these fountains numbered in the hundreds and had been built over several centuries prior to the so-called era of reform in the mid-nineteenth century. They not only provided free water, but also served as centers of public space; many were embellished in a highly artistic manner. Dinçkal maintains that they rivaled mosques in cultural importance.

However, by the nineteenth century, population increase and severe financial problems created havoc with the city’s water supply. There was not enough water for either domestic consumption or firefighting; conduits were neither extended nor maintained. In the 1870s, Istanbul authorities decided it was time to modernize using Western technologies and a centralized water system. The step would resolve water issues while at the same time proclaiming the Ottoman capital an enlightened and progressive city. Still, tradition was to be given its due. Turkish officials negotiated agreements with French companies that, in exchange for the right to build and operate a new centralized water system, required the companies to provide free water to meet various public needs, including schools, fire hydrants, hospitals, and the fountains. Additionally, the agreements required the companies to build fountains at specified locations, thus guaranteeing that public fountains would continue and increase in number. The stipulations obviously undermined efforts to privatize the water system, and, as service was extended to all parts of the city, the companies faced financial problems. Aside from Europeans and wealthy Ottoman Turks, who eagerly emulated Western ways, few residents agreed to become customers and pay for tap water when they could obtain free water at the fountains.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Istanbul had a hybrid water system: one part tradition, one part European. Municipal authorities built a new water main in 1902 that added to the heterogeneity. The new main principally supplied water to the fountains and public institutions. Then, after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the municipal administration took control of the water system and faced major public health problems resulting from the poor quality water and deteriorating conditions at the public fountains. Authorities, too, were anxious to continue the modernization of their city and to connect households to a central water system. Consequently, by midcentury, most public fountains had been closed. They had lost their social significance as well as functional usefulness, and their demise marked the end of a tradition reaching back centuries.

The modernization of Istanbul’s water system required the transfer of cultural and technological values from Western Europe, and that in turn required negotiations with European water companies. Apparently, the municipal authorities paid far more attention to the districts to be served than to the manner of construction. According to Dinçkal, they specified which districts would receive taps, but prescribed little regarding the number of households to be served or the exact extent of the water system. The new system also conveyed numerous and conflicting meanings to Istanbul’s jumbled population. Many residents preferred to retain the old Ottoman public fountains, not simply because they were free, but also because of their highly artistic style and their use in religious ceremonies. Until the municipal administration pushed through the completion of the water system, primarily for public health reasons, cultural fragmentation, not technological obstacles, delayed universal acceptance of Western water technology and management.

In comparison, Dianne van Oosterhout’s narrative tells of the grafting of European sensibilities onto an indigenous technology, helping to imbue it with perceived values that facilitated its resurrection decades later. The subject is the waduks of the Netherlands East Indies. The waduk is a small reservoir used for irrigation, similar to Indian water tanks. Dutch irrigation engineers, who had replaced local village water lords by the end of the nineteenth century, thought that the construction and regulation of waduks might lead to a more equitable allocation of water, improve productivity, and insulate growers from arbitrary decisions by local leaders and colonial administrators. Water would be stored in the reservoirs at night and distributed during the day.7 Both small farmers, who grew mainly rice, and large, European sugar plantation operators would profit. The Dutch constructed these waduks in the early twentieth century in the sugar-producing parts of Java. Whether the reservoirs would provide all the benefits envisioned was an open question. Since their origins were indigenous, dating back to the precolonial period, they fit prevailing cultural preferences in favor of small-scale, local technology. Yet they proved particularly vulnerable to abuse, since under cover of darkness upstream farmers would block the flow of water from the tanks. Thus, results were mixed. Thievery eventually declined, and the new allocation of water encouraged the cultivation of secondary (non-rice) crops. Still, some farmers refused to cooperate; they evidently feared repercussions from either authorities or the sugar plantation owners. Nor did the waduk system prove as economically efficient as hoped. While Oosterhout reports that by 1919, 342 waduks had been put in operation, the experiment eventually failed. Although a technologically sound idea, the system became too costly, and so many farmers opposed the regulation that the system never became viable. Moreover, the Dutch began to favor large-scale over local irrigation projects. Perhaps the major problem, Oosterhout argues, was that the engineers never valued the local context and never solicited the views of farmers and local elites. Engineers should have served as intermediaries between the government and the local community, but instead they subordinated the indigenous social context to their own technological values. It seems clear, although Oosterhout does not explicitly state it, that the engineers’ reports that reached higher administrative levels conveyed far more technical language than the views of local communities.

Oosterhout’s essay continues with the era of independence. At first, irrigation works decayed, but in the period following President Suharto’s takeover of the government, a new interest in improving irrigation emerged. The government planned numerous large-scale projects, some of which involved the construction of reservoirs far larger than those created during the period prior to independence. Still, the new reservoirs were also called waduks. They served irrigation, but often other needs became paramount, such as electricity, flood control, and even recreation. Their construction sometimes required the resettlement of villages. Suharto, Oosterhout shows, suggested that these waduks came from traditional technological knowledge and that now was the time to “restore” them. Given the substantial differences between the new and old waduks, this claim stretched credibility, but it clearly resonated with many Indonesians. In West Java, farmers built smaller waduks more closely resembling their colonial counterparts. The construction of the waduks in part resulted from the conviction that the technology not only better suited the people’s needs, but also elevated moral order. In other words, the colonial past was more just and less corrupt than Suharto’s Indonesia—or, as Oosterhout puts it, the sentiment sprang from a collective “romanticization of the colonial past.” Indeed, early-twentieth-century waduks evoked sentiment and imagery far more enduring than the waduks themselves. A system that had failed to eliminate all abuses, increase production, or substantially enhance the local economy helped legitimize developments that occurred more than half a century later. In a sense, Dutch colonial engineers negotiated better with future communities than with those they actually dealt with.

High Modernism

Today, hardly any academic discussion of government’s relationship to public works escapes mention of James Scott’s idea of high modernism, and three of the articles in this issue (Shah, Hoag and Öhman, and Biggs) explicitly refer to it, although not always with approval. Scott includes in high modernism a confident belief in scientific and technological progress, expanding production, rational design of social order, growing satisfaction of human needs, and increasing control of nature. He believes that all these characteristics emerged in industrializing Europe and North America in the period roughly from 1830 until World War I.8 Readers of this journal will recognize that high modernism largely replicates the engineering orthodoxy that held sway by the end of the nineteenth century.9 The interesting point for us to consider is that Biggs, Hoag and Öhman, and Shah do not embrace Scott’s argument it its entirety, but they do use it as a kind of counterpoint to their own theses. In other words, Scott’s definitions and construction carry weight even if his overall contribution may be deficient in one respect or another. Thus, Hoag and Öhman note Scott’s use of the term “legible” to describe waterways that are,in their words, “knowable and controllable” (and—the larger point—capable of being manipulated). Shah suggests that Scott’s use of the Greek term me¯tis to describe local practical skills very nearly describes premodern traditional knowledge, such as that which the Voddas exhibited. Biggs more broadly rejects Scott’s high-modernist concept as an explanation for the failure of American nation-building in Vietnam. Instead, he argues that local actors influenced by colonial conditions undermined and transformed American intentions.

Ironically, nothing is mentioned of high modernism in the one article in this issue that most fully captures its essence: Abbie Liel and David Billington’s essay on Bonneville Dam. Here was a project that not only altered land and water, but also helped transform the entire economy and society of the Pacific Northwest. It mobilized science and technology to answer numerous challenging engineering issues, and it placed the national government— through the Army Corps of Engineers—squarely in the driver’s seat.

The authors emphasize innovations at Bonneville Dam in concrete mix, spillway design, and a new water turbine. Undeniably, these innovations were engineering achievements that reflect well on the Corps of Engineers. Yet a bit of historical context suggests that these innovations occurred within an established institutional framework that departed little from typical Corps organization and procedures. For instance, the Corps’ increasing dependence on civilian experts began in the immediate post–Civil War era.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, many of these experts were hired temporarily for work on specific projects. Some, such as Hugh Cooper at Wilson Dam, were hired as consultants, but in no ways did hiring an outside consultant—even one with substantial supervisory authority such as Cooper—reduce the Corps’ responsibility for approving designs and overseeing project construction. In another example, the use of models to resolve design issues extended back to the construction of Ohio River locks in the late nineteenth century, and Gatun Dam in Panama and Wilson Dam on the Tennessee River in the early twentieth.10 Four years before the commencement of the Bonneville Dam project, the agency had begun building a major hydraulics laboratory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and had already performed some model investigations. Also, the Corps’ experience in constructing fish ladders did not begin on the Columbia River but goes back to the Potomac River in the 1870s.11 Finally, during the same decade that Bonneville Dam was constructed, Corps personnel, occasionally with the support of outside consultants and university laboratories, produced numerous innovations dealing with lock and dam combinations on the Ohio and upper Mississippi rivers and with multipurpose dams on the Missouri River. Any assessment of engineering contributions at Bonneville Dam must acknowledge a Corps history that transcends both the New Deal and the Columbia River.

Beyond the question of context, an even greater challenge beckons: crediting the right people for innovations, or even identifying when the innovations first appeared. If Isaac Newton “stood on the shoulders of giants,” most engineers stand on the shoulders of hundreds, if not thousands, of predecessors in their profession. Attribution thus becomes difficult. In this regard, public works agencies may pose special problems. Within these agencies, nameless and subordinate engineers, consultants, and contractors can make a huge difference in both structural and mechanical innovations and project design. The research challenge is daunting. Aside from careful inspection of the technical literature, which may extend the research back for decades, historians must also examine agency policies, rules, regulations, organizational structure, and even operational philosophy. Their research should include agency archival material, including meeting minutes and technical and political correspondence and memoranda. In the United States, federal agency material is often scattered among the regional offices of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), making the research task even more difficult. In this regard, most unpublished agency archival material dealing with Bonneville Dam is at the Seattle regional office of NARA, and an examination of the documents there would certainly have enhanced the story that Liel and Billington relate.

When they track the story of innovation, historians often find one more story of negotiation, this time more technical in nature, at least partly performed out of public view, and in recent decades strongly interdisciplinary in character. Negotiations can be marked by collaboration at one point, competition at another. Sometimes, of course, even the most conscientious analysis of the documents may yield frustratingly meager results. Yet historical investigation can offer something even more rewarding than the identification of individual engineering contributions. Agency policies and regulations respond to political requirements, cultural values, professional standards, and agency self-image. As such, they establish the formal rules of negotiation within the agency and between the agency and outside engineers and experts (and, of course, politicians and stakeholders); they provide valuable insights into the practice of high modernism within the government. A close reading reveals boundaries between liberty and authority, centralization and decentralization, and technical expert and politician. Such an examination helps us to understand and define the political process.12

Any analysis of engineering negotiations in the public works arena necessitates some modification of Scott’s high-modernist concept. At a minimum, the articles in this issue suggest that successful engineering requires more than the application of scientific rationalization. Indeed, rather than pushing politics to the side, as high-modernist ideology prescribes, modern public works negotiations often place politics—meaning here the often conflicting relationships among social groups—squarely in the middle of any discussion about a project. Consequently, social input—irrelevant in high modernism—becomes a key feature of negotiations. Nor can engineers focus only on the future, as high modernists are inclined to do. Aside from the fact that engineers depend on prior surveys and examinations to supplement their own site inspections and analyses, successful engineers take into account indigenous knowledge, cultural biases, and patterns of living, all products of historical evolution. Finally, it will come as little surprise to many public works engineers that social-engineering projects imposed from above have little chance of success, as Scott points out.13 None of this means that the institutions that employ engineers necessarily will follow engineering advice, or that government policies and funding will support engineers’ requests to obtain local information or expand the scope of investigations; the articles on East Africa, Indonesia, and Vietnam inform us otherwise.

What it does suggest is that public works engineers around the world are linked by common experiences that do not correspond with high-modernist ideology. The ways in which these experiences are reconciled with high modernism deserves more historical analysis. Similarly, Scott’s book provides a starting point for examining the intersection of modern Western technique, rooted in theory and mathematical rationalization, with me¯tis, the practical knowledge and skills found at the local level. In defining technological advances, we tend to focus on artifacts, on things, on “boys and their toys.” But in defining the art of engineering, we must pay more attention to a negotiating process that does not always end in a project, but nevertheless is an intrinsic part of engineering activity. Without understanding the engineer as negotiator, we cannot hope to understand public works engineering as a profession. Every engineer brings to negotiations a vision formed from experience, training, imagination, and cultural inferences. In the case of water projects, the vision usually involves transforming nature’s order into a second order that is publicly financed, serves a social need, and involves manipulation of a natural resource. The control of water may include dams, locks, levees, floodwalls, pumps, pipes, channels and ditches, diversion structures, water-and waste-treatment plants, turbines, and chemical and mechanical water purification technology. These are the products of the water resources engineer, but whether they are used or the project is built at all can be decided only after engineers modify their vision through negotiations with one another and with other interested parties. This negotiated vision becomes the raw material of design. It reconciles tradition and technique, the past and future, with tradition often gaining more influence than engineers had originally contemplated. Negotiations explore the possible, define project meaning, and test engineering imagination. Over time and in locations near and remote, negotiations change the very nature of public works engineering and of what people expect of engineers.

1. Roberta J. Magnusson, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 2001), 118–21.

2. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998).

3. Historians who have exploited archaeological resources in water history include Magnusson (n. 1 above); Dora P. Crouch, Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities (Oxford, 1993); Trevor Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (London, 1989); André E. Guillerme, The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800 (College Station, Tex., 1988); Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Baltimore, 1983), and subsequent articles; Louis C. Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, vol. 1: Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville, Va., 1979); and Patrick M. Malone, Canals and Industry: Engineering in Lowell, 1821–1880 (Lowell, Mass., 1983), and subsequent studies and articles. Archaeological resources for historians also include cultural resource management (CRM) reports prepared, usually by archaeologists, for various U.S. public works agencies prior to project construction. See also the reports, photographs, and illustrations of the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER). For online access, go to (accessed 6 May 2008). There are also numerous articles dealing with water projects in IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology and in American Canals: Bulletin of the American Canal Society.

4. Historian Mike Chrimes first drew attention to the importance of Bazalgette’s contract documents and drawings; according to Chrimes, “the printed contract documents and lithographed contract drawings were part of a meticulous attention to detail in the contract procedure which are the basis of civil engineering contracts today.” See Chrimes, Civil Engineering, 1839–1889: A Photographic History (Phoenix Mill, U.K., 1991), 87–88.

5. Ibid., 11.

6. David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

7. Maurits Ertsen calls the waduks “night reservoirs” and provides a Dutch spelling for the word, nachtwadoeks; see Ertsen, Prescribing Perfection: Emergence of an Engineering Irrigation Design Approach in the Netherlands East Indies and Its Legacy, 1830–1990 (Rotterdam, 2005), 91–93.

8. Scott (n. 2 above), 89–90.

9. On this point, see Edwin T. Layton Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore, 1971), esp. 53–78.

10. On early corps analytical techniques, see Martin Reuss, “The Art of Scientific Precision: River Research in the United States Army Corps of Engineers to 1945,” Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 292–323.

11. Frank N. Schubert, “From the Potomac to the Columbia: The Corps of Engineers and Anadromous Fisheries,” unpublished draft (December 1978). Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Virginia.

12. For a discussion of the parameters molding water resources development in the United States, see Martin Reuss, “The Development of American Water Resources: Planners, Politicians, and Constitutional Interpretation,” in Managing Water Resources: Past and Present, ed. Julie Trottier and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2004), 51–71.

13. Scott (n. 2 above), 94–95, 340.

Dr. Reuss retired from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2006, after having served as the senior historian, water resources, for over twenty-five years. Presently he is a consulting historian and continues his research and writing on water history. He expresses his appreciation to Suzanne Moon for her critical eye, encouraging words, and welcome suggestions.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Under such conditions, the volumes reviewed here—a recent subset of the emerging literature—constitute welcome, if highly varied, contributions. Peter Annin’s The Great Lakes Water Wars (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006, pp. 320, $29.95) follows directly in a tradition of popular journalistic books about water, starting in the United States with Marc Reisner’s now canonical Cadillac Desert (1986) and leading up through more recent books like Diane Ward’s Water Wars (2002), Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke’s Blue Gold (2003), and Robert Glennon’s Water Follies (2004).1 At the heart of Annin’s story lies the as-yet-unrealized specter of large-scale, out-of-basin transfers from the Great Lakes basin to the high plains, the American Southwest, or beyond. The book does a particularly nice job at tracing this fear over time, as well as the various steps taken to prevent it from actually happening. Annin is arguably strongest at tracing the obscure and tortuous path of political negotiation—through a variety of agreements, compacts, and less formal arrangements among regional policymakers—to maintain the integrity of the basin line and to construct political and legal defenses against would-be diverters. This work resulted most recently in the Great Lakes Compact, signed by regional leaders in 2005 and now slowly working its way through the various provincial and state legislatures. Annin’s book also gives a nice account of basin diversions to date, ranging from the famous (e.g., the reversal of the Chicago River in 1900) to the obscure (e.g., the almost untold Long Lac/Ogoki story, which involved turning the vast bulk of the Ogoki River back into the basin and away from its natural flow to James Bay).

Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly for a book of its kind, the human story of Great Lakes water (apart from boardroom intrigues in the various state legislatures) mostly drops out of Annin’s account. We see surprisingly little of the people who actually live and work on the lakes, and who presumably stand to lose the most. While the book is deeply sympathetic to their concerns, the advocacy community itself and the broader social movements surrounding the issue of water supply don’t show up in any kind of detail. The net result is a competent, timely, and certainly important book, but one which lacks the dramatic punch of a book like Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (admittedly, a high bar). This may in part be a feature of the topic under study; fights over small and extremely local transfers to places like Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, and Lowell, Indiana, while no doubt significant for legal precedent, can hardly command the drama of a Hoover Dam, an Imperial Valley, or an Owens Valley water grab by the city of Los Angeles. But one also wonders whether, in centering the Great Lakes story on questions of diversion (a notably western framing), Annin doesn’t miss the chance to tell a different and richer story that lies beyond supply controversies and is reflective of the somewhat different character of the lakes themselves vis-à-vis western rivers or a place like the Ogallala Aquifer. While it is enjoyable and competently executed, the first popular book-length foray into Great Lakes water politics might have done better.

A different set of strengths and weaknesses can be found in journalist Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, pp. xi+324, $26.95). Pearce’s canvas is, literally, the world, with a total of thirty-four chapters devoted to case studies from almost every corner of the globe. This coverage is truly impressive, both geographically and topically, addressing the full panoply of water issues, from shortages and mass diversion schemes to quality problems, water-based geopolitical conflict, and even civilizational decline. Pearce’s stories can be subtle, poignant, and, in the case of famous water disasters like the Aral Sea and China’s Yellow River, rendered in a notably fresh way. There also are stories that have not received much press to date—about Afghanistan’s Hamoun wetlands, for example, and an almost anthropologically rendered account of changes on the Mekong River system, including the consequences of the recent failure of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake to reverse itself during periods of Mekong peak flow (this is the natural phenomenon most responsible for Cambodia’s ancient civilization at Angkor Wat).

There are some wonderful concluding chapters charting the persistence and partial resuscitation of water management techniques officially forgotten or sidelined during the high modernism of the dam engineers: Chinese water cellars, English dew ponds, Chilean fog harvesters, Indian water tankas, and Persian qanats (the latter an ancient and recently rediscovered system for running rainfall from mountains to valleys). These chapters alone make When the Rivers Run Dry worth the read. But its range is at once the book’s greatest strength and a source of weakness. Pearce occasionally stretches too far, sacrificing depth for breadth. There is, for example, his account of Colonel Qaddafi and the Halliburton Company’s “Great Man-made River,” which tapped fossil water in the Nubian Desert in an attempt to drive the modernization of Libya. This potentially fascinating story receives a mere four pages, and in such cases Pearce’s decision to cast his net wide makes it hard to get inside the complex issues he surveys with any sense of historical or social depth. But this is a minor quibble. In both range and quality, Pearce’s is arguably the best and certainly the most thorough to date among popular books addressing water issues in international context.

With Steven P. Erie’s Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. xvii+364, $55) we move into a different genre entirely, that of the academic historian (think here of classics like Norris Hundley’s The Great Thirst [1992], Richard White’s The Organic Machine [1995], and Donald Worster’s more critically flavored Rivers of Empire [1985]). But as an urban historian and political scientist, Erie brings an interest and skill in fine-grained institutional analysis sometimes lacking in the canonical water histories. In Beyond Chinatown, that skill is well on display, as Erie takes on one of the legendary giants of the American water world: the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “The MWD” generally shows up in both academic and popular accounts of water as a monolithic and somewhat shadowy figure: the formidable central purchasing agency through which much of Southern California’s seemingly insatiable demands get satisfied; a dominant player in the massive projects to bring water from the Colorado River and Northern California to the lawns and swimming pools of the arid South; the unnamed conspiracy that provides the backdrop to Roman Polanski’s film noir classic Chinatown.

As suggested by the book’s title, Erie sets out to both update and complicate this picture, distilling new and usable lessons for regional resource management. In the process, a slightly different MWD emerges: a growth machine indeed, but neither a private nor entirely secret government, and one long riven by intraregional rivalries and increasingly on the defensive vis-à-vis critics and rival claimants both external and internal to the region.

The book is particularly strong on contemporary history, with its middle chapters tracing central tensions in the MWD through the 1990s and early 2000s, including a growing split between its traditional power base in Los Angeles County and its increasingly restive San Diego subscribers; the waning security of key imports from the Colorado River and Northern California owing to shortage and environmental damage on the Colorado and in the crucial Bay Delta region; and challenges to the MWD’s traditional command-and-control strategies coming from the introduction of new market mechanisms.

In his concluding section, Erie tackles a series of looming challenges (population growth, climate change, water quality, “environmental water,” and so forth) and the MWD’s emerging responses to these, including its move toward an innovative integrated regional planning model (which Erie touts as a partial model for other regional resource management agencies) and shifts in the agency’s basic governance structure and business model. The sum is an insightful, balanced, and deeply instructive account of a fascinating and arguably unique public agency. While Beyond Chinatown won’t satisfy the most bloodthirsty of critics of the Metropolitan Water District—it lacks the intrigue and stark moral outlines of Chinatown in the original—it may in fact provide a more usable model for academic water scholarship going forward.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Erie’s fine-grained analysis, and relative newcomers to the water crisis genre, stand a pair of recent reports: the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme’s Water: A Shared Responsibility (New York: UNESCO and Berghahn Books, 2006, pp. 600, $65) and the Pacific Institute’s The World’s Water, 2006–2007: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006, pp. 392, $35). Within the genre of Large World Reports (think here of the World Bank’s World Development Report, or the UN’s Human Development Report), Water: A Shared Responsibility is an unusually readable and well-crafted example. It is truly impressive in its coverage of topics ranging from ecological assessment (coastal and freshwater ecosystems, ground- and surface water supply assessments) to institutional arrangements (water valuation and governance) to a series of water-plus analyses (water and agriculture, water and industry, water and urbanization). Unlike many Large World Reports, it also exhibits a refreshing degree of statistical good sense—for example in its decision not to overwrite complex global scenarios with dubious meta-indicators and global rankings. The narrative sections are substantive, generally insightful, and richly illustrated with appropriate illustrations, charts, and statistical information.

The report is particularly strong in its treatments of the connections between water, poverty, and governance (though other sections, for example those dealing with the impacts of climate change and urban settlement, are equally strong). Structurally, it is enriched and given depth by a set of national and subregional case studies, included in summary form as appendixes with full versions available for download via linked sections on the report’s accompanying website. This decision to relocate the most extensive case materials outside the body of the report proper—a clear concession to space in an already dense 600-page document—detracts somewhat from their potential impact. But it also leaves the individual cases unconstrained by page count, enabling a depth of coverage otherwise difficult to achieve short of multivolume publication. The effect is also lessened when reading the report in its free online version, which seems likely to be the dominant mode of readership given the hefty price of its glossy print version. Somewhat unusually for a multiagency-authored report (different chapters have been prepared by different UN bodies), this one hangs together rather well, showing a nice consistency of style and purpose throughout.

The same cannot be said of the venerable The World’s Water, now in its fifth biennial edition. Prior to the publication of the World Water Assessment Programme’s first report in 2003, The World’s Water was the only game in town. Produced out of the California-based Pacific Institute and lead-authored by its director Peter Gleick, the biennial series has long functioned as an essential resource within the water community. From its inception, The World’s Water series has sought to juggle a number of hard-to-reconcile roles: an introduction to water issues for the uninitiated; a semiregular update on new approaches, research, and thinking in the field; a documentary record of hot spots and emerging issues; and, until the inauguration of the WWAP, the preeminent global statistical compendium of the field. Past editions have given us the “soft path” to water development, a fresh and well-balanced approach to questions of water management emphasizing a range of options and priorities almost entirely forgotten by the twentieth century’s “hard path” purveyors of dams, reservoirs, and megaprojects.

Partly because of this range, The World’s Water reports have always been somewhat uneven in style and quality, and the 2006–2007 edition is no exception. As statistical compendium and global report, it can no longer compete with the reach, resources, and professionalism of the WWAP; seekers of world water numbers and the broad state of the field will be better served by turning, at least initially, to Water: A Shared Responsibility. The World’s Water is also undeniably quirky, in ways both good and bad. In places it has a distinctly homespun quality—as witnessed, for example, in its inclusion of an odd series of “briefs” in the report’s conclusion, including one on water on Mars, and the endearing but not necessarily great poem, “The Soft Path in Verse.” Touches like these, combined with lower production values and notably uneven writing, make The World’s Water seem, in comparison with the WWAP report, somewhat of an in-house operation. At the same time, it needs repeating that this uneven quality is frequently endearing and/or innovative. An example is the report’s unusual opening chapter on “Water and Terrorism,” complete with a chronology of water-based terrorist activities stretching back to the 1700s (this chapter builds on and extends the Water Conflict Chronology, a regular feature of The World’s Water series since its inception). If The World’s Water is unlikely to compete over time with the WWAP report as a global state-of-the-field document, it seems likely to continue to play an important role in introducing new and heterodox ideas into the global water debate.

The volumes reviewed here represent several strategies, each with distinctive strengths and weaknesses, for writing about the global water crisis. For reasons they themselves document, the recent flood of attention shows few signs of abating. Water-related issues and challenges can only multiply in the years and decades ahead. As this review goes to press in May 2008, the world is learning of yet another catastrophe: cyclones and flooding in Burma/Myanmar with early death tolls reported in the tens of thousands and certain to rise. The Burmese events provide a fitting if sober conclusion to this essay. Again we are reminded of water’s deep and here tragic confluence with many other only apparently unconnected issues: poverty, governance, conflict, power, and control. The books reviewed here can help us to think through these connections. It remains to be seen if they will lead to new modes of action that will help make future Burmese floods and similar events less likely.

1. For an essay review of these volumes, see Ted Steinberg, “Big Is Ugly: Corporate Enclosure and the Global Water Supply,” Technology and Culture 45 (July 2004): 618–23.

Steven Jackson is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and a steering member of the university’s Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) programs.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Still another fiftieth anniversary deserving attention in the context of SHOT’s founding is the anniversary of the bridge soaring across the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan and providing ready access to Michigan’s upper peninsula, noted for its mineral riches, its vacationland, and its university in Houghton known in SHOT circles as “Tundra Tech.” Just as SHOT is linked to NASA via Kranzberg’s professional and personal relationship with Glennan, it is linked to this bridge via his plan to launch SHOT under a succession of eminent chief executives who would attract attention to the new organization, and attract support. The designer of the Mackinac Straits Bridge was David B. Steinman, an illustrious civil engineer during an epoch when ever more dramatic suspension bridges captured popular fancy. Steinman also became the president of SHOT, the second in a succession that began with William Fielding Ogburn and after Steinman continued with Lynn White jr., Cyril Stanley Smith, and Peter Drucker.

Each of these men was known beyond his own professional precincts, each in effect a public face for his profession, and that was quite according to plan. While Mel Kranzberg had no thought of imbuing SHOT with a “disciplinary ideology” (contrary to a loopy assertion in a recent issue of History and Technology), during the early years he most certainly called the shots about organizational strategy and structure. In the 1980s, as he recounted to me and to John Staudenmaier the conversation with Carl Condit when he first aired the idea of “our own society and our own journal,” Condit’s response was “Okay, Mel, it’s your idea, you do it.”2 Some thirty years after the event, maybe Mel was just telling a story. But whether or not Condit spoke these exact words, they certainly convey an accurate sense of SHOT’s one-man-show reality. Of course Kranzberg sought advice on important issues, consulting trusted friends such as Condit and John Rae, and on one occasion he even called for a plebiscite to determine the name of the journal that he was arranging to have published by Wayne State University Press in Detroit.3 But when it came to filling key offices, when it came to conferring or withholding actual power and status in the new society, Mel’s say is what counted.

Among his academic cohort, the man who had the most prestige and to whom he listened most attentively was Lynn White jr., and it was White who Mel had in mind as the first president of SHOT. But White demurred. He had accepted a UCLA professorship after fifteen years as president of Mills College, and he was busy preparing courses as well as trying to distill into one book“everything I know and some things I merely suspect.”4 For much of 1958 White and Kranzberg traded thoughts about other possible candidates, including Roger Burlingame, Robert Merton, Richard Shryock, and Abbott Payson Usher. Acting on Mel’s behalf, essentially as a one-man nominating committee, John Rae knew exactly what was expected of him when provided with “the necessary ‘hints.’”5

Most of Kranzberg’s hints had been about historians of one sort or another, and none of these had panned out. But the name of an eminent sociologist had also come up, as well as the name of an engineer. While Kranzberg had a benign view of engineers in general (indeed, he envisioned engineers as SHOT’s primary constituency), he told White that he “tend[ed] to view sociologists with suspicion.” He also added this remark, however: “I recognize that one of the strong points of our organization is that it is interdisciplinary.”6 And so it happened that SHOT’s first president was Ogburn, who had retired a few years earlier as the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Though Mel had known Ogburn only by reputation, as a man for whom “technology and its consequences were at the center of his intellectual career,”7 they hit it off well at the first annual meeting in Washington in December 1958. But Ogburn was not young, nor vigorous—born in 1886, he had served as president of the American Sociological Society thirty years before and had held demanding appointments with both the Hoover and the Roosevelt administrations—and he died after only a few months in office. And thus was set in motion a plan that Mel later said was on his mind from the outset, “alternating academicians and nonacademicians,” men of eminence as scholars with men of eminence in engineering or applied science.8

Kranzberg had described David Steinman in the December 1958 issue of the SHOT Newsletter (the premier issue) as a man who “had revolutionized the artistic, engineering, and scientific aspects of bridge building in the more than 400 bridges he has built on five continents.” The newest was the bridge across the Straits of Mackinac, and its completion had brought Steinman at age seventy-two (he was a few days older than Ogburn) considerable acclaim. Kranzberg had never met Steinman, but of course knew of him from his “works” and also from all the fanfare about “Big Mack,” including a well-circulated article that began: “Few men have lived who could match Dr. Steinman in achievement.”9 Most important,he knew of him from a close friend in Cleveland, Sara Ruth Watson. Watson was a Western Reserve University Ph.D. who taught a course in the history of civil engineering along with courses in English literature at Fenn College, a Cleveland engineering school. (Fenn became part of Cleveland State University in 1965.)10

Sara Ruth’s father, Wilbur J. Watson, headed a prominent Cleveland engineering firm and also wrote books celebrating bridges as instruments and emblems of civilization. Among these was Bridges in History and Legend (1937), an elegant fine-press volume coauthored with his daughter Sara Ruth, illustrated by her sister Emily, and with an introduction by William E. Wickenden, who was Glennan’s predecessor as president of Case Institute of Technology.11 Like Wilbur Watson, David Steinman was interested in the history of bridges as well as structural design, and in 1941 he too had enlisted Sara Ruth Watson as coauthor of a book about bridges as “the fulfillment of human dreams and hopes and aspirations.”12 Chapter 11 was titled “The Roeblings and the Brooklyn Bridge,”and four years later—with the encouragement of Lewis Mumford—Harcourt, Brace published Steinman’s 300,000-word manuscript on the Roeblings, The Builders of the Bridge. Henry Petroski, in a book which includes a keen critical assessment of Steinman and his work (and who I will cite or quote often from here on), tells how he even toyed with the notion of writing a screenplay.13

Steinman grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, just as a second East River bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, was under construction nearby; he was fond of calling these two bridges his “surrogate parents.” Something of a mathematical protégé, he graduated from the City College of New York in 1906 at age twenty, and he received a civil engineering degree from Columbia University three years later with a thesis on the “Design of the Henry Hudson Bridge as a Steel Arch” (a bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek connecting Manhattan and the Bronx which actually materialized in 1936). He wrote his doctoral dissertation,“Suspension Bridges and Cantilevers: Their Economic Proportions and Limiting Spans,”while teaching civil engineering at the University of Idaho, and then in 1917 he returned to New York to become professor of civil and mechanical engineering at City College. He worked briefly for the New York Central Railroad, assisted the eminent Gustav Lindenthal in the design of the Hell Gate Bridge, and then set himself up as a consultant. His big break came in 1924 when he was offered a partnership by Holton D. Robinson, whose earlier projects had included work on the Williamsburg Bridge. Their first commission was the design of the Ponte Hercílio Luz connecting the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina with its capital on the island of Florianópolis (at the time the longest suspension bridge in South America), their second was the Carquinez Strait Bridge (the first major bridge on San Francisco Bay), and subsequently the firm of Robinson and Steinman designed hundreds of other bridges, as Mel Kranzberg would note in the SHOT Newsletter.

Steinman had a dream. In 1926 he proposed a bridge across the Narrows at the entrance to New York Harbor called “The Liberty Bridge,” with 800-foot towers (“higher than the Woolworth Building”) and a 4,620-foot main span, along with observation decks, an elaborate clarion, and Gothic tracery. It was to be a privately financed toll bridge, in the manner of many bridges built during the boomtimes of the late 1920s, notably the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. But New York’s powerful Congressman Fiorello H. La Guardia objected to such means of financing, and Petroski tells us that Steinman “did not have the ear of Robert Moses.”14 Steinman’s dream died hard: A rendering of The Liberty Bridge appeared as the frontispiece of his 1941 book with Sara Ruth Watson, and a brochure issued by his firm in the late 1940s still had this rendering of “the world’s greatest engineering achievement.” As a sort of consolation prize, Steinman won a $9.4 million contract to refurbish the Brooklyn Bridge, strengthening the trusswork and removing the tracks for trolleys in order to create more lanes for motor vehicles. (The New Yorker ran a characteristically evocative feature [17 May 1952] with “a Boy Scout who blew taps” for the trolleys that had been running since 1898.) For the site where he had envisioned his own Liberty Bridge, however, Othmar Ammann—who also designed the George Washington Bridge and whom Steinman regarded with intense rivalry—would design the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, erected in the early 1960s. As for Steinman’s de facto crowning achievement, it was a little less imposing than what he had planned for the Narrows (552-foot towers, a 3,800-foot main span), but it was the world’s longest suspension bridge at the time of its completion, five miles between anchorages, and, at $100 million, surely the costliest, nearly four times more than the Golden Gate. It was not the monument Steinman had dreamed of for thirty years, but it was a great bridge and certainly, as he put it himself, “a triumph of science and art.”15

Petroski writes that “fully understanding how bridges have been conceived, financed, and built requires a fully integrated view of technology, society, and culture.”16 The story of the Mackinac Bridge is filled with political intrigues and seemingly overwrought claims about “public necessity,” as would be any story of a $100 million public-works project, especially in a part of a country usually perceived as wilderness.17 Begun in May 1954 and opened in November 1957, the bridge was materializing at exactly the same time as Mel Kranzberg was gathering his thoughts and energies for a new organization “to promote the study of the development of technology and its relations with society and culture.” Formal dedication of the bridge by Governor G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams took place on 26 June 1958,four weeks after Kranzberg filed SHOT’s incorporation papers at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland. Six months after that, Steinman’s name as first vice president was part of Rae’s slate of SHOT officers that Kranzberg brought to a vote. Four months later, Ogburn was dead and Steinman was startled “to be suddenly catapulted into the duties of the presidency of our organization.”18

The Mackinac Bridge.

Steinman suffered a stroke in May 1960 and died in August. During his time as a SHOT officer, he had been drawn into the negotiations with Wayne State, and he had also provided a list of “prominent consulting engineers” who might be persuaded to support SHOT as sponsors ($50) or associates ($100) by means of a letter over his signature. He had begun thinking about a presidential address and had sent Kranzberg a paper on the Brooklyn Bridge to consider for publication in T&C. But, even though there is a substantial file of Steinman correspondence in Kranzberg’s papers, there is little evidence that he had much of an influence in shaping the fledgling SHOT—and, indeed, Mel confessed to Lynn White that Steinman was “content to rubber-stamp all the activities which I performed in his name and in the name of the organization.” He certainly served a vital purpose in enhancing SHOT’s visibility by virtue of his own notoriety, however, just as did the presence on the advisory council of ex-president Herbert Hoover and Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a former president of the ASME. And, even if President Steinman never presided over SHOT in any literal sense (nor does it appear, for that matter, that he and Kranzberg ever met), he did “help present the needs of the society” to important people, in exactly the role that Kranzberg and White had initially envisioned. Moreover, there was much about his career to make him worthy of attention by historians of technology, much that resonates with classic themes in SHOT’s literature.

Steinman was a rather peculiar character personally. He never spoke of his Lithuanian Jewish parents and seems to have wanted to suggest, in Petroski’s words, “that his beginnings were in the stone and steel of a mythic bridge rather than in the flesh of immigrants.” About the Brooklyn Bridge, Steinman waxed poetic:

Against the city’s gleaming spires,
Above the ships that ply the stream,
A bridge of haunting beauty stands—
Fulfillment of an artist’s dream.

From deep beneath the tidal flow
Two granite towers proudly rise
To hold the pendant span aloft—
A harp against the sunset skies.

Peculiar, too, was his apparent desire “to measure his life by his documented degrees, honors, and achievements, and almost to lust after any recognition or achievement that he did not yet have.”19 Though by all accounts a kindly mentor and considerate with subordinates, he was not universally popular among peers. His egocentrism was especially evident in contrast to Ammann’s storied modesty. Robert Vogel—newly hired as the Smithsonian’s curator of civil engineering—visited Steinman in 1958, in his New York office in the Roebling Building on Liberty Street. What he recalls most vividly were “office walls decked solidly, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, with certificates, awards, diplomas, and medals.” Even though tangible evidence of his accomplishments was ubiquitous, symbols of rank and status meant a great deal to Steinman. He pushed for a system of licensing engineers on the basis of formal education and for using formal modes of address as in Latin cultures: “Engr.” with personal names, like “Dr.”

Signing his own letters “Engr. D. B. Steinman” may have just seemed quirky, but the idea of licensing—of emulating a closed profession on the order of the American Medical Association—aroused real dissension among leaders of the so-called founder societies, especially the American Society of Civil Engineers. In The Revolt of the Engineers, Edwin Layton writes that many of these elders “considered licensing a form of collectivism little different from unionism.” And Layton also notes a more compelling reason for opposition. Many accomplished engineers lacked even a college degree, let alone a doctorate like Steinman, and men without degrees had become managers with no hands-on relation to the profession. “If the profession were to be reconstructed around the idea of licensing, many such men would lose their influence.”20 The conflict, which became especially divisive within an organization called the Engineers Council for Professional Development, often pitted Steinman against William Wickenden, the president of Case Institute, who was adamantly opposed to licensing.

In 1934, when it became evident that Wickenden’s side would prevail, Steinman and fellow dissidents broke away and formed their own organization, the National Society of Professional Engineers. Although it remained relatively small (30,000 members in 1954), the NSPE pushed successfully for the adoption and enforcement of state licensing laws, and, more important, it “represented a power center outside the founder societies and an important source of agitation for professional ethics.” Even though Steinman was anything but liberal in his view of such matters as collective bargaining, Layton suggests that his organization “functioned to some extent as the conscience of the profession.”21

Just as historians of technology are apt to ask “for whom?” when the word progress comes up, a similar question may be asked about conscience: “whose?” When it came to ethical issues, Steinman was often regarded by leaders of the engineering establishment as something of a scold, and it is not difficult to discern one root of his problems with those men. There was another. Just as the failure of the Quebec Bridge early in the century had cast a pall over perceptions of large-scale cantilever designs, the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 had done the same for long-span suspension bridges. If anyone were to be directly blamed for that calamity, it was Leon Moisseiff, who had been responsible for the basic structural design, and the design of the Golden Gate Bridge as well, and had been seriously considered for the same role with a bridge at Mackinac Straits. While Steinman was not involved in the official investigation of the Tacoma Narrows disaster, he had a different explanation for what had happened than did Ammann, who had a key role in the investigation. It had to do with what Steinman called “critical wind velocity.” Forty-two miles an hour had been sufficient to induce catastrophic oscillations at Tacoma Narrows. Steinman was confident that his Mackinac Bridge had a “perfectly assured aerodynamic stability for all wind velocities up to infinity.” The contested technical analysis need not be recounted here, for it has already been set forth with admirable clarity by Petroski. But a few lines are worth repeating:

Among the reasons for Steinman’s lack of recognition by some segments of the engineering establishment must certainly have been his insistence on keeping the embarrassment of the Tacoma Narrows collapse more in the forefront of discussion than many engineers, such as Ammann, would have liked. The more it was talked about, the more attention it might call to the underlying influence of his George Washington Bridge, and to other spans built in the design climate of the 1930s. In the early-to-mid 1940s, Steinman’s desire to understand and articulate theories on the stability of suspension bridges, not to mention to build still larger ones, had brought plenty of attention to the most ignominious event in engineering history.22

Steinman, it seemed, would not allow the profession simply to forget about failure or the possibility of failure, and this explains a lot of his difficulties with “some segments of the engineering establishment.” A profile in Engineering News-Record not long before he died referred to a “loss of affection” among contemporaries because of a personality that nobody could just “take or leave.”23 Though he had received medals from the ASCE as early as 1923 and even in 1959, that organization made dozens of awards every year and his obituary in Civil Engineering treated him as “just another dues-paying member.” And Engineering News-Record delivered what Petroski calls an ultimate “kick in the casket”: “His bridges, which will remain as great monuments to him, probably would have been designed by others if he had not come along.” Others? More than anything, Steinman had wanted people to understand that designing bridges was “one of the most specialized of all crafts; only a handful of men in the world today are capable of building a large span.” Even Steinman the historian did not escape criticism. In his own book on the Brooklyn Bridge, David McCullough wrote that Steinman’s “was based on superficial research and contains many inaccuracies.”24

Steinman received countless respectful obituaries—both a regular obituary and a news item in the New York Times—and surely he did not go to his grave without having amassed an extraordinary number of well-deserved honors. From a list that fills two closely spaced columns in the 1959 edition of Who’s Who in Engineering and includes the Gold Medal of the Americas and the Legion of Honor, one is worth singling out in conclusion because it is so freighted with irony. In 1941, The American Institute of Steel Construction inaugurated the J. Lloyd Kimbrough Gold Medal, named for the AISC’s first president to honor “an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the structural steel industry through his or her design work.” The first recipient was Robert Moses, the next was Steinman, and afterward there was his nemesis Othmar Ammann.

What was very likely Steinman’s fondest obituary appeared in the journal published by the society that endowed him with his final honorific, Technology and Culture. Clearly, the memorialist saw Steinman through different eyes than whoever it was at Engineering News-Record that delivered a kick in the casket. To the woman who remembered a happy and respectful literary collaboration, Sara Ruth Watson, Steinman was a modern-day Renaissance man, and she quoted from his essay titled “The Spiritual Challenge of the Atomic Age”:

St. Thomas Aquinas once said that there are only three really important endeavors in life; to have faith in the right things, to hope for the right things, to love the right things. . . . Our faith, hope, and love for the good, the true, and the beautiful find their expressions in science, religion, and art. . . . All three are but different aspects of the same reality, of the same feeling for the sublime, rooted in the supreme mystery of being.25

The sublime. When David Steinman died, his design for a bridge across the Tagus at Lisbon had been accepted, and the Ponte Salazar (now Ponte 25 de Abril)—so often compared to the Golden Gate Bridge—would materialize in 1966. There were plans on his drawing board for double-decking the Golden Gate for rapid transit, for linking Denmark and Sweden, Siberia and Alaska, for bridging both the Bosporus at Istanbul and the Strait of Messina between Scylla and Charybdis.

In his own way, Mel Kranzberg was no less a dreamer than David Steinman. For Mel, SHOT materialized, T&C materialized, but not his dream of a major research center at Case. The Tagus was bridged, the Bosporus eventually, but never the Strait of Messina. Faith, hope, and love were no less a part of Kranzberg’s vocabulary than Steinman’s. Steinman was also something of a mystic, which is just about the last thing anyone would have said about Kranzberg, trained as a French historian with implicit faith in the Enlightenment. But he certainly would have thought well of any man, as Sara Ruth Watson described Steinman, “in whom were integrated the scientist, artist, lecturer, educator, poet, and humanist.”26 And it is easy to understand why Kranzberg would have believed that such a man would make a valuable collaborator as he established his new organization, designed as a bridge, and not just metaphorically. One can imagine that he especially liked the final two lines in Steinman and Watson’s Bridges and Their Builders, which might also be suitable for SHOT in 2008 as it Looks Beyond:

From dream to deed, and from that deed again
To further dream, and deed more mighty yet.

1. See Melvin Kranzberg, “T. Keith Glennan (1905–1995),” Technology and Culture 37 (July 1996): 659–62. These were the last words of Mel’s ever published in T&C; this same issue included a set of essays titled “In Memoriam: Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995).”

2. Robert C. Post, “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg,” Invention and Technology, winter 1989, 38; John Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 1.

3.See Robert C. Post, “History and the Society for the History of Technology,” Looking Back/Looking Beyond (SHOT Fiftieth Anniversary Meeting Site), “NSF Workshop,” available online at (accessed 23 April 2008).

4. Lynn White jr. to Carl Condit, 14 April 1958, Melvin Kranzberg Papers, Record Group 266, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change was published by Oxford in 1962. A decade later he served successively as president of the History of Science Society, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Historical Association.

5. Melvin Kranzberg to Lynn White jr., 15 April 1958, Kranzberg Papers. Mel had also named a youthful Edward Lurie to the nominating committee, but reported to White that “he was so busy finishing his book on Agassiz . . . that he was out of contact with the world.” Lurie, who died 8 March 2008, outlived all but two of Kranzberg’s initial group of advisors, Thomas Hughes and Morrell “Bo” Heald.

6. Kranzberg to White, 19 September 1958, Kranzberg Papers.

7. Rudi Volti, “William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature,” Technology and Culture 45 (April 2004): 396.

8. Kranzberg to White, 30 August 1960, Kranzberg Papers.

9. Robert Daley, “Dreamer in Concrete and Steel,” New York Times Magazine, 5 January 1958.

10. Sara Ruth Watson deserves to be much better known. Her course in the history of civil engineering, begun in 1940, was one of only two in the nation (the other was at Purdue), and ultimately she was a recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ History and Heritage Award, not long after Carl Condit and not long before David McCullough. She was also a biographer of the British novelist Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf’s lover, and she was the very first person to join SHOT as a charter member rather than an appointee to the executive committee or advisory council. Mel knew Sara Ruth as Sally, and there is a suggestion of their cordiality in a remark with which he concluded a letter after they had not seen one another for a while: “Maybe it’s because you don’t go to Temple and I don’t go to bars!”

11. Wilbur J. Watson and Sara Ruth Watson, Bridges in History and Legend (Cleveland, 1937). On Wickenden, see Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.

12. David B. Steinman and Sara Ruth Watson, Bridges and Their Builders (New York, 1941), xv.

13. Henry Petroski, Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (New York, 1995). Petroski calls the Steinman biography by William Ratigan, Highways over Broad Waters: Life and Times of David B. Steinman, Bridgebuilder (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1959), “hagiolatrous,” and indeed it is: here he is depicted as “the leading builder of bridges in recorded time” (p. 13). In his review for Technology and Culture 2 (spring 1961): 204–5, John Kouwenhoven wrote that “it is deplorable that such an interesting man and such notable achievements should be so shabbily presented to the general reader.” Shabby though the book may be, anyone writing about Steinman must, for better or worse, pay attention to Ratigan.

14. Petroski, 351.

15. Steinman, quoted in Naseem Stecker, “A Mackinac Milestone,” Michigan Bar Journal, September 2007, 19. The “between anchorages” qualification was necessary because the Golden Gate Bridge had a longer main span.

16. Petroski, 18.

17. For a narrative that is cast, not unpersuasively, in terms of “perseverance, faith, and courage,” see Lawrence A. Rubin, Bridging the Straits (Detroit, 1985).

18. Steinman to Kranzberg, 4 May 1959, Kranzberg Papers. The SHOT constitution initially stipulated that there would be a first vice president who would succeed to the presidency, and a second vice president who would then move up.

19. Petroski (n. 13 above), 328, 327. Steinman wrote and published a great deal of poetry, some of which ended up getting reprinted in the Congressional Record. The poem quoted here, which carries on for several more verses, was titled “Brooklyn Bridge: Nightfall.”

20. Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore, rev. ed. 1986), 237.

21. Layton, 239.

22. Petroski, 356. In the Dictionary of American Biography entry by C. G. B. Garrett, one reads that “it seems questionable . . . whether Steinman fully understood the problem of torsional oscillations.” But contrast a more authoritative remark by Petroski (p. 368) about a 1954 article by Steinman in American Scientist: “Forty years after its appearance, the paper is remembered by engineers and scientists alike as having been a definitive resolution of the problem of suspension bridge oscillations, both practically and theoretically.”

23. “What Measure for this Man?” Engineering News-Record, 25 June 1959, 57–59.

24. David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York, 1972), 608–09. To temper the negativity, it is perhaps also worth quoting Justin Spivey’s remark that Steinman “retains his reputation as an engineer admirably capable of communicating with others outside his profession” (Review of Thomas Winpenny, Manhattan Bridge: The Troubled Story of a New York Monument, in IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 30, no. 2 [2004]: 49).

25. Quoted in Sara Ruth Watson, “An Appreciation of David Bernard Steinman (1886–1960),” Technology and Culture 2 (winter 1961): 23–27.

26. Watson, 25. In an oft-published 1980s photo of Kranzberg posed in front of a bookcase in his Georgia Tech office, on the shelf over his shoulder one sees the Ratigan biography of Steinman right between Hugh Aitken’s Syntony and Spark and Edwin Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers.

Bob Post was the second editor of Technology and Culture and the twenty-first president of SHOT. Mackinac is pronounced Mackinaw.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

On the occasion of the Society for the History of Technology’s 2008 meeting in Lisbon, what follows is an abbreviated tour of the major scientific and technological museums of the area and a brief glimpse at their rich and varied collections. This review proceeds thematically, beginning with the more broadly chartered institutions of the region and continuing with the more specialized museums that focus on particular industries or particular sectors: transportation, communications, natural resources, and energy. Our hope is that this brief review will serve as a useful guide for those who choose to venture forth from the annual meeting itself and experience Lisbon’s vibrant museum scene.

Museu da ciência (Science Museum) and Museu de história natural (Natural History Museum)

The Museums of Science and Natural History are located in the former Lisbon Polytechnic School. The Science Museum was created in 1985 and is largely devoted to the public understanding of science.1 Many of its long- and short-term exhibitions and workshops are aimed at a younger audience. At the core of the permanent collection are more than 10,000 scientific apparatuses, most dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The permanent display presents both a historical approach (instruments used in the past) and an interactive experience that allows visitors to be part of the various experiments. The highlight of the Science Museum is the nineteenth-century Laboratorio Chimico (Chemistry Laboratory), which was considered one of the best laboratories of its time.2 Recently restored to its original plan and with its old instruments and apparatuses in place, the unique setting of the Chemistry Laboratory now offers visitors a glimpse of how chemistry was studied and taught in the nineteenth century (fig. 1).

The museum also has a planetarium, used mainly for pedagogical purposes. Its small astronomical observatory on the terrace, which dates to 1898, is used for public courses in astronomy. It has not yet been restored.

The Natural History Museum has three primary collections: botany, zoology, and mineralogy and geology.3 The museum was part of the pedagogical strategy of the Lisbon Polytechnic School, which promoted an experiment-driven approach to science. In this context, the school created both the mineralogical and geological collections (1840) and the Botanical Garden (1873) that is the highlight of the museum. The Botanical Garden was considered crucial to the training of students enrolled at the Polytechnic. The first plants and trees were brought from the botanical garden at Ajuda in 1873. Later plantings were purchased from European botanical gardens and supplemented with specimens from the Portuguese colonies in South America, Africa, and Asia.

Fig. 1 The Laboratorio Chimico (Chemistry Laboratory) at the Museum of Science, University of Lisbon. (Photo by P. Cintra, reproduced courtesy of the Museum of Science.)

Museu da farmácia (Pharmacy Museum)

Founded in 1996 and located in a former palace, the Pharmacy Museum covers more than 5,000 years of pharmaceutical history, from prehistoric medicines to medieval potions, and artifacts from 3600 BCE to pharmaceutical techniques developed for voyages to outer space.4 Objects related to the pharmaceutical art and science of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Japan, Africa, Europe, and South America are on display. The highlight of the museum lies in the four pharmacies brought intact from other parts of Portugal and the Portuguese empire; these include a nineteenth-century Chinese drugstore from Portugal’s former territory of Macao.

Museu do azulejo (Tile Museum)

The Tile Museum is located in the sixteenth-century Madre de Deus convent and cloister.5 Created in 1980, the museum features the tile exhibition that opened at the King João III cloister in 1971 as part of the National Museum of Ancient Art. Portuguese tiles from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century are on permanent display, organized chronologically in fifteen rooms. These exhibitions range from early manufacturing techniques (Room 1) to designs by contemporary artists (Room 15). Rooms A to H, original to the convent, are richly decorated with paintings, tile panels, and gilded wood in the mannerist and baroque styles (fig. 2). Room H features the Panorama of Lisbon, a tilework showing Lisbon as it appeared prior to the earthquake of 1755. In addition to the permanent collection, the museum organizes temporary exhibitions on the history of tiles and ceramics.

A fine example in situ of Portuguese tilework is found in the Marquis of Fronteira Palace, where eighteenth-century tiles cover every surface, their scale varying from tiny panels to entire walls, their color from polychrome to blue and white, their nationality from Portuguese to Spanish and Dutch, and their themes from the erudite to the satirical.6

Fig. 2 Altar tiles, Lisbon, about 1650, on display at the Museu do Azulejo (Tile Museum). (Photo courtesy of the Tile Museum.)

Museu da marinha (Maritime Museum)

The Maritime Museum is located in the northern and western wings of the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, the well-known monastery conceived and commissioned by Manuel I as a symbol of the Portuguese royal dynasty and a tribute to the Portuguese oceanic explorations to Africa, South America, India, China, and Japan.7 The monks of the religious order of Saint Jerome were charged with praying for the king’s soul and providing spiritual comfort to those leaving for unknown and distant lands. The monastery is considered the masterpiece of Manuelino, the Portuguese architectural style that combines elements of the late Gothic and Renaissance periods with an iconography related to the king, Christianity, and the natural world.

The Maritime Museum collection was planned in 1863 by King Luís, himself commander of a ship of the royal fleet. The museum illustrates the importance of the Portuguese seafaring tradition with maps, maritime codes, navigational equipment, full-size and model ships, uniforms, and weapons. Galeotas (the richly decorated rowboats used by the royal family in their promenades along the banks of the Tagus River) are displayed in the adjacent freestanding gallery. The particularly interesting Room 5 is dedicated to the eighteenth-century shipbuilding industry of the Lisbon Arsenal.

Museu militar (Military Museum)

This museum is located in a neighborhood long related to the Lisbon Arsenal.8 Beginning in the fifteenth century, weapons, explosives, and gunpowder were made and stored in the tercenas, along the bank of the Tagus. The museum building dates to the eighteenth century, when the Marquis of Pombal rebuilt the former headquarters of the Tenência (the government office in charge of making and storing weapons and other war matériel), which was damaged in the 1755 earthquake. The eastern courtyard (Pátio dos Canhões) was part of this building. In 1842, the chief inspector of the Arsenal was attracted by the “old and bizarre machines” and other apparatuses forgotten in the cellars of several of the Arsenal buildings. The Artillery Museum was founded nine years later (1851), but it did not open to the public until 1877.

The building was remodeled and enlarged at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the principal artists of the time were invited to contribute works of art. The Corinthian-style portal authored by a renowned Portuguese sculptor dates from this period.

The Military Museum displays weapons, uniforms, and armor, as well as war-themed paintings, sculpture, and tiles. Three of its five rooms contain war artifacts from the fifteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. The Camões room is devoted to paintings that show the primary episodes from the Portuguese epic, Os Lus’adas. The basement level is devoted to the Mouzinho de Albuquerque, an influential military leader in the Portuguese African empire.

Museu dos coches (Coach Museum)

The National Coach Museum is located on the premises of the old Royal Riding Arena of Belém Palace,9 designed by Italian architect Giacomo Azzolini for King João VI. The upper part of the main hall (50 m by 17 m) contains platforms used by the royal family and members of the court to watch equestrian games. The arena became a museum in 1904; the exhibition area was enlarged in 1940.

The collection features ceremonial vehicles from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, most of which belonged to the crown or were the private property of the Portuguese royal house. It includes coaches, Berlins, carriages, chaises, cabriolets, litters, sedan chairs, and children’s buggies. The excellent collection enables visitors to understand the technical and artistic evolution of the animal-drawn carriages used by European courts before the advent of the motorcar.

Particularly impressive are three Triumphal Vehicles that King João V sent to the Pope in 1716 to demonstrate his wealth; the richly gilded Lisbon Coronation Coach in the baroque style that symbolizes Lisbon as capital of the Portuguese empire and victorious in the defense of the Christian faith; the Ambassador Coach, which features stone and wood sculpture carved with the symbols of navigation and glorifies the Portuguese king (depicted as the Lord of Navigation); and, finally, the Oceans Coach, a tribute to the Portuguese empire that extended from Brazil to India.

Museu da carris (Museum Of Public Transportation)

The Carris Museum, created in 1999, is dedicated to the Lisbon transport system.10 The collection is housed in two locations, linked by a short ride in a 1901 tram. Most of Area 1 displays documents, pictures, and small-scale artifacts related to the history of the transport company; Area 2 exhibits Lisbon trams and buses, both horse-drawn and modern. The museum features the typical yellow trolleys of Lisbon and the green double-decker buses that first operated during the Mundo Português (the Portuguese World Exhibition) that took place under the dictatorship.

Museu das comunicações (Communications Museum)

The Communications Museum, created in 1999, is located in Alcântara, an industrial area in nineteenth-century Lisbon.11 It is dedicated to several forms of communication: stagecoach mail services, postal services, stamps, television, radio, telecommunications, and air navigation. It also includes the House of the Future where contemporary technologies are presented in a domestic environment to show how they can enhance daily life. The museum is strongly committed to an educational program for children.

In addition to multiple temporary exhibitions, the museum features Shortening Distances, a permanent display of the history of Portuguese postal and telecommunication systems. The permanent exhibition is organized around four main themes: the telephone network, which presents old telephones and automatic exchange stations; a typical nineteenth-century postal station, which contains commonly used artifacts and furnishings; stagecoach mail services, which revisits early Portuguese postal services; and the House of the Future, where the latest developments in home automation (domotics) are presented and experienced.

Museu da água (Water Museum)

This museum dates from 1919, when the water company decided to show the public some of the artifacts used in the Lisbon water supply network. The museum was remodeled in 1987, and in 1990 it earned the Council of Europe Museum Prize.

The Water Museum consists of four different sites that formed the core of the Lisbon water supply network, itself some 60 km long (the distance between Lisbon and the water source on its outskirts is approximately 18 km). The sites are: the Barbadinhos Steam Pump Station (1880–1928); two storage reservoirs (Mãe d’Água, 1746, and Patriarcal, 1856–1940s); and the Águas Livres Aqueduct (1732, 1834–1960s).12 The well-preserved Barbadinhos Steam Pump Station is particularly interesting from a technological point of view; built in 1880, it used four steam machines and five boilers to increase the volume of water distributed. The two reservoirs were constructed to receive and distribute water collected by the aqueduct. Today they are used for art exhibits and other cultural displays, but it is still possible to view the vast holding tanks, the internal waterfall at Mãe d’Água, and the related equipment (fig. 3).

The aqueduct itself was planned by Manuel da Maia under King João V and took one hundred years to complete. It is a remarkable example of architectural engineering, not only for its length (it extends 941 m across the Alcantâra Valley) but also for the heights of its thirty-five arches, among which is a pointed arch 65.29 m high by 28.86 m wide, the world’s largest pointed arch built of stone.

Museu da electricidade (Electricity Museum)

The Electricity Museum is located in the Tagus Power Station (Central Tejo), a Lisbon architectural landmark with a facade of red brick, iron, and glass.13 The plant dates to 1908, when a small power station was built to supply Lisbon with electricity and to power gaslights. The plant was enlarged in 1919 when two generators and six low-pressure boilers were installed.

Fig. 3 The Machinery Room at the Barbadinhos Steam Pump Station, at the Museu da Água (Water Museum). (Photo courtesy of the Water Museum.)

The Central Tejo was fully operational until 1954, when both its space and technological equipment were altered to accommodate new technical demands and productivity growth. The plant closed in 1975 and reopened in 1991 as the Electricity Museum. In 2006, the permanent exhibition was enriched with rooms devoted to the history of energy; they highlight the role of future renewable energy sources and allow youngsters to experience electrical phenomena.

The main part of the permanent exhibition is the old power station, which still contains all its generating equipment (a high-pressure boiler made by the Babcock & Wilcox Company of Britain) and groups of turbo-alternators.

It is worth remarking that the primary fuel used to run the plant was the coal unloaded and carried in baskets to the power station by workers from Alcochete, a small village on the opposite bank of the river.14

The Science Museum’s Laboratorio Chimico is unique and highly regarded within the European museum community, and the Water Museum has received several European prizes. On balance, however, Portuguese museums are typically less well-known and recognized than their counterparts elsewhere. Nevertheless, they do offer stimulating perspectives on the scientific, technological, and industrial history of Portugal, and they are more than worth a visit.15

1. <http://www.mc.ul.pt> (accessed 25 March 2008), partially available in English. All museums discussed here are easily reached by public transportation. Local organizers are available to help SHOT conferees arrange visits.

2. Visits can be arranged online at <http://www.mc.ul.pt/lab/> (accessed 25 March 2008). During the SHOT 2008 meeting, Tour E will visit the Chemistry Laboratory and Botanical Garden as part of the Lisbon technological walking tour.

3. <http://www.jb.ul.pt/> (accessed 25 March 2008; no English version available).

4. <http://www.anf.pt/site/index.php?page=data/anf/museu_farmacia.php> (accessed 25 March 2008; no English version available).

5. <http://www.mnazulejo-ipmuseus.pt> (accessed 25 March 2008).

6. During the SHOT 2008 meeting, Tour D will visit the Marquis of Fronteira Palace.

7. <http://museu.marinha.pt> (accessed 25 March 2008; no English version available).

8. <http://www.geira.pt/mmilitar/> (accessed 15 April 2008).

9. <http://www.museudoscoches-ipmuseus.pt/> (accessed 25 March 2008).

10. <http://www.carris.pt/en/index.php?area=empresa_historia> (accessed 25 March 2008).

11. <http://www.fpc.pt/> (accessed 25 March 2008; an English version of this page is currently under construction). During SHOT 2008, Tour E will visit the surroundings of the museum.

12. <http://museudaagua.epal.pt/museudaagua/> (accessed 25 March 2008). During SHOT 2008, Tour B will visit part of the aqueduct and the Mãe d’Água reservoir.

13. <http://www.edp.pt/EDPI/Internet/EN/Group/AboutEDP/EDPFoundation/EDP ElectricityMuseum/default.htm> (accessed 25 March 2008).

14. The SHOT 2008 banquet will be located in Alcochete; Central Tejo is visible from the restaurant.

15. Admission to most of the museums covered in this essay will be free to SHOT members during the Lisbon meeting; simply show your conference badge at the door.

Maria Paula Diogo is assistant professor of history of technology in the Faculty of Science and Technology at New University of Lisbon, Portugal, and coordinates a project on technology and the Portuguese empire. Her current research focuses on Portuguese engineering. She publishes on a regular basis both nationally and internationally and is a member of several international research networks and groups. She chairs the SHOT 2008 local arrangements committee.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.