The opportunity for historians of technology to engage with transnational history seems twofold. First, in historiography concepts are judged by their ability to inspire new research, and transnational history may suggest to historians of technology new and important research questions and strategies. Second, a transnationally minded technological history may in turn inform transnational historical scholarship, which tends to recognize the pivotal importance of technology but often lacks the concepts and experience to study it adequately.

In this essay, I will take this double opportunity as a starting point to examine more closely the possibility of a transnational history of technology. I shall try to sort out some of its potentially conflicting meanings and implications: what could “a transnational history of technology” possibly mean, why is it interesting or important, and what are the pitfalls of this line of inquiry? In short, what should historians of technology know when responding to the challenges of transnational history?

Before proceeding, let me briefly note some of the ways that historians of science and technology have begun to address the promises I refer to above. They have, for instance, studied the role of transnational networks of scientists working for nuclear arms control; transnational versus national influences on professional engineering identities; transnational patenting and the associated transnationalization of industrial property rights; knowledge acquisition of firms beyond national systems of innovation; and the role of technology in globalization (understood as “a large number of phenomena sharing a transnational or world-encompassing character”).2 In particular, the study of transnational networks of scientists has been embraced by transnational historians in search of agents forging global community.3

But without question the major experiment in transnational history of technology to date is the pan-European research network and program Tensions of Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe, a “transnational enterprise” exploring and defining “ways to study transnational European history with a focus on the role of technology.”4 As a transnational history of technology incubator, Tensions of Europe not only experiments with novel forms of collective research (currently associating some two hundred researchers around a common research agenda and themes) and collective funding (particularly noteworthy is its latest offshoot, the ambitious European Science Foundation program Inventing Europe).5 It also demonstrates how a transnational history research agenda inspires innovative history of technology research.

This research agenda initially emerged from internal history of technology considerations, but its resonance with transnational history concerns was soon acknowledged. When Johan Schot, Ruth Oldenziel, and others in 1999 set out to study contemporary European history through the lens of technology, they found that existing overviews either juxtaposed or compared national histories of technology or adopted a general “Western technology” perspective represented by a few leading countries. These scholars argued that major technical developments happened not only in national contexts but also in subnational and international ones. More important, nation-centered histories missed the “European dimension”—that is, the connected histories of Europe’s nations, cities, and microregions, its international collaborations, and its global context, including transatlantic and colonial and postcolonial relations. To study “Europe as something more than a collection of partly contrasting and partly overlapping national experiences”6 the program suggested investigation of“international linkages between infrastructures, exchanges, and circulation (and control) of people, artifacts, capital, knowledge, goods, services and natural resources” as research sites where “Europe” and “technology” were mutually constituted.7 The prominence of the word “tensions” signaled the contested character of such processes.

This agenda has inspired an impressive range of scholarship. Examples include studies of transnational infrastructures, from heavily contested cross-border railway or telegraph links to pan-European rail, road, and electric power networks;8 research on large transnational projects, from Concorde and Airbus to CERN, EURATOM, and space programs;9 work on transnational mediation or consumption junctions, from multinationals to organizations such as Consumers International, which shaped twentieth-century European ways of life;10 and studies of the international circulation and local appropriation of technologies in the contexts of colonial and postcolonial relations, as well as in the shaping of modern cities.11

Even in the Tensions of Europe program, however, the term “transnational” has been given divergent (and sometimes conflicting) meanings, and explicit reflection on the connotations and pitfalls of transnational history perspectives is lacking. Especially if we are to contemplate a transnational history of technology that transcends the confines of that program, such reflection seems indispensable. In the remainder of this essay, I shall draw on two decades of debate on the pros and cons of transnational history to propose some guidelines for a transnational history of technology.

What Does Transnational History Mean?

A first indication of possible new perspectives and research questions associated with transnational history may be found in various definitions of this concept. Not that those definitions are explicit and unambiguous; from the beginning, when the term “transnationalism” first became popular among political scientists in the 1960s and early 1970s, its precise meaning was considered unclear and problematic. As Samuel Huntington put it in 1973, “many people . . . use it to mean many different things. It has achieved popularity at the price of precision.”12 The same is true in historiography; since its takeoff in the 1990s, “transnational history” has been characterized as a fluid, broad term packed with contradictory impulses, a catchall concept lacking precision.13 When contemplating a transnational history of technology, it is therefore important to acknowledge the different and potentially conflicting meanings and connotations of the term; these may suggest different research questions, but at the price of confusion and misunderstanding. To sort this out at least a bit, I shall here discuss three such meanings found in the transnational history literature. Although these might coincide and overlap in the writings of individual authors, they have sufficiently distinct roots and connotations to merit separate treatment. First, transnational history often refers to the study of cross-border flows. This follows from the dictionary definition of “transnational” as transcending national boundaries. It is invariably cited in recent discussions of transnational history, in particular when specifying the object of inquiry. Authoritative examples include Akira Iriye writing of “the study of movements and forces that cut across national borders,” and Pierre-Yves Saunier referring to a transnational angle that “cares for movements and forces that cut across national boundaries. It means goods, it means people, it means ideas, words, capital, might, and institutions.”14 These two historians coedit the forthcoming Palgrave dictionary of transnational history, which investigates the “circulation and flows of people, ideas and objects across national boundaries, with the structures that support these flows and with different scales across which structures and flows operate.”15 Several historians of technology contribute to this notable project. A final example is the introduction to transnational history by Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, highlighting “ways in which past lives and events have been shaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of nation states . . . transnational history seeks to understand ideas, things, people and practices which have crossed national boundaries.”16 As a consequence, they argue, transnational history practitioners often use concepts like “fluidity,”“circulation,”“flow,” “connection,” and “relationship.”

While this meaning of transnational history seems straightforward and in line with the examples from technological history noted above, two comments are in order. First, Saunier’s recent etymology of the term “transnational” demonstrates that actual usage deviates from its dictionary meaning. There is a clear cross-border element in the first known use of the word, by the German philologist Georg Curtius in 1862 in reference to “transnational language families.” (It appeared in American English within the same decade.) But in the United States “transnational” was also used synonymously with “transcontinental,” most notably in highway building. Here the term meant traversing, not transcending, the nation.17

More important, the designation “cross-border studies” may be too narrow to capture much ongoing work in transnational history and, by extension, an emerging transnational history of technology. An instructive example from technological history is Judith Schueler’s recent examination of the multiple cultural meanings of the famous Gotthard railway tunnel.18 Certainly this tunnel, inaugurated in 1882, was and is a key node in transalpine traffic and therefore one of Europe’s most prominent north-south passages. Still, Schueler’s analysis of the cultural meanings of this tunnel and the Gotthard Massif is not well characterized as an instance of cross-border studies: her research aims and conclusions concern not cross-border flows but the layered meanings of this railway project within Switzerland, and in particular its inscription in Swiss national identity. Accordingly, Schueler’s research method and sources—onsite examination of cultural meanings and representations using local, regional, and national publications, memorials, exhibitions, and museums—were primarily within a single nation’s borders (the Gotthard Massif is located within Switzerland, not at its border). Her analysis of the cultural nationalization of an international transport node clearly fits a transnational history research agenda, but this is an agenda that embraces more than cross-border flows (see the discussion of the third sense of “transnational,” below). In general, the cross-border connotation of transnational history may suit scholars working on globalization or regional integration better than those reexamining national or local history from transnational perspectives.

Second, “transnational” is frequently employed to refer to the study of the historical role of international nongovernmental organizations (and the relations and flows that they represent) in shaping the modern world. This meaning derives from the so-called first transnational turn in the social sciences, around 1970.19 It originated in political science, where “transnational” became a term of rebellion challenging the so-called state-centric view of world affairs in the subdiscipline of international relations.20 In this state-centric view (as in its historiographical cousin, diplomatic history) the focus was on interactions among formal representatives of state governments—politicians, diplomats, and soldiers—to the exclusion of a booming number of nongovernment actors who also made a deep imprint on world affairs. State-centric international relations was therefore to be supplemented by the study of “transnational relations,” defined as “contacts, coalitions, and interactions across state boundaries that are not controlled by the central foreign policy organs of governments.”21 Transnational relations as a focus of study was further subdivided into “transnational interactions”—denoting in a particularly obdurate definition that at least one participant is not a government agent or an intergovernmental organization—and “transnational organizations,” referring to nongovernmental organizations such as IBM, Unilever, international trade unions, or the Roman Catholic Church.

This understanding of transnational—as opposed to the formal “international” or “interstate” system—still has currency in political science today, as in, for example, debates on transnational activism pivoted against realism.22 It also thrives in transnational historical scholarship. Indeed, historians interested in activists and civil society shaping the twentieth-century world may define transnational history in opposition to “international history” and emphasize the popularity of the transnational turn among social and cultural, rather than political, historians.23 In science and technology history, this concern resonates in studies of transnational networks of scientists and technologists, such as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.24

While this usage of transnational history to connote a specific set of nongovernmental actors remains current, others have expanded its meaning to take in the role of all organizations involved in world affairs, whether nongovernmental or intergovernmental. This is also a carryover from political science debates; Huntington, for example, has criticized the first transnational turn for a one-sided focus on nongovernmental actors. He emphasizes the similarities, rather than the differences, between intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank, governmental organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the U.S. Air Force, and private organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church and General Motors: all were bureaucratic organizations operating in many countries, and this defined their important role in world affairs.25 Huntington therefore reserved the term “transnational” for transnational operations, that is, “significant centrally directed operations in the territory of two or more nation-states” regardless of the private or public constitution of actors. Actors were no longer “international” or “transnational”; the World Bank, for instance, was international (intergovernmental) in control structure, multinational in personnel policy, and transnational in its operations.

This additional political science–inspired meaning also resonates in transnational history debates today. Iriye’s study of the role of international organizations in the making of the contemporary world juxtaposes nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations as transnational forces building global community, providing a counterweight to twentieth-century nationalism and geopolitics, and possibly preventing a third world war.26 Other historians have used Huntington’s insight that some organizations are simultaneously international, multinational, and transnational in reevaluating the historical role of the League of Nations.27 In the history of technology, a comparable understanding informs the notion of “transnational system builders,” an adaptation of Thomas Hughes’s original concept to explore the role of organizations—whether governmental, intergovernmental, or nongovernmental—in transnational infrastructure development.28

These political science–inspired senses of the term “transnational history” are again somewhat constraining. Understanding transnational as nongovernmental tends to exclude those organizations and cross-border exchanges predominantly organized or controlled by formal state representatives, which is especially unfortunate in technological history, for both state and nonstate actors were key players in technical change.A technological history surely would study railway traffic regulation by the (nongovernmental) International Railway Union next to, not opposed to, telecommunications regulation by the (intergovernmental) International Telecommunications Union. The notion of international organizations (whether governmental or not) as characterized by transnational operations solves this problem, but it remains a subset of the former “cross-border studies” meaning. Furthermore, these political science–informed meanings of “transnational history” place much weight on the term’s specificity, whether that is opposed to the interstate system or to “international,” “supranational,” or “multinational” features of organizations. Separating these meanings counts as an intellectual gain, and to a political science audience blurring or confusing them may count as uninformed and imprecise. A transnational history of technology needs to be aware of that.

Third, and finally, transnational history is often taken to mean decentering the nation-state from its position as the principal organizing category for scholarly inquiry. This resonates with what we may call the second transnational turn in the social sciences and the humanities, in the 1990s, and again it has a subversive undertone: in the context of increasing academic awareness and debate about the phenomenon of globalization, nation-centered analysis (at least initially) seemed less and less convincing. Transnational analysis supposedly provided an alternative.

In historiography, the blunt version of the argument was that the modern history profession was born in conjunction with the process of nation building and often tended to emphasize a monolithic national community by constructing national narratives, experiences, traditions, and values. It was therefore biased toward stressing the uniqueness of the nation—a tendency known as exceptionalism.29 Transnational history questions such nation-centered history and spotlights other scales of lived history. As Thomas Bender has recently put the issue, “the nationalist histories of the nineteenth century naturalized the nation as the most significant form of human solidarity. Can history unmake what it did so much to make?”30

This meaning was forcefully promoted by Ian Tyrrell and others beginning in the early 1990s, when these scholars proclaimed a “New Transnational History” in the United States. For Tyrrell, exceptionalism seemed particularly resilient in U.S. historiography, and it deserved rigorous scrutiny “from the perspective of alternative transnational approaches.”31 Note that, contrary to the two meanings of transnational history discussed thus far, the research object remained U.S. national history, which was now to be studied from perspectives previously ignored. As in the former two meanings of transnational history, these perspectives could be international (for example, the influence of international trade, migration, and reform movements on U.S. national history). But in Tyrell’s understanding they could also be subnational: studies of microregions (subnational or cross-border) could explicitly be recovered as part of a transnational history inquiry. The “national” as the organizing theme in U.S. history could thus be questioned from above and below, or, in David Thelen’s intriguing formulation, from movements “above, below, through, and around, as well as within, the nation state.”32 The new focus was on people, institutions, ideas, or culture moving through time and space in rhythms of their own, in which case they still “drew from, ignored, constructed, transformed and defied claims of the nation state.”33

Historians in Europe similarly moved to decenter the nation-state. Their inspiration was a rising critique of the paradigm of comparative history, which was considered equally nation-centered and exceptionalist. Comparative history (the argument went) reduced variations in space and time to national experiences, which were subsequently compared, thus reifying national histories. In reaction, these historians developed a succession of increasingly encompassing and reflective waves of transnational history. Initially, “transfer history” showed the permeability of national borders by focusing on cross-border transfers of, for example, ideas and technologies. Later, “connected,”“relational,”or “embedded history”would debunk national exceptionalism by highlighting the related character of Europe’s national histories. Lastly, histoire croisée (crossing history) explicitly addresses the crossing of analytical boundaries (including the local-regional-national-international distinction) and urges researchers to reflect on their use of such terms as “national.”34

Early critics, and probably a fair number of historians today, feared that decentering the nation-state would lead to abandoning the national as a category of analysis altogether.35 This would indeed be a major difficulty, in view of the important role of the nation-state in modern history. Yet advocates of the new transnational history did not advocate giving up that analytical category, but rather placing it in its proper historical context. In Tyrrell’s words, “no one doubts the importance of both nationalism and the nation-state in the modern world.”36 What he proposed was to study U.S. national history in a three-tiered scheme of social action involving interactions of the international, national, and local spheres. “I do not mean to suggest that American history must be homogenized as part of some amorphous international history. The alternatives to national history that I propose would contextualize nationalism.”37

Later calls for a transnational history have repeated the observation that the nation-state remains a key analytical category that should be contextualized, not abandoned. Thus, unlike the first two meanings of transnational history discussed above, this third does not complement national analysis so much as embrace it. Nevertheless, for a number of scholars transnational history still connotes an underestimation of the importance of the nation-state. A transnational history of technology should therefore be explicit about its view of the nation-state in history.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler has noted that meanings of transnational history may proliferate even further when considering bodies of historical scholarship that address issues currently labeled, or relabeled, transnational, such as travel history, imperialism history, labor history, the history of religion, the history of industrialization, world history, and regional or mesoregional history.38 However, I would be inclined to interpret these topic-centered literatures as forms of transnational history exactly because they speak to the more general, cross-topic research questions identified by the three meanings discussed above—about cross-border flows, about international organizations shaping the modern world, and about lived history across or within established analytical categories (and the importance of such categories as “the national” in history).

Where does all this leave the possibility of a transnational history of technology? First, I would suggest that we treat the interpretative flexibility of the idea of transnational history as an enrichment, not a disqualification. The dictum that the only good concepts are unambivalent ones seems outdated; good concepts usually involve successful tradeoffs between many criteria—familiarity, resonance, parsimony, coherence, differentiation (from other concepts), depth, and others.39 Historiographical concepts specifically should also inspire new research, and all three connotations of transnational history have already proved productive for technological history.

Indeed, perhaps the transnational history of technology experiment Tensions of Europe resonates so well because its research agenda tacitly mobilizes all three connotations of transnational history. The theme of cross-border studies is, for instance, foregrounded in research of transnational infrastructures and cross-border flows. The role of international organizations, especially nongovernmental organizations, in shaping the modern world informs the key research concern of investigating how engineering and business communities built “Europe” in the technological sphere, producing a “hidden integration” (and fragmentation) overlooked in histories of European integration that focus on the politicians who built the European Union and its predecessors.40 This focus has inspired scholarly work on transnational organizations such as international road, railway, and tourist associations regulating international ground transportation at a time when the transport policies of the European Communities had not yet been born or failed to take off.41 The third meaning, finally, surfaces in the explicit ambition to investigate and evaluate the roles of pan-European, transatlantic, and colonial and postcolonial relations in shaping contemporary Europe, as well as the influence of the nation-state and the city in that process. It emerges also in the twin concepts of “circulation” and “appropriation,” complementing the study of cross-border flows (circulation) with research into national and local modes of resistance and appropriation as those play out in the histories of, for example, American consumption models, IBM business strategies, international urban planning ideologies and technologies, or transnational traffic junctions (like the Gotthard railways mentioned above).42 In other words, this form of transnational technological history includes the reassertion of the national and local in twentieth-century history.

While drawing on these varied meanings of transnational history as sources of new questions, a transnational history of technology should certainly be aware of the different ring the term has to different audiences, and of the misunderstandings this can induce. In particular, a transnational history of technology needs to be quite explicit about whether or not to include such research categories as intergovernmental organizations (as opposed to nongovernmental ones), the local, and the nation-state.

What Does Transnational History Promise?

This discussion of the meanings of transnational history provides a first approximation of possible research questions and perspectives that could inform a transnational history of technology. But where will these new research questions lead? What, in short, are the grand promises of transnational history? Some of the concerns behind transnational history seem rather mundane.43 These include the internationalization of the history profession; historians increasingly travel abroad, publish in international journals, and so on, and this trend coincides with an increased focus on “connections” and embedding research in a common scholarly discourse. Tellingly, transnational history in Australia, for some, answered “a desire to break out of historiographical marginality and isolation.”44 It is in the realm of content, however, that the potential of transnational history becomes exciting. In particular, it promises two core benefits.

The first is to spotlight and investigate important topics previously neglected, or underestimated, or inadequately conceptualized. The ground was prepared, perhaps, by the growth of social and cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s, because their topics—social groupings, ideological categories, personal memories—were much less entangled with the nation-state as a central category than traditional military and diplomatic history.45 Some topics, such as the histories of diasporas and nomads, led scholars to “query the tyranny of the national in the discipline of history.”46

Most authors agree, however, that the breakthrough for transnational history occurred when globalization and regional integration (such as the European Union) became more important themes in public affairs, along with such global issues as environmentalism, human rights, and terrorism. These phenomena transcended existing units of analysis; they required a new form of historiography.47 For Saunier, for instance, “one of the most immediate possibilities opened by the adoption of a transnational angle is a contribution to the historization of what is commonly called ‘globalization.’”48 Similarly, Iriye notes that words like “global” and “globalization” proliferated in the 1990s and calls for “a historical context for the phenomenon of globalization.”49 A recent exchange on transnational history in the American Historical Review predominantly addresses globalization and its interpretations.50

A transnational history of technology obviously will contribute to this endeavor. This seems particularly appropriate because historians of globalization have frequently invoked technology as an exogenous driving force, often dividing the history of globalization into epochs defined by the expansions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century shipping networks, nineteenth-century rail and telegraph networks, twentieth-century air travel and broadcasting technologies, or today’s internet. A transnational history of technology should provide a more nuanced picture of the role of technology in globalization, drawing on the perspectives discussed in the preceding section.51

The transnational history of technology explored in Tensions of Europe holds out similar prospects for the study of European regional integration. Thomas Misa and Johan Schot argue that the history of technology could help explore the “meaning and significance of European integration” as a transnational process, seeing European integration as something more than an episode in the international relations of nation-states. The particular contribution of technological history to such a new transnational history of European integration would be its inquiry into a “hidden integration” and “hidden fragmentation” in the realm of technological linking and delinking, circulation and appropriation, which are largely missed in existing histories of European integration. The explorative first phase of Tensions of Europe, Misa and Schot argue, demonstrated the viability of this transnational approach. If the research agendas developed here are followed up, “a new kind of history of European integration will emerge as well as a new kind of history of technology.”52

The second core benefit of a transnational perspective on history is that it furnishes a new and more accurate perspective on existing themes in historical scholarship, a novel understanding of not only global or regional integration issues but also national and local history. This was the promise held out by the New Transnational History of the early 1990s: a more balanced view of U.S. history, which took into account international, national, and subnational developments. In European history (as distinct from more recent European integration history or the European Union), the second wave of transnational history (“connected” or “embedded” history) conveyed the similar message that “the history of Europe and its single states, regions and cities, and its peoples should not be written as artificially national, but as transnational histories.”53 A transnational angle on urban history, likewise, would take into account the myriad of international exchanges, associations, and congresses—aptly called the Urban Internationale—defining perceptions of urban issues in order to better understand what happened locally.54 The promise of a more qualified understanding of existing historiographical themes is also found beyond the confines of local and national history—in, for example, histories examining the role of the transnational disarmament movement in the cold war, which for Matthew Evangelista was a matter of “setting the historical record straight.”55

Again, historians of technology may contribute to such a reevaluation of existing themes. A recent collection of essays on the transnational urban history of technology, edited by Mikael Hård and Thomas Misa, is a case in point. These scholars have added to transnational urban history work a focus on technological issues, spotlighting the confrontation of such homogenizing forces as international associations developing urban planning ideals and technologies on the one hand, and the local appropriation processes in which urban officials, engineers, planners, and citizens could adapt new urban technologies to their local interests and traditions on the other.56

One may ask how far the concept of transnational history can be extended backward in time, to eras predating nation-state dominance. For some, the sense of “transcending the national” makes the notion of transnational history seem too restrictive before about 1850, when “large parts of the globe were not dominated by nations so much as by empires, city states, diasporas, etc.”57 They might prefer the phrase “global history” to a transnational history. Others argue that transnational history provides innovative analytical perspectives even for earlier periods. Immigration history, as Patricia Seed notes, has tended to focus on either the origins or the destination of the migrant. Adopting a transnational history perspective, however, requires such histories to focus on both simultaneously, exploring the multiple ties between the lands of origins and destination.58 One might likewise expect a transnational history of technology to be productive in premodern history as well.

Pitfalls

A transnational perspective on history, in sum, may train attention onto important subjects previously relegated to the margins and produce more perceptive work on existing themes. Moreover, transnational history offers research sites and questions to facilitate such inquiry, spotlighting cross-border flows, international organizations shaping the modern world, and lived history across or within established analytical categories. A transnational history of technology may profit from, and contribute to, such lines of research. But with opportunity comes risk, and the transnational history literature discusses some of the potential dangers in this approach to historical scholarship.

A brief digression into comparative history debates may help interpret the status of historiographical pitfalls. Transnational history manifestos generally criticize comparative history for reifying national exceptionalism. But as Jürgen Kocka has observed in response to this criticism, good comparative history does not necessarily construct national essentialism and exceptionalism.59 It may well bring out elements of national particularity, but it is also indispensable for challenging these conceptions—as when testing claims to primacy or particularity. For analytical purposes comparative history indeed does cut entanglements when constructing its units of comparison, but good comparative work also reconstructs embeddedness and context, and it critically reflects on and accounts for its chosen categories of comparison. For Kocka, while comparative and transnational history are fundamentally different, both can be carried out in more or less reflective ways, and both have their place in historiography. Indeed, Kocka advocates combining them to bring out connections as well as difference. The point is that the risks entailed by any historiographical perspective, even those inherent in its basic intellectual operations, do not necessarily disqualify it. Rather, they help distinguish good practice from not quite so good practice. What are those dangers, then, that separate good transnational history from more problematic versions?

Two have already been discussed: misunderstandings introduced by the multiple meanings that may be assigned to the concept of transnational history, and underestimating the importance of the nation-state in modern and contemporary history.60 Guarding against the first demands reflection about the presumed audience and explication of which analytical categories (e.g. intergovernmental organizations, the nation-state) are included and which are not; the second requires that the role of the nation-state vis-à-vis other categories—such as cold war tensions, regional integration, transatlantic relations, and so on—be explicitly thematized.

A third hazard is that studying more distant transnational phenomena may risk alienation of local and national audiences and, by extension, a loss of relevance to local and national political debates. This is so not only because audiences and politicians seem “intensely nationalistic.”61 A professional reorientation toward international peers instead of lay audiences at home, too, may imply that historians only study local and national history when relevant to international historiographical debates; “as a result, there is the danger that the people whose history we write will know little of our work; and even if they do, they recognize that we are not really talking to them. Our gaze has moved elsewhere.”62

One response offered to this warning has been that historians’ audiences have not only national identities but also parochial and international ones.63 More important, as noted above, a transnational history agenda may well aim at improving national and urban history, in which case the problem seems to fade. It is also instructive to recall how the transnational turn worked out in other disciplines. In anthropology, for example, transnationalism may refer to transmigration sparked by the restructuring of global capitalism, but the focus of inquiry remains on the effects of such processes on nation-state building and identity construction—in short, on the implications of transnational phenomena on national and individual scales.64 As for political engagement, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 presidential address to the American Studies Association is noteworthy, for she positioned a transnational American studies as an alternative site of knowledge “at a time when American foreign policy is marked by nationalism, arrogance, and Manichean oversimplification. . . . [I]t is up to us . . . to provide the nuance, complexity, and historical context to correct reductive visions of America.”65 Opinions about the moral duties of technological history will naturally vary, but a transnational turn as such should not prevent historians of technology from fulfilling those duties as they understand them.

A fourth danger is the threat to the gains that social history has made in addressing the histories of individual people, personal experiences, and private spaces regardless of wealth and power. Transnational history, some argue, would lead historians to look at the world of elites instead.66 In response, Ian Tyrrell has emphasized that transnationalism should be “a form of the new social history, not a repudiation of it.”67 It ought to incorporate a humanistic perspective in a grand narrative, exploring how people change and are changed by history. The viability of this possibility is amply demonstrated in transnational migration histories, which often take individuals, their lives, and their support networks as the units of analysis.68 Current experiments in a transnational history of technology underline this point; they may focus on a technical or business elite working in international organizations, but also on bus passengers, truck drivers, and shopping tourists crossing borders, or on the reception and appropriation of foreign technologies and consumption practices by consumers.69

A fifth potential risk lies in replacing nation-centered historiography with another essentialized scale—the globe, for example, or the European Union. Such essentialism may be accompanied by an unwarranted teleology, presenting the history of border crossings and transnational encounters as ever-progressing cooperation and integration.70 It could also inspire a view that transnational history itself represents a higher form of history, an evolution that leaves outdated national and local historiography behind. A good example of this danger is William Robinson’s proclamation of transnational studies as the new paradigm in the social sciences, an epistemological shift to match globalization’s “supersession of the nation-state as primary form of social organization.” Henceforward, transnational social structure should be the appropriate unit of macrosociological analysis.71

Perhaps historians are less prone to fall into this trap; challenging teleological assumptions is at the core of their trade. They would also be reluctant to betray the “pluralist bargain,” by which different topics—people, cities, regions, nations, global society, nature—are all deemed worthy of professional scholarly inquiry.72 Several transnational history manifestoes warn explicitly against essentialism and teleology. Thomas Bender, for instance, maintained that “in seeking a respatialization of historical narrative in a way that will liberate us from the enclosure of the nation, it is important that we avoid imprisoning ourselves in another limiting conceptual box . . . we would do better to imagine a spectrum of social scales, both larger and smaller than the nation and not excluding the nation.”73 Saunier likewise warns against a transnational history that adds a new scale above the national, and instead he advocates moving across established categories.74

The Tensions of Europe intellectual agenda provides an antidote to essentialism and teleology in its insistence on querying technological integration and fragmentation simultaneously. This approach obviously derives from the historian of technology’s view of technological change as a negotiated, contested, and often failing process, and it constitutes a fruitful contribution of technological history to transnational history. It would suggest a transnational history of technology that deliberately spotlights success as well as failure, inclusion as well as exclusion of countries, areas, and social groups from transnational technical collaborations.75

A heightened critical awareness may still furnish insufficient protection against a sixth danger, the problem of reflexivity. How does the very act of doing transnational history affect its research objects? If national historiography was for a long time the handmaiden of nation building, can transnational history avoid becoming a handmaiden of internationalism and the United Nations agenda, globalization and global capitalism, or European integration?76 Even when investigating these phenomena critically,the very shifting of the historian’s gaze to new topics has real consequences in the outside world, if only inasmuch as it helps emphasize new categories more than old ones. In the past, it should be remembered, even critical studies of nationalism may have strengthened the dominance of nation-centered analysis simply by foregrounding this particular category of lived history.

The nation-state version of the reflexivity problem also spotlights a seventh challenge for transnational history. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann argue that national reification remains widespread, even in transnational history. They criticize in particular transfer history, an early form of transnational history focused on cross-border flows, for its use of fixed national categories—as in, for example, the transfer of urbanization patterns between Great Britain and Russia. Such studies may aim to show that national borders were permeable, yet the nation-state sneaks in through the back door in the form of the conceptual units between which transfers occur, implicitly telling readers that the national remains the fundamental analytical category after all. Transfer studies thus “only reinforce the prejudices that they seek to undermine.”77 Werner and Zimmermann’s response, which they term histoire croisée, explicitly thematizes its own historicity and relationships between researcher, research categories, and research object. It remains to be seen, however, if that reflective approach will inspire empirical studies in the same way that the grand promises of transnational history did.

The reproduction of national categories is also quite common in current experiments with a transnational history of technology. It surfaces, for instance, in studies of the infrastructural linking, delinking, or nonlinking of nation-states, and of collaborations between two or more countries in transnational projects. It may also take the form of “banal nationalism,” in Michael Billig’s phrase: the “ideological habit” of constantly and casually flagging national properties at the expense of other allegiances.78 Engineers, entrepreneurs, companies, and products (not to mention fellow historians) are routinely classified as American, British, German, French, Dutch, and so on, not only because they appear as such in the sources (which would make the label legitimate) but also because authors add these adjectives to provide context for their readers. Such attributions go largely unnoticed by both author and reader, and they cannot easily be avoided if one wants to write an intelligible narrative.

An eighth and final pitfall emerges not from the literature on transnational history but in conversation with historians of technology.79 Does transnational history risk a return to internalist history of technology— that is, a history of technology highlighting the global progression of specific technological designs, abstracted from political and cultural contexts?80 Internalism may have its merits, but such a movement would certainly inspire controversy.81 Dispensing with the image of technology as a context-independent, autonomous force in modern society, and developing in its place more nuanced understandings of how design trajectories and societal context intertwine, has been counted among the major advances of the field for decades. Yet following what we today call “transnational actors” as scientists and engineers, easily crossing borders while building their international communities, sciences, or technologies, comes close to what internalist history of science and technology has always done.

Emerging research agendas for transnational history of technology, however, show no sign of undermining this concern for technology’s situated and negotiated character. Rather, they seek to transnationalize contextualist history, expanding the understanding of how technology interacts with local and national contexts to include international ones. Thomas Misa’s research agenda for the history of computing, to take only one example, spotlights “local circumstances and distinct cultures” shaping computing artifacts and practices, as well as the long-term processes in which computing “shaped the world.”82 The transnational history of technology exemplified by Tensions of Europe likewise situates technological and societal change together in contexts ranging from cities to transatlantic and postcolonial relations. The risks, I believe, can be dealt with or lived with. The promise of transnational history of technology seems too bright to decline. Only time will tell if it will manage to be intellectually stimulating, historiographically productive, and able to deal adequately with the dangers accompanying this new line of inquiry. Current developments in the history of technology in Europe suggest that it may well be worth the effort.

1. Thomas Misa and Johan Schot, “Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 1–20, at 2.

2. Kai Henrik Barth, “Catalysts of Change: Scientists as Transnational Arms Control Advocates in the 1980s,” in Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs, ed. John Krige and Kai Henrik Barth (Chicago, 2006), 182–208; Gary Lee Downey and Juan C. Lucena, “Knowledge and Professional Identity in Engineering: Code Switching and the Metrics of Progress,” History and Technology 20 (2004): 393– 420; Eda Kranakis, “Patents and Power: European Patent System Integration in the Context of Globalization,” Technology and Culture 48 (2007): 689–728; Arjan van Rooij et al., “National Innovation Systems and International Knowledge Flows,” Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 20, no. 2 (2008): 149–68; and Peter Lyth and Helmut Trischler, eds., Prometheus Wired: Globalisation, History and Technology (Aarhus, 2004). For the history of science, see also Josep Simon and Néstor Herran, eds., Beyond Borders: Fresh Perspectives in History of Science (Newcastle, 2008).

3. Compare Akira Iriye, “Transnational History,” Contemporary European History 13: 211–22.

4. See http://www.tensionsofeurope.eu (accessed 28 March 2008).

5. See http://www.esf.org/inventingeurope (accessed 28 March 2008). Another related program is the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) program Transnational Infrastructures and the Rise of Contemporary Europe; see http://www.tieproject.nl (accessed 28 March 2008).

6. Johan Schot, Ruth Oldenziel, et al., “Tensions of Europe: Technology and the Making of Twentieth Century Europe: Proposal for a European Science Foundation Network” (2000), 3 (part of the initial proposal to the ESF; copy in author’s possession). See also Johan Schot and Ruth Oldenziel, “Tensions of Europe, Phase 2: Intellectual Agenda,” available at http://www.tensionsofeurope.eu (accessed 28 March 2008).

7. This suggestion was first articulated in Johan Schot, “Tensions of Europe: Twentieth Century European History of Technology: Description of an International Project” (1999), 2. (This is a reworked version of the keynote presented at the workshop “Tensions of Europe: Technology, Economy, and Society in the Twentieth Century,” Eindhoven University, 25–26 November 1999). Compare Misa and Schot (n. 1 above), 9–11.

8. Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser, “Networking Europe,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 21–48; Van der Vleuten and Kaijser, eds., Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000 (Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2006); Johan Schot, ed.,“Building Europe on Transnational Infrastructures,” special issue of the Journal of Transport History 28 (2007); Vincent Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe: The Power of Europe in the Construction of Electricity Networks (Amsterdam, 2008); Frank Schipper, Driving Europe: Building Europe on Roads in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam, 2008); Irene Anastasiadou, In Search of a Railway Europe: Transnational Railway Developments in Interwar Europe (Amsterdam, forthcoming); Alexander Badenoch and Andreas Fickers, eds., Europe Materializing? Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe (forthcoming).

9. Helmut Trischler and Hans Weinberger, “Engineering Europe: Big Technologies and Military Systems in the Making of twentieth-century Europe,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 49–84; Nina Wormbs, “A Nordic Satellite Project Understood as a Trans-National Effort,” History and Technology 22 (2006): 257–75.

10. Ruth Oldenziel, Adri Albert de la Bruhèze, and Onno de Wit, “Europe’s Mediation Junction: Technology and Consumer Society in the Twentieth Century,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 107–40; Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Kitchen Politics: Americanization, Technology Transfer, and European Users (Cambridge, Mass., in press).

11. David Arnold, “Europe, Technology, and Colonialism in the 20th Century,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 85–106; Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Bodies, Networks, Geographies: Colonialism, Development, and Cold War Technopolitics, in manuscript; Mikael Hård and Thomas Misa, eds., Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

12. Samuel Huntington, “Transnational Organizations in World Politics,” World Politics 25 (1973): 333–68, at 334.

13. See David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 965–75, at 968, and Patricia Clavin, “Introduction: Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History 14 (2005): 421–40, at 433–34.

14. Iriye, “Transnational History” (n. 3 above), 213; Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Going Transnational? News from Down Under,” History: Transnational, http://geschichtetransnational.clioonline.net/, 13 January 2006 (accessed 13 August 2007).

15. “Guidelines for Contributors,” Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, www.palgrave.com/history/transnational (accessed 13 August 2007). See also Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Learning by Doing: Notes about the Making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History,” Journal of Modern European History 6, no. 2 (2008, in press).

16. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, introduction to Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra, 2005), 5–20, at 5.

17. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds., Palgrave Dictionary for Transnational History, s.v. “Transnational/Transnationalism” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

18. Judith Schueler, “Travelling towards the ‘Mountain that has Borne a State’: The Swiss Gotthard Railways,” in Networking Europe (n. 8 above), 71–97, and Materialising Identity: The Co-Construction of the Gotthard Railway and Swiss National Identity (Amsterdam, 2008).

19. Palgrave Dictionary for Transnational History, s.v. “Transnational/Transnationalism.”

20. Joseph S. Nye and Robert O. Keohane, “Transnational Relations and World Politics: An Introduction,” International Organization 25 (1971): 329–49.

21. Ibid., 331.

22. Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge, 2005), and “Transnational Politics: Contention and Institutions in International Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 1–20; Thomas Risse Kappen, “Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Structures, and the End of the Cold War,” International Organization 48 (1994): 185–214. This meaning informs the current Wikipedia entry on “Transnationalism” as well; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnationalism (accessed 13 August 2007).

23. Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare:23 Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62–90, at 63.

24. Barth (n. 2 above); Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999).

25. Huntington (n. 12 above), 336. For a25 response, see Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, “Transgovernmental Relationships and International Organizations,” World Politics 27 (1974): 39–62.

26. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, Calif., 2002).

27. Clavin (n. 13 above); Patricia Clavin and Jens Wilhelm Wessels, “Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of Its Economic and Financial Organization,” Contemporary European History 14 (2005): 465–92.

28. Erik van der Vleuten et al.,“Europe’s System Builders: The Contested Integration of Transnational Road, Electricity, and Rail Infrastructures,” Contemporary European History 16 (2007): 321–47.

29. Curthoys and Lake (n. 16 above), 5.

30. Thomas Bender, “The Boundaries and Constituencies of History,” American Literary History 18 (2006): 267–82, on 271.

31. Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031–55,on 1038.See also Michael McGerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational History,’” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1056–67, and Ian Tyrrell, “Ian Tyrrell Responds,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1068–72. Similar arguments played out later in David Thelen (n. 13 above), 965–75, and Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plentitude of Narratives,” introduction to Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002), 1–21.

32. Thelen, 967.

33. Ibid.

34. For an overview, see Hartmut Kaelble, “Die Debatte über Vergleich und Transfer und was jetzt?” History.Transnational, http://geschichtetransnational.clioonline.net, 8 February 2005 (accessed 13 August 2007). The concept of transfer history is usually attributed to the work of Michel Espagne. For a more recent example in English, see Henk te Velde, “Political Transfer: An Introduction,” European Review of History 12 (2005): 205–21, on 206. For connected or relational history, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asia Studies 31 (1997): 735–62, and Philip Ther, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe,” Central European History 36 (2003): 45–73. For histoire croisée, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50.

35. McGerr.

36. Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism” (n. 31 above), 1033.

37. Ibid., 1038, and Tyrrell, “Ian Tyrrell Responds” (n. 31 above).

38. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Transnationale Geschichte—der neue Königsweg historischer Forschung?” in Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (Göttingen, 2006), 161–73.

39. The social sciences would add theoretical utility and field utility. John Gerring, “What Makes a Concept Good? A Critical Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences,” Polity 31 (1999): 357–93.

40. Misa and Schot (n. 1 above).

41. Johan Schot, “Introduction: Building Europe on Infrastructures,” Journal of Transport History, 3rd ser., 28, no. 2 (2007): 167–71.

42. Oldenziel and Zachmann (n. 10 above); Hård and Misa (n. 11 above). See also ongoing research described in Johan Schot et al., eds., Eurocores Programme Inventing Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present (Strasbourg, 2007), available at http://www.esf.org/inventingeurope (accessed 28 March 2008).

43. This point was made by Iriye, “Transnational History” (n. 3 above), 212–13.

44. Curthoys and Lake (n. 16 above), 15.

45. Iriye, “Transnational History,” 212.

46. Donna R. Gabbacia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1115– 34, quote on 1116.

47. Iriye, “Transnational History,” 211;47 Kaelble (n. 34 above); Budde, Conrad, and Janz (n. 38 above), 11. Seigel (n. 23 above) disagrees and argues that anticolonialism and postcolonialism triggered the transnational turn.

48. Saunier, “Going Transnational?” (n. 14 above).

49. Iriye, Global Community (n. 26 above), 196.

50. C. A. Bayly et al., “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1441–64.

51. See, for example, Lyth and Trischler (n. 2 above). In technological history, such work has a history predating the transnational turn, most notably by Daniel Headrick; see The Tools of Empire (Oxford, 1981), The Tentacles of Progress (Oxford, 1988), and The Invisible Weapon (Oxford, 1991).

52. Misa and Schot (n. 1 above), 15.

53. Ther (n. 34 above), 69.

54. PierreYves Saunier, “Sketches from the Urban Internationale,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (2001): 380–403. Thomas Bender has noted that Frederick Jackson Turner, in his 1891 article “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” held that “local history can only be understood in the light of the history of the world”; see “Historians, the Nation, and the Plentitude of Narratives” (n. 31 above), 4.

55. Evangelista (n. 24 above), 5.

56. Mikael Hård and Thomas Misa, “Modernizing European Cities: Technological Uniformity and Cultural Distinction,” in Hård and Misa (n. 11 above), 1–22.

57. Bayly et al. (n. 50 above), 1442.

58. Ibid., 1443.

59. Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 39–44.

60. For example, Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 2nd ed. (London, 2000).

61. McGerr (n. 31 above), 1066.

62. Curthoys and Lake (n. 16 above), 14–15.62

63. Tyrrell, “Ian Tyrrell Responds” (n. 31 above), 1071.

64. Cristina Szanton Blanc, Linda Basch, and Nina Glick Schiller,“Transnationalism, Nation-States, and Culture,” Current Anthropology 36 (1995): 683–86; Alejandro Portes, Luis Guarnizo,and Patricia Landolt, “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (1999): 217–37.

65. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17–57, at 20.

66. McGerr, 1065.

67. Tyrrell, “Ian Tyrrell Responds,” 1071.

68. See Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt.

69. See the descriptions of several ongoing research projects at http://www.inventing europe.eu, in particular the research programs “European Ways of Life in the American Century: Mediating Consumption and Technology in the Twentieth Century” and “Experiencing ‘Europe’ on the Road: Transnational Bus Travel and the Making of ‘Europe,’” and the Ph.D. program “The Hidden Integration in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.”

70. Clavin (n. 13 above), 424.

71. William I. Robinson,“Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization,Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies,” Sociological Forum 13 (1998): 561–94, at 564. Robinson mentions and rejects teleological reasoning (582–83), but his overall argument and language contradict that caveat.

72. McGerr (n. 31 above), 1065.72

73. Bender, “Historians,the Nation,and the Plentitude of Narratives” (n.31 above),8.

74. Saunier, “Going Transnational?” (n. 14 above).

75. Schot, “Tensions of Europe” (n. 775 above).

76. McGerr, 1066; Saunier, “Going Transnational?”

77. Werner and Zimmermann (n. 34 above), 37.

78. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), 6.

79. I thank Gerard Alberts and Pierre Mounier-Kuhn for raising this point at the “Inventing Europe—Software for Europe” workshop in Grenoble, January 2008.

80. John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 10–11.

81. On the merits of internalism, see Terry S. Reynolds, “On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé,” Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 523–30.

82. Thomas J. Misa, “Understanding How Computing Has Changed the World,” Annals of the History of Computing 29 (2007): 52–63, on 52.

Erik van der Vleuten is universitair docent in the School of Innovation Sciences at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. He recently coedited, with Arne Kaijser, Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000 (2006). He thanks Gerard Alberts, Francesca Bray, Karen Freeze, Eda Kranakis, Thomas Misa, Pierre Mounier-Kuhn, Pierre-Yves Saunier, and Johan Schot for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the European Science Foundation (ESF) for financial support.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Exterior view of the London Transport Museum. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

The museum has always been committed to the history of urban transport beyond vehicles. The initial suite of exhibitions sketched the role played by transport in shaping the physical form of, and life in, the metropolis. But this interpretation was not tied in with the vehicles that dominated the displays. A redisplay in 1993–94 gave a much greater emphasis to transport as a factor in urban history. But there was still a tension between the museum’s illustrated narrative of the social, political, and economic history of mobility in London and the displays of trams, buses, and Underground vehicles conveying a rather conventional notion of technological progress.1 By contrast, the present museum, opened in November 2007 after a closure of just over two years, marks a substantial step toward integrating the material remains of London’s public transport with a technocultural history of personal mobility in the city. It also relates that history to debates about how London’s transport might develop in a future dominated by climate change.2

The museum’s legally protected Victorian market building, with its light, airy, cast-iron and glass structure, was both an attraction in its own right and a nightmare for the museum’s exhibition designers and conservationists. Ameliorating some of the worst environmental deficiencies without destroying the amenities was a priority for the refurbishment, swallowing around 80 percent of the project’s £22.5 million ($45 million) cost. A rationalization of the museum’s ancillary services, with the entrance, shop, café, and a new 100-seat lecture theater now located in an annex, leaves the main hall with two upper levels free for displays and a small library, open to both browsers and scholars. The result is a much-needed additional gallery, easier circulation, and splendid views of both the full height of the Victorian structure and, from the upper galleries, an impressive selection of road vehicles on the ground floor.

The success of any exhibition needs to be judged partly against its target audiences, in this case visitors who do not have a historical knowledge of either London or its transport. The old museum was good at attracting family groups, with well over half of the annual visitation just before closure (200,000) falling into this category, split roughly equally between the sexes. The new displays seek to retain these audiences while also reaching out to a new demographic—people, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, who are interested in art and design. Here London Transport’s long and well-deserved reputation as a world leader in industrial and graphic design offers considerable opportunities to build on the tentative start the old museum had made in this direction.3 On the other hand, those with a strong interest in technical details will be disappointed that the museum does not provide these as part of its main displays; research suggested a low demand, and such information is available chiefly in the library. By contrast, children are seen as a key audience, and considerable thought has gone into making exhibits accessible to them throughout by tailoring interpretative content and presenting it at appropriate heights (fig. 2). But this is equally a museum for adults, albeit not one aimed in its main galleries primarily at the specialist or the scholar.

The new forms of interpretation at the London Transport Museum appeal to children.(Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

The museum presents London as a metropolis whose world-class status over the last two centuries owes much to its transport systems, public and private. This aim reflects the priorities of the new body, Transport for London, which took over London Transport, and hence the museum, in 2000, providing around £9 million of the funding. Although the museum now treats all of London’s passenger transport since roughly 1800, public transport still dominates visually. There are fewer (twenty-five) vehicles on display than before, although the total number of objects is up from some four hundred to more than a thousand. While vehicles can all too easily overwhelm other aspects of exhibitions, they remain powerful attractors for many visitors, especially when it is possible to board the interiors in a controlled manner as is the case with many here. Inevitably, given the different stories that can be told with a particular vehicle, there are hard choices to be made over which to exclude, and old favorites now gone can usually be found in the museum’s warehouse at Acton in the far-western suburbs. This is open to the public on a handful of occasions each year.

How well does the museum shape up to its mission to interpret London’s transport as a vital aspect of everyday life, historically, now, and in the future? Pretty well in general, although inevitably some elements work better than others.

The visit is a semi-directed one. Once past the turnstile—the fairly substantial entrance charge is partly there to control demand—visitors go up to the highest gallery and then work their way down to the ground level, ideally through both upper galleries, although it is possible to cut out the one on the middle floor. The narrative interpretation in the first of these upper spaces is nicely done, the gallery’s linearity lending itself to a chronological treatment of transport’s influence on London’s growth during the nineteenth century. Four themes are treated (literally) in parallel: the River Thames as both a facilitator of and barrier to mobility, the growth and impact of London’s suburban railway network, the place of street transport, and an overview of the city’s changing morphology. It is easy enough physically to weave between these narratives, which are told through the range of visual, tactile, and aural media one expects these days, and to make connections between them. I have no serious quibble with any of the interpretations, given the constraints of space and the intended audiences. Technological alternatives are given some notice, serious efforts are made to contextualize technological change in social and economic terms, and generally speaking the interpretation avoids any implication that, important though it was, transport was singlehandedly responsible for London’s development.

The world’s first Underground continues to appeal to a wide audience. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

There is the old challenge of most visitors gravitating to the vehicles, which here are horse-drawn buses and trams (plus a sedan chair right at the start) arranged chronologically, and ignoring much of what else is on offer. Whether visitors come away with anything other than a vague idea that one technology supersedes another remains to be discovered, but the freedom to pick and choose is at the heart of all museum visiting and informal learning. In any case this emphasis on the horse, a topic only quite recently taken seriously by historians of urban mobility, is very welcome. And there is much I liked about the way the individual vehicles are treated, not least the fact that they are now fully integrated into the overarching story. Associated with each is a panel narrating a snippet of the life story of an individual, usually a worker, associated with the vehicle; a ghostly photograph of the person helps to convey an impression of times past that is conspicuously denied by the patina of the restored vehicles. Touch-sensitive labels offer a choice of information for each vehicle, addressing the design and development of its type, the service of that particular example, and the kinds of journeys for which it was used. Words, photos, and occasionally film all have a role here, sometimes intriguing in the possibilities they suggest for academic research.

Mannequins suggest the long service life of Underground trains. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

The next gallery down, also linear, focuses on the Underground and the spread of London’s suburbs, with a small selection of locomotives, steam and electric, complemented by passenger accommodation (figs. 3 and 4). Essentially the same mix of multimedia interpretation and vehicular access is used here, and again there is little to argue with in terms of historiographical perspective. Very occasionally a hint of technological determinism creeps into the graphic panels (“Public transport creates suburbs”), but equally the attentive visitor will note the suggestions that the expansion of mobility and the provision of transport infrastructure and services were coconstructed. Some neat touches bring vehicles to life and emphasize the longevity of railway equipment. Inside the famous 1938 Underground cars, for example, the alert visitor will notice that the fashions of the “passengers” boarding and alighting the train in a life-size film projected on the end wall change as the decades roll by—it was 1988 before the last of these cars disappeared (fig. 4). And the gendered nature of mobility, a notable absence in the old displays, now receives some mention, as, for example, with the “ladies only” compartment of the Metropolitan Railway coach occupied by two women “off to town.”

By the time they reach ground level visitors have thus had the opportunity to think about London’s transport from several perspectives and through a variety of media. Now they are faced with a mix of further historically orientated spaces, with no clear path through them until they head for the exit and some exhibits about the future. However, the theme of each part of the ground floor is signaled clearly enough once one reaches it. In addition to single examples of an electric tram and trolleybus there are several motor buses, including the iconic red Routemaster double-decker, withdrawn from ordinary service in 2005 after nearly fifty years (fig. 5). There are also further exhibits relating to the Underground, including welcome displays on the hidden technologies of tunneling techniques and the escalator, an American invention transforming access to the deep-level “Tube” stations from 1911. There are also taxis, motorized successors to the personalized mobility afforded by the sedan chair displayed upstairs, and a bicycle—a much-needed, if understated, reminder that technological mobility is not just about mechanical power.

Key vehicles tell the story of changing street transportation. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

Because they are physically discrete, it is easier to locate the galleries dedicated to London Transport’s contribution to industrial and graphic design from the 1930s and to the experience of the system in both world wars. The former is particularly striking, with a continuous large-scale projection of key posters and other design features, including the Underground map, making the point that the automobile was not the only kind of mobility to benefit from sophisticated cultural work.

All this is nicely done, and although I might quibble here and there about the detail of interpretation, there is much to engage the historian of technology as well as the more casual visitor. The one clear disappointment was toward the exit, where the present and future of London’s transport come under the spotlight. The principle is excellent—encouraging visitors to think about future possibilities in the light of the past. At the display’s core is the imperative of addressing climate change, requiring hard thinking about how much and what kind of urban mobility we can afford. Public transport is presented as a key to both sustainable mobility and urban regeneration. The overall tone is perhaps a little too didactic to be truly engaging, but there are opportunities to reflect on different scenarios for the future, depending on how strictly and by what means carbon emissions are controlled. Technological possibilities are given some emphasis, but rather too much space is given over to exhibits mounted by various of the museum’s commercial sponsors. They are marked as such, and to a media-savvy generation perhaps it is no great hardship to interpret their content in this light. But while I acknowledge the need for commercial money, I feel that this level of influence over content is unacceptable in any museum, not least because it radically diminishes exhibitors’ freedom to treat topics from a disinterested perspective. For example, the advertisement—for this is all it amounts to—for “The pursuit of the ultimate eco-car” by a well-known manufacturer does not address the concern that hybrid drives might, under some full-life cycles, cost more in carbon terms than a conventional auto. However, this whole section has a limited life; it will be interesting to see how it is replaced.

There is a very great deal that is excellent or good about the new London Transport Museum, keeping it in the first rank of transport museums around the globe. The new displays do a good job in broadening the historical remit, comprehending transport as an important factor in the social and spatial development of this world city. Vehicles remain the stars of the show, as they always will be, but they are much better integrated into the overall stories than in the museum’s previous incarnations. The interpretation nicely contextualizes the vehicles as both places of work and spaces of consumption, and there is much to delight specialist and lay visitor alike about the wider history of mobility in London.

1. Colin Divall, “Changing Routes? The New London Transport Museum,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 630–35.

2. London Transport Museum website: (accessed 16 May 2008).

3. One result is a most welcome addition to the new website—a searchable collection of over 5,000 advertising posters and 700 pieces of original poster artwork. Equally invaluable to the historian as well as the casual viewer is a selection of some 15,000 black-and-white photographs (roughly 10 percent of the collection), some dating from the 1860s. See and (both accessed 16 May 2008).

Colin Divall is head of the Institute of Railway Studies and Transport History, a joint initiative of the National Railway Museum and the University of York, UK. He is the author, with Andrew Scott, of Making Histories in Transport Museums (London and New York, 2001). He thanks Oliver Green, head curator at the London Transport Museum, for arranging his visit and discussing the project’s background, philosophy, and challenges. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

This theme lies at the center of Allison Muri’s The Enlightenment Cyborg.2 Muri has set out to uncover the “prehistory” of the cyborg, a twentieth-century hybrid between man and machine, a prehistory she locates in the Enlightenment trope of the human-machine. She has two basic aims. First, she inveighs against the exaggerated rhetoric of postmodern theorists, who claim that the age of the cyborg heralds a “new humanity” or the “posthuman,” and against recent claims that the cyborg overcomes or, alternatively, rearticulates the ills allegedly created by technology and modernity. “History,” she argues, “is necessary to combat the oversimplified and frequently incendiary rhetorics of utopia and despair that have tended to characterize theories of human identity in a technologized environment” (p. 7). Second, Muri accuses postmodernists and cyborg theorists of misappropriating the Enlightenment. She stresses its complexity and proposes to provide a more adequate history of the cyborg figure.

Muri locates the history of the cyborg as man-machine in the early modern mechanistic view of the body as an engine, as well as in Enlightenment mechanistic understandings of the mind, prefiguring theories of neural networks and the electrochemical mind-machine interface. Then and now, in man-machine and cyborg, the role of the soul is contested—affirmed by some and dispensed with by others. In chapter 4, the heart of the book, Muri sketches the history of the nervous system in terms of circulations and communications, and she examines the transformation from control by an immortal soul to a machine-like bodily feedback system. She calls the physician and natural philosopher Thomas Willis (1621–75) the originator of the cyborg tradition, because—Muri claims—Willis took a materialistic approach toward the soul, which was in essence the nervous system consisting of an active and energetic communications network, and because he treated the body as a feedback engine. Muri describes it as “a case study in mechanical consciousness” (p. 118), in which the animal spirits are seen as messengers, akin to current-day information technology. From Willis’s theories, she sketches the development of a new image of man-machine as “sensible machine” in physicians such as George Cheyne and Samuel Auguste Tissot, and writers like Laurence Sterne. Then she goes on to describe Diderot’s view of the nervous system as a sensitive network and Erasmus Darwin’s identification of the nervous fluid with electricity. In this way we arrive at the idea that the matter of the mind is continuous with electromechanical systems, a precondition for the cyborgian idea that the mind can actually be connected to a machine, and that the human spirit might be downloaded and transmitted in an information network.

Elsewhere in her book, Muri focuses on different aspects of cyborg discourse. In chapter 3, she analyzes the body politic of the man-machine in order to uncover the historical roots of the acclaimed political and moral consequences of cyborgs. What governs the human machine? Is it a steersman, such as a disembodied soul, or can the human machine govern itself by means of material feedback systems? Similarly, can the political body organize itself, or does it need a divinely installed authority? In chapter 5, Muri searches for an Enlightenment woman-machine as a precursor to the female cyborg, but she claims that she cannot find much evidence for this.3 She therefore takes an indirect route and presents the history of two main (antagonistic) characteristics of the female cyborg in popular culture: a “femme fatale” and the disembodied womb for reproduction. Muri describes the Enlightenment literature of morality, physiology, midwifery, and pornography in order to show us that the womb was compared to the brain, that female vanity was sometimes perceived as “artificial,” sexuality as mechanical, and a woman as mechanically guided by her clitoris. In her concluding chapter 6, Muri briefly shows that human identity and consciousness are not restructured as a result of the introduction of electronic media, as Marshall McLuhan would have it, but that early modern analogies of the page as body and of the text as thoughtful reflection now have to be rethought in the face of new technological developments. The electronic revolution causes no changes in humanity, Muri argues, but rather in the discipline of the humanities.

I agree with Muri about the desirability of bringing some historical sensibility into cyborg and media theory, and in this objective she has succeeded very well. The historical project developed in The Enlightenment Cyborg is interesting and challenging. Whether Muri’s historical objectives are met is open to more questioning, however, and it is on this aspect that I will now focus by playing devil’s advocate. I will discuss problems with her book at three distinct levels: historiography, general historical claims, and particular historical points. At each level, I will challenge some of the choices she makes and the conclusions she draws.

The catchy title of the book itself, introducing an “Enlightenment cyborg,” points to problems that are present throughout the work. Muri recognizes at the very outset that “there is no such thing as the Enlightenment cyborg” and that her project “could seem anachronistic to say the least” (p. 3). After that, however, she happily ignores the problems raised by her approach. What kind of history can this yield? The word “cyborg” implies a complex set of meanings in twentieth-century culture which have no counterpart in the Enlightenment. So what exactly is Muri looking for? She considers her object of study the man-machine, but any identification of the man-machine with a cyborg will be tenuous, and analyzing perceived “shared” characteristics is bound to result in vague analogies at best, often bordering on the meaningless or the trivial. Granted, Muri’s point is more subtle than I have just presented it: “Of course,” she writes, “no broken lineage exists to be traced from an ancestor-machine to its offspring cyborgs; what demands our attention, however, are the shared assumptions concerning the perceived relationships of human to mechanism, material embodiment to human spirit, and mind to matter” (p. 5). This is more interesting, but it demands a difficult balancing exercise to write such a history, and problems thus remain.

Attempting to write the history of these “shared assumptions” comes close to attempting to write the history of Western intellectual culture. Muri, of course, wants to be more concrete, and her book is rife with discussions about cyborgs and links to their alleged counterparts in the past. So we are back with our former problem of identifying a sensible subject of study that is relevant for our conception of the cyborg today. Furthermore, when closely scrutinized, many of our assumptions will look very different from prevailing assumptions 350 years ago. After innumerable developments in the sciences, technology, and philosophy, the mind-body problem today can hardly be seen as identical with the problem confronted by Descartes or Willis. Only on the most abstract level might we talk about shared assumptions. But Muri is not so much into abstract metaphysical subtleties. Instead, she is interested in historical detail. Yet in tracing long-term similarities, she tends to forget that local contexts are crucial for understanding historical detail, and that the similarities she finds are superficial. A general problem with Muri’s book is that the reader finds it difficult to extract a clear argument from her dense descriptions and enumerative discussions of early modern works, which are juxtaposed with few hints at the parallels and differences. The book keeps branching out in different directions, chasing diverse cyborg images.

Looking for precursors and origins often results in a Whiggish and much too diachronic view, one which is prone to missing the synchronic multiplicity of objects, contexts, and meanings. For instance, even if one could trace a continuous historical line between technologies, e.g., from the magic lantern to the movie projector, one would miss noting that such an instrument is actually not stabilized: variants were developed, hybrid and alternative technologies that may have flourished and then disappeared after a while. Finally, I would suggest that looking for differences is often much more interesting than finding vague and already obvious similarities, because one is compelled to look closely in order to make them as precise as possible. The resistance of the unexpected that we can find in closely studying history can bring to light the differences in our presuppositions, and this can compel us to refine our current categories of thought.

In addition, it is not just that the term “Enlightenment cyborg” is historically vacuous, for to read a current set of problems into the past can also result in anachronistic history, even if “similar” questions were posed at the time. To identify our questions with theirs is to neglect the contexts in which these questions were posed—and as a result, to lose the specificity and particularity of history.4 Many of the passages discussed in Muri’s book will reappear in a new light when confronted with early modern concerns about morality, religion, the immateriality of the soul, and the passivity of matter.

Even if we would grant that a history of “shared assumptions” is an interesting and feasible project, is the man-machine the right focus for a history of the cyborg? Inspired by cybernetic theory, Muri interprets the cyborg as a “steered organism” (p. 19) and focuses for her history on two crucial characteristics: a mechanistic assumption and the metaphor of steering or governing the body.5 This definition is controversial, however. First, it does not correspond to the popular view of the cyborg as a mixture between organism and machine. Second, it does not come close to the first use of the term in a NASA report about humans modified for surviving in space without spacesuits (there is explicit reference to incorporating artificial organs, drugs, and/or hypothermia in the human organism).6 Third, Muri does not apply her definition consistently. On the one hand, she often takes the human body, guided by a soul or by its own material processes, as representative. On the other hand, she seems to be talking more about what most would call “robots” steered by cybernetic mechanisms.

Donna Haraway offered what is now the most prominent definition of the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creatureof social realityas well as acreature of fiction.”7 In Haraway’sview, the cyborg subverts all the traditional modern dichotomies, such as human–machine, mind–body, organic–mechanical, public–private, natural–cultural, man–woman, life–death, reality–appearance, and truth–illusion. It is a boundary creature that challenges all previously accepted categories and takes pleasure in it. This explains why the cyborg is interesting and should be treated as distinct from a robot. Anthropological studies have shown that hybrid objects and the crossing of boundaries create angst and unheimlichkeit—these hybrids are liminal objects—and therefore haunt the cultural imagination. Although Haraway denies that the cyborg has a history, we could still conceive of writing an alternative history of such creatures in which the boundaries between life and the mechanical, and maybe other boundaries as well, are transgressed.

It is tempting to see the Enlightenment man-machine as the focus of a prehistory of the cyborg. But this contradicts the commonplace image of the cyborg as a hybrid of man, animal, and machine. First, Cartesian philosophy saw man as if he were a machine and never considered a real intermingling of the organic and the mechanical. Organic material consisted of much more subtle “machinery” than manmade machines. This was an insurmountable difference in degree resulting in incompatible “kinds” of machines. Second, it is true that the organic was treated on the same ontological footing as the mechanical. Yet it is precisely the mixture of what we perceive as different and irreconcilable kinds of being (organism and machine) that makes the image of the cyborg so fascinating for us. Treating everything as a machine makes the essential hybridity of the cyborg disappear.

Given that the Enlightenment human-machine is at odds with the common image of the cyborg in many ways, we could just as well construct a very different origin story. It is well known that Descartes’ account of the animal-machine was inspired by an older tradition of automata-making, sometimes known as thaumaturgy or artificial magic. This tradition has its roots in the ancient texts of Heron of Alexandria and Vitruvius, and in the medieval texts of Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. These “magical” texts claim several inventions, such as talking heads, moving statues, and other automata, which seemed imbued with life and are imbedded in a magical tradition of marvels, monsters, simulation, and imagination. As Jessica Riskin argues, these machines did not so much assert the mechanical nature of animals or humans as they represented, in a paradoxical way, life at its very liveliest.8 The magical imagination could produce illusory hybrids of man and animal, and the magus himself was a half-human half-god who conjoined the earthly with the heavenly. Body–mind, culture–nature, reality–illusion, and natural–artificial are all marked boundaries he easily crossed, and—like Haraway’s cyborg feminist—he enjoyed it.

This example of an alternative history of the cyborg also serves to indicate that Muri privileges the Enlightenment unwarrantedly. She denies postmodernism the rhetoric of seeing the cyborg as a radically new phenomenon, but she assumes that the Enlightenment witnessed some revolutionary transitions, which is taken as (unjustified) ground to start her origin stories in the mid-seventeenth century. Most of her examples of Enlightenment revolutionary transitions can be contested: the transition from spiritualized to materialist æther theories, for example, or from the theory of the female as an inverted male to the view of women as mechanisms for reproduction.9 Not even the idea of the animal-machine is original to the Enlightenment. As early as 1554, Gómez Pereira had held that animals (and the animal part of humans) are nothing other than machines. This indicates that Muri should have taken her historical sensibilities farther and to earlier periods. Furthermore, she has failed to study the period between 1800 and 1950, which leaves us wondering what happened to this Enlightenment cyborg in the meantime. Finally, not only is The Enlightenment Cyborg too narrowly focused on the Enlightenment, it is also disturbingly Anglocentric, ignoring almost everything outside this set temporal and geographical framework.

But let us take seriously Muri’s characterization of the cyborg as a steered organism, together with her focus on feedback mechanisms and bodily circulations. She gives a fascinating overview of Enlightenment physiological theories and how they were used metaphorically to think about politics. She seeks to do away with simplistic history that is often centered on naive interpretations of Descartes or other major philosophers. Unfortunately, she misreads Descartes, ascribing to him the view of the human soul as a pilot in a ship (followed by a quote which explicitly denies this), and she almost exclusively makes reference to his metaphysical dualism while ignoring his other texts.10 To the contrary, Descartes writes:

I showed, too, that it is not sufficient that it [the soul] should be lodged in the human body like a pilot in his ship, unless perhaps for the moving of its members, but that it is necessary that it should also be joined and united more closely to the body in order to have sensations and appetites similar to our own, and thus to form a true man.11

Furthermore, the idea of the soul as a pilot in a ship greatly precedes Descartes. It was an important Averroist idea, commonly discussed and rejected in medieval and in early modern scholastic literature. In general, Muri ignores the rich and complex history of mind-body interactions and organism-mechanism relations before the seventeenth century and seems to believe that the general strand of premodern thought was occultist. Actually, the idea of a reciprocal action of body and mind was commonplace in most of Western history. Only the exact theoretical elaboration differed, was difficult, and was contested.

In place of Descartes, Muri puts forward Willis as a revolutionary figure because of his neurophysiological theories of animal spirits as messengers, which can be interpreted as the description of some kind of feedback mechanism. But it is unclear to me why Willis deserves so much attention and why other contemporary physicians, such as Francis Glisson, Johannes Baptista van Helmont, and Hermann Boerhaave, are not even mentioned. Furthermore, Muri unduly emphasizes Willis as an innovator for those aspects of his thought that were almost common knowledge at the time. Although Willis’s energetic theories of animal spirits are indeed striking, many physicians had similar views and compared animal spirits to light or æther. Furthermore, animal spirits were widely acknowledged to constitute some kind of communications network. Kenelm Digby, for instance, wrote before Willis that they served as “centinells, to bring their discoveries to their General, viz. to the imagination, who is as it were the Mistresse of the whole family.”12 Muri also misrepresents Willis as an innovative materialist. Spirits and imagination were seen as material in dominant medical traditions long before Willis, and in crucial passages she ignores that Willis was orthodox in positing an immaterial rational soul next to a material animal soul.

Not only does Muri represent common ideas as revolutionary, she also glosses over truly important changes. She states, for instance, that our current representation of “the cyborg or sentient machine” as a highly rational being that lacks certain degrees of feeling reiterates early modern presentiments (p. 33). It is precisely here, however, that there is a crucial and fascinating historical change happening—a change from a mechanical body and a transcendent reason, not reducible to mechanism, to more current ideas of mechanical reason and artificial intelligence—which is left unnoticed and unexplained. Such changes are crucial for the topic of the book, since android automata such as the organ player of Pierre Jaquet-Droz and the chess player of Wolfgang von Kempelen were built in the middle of the eighteenth century to show the possibility of a sensitive machine and to question the idea of mechanical reason, which was slowly being conceived after the development of the first calculating machines. Other directly relevant material not discussed by Muri includes the animal soul in a broader context, Enlightenment android automata, and the role of medical electricity. References to standard secondary works are also lacking at times.13

I have been particularly critical in this review because Muri’s approach highlights long-standing problems that still beset certain strands in the historiography of technology. It also serves as an example of the problems encountered when one tries to intertwine and make relevant early modern history for discussions of contemporary theory. In this last paragraph, however, I want to counterbalance my critique by pointing out that Muri’s book does have many virtues. First, I can only praise an author willing to bring a historical sensibility to current “theory” and media studies. Such an author can refine the arguments of “theorists” and help them to reconsider their presuppositions. Second, when considering the history of body-machine interactions, it is a brilliant strategy to take the body-as-machine seriously and to look at mechanistic metaphors and assumptions in the history of physiology. It is true that we should not concentrate solely on automata and other technological artifacts. In order to conceptualize a real interface between animal and machine, it is necessary to come to an understanding of the body as something compatible with a machine, at least in certain respects. Third, Muri shows a keen interest in the English Enlightenment, which has led her to curious finds and amazing discussions of little-known texts from an incredible variety of disciplines and backgrounds. This is the most admirable aspect of the book, and she discusses some veritable historical jewels—but I will leave these for everyone to discover by themselves. To conclude, I would say that this book itself is a “cyborg”: a hybrid between history and theory, at once fascinating and unsettling.

1. Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), 1–2; Leonora Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York, 1968), 203.

2. Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. viii+308, $60).

3. Surprisingly, Muri does not discuss obvious examples such as Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s female organ player or the legend of Descartes’ Francine. For female androids in the Enlightenment, see Adelheid Voskuhl, “Motions and Passions: Music-playing Women Automata and Cultural Commentary in Late 18th-Century Germany,” in Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago, 2007), and Voskuhl, “The Mechanics of Sentiment: On the Construction and Interpretation of Music-playing Women Automata in 18th-Century Europe” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2007).

4. On the role of questions in the historiography of the sciences, see Nicholas Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences (Oxford, 2000).

5. This is not consistently carried through in her discussion of the woman-machine, where Muri focuses on different characteristics, as discussed above.

6. See Robert W. Driscoll, “Engineering Man for Space: The Cyborg Study,” NASA Biotechnology and Human Research Final Report NASA-512 (15 May 1963), and Edwin G. Johnsen and William R. Corliss, Teleoperators and Human Augmentation: An AEC-NASA Technology Survey (SP-5047) (Washington, D.C., 1967), both reprinted in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa, and Steven Mentor (New York, 1995), 75–92.

7. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1991), 149–81, quote on 149.

8. Jessica Riskin, Mind Out of Matter: The Animal-Machine from Descartes to Darwin (forthcoming), chap 2.

9. Material as well as spiritual theories of substances like æther, such as pneuma or spirit, had been around for a long time. Furthermore, Thomas Lacquer’s account of the “inverted male” has recently been challenged by Katharine Park in an as-yet-unpublished paper, “Itineraries of the ‘One-Sex Body’: A History of an Idea.”

10. In his treatise on the passions and in his letters to Princess Elisabeth, Descartes explains that “the mind, the body and the union between them belong to distinct dominions of knowledge. In metaphysics, intellect can only clearly think a dualism between body and mind, but it is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstention from meditation and from the study of the things which exercise the imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body.” See René Descartes, Philosophical Letters, ed. and trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 1981), 141.

11. René Descartes, Discourse, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. T. R. Ross (Cambridge, 1968), 1:118. Muri cites a similar passage from the Meditations.

12. Kenelm Digby, A Late Discourse Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier in France; Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, trans. R. White (London, 1658), 89.

13. To give some examples, Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), and Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001); Rosenfield (n. 1 above); Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds., Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity (Bologna, 2001); Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 599–633, and “Eighteenth-Century Wetware,” Representations 83 (2003): 97–125. Promising material (recent or forthcoming) that will reshape this field of research are Riskin, Genesis Redux (n. 3 above); Riskin, Mind Out of Matter; and Voskuhl, “The Mechanics of Sentiment” (n. 3 above). Also, recent contributions of importance to cybernetics, such as those of Andrew Pickering, go unmentioned in Muri’s work.

Koen Vermeir is Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research—Flanders and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has written on the history of the magic lantern, artificial magic, and the theology of early modern magnetic instruments. He is currently working on projects on early modern magnetic and optical technologies and on the cultural history of the early modern imagination. He thanks Lauren Kassell and Heidi Voskuhl for their comments on this essay.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The response varied. One group of faculty members insisted they could never permit use of the internet in their classroom. A few immediately squeezed into their own schedule the oversubscribed introductory course that explained the basics of creating a website. Several others ignored the request as redundant (they already had an internet component in place), as exploitative (the increased workload came with no increase in compensation), or because they didn’t read the memo. At the end of the semester, this department had the same number of “course websites” as it had before the memo was distributed.

Readers with at least one foot in academia may recall similar episodes at their own institution. The conflicts raised by differing perceptions of “digital scholarship,” “the internet,” or “cyberspace,” and differing perceptions of its value, are by no means confined to classroom teaching, to the university, or to education, however. I’ve observed similar anxious requests and equally anxious responses at nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, professional societies, homeowners’ associations—all institutions that serve a constituency and are concerned with serving it well.

We (or our administrations) know the internet is a useful addition to our scholarly lives. But how, exactly? What must we learn to do, or to accept? What place should the internet hold in professional activities or scholarly endeavors?

In answering these questions, it is helpful to remember that the internet is, in essence, a communication tool. It can bring information to a great number and range of people more quickly and at less expense than surface mail or conference attendance. It is also helpful to remember that the essence of scholarly activities is communication. It’s not enough to generate new ideas or conclusions; telling others and learning their opinions are critical aspects of participation in the academy. The adoption of the internet by scholarly communities has changed the paths of scholarly communication, argues Christine Borgman in her new book Scholarship in the Digital Age, and in so doing has transformed those communities.1 An aspect of that transformation is a redefinition of data—what it is, how it is used, who owns it and what that ownership means—that challenges the foundations of the academy.

Scholarly communication, much like building a website, involves a series of interconnected activities and considerations, some public, others private. Borgman’s assertion is based in the particular ways that interactive (internet-dependent) digital formats have altered scholarly digital communications. They offer new presentation tools and new techniques to communicate with colleagues. Discussions and distribution of information and resources are simultaneously broader and more personalized. The revised formats accommodate and encourage greater collaboration.

These changes have brought good and less-good results, as the proliferation of information has altered attitudes toward content and presentation. Internet access eases the exchange of information within and beyond single disciplines; this democratization of information is a notable feature of digital scholarship. Some common internet or cyberspace protocols disrupt assumptions that academic or scholarly work is published exclusively by academic or scholarly publishers. The ease of distributing unprocessed data along with explanatory charts, graphs, and conclusions means that information can be studied in different ways by practitioners of different disciplines. As a result, the use of the internet as a tool for scholarly communication raises new questions about controls and gateways. The same questions arise when examining the internet-wrought changes to peer review and to concepts of ownership, particularly as each relates to the goal of open access. In scientific disciplines where acknowledged priority ensures future funding or advancement, openness and the interactive nature of the internet are as much threat as promise. Openness and interactivity have widened the gateway into the humanities, suggesting that scholars in those disciplines need to conduct more critical assessments of internet-accessible works.

Which of these you consider good results and which less-good depends on other factors, as standards for scholarly interactive communication have not yet reached a consensus point. The unresolved issues range from acknowledgment of new uses for “raw data” (and so the need to recognize data management as a valid contribution to scholarship) to the need for further discussion about priority and copyright to defining for whom and to what specific purposes any scholarly digital system exists.

To further the goal of developing a consensus, Borgman defines the present state of interactive digital scholarship. Her emphasis, as she explains, is on the science and social science disciplines; she leaves out the humanities because their cyberinfrastructures are less well established. She looks at both the architecture and design of current systems and categorizes unresolved issues as a means to further illuminate collaborative possibilities. Borgman finds that the functions of the scholarly communities (peer review), the dissemination of new findings (open access), and the need to preserve information (preservation) are key differences between digital and paperbound scholarship systems.

Traditionally, the scholarly community has relied on a print-focused partnership to communicate. A scholar generates new information. Peer reviewers ensure its quality and priority, and similar concerns. A publisher or conference organizer provides the means of dissemination, producing an object (journal, book, pre- or post-prints, book of abstracts, etc.) and informing the whole community of its availability. The paper form has a finality that supports and is supported by its significance.

While aspects of the print-focused partnership exist in digital scholarship, the ease of disseminating work through the internet has shifted its balance. Scholarly digital publishing relies on production and distribution systems that are both similar to and different from those of “traditional” publishing. One way to understand the differences is to consider the distribution of costs of the two communication paths. For electronic publication, the greatest expense resides in production of the first or master copy; the marginal costs of additional copies are minimal. (These statements also explain email spam and the shift to digitized backlists in publishing.) A paperbound book or journal has similar expenses associated with the initial print run, but the costs of warehousing, delivery, and reprinting can be considerable and do not diminish much as copies are sold. And, while social and sociological factors may limit the number of born-digital books (at least in the humanities), born-digital or internet-based journals have become a common feature of many scholarly disciplines.

The role of peer review, in particular, changes when coordinated with the concept of open access familiar in digital scholarship; Borgman calls on sociological studies in her analysis of the impact of these changes. She suggests that peer review may become an interactive post-publication event in which the opinion of many peers, apparent through citation (in the traditional sense, or as links to a book or paper), replaces the time-consuming and often problematic prepublication review system. But I wonder if, by setting aside the humanities, Borgman has misjudged the potential contribution of a different kind of model to the development of this new scholarly system. When data are not quantitative, peer review systems demand more individual analytical skill to judge the quality and presentation of information. Perhaps a greater part of developing these new standards will be to ensure that future scholars are able to assess the communications offered by their colleagues, whether raw data or detailed analysis. These are familiar skills in the humanities.

Recognizing these changes raises other questions. How much do assumptions about or perceptions of audience affect scholarly electronic publishing now? How will this change? Do you write for your colleagues today, even those who refuse to read digitized material or participate in an internet-based scholarly enterprise more interactive than a listserv? Or is your audience your peers in three or five or fifteen years, a group that will no doubt be more comfortable with interactive formats but at the moment has no influence on your prospects of tenure or promotion? The answers hover around current attitudes toward the internet as a scholarly tool and in more general discussions about the construction of a scholarly cyberinfrastructure. The length of time a publication remains important to a community, the likelihood that any article or book will become important to several disciplines, and the possibility that a presentation will be revisited in the future are discipline-specific factors. This issue may not ever have a single answer.

Access issues appear to be equally resistant to consensus. What is excessively open to one discipline (or person) might be stultifyingly restrictive to another. But open access—which is not, as Borgman points out, the same as free access—also calls into question the role of the publisher, threatening the publishing system (including business models) just as interactive communications challenge peer review systems. Open access affects scholars by redirecting control of intellectual property, though this could be considered an advantage as much as a disadvantage. Again, although what counts as valuable scholarship or as work of value to scholars varies with each discipline, open access and the expanded communication opportunities of digital scholarship have consistently altered the terms. As an example, Borgman describes the changing perceptions of research data in the experimental sciences. Predigital accumulations of raw data were incidental, assembled in the course of a project but useful only after treatment and without value outside of the project. As these data become part of the scholarly infrastructure they form a new and different kind of capital for the sciences

The combination of open access and expanded communication also suggests that an ideal of “perfect information” might be possible. To some extent this ideal already exists in the humanities and certain social science disciplines, when a comprehensive bibliography or copies of critical primary sources are appended to a publication. But it is an order of magnitude different to imagine that I might have access to every book printed before 1800 that I believe I need for my research, including books that exist only as single copies in repositories scattered around the world. And it is a difference several orders of magnitude greater still to consider that I might have access to every document in every archive that I believe I need, and that I might make this accumulation of data available to others, or be able to examine the materials similarly compiled by someone else.

The problem of access to data and its reinterpretation is also a problem of stability and permanence: physical equipment changes and media deteriorate over time. This is probably a more serious concern—with different possible resolutions—for those systems on which the cyberinfrastructure is based than it is for an individual scholar who wishes to save personal scholarly records. The need to migrate data as obsolete hardware or software become difficult or impossible to maintain is well-known in the preservation community, but again the permanence standards have not yet reached a point of consensus. One data preservation service now offers to save digital photographs on archival-quality film as the best way to ensure permanence without constant migration. Illegibility of old files is a problem that still needs resolution, if only in the interest of achieving the goal of access to all data.

It may seem that the problems of scholarly digital publishing—including those of ownership, management, reproduction, peer review, preservation, and control—are unresolved because they are irresolvable, and that these problems overwhelm any advantage. But perhaps we are so familiar with the drawbacks and limitations of paperbound systems that we simply overlook them. Perceived differences between electronic and traditional publishing models carry over into expectations about the use and the availability of scholarly communications—whether initially raw data, interpretations that have become raw data for others, or objects that have value exactly as originally intended—in the future.

Clearly, scholarship has entered the digital age. We can no longer ignore the memo telling us it has arrived, or refuse its entry into our professional lives; even if we don’t partake, it has changed the work habits of our colleagues and changed the expectations of our disciplines. The details and meanings of those changes are still fluid, however, and may remain so for some time still.

1. Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007, pp. xxiv+336, $35).

Dr. Lowengard is a historian with a special interest in early modern technology and science. She has been an active participant in internet-based scholarly and professional endeavors—including listserv and website editorships, curriculum design and teaching, and born-digital publication—for more than fifteen years.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Chinese manufacturers have not been as aggressive in developing an ultra-low-cost automobile, but production there has rapidly expanded nonetheless. In 2007, the Chinese auto industry produced 8.88 million motor vehicles, of which 6.38 million were passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs, and minivans). This represented an increase of 22 percent over the previous year and made China the world’s third-largest producer of automobiles, surpassed only by the United States and Japan.1

The current and projected expansion of the automobile market in China and India brings to mind earlier epochs, when vehicles like the Ford Model T and the Volkswagen Beetle made car ownership possible for what Henry Ford dubbed “the great multitude.” When the first Model Ts rolled out of Ford’s Piquette Avenue factory in 1908, the United States had 198,000 registered automobiles.2 With the country’s population then standing at just over 88 million, that worked out to 2.2 cars for every thousand people. In only five years, this ratio jumped to nearly 13 cars per thousand, and by the mid-1920s, every American man, woman, and child could have been seated in the nation’s automotive fleet. The historical trajectory of automobile ownership in other nations also shows impressive rates of growth. In 1950, for example, the Federal Republic of Germany had only 40 cars per thousand people; a scant two decades later, that ratio stood at 230 cars per thousand. Similar examples of growth could be found throughout Europe during this period.3

Somewhat more germane to the cases of India and China is the expansion of the car population in Russia that occurred during the years following the collapse of communism and the abandonment of centralized economic planning. For decades, Soviet economic planners had little interest in expanding the production of passenger automobiles, and it was not until 1972 that more cars than trucks were produced.4 The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in many profound changes, among which was the rapid growth of private automobile ownership. In 1991, the year of the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, 600,000 automobiles were registered in Moscow, about the same as the Parisian car fleet four decades earlier; by 2006, the city’s car population had zoomed to 3.5 million.5 The growth statistics for Russia as a whole were almost as impressive: the number of automobiles per thousand inhabitants, which stood at 75 in 1993, had doubled by 2003—a year in which 1.5 million cars were sold.6

Today, India and China are not too far from the car-to-population ratios achieved during the early stages of automobile ownership in the United States and Europe. And, as occurred in the past, their car fleets are increasing rapidly. In 1999, Chinese consumers bought 1.2 million cars; that number increased sixfold by 2006, when 7.2 million cars were sold.7 In that year, China surpassed Japan in domestic auto sales, and it now trails only the United States in annual sales.8

By the end of 2007, the motor-vehicle population in China had reached 57 million, of which 21.5 million were privately owned cars.9 This made for a ratio of 44 vehicles for every thousand people, well below the current world average of about 120 cars per thousand, but a bit above the ratio found in West Germany in 1950. A similar story could be told of India, where the car population has been growing at an annual rate of 17 percent in recent years. A ratio of 60.3 vehicles (cars, trucks, and motorcycles) per thousand people puts it ahead of China, but Indian passenger-car ownership translates to only 11 cars for every thousand people.10 Even so, this is a ratio only slightly lower than the one for Italy in 1950.11

Growth rates of this magnitude in automobile ownership should not be surprising. A number of cultural, societal, and political variables affect the growth of automobile ownership, but the most powerful influence on automobile sales is income per capita.12 Although the expansion of automobile ownership in recent years has been impressive, it is only a glimmer of what is likely to come. Although both India and China are poor countries and will remain so in the immediate future, their middle-class populations have been expanding in parallel with the growth of their economies. India’s annual increase in gross national product (GNP) has exceeded 8 percent in recent years, while China’s growth rate has been even more impressive: though the commonly cited rate of 10 percent GNP growth per annum may be an overstatement, there is little question that China has achieved one of the highest sustained economic growth rates of all time.

Yet for all of their impressive economic advances in recent years, both China and India have large populations of very poor people. “Poverty,” of course, is an elusive concept that can be defined and operationalized in a number of ways. Adding to the difficulty are the pitfalls of cross-national comparisons of income (or, more properly, of buying power). Yet by any reasonable measure, poverty continues to be the prevailing condition for hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese. According to a 2007 World Bank estimate, 100 million people in China fall below the poverty line.13 The situation in India is even more baleful, with an estimated 350 to 400 million people living in poverty.14

Poverty in the two countries is heavily concentrated in rural areas that have not participated in the economic boom transforming many urban regions. The countryside also contains the majority of the population living just barely above the official poverty level. This means that the spatial distribution of automobiles in India and China resembles the initial stage of automobile ownership in Europe and North America, where the bulk of automobiles were purchased by urban residents. This pattern had shifted by the second decade of the twentieth century in the United States, as farmers and other rural people began to constitute a key segment of the automobile market.15 Given the poverty of much of rural China and India along with the associated rural–urban income gap, many years will pass before the countryside catches up with the city in terms of automobile ownership.

The Automobile’s Impact on China, India, and the World

The growth of the world’s automobile population has been inseparable from an ever increasing consumption of petroleum. The future consumption of this essential resource by the Indian and Chinese car fleets will depend on a number of factors, such as the rate at which the car population expands, its average fuel economy, and aggregate miles driven. But even under the most favorable scenarios, the large and growing car fleets of China and India will make substantial claims on the world’s petroleum resources; within twenty years, China alone is expected to equal the United States as a market for imported oil.16 It can be reasonably assumed that global fuel prices will reflect the resultant pressure on supplies.

An inescapable result of petroleum consumption is the production of nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and other pollutants. The local effects of automotive emissions are readily observable in the blankets of smog that hang over many Chinese and Indian cities. More ominous, especially for foreign observers, is the prospect of substantial future increases in the production of carbon dioxide, a leading contributor to global warming. By 2020, according to one estimate, China’s passenger-car fleet may produce 144 million metric tons of CO2;17 other estimates range between 89 and 231 million metric tons by the year 2025.18 India’s car population will likely not expand as rapidly as China’s, but if present rates of growth are sustained, its vehicles will increase the nation’s CO2 emissions sevenfold by 2035.19 CO2 emissions from the two countries will make significant contributions to global warming, but many years will pass before emissions from Indian and Chinese vehicles begin to approach levels currently existing in the United States, where gasoline-burning vehicles produced 1,186.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2005.20

More immediately damaging to China and India than the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions is an increased number of vehicular accidents, and the injury and death that come with them. Although India and China have far fewer vehicles per capita than the industrially developed nations, they account for an inordinately large share of the world’s car accidents. According to the World Health Organization, China had more than a half-million traffic accidents in 2005, which resulted in 107,077 deaths and 480,640 injuries.21 This amounted to 338.8 deaths and 1,521 injuries per 100,000 vehicles.22 Put differently, despite having only 3 percent of the world’s vehicles, China accounted for 21 percent of the world’s traffic fatalities.23 Somewhat less grim are the statistics for India, where traffic deaths claimed 98,254 lives in 2005, resulting in a ratio of 148.22 deaths per 100,000 motor vehicles.24

A high rate of vehicle-related deaths and injuries may be inevitable during the early phase of mass motorization, as can be seen in early-twentieth-century statistics from the United States: the vehicle-related death rate per 100,000 vehicles was 268.5 in 1914, and 188.1 in 1917.25 If past trends are any guide to the future, the rates for India and China will eventually drop with increasing levels of automobile ownership, but only after further increases in fatality and injury rates.26

The Political Costs of Automobility

These grim statistics can be attributed in part to woefully underdeveloped infrastructures in China and India: roads, bridges, signage, traffic-control devices, and the other essential ancillaries of high-density motorized traffic have all lagged behind the rapid growth of automobile ownership. These deficiencies can be viewed as a reprise of the history of mass automobility in other lands; the United States presents a particularly vivid example of automobile ownership outstripping the development of supportive infrastructures.27 Even today, in many parts of the industrially developed world, infrastructural development still trails automobile ownership—as attested by bridge collapses and jammed roadways.

Infrastructures that are essential to mass automobile ownership are classic “public goods”—projects that only governments can provide. A growing automobile population requires increased efforts by governments to build and organize highway projects and to collect the revenues to finance them. This expanded role for government creates a paradoxical situation for car owners and drivers. From its earliest beginnings, the automobile has been the “freedom machine” par excellence: along with their utilitarian value, private automobiles have held out the promise, and usually the reality, of taking their operators where they want to go, with whom, and at what time. But this freedom rests upon a significant degree of governmental intrusion in the form of taxes, emissions and safety inspections, mandatory insurance, the enforcement of traffic laws, and the punishment of violators. Although much of the recent economic success of India and China has stemmed from the liberalization of their economies, the parallel expansion of automobile ownership will necessarily bring new forms of government intrusion into private life.

These restrictions on individual freedom notwithstanding, it still can be argued that automobile ownership promotes a more individualist lifestyle. If this is true, one would have to conclude that authoritarian and totalitarian states that encourage automobile ownership and undertake large-scale highway construction undermine their own power. The most notable historical examples are, of course, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev. While the former never made good on its promise of universal Volkswagen ownership, during the 1970s the central leadership of the USSR exhibited a genuine commitment to expanding the nation’s automobile population. But the Soviet Union entered into a Faustian bargain when it partnered with Fiat to build a gigantic manufacturing complex for the production of Soviet versions of the Fiat 124. The resultant expansion of car ownership may have served to dampen popular discontent over a moribund economy and the general stagnation of the Brezhnev era, but, as Lewis Siegelbaum has noted, through its promotion of automobile ownership, “the Soviet state virtually guaranteed that millions of its citizens would become entangled in webs of essentially private relations that were ideologically alien and often in violation of Soviet laws.”28

At this point, ideological rectitude is honored in the breach in China, and mass motorization can be seen as part of the general trend of economic and social liberalization. In similar fashion, less allegiance is given in today’s India to its founding principles, which stand in sharp contrast to the mass-consumption society that is epitomized by widespread automobile ownership. Given the many economic, environmental, and cultural challenges engendered by mass automobility in China and India, we can only speculate on its future trajectory. At present, however, it can fairly be asserted that the spirits of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan have prevailed over those of Mao Zedong and Mahatma Gandhi.

1 “Auto Production, Sales Hit Record 8.8 Million Units in 2007,” (accessed 18 March 2008).

2 U.S.Bureau of the Census,“Transportation Indicators for Motor Vehicles and Airlines: 1900 to 2001,” (accessed 15 February 2008)

3 Jean-Jacques Chanaron, “The Universal Automobile,” in The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardou et al. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 197.

4 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008), 238.

5 Ibid., 255.

6 Ibid., 256.

7 Alexis Madrigal, “China’s 2030 CO2 Emissions Could Equal the Entire World’s Today,” (accessed 5 March 2008).

8 “Auto Output,Sales Likely to Hit 10 Mln Units in 2008,” (accessed 18 March 2008).

9 Ibid.

10 Gwynne Dyer, “Western Hypocrisy over India’s Nano Ignores Global Need for Fewer Cars,” (accessed 8 February 2008).

11 Chanaron (n. 3 above). In 1950, Italy had only 15 cars for every thousand inhabitants.

12 For example, my study of the growth of automobile ownership in Spain yielded a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.886 for per capita income and car ownership; see “Mass Motorization in Spain,” Journal of Transport History 27 (September 2006): 116.

13 David Dollar, “Poverty, Inequality, and Social Disparities during China’s Economic Reform,” World Bank Policy Research working paper WPS 4253, (accessed 23 March 2008).

14 “Poverty in India: A Synopsis by IndiaOneStop.Com,” (accessed 14 March 2008).

15 Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and GrassRoots America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972).

16 Kelly Sims Gallagher, China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 155.

17 Ibid., 18.

18 P. H. Kobos, J. D. Erickson, and T. Drennen, “Scenario Analysis of Chinese Passenger Vehicle Growth,” Contemporary Economic Policy 21, no. 2 (April 2003): 200–17, cited in Gallagher.

19 Randeep Ranesh, “India Gears Up for Mass Motoring Revolution with £1,260 Car,” Guardian, 11 January 2008.

20 U.S. Energy Information Agency, “Emission of Greenhouse Gases Report,” 28 November 2007, DOE/EIA0573(2006), table 8, (accessed 24 March 2008).

21 World Health Organization, “Environmental Health Country Profile—China, as of 9 June 2005,” (accessed 5 February 2008).

22 For these ratios, the number of vehicles in 2005 is taken to be 31.6 million, the figure given for “civilian-owned cars” in the online edition of People’s Daily; see “China Has Over 20 Million Privately Owned Cars,” People’s Daily, 28 February 2007, at (accessed 12 September 2008). The ratios given here should be treated with some caution due to a lack of reliable death and injury statistics.

23 Peter Hessler, “The People’s Republic Learns to Drive,” New Yorker, 26 November 2007, 108.

24 [Indian] National Crime Records Bureau, “Accidental Deaths in India,” 2005, (accessed 24 April 2008).

25 Calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau’s “Transportation Indicators” (n. 2 above).

26 Matthijs J. Koornstraw, “Prediction of Traffic Fatalities and Prospects for Mobility Becoming Sustainable, Safe,” Sa¯dhana¯ 32 (August 2007), available online at (accessed 5 February 2008).

27 The lag between automobile ownership and highway development in the United States is one of the central themes of John B. Rae’s The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).

28 Siegelbaum (n. 4 above), 248.

Dr. Volti is emeritus professor of sociology at Pitzer College and the author of Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

—UN IPCC report

It is not uncommon for utopian narratives to operate on “decadal timescales,” as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts it. Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit for the 1939 World’s Fair placed “the future” in 1960. Many science fiction works of the 1960s and 1970s looked to the year 2000 as a threshold. Similarly, various scenarios of reduction, stabilization, and mitigation of greenhouse gases operate on decadal scales. For example, California’s Air Resource Board has outlined a self-regulated scheme to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020; an 80 percent reduction of current levels is hoped for by 2050. The year 2030 is a key target for many of the scenarios presented in the 2007 IPPC report. In The Future of Life, E. O. Wilson expresses a humanist optimism: “Within several decades, many neuroscientists believe, we will have a much firmer grasp of the biological sources of mind and behavior. That in turn will provide the basis for a more solid social science, and a better capacity to anticipate and step away from political and economic disasters.”1

We tend to think of “the future” as coincident with the big life changes in the personal-economic cycle: graduation from college, buying a home, starting a family, promotion, grandchildren, retirement, and so on—the events featured in television commercials for financial planners and investment companies. Yet “the future” of the climate must be measured in geological terms, and on that scale these life events of ours do not even register. Even the popular idea that climate change starts with the Industrial Revolution fails to synchronize with the temporality of carbon-based life-forms compressing underground. Fossil fuels are produced over millions of years; anthropogenic intervention is a mere blip on the geological timeline. To paraphrase Hamlet: the time of climate change is out of joint.

How are we to think of such a radical disjuncture? Thomas Kuhn’s conception of paradigm shifts offers little help, as these are revolutions in thought that presume a stable universe, a clearly demarcated “outside” of the human. George Kubler, whose book The Shape of Time shook up the discipline of art history by warning of the bias of Western temporality, still frames his thoughts in terms of human activity.2 In fact, the immense discrepancy between geological and human temporalities is rarely confronted—and certainly not by so-called global-warming optimists.

Bernard Stiegler’s dense work Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus dates from 1994—the present, by many estimates, and yet before climate change was in the public sphere. This is how strange the temporality of our present situation really is. Stiegler, influenced by Martin Heidegger and the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourham, develops the idea that humans and technology are always bound together. What makes us human is technics, and without technics we would have no access to “what came before” the human. Technical objects constitute our very experience of time (Heidegger would say our relation to Being), and this had always been so. Humans have been relatively stable in a biological sense for twenty or thirty thousand years, but technics has continued to evolve, ever faster. Stiegler discusses the alteration of “eventization,” or a breaking of the time barrier. He fears the destruction of ethnic groups and nature by the “marketization” of democracy and expresses anxiety about the technicization of all domains of life, but in the examples he uses—genetic manipulation, real-time information technologies, weapons of mass destruction—he cannot yet anticipate climate change. Perhaps Heidegger, writing earlier, comes closer to that subject. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” he addresses energy directly—but not to say that consumption is proceeding too fast (leading to the depletion of resources), or that fossil fuel consumption is producing warming greenhouse gases (he could not have anticipated this particular outcome, nor would he have been precisely interested in a technohistory), or to suggest alternatives or even propose a Luddite retreat from technology. Rather, Heidegger is interested in drawing a distinction between a form of “disclosive looking” in an earlier era and in his present. In the past, man built a wind-powered mill that was geared into nature. When the wind blew, it turned, producing energy that could be used immediately (unmittelbar). Now a windmill—that much-celebrated form of renewable-energy technology, touted everywhere in the public sphere—takes wind out of nature, stores it, and makes use of it in remote times and spaces. This, for Heidegger, is a form of rape, in essence, not qualitatively different from a hydroelectric plant that steals water and makes the river no longer a river but a system of generation, or even from mining that rapes the land in a manner more visible to all. One of the most important things to take from Heidegger is the problem of time: modern power plants are a form of physical usury, but rather than offending the gods, we offend Being itself.

Focus on the Automobile

Doubtless human-centered temporality accounts for the myopic focus on the automobile in current debates about climate change. At the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore reminded viewers of their responsibility as green consumers: “Use compact fluorescent bulbs, and if you can, buy a hybrid.” By the most generous calculation, transportation may account for a quarter of current global greenhouse gas emissions, yet at least in the United States we are obsessed with alternative fuels for cars. Fueled by predictions of growth in China, India, and other emerging markets, we have demonized the automobile even as we accept its inevitability. This is not by chance. The car is the commodity most easily assimilated to human time and common sense. We—again, at least in the United States—assume we need the car to function in the world; without it, we would be living asynchronously.

From the earliest days of the automobile, producers and consumers have expressed anxiety about pollution and about gasoline shortages, and “future fuels” have been a topic in the industry’s boardrooms throughout the very brief (in geological terms) history of the automobile. Yet the internal combustion engine (ICE) and petroleum-based fuels have persistently dominated. It has been too easy for manufacturers to blame the high performance of the ICE itself for their failure to develop alternatives. And the Big Three have lobbied with regrettable success against “excessive” regulation and “artificial” thresholds for fuel efficiency that, they have argued, will kill the industry. But in this case we must question the tendentious view that Technology—reified—cannot keep pace with demand for technology. A memo written by a Ford executive in 1979 succinctly encapsulated the common argument: “We’re not complaining about having standards. We will do our best to meet them. But we do quarrel with the idea that technology can always save our skins if we push hard and fast enough. We are driving virtually to the limits of our know-how and financial resources already.”3

Such statements could be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Literary theory teaches us that technology and language are intimately bound up, so we must take the expressions of temporal and spatial deferral here as crucial, not incidental or peculiar to corporate cynicism. If we are in a fine mess in the present, it is not simply because we were not smart enough to know better; it is not because the price of gas has largely been perceived by consumers (until very recently) as just or because neoliberalist policies have kept inflation in check; it is not because geopolitical crises of supply have been averted through OPEC or other bodies; it is not even because of behaviors and choices of individual “stakeholders,” to use the language of the IPCC. Rather, what is to blame is human temporality itself, tragically out of synch with the time of earth.

We must question the idea of the automobile as a product invented to satisfy a need for increased personal mobility, as if technology always takes time to catch up to an idea. The car should not be thought of as a “technology” that came to be and was then capitalized with various degrees of success in production. The “technology” does not exist prior to modes of production—not only to the assembly line, but to the entire manufacturing apparatus: special tools, fast-drying paints, glassmaking, metal stamping, and so on, along with necessary social practices (high wages, regulation, corporate intervention into everyday life, etc.). Moreover, the early history of the car—electric, steam, and finally ICE-powered—suggests that success depended on understanding the necessity of financial capitalization.4 From its very origin, the car is about debt, speculation, the future.

“Futurity” is deployed, in part, to mask the intrinsicness of debt to the automobile. Production vehicles have been marketed since the earliest days as ahead of their time. Certainly, the automobile represented a vast leap in technology and radically transformed civil society. While consumers were mobilized around the auto as a durable good, it was always a commodity with built-in obsolescence, a hybrid of past (horsepower endured as mode of measurement and a standard for comparison), present (ownership), and future (debt, financing, model replacements). In this regard, the auto represented an obliteration of time itself.

A 1912 Detroit Electric advertisement exemplified the formal projection of the automobile into the future: “[W]hen you buy a Detroit Electric you anticipate the future, because of this car’s many new, exclusive and patented features.”5 The product itself was, of course, actually available on the market—and, ironically, in reality the electric car did not have a very bright future, at least up until the present. As early as 1911, Henry Ford was marketing his products with the idea of “the-future-as-now.” The automobile, Ford fervently maintained, would be the instrument of all labor in the future, which was precisely why one must consume it in the present. The same philosophy could be carried over to improvements in technology: “The eight-cylinder engine, said the engineers, is a luxury that one can do without. Yes, it’s quicker, more subtle, easier to drive . . . but . . . it’s to this but that FORD replies: The V8 engine as I have just developed it is the real progress of tomorrow.”6 This was no science-fiction scenario, but the future-as-present of capitalism in the Fordist paradigm. General Motors’s well-known focus on marketing ever-new designs—the company invented the idea of the “model year” and set in motion a product cycle that has become so naturalized as to appear like the seasons themselves—offers only a slight contrast.

In any case, it is important to note that future fuels have been a consistent feature of the auto over the years, whether allied with a traditional or a futuristic design or simply suggested in promotional literature. Concept vehicles have been put forward as future solutions to diverse problems that include the high price of gasoline, environmental concerns, and dependence on foreign oil. Whether or not automakers ever had the slightest intention of producing such vehicles, they could capitalize on the language of futurity to boost their corporate brands. The attraction of concept vehicles has to do not only with their exterior design, but also with the positive social and environmental forces they signal. But we should recall that a discourse of futurity has been part of the marketing of the automobile from its very inception. The “future” did not emerge as a favored trope of the auto industry in response to the challenges of wartime, or with the space-age optimism of midcentury, or following the oil crisis of the 1970s. It has been ubiquitous.

The future, then, is not so much a time as an ideological space for storing all that cannot be achieved in the real space inhabited by common sense. In the city of the future—the city of world’s fairs, auto shows, utopian design projects, and quasi–science fiction cultural forms—transportation is lifted from the terrestrial sphere; gone are the heavy, earth-bound Sierras, Land Rovers, Explorers, Grand Cherokees, Wranglers, Yukons, and Suburbans. Passenger cars may continue to move along urban thoroughfares, and pedestrians may slog their way to work, but another class of movement takes place above—airborne, or rapidly cruising along elevated tracks.7 In the city of the future, there is no need for regulation, since Technology has resolved problems such as safety, traffic, and fuels—areas of intense state intervention in the real world of the present. The space of the future is a smooth and neoliberal space, where passengers move as freely as goods and capital. It is still a space, though, where individuals or small groups enjoy the freedom of their own vehicles; think of the Jetsons.8

Time and the Market

Approaches to debt and financing vary among automobile manufacturers. While Ford has a long history of focusing attention on the links between forward-looking methods of production and affordability, General Motors considered debt financing integral to car sales. A 1939 Buick informational brochure explains the mechanisms behind GM’s proprietary financing:

Organized for the use of GM Dealers only and their customers, The GM Acceptance Corporation has taken the lead in reducing the cost of financing car purchases. Its financing cost including adequate insurance is as low as that of any well-established financing organization and in many cases lower. Terms can be arranged to suit your convenience and courteous treatment is assured at all times. A comparison of costs will show the advantages of purchasing a Buick on the convenient General Motors Installment Plan operated by GMAC.9

In 1992, General Motors introduced a “GM reward” credit card as part of an effort to boost the brand after the company suffered a dramatic loss in market share. Every purchase made using the card added “earnings” toward the purchase of a GM car or truck. Since its inception, it has helped GM sell or lease approximately 5 million vehicles. The card was significant in its formal linking of general debt and the purchase of an automobile. Something else of note recently took place: in 2006, for the first time in its history, the Ford Motor Company began mortgaging its assets. The total mortgage exceeded the value of its outstanding stock; Ford’s credit has always been good enough that it never had to borrow. Then, in 2008, facing possible bankruptcy, GM fired workers, sold assets, borrowed cash, and suspended its dividend. It seems certain that the financial institutions will bail out their investors before making any significant investment in alternative fuels.

The links between neoliberalist economic policies since the early 1980s and energy are too well known to be reiterated here in detail. Suffice it to say, the current political climate supports the dream that market forces will keep inflation in check while leading to developments in efficiency and alternative fuels. Carbon trading is but a manifestation of that dream. Dematerialized speculation on pollution has come to represent the financialization of futurity in the environment itself.10 Consider, then, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony before the House budget committee on 28 February 2007, one day after a major downturn in the markets (blamed, significantly, on a shift in Chinese accounting practices). Bernanke focused on issues of intergenerational fairness, while also assuring the markets (performatively) that there was no need for panic. Indeed, stocks climbed steadily afterward, reaching all-time highs several months later (they have, of course, lost considerable ground since that time). But it is interesting to note that in this particular speech, titled “Long-term Fiscal Challenges and the Economy,” Bernanke did not once mention the environment as an intergenerational issue—not in the context of fairness or even of economics. In short, the typical move of divorcing economics from other spheres of life, such as civil society, continues apace. But if climate change, while structured like debt, is fundamentally different from debt, then we cannot accept this separation.

The public sphere remains concerned with the individual consumer. Conservation is presented as a (possibly pleasurable) ethical choice, even when the consumer may be skeptical or may suspect greenwashing. Yet the focus on the individual diverts attention from the larger issues of manufacturing, agriculture, and local or national policies that contribute significantly to environmental devastation. The consumer-based model of responsibility strengthens the foundations of neoliberalist market practices and simultaneously helps to defer discussion of the broader and deeper changes that will be needed on a global scale to achieve reductions in greenhouse gases, to slow the destruction of biodiversity, and so on. It is easy to see, then, why the individual consumer and that exemplary object of consumption—the automobile—continue to maintain such prestige in the public sphere. The strategy of Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, to introduce a steep carbon tax in order to test the will of the consumer is merely an actualization of the faulty logics of a “politics” of climate change.11 Any consumer-based model of the politics of petroleum, while useful, can only go so far.

I have focused on the automobile because of its centrality in the public sphere and its intimate links to the way humans now experience time, but it is crucial that we also step back and seek a broader perspective. To succumb to the spectacle of the “green” car is not so qualitatively different from succumbing to the optimism of tail fins, streamlined design, or chrome. Yet if technics is not simply an external means, and the automobile is not simply a shell that could quickly and easily be filled with a greener technics, then it is not enough to have a debate, even in a democratic context, about how best to use it. If the future is always already linked to the automobile, then it is not enough to bank on “future fuels” to save us from the present crisis.

We must begin by addressing the human actor as something other than a consumer. Then thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Giorgio Agamben can help undo the certainty with which we approach decadal timescales. They can unravel E. O. Wilson’s faith in the redemptive power of neuroscience. The earth existed before humans, but literary theory, which holds that there is no “before language,” could help us deconstruct the myth of untarnished, prehuman nature. What I am suggesting goes beyond common sense to something that is not knowable in the terms of energy policy, no matter how enlightened. Thinking about time and technics leads us to acknowledge the disjuncture between human and geological temporalities—not to reconcile them, but to see them in their very differential relation, as irreconcilable. In this regard, Heidegger is a crucial thinker for our times, for his suggestion that neither conservation nor Ludditism allow us to truly grasp technology in its essence in order to supplant the current mode of “calculating” disclosive looking with poesis. His radical thought pushes us not to new technologies, nor even to abandon cars, but to think otherwise.

1. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007 (Geneva, 2007). Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York, 2002), 156.

2. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, Conn., 1962), 1.

3. Stuart M. Frey, “There’s an Auto in the Future,” in Super Service Station (May 1979), 54, pamphlet, Duke University Special Collections, JWT Marketing vertical file, box 13, “Marketing—retail service stations, 2000-0182.”

4. Rudi Volti, “A Century of Automobility,” Technology and Culture 37 (October 1996): 663–85.

5. Cited in Gijs Mom, The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age (Baltimore, 2004), 119. The ad shows a well-to-do woman in winter gear near the car. It is made by Anderson Electric, and it includes Edison’s “greatest invention”—the Edison nickel-and-steel battery.

6. “Au service du public,” La Revue Ford 14 (1932): 3.

7. See Nick Barley and Ally Ireson, City Levels (London, 2000).

8. The Jetsons was an animated television show produced in 1962–63 and then revived during the 1980s. The Jetsons flew their vehicles to their apartment in the “Skypad” apartment building. Many of the businesses were also elevated (resembling the Marina Towers of Chicago, the Seattle Space Needle, and the Los Angeles International Airport theme building). The freeway had a speed limit of 500 mph. For all of the futuristic gadgets, the family was very traditional (the show was conceived as a futuristic version of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones).

9. 1939 Buick brochure, 6. Wolfsonian Library, Miami Beach, TRA2 83.2.2291.

10. David Wolman,“How to Get Wall Street to Hug a Tree” (New York Times, 11 February 2007), reports on various forms of green financing: “In fits and starts, trading and payment schemes are taking shape. In 2000, a $25-million company specializing in bioreserves was listed on the Australian stock exchange—history’s first publicly traded conservation company. Although Earth Sanctuaries Ltd. later struggled and was bought out by a nonprofit, it generated considerable buzz. Meanwhile, the government of Costa Rica has been experimenting with programs to compensate landowners for leaving some of their acreage undeveloped; in Quito, Ecuador, an alliance of local water companies, an electric company, and a brewery pay to protect and manage the 5.4-million-acre Condor Bioreserve, which is the source of much of the city’s water.”

11. Dingell has admitted that his proposal is bound to fail, but his goal is not to achieve “success” so much as to expose the very lack of individual will; see Edmund L. Andrews, “Counting on Failure, Energy Chairman Floats Carbon Tax,” New York Times, 7 July 2007.

Karen Pinkus is professor of Italian, French, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. Her current work explores how the humanities—and literary theory in particular—can contribute to discussions of climate change.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Part 1 covers ancient written sources (Serafina Cuomo, chap. 1), ancient artistic representations of technical processes (Roger B. Ulrich, chap. 2), and historiography combined with theoretical approaches (Kevin Greene, chap. 3). Cuomo surveys ancient sources from classical Athens, the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Roman Empire, and late antiquity side by side. She examines Vitruvius’ Architecture and Frontinus’ Aqueducts for the way each author celebrates the achievements made possible by technical knowledge, and at the same time, she explores the proud epitaphs of two everyday practitioners of technology, Benignus (in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum [CIL] 12.722, from a sarcophagus found in Arles, third century CE), and Harpalus (in Michael Donderer, Die Architekten der späten römischen Republik und der Kaiserzeit: Epigraphische Zeugnisse [1996], A8, written in Greek on a tablet from Egypt, probably also third century CE). The contrast between the full-fledged treatises and those humble inscriptions highlights how oral tradition and apprenticeship must also have preserved technical knowledge, while writing made it more visible and respectable and created a memorial for the author.

In chapter 2, Ulrich collects and analyzes ancient images of technological processes—bas-reliefs from Egyptian tombs, Greek painted pottery, and Roman-period relief sculpture and painting—that offer vital evidence for the reconstruction of methods, equipment, scale of operation, labor force, and sequencing of tasks. He not only reproduces critical examples of these images, but also considers their artistic intent, the range and category of the depictions, and the technologies represented in mythological settings, such as Hephaestus at his forge or Minerva and Arachne at their looms (p. 54). While images of industrial activities were made mostly by private individuals for private commemoration, they give us both expected and surprising information about the workforce—on the one hand, the dominance of women in Greek spinning and weaving, and on the other, the presence of a Greek woman in a mining operation; on the one hand, Roman women involved in the distribution of food and drink on the retail level, and on the other, women as portrait-painters or laborers (p. 55). We also learn about clothing and personal accessories of workers. It seems Romans, however humble, were always garbed (p. 56).

Chapter 3 offers a stunning overview of the literature and attitudes toward ancient technology from the scholarship of the nineteenth century to today. Greene asks “Where are we now?” (in our thinking about ancient technology) and “How did we get here?” He considers the methodologies of studying ancient economies as such methodologies are influenced by revolutions, determinism, and theories about relevance, continuity, ethnography, material culture, evolution, and alternative technology. He reminds us that the very act of compiling a handbook of Greek and Roman technology involves theoretical choices both in its subject matter and its period of study. He reviews the meaning behind explicit terminology, such as “discovery,” “invention,” and “innovation,” in order to understand the theories behind many conclusions. Greene does not disappoint with his succinct summaries of the work of Michel Foucault, Mark Bradley, Pierre Lemonnier, and others who have been a part of the theoretical discourse on technology.

Part 2 surveys the primary, extractive technologies of antiquity: mining and metallurgy (Paul T. Craddock, chap. 4); quarrying and stoneworking (J. Clayton Fant, chap. 5); sources of energy and exploitation of power (Örjan Wikander, chap. 6); Greek and Roman agriculture (Evi Margaritis and Martin K. Jones, chap. 7); and animal husbandry, hunting, fishing and fish production (Geoffrey Kron, chap. 8). We are treated both to the richness of information on each of these topics and to the depth of research behind each. Fant, for example, gives us a provisional list of stone sources owned and exploited by the ratio marmorum, or marble bureau, an institution that likely developed in the age of Augustus (pp. 127–28). Kron, in several illuminating tables (8.1–5), provides details (ancient sources, modern scholarship, and comparative evidence) on Greco-Roman domestic animal species, hunting dog breeds, game and gamebird species, and fish-catching methods.

The five chapters of part 3 involve engineering and the complex machines of the Greeks and Romans. Frederick A. Cooper (chap. 9) deals with Greek engineering and construction and focuses almost exclusively on temple architecture. He convincingly shows us that at most Greek temple sites, stone architectural components were designed to maximize the geotechnical properties of the stones, and that the drainage systems laid successfully moved water away from stone foundations. He also reviews the independent units of temples (peristyle and cella, p. 235), surface materials (plaster, stucco, flooring, tiles, pp. 236ff.), and other building materials, including a variety of metals and wood in temple construction. We learn that Greek architect-engineers were not impractical and idealistic artists, as they have been viewed in the past, but technicians very knowledgeable about the demands and opportunities of the available building materials and very well prepared to confront the challenges of constructing elaborate designs in a seismic environment.

Lynne Lancaster (chap. 10) reminds us that the building technologies of the Romans, both in Rome and in the provinces, often advanced hand in hand with the desire for public amenities, namely theaters, amphitheaters, and bath buildings. She concludes that both theaters and baths provided a place to display the latest materials and architectural forms and were at the forefront of building technologies in every part of the Roman world.

The main message of Andrew I. Wilson’s arguments (chap. 11) is that the control and management of water have been vital to all societies since the very beginnings of agriculture and urbanization. He describes the evidence for wells, cisterns, and aqueducts both before and during the Greek and Roman periods. Furthermore, he discusses the relationship between long-distance water supply and fountains, nymphaea, baths, and irrigation systems in Roman cities and considers whether aqueducts were necessary or merely a luxury in the Roman period. While admitting that much more work needs to be done on the chronology of the spread of aqueducts and on the chronology of the spread and development of cities in the western provinces, Wilson concludes that aqueducts definitely enabled cities to grow larger and support more and more people at the same time that they supported many luxurious amenities.

Because tunnels are less conspicuous than bridges, Klaus Grewe (chap. 12) notes that they have remained somewhat in the background within the history of technology. Grewe not only lists in detail all of the important tunnels in the classical world (table 12.1), but also discusses early tunnels and the qanat system, canals, and special achievements in ancient tunnel construction. The tunnel of Eupalinus in Samos and that of Nonius Datus at Saldae—modern Bejaïa, Algeria—are featured (pp. 324ff.). Grewe also analyzes the remarkable inscription of Nonius Datus (in the CIL 8.2728, p. 331) that reveals the drama and personal emotion encountered during the construction of the tunnel—including an attack by bandits—and information about its counterexcavation at the other side of the obstructing hillside.

The concluding chapter of part 3 (chap. 13, also by Andrew I. Wilson) surveys machines in Greek and Roman technology, including simple machines for mechanical power, cranes and traction, surgical traction machines—for resetting bones, for example—engines of war, and water-lifting devices. In addition to water mills, we learn of other applications of waterpower, such as for dough-mixing, for sawmills, for pounding grain with pestles, and for recumbent triphammers or vertical ore stamps used for crushing ore in mining regions (p. 357). In the chapter’s final section, on machines for purposes of entertainment, Wilson considers the water organ (hydraulis, p. 360) and mechanical devices used in public entertainments in Greek and Roman theaters and in Roman amphitheaters and circuses. He rightfully notes that the role of machines in the social and economic development of antiquity has perhaps been excessively downplayed in the past. The idea that slavery made machines unnecessary or that animism discouraged the exploitation of waterpower can now be roundly rejected.

The secondary processes and manufacturing technologies of the Greeks and Romans take up the eight chapters of part 4 and provide many contributions to new scholarship and analyses of their topics: food processing (Robert I. Curtis, chap. 14); large-scale manufacturing, standardization, and trade (Andrew I. Wilson, chap. 15); metalworking and tools (Carol Mattusch, chap. 16); woodworking (Roger B. Ulrich, chap. 17); textile production (John P. Wild, chap. 18); tanning and leather manufacture (Carol van Driel-Murray, chap. 19); ceramic production (Mark Jackson and Kevin Greene, chap. 20); and glass production (E. Marianne Stern, chap. 21).

Part 5, technologies of movement and transport, has four chapters. Lorenzo Quilici (chap. 22) studies Roman roads and bridges along with their predecessors, while Georges Raepsaet (chap. 23) collects as much information as possible on land transport—involving horseback riding, harnessing systems, and land vehicles such as carts, wagons, and the like. He demonstrates the epistemological prejudice concerning these topics (cf. J. G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World [2000], p. 170, where Landels explicitly states that land transport was “unimportant” by comparison with transport on the sea). Raepsaet’s close examination of the archaeological evidence repositions land transport soundly among the major transportation technologies of Greece and Rome. Seán McGrail (chap. 24) reviews the technologies of ships and navigation from ancient Egypt to about 500 CE. McGrail’s use of The Odyssey as a source for plank-fastening techniques in shipbuilding is perhaps a tad overstated, since the Homeric epics are not handbooks on these matters. David J. Blackman (chap. 25) explores the REVIEWS construction of harbors in the classical world, including moles, quays, naval harbors, ancient ship sheds, hauling-ways, lighthouses, shipbuilding yards, silting and dredging, and issues of sea level change. While scholars have long puzzled about the relationship between harbors and the cities they served, new evidence, particularly at Rome and Pisa (p. 664), suggests that certain river systems have changed course and various canals and lagoons that once existed are now silted up.

Philip de Souza (chap. 26) on Greek warfare and fortification and Gwyn Davies (chap. 27) on Roman warfare and fortification make up part 6 (the so-called technologies of death). Chapter 26 involves a wide spectrum of Greek war-making technologies: archaeological evidence for hoplite warfare, the new tactical formations of the Macedonian war machine under Philip II (359–336 BCE), such as the densely packed phalanx, and Greek naval warfare. As in chapter 24, I must lodge a modest complaint about de Souza’s use of Homeric epic, this time as a reflection of “contemporary martial culture” (p. 673), as it ignores some of the latest scholarship on Homer, especially the work of Gregory Nagy. Davies (chap. 27) asserts that Rome’s success at continuous expansion was inextricably linked with the maintenance of military supremacy. He therefore outlines the army in the field (organization, weapons, and tactics) with special emphasis on the spear and sword, missiles, artillery, shields, helmets, and body armor. In each case he demonstrates how Roman tactics, including prowess at constructing siegeworks—the Roman assault ramp at Masada, 73 CE (p. 705) is featured—defensible fortifications, and superior military equipment gave the Roman army a technical edge on the battlefield that persistently set it apart from most other contemporary armies. The history of military machines considered by Wilson in chapter 13 seems to belong more sensibly here, in part 6.

In many ways, part 7, technologies of the mind, and the final part 8, ancient technologies in the modern world, offer the most innovative and refreshing observations in this mammoth volume. Part 7 includes an essay on information technologies such as writing, book production, and the role of literacy by Willy Clarysse and Katelijn Vandorpe (chap. 28); one by Robert Hannah on timekeeping (chap. 29); one by Charlotte Wikander on the technologies of calculation such as weights and measures, one by Andrew Meadows on coinage, and one by Karin Tybjerg on practical mathematics (three separate parts of chap. 30); one on gadgets and scientific instruments by Örjan Wikander (chap. 31); and one by Kevin Greene on inventors, invention, and attitudes toward innovation (chap. 32). Michael B. Schiffer rounds out the volume with chapter 33, on the historical evidence for expanding ethnoarchaeology and model-building in the study of technological change.

The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World aims to deploy critical examinations both of the progress and direction of the many debates in the field of ancient technology and engineering, and the end result provides scholars, graduate students, and a serious readership of nonspecialists a set of compelling new perspectives on a wide range of subfields within the study of these topics. I note very few omissions in this extraordinary book (developments in plumbing and latrine architecture come to mind, but not much has been published on these topics to date), so there is very little to complain about overall. Oleson’s editing is excellent, so there is no jarring sensation as we read from chapter to chapter by so many different authors from so many different countries. The bibliographies at the end of each chapter are invaluable. This handbook has indeed set a new standard, and it will leave a large and definitive intellectual footprint on a new age of scholarship.

1. The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. John Peter Oleson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, xviii+865, $150).

Dr. Koloski-Ostrow is associate professor and chair of classical studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Sarno Bath Complex (1990) and editor of Water Use and Hydraulics in the Roman City (2001). Currently she is working on a book titled The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Water, Sewers, and Toilets that is being published by the University of North Carolina Press, and another entitled Pompeii and Herculaneum: Daily Life in the Shadow of Vesuvius, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The accompanying photograph, taken early one morning in February 1934, is associated with the making of a film about the Renault Motor Company. A section of assembly line is illuminated by huge spotlights that throw the rest of the cold work area into deep shadow. Three activities are under way: a team of workers is acting, a film crew is shooting or preparing for a shot, and—out of sight—a photographer is taking this photograph. The creation of this image was divorced from the activities it depicts; despite that, what can it tell us about picture taking, film shooting, and industrial work?

The image is certainly atmospheric, but it has limited historical value when viewed alone. However, when seen as part of a network of associated documents, it becomes more useful. One approach is to compare it to a corpus of related documents. Like any other historical vestige, images have to be interpreted in relation, one to another, as well as compared to other sources: they have to be (re)contextualized. A second approach is to investigate archival origins: a picture is always one piece of a photographic coverage; a film is a specific editing of selected rushes, etc. Returning as far as possible to the source of an image, one can identify at least the logic of its conservation, and perhaps eventually the process of its making and the context of its usage. Thus images can become irreplaceable historical documents.

The Hints of a Working Situation

The image captures a staged work scene set up on a working section of a Renault factory conveyor. Based on a few clues in the picture—along with other photographic documentation—the location can be identified as the middle of the final body assembly line, “Workshop 147,” set up since 1930 in the new “Building no. 3” at the Seguin Island plant.

The image reveals details that would be invisible in the motion picture. For example, it shows that the conveyor is a relatively simple device—two U-rails, mounted eight inches above the floor, to guide the automobiles on their actual wheels. Other plans and pictures reveal that the cars were hauled from left to right by hooks connected to an endless chain running between the rails and returning under the floor. At least four men are working on the car in the center, one of them seated on a wheeled stool that allows him to roll at the same rate as the assembly line; his movements are the principal subject of the scene being shot.

Still picture of the shooting of L’Automobile de France, a documentary released in October 1934. To accompany the film, twenty-seven photographs were made by Renault’s photographic department in February 1934. (Photo reproduced courtesy of Renault Communication/DR.)

Two Prima4s,1 left and center, are in the queue. Workers are installing a trunk, but as yet the vehicle has no hood; its seats have been placed on the roof to avoid damage from workers at subsequent stations as they complete the car’s interior. The fenders are shrouded with protective covers for the same reason. Interestingly, this car has been preceded by a larger and less complete vehicle. Its presence is evidence that Renault’s assembly line was able to accommodate the assembly of a variety of car models. In 1934, this assembly line finished 19,708 Mona4 and Celta4 (8 horsepower) cars, plus 16,445 Prima4 and Viva4 (11 horsepower) units—Renault’s basic four-cylinder models. Four years earlier this then-new conveyor was host to mostly six-cylinder Mona6 and MonaStella cars. The worsening economic situation in America, and a little later in France, had prompted Renault to gradually shift to the production of more economical cars, using the same type of bodies. In 1930 some 18,170 MonaStella cars were assembled, along with 14,867 Prima4 and Viva4 models. The following year, only 2,820 Mona6 and MonaStella cars were produced, while 27,418 Mona4, Prima4, and Viva4 models took their place on this assembly line. In 1932 production dropped to 17,144 four-cylinder cars (plus only 518 six-cylinder MonaStellas), but in the following year it leaped to 32,508 four-cylinder cars. These various production shifts were accommodated without either changing the tributaries feeding the assembly line or reducing the diversity of available models. This flexibility was fundamental to Renault’s survival in the first period of the Great Depression.

Other issues related to the social equilibrium of the plant would become apparent during this period. In the background of the image, illegible in the shadows, is a lengthy notice. Other images reveal that it lists things the workers “must” and “must not” do. For example, one must “keep the cover on the painted parts”; one must not “assemble a faulty part and say: ‘who cares, they will put it right in retouch.’”2 This type of notice combining technical and ethical instruction began to appear in Renault workshops in 1928 and remained there for the next ten years. Prior to this, signs were few in number, placed in noisy areas, and largely general in nature— “smoking forbidden,” for example. With the introduction of manual assembly lines in 1922–24, small notices identifying the station’s number and purpose were added. Later, the mechanization of the conveyors led to this obvious tie between the neatness or carefulness of the workers and the instructions of shop management. Many pictures of the whole line, presenting the suite of working stations, produced a visualization of the process, intended not so much for the workers as for visitors to the plant. These images are part of a global setting for the factory. One has to look beyond what they show to decipher the message.

Significant Classification

This photo print is mostly, but not solely, an image: it also bears a serial number in its lower right corner which identifies its “place” as an element in the photographic collection of the Renault Company. To a degree, the classification system aids in dating the photograph. It also offers insight into the evolution of the photographic department’s work of documenting the firm. This department was created in 1911, after Louis Renault became the sole boss of the family company he and two brothers had founded in 1898. In addition to making images, the newly created department collected earlier images and reproduced outside material as well. These three types of images were numbered and classified in distinct albums, with a simple jump in number to differentiate each series: the older pictures were numbered 1 and up to form a first album; the department’s new photographs were numbered 1,001 and up to form a second; and the reproduced images started at 2,001. The problem was that the photographic service soon caught up to picture number 2,000 and thus had to jump to number 3,001.

The organization of the photographic archives had to adapt to the growth of the firm and to the evolving missions of the department. In 1928, having made some 24,500 photographs, it decided to distinguish its important new thematic series through larger numeric gaps. The collection of original pictures became the “red albums” and continued the previous numbering. The reproduced images became the “blue albums,” numbered 75,000 and up. Pictures of auto parts were put in different albums starting at 100,000; the “greenalbums” at 200,000 contained images of the buildings and working situations; promotional images were gathered in the 300,000 albums; and so forth. In this way, it was improbable that the numbers assigned to one series would ever catch up with those of another.

Consequently, a picture’s identification number gives only an approximate indication of its date of production.3 Thus, our cover picture is not the 202,469th picture of the whole collection, but is instead the 2,469th of the “green albums.” There are no written documents—left nor probably ever made—which explain the evolution of this photograph-classification system. The department simply adapted its archives to its changing practical needs. It had to cope with a growing number of pictures, fit them in with its productive mission, and respond to the firm’s various demands. These different classification systems can only be deduced through a systematic analysis of the global photographic archives. Understanding it is vital in order to clarify the origin of a given print, to deduce its date of production, and also to determine how it was used as an illustration. This archival approach to an image is important for understanding its role in the changing visions of the factory. In this sense, visual archives are global documents.4

The Making of a Documentary

Having been put in the 200,000-range albums, this picture of the making of a film was considered by the photographic department as an image of work and not as the act of promotion it actually was. A young employee of the advertising department, Paul Grémont, was assigned to the service of the shooting team for a period of three months. His role above all was practical and economic. “It would have been unimaginable to stop an assembly line for several minutes to set up lights. We decided to shoot the scene on a Sunday morning, specially summoning all the necessary personnel so that the workshop didn’t appear too deserted.”5 Normal industrial work was clearly not compatible with the constraints of the filmmakers.

The resulting product, L’Automobile de France, was a propaganda film, a full-length sound documentary produced “for the glory of French industry” under the patronage of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. It was directed by Jean Loubignac, editor in chief of the Pathé-Journal and an enthusiastic defender of talking movies. It was first shown at the Gala de l’Opéra on 2 October 1934, a time of fierce industrial crisis. The screenplay constructs the story of a factory visit in the style of a fictional film, papering over the economic difficulties of the time.

No motion pictures from the post–World War II period can be found in the company’s archives. The films of that era were ordered from external production companies like Gaumont and Pathé; they have kept some footage, but no concomitant records concerning the commission, production, or utilization of those motion pictures. We therefore have little information on the authors and their intentions. What was expected of these films, and how did viewers react? Written explanations would have been of great help, but their loss does not compromise the documentary potential of the images. It compels us to make a deeper, primary analysis of the moving pictures themselves, exploiting all the hints they disclose or the clues they divulge and comparing them to the corpus of surviving films on the Renault workshops.

It turns out that L’Automobile de France came at the end of a short period (1930–34) when filmmakers and newsreel reporters were interested in filming the Renault factories. These films were targeted mostly on firm promotion, insisting on the founder’s personal success story and using cinematographic techniques to give a proper vision of the working process. Images were used as “visual evidence” of what the firm wanted people to understand about its industrial activity. Thus, they are an oriented representation of work and labor.

On the whole, industrial documentaries of this sort were in the minority among corporate films, which more typically aimed to present a firm’s products in action rather than the process of their production. Moreover, films were not the only visual medium used by the automobile industry to promote its activity and to encourage car sales. An industrial documentary was commissioned by a firm and produced by a filmmaker only if the two could expect to profit from it—if they believed the subject would attract an audience. Efficiency was expected. Indications of this expectation can be observed in the number of such films produced at different periods. There were specific moments when industrial films were made, and others when the factory was not a cinematographic subject.

Conclusion

Each type of industrial image provides a different vision of what is going on in a workshop. They show various aspects, follow specific rhythms of production, and tell their own story.6 But in a micro-based historical approach, different images of the same workshop can be compared to become hints and traces of an industrial activity that is seldom described in the written documents.7 These images represent an opportunity to observe and study details that no other records have preserved. By analyzing the context of their visual message, and by questioning both the production and reception of these corporate images, they can help us understand the ways in which people actually worked. Visual documents can therefore renew the technological, social, and cultural history of Renault and enrich our global apprehension of the industrial past.8

1. These are of the KZ14 type (a Prima4 with four cylinders and 11 horsepower). See Gilbert Hatry and Claude Le Maître, Dossiers chronologiques Renault: Voitures particulières (Paris, 1982), 5:211.

2. This notice is visible in picture number 670 (album 2, Série G, 1935).

3. Since it was placed between picture 202,338, taken on 30 January 1934, and picture 202,504, taken on 4 April 1934, we can deduce that picture 202,469 was taken in late February 1934.

4. Alain P. Michel, “L’Archive photographique,undocumentintégral: Doisneau chez les Joliot-Curie, 1942–1956,” Études photographiques 16 (May 2005): 108–19.

5. Paul Grémont, “L’Automobile de France,” De Renault Frères, constructeurs d’automobiles, à Renault Régie Nationale 18 (June 1979): 285–86.

6. See Alain P. Michel, “Corporate Films of Industrial Work: Renault (1916–1939),” in Cinematic Means, Industrial Ends: The Work of the Industrial Film, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam, 2008).

7. Carlo Ginzburg, “Signes, traces, pistes: Racines d’un paradigme de l’indice,” Le Débat 6 (November 1980): 3–44.

8. See Alain P. Michel, Travail à la chaîne: Renault, 1898–1947 (Paris, 2007).

Alain Michel is an associate professor at the University of Évry-Val-d’Essonne, where he teaches contemporary history, and a researcher at the Laboratoire d’histoire économique, sociale et des techniques (LHEST). His research focuses on two complementary areas: a social approach to the history of automobile production technologies in the twentieth century, and an analysis of visual sources as they relate to the history of labor.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

What, then, was the “revolt of the engineers”? Why should the mild reforms of Progressive-Era engineers in the United States be considered a “revolt” when they did not seriously challenge the political and economic order? The question has come up ever since the book was first published in 1971. In his review for Science, Charles Rosenberg wrote, “In the broadest perspective—Layton’s own evidence makes this clear enough—there was no ‘revolt’ of engineers (Layton notes that even at its height the struggle for professionalism was ‘only dimly understood by most engineers’) but rather a series of elitist gestures, sometimes petulant, sometimes earnest, but gestures inevitably.”4 Peter Meiksins critiqued the anatomy of the “revolt” in 1988, describing complex relationships between the engineering establishment, the patrician reformers at the heart of Layton’s study, and rank-and-file engineers who led a “second revolt of the engineers” by pushing bread-and-butter issues.5 In a recent Ph.D. dissertation on engineers and social responsibility in the U.S. during the cold war, Matthew Wisnioski acknowledges a large debt to Layton but refers to the “so-called ‘revolt’” of the Progressive-Era engineers.“Despite the heated rhetoric and the internal dissent within the professional societies, the engineers’ political maneuverings prior to the First World War could hardly be called a ‘revolt.’ Moreover, the only measurable reforms had taken place within the professional societies, again with quite limited reach.”6

In his new preface to the 1986 reprint, Layton explained how “revolt” came to be in the book’s title. Responding to complaints by the original publisher, the Case Western Reserve University Press, that his proposed “title lacked ‘pizzaz,’” Layton “offered the new title, although with some misgivings.” (He had used the phrase “revolt of the engineers” in an earlier essay on the conservationist Frederick Haynes Newell.) “Revolt seemed appropriate because of the radical nature of the challenge to established values and loyalties presented by these reformers.” But Layton also acknowledged in 1986 that “clearly, all the reformers were not radicals. Most of the reforms discussed were far from revolutionary.” At best, it was a “failed” revolution.7

What has made the book a classic, I would argue, does not hinge on the veracity of the rather narrow claim that the actions of engineering reformers from 1900 to 1930 amounted to a “revolt,” but on the book’s rich and insightful account of the struggles between “progressive” and “conservative” engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies. In large part, the reformers adhered to a model of professionalism based on autonomy and social responsibility. Moreover, as a graduate student at UCLA in the 1950s, Layton set his social and intellectual history in the broad political and economic contexts of American history as defined at the time. As Samuel Haber observed in his review for Technology and Culture, Layton was “ostensibly” writing about the revolt of engineering progressives who tried to reform engineering organizations and American society. “Both remained unshaken, however; and in order to show why this was so, Layton undertakes a much broader study.”8 This broader scope helps explain the book’s enduring value.9

In explaining the rise and fall of the reform movement, Layton described how engineering was (re)defined as a profession within, and often in opposition to, the national engineering societies in terms of tensions between professional ideals and business demands, and the “‘status-crisis’ theory of progressivism,” then prevalent among American historians (n. 1, p. 101). The main context for these struggles was a shared “ideology of engineering,” which Layton reconstructed chiefly from speeches of engineering leaders. This ideology, a “philosophy of professionalism,” maintained that the engineer, as an applied scientist, was the “agent of all technological change” and a “logical thinker free of bias,” who thus had a special role to play in ensuring the responsible use of technology (p. 57). In the “first wave of engineering reform” beginning about 1900, leaders of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), followed by the American Institute of Mining Engineers, instituted changes in membership standards, enacted codes of ethics, and dealt with policy issues. The initiatives favored business interests, especially on the codes of ethics, and ended by World War I.

A more militant and successful wave of reform, which covered broader social issues, began about 1915 in the fields of civil and mechanical engineering. Central to this movement was Frederick Haynes Newell in the conservation movement and Morris Llewelyn Cooke in scientific management, an “extension and codification of engineering ideology” (p. 140). But despite strenuous efforts, Cooke did not succeed in removing pro-business elements from the code of ethics of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Attempts to unify the engineering profession by establishing a powerful umbrella organization on the lines of the American Medical Association were frustrated at every turn. The American Association of Engineering (AAE, led initially by Newell), the Engineering Council (the national engineering societies’ response to the AAE), and the Federated Association of Engineering Societies (whose first president was Herbert Hoover) were ineffectual; the latter two were short-lived.

Layton attributed the decline of the progressive reforms in engineering to the failure of scientific management to achieve its larger social goals, and to the decline of the broader progressive movement. As noted by Meiksins, Layton laid the blame on the reformers. This was in contrast to David Noble, whose influential America by Design argued that the revolt of the engineers was an anomaly led by corporate liberals; its failure was inevitable because of the corporate control of engineering.10

In reviewing the reprinted edition of The Revolt of the Engineers for Technology and Culture in 1986, I noted its strengths and classic status while criticizing it (rather mildly) for not treating the Great Depression as comprehensively as the other periods. Missing was an account of the work on accreditation and codes of ethics by the Engineers Council for Professional Development, which was established in 1936 and is the forerunner of today’s Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology. I also noted the good work that grew out of Revolt, including Bruce Sinclair’s book on the ASME in 1980, my Ph.D. adviser Terry Reynolds’s book on the American Institute of Chemical Engineering in 1983, and Michal McMahon’s book on the AIEE and its successor organizations in 1984.11 I also drew heavily on Layton in my 1992 biography of Charles Steinmetz, the socialist chief engineer of General Electric and president of the AIEE. In fact, I used a metaphor from an earlier paper by Layton—a “patchwork of compromises between professionalism and organizational loyalty”—to characterize how Steinmetz negotiated conflicts between his notions of professionalism and the demands of his employer.12

None of this scholarship, including my own, questioned Layton’s concept of professionalization. The claim that esoteric knowledge, autonomy, and social responsibility comprised the “professional values adopted by American engineers,” which were the “same as those of other professions” (p. 4), seemed evident to me from reading the American engineering journals published at the turn of the twentieth century. The standard theory of professionalization, which Layton cited in The Revolt of the Engineers (n. 8, p. 20), also supported his claim.

In 1999 this view was successfully challenged by Ruth Oldenziel in her book titled Making Technology Masculine.13 Oldenziel argued convincingly that engineers treated professionalization as a project in masculinization, in a way similar to that shown by Margeret Rossiter for scientists in the United States before World War II.14 In this light, Oldenziel reinterpreted three issues usually discussed separately in the historiography of engineering—shop versus school culture in education, reactions against unionism, and debates about whether or not engineering was an applied science—as cultural conflicts that shaped engineering almost exclusively as a masculine, middle-class, white profession. Oldenziel noted that ideals of genteel masculinity gave way to middle-class notions of masculinity as engineering became less of an elitist profession and more of a mass occupation.

While Layton had seen the enactment of membership standards based on the ability to supervise engineering projects as a reform of engineering societies, Oldenziel saw them as a way to exclude women, mainly because women were thought to be incapable of managing men. Nora Stanton Blatch, the first woman to graduate in civil engineering from Cornell University, for example, sued the American Society of Civil Engineers on this score in 1916 for refusing “to elect her as an associate member because she was a woman.” The lawyer for the ASCE said Blatch did not meet the criterion of having been in “charge of responsible engineering work.”15 While Layton assumed that the social-contract model of professionalism, derived by patrician reformers from medicine and law, was universal in the period under study, Oldenziel placed it alongside two other models of professionalism common at the time: management ideals of command and control, favored by the shop culture; and unionism, a favorite of some rank-and-file engineers. She reinterpreted struggles between these groups as struggles over concepts of professionalism, and the control that entailed, rather than over the progressive reforms themselves. By emphasizing jurisdictional competition among the professions, sociologist Andrew Abbott has also helped change the way historians and sociologists of science and technology think about professionalism.16

Women—who are absent in The Revolt of the Engineers—find a prominent place in Oldenziel’s Making Technology Masculine. In her account, women struggle to gain an engineering education on male-dominated campuses, and they write novels about male engineers as supportive wives and daughters. A few activists like Blatch challenge the professional hierarchy and press for their own reforms. On the other hand, Lillian Gilbreth, a Taylorite, presents an assimilationist face to the early women’s movement in engineering, in which strategies of stoicism and over-qualification help reinforce gender discrimination. The women who found the Society of Women Engineers in 1950 face the dilemma that if they combat sexism too strenuously, they risk alienating female engineers and prospective female students, the vast majority of whom are not feminists.17

The Revolt of the Engineers still holds a prominent place in the historiography of technology and engineering.18 But its interpretation of professionalization has been revised and extended beyond the historiographic concerns of postwar scholarship on the Progressive Era. As noted by Layton in the preface to the 1986 edition of Revolt, the book found favor in the burgeoning area of engineering ethics. Established by moral philosophers and engineering faculty as an academic field during the renewed questioning of technology in the 1970s, engineering ethics was embraced vigorously by activist groups within engineering societies. In 1971, for example, Steve Unger and colleagues founded the forerunner of the present-day Society on Social Implications of Technology within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They soon supported the case of three whistle-blowing engineers who were fired by the Bay Area Rapid-Transit District in 1972 for reporting safety concerns.19 Any reader of recent literature in the field of engineering ethics will find plenty of references to The Revolt of the Engineers.20 By explaining how social responsibility was defined and debated by the American engineering profession in the past, Revolt has become a foundational text in the field of engineering ethics.

For historians of technology, Layton’s book is still an invaluable outsider’s account of the U.S. engineering profession in the Progressive Era. Revolt is also required reading in the related new field of “engineering studies,” which now has its own journal by that name, edited by anthropologists of science and technology Gary Downey and Juan Lucena.21 The presence of almost a dozen historians of technology on its interdisciplinary editorial board, including Atsushi Akera, Ann Johnson, Scott Knowles, Eda Kranakis, Antoine Picon, Bruce Seely, Amy Slaton, Rosalind Williams, Matthew Wisnioski, and myself, should make Layton proud.

1. The Revolt of the Engineers was first published in 1971 by the Press of Case Western Reserve University and reprinted with a new preface by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1986.

2. Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Veblen and the Engineers,” American Quarterly 14 (1962): 64–72; and Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” pp. vii–xxi, on pp. xiv–xv. The citation for the book’s Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology praised Layton’s use of sociology and psychology. See “The Dexter Prize,” Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 432–33, on p. 433.

3. The relevant work by Veblen is The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1921), reprinting a 1919 essay; and The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York, 1914).

4. Charles Rosenberg,“Rolesand Professions,” Science 174 (1971): 280–81, on p. 280. See also the review by Gene D. Lewis in The Journal of American History 58 (1972): 1037–38.

5. Peter Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 219–46, quotes on p. 235.

6. Matthew H. Wisnioski, “Engineers and the Intellectual Crisis of Technology,1957–1973” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2005), n. 9, p. 7, quotes on pp. 173 and 176.

7. Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” pp. vii–viii.

8. Samuel Haber, review of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, by Edwin T. Layton Jr., Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 100–104, on p. 101.

9. For example, Wisnioski (pp. 168–76) draws heavily on the book to describe the movement for social responsibility in American engineering before World War II.

10. Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” 220–21; and David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977).

11. Ronald R. Kline, review of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, rev. ed., by Edwin T. Layton Jr., Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 835–36.

12. Ronald R. Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, 1992), 174. The phrase comes from Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Science, Business, and American Engineering,” in The Engineers and the Social System, ed. Robert E. Perruci and Joel E. Gerstl (New York, 1969), 51–72, on p. 54. Layton used a similar phrase, “patchwork of compromises between professional ideals and business demands,” in The Revolt of the Engineers (p. 5).

13. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam, 1999).

14. Ronald R. Kline, review of Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America, ed. Roger Horowitz, and Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945, by Ruth Oldenziel, Isis 94 (2003): 775–76; and Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Strategies and Struggles to 1940 (Baltimore, 1980).

15. Oldenziel, 148 and 169, and “Old Men Bar Miss Blatch,” New York Times, 12 January 1916, p. 7 (quotes).

16. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988); Ronald R. Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880–1945,” Isis 86 (June 1995): 194–221; and Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundaries of Science,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (London, 1999), 393–443.

17. Oldenziel, chap. 5.

18. In addition to drawing heavily on the book for the period before World War II, Wisnioski (n. 6 above) observes that the ideology of engineering described by Layton “remained largely intact when discussions of professionalism began anew in the 1960s, despite the fact that the critique confronting engineers had changed substantially” (p. 176).

19. Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” xv, and Karl D. Stephan, “Notes for a History of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 25, no. 4 (2006): 5–14.

20. See, e.g., Deborah Johnson, “Do Engineers Have Social Responsibility?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 9 (1992): 21–34; Caroline Whitbeck, “Investigating Social Responsibility,” Techné 8 (2004): 79–98; and Joseph Herkert, “Ways of Thinking about and Teaching Ethical Problem Solving: Microethics and Macroethics in Engineering,” Science and Engineering Ethics 11 (2005): 373–85. Even a critic finds it necessary to rebut Layton’s account; see Michael Davis, “Three Myths about Codes of Engineering Ethics,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 20, no. 3 (2000): 8–14.

21. The homepage of engineering studies is (accessed 27 August 2008). For an early statement of the field’s scope, see Gary Downey and Juan Lucena, “Engineering Studies,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 167–88.

Ronald R. Kline is Bovay Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University. He is completing a book on the history of cybernetics, information theory, and information discourse in the United States during the cold war.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.