Perhaps the surest marker of her success, however, came when one of these stories was dramatized for presentation on that remarkable new medium of the day, American commercial television. O’Connor, who lived quietly on her mother’s dairy farm in rural Georgia along the Oconee River (you will hear reference to this river several times in my talk), had to borrow a set in order to watch the production. The drama traced the exploits of a drifter who takes work at a dairy farm and eventually marries the owner’s mentally impaired daughter in order to gain possession of an automobile. To O’Connor’s chagrin (but characteristic bemusement), the role of the drifter was played by the esteemed song-and-dance man Gene Kelly. (This foray into drama made no one forget American in Paris, another characteristic Hollywood product of the time.) Still more to her chagrin (but no bemusement), the producers altered the ending of her story. The Kelly character, after temporarily abandoning his new bride at a roadside café, thinks better of the situation and returns to pick up the girl. In the written version, the drifter does not return. He takes the car but not the girl.³

With plots like this, it is perhaps not surprising that O’Connor occasionally felt compelled to explain herself. About once a year—she was on crutches and had limited mobility—she traveled to college campuses, where she gave lectures and led workshops on the nature and aim of fiction. The essays she prepared for these occasions were later collected in a small volume. Its title, Mystery and Manners, aptly conveys what O’Connor saw as the central challenge of the serious writer of fiction: to glimpse the universal mysteries common to all human experience by observing as accurately as possible the manners and customs of lives in a particular place. A good character in a story, she once explained, is of interest “because he shares in the general human condition and in some specific human situation.”⁴

In many of these talks, O’Connor used as a jumping-off point an editorial published in Life magazine, the iconic publication of Henry Luce’s vast empire at Time, Incorporated. Luce had famously proclaimed the postwar era to be the American Century, and his editors at Life wanted to know why American novelists had not embraced his idea. Why did so many fiction writers dwell on the poor underside of American culture, the editors asked, when in fact Americans were living through a wholly remarkable period of national power marked by democratic principles made manifest by unprecedented material affluence for a vast middle class, as epitomized by the swaths of suburban houses with cars in every drive? In overlooking such beneficent scenes, the editors complained, writers failed to grasp that most universal of human concerns and experiences, “the joy of life itself.”⁵

Now here was a gauntlet few serious fiction writers could ignore. For O’Connor, the challenge was especially severe. Not only did she insist upon writing about the poor, she wrote about the southern rural poor, a people distinguished not only by their material poverty, but by their enduring resistance to the democratic secularism that Luce and his colleagues embraced so fully—a resistance that found expression in both the religion and the racism of her region. Further complicating matters for O’Connor were her own deep religious convictions. For she was, as the title of one of her essays put it, “A Catholic [capital C] Novelist in the Protestant South,” and the mysteries she ultimately strove to reveal were those she associated with her God and her faith.⁶

It was with this deep sense of alienation from the prevailing spirit of her times that O’Connor responded to the likes of Henry Luce and explained the plight of the fiction writer. Characteristically, she chose her words carefully, and I want to take you through them carefully:

What is such a writer going to take his “country” to be? The word usually used by literary folk in this connection would be “world,” but the word “country” will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on to and through the peculiar characteristics of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute. This covers considerable territory, and if one were talking of any other kind of writing than the writing of fiction [as we will be], one would perhaps have to say “countries,” but it is the peculiar burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country through the concrete particulars of a life that he can make believable.

This is first of all a matter of vocation, and a vocation is a limiting factor which extends even to the kind of material that the writer is able to apprehend imaginatively. The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.⁷

On another occasion, O’Connor told a gathering of local authors:

To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality.⁸

And then there is this tidbit, particularly tantalizing for those of us assembled here:

There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene. For him, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it.⁹

Such passages are what I have in mind when I ponder what might be the true country of the historian of technology. Historians of technology are not, strictly speaking, fiction writers. Yet as the title of John Staudenmaier’s now midpoint reflections on our discipline reminds us, we are storytellers.¹⁰ More than any other practitioners among the humanities and social sciences, historians practice the art of narrative, and in doing so we face many of the same challenges as the fiction writer. Like novelists, historians must immerse themselves in the manners and customs of a time and place, in hopes they might glimpse something of the larger mystery of human affairs. We, too, seek to connect the local to the universal, to speak to the largest of concerns through the most accurate rendering of reality. And though we need not share O’Connor’s particular way of seeing, each of us who aspires to narrate the past must make a commitment to our own mode of vision. We must have a point of view—not a preconceived opinion, necessarily, but a commitment to a way of seeing and a willingness to trust that the perspective we bring will reveal some insight into the human condition.

Just as O’Connor’s vision was at once deeply personal yet also connected to a larger theological tradition and community, so must our individual points of view derive from our belonging to a larger community, or a nexus of communities. For me, and I trust for many of you, SHOT and the discipline it supports provides such a community. Now of course the larger concerns that occupy us as historians of technology may not be “what is eternal and absolute” in the sense O’Connor used that phrase. Yet our concerns do possess a transcendent quality. Through our narratives (and here I would include exhibits and films and other media, in addition to works for the printed page), we hope to reveal something at once deeper and broader than what appears on the surface of the events we describe. We wish to contribute insights about, for lack of a better phrase, technology and culture. And in our shared commitment to that objective, we develop axioms and habits of mind that influence how we see. One of my prime objectives this evening is to reflect upon what being a part of this community has enabled me to see. I cannot speak for all of us; I can only share my own experience, and trust it resonates in some way with yours.

In seeking to glimpse the universal through the particular, the historian of technology must, like the fiction writer, navigate the particulars of region or country, as that term is commonly understood. Most of us, like most historians, stake some claim to knowing a particular place—a nation, or continent, or region—which may or may not be the place we know through felt experience. I am, in the prevailing usage, “an Americanist” (with apologies to my neighbors north and south) and also an American (subspecies Californian, or Westerner, now pretty thoroughly steeped in the South, though still, as students and neighbors regularly remind me, “not from there”). When we call ourselves historians of technology, we uproot ourselves from these geographic moorings and travel to some different country. Where have we gone? What have we put ourselves in position to see, and what have we given up in the process?

Is it, in fact, appropriate to disassociate technology from nation? Can technology ever be freed from nation? Or, conversely, is it ever not?

From its earliest days, such questions have loomed large within SHOT. The technologies of Flannery O’Connor’s day—mass production, television, space flight, centralized electronic computing, The Bomb—were often interpreted through the lens of an overarching ideological conflict between competing systems of social organization. In the pages of Technology and Culture, Lewis Mumford wrote of authoritarian and democratic techniques.¹¹ In other forums, public intellectuals such as John Kouwenhoven could embrace mass production and the Model T as the ultimate expression of the values and culture of the United States—the manifestation of Luce’s American Century.¹² Time would reveal this remarkable accretion of U.S. productive capacity as a passing phenomenon, the product of a particular constellation of events. American productive techniques circulated through other settings, where they melded with cultural routines and local governance structures. The resultant productive systems were at once recognizable heirs to the American antecedents yet distinctive products of their local environs. Now, today, as the world experiences another profound episode of globalization, in which technology appears to facilitate the rapid breaking down of national barriers while also losing what distinctive national character it might once have possessed, such questions again loom large.¹³

What O’Connor felt on the banks of the Oconee was the sort of global leveling or convergence that so many people perceive to be happening in our own time. All around her, O’Connor saw the forces encapsulated in Luce’s evocation of the American Century as advancing inexorably into her region.¹⁴ They showed up in the form of widened highways and strip malls brought literally to the edge of her farm.¹⁵ She found evidence of them as well in a set of stories written by students at the local college. “They might all have originated in some synthetic place that could have been anywhere or nowhere,” she complained. “These stories hadn’t been influenced by the outside world at all, only by television. It was a grim view of the future.”¹⁶ (She was, in fact, an admirer of Marshall McLuhan.¹⁷)

Like many people who perceive their identities to be threatened in this manner, O’Connor found some refuge in history. She confessed sheepishly to a friend that she was “reading of all things a history of Georgia written by a professor at the local college.” She found it fascinating. “It is full of eye-gougers and duelists,” she enthused.¹⁸ (Like many of us, she had learned to smile grimly at the local manners.)

O’Connor admired the great southern historian C. Vann Woodward, whose works were widely read at the time.¹⁹Woodward suggested the South suffered from a sense of loss—of failed promise—which hung upon the region and kept it from embracing change. Woodward associated the loss most explicitly with the American Civil War. O’Connor begged to differ. The real burden hanging over the South, as she saw things, came not from the lost war but from the institution of slavery.²⁰ This was the South’s Original Sin; it was, in her memorable phrase, what left the place a “Christ-haunted region.”²¹

O’Connor lived in creative tension with this legacy. Slavery and segregation were sins, yet precisely because of this, southerners had “gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence— as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country.”²²

In her lectures, O’Connor could state the differences in outlook between regions quite baldly, in terms we would not at all be surprised to hear at a SHOT meeting. I must quote her here: “Since the eighteenth century,” she told one audience, “the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more and more to the view that the ills and mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong even though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of these advances.”²³ Yet as a fiction writer, she understood that such bald pronouncements, while perhaps revealing of one’s deepest sympathies, could never capture the full complexity of a situation. “Fiction writing is seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things,” she explained.²⁴ “You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”²⁵ (A sentiment I never quite grasped until I moved to a storytelling region.)

Some of the most memorable of O’Connor’s stories present situations where rationalism, commercialism, and modernization intrude on the established cultural relations of the South. In one of her most revealing stories, these forces show up in the form of a displaced person, a Hungarian refugee, saved from the gulag and brought to rural Georgia by a Catholic priest.²⁶ (Here is the bomb resonating on the Oconee.) The immigrant finds employment at a local farm, managed by a widow who hopes his exemplary work ethic might rub off on the local hired hands. The experiment has some of the desired effect but ultimately goes terribly awry, from the point of view of the widow, when the immigrant violates a local taboo by arranging for one of the black workers to marry a relative who is looking to emigrate from Hungary. At the end, the widow conspires with her white tenants to crush the immigrant under a tractor. The tractor stays, but the old order persists as well—though only through resort to murder.²⁷

In her refusal to accept that the transforming forces of global modernization must, or could, simply sweep aside everything in their path, O’Connor brings to mind (well, to my mind, anyway) another distinctive voice in American letters, that of Abraham Lincoln. In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States launched military expeditions into Mexico (in the name of democracy, of course) and supported efforts to build transcontinental railroads and lay an underwater cable linking its commercial and political capitals with those of imperial Britain, the nay-saying Lincoln struggled to articulate an alternative vision of the future. One could not, Lincoln insisted, pursue such a course without first coming to grips with the profound moral issues of the day: the fate of independent, freeholding citizens and, above all, the abomination of slavery, which ate like a cancerous growth on the soul of the United States and undermined its moral influence in the world. This was the essence of the position Lincoln took in his famed debates with Douglas, which occurred precisely one hundred and fifty years ago as I speak.²⁸

It may seem odd to join the name of Lincoln with a southern writer who lived a century later in a house adjacent to the mansion where the Confederate governor of Georgia once resided. What ties the two, I think, is that both insisted that the powers that be must be held—and must ultimately hold themselves—to a more complex system of accounts. They must not be allowed to reduce human progress to a simplistic measure that obliterates all other dimensions of human value and obscures the nuanced ways those values find expression in local contexts. Without shunning progress entirely—indeed, both Lincoln and O’Connor embraced it as an irresistible and in many respects salutary phenomenon—they looked to complicate its course, to stem its tide and direct its force in ways that served a larger purpose than its own ends.

Such are my stories, anyway—and I stand by them.

So, how have I come by these stories?

In certain respects, the answer is personal and idiosyncratic. (I will spare you the details.²⁹) Yet whatever their roots in my own peculiar interests and experiences, I am absolutely certain that these brief interpretative narratives would never have come together in this fashion, or come into being at all, without my having been associated with SHOT and the history of technology.

I first encountered this intellectual community in the late seventies, when a part-time instructor at UC San Diego assigned a book containing essays from Technology and Culture—the T&C of the Mel Kranzberg era. It included the likes of Peter Drucker and Lewis Mumford, whose ideas I lapped up with the enthusiasm of a new convert. But the piece that really caught my fancy was—brace yourself—John Burke’s “Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power.”³⁰ That one got in me and has never got out. (A technical challenge, which compels a rearrangement of governance structures along federal lines—you can see the appeal.)

When I showed up at a SHOT meeting a couple years later (having come East to discover America), I sensed immediately that I was among like-minded people. Here were folks who liked trains but held their own enthusiasm suspect. (Fill in your own technology of interest, and try that out as a working definition of SHOT’s culture.) These were scholars who were intrigued by technology, who were fully capable of grasping its appeal and were absolutely convinced of its importance, yet who retained a healthy dose of skepticism toward it.

While I found many brethren within SHOT, two works written by scholars who identified the Society as their primary intellectual home loomed especially large for me. One was Roe Smith’s Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology; the other was Tom Hughes’s Networks of Power.³¹ At their core, these two works seemed to me to be concerned above all with governance. Smith and Hughes were convinced that humans governed much of what mattered in their affairs through their encounters with technologies.

In some instances, the act of governance took the form of their enthusiasm in creating technologies—an enthusiasm derived both from these technicians’ satisfaction in achieving practical effects (and financial rewards), but also at times from broader ideological considerations such as the appeal of order or the association of their accomplishments with the fulfillment of religious ideals or national ambitions. In other cases, the act of governance took the form of a deep and heartfelt resistance to the changes those technologies seemed capable of forcing upon people. (A resistance that, in the case of Harpers Ferry, found expression in an act of violence worthy of O’Connor’s fiction, when the leader of a local junta shot dead a superintendent too intent on imposing Yankee discipline.)

In each case, moreover, the authors of these books felt compelled to situate their actors within a larger frame of nation and region, frames which they established in terms that we might today characterize as political economy. Such a viewpoint might acknowledge the grand ideological claims asserted by the likes of Kouwenhoven, but tempered them severely with close attention to political and economic structure. While sensitive to larger ideals that ultimately impinged upon the situations they described, Smith and Hughes were attentive above all to actual practice. They showed great respect for the practical difficulties involved in governing technologies, both for the enthusiasts and for those who might resist them.

It is this deep respect for practice, I think, that ties many of us to this particular intellectual community. An appreciation for practice is the stuff which runs through our veins. More than anything else, it is what enables us—well, me, at least—to drift comfortably among sessions devoted to various technologies, times, and places. We may differ in how much emphasis we place upon it, but we almost always consider it worth taking into account, and in that we often distinguish ourselves from other historians.³² It is certainly one place where many of us find our true country.

The legacy of the approach epitomized by Smith and Hughes—and I want to emphasize that they were exemplars, especially noteworthy products of an intellectual milieu that had taken wide root within SHOT during the first half of its existence (I feel compelled here to also mention Bruce Sinclair, whose works were extremely influential on my thinking³³)—remains very vital within our Society today. Indeed, these works may have even more vibrancy today than they did a decade ago. Flip through the program for this meeting, and you will see a remarkable number of sessions and papers that echo with the touchstones of Smith, Hughes, and their ilk. One can find numerous examples of concepts applied to new frontiers—to new locales, I am pleased to see, but also to technological frontiers (such as computing and the internet) that had barely appeared on the horizon when these works were published.

This is not meant to imply that historians of technology have simply been treading water over the past quarter century, or that SHOT has spent the past twenty-five years merely exporting its established way of seeing to new domains. Of course we have continued to cultivate new concerns and new perspectives. Most impressively, I think, are the ways we have expanded our consideration of matters pertaining to identity. By the early seventies, emphasis had already shifted from grand, national identities toward consideration of the professions. Since then, SHOT members have complicated our understanding of professional authority while also exploring entirely new dimensions of cultural identity. As in most branches of history, the pioneers here were feminist scholars who brought gender analysis to the fore.³⁴ More recently, additional veins have opened, including significant efforts to bring race and ethnicity into sharper focus. Perhaps nothing testifies so clearly to the growing sophistication with which we engage questions of identity than the pronounced anthropological turn taking place within our discipline. Surely, such perspectives are vital if we wish to explore a wider array of countries and regions and secure a place at the table in contemporary discussions of globalization.³⁵ And if we are looking for of just how we can contribute, we need look no further than a recent issue of Technology and Culture, which shows how all these intellectual strands—older and newer—have come together in a new and distinctive approach to the subject.³⁶

SHOT has shown considerably less enthusiasm for new perspectives opened by economics and economic historians. We have been too quick, I think, to dismiss such perspectives, perhaps because we have so readily associated them with the doctrine of progress. There is some cause for this. When the World Bank imposes market mechanisms as a one-size-fits-all approach to growth or economists hold technologies to be optimal outcomes of competitive processes, skepticism is in order. Yet in being so quick to unleash our nay-saying instincts, we have neglected more subtle approaches that have a great deal to offer us. Economic historians, in particular, have a great deal to say about the ways in which historical trajectories influence markets, and how market mechanisms can through historical happenstance arrive at very different equilibria (as they would call them, or outcomes, as we would say).

In my studies of technology in America, I have found it impossible—impossible—to make sense of things without taking account of this sort of work. For better or worse, Americans have leaned heavily upon market mechanisms in governing their technologies, and in governing themselves. ³⁷ (As we are being reminded of on a daily basis at present, as we experience the crisis in financial markets.)

A wonderful example of the utility of this approach can be found in the work of Gavin Wright, an economic historian who has written widely on two subjects of particular relevance here: the American South, and the distinctiveness of American technology. Much of his work highlights the ways in which nations and regions can gravitate toward distinctive technological regimes that persist across time, when we might expect them to converge on a common store of techniques and processes.³⁸ Wright shows us, for example, that from the Civil War until O’Connor’s day, the South remained a low-wage region in a high-wage nation, so that the distinctive technologies developed for the high-wage, mineral-rich North and West offered little advantage to the region.³⁹ In another work, Wright confronts the question of why industrial countries did not converge rapidly on a common set of technologies in the middle decades of the twentieth century.⁴⁰

In explaining the stickiness of national and regional differences, scholars such as Wright exhibit a rich understanding of concepts and evidence generated by historians of technology. They exhibit great respect for the sort of learning technologists derive from actual practice.⁴¹ Unlike many historians of technology, however, these historians are willing to assess the magnitude of such phenomena and to situate developments in historical time.

Perhaps one reason we have been slow to embrace such scholarship has been our relentless pursuit of the concept of social construction. As our field grew more diverse, this concept emerged as our most transcendent universal principle, a means of linking our various and sundry stories. This was an admirable aim, driven by the best of intentions, and there is no question that it yielded real benefits. Certainly it is very evident in my own work. But as O’Connor would tell us, it was also limiting. Ironically, our insistence on demonstrating social construction often bred a new internalism, for it encouraged us to focus ultimately on the technological outcome rather than the social one. In attempting to situate our stories within an evolving shared discourse among historians of technology, we extract from them abstract concepts pertaining to a universal process of technical change. In so doing, we uproot them from time and place—from their particular historical contexts.⁴²

This state of affairs reflects the inherent tendencies of all disciplines to grow ever more specialized and inward-looking. Still, we would do well to guard against them. For in tracing this arc, we run the risk of removing technology fromhistory.⁴³We lose track of the scale of phenomenon we are considering, and we neglect the fundamental truth that most people experience most technologies not through a process characterized by construction but through something more akin to challenge and response—with technology posing the challenge rather than providing the response. (Roe Smith, you might recall, subtitled his book “the challenge of change.”) Indeed, the response typically is quite constrained by the technology. The bomb falls, and it is felt on the banks of the Oconee. The fact that the bomb was socially constructed within a political economy that included those folks along the Oconee should not keep us from recognizing it as an exogenous event in their lives.⁴⁴

Now, what I am suggesting here will strike many among you as anathema. It smacks of determinism, of technology driving history. For a few of you, it might also seem incongruent with my own scholarship. I don’t find it so. When my publisher insisted on inserting the word “railroad” between “regulating” and “innovation” in the title of my book, I sacrificed the intended double meaning—“Regulating Innovation.” For in my mind, the question was entirely open as to whether railroad technology and innovation were being regulated or doing the regulating. I saw my study as an extended meditation upon this issue, as an exercise in comprehending precisely what was negotiable (within the United States) about the course of change associated with railroading. The same objective has animated my studies of computing and information processing across the twentieth century. And in each case, I find anything but a blank slate.

But now, I have slipped deep into declarative statements. I am saying, not showing. Stories take time, and I have taken enough of yours already.

Besides, sometimes it is good to generalize. It is the historian’s equivalent to O’Connor’s resort to violence in her fiction. We may need to shout to be heard, and generalization is a form of shouting. (Thick description, we would do well to remember, can be as off-putting as many other forms of expression.)

Such generalization is of course a personal statement. I am not speaking for the Society. Generalizations from the collective, I suspect, will grow ever more difficult to formulate as we achieve the internationalization and other forms of diversity we desire. This is a good and healthy thing. But as individuals, we should not shy away from staking broad claims. After fifty years of truly impressive intellectual accomplishment, surely our sense of manners can allow for engaged dispute—if not for actual duels and eye-gouging— in full confidence that the elusive mystery of our commonality will long persist. For as Flannery O’Connor once explained to a friend who wondered how she could endure the South: “It is good to be at home in a region, even this one.”⁴⁵

1. This essay was prepared for oral delivery at the fiftieth annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Lisbon, Portugal, on 12 October 2008. The text reproduced here is a nearly verbatim transcript of that talk. Its frequent italics and parentheses are intended to assist readers in discerning the pace and tone of my spoken remarks. For this printed version, I have also incorporated extensive footnotes. Some notes merely provide bibliographical references, while others offer more substantial elaborations. All of the material in these notes is drawn from actual drafts of my address; the passages included here informed what I had to say even if they did not survive the cuts required to fit the time allotted for my talk.

2. The novel was Wise Blood (New York, 1952). The story collection was A Good Man Is Hard to Find (New York, 1955). In 1960, O’Connor would publish a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (New York, 1960). A second collection of stories, Everything that Rises Must Converge (New York, 1965), appeared the year after she died, of complications from lupus, at age thirty-nine.

3. The story was “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” from A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 47–62.On the television production, which appeared as an episode of the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars on 1 March 1957, see “Writing Short Stories,” from Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1969), 94–95, and letters from O’Connor to Elizabeth Fenwick Way (13 September 1956), to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (10 December 1956), to Elizabeth Hester (28 December 1956), and to Mrs. Rumsey Haynes (3 March 1957), all of which are reproduced in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (New York, 1979). Later in 1957, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars presented “The Lonely Wizard,” a biopic of Charles Steinmetz (played by Rod Steiger) that won an Emmy for writing and a directorial award from the Directors Guild of America.

4. O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” 90.

5. O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Mystery and Manners, 26. O’Connor presented this essay at the University of Notre Dame in April 1957 and contributed it to a book edited by Granville Hicks, The Living Novel: A Symposium (New York, 1957). For further reaction to the editorial in Life, see O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (8 September 1956), in The Habit of Being.

6. Presented at Georgetown University on 18 October 1963, it eventually appeared in the university’s magazine, Viewpoint, and can be found in Mystery and Manners, 191–209.

7. O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” 27 (emphasis added).

8. O’Connor, “The Regional Writer,” in Mystery and Manners, 51–59 (quote on 54).

9. O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, 63–86 (quote on 77). The editors assembled this essay from notes O’Connor made for occasional lectures.

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

11. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 1–8.

12. John A. Kouwenhoven, The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What’s American about America (New York, 1961). This book was reviewed by Hidetoshi Kato in Technology and Culture 4 (1963): 116–17. The essay “What’s American about America,” which discusses the Model T, appeared in the July 1956 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

13. The notion was advanced most forcefully by Thomas L. Friedman in The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2005). It is explored with far greater subtlety in Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 3 vols., (Malden, Mass., 1996, 1997, and 1998), which has appeared in several subsequent editions.

14. “The writers of the editorial in question suggested that our anguish is a result of our isolation from the rest of the country. I feel this would be news to most Southern writers,” O’Connor wrote in response to the editors at Life. “The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough, that every day we are getting more and more like the rest of the country, that we are being forced not only out of our many sins, but out of our few virtues. This may be unholy anguish but it is anguish nevertheless.” O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country” (n. 5 above), 28–29.

15. This farm, called Andalusia, is maintained as a historic site and is well worth a visit. One enters the farm via a nondescript dirt drive opening directly onto Georgia Highway 441, a major north-south artery lined with fast food outlets, motels, and retailers such as Wal-Mart. One of O’Connor’s stories, originally published in the fall of 1957, depicts the tempestuous relationship between an old man and his feisty granddaughter, who pass time watching a giant earthmover as it digs a pond and the foundation of a modern gas station in what had been the family cow pasture. “‘Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is not on my books,’” crows the old man, hoping to catch his granddaughter’s attention. “But the child did not have eyes for anything but the machine. She sat on the hood, looking down into the red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up. Her pale eyes behind her spectacles followed the repeated motion of it again and again and her face—a small replica of the old man’s—never lost its look of complete absorption.” The story ends with the pair dead at each other’s hands, and a vision of the “huge yellow monster . . . gorging itself on clay” flashing before the man’s mind. O’Connor, “A View of the Woods,” in Everything that Rises Must Converge (n. 2 above), 54–81 (quotes on 55 and 81).

16. O’Connor, “The Regional Writer” (n. 8 above), 56.

17. To a friend whom she believed had misconstrued McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, O’Connor wrote: “No mam [sic], it isn’t comic or meant to be and it isn’t sociology or written by a sociologist. To be understood, it has to be read completely and slowly, as McLuhan has a packed style. I will admit that occasionally he says something crudely funny—as when he calls the hero of the ad ‘Big Barnsmell’—this seems just right to me I must admit but it’s not why I appreciate the book. Also you can omit the little captions by the pictures. The meat is in the text and has to be read carefully.” O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (8 September 1956), in The Habit of Being (n. 3 above), 173–74. In this letter and one to Ben Griffith (3 March 1954), O’Connor also praised an essay McLuhan had published on southern writers in the Southern Vanguard. She referred back to this essay in 1963 when assessing the state of race relations in the South during an interview with Jubilee magazine, which is excerpted in the appendix of Mystery and Manners (n. 3 above), 233–34.

18. O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (25 October 1958), in The Habit of Being. “It is a very fine thing and very good for getting your sense of continuity established,” O’Connor observed of the history.

19. C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955) and The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960) each received considerable public notoriety.

20. O’Connor took great joy in ridiculing southern remembrances of what she often referred to as “The Wah Between the States.” An early story, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” (A Good Man Is Hard to Find [n. 2 above], 153–66), lampooned one such commemorative event. When her town of Milledgeville staged a parade and pageant to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Georgia’s secession from the Union, she could hardly contain herself. “There is no wound, my girl,” she wrote to a friend; “this is merely a gorgeous way to make money.” O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (4 February 1961). The “pageant was such a smashing success that the Chamber of Commerce hopes to put it on during the season and make this another Wm’burg,” she explained to another. “The Civil War is just beginning to pay off its investment.” O’Connor to Maryat Lee (14 February 1961).

21. “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered,” she told an audience at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, on 28 October 1960, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.” The remarks were published as part of the essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” which appears in Mystery and Manners, 36–50 (quote on 44–45). The connection with the shadow of slavery is conveyed most profoundly for me in several of her stories, perhaps most powerfully of all in “The Artificial Nigger,” which appeared in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 98–126. The provocative title comes from an uneducated rural character’s exclamation upon encountering a lawn ornament in suburban Atlanta; the narrator never uses the offensive word. “There is nothing that screams out the tragedy of the South like what my uncle calls ‘nigger statuary,’” she wrote when explaining to a friend why the story was her favorite. O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (6 September 1955). “What I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger,” she told another correspondent, “is the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all.” O’Connor to Ben Griffith (4 May 1955).

22. O’Connor, “The Regional Writer” (n. 8 above), 59.

23. O’Connor, “Grotesque in Southern Fiction, ”Mystery and Manners (n. 3 above), 41.

24. O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories” (n. 3 above), 93.

25. O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” 96.

26. Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” from A Good Man Is Hard to Find (n. 2 above), 197–251.

27. O’Connor’s imagined confrontations often ended in such violence—a violence intended to shatter the hubris of those who swelled with pride, whether that pride be derived from their smug racist superiority or their unqualified belief in the doctrine of progress. For a highly perceptive treatment of this theme in O’Connor’s work, see Robert Coles, Flannery O’Connor’s South (Baton Rouge, 1980). Coles entitled one of his three lectures on O’Connor “Stalking Pride.” In explaining the frequent resort to violence in her fiction, O’Connor once wrote: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take evermore violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country” (n. 5 above), 33–34.

28. On Lincoln and technology, see Steven W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics, 1840–1920 (Cambridge, 2002), chap. 1.

29. Here in print I will lay my cards on the table. My father’s great-grandparents, German immigrants, were contemporaries of Lincoln who farmed and taught school on the Illinois prairie south of Springfield; they might well have attended one of his debates with Douglas. My mother, like me a native Californian, received her naval training at a women’s college in Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery O’Connor was a student; throughout the fall of 1944, the two of them regularly attended mass together in the small Catholic church there (a fact I never knew while my mother was alive). In tracing the lives of Lincoln and O’Connor, then, I have pursued a trail that courses deeply through my own life and helps me come to grips with the region in which I reside, as something of a resident alien myself. Such personal attachments, I suspect, inform many of the stories we tell, even if most of us are usually loathe to fess up to them so forthrightly.

30. John G. Burke, “Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power,” Technology and Culture 7 (1966): 1–23. The essay was reprinted in Melvin Kranzberg and William H. Davenport, eds., Technology and Culture: An Anthology (New York, 1972; paperback, 1975), 93–118.

31. Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977) and Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1983).

32. I was very encouraged a couple of years ago when the distinguished historian Richard White, in a column written in his capacity as president of the Organization of American Historians, issued a plea for all historians to shift their attention from ideology to practice, both in their choice of topics and the interpretations they offer. During his presidency, White reached out to historians of technology (as well as to business historians), groups he sees as exemplars of the type of scholarship he endorses. While I would not take White as representative of the larger historical profession, I do believe he speaks for a significant contingent that is ready to embrace a more pragmatic turn. We have much to offer them.

33. Of particular influence were his “At the Turn of a Screw: William Sellers, the Franklin Institute, and a Standard American Screw Thread,” Technology and Culture 10 (1969): 20–34, and his A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880–1980 (Toronto, 1980).

34. For a sampling, see Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun, eds., Gender and Technology: A Reader (Baltimore, 2003).

35. For a stimulating introduction, see Castells, The Information Age (n. 13 above), esp. vol. 2, The Power of Identity (London, 1997; 2d ed., 2004). On the subject of regional and national identity, Flannery O’Connor offered this sage advice: “An identity is not to be found on the surface; it is not accessible to the poll-taker; it is not something that can become a cliché. It is not made from the mean or the average or the typical, but from the hidden and often the most extreme. It is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure, regardless of what passes.” O’Connor, “The Regional Writer” (n. 8 above), 57–58.

36. The issue, vol. 49, no. 3 (July 2008), creatively engages the highly influential work of James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998). Scott’s ideas have resonated with many of us within SHOT, I believe, precisely because he utilizes the concept of metis, a notion grounded in an appreciation for the subtleties of actual practice on the ground. Scott contrasts this approach explicitly with the designs of engineers, whom he chides for pursuing highly idealized approaches that are derived from abstract principles, based on data of insufficiently fine grain, and tinged with ideologies of control. In his introduction to this issue, Martin Reuss critiques Scott by suggesting that the case studies presented in the issue reveal engineers acting in a manner far more respectful of practice than Scott would lead us to believe.

37. While I appreciated the high praise of John Larson in the pages of this journal, I was a tad chagrined to see my work on railroads presented as being in such stark opposition to that of economists. John Lauritz Larson, “Demythologizing Innovation: Steven Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation,” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 159–61. When an economist such as Robert Fogel asks whether Americans really needed to make such a wholesale commitment to transcontinental railroads as they did in the nineteenth century, he is pursuing a question entirely congruent with my approach and with the ideas of social construction. For an effort to situate my research in the framework of economic history, see Steven W. Usselman, “Patents, Engineering Professionals, and the Pipelines of Innovation: The Internalization of Technical Discovery by Nineteenth-Century American Railroads,” in Naomi R. Lamoreaux et al., eds., Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries (Chicago, 1999), 61–91.

38. Like much of the best work in economic history, Wright creatively blends microeconomic analysis—focused on the behaviors of individuals and firms as they make choices regarding matters such as which crops to plant or machines to use—with a subtle understanding of the larger macroeconomic environment in which they operate. Wright appreciates, moreover, that the macroeconomic environment has evolved in historically specific ways, though not necessarily as the result of specific intent on the part of any individual or influential party. This notion that historical outcomes may not reflect the intent of any of the contesting parties may seem hopelessly forlorn. For some, it reeks of fatalism. I see it differently. In acknowledging that larger forces shape outcomes, we better grasp the extent of meaningful action we do possess. We put ourselves in position to reach more reasoned assessments of what is possible. For further elaboration, see Steven W. Usselman, “Still Visible: Alfred D. Chandler’s The Visible Hand,” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 584–96.

39. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986). As O’Connor sensed, the situation changed drastically (though not completely) with new policies and conditions brought by the New Deal and World War II.

40. Richard R. Nelson and Gavin Wright, “The Rise and Fall of American Technological Leadership: The Postwar Era in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Literature 30 (1992): 1931–64. Across his extraordinarily productive career, Nelson and his collaborators have produced many works of utility to historians of technology. These include his National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (New York, 1993), a collection with particular relevance to this address; Sources of Industrial Leadership (Cambridge, 1999), which he edited with David C. Mowery; and Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), a foundation stone of an important body of historically minded explorations of technology and innovation, many of which can be found in the journals Industrial and Corporate Change and Research Policy.

41. In this respect, their work brings to mind Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002), another work written by an economic historian.

42. My critique of social construction bears some resemblance to that offered by David Edgerton in his recent provocative book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York, 2007). Edgerton chides historians of technology for being preoccupied with creation stories. Though I think he overstates the case and presents a caricature of the history of technology that fails to capture the richness of the field (a richness his own treatment reflects), I admire Edgerton for insisting that we consider the magnitude of the phenomena we study and for emphasizing that we consider technologies in use. For further elaboration, see Steven W. Usselman, “Material World,” Reviews in American History 35 (2007): 580–89. For a recent forum on the importance of users, see JoAnne Yates, “How Business Enterprises Use Technology: Extending the Demand-Side Turn,” Enterprise and Society 7 (2006): 422–55, and comments.

43. Our turn to STS and anthropology, while offering useful insights, heightens that risk.

44. If a secret military project of such monumental proportions strikes you as exceptional, consider the movies. Among the observers who experienced the transformative force of moving pictures in the late teens and twenties was Carl Sandburg, the famed poet and biographer. While struggling to make his way as a young writer, Sandburg supplemented his income by reviewing films for a Chicago newspaper. Asked to justify why he would devote so much time to what many literati considered a crass phenomenon, Sandburg pointed out that film was already the fifth largest industry in the United States. “The movies are,” he concluded, and one can find in his reviews numerous trenchant observations about how the mere fact of their existence—of people crowding into dark spaces several times each week to view world events and watch faces in close-up transform upon the screen—was fundamentally altering the emotional basis of the American polity and the temper of modern life. Carl Sandburg, “The Movies Are,” 18 December 1926, quoted in Arnie Bernstein, ed., “The Movies Are”: Carl Sandburg’s Film Reviews and Essays, 1920–1928 (Chicago, 2000), vii. The bomb drops; the movies are; the internet is— and in each case, lives change profoundly, and the course of history alters, in ways that are far from obvious and beg for further exploration.

45. O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins (22 February 1959), in The Habit of Being (n. 3 above).

Steven W. Usselman, who teaches at the Georgia Institute of Technology, served as SHOT president during 2007 and 2008. His coedited book, The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business, will appear in spring 2009 with Stanford University Press.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

Empire and Communications is a seminal book.¹ Its meticulous examination of civilizations from ancient history to the early twentieth century consumed years of Innis’s life, as he looked to support his thesis that media technologies are the critical influences in the rise and fall of empires. He explains that “the concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. . . . Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character” (pp. 26–27). Too often, though, students and casual scholars retain the space bias/time bias distinction without following it through to the critical point: that it is essential for both of these biases to be present in any enduring civilization and to function in tandem—for that is where the cultural and economic links that allow empires to prosper are forged. As Innis goes on to explain: “Large-scale political organizations such as empires . . . have tended to flourish under conditions in which civilization reflects the influence of more than one medium and in which the bias of one medium towards decentralization is offset by the bias of another medium towards centralization” (p. 27).

In the case of ancient Egypt, Innis sees scribal power, the development and use of writing systems, checked by religious adherence to oral tradition. He sees Egyptian monarchs as having been extremely powerful internally because of their connectedness to religious beliefs, but he also uses this to account for the nation’s limited success at empire building. His initial contrast is with Babylonia, where secular monarchies and a written code of law kept in check the religious practices of smaller city-states within the empire. The balance was even more apparent in ancient Greece, as Innis writes:

The strength of the oral tradition and the relative simplicity of the alphabet checked the possible development of a highly specialized profession of scribes and the growth of a monopoly of the priesthood over education. A military aristocracy restricted the influence of a priestly class and poets imposed control over public opinion. The Greeks had no Bible with a sacred literature attempting to give reasons and coherence to the scheme of things, making dogmatic assertions and strangling science in infancy. Without a sacred book and a powerful priesthood the ties of religion were weakened and rational philosophy was developed by the ablest minds to answer the demand for generalizations acceptable to everyone (p. 88).

The Greek empire did fall, of course—but not before building a legacy of art and ideas that would leave its mark on cultures the world over until our own day. Innis’s time/space bias concept, developed in later work of which Empire and Communications is the most important statement, makes a fine complement to his earlier nation- or empire-focused “staples theory” of economics, in which control over geographic territory is understood as being gained and held through an unequal balance of trade. In the history of his native Canada, for example, Innis saw that the export-import relationship of unprocessed pelts to finished fur coats had represented a net financial loss for the exporter of the pelts. But in later years, the export-import relationship of pulp and paper to print publications (books, newspapers, magazines) came to represent, in addition to financial loss, a lost opportunity for cultural development, as defining ideas and forms of expression increasingly were brought in from elsewhere. This phenomenon troubled Innis throughout much of his career, and his writings on this subject posed questions for future scholars to apply to media Innis never even knew.

Since his death, and especially since the 1980s, Innis’s work has been reinvigorated by communication scholars who have used it in fashioning both a materialist approach to colonialism and an interdisciplinary approach to the history of media. Scholars in his native Canada have looked to his work for insight into the problem of cultural incursions from the United States. But North American media scholars more generally look to Innis as something of a middle ground between scientific study of the media in the behaviorist tradition that developed here in the mid-twentieth century and the sometimes impenetrable concepts associated with European cultural studies and theories of postmodernism. Innis’s writings may be lengthy and overly detailed, but they prove understandable and applicable in a variety of modern-day contexts, particularly for nations whose identities solidified during the industrial era. One might well claim that the American empire has been Innis’s best theorized, even though he did not live to witness its most revealing manifestations.

Innis and Canada

Before examining what Innis’s theoretical work reveals about the role of empire in the twenty-first century generally, it is important to look briefly at Canada specifically, the nation and cultural context in which his ideas were formed. The view from north of the forty-ninth parallel lent Innis some of his greatest insight into the formation of empires—especially the information empires of Great Britain and the United States, which have dominated modern society.

Innis worked throughout his life, in various capacities, for a variety of government commissions and bureaus, always in the interest of strengthening Canada’s intellectual and cultural backbone. But he avoided what he considered token gestures of patriotism, perhaps seeing them as emulating the commercially supported messages that emanated from the U.S. media empire. As Charles Acland writes, Innis presents a “case for Canada” that, when he begins to discuss culture more explicitly, becomes a critique of lost cultural potential rather than an argument for national partisanship.² Innis shared a common concern that Canada risked losing (or perhaps never attaining) the cultural cohesiveness it needed to function as a nation. Compared with Great Britain and the United States, there was a gap to be filled— perhaps artificially—by public funding.³

Canadian cultural studies scholar Jody Berland explores this theme in a 1995 essay, echoing Innis’s doubt (especially as he expressed it later in his life) whether Canada would be able to escape its history as a staples economy, even in the very different time coming—what came to be called “the information age.” She writes that, with all Canada’s publicly funded cultural institutions, “we are left with a constellation of national bureaucracies that empower an abstract collective identity without necessarily empowering the actual citizens in whose name they speak.”⁴ Berland, like other recent theorists, cites the regional, cultural, and linguistic disparities highlighted by Quebec, indigenous peoples, recent immigrants, and others as posing intractable questions about the nationalist project. Innis and Berland together suggest a Canadian nationalist empire (white, European, Anglophone) that is, itself, subordinate to a much larger U.S. cultural empire.

Addressing and representing cultural diversity by national and international media systems inevitably raises thorny questions around the concept of empire. This idea is underdeveloped in Innis’s writings on the American empire and the role of newer media technologies. But he alludes to it clearly throughout his discussions of earlier empires. The strengths he saw in both Babylonia and Greece, for instance, relate to their maintenance of local cultures through oral tradition and ritual even as they centralized control through codified law and the spread of knowledge via simple written documents. In other words, there are multiple tiers in which Innis’s staples theory applies to information: exporting raw materials (from paper pulp to indigenous stories) and importing them after processing by a more powerful external entity (whether U.S. broadcast networks or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] itself, as it provides programming to indigenous peoples).

Canada’s commercial producers, thanks perhaps to the “Canadian content” guidelines imposed by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, operate with a deliberate awareness of cultural diversity uncommon in the United States, though the various groups that make up the Canadian population have unequal influence over cultural messages. Furthermore, while Canadian airwaves and cable lines continue to be filled with U.S.–origin content, Canada has assumed a significant role of its own in media production and export. In comparison with the United States, Canada remains a marginal player in the world’s information economy. But as the divide between developed nations and developing nations (including a number of other former colonies) widens, Canada is holding its own.

This owes something to Innis’s having opened the discussion in the first half of the twentieth century. I also credit some of his contemporaries, including early nationalist literary critics such as E. K. Brown, John Sutherland, and, later, Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood. And I credit Canadian artists, notably the Group of Seven, who brought the vivid forms and color of the Canadian landscape into museums, homes, and college classrooms. Acland has pointed out that Innis did not spend much time reading literature or cultivating an appreciation for the arts generally—leaving these interests to his wife, Mary Quayle Innis. So I feel that more recent discussions of Canadian nationalism owe a debt as equal to the broad characterizations of the infrastructure made by Innis and his followers as to those who have been able to describe the country’s unique and concrete attributes.

Innis and North America Writ Large

Although my first encounter with Innis was reading The Bias of Communication (1951) for a graduate course, I was spending more time studying the literary critics at that stage. My understanding of Innis today owes a great deal to two U.S. scholars I encountered after my career shifted to media history: the late James Carey and Daniel Czitrom. Both writers, one a journalism scholar and one a historian, discussed Innis in books published in the 1980s, three decades after he died. Both recognized the importance to Innis’s work of Canada as a specific place. And both understood how Innis uniquely addressed the intersections of geography and communication technologies that shaped civilizations in North America.⁵

Carey credits Innis with a theory of imperialism grounded in real historical circumstances. According to Innis, “There would be no transformation of the great society into the great community by way of disinterested technology but only in terms of the ways in which knowledge and culture were monopolized by particular groups” (p. 152). Carey explains the impact of place on Innis’s intellectual formation—perhaps comprehending it even more than Innis himself had. In an essay subtitled “A Tribute to Innis,” he ponders the influence on Innis’s thought of the years he spent studying at the University of Chicago, especially as he shifted away from the pure staples=based economic theory of his early career.⁶

Chicago communication sociologists including Charles Cooley and Robert Park were early pioneers of the notion that organic societies, wherein individuals held unique and meaningful roles, were giving way to an alienating industrial scenario. They saw the association of industrial society with social progress as a potentially destructive misconception. Carey highlights Innis’s affinity with the Chicago sociologists by noting that “they characterized communication as the entire process whereby a culture is brought into existence, maintained in time, and sedimented into institutions. Therefore, they saw communication in the envelope of art, architecture, custom and ritual, and, above all, politics.”⁷ However, as U.S. sociology (and hence communication studies) acquired a more scientific, functional, and behaviorist bent, the divergence with Innis’s ideas could not be missed. Carey thus tried to shift attention back toward Innis’s status as a Canadian and its influence on his work.

For his part, Czitrom cites the Chicago School sociologists as one influence on Innis, but he focuses more on economist Thorstein Veblen. I would have to agree. While it is likely that exposure to the nascent subfield of communication sociology associated with the Chicago School nudged Innis toward a later awareness of how relevant his economic theories were to the study of communication technologies, other connections are more tenuous. Perhaps Innis took note of the Chicago School’s focus on the effects of industrial technology on human consciousness, but I believe he was more keenly aware of the economic factors that brought those technologies into being and caused them to develop differently in different places.

Veblen’s ideas about social stratification, especially when projected on an international scale, proved a natural draw for Innis. Czitrom points out that “Veblen’s assault on neoclassical economics challenged the notion that economic laws were universal: timeless and true for all places.”⁸ Such a notion would, of course, become manifest in Innis’s Canada-grounded theory of economic history, through which we can see how both older and newer colonial powers relegated those native to the colonized nations (indigenous peoples as well as later-generation immigrants) to an inferior cultural status. This has been true of direct political power as well as of formal efforts to generate appreciation for forms of cultural expression.

Innis and Contemporary Media

Both Carey and Czitrom appreciated Innis’s later work, in which he shifted application of his economic theories from physical commodities (staples) such as furs, cod, and lumber to the more conceptual commodity of information. Thinking about media history as a history of empire building offers a frame—and a justification—for the ways I approach history in my own research. As a television historian whose work has depended heavily on research in local communities, incorporating oral history and archival methods, Innis’s concepts of space and time biases, and the dynamic interplay between them, make a great deal of sense to me. Most established histories of television in North America focus on the major networks (both broadcast and cable) and their technological and economic means of delivering programming to communities or regions. There is a clear emphasis on space bias in this approach. But it is at the local level that viewing habits, preferences, and practices are established and maintained. The local, which leans toward a time bias, plays an essential role in what will define television at a national, continental, or global level as well.

This notion has been put forth in part by several scholars through their conceptualizations of television, which they describe variously as an “electronic hearth” (Cecilia Tichi), a “cultural forum” (Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch), and having a “bardic” role (John Fiske and John Hartley).⁹ All of these suggest a function of television as social mediator or common ground, hearkening back to oral culture traditions. This function has also been identified in some work done under the rubric of reception studies or audience analysis. Innis surely would agree that this role of television speaks to a time bias. Yet seldom does it come across just how much television’s agenda-setting function—which Innis would associate with the space bias—depends on its capacity to be articulated in ways specific to local communities. In other words, for television to contribute to centralizing “monopolies of knowledge,” as it does in powerful ways, it needs to be embedded within local cultures as well. Here, the time and space biases clearly work together—not unlike the religion/government synchrony Innis saw in the enduring empires of past millennia.

Innis had some experience with radio, but he barely knew of television at the time of his death (CBC television broadcasts would arrive a month later). His remarks on radio at the end of Empire and Communications hint at an association of radio with oral culture (p. 196). But, as Czitrom speculates, for Innis radio “presaged a return to oral tradition only in a shallow sense.”¹⁰ In spite of any origins in oral culture,the ease of transporting messages over space—including national borders—subordinates any local traditions that might form around shared listening or viewing experiences. Czitrom further points out, as do other scholars, that the literal selling of units of time centralizes control of any messages at the place where payment is received. Paul Heyer elaborates further in a recent biography of Innis: “What he suggests but does not explore is that such media [as commercial radio and television] exacerbate the spatial-bias inherent in print by extending the influence of metropolitan centers of power, in the guise of providing greater access and democratizing knowledge. They tend to perpetuate modes of domination—especially in the case of the influence of American mass media on smaller nations, such as Canada—that in many ways resemble what took place in previous epochs.”¹¹ However much one might debate claims of television’s biases when giving consideration to its ritual aspects and broadcasting’s roots in oral tradition, television’s sheer colonizing power leaves little doubt as to its space bias. Not only has U.S. television dominated North America for half a century, constantly channeling audiences’ attention toward consumer products, the extremely low marginal costs of its distribution have allowed it to be a forceful cultural presence virtually worldwide—including in places where the existence of some U.S. products otherwise would be superfluous and perhaps unwelcome.

To me, though, there is even less question as to where Innis would place the internet on the time-bias/space-bias media continuum. In discussing newspapers, especially those that arose in the United States during the nineteenth century, he questioned the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment out of concern that its stress on literacy and print-based media would create monopolies of knowledge, in contrast to the more balanced efforts at democracy he saw in the Greek empire. Where many scholars would see the spread of literacy and the rise of the penny press during the nineteenth century as heralding a democratization of information, Innis believed these phenomena took control of information away from communities and delivered it to business interests in large U.S. cities. This surely was exacerbated by the large-scale relocation from farms and rural communities to factories and urban areas—and from a lifestyle determined by family and community needs to one dictated by a time clock. The recent history of news and its various delivery technologies bears out Innis’s notion, but it is epitomized by recent developments with the internet.

The origins of the internet and world wide web parallel those of commercial radio in that both represent a sort of communitarian takeover of technologies first defined for military use. In Inventing American Broadcasting (1987), Susan Douglas has documented the role teenage “amateurs” played in turning radio into a news and entertainment medium, and other scholars have chronicled and theorized ways in which various contemporary facets of the internet arose out of endeavors like Usenet and The WELL during the 1990s. Nonetheless, I believe that if Innis were alive today, he would be calling attention to the shift away from the internet’s short-term boost to oral and communitarian modes of communication. Since at least the mid-1990s, this kind of momentum—with its empowerment of grass-roots organizations and self-publishing individuals—has been steadily giving way to corporate buyouts of successful websites and the various forms of e-commerce (both licit and illicit). As early as 1993, when Mosaic, the first successful graphical web browser, was released, popular internet analyst Clifford Stoll expressed concern that the new medium would be given over to deception and hucksterism.

Of course there is a ritual dimension to the internet even today, just as there has been with newspapers, television, and other media. The chat rooms remain, and a plethora of social networking sites have emerged. And, in a rather different vein, scholars too numerous to list have noted the parallels between modern advertisers and the priests and shamans of other ages and civilizations. Their messages guide our cultural rites, and their brand logos are our totems. Nonetheless these ritual aspects speak to the same cultural goal as they did with earlier media: to channel belief systems toward consumption, which ultimately feeds the space-consuming centers of media influence. As American media messages (and those of other developed nations) grow ever more influential, such false rituals and totems replace more traditional (and time-binding) ones all over the world, helping to build a cultural empire dedicated to commercial goals.

Moreover, as Catherine Frost explains, the predominance of English on the internet ensures that the English-language empire begun by the British and perpetuated by the United States will continue. Frost writes that Innis “worried that reading the written word was an isolating experience.” And of course isolation is antithetical to communitarian goals. She goes on to note that “although it can support instantaneous change, this is not the Internet’s primary use or advantage. By reinforcing the written word in a physically and temporally isolated environment, the Internet displays some of the same alienating tendencies as written media.”¹²

Frost credits the internet with being vast and flexible enough to accommodate alternative uses—certainly more than broadcast or cable television. She credits conventions such as hypertext with the capacity to “break down the linear communications experience necessitated by the written word” into a “user-defined” and “multi-associative” approach to information. She also credits its decentralized form of control with allowing its content to literally be other users. Frost sees the internet as offering a new way of having something to say that is inherently more user-driven than earlier media. But this too is problematic, as she makes clear, in that “not only does it lack physical durability, but it also compounds the modern problem of impermanence. Because it provides a way to constantly update information, the Internet is constantly making the information we have obsolete, and the problem of impermanence that Innis associated with modern media reaches new heights with the Internet.”¹³ It seems that history grows less relevant with each passing day.

In unpacking the term “information superhighway,” coined by former U.S. vice president Al Gore, Heather Menzies suggests that the “transmission model” (or space bias) for the internet probably was inevitable, given its origins in the U.S. media and defense industries. “In the absence of a clear and meaningful policy commitment towards a mixed-model approach to communication in the era of instant digital connectivity . . . it also seems clear that in the late 1990s the commercial, transmission model was poised to enclose the internet as an alternative infrastructure, retooling and/or containing it as a niche within the larger commercial sphere, rather like Community Access Cable.”¹⁴ This sentiment is echoed by Edward Comor when he observes that, in spite of their capacity for counterhegemonic information, “these technologies are being developed and implemented to enable capitalist interests to expand their reach and improve efficiencies.”¹⁵ Rupert Murdoch’s 2005 acquisition of the popular social networking site MySpace is a perfect example of how an internet application intended for interpersonal and group communication has become a way of accessing consumer data and using it to target a broad mass of potential consumers more effectively. Consensus seems to be that the internet is rapidly heading down the same path of commercialism and empire building as its media forebears.

My college students, at least some of them, like to consider themselves “post-television” (they say they don’t have time to watch anymore). They also find discussions of advertising influences tiresome, claiming that we, collectively, chose to be surrounded by commercial messages. And they feel that we have the power to stop those messages at any time—if we really wanted to, that is. They accept the fact of having to put up with advertising messages received via newer networked technologies (including cell phones and certain features of the internet, such as social networking and instant messaging, but not e-mail). And they greatly appreciate that now internet users can subscribe to services that will provide news of current events only within preselected categories. The convenience appeal here is to avoid sifting through ever-increasing amounts of information simply to stay informed. Who could blame them for this? And yet the news cliques emerging in this scenario are buttressed by increasingly narrow consumer target groups.

But my students (again, at least some of them) claim that ads are okay if they are for things they actually need and use. And the students want to be directed through the clutter to access these more desirable messages. Could they be right? Will groups defined by increasingly narrow information-seeking behaviors, and refined by commercial interests, become the “nations” of the future? If this is to be the case, perhaps these “nations” will be more cohesive and involve less identity contestation than those that exist today. It is a frightening prospect to my mind, since discussions of identity necessarily involve efforts to communicate across thorny cultural divisions. In an era of globalization, will we actually be losing our ability to communicate across cultures, even within our own national borders?

The Future of the American Media Empire?

Is it the ultimate triumph of advertisers that young people have grown so blasé about commercially motivated messages? As the German philosopher Goethe is often quoted as saying, “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.” But are we all just becoming mediated drones? Or are we witnessing the emergence of a generation possessing a degree of control over media influence not seen previously? If the latter, perhaps it indicates a continuing balance of space and time biases that will keep the U.S. media empire in power for a long time to come. What would Innis say?

While our modern technologies can still be rather heavy (television sets, mainframe computers), their messages are weightless. Electronic and digital messages travel over great distances (even through outer space) in split seconds, so by Innis’s definition these media have a space bias and thus are conducive to empire building. And yet they are held in check by a continual emergence of new user-driven behaviors. This is more the case with the internet than with earlier media, because of its lower barriers to entry for those with access to the technology. Yet the hegemonic process through which new internet applications fall out of favor or are bought out by commercial interests is as regular and predictable as ever. It just moves faster.

Who could dispute that first television and now the internet have been major culprits in building and sustaining cultural empires? And why should we be surprised that this is ongoing? One need only think about that gap between developed nations, where most residents have easy access to the latest media technologies, and developing nations, where many residents lack access even to telephones or radios—or literacy, for that matter. By the time the developing world gains access to a technology, it has already been “colonized” by developed nations with information and established practices. Those developed nations, in turn, have moved on to even newer technologies, so the gap can never be closed.

In my lifetime I have witnessed American hubris. The history books I grew up with gave me every reason to forget that the era of U.S. world power really has been a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon—and that the era of white, European-American hegemony hasn’t existed for much longer in the grand scheme of things. The perspective granted by the lengthy coverage of earlier empires in Empire and Communications is humbling in this regard, since it makes me wonder how long the U.S. empire will endure. If attaining a dynamic interplay between time and space biases is crucial to the success and longevity of civilizations, isn’t this what the United States has accomplished through its commercial media industries in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries? Yet by Innis’s reckoning, the overemphasized space bias will make it relatively short-lived in the end.

1. Empire and Communications was originally published by Oxford University Press in 1950. Edited by Mary Quayle Innis and with an introduction by Marshall McLuhan, it was reissued in 1972 by the University of Toronto Press. An illustrated third edition was published by Press Porcepic in 1986. The fourth and latest edition, which I cite here, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2007.

2. Charles R. Acland, “Histories of Place and Power: Innis in Canadian Cultural Studies,” in Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, ed. Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton (Montreal, 1999), 243–60 (quote at 251).

3. Kevin Dowler, “The Early Innis and the Post-Massey Era in Canadian Culture,” in Acland and Buxton, 345.

4. Jody Berland, “Marginal Notes on Cultural Studies in Canada,” University of Toronto Quarterly 64 (1995): 517.

5. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (New York, 1989); Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).

6. Carey.

7. Ibid.

8. Czitrom, 150.

9. Cecelia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (New York,1992); Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum: Implications for Research,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (summer 1983): 45–55; John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (New York, 1978).

10. Czitrom, 159.

11. Paul Heyer, Harold Innis (Lanham, Md., 2003), 67.

12. Catherine Frost, “How Prometheus Is Bound: Applying the Innis Method of Communications Analysis to the Internet,” Canadian Journal of Communication 28 (2003): 16–17.

13. Ibid., 17, 21–22.

14. Heather Menzies, “The Bias of Space Revisited: The Internet and the Information Highway through Women’s Eyes,” in Acland and Buxton (n. 2 above), 322–38 (quote at 331).

15. Edward Comor, “Harold Innis and the ‘Bias of Communication,’” Information, Communication and Society 4 (2001): 287.

Megan Mullen is associate professor and chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin—Parkside. Her book, Television in the Multichannel Age, was published in 2008.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

Howe knits together a complex tapestry of seemingly unrelated historical events with keen insight and wonderfully lucid prose. His intermittent snapshots of American society between 1815 and 1848 are well done, as are his depictions of American science and literature. Of greater significance, however, are the connections he establishes between evangelical religion, social reform, sectional politics, and economic development as key elements in America’s transformation. His discussion of the Second Great Awakening, with its focus on revival-oriented Protestant preachers like Charles Grandison Finney and Lyman Beecher (the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is extremely well done. Owing to the efforts of Finney, Beecher, and other “New Light” evangelists, the Second Great Awakening became a major force that not only ignited widespread millennial fervor in America but also spawned numerous voluntary associations calling for the reformation of society in preparation for the second coming of the Christ. Among these associations numbered temperance, missionary, Bible distribution, and pacifist groups as well as the most important of all, the abolitionist movement aimed at ridding the country of slavery. What is more, white middle-class women joined these movements and, through their experiences, came to the realization that their rights needed to be legally recognized. Some of Howe’s best writing centers on the rise of the women’s rights movement and its association with abolitionism. Equally interesting is his discussion of how evangelical revival methods influenced politics, resulting most notably in the “political revivalism” that characterized William Henry Harrison’s successful campaign for the presidency in 1840 (p. 573).

Howe’s chapters on Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party, and the socalled “second party system” that emerged during the 1830s are particularly telling. Howe is no admirer of Jackson. Rather than applauding him as a national hero and “man of the people,” he portrays “Old Hickory” as a selfabsorbed white supremacist with “profoundly authoritarian instincts”—definitely “not a man to be crossed” (p. 328). Particularly noteworthy are Howe’s observations on Indian removal, a brutal process that he describes as a form of ethnic cleansing (pp. 423, 810). “The fundamental impulse behind Jacksonian Democracy,” he emphasizes, “was about the extension of white supremacy across the North American continent,” adding that “Indian policy, not banking or the tariff, was the number one issue . . . during the early years of Jackson’s presidency” (pp. 356–57). Jacksonian America was many things, but it was not essentially democratic. To be sure, the franchise expanded during the period, but only for white men. Indians, free blacks, undesirable immigrants, and women were systematically excluded from citizenship, to say nothing of the terrible plight of slaves. An unswerving commitment to America’s “Manifest Destiny” and the protection of slavery accordingly became central tenets of Jacksonian Democracy (p. 524).

Contrasted with his critical view of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party, Howe portrays the Whig Party as a force for innovation and change in antebellum America. If Andrew Jackson and his successors Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk are the villains of his story, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay are its heroes. Indeed, Howe dedicates What Hath God Wrought “to the memory of John Quincy Adams ”! While neither Adams nor Clay succeeded in garnering the degree of public adulation and support that Jackson did, their visionary ideas about American advancement provided a blueprint for transforming rural America into a modern urban-industrial nation.

In Howe’s view, Adams and Clay were “improvers” who resisted Jackson’s expansionist policies, including the expansion of slavery. They opted instead for “public improvement” within the existing states and territories of the United States. Unlike the states’ righter Jackson, Adams and Clay viewed the federal government as the great instrument of improvement that would propel the developing nation into a millennial age of progress and prosperity. Both men supported the Second Bank of the United States, a vast national program of internal improvements, and a tariff aimed at protecting American manufacturers. Clay called his program the “American System” and considered it “the economic basis for social improvement” (p. 570). State involvement in economic development, especially federal planning and support of a national transportation system, was critical to their vision of a new, more modern America.

The contrast Howe establishes between the Jacksonian Democratic Party and the Whig Party is stark. In a particularly revealing paragraph he notes that

Adams [and Clay] stood for a vision of coherent economic progress, of improvement both personal and national, directed by deliberate planning. Instead of pursuing improvement, Jacksonians accepted America the way it was, including the institution of slavery. They looked upon government planners as meddlesome, although they were more than willing to seek government favors on an ad hoc basis. . . . But they too had a vision of the future, and theirs centered not on economic diversification but on opening new lands to white settlement, especially if those lands could be exploited with black labor.(p. 279)

“This imperialist program,” Howe asserts, became “a primary driving force” of the antebellum period (p. 852). It reached its apex when the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846 using the questionable pretext that the Mexican Army had “shed American blood upon . . . American soil” (p. 741). Howe leaves no doubt that the expansionist president James K. Polk, intent on pushing America’s empire to the Pacific, purposely provoked the conflict. The spoils of the war yielded all of California (where gold would soon be discovered) as well as Texas, plus the vast territory of New Mexico, which later formed the states of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah as well as parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.

Near the end of What Hath God Wrought Howe states that “this book tells a story; it does not argue a thesis” (p. 849). Doubtless Howe provides an excellent narrative history of the years between 1815 and 1848, but his contention that the book “does not argue a thesis” is debatable. His depiction of Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian Democracy explicitly challenges what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz have written about the “Age of Jackson.”² Moreover, his rejection of Charles Sellers’s influential “market revolution” thesis flies in the face of much recent scholarship published about the same period.³ Particularly striking for readers of this journal, however, is the prominence Howe assigns to technology. At the outset of What Hath God Wrought, he declares that “I provide an alternative interpretation of the early nineteenth century as a time of a ‘communications revolution.’” He maintains that that revolution “would be a driving force in the history of the era” (p. 5).

According to Howe, America’s communications revolution comprised three major technological innovations introduced after the War of 1812: the advent of steam-powered rotary presses capable of mass producing all sorts of printed materials; the reorganization of the U.S. postal system to one capable of distributing these printed materials over vast distances; and, most awesome of all, the introduction of Samuel Morse’s “lightning” electric telegraph in 1844. All three speeded the flow and geographic reach of information, thus impacting everything from religious revivals and social reform movements to politics, business, and war making. Coupled with the contemporaneous advent of a “transportation revolution” consisting of improved roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads, these technologies played an essential part in shaping modern America (p. 854).

Throughout the text Howe points to the “transforming impact” of these “twin revolutions” (pp. 627, 854). Indeed, he refers to their influence at least sixty times in the text. Given the weight he assigns to the communications and transportation revolutions, one might legitimately ask whether Howe is a technological determinist. At times it appears that he is. Reference has already been made to his statements about the new technologies of the era as a “driving force” that had a “transforming impact” not only on “political, economic, and academic life,” but “literature, the arts, and social reform as well” (p. 627). He quotes approvingly of Frederick Douglass’s observation in 1848 that “thanks to steam navigation and electric wires, a revolution now cannot be confined to the place or the people where it may commence, but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, until it has traversed the globe” (p. 848). Douglass made this comment with reference to the gathering momentum of the antislavery and women’s rights movements of the day. Howe contends that these transformational activities were “no accident.” “ The same technological developments that permitted the formation of the new mass political parties likewise empowered other agencies for influencing public opinion,” he asserts. Indeed, he adds, “the abolitionist movement could not have flourished without the mass production of periodicals, tracts, and inexpensive books (including antislavery books for children), the circulation of petitions to Congress, the ability to gather national conferences, and convenient travel for its agents” (p. 646). These and other activities point to “the importance of the distribution of information to the cause of antislavery” and, of course, other reform movements like temperance and women’s rights (p. 647).

Clearly Howe does flirt with technological determinism. It’s not unusual for historians to fall into the determinist trap. Witness, for example, the deterministic role Alfred Chandler assigns to technology in The Visible Hand, his classic study of the rise of modern management.⁴ This happens because historians tend to “black box” technology rather than carefully assess its complexities, contradictions, and ultimate consequences. Like Chandler, Howe avoids grappling with things technical, accepting them at face value without carefully considering their multifaceted implications. Doing so gives his narrative a deterministic flavor, even though at times he seems to view technology more as a facilitator and/or catalyst of socioeconomic change than an autonomous driving force. One consequently leaves the book with a somewhat muddled understanding of the relationship of technology to sociopolitical change. Such a mixed message weakens the overall effect of what is otherwise a brilliant study.

To his credit, Howe devotes more attention to technological developments after the War of 1812 than do most historians of the period. His treatments of textile manufacturing, canals (notably the Erie Canal), railroads, and telegraphy, though lacking in detail, are adequate to his larger purpose. On the other hand, his discussions of papermaking and metalworking, notably printing and interchangeable manufacturing, gloss over those subjects and leave much critical information wanting. He encapsulates the advent of high-speed printing innovations in just five sentences (p. 227). Given the importance he assigns to printed materials in propelling social reform and reconfiguring politics, he should have devoted more space to the subject. Doing so would have doubtless complicated his contention about the larger benefits of industrialization, but in the end it would have strengthened his overall argument about the transformation of America (pp. 538–39, 541–42, and esp. 849).

The same goes for Howe’s discussion of the advent of interchangeable manufacturing, often referred to as the “American system of manufactures.” ⁵ He points to its early development in the military firearms industry, but he fails to appreciate its larger influence on the development of the American machine-tool industry and the subsequent spread of “armory practice” to other technically related manufacturing activities such as sewing machines and pocket watches in the antebellum period and typewriters, business machines, bicycles, and automobiles after the Civil War. Given the fact that the book closes with an extremely insightful discussion of the women’s rights movement and its connections to the larger evangelical reform impulse of the 1830s and 1840s, his discussion would have benefited by noting that the first domestic product made with armory methods was, ironically, the sewing machine. An opportunity is missed here to enrich and complicate the relationship of technological change to the emergence of social movements, especially the way sewing machines impacted women’s work and the “separate spheres” women were expected to occupy.

Howe’s emphasis on communications and transportation raises a related question about the role of manufacturing in the transformation of America. Although he does not overlook the subject, it definitely occupies a second tier in his exposition. But should it? Sophisticated tooling and machining methods preceded rather than followed the developments in mass communications and transportation that Howe stresses. Indeed, the ability to make steam engines and large rotary printing presses required metalworking methods that originated in the firearms, forge, and textile industries. In the end, Howe’s argument about the centrality of technology in the transformation of America would have been more compelling if he had developed an interactive model of modernization in which communications, transportation, and manufacturing played more equal parts.

That said, What Hath God Wrought is a wonderfully evocative book. In terms of balance, conceptualization, and breadth of vision, it supersedes Arthur Schlesinger’s classic, The Age of Jackson, as well as Charles Sellers’s Market Revolution as the best general synthesis of the period between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Howe deserves high praise for producing such a comprehensive yet eminently readable work. One leaves it convinced that the years between 1815 and 1848 constituted a critical transformational period in American history. It is not a short book, but it does a splendid job of integrating many disparate factors into a coherent explanation of how and why the United States emerged as a modern industrial nation at the very time it was dividing along bitter sectional lines. For anyone who wants to understand the origins of modern America, this is the book to read. It fully deserves the many accolades it has received, including last year’s Pulitzer Prize in history.

1. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. xviii+904, $35).

2. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945), and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York, 2005). For Howe’s critique of Schlesinger and Wilentz, see Daniel A. Yerxa, “An Interview with Daniel Walker Howe,” Historically Speaking, March/April 2008, 31. For specific textual references to his differences with Wilentz, see What Hath God Wrought, 5n5, 239n90, and 856.

3. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1848 (New York, 1991). Also see Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America (Charlottesville,Va., 1996); Scott C. Martin, ed., Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789–1860 (Lanham, Md., 2005). For an incisive review of Howe’s critique of Sellers’s thesis, see Jill Lepore, “How America Came of Age,” The New Yorker, 29 October 2007. For specific textual references to Howe’s differences with Sellers, see What Hath God Wrought, 5n6, 359n86–87, 566, 849–50n32, 852, and 856.

4. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

5. On the “American system of manufactures,” as differentiated from Henry Clay’s “American System,” see David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, 1984), and Merritt Roe Smith, “Army Ordnance and the American System,” in Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, ed. M. R. Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 39–86.

Merritt Roe Smith is a member of the STS and history faculties at MIT. He is currently working on a book about technology during the American Civil War.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

A galley of the Flanders type, from the section on shipbuilding in the Michael of Rhodes manuscript. (Reproduced with the permission of the Dibner Institute, MIT Press, and the anonymous owner of the Michael of Rhodes manuscript.)

A three-volume facsimile edition of this manuscript will appear in 2009, published by MIT Press. The codex, which is more than 400 pages (or 200 folios) long, adds significantly to the small body of writings by nonelite persons from the early fifteenth century. It is of intense interest for other reasons as well. It contains an approximately 180-page (90-folio) treatise on commercial mathematics, and it adds significantly to the small number of medieval books on mathematics that have a Venetian provenance. It also contains the above-mentioned treatise on shipbuilding—the earliest extant treatise on the subject in the world. It contains a remarkable autobiographical service record in which Michael records each of his annual voyages. Further, it includes much calendrical and astrological material, charming illustrations of the signs of the zodiac, illustrations pertaining to shipbuilding (including the image of the fully rigged Flanders galley featured here), and other images, including Michael’s own coat-of-arms with an “M” emblazoned in the center. The colors of this coat-of-arms, gold and silver, also appear on the flag flying on the galley illustrated on the cover. Such a flag was permitted only to noble commanders, just as heraldic coats of-arms were considered the exclusive prerogative of the noble class. Michael’s transgressive individuality is much in evidence here.

Michael’s book was unknown to the world of scholarship before 1966, when the manuscript came up for auction at Sotheby’s of London. A detailed description in the Sotheby’s catalog was accompanied by reproductions of several of the manuscript’s hand-drawn illustrations.³ Scholars knowledgeable about early ships and shipbuilding immediately recognized the codex as the source for a sixteenth-century manuscript on shipbuilding located in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, the contents of which had been published in the nineteenth century.⁴ Michael’s book contained many other riches as well, but sadly, it did not become available for study at that time; rather, it was purchased by a private collector and again disappeared from sight.

The present edition had its beginning in the year 2000 at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. The curator of rare books at the Burndy Library of the Institute, Ben Weiss, noticed that this unique manuscript was again to be auctioned at Sotheby’s. As a fellow at the Institute that year who had worked intensively with the premodern engineering and architectural books in its library, I was asked if the acquisition would be a good one—of course, I said yes. In fact, it would have been an acquisition wonderfully consonant with Bern Dibner’s collection and with his interests in early technological and engineering writings.⁵ The library lost out, however, to a higher bidder. That was seemingly the end of it—this important and unique manuscript was again consigned to oblivion as far as the scholarly world was concerned. Little did I know that the new owner of the manuscript, who prefers to remain anonymous, would write to the Dibner Institute to say that although he owned the manuscript, the Institute was welcome to study it. This act of generosity is the basis of all that followed.

A process began that would never have been possible without the Dibner Institute. A team was formed of three codirectors—myself; historian of technology David McGee, who had recently been appointed director of research at the Burndy Library; and historian of medieval Venice Alan Stahl.⁶ In 2002, the three of us and the supportive administrators of the Institute gathered around the seminar table to discuss the study of the manuscript. We were particularly anxious that there be a facsimile edition, given that it had long been, and was still, privately owned and thus not generally available to scholars. We also decided that we needed a transcrition by an expert paleographer. In addition, we believed that an English translation was essential. And, finally, we believed we should have an additional volume of studies by specialists in each of the areas covered by Michael: medieval commercial mathematics, portolans (i.e., navigational instructions), and shipbuilding. We also needed an art historian to study the many hand-drawn and colored illustrations.

With the help of Google, we created our ideal list of who should be on the team, and we e-mailed most of them to ask if they would be interested in working with us—if, in fact, we could raise the necessary funds to undertake the project. Later, as we got further into the project, we realized that the manuscript contained many calendars and other kinds of time-reckoning material, so we brought in an expert on these.⁷ We also decided we should create a Michael of Rhodes website so that not only could this fascinating manuscript and its author become more widely known to the public, but also so that some of the material in the manuscript, carefully explicated, could be used in educational settings. Each of the scholars we invited to participate in the project immediately consented. The Boston public television station, WGBH, which has a web division, agreed to create the website if we could obtain funding.

The process of applying for grants, which we undertook in 2002, was an exacting one. For these applications, we argued that the creation of a facsimile edition of this unique and complex manuscript would entail much original research, both in studying the various sections and topics of the text and in understanding the ways in which the manuscript was related to other known materials. What actually was in the mathematical treatise, and how did it relate to the substantial manuscript tradition of late medieval commercial mathematics? What could we find out through a study of Michael’s highly cryptic list of his annual voyages, in which he usually listed his own position onboard as well one or two other officers? How did he produce his tract on shipbuilding, and what was its relationship to shipbuilding practice in Venice and to the Venetian arsenal? What about the large amount of material on rigging—ropes, sails, anchors, and the like? How did the charming illustrations relate to contemporary visual images? Who created these images? How could the calendrical material be described? How did the portolans in the manuscript relate to known portolans and to the actual practice of navigation? Who was Michael of Rhodes and why did he write a book? Did he write the book himself, or did a scribe write it? At the start, we knew very little about this manuscript or its author. We faced a daunting task, both in editing and translating a highly technical text and in understanding its contents. Our project became possible when our grant applications were funded—admittedly, much to my surprise.⁸ (I had been convinced that funding for a scholarly edition of a fifteenth-century manuscript, no matter how interesting, would receive low priority.)

With our project funded and team members established, we all set to work. Our collaborative enterprise was made possible by a web portal, set up and then managed by David McGee. This allowed us to view digital images of the manuscript, together with transcriptions and translations of each page, as they were produced by Franco Rossi and Alan Stahl respectively. Team members could insert comments or suggestions on any page. In addition, each of us studied the manuscript for our own essays that were to be published in the third volume of the project. Alan Stahl, the translator, who would also be writing a biographical essay on Michael, took a research trip to Venice to search the archives for evidence about the author’s life. Finally, in 2004, with two years of work behind us and first drafts of our respective essays in hand, we gathered together for the first time at the Dibner Institute. The manuscript itself was brought to the Institute as well so that each of its pages and the book as a whole could be examined in detail.

At this workshop, many of us were meeting for the first time, in addition to viewing the actual manuscript for the first time. As each of us discussed her/his findings, we learned in detail what our colleagues had discovered. All of it turned out to be fascinating. Franco Rossi, the paleographer in charge of the transcription and a codicological study, argued convincingly that the book was an autograph, handwritten by Michael himself, for no professional scribe would have written a book in this way. Moreover, he argued that the manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, which had been attributed to Pietro di Versi, was written in the same hand and thus was also written by Michael; he confirmed this by demonstrating that in the Marciana manuscript, Michael’s name (Michalli da Ruodo) had been scratched out and Pietro’s written over it.

Other revelations followed. The historian of medieval mathematics, Raffaella Franci, explicated the various forms of calculation that Michael had demonstrated, and convincingly argued that Michael had done the calculations himself, that he was a good mathematician, and that he was more interested in mathematical theory than pragmatic commercial mathematics. The art historian Dieter Blume argued that Michael himself had created the images in the book. Blume also explicated the wonderful coat-of arms—usually the prerogative of elite individuals—that Michael had created for himself: an “M” in the center, a turnip on each side, and a mouse eating a cat perched on the top! David McGee and Mauro Bondioli, both experts on ships and shipbuilding, provided detailed explications of the shipbuilding treatise. They addressed the issue of where Michael obtained his information, how it fit into the culture of shipbuilding, and why he might have gathered this material. Piero Falchetta, an expert on Renaissance cartography, reported his discovery that the navigational directions included so many inaccuracies that, if followed, they would bring about shipwreck or loss at sea. There appears to have been no attempt made at correction, even in cases where Michael personally would have known the route. Falchetta’s fascinating report dwelt on why such faulty navigational directions would have been included in the book. Faith Wallis reported on the calendrical material, explaining what it entailed and showing how Michael could be considered to be in the process of mastering various calendrical calculations—sometimes successfully, at other times not. Alan Stahl reported on his findings in the Venetian archive and provided a draft of his biography of Michael, which turns out to be the most extensive biography of any nonelite person of the early fifteenth century, with the exception of a few famous artists. Finally, I reported on my own research for the introductory chapter, including my findings about some of the voyages on which Michael worked, about which (because his brief statements concerning his service included precise details) I was able to discover much from other sources.

Armed with new information, critiques, in-depth discussions, and the careful study of the actual manuscript, we all returned home to continue our work. As planned, we held a public conference in December 2005 to report our findings, to which we invited a number of outside experts to examine the text pages on our working website, review our penultimate drafts, and provide feedback and comments before we completed the work.⁹ This intense two-day conference was immensely helpful, and we revised our work in light of these outside critiques.

All of us who worked on this project agree on one thing: that our work represents the first word about this important codex, but by no means the last. Our belief is that the availability of a facsimile edition—including a transcription and English translation with extensive notes and indexes and a supplemental volume of studies—provides what is needed for extensive further study and use in the world of scholarship, as well as in educational settings. What is eminently clear is that such a complicated task involving an international team of scholars could never have been carried out at all without the support of the granting agencies and, crucially, that of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology—nor could MIT Press have undertaken the publication of such a complicated and costly work without the support of the Institute. Miraculously, or at least at times so it seems, the book of a low-born and brilliant mariner, a book closely held by private collectors for more than 500 years, has finally made its way into the public arena.

1. The second of Michael’s two books is a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice and is published in an edition with one Pietro de Versi named as the author. See Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, ms. Ital., cl. IV, cod. 170 = 5379; and Pietro di Versi, Raxion de’ marineri: Taccuino nautico del XV secolo, ed. Annalisa Conterio (Venice, 1991).

2. The edition includes a facsimile (vol. 1), a transcription and English translation (vol. 2), and a volume of studies (vol. 3): The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, ed. Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). The Michael of Rhodes website is hosted by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, Italy, and can be found at http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/michaelofrhodes/index.html (accessed September 9, 2008).

3. Sotheby’s, London, Catalogue of Important Western and Oriental Manuscripts and Miniatures, 11 July 1966, Lot 254. Auction catalog entry by Andreas Mayer (London, 1966), 89–93.

4. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, ms. Magliabechiano, cl. XIX, cod. 7 (Fabrica di galere, ca. 1510); and August in Jal, “Mémoire no. 5,” in Jal, Archéologie navale (Paris, 1840), 2:1–133.

5. The Dibner Institute closed its doors in 2006. However, the Burndy Library remains intact and is now housed in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

6. David McGee is now manager of library and information systems at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. Alan M. Stahl is curator of numismatics at the Firestone Library at Princeton University and holds a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

7. In addition to the three codirectors, the team included: Dieter Blume, professor of medieval art history at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany; Mauro Bondioli, a leading authority on early Venetian and European shipbuilding; Piero Falchetta, curator of maps and special projects at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice; Raffaella Franci, professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Siena; Franco Rossi, paleographer, vice-director of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, and director of the Archivio di Stato di Treviso; and Faith Wallis, professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University and an authority on medieval chronology, calendars, and medicine.

8. In addition to support from the Dibner Institute, the Burndy Library, and the Dibner Foundation, the project was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Grant no. RZ-50047-03), the National Science Foundation (Grant SES no. 0322627), and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

9. The invited scholars included: Patricia Fortini Brown, John Dotson, Paolo Galluzzi, Matthew Harpster, Alan Hartley, David Jacoby, Brad Loewen, John Jeffries Martin, John Pryor, Dennis Romano, Pamela H. Smith, Peter Spufford, Glen Van Brummelen, Warren Van Egmond, Filipe Vieira de Castro, and Diana Gilliland Wright.

Pamela O. Long’s publications include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001) and (with Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, and Benjamin Weiss) Obelisk: A History (2009). She is coeditor and codirector of the Michael of Rhodes project, and she is also at work on a cultural history of engineering in Rome, 1557–1590.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

These questions are the focus of three books published since 2000, by Seth Shulman, A. Edward Evenson, and Burton Baker. This review will address the degree to which the arguments of these three authors are successful. Because I want to conclude with some broader comments about popularization, I shall also refer to another recent book, by Charlotte Gray.¹

By Way of Background

It may help to begin by mentioning a few significant dates. Starting in 1873, Bell and Gray (along with Thomas Edison and others) independently began developing versions of a “harmonic telegraph” whereby tuned iron reeds, vibrating near electromagnets, induced electrical currents at different audio frequencies into a single wire which then could carry several separate telegraph messages at the same time. The signals were separated at the other end by reed receivers tuned to the same frequencies. This led each of them to conceive of a device with an untuned reed (or diaphragm) receiver that could respond (less efficiently) to all audible frequencies. Bell turned one of his untuned instruments around so that it could also act as a transmitter, and in June 1875 he tried unsuccessfully to transmit and receive intelligible voice signals. On the basis of this experiment he began preparing a patent application that fall; the application mainly concerned improvements in harmonic telegraphy but included a claim for voice transmission by “undulating” currents. A copy of his draft was given to George Brown on 25 January 1876. Brown was about to leave for England, and it was deemed important that he should file for a patent there before an application was made in the United States. Available evidence indicates that Brown’s document, which survives, was identical to a version Bell had notarized on 20 January for submission to the U.S. Patent Office. It contained no reference to a liquid transmitter or to a variable-resistance transmitter.

Gray conceived the essentials of his variable-resistance liquid transmitter in late 1875 and filed for his caveat on 14 February 1876. Bell’s lawyers had been holding Bell’s application, waiting for word that Brown had been successful in Britain. Without receiving any such confirmation, they filed it in the U.S. Patent Office on 14 February. Bell later admitted learning the essence of Gray’s variable-resistance claim on a trip to Washington when he met the patent examiner (an improper communication) on 26 February; an amendment requesting that unrelated items be changed was submitted on 29 February; and the patent was granted 7 March. In this final version it included a clause claiming credit for a variable-resistance transmitter, with specific reference to a device using acidulated water.

Immediately after his return to Boston, Bell began what for him was an unprecedented series of experiments with a metal-water electrical contact, and he achieved successful voice transmission using a liquid transmitter on 10 March. Gray tested versions of his system (liquid transmitter, induction receiver) unsuccessfully in July and successfully later in the year, but his interests were consumed by work related to telegraphy, and especially to the harmonic telegraph. Bell demonstrated a now-successful version of his 1875 induction telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in July—making no mention of the liquid experiment—and in 1877 he launched a company using this design. By 1878 the induction transmitter had been replaced by a variable-resistance device using carbon, based on the inventions of others.

In the numerous lawsuits that followed, the most serious challenges to Bell’s patent were claims that his achievement had been anticipated by various other inventors, including Philipp Reis, Antonio Meucci, Daniel Drawbaugh, and Elisha Gray. None would prevail. Subsequent investigators— among the authors whose books are under review here, Baker is especially effective—have argued that the courts erred and that Bell’s claims should at least have been limited, as they were in other countries.

In and Around Valentine’s Day, 1876

A separate line of attack was pursued in some of the court cases: that Bell had improperly appropriated Gray’s concept of a variable-resistance liquid transmitter. This charge was invariably dismissed, but it has now been raised again by Baker, Evenson, and Shulman—with new and effective arguments.

Why should we care? If the detractors are right, we would have cause to make a judgment about the character of Bell and/or his attorneys—of some significance because of the iconic stature of the Bell name. At an institutional level we would gain insights into the working of the Patent Office. And, if the changes fundamentally affected the nature of the patent, we would conclude that the wrong group of people became rich.

These are all interesting potential conclusions, but historians have generally avoided their pursuit. Part of the reason is that the traditional version, with substantial support from the telephone company (AT&T) and the Bell family, has become imbedded in popular mythology. If they treat it at all, professional historians are much more likely to cite 14 February as a dramatic example of simultaneous invention rather than as a possible instance of collusion.

My own research was conducted in the mid-1960s with the help of Elliot Sivowitch at the Smithsonian and was based on original artifacts and laboratory notebooks. This investigation showed that, whatever the reason Bell began his experiments on a liquid transmitter, he had good reason for abandoning them less than a month after his great success.² My concurrent examination of the various patent drafts and the Bell papers led me to believe (albeit with insufficient evidence to assert) that some level of chicanery had occurred, but that it was not significant enough to affect Bell’s patent claims.

Robert Bruce published his definitive biography of Bell in 1990.³ In his research, Bruce had dug more deeply into court records and Bell correspondence. Failing to find anything approaching a smoking gun (and he wasn’t really looking for one), he let the coincidence story stand. David Hounshell, in these pages in 1975, provided evidence that Gray probably anticipated Bell in conceiving both a liquid transmitter and an induction receiver, though not an induction transmitter.⁴ But Hounshell’s main concern with the events surrounding 14 February was that they reinforced the image of Gray as a traditional professional inventor who was absorbed in his own telegraphic work and failed to see any commercial value in a speaking instrument, and who therefore failed to take timely steps to protect his position.

The amateur historians have seen things differently. Obsessed with the desire to set the record straight, to right an old wrong, and to establish who was really first, a few of them have spent untold hours of research in attempts to unearth some combination of material that will prove that Gray was the good guy and Bell was not. More than seventy years ago, Lloyd Taylor, a physicist at Oberlin College, was stimulated by Gray apparatus stored in his department (after Gray’s death in 1901, half of a substantial collection had been given to the college, the other half to the Smithsonian). Taylor assembled a significant amount of documentary material and wrote an article (published) and a book-length manuscript (unpublished) passionately advancing Gray’s right to be called the inventor of the telephone.⁵ But he added nothing new to help untangle the events surrounding 14 February. Now, in the past few years, three more amateurs—a lawyer, an engineer, and a journalist—have brought their talents to bear and produced strongly persuasive arguments that go a long way toward doing just that.

Burton Baker, the lawyer, has made an exhaustive study of court proceedings and government investigations. His detailed analysis of the events surrounding 14 February provides evidence that Gray’s application arrived at the Patent Office ahead of Bell’s—a matter that should not have been important but became so. His conviction that Bell’s application lacked the variable-resistance clause is based largely on surviving patent drafts and inconsistencies in court testimonies by Bell and others. He concludes that the appropriate changes in the application were made after Bell’s encounter with the examiner on 26 February. Baker finds particularly compelling Bell’s notebook drawing of the 10 March experiment, where the speaker is shown “nose down” above the transmitter in a manner identical to Gray’s caveat drawing (p. 108). Personally, I find this less than startling, especially since on a previous notebook page, where Bell sketched a preliminary version of the liquid transmitter, the speaker is shown talking horizontally into a differently designed mouthpiece. Of greater concern is Baker’s statement that “There is no question of the practicality of his [Gray’s] transmitter” (p. 33). The liquid transmitter was in fact fatally flawed, a matter to which I shall return below. Baker does a major service, however, in arguing that, in the decades that followed, a variety of forces conspired to influence government investigations and the judicial system in ways that supported AT&T’s telephone monopoly, and in reproducing a hundred pages of patent specifications and other documents.

Although A. Edward Evenson’s background is that of an engineer, the strength of his argument lies in his analysis of interpersonal relationships among the principal players in our story, especially within the patent culture in Washington. Much of this apparently was gleaned from court and congressional documents as well as from Bell’s papers at the Library of Congress and Gray’s at the Smithsonian (where surprisingly he did not ask to see the extensive instrument collections for both inventors). Evenson’s picture of a close-knit fraternity of patent lawyers and patent examiners is highly believable—though frustratingly lacking in documentation—as is his analysis of Bell’s frame of mind both during the critical days of 1876 and subsequently when he discusses the events in letters and testimony. Evenson paints the same basic picture as Baker, but in the end he concludes that Bell’s attorneys probably learned of Gray’s plans over the weekend before the caveat was filed (14 February was on a Monday) and took it upon themselves to alter Bell’s application before rushing it over to the Patent Office. This creates certain problems, though not problems that are insurmountable. How are we to explain, for instance, a surviving patent draft that includes the critical items in the margins, apparently in Bell’s handwriting? Evenson’s analysis has the advantage of exonerating Bell from complicity in this initial act, and of giving credibility to his account of being surprised at what he learned from the examiner on 26 February, though very shortly thereafter he would have to have known what had happened. Evenson comes close to admitting that all of this was of little practical consequence, since transmissions over Bell’s liquid transmitter were drowned out by noise at more than a few volts. But he also says that “Gray had invented a workable telephone” (p. 119). In fact, since it suffered from the same problem, it was no more “workable” than Bell’s.

The books by Baker and Evenson, which appeared almost simultaneously, were greeted by a deafening silence from the reviewing media. Not so Seth Shulman’s The Telephone Gambit. As a journalist, Shulman is well aware of the need for publicity, as is his publisher. And he has the kinds of contacts that assist in the process. He also has much more at stake because he specializes in making science understandable to the general public. He had certain advantages over his predecessors: in addition to being able to refer to their works, he had a year’s appointment at the Dibner Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had access to an excellent library and could view from his office those portions of the Bell papers that the Library of Congress had recently made available online. In the course of starting a project comparing Bell and Edison, he was looking at Bell’s notebooks and was struck by the sudden interest in water. Further investigation revealed the “virtually identical” Bell-Gray nose-down drawings, and he concluded that he “might have discovered something that had eluded generations of historians” (pp. 35, 36).

Shulman describes his pursuit of proof that Bell had indeed received critical information from Gray. Most of his time was spent using the facilities of the Dibner Institute, though he did visit Baker in Michigan and went to see the Taylor papers at Oberlin and some telephone instruments at the Science Museum in London. He apparently did not go to Washington to check the Bell collection at the Library of Congress (only a portion has been digitized) or to view the Bell instruments at the Smithsonian or to check out the Gray papers and Gray instruments which many years ago were given to the Smithsonian by Oberlin. Still, in an easy-flowing narrative he argues that Bell was indeed the guilty party and deserves at most only partial credit for inventing the telephone.

Unfortunately, Shulman’s shortcuts in research contributed to some important errors. Four stand out. First, the description of a liquid transmitter on the first page of text does not match the experimental instrument of 10 March, which did not look “something like” the illustration on page 12 (or on the cover). The pictured device was probably constructed for demonstrations in early May and subsequently taken to (but not shown at) the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. This is a common error, and Shulman seems to be victim of a pitfall that he warns against himself (p. 163ff.): popular history is often larded with accounts that creep into the literature and are difficult to dislodge. (The primitive 10 March instrument is depicted in Bell’s notebook on a page reproduced—very poorly—by Shulman on p. 36.) Second, in his analysis Shulman states that the resistance changes as the tip of the needle (attached to a diaphragm) “moves alternately closer [to] and further from a separate metal contact immersed in the cup” (p. 12). Conceptually, this is the way Gray’s instrument worked; for Bell the varying resistance came from changes in the degree of surface contact between the needle and the water. Third, Shulman finds no evidence in the notebook that Bell was dissatisfied with his liquid device, which flies in the face of expressions of frustration (in the notebook) as Bell failed to get consistent results and in seeming desperation within a month turned back to his induction instrument. Fourth, for a popular work, there are a reasonable number of endnote citations, but there are gaps in attributions. For example, Shulman seems to borrow much more from Evenson than is acknowledged, especially regarding activities in and around the Patent Office. Even if he arrived at this information independently, he should have indicated where others anticipated him.

One citation that Shulman can be forgiven for not checking further is a memo in the Library of Congress speculating that, when the Bell collection was in the National Geographic Society archives, Robert Bruce was the only historian who used it “to any great extent” (p. 210). From personal experience I know this to be untrue.

But by far the biggest error that all three authors make is in claiming that the origins of the liquid-transmitter concept are of any consequence in determining who was “the inventor” of the telephone. The device was in fact worthless. Shulman, like Evenson, expresses the view that the “variable transmitter’s signal could be easily amplified” by increasing the voltage (p. 176). This in spite of the fact that in the same paragraph he cites my experiments that show that the liquid transmitter was operating at the edge of practicality. Raising the voltage even slightly increases the amount of gas generated to the point where static drowns out the voice signal—something Bell himself noted. (Something Bell did not note, which may have caused part of his frustration, is that an inadvertent reversing of battery polarity would cause hydrogen to be emitted at the contact point in amounts twice as great as oxygen, so that an experiment that worked marginally well one day might have been a disaster the next.)

In any case, Bell’s claim to the liquid transmitter was disallowed, as was his wider claim to variable resistance. What he was granted by the Patent Office, later upheld by the courts, was a remarkably broad claim to transmission of voice by undulating currents, as well as to the induction forms of transmitter and receiver. One can argue, and numerous other claimants did argue, that these rights were given erroneously. But they were in no way dependent on the liquid-transmitter clause. Indeed, one might contend that Bell, or his lawyers, did his cause a great disservice by slipping this language into his application and jeopardizing the overall patent.

The Problems of Making History Popular

In what has been written thus far I have expressed admiration for contributions to the body of historical evidence that have been made by amateur historians. To this should be added an appreciation for their assistance in spreading the fruits of our professional research to an audience much larger than we generally hope to reach—a process frequently termed “popularization.” Shulman fits into this latter category, but an even better recent example is Charlotte Gray, who has added Bell to her list of Canadian biographical studies. My concern is the degree to which these works ignore or misrepresent established historical information. Gray, for instance, has produced a generally competent, readable book. But when addressing the matter being discussed here, she includes some unconscionable errors. She states, for instance, that Bell’s breakthrough experiment in May 1875 was limited to showing that one tuned reed could respond to another without the benefit of a battery in the circuit. She ignores the much more important discovery that a damped untuned reed could be seen and heard to respond to the currents produced by a tuned reed. (Shulman, incidentally, makes this same mistake.) More surprisingly, she writes that the demonstrations at the Centennial Exhibition were with a liquid transmitter and a tuned-reed telegraph receiver.

Casting technical historical material into a popular form requires more than a fluid style. There are at least three potential challenges to overcome. One is making the technology accurate and clear. Even if an author understands the technical problems, which is frequently not the case, he or she often finds it difficult to translate them into a form that does not impede the flow of the narrative. Second, there is the need for a plot. Not all historical sequences lend themselves easily to being cast into a form that will keep the reader’s attention. One way of getting around this is to make the author’s quest the plot. This is a standard technique, used regularly and effectively in magazines ranging from National Geographic to The New Yorker. And it is used here by Shulman. But there are pitfalls, the most important being that the story is invariably tailored to the excitement of the chase. Compromises inevitably have to be made, and material ignored—all too frequently in ways that distort the conclusions. Third, there is the problem of references. Most popular writers want to provide some evidence that they have conducted significant research, and often they want to suggest additional readings. But there is also a strong impetus not to clutter up the account and not to take the extra time required to include meaningful citations. In the present group of books, Baker has no citations and only a brief bibliography; Evenson has a reasonable number of endnotes (with some gaps, as mentioned above) but no bibliography; Shulman is good at referencing quotations but not general statements, and he imbeds a short list of references among his acknowledgments; Gray has no citations or bibliography, providing instead a list of source readings for each chapter.

Professional historians rightly feel frustrated when popular writers inadequately respond to these challenges—as was apparent in a recent exchange in Technology and Culture between John Larson and Frederic Schwarz.⁶ Mixed in with frustration is a sense of betrayal and lost opportunity. Our own research is not being used effectively to achieve a broader level of public understanding. But the situation is not beyond improvement.

Proposed Guidelines

Responsibility for the failure to incorporate decent scholarship into popular accounts arguably lies with several parties. Authors in search of information may be lazy or in a hurry, or they may just not know where to look. Or they may have difficulty boiling the facts down to a readable account without losing meaning. All too many editors (and publishers, especially those engaged in producing popular works) tend to be lax in checking on authors. And historians, even if they are asked, may decline to assist in the process because the professional rewards are often small. As a means of addressing this pervasive and important problem, I suggest the development of what might be called A Guide to Inclusion of Good History of Technology in Popular Presentations. I do so in the hope that it will encourage others (perhaps a committee of SHOT) to expand on them, refine them, publish them, and promote their use.

Items that might be included are: standard bibliographies and other means of gaining access to recent historical literature; suggestions of ways to handle citations, bibliographies, and source notes, and of how to frame cautionary statements when shortcuts have been taken; examples from the popular literature where seemingly complex technical information has been described clearly and effectively. Exhibits and video (or film) productions have their own special needs and difficulties. There is no reason, however, for the former not to mimic the latter and systematically include display panels of credits and comments. For all media, but especially video and film, the internet is an obvious repository for more extensive information—bibliographies, annotated scripts, authors’ comments—for which separate guidelines could be proposed.

To establish such guidelines is clearly not enough. I suggest that they be endorsed by SHOT, published in accessible locations, and made known to publishers. Actual adoption is more difficult, but can, I believe, be achieved if members of SHOT, when asked to participate in projects as expert advisors or reviewers, require that in return the guidelines be followed. And in printed reviews we would draw attention to the extent to which they had been followed.

My own experience suggests that authors will be pleased to have such guidance. Print publishers, and other media producers, are a more problematic group. But the demands are not great, and there are meaningful rewards, both in simplifying what can be a vexatious internal decision-making process and in reducing unwanted external criticism. The rewards for professional historians will be greatest: guidelines will help to assure that our assistance does not go unheeded, that our own works are more accurately and effectively represented at the popular level, and that both as individuals and as a profession we receive recognition for our contributions.

1. Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008, pp. 256, $24.95); A. Edward Evenson, The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000, pp. 269, $39.95); and Burton Baker, The Gray Matter: The Forgotten Story of the Telephone (Saint Joseph, Mich.: Telepress, 2000, pp. 145, $14.95). Charlotte Gray, Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006, pp. 320, $25).

2. Bernard Finn, “Alexander Graham Bell’s Experiments with the Variable-Resistance Transmitter,” Smithsonian Journal of History 1, no. 4 (winter 1966): 1–16.

3. Robert Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1990).

4. David Hounshell, “Elisha Gray and the Telephone:On the Disadvantages of Being an Expert,” Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 133–61.

5. Lloyd W. Taylor, “The Untold Story of the Telephone,” American Physics Teacher 5 (1937): 243–51.

6. John Larson, “What Are We Doing Wrong?” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 803–7; Frederic Schwarz, “We Should All Be Friends,” Technology and Culture 48 (2007): 407–10.

Bernard Finn is curator emeritus of the electrical collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He is currently a coeditor of the book series Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, which seeks to promote effective use of objects in historical analysis.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology