We return to it for two reasons—intellectual and institutional. The three articles that follow in this theme cluster all break new ground on an issue of longstanding concern to historians of technology: the evolving nature of engineering education. As Rosalind Williams commented at the 2007 SHOT meeting, work in the history of engineering has paid “a lot of attention” to engineering education, in sharp contrast to concerns within the history of science.4 The extensive historical study of engineering education reflects, in part, a broader focus in histories of engineering generally to highlight the normativities of technical practices. Here we are speaking of fine-grained historical work delineating the ways in which engineers have served specific social agendas as they have reworked the material world. The practitioners of this sociotechnical knowledge have carried different names over time and across differing territories. But in all times and places, engineering has entailed technical work to achieve social ends—both stated and hidden. Edwin Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers is still widely read, according to Ronald Kline, because of its “rich and insightful account of the struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies.”5 David Noble’s America by Design is also still widely read, in part because of its argument that engineers in the United States have been a “domesticated breed” who “in reality served only the dominant class in society.”6 Peter Meiksins challenged Layton’s account by calling attention to the role played by “rank-and-file” engineers who sought to enhance their material welfare by “pursuing a ‘middle way’ between patrician reformers and trade unionism.”7 A host of volumes by Angus Buchanan, Kees Gispen, Ronald Kline, Michal McMahon, Terry Reynolds, Bruce Sinclair, and others have documented the contents and challenges of professionalism in engineering.8 Ruth Oldenziel found the professionalization of engineering to be a project that “turned out to be a thoroughly male and middle-class endeavor.”9 Comparing the drawing practices of mid-nineteenth-century British and American engineers, John K. Brown concluded that their “application of plans (and the drawings themselves) came to reflect and reinforce their host cultures.”10 Comparing engineering building practices in early-nineteenth-century France and the United States, Eda Kranakis maintained that “the difference between the engineering cultures of the two countries was a factor” in their differential technological development during the nineteenth century, making France “less dynamic” industrially than the United States.11 Antoine Picon showed how engineers came to supplant architects in eighteenth-century France as “[t]he accuracy of their calculations . . . bec[a]me synonymous with progress.”12 Engineering is never solely about reworking the material world.

In like fashion, histories of engineering education have frequently described how practices of engineering formation (including variable mixes of informal training and formal education) positioned engineers in relation to larger societal projects. Ken Alder’s Engineering the Revolution showed how instruction in a “middle epistemology” to “describe quantitatively the relationship among measurable quantities . . . [in order] to seek a region of optimal gain” both facilitated the developing autonomy of French artillerists and grounded the later revolutionary movement.13 Through several works, Bruce Seely has reported how by the late 1950s U.S. engineering schools seeking to grow “had to develop graduate programs to support fundamental research, and emphasize engineering science” not to serve industry, but “rather to attract federal research funds.”14 Amy Slaton’s recent Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering examines how specific “conceptions of engineering talent and rigor” have supported racial selectivity in U.S. engineering schools, ranging from formal segregation in the 1940s to the denial of “race-based interventions” in the 1990s.15

Among Continental historians of engineering education, Peter Lundgreen turned to “bureaucracy rather . . . than industrialization” to account for contrasts between training “state engineers” in Continental Europe and training “engineers for the private sector of the economy” in Anglo-America.16 The elite status of state engineers in France, stretching back three centuries, has justified a veritable industry of historical work on engineering education.17 More recent Continental work has examined the travels of “models” of formation, the role of key “reference schools,” and, most recently, the distinctive normativities of schools on the European “periphery” in the context of the ongoing debate on concepts such as transnationality, circulation, and appropriation.18

The three articles in this cluster extend this interest in relationships among the contents of engineering education and larger-scale social projects in three different ways. Matthew Wisnioski’s “‘Liberal Education Has Failed’: Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America” hews closely to the link between engineering and technology in a cautionary tale for historians of technology and other would-be liberal educators of engineers. He examines how engineering educators in the 1960s coped with a “broad . . . conceptual breakdown” in the “technological foundations of modernity” by attempting to appropriate critical insights from the humanities and social sciences.19 Ideological debates over the nature and control of technology offered concepts, asserts Wisnioski, that “provided commonality among the countercultural, environmental, civil rights, and antiwar movements” and “challenged engineers’ self-image as creative individuals responsible for technological progress.”20

Wisnioski examines three approaches engineering educators took to wielding liberal education and social theory as tools to reassert that engineering served as a beneficent force in society. One approach to control involved telling students technology had adversely affected civilization and attempting to develop a new applied humanities to produce “expert managers of the public good.”21 Another approach resisted dramatic curricular change by granting social scientists both the resources to develop fundamental theory about technology and society and the curricular responsibility to create “expert policymakers.”22 A third effort involved producing “introspective” engineers who would “draw on” the humanities and social sciences just as they currently drew on mathematics and the basic sciences of chemistry and physics.23 Wisnioski also recounts how historians of technology helped “enhance engineering’s luster” by becoming “embedded participants in engineering culture” who “assimilated the humanities and social sciences to engineers’ sensibilities” as “humanist mediators.”24 Although most of these programs did not last, what did endure was an emergent “ideology of technological change” that preserved “existing managerial relations” by casting technological change as autonomous and accelerating, and by assigning to engineers the responsibility for managing it.25

Wisnioski concludes with a worry that the apparent receptivity of contemporary engineering educators to liberal educators constitutes yet another attempt to essentially co-opt the humanities and social sciences, “this time to redefine who engineers should be in a global economy.”26 Echoing Langdon Winner, Wisnioski cautions that participants in engineering education must replace problem sets with question sets. Those who fail to make this transition risk “acced[ing] to the longevity of feigned innocence” exhibited by too many of their forebearers.27

Ross Bassett’s “Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States” examines how Indian technical elites used strategic international alignments in engineering education as a vehicle for acquiring powerful technologies for the new country—and to advance their own professional aspirations. Following independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru strongly advocated scientific and technological development as a pathway toward unity and international strength. The greatest “national enthusiasm toward technology” focused on atomic power, steel mills, and hydroelectric dams.28 Embracing a report written before independence, Nehru also endorsed the establishment of five advanced technological institutes. The first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was formed in 1951 at Kharagpur with multinational support. But each of the other four institutes, established between 1958 and 1961, aligned to a separate partner: the USSR, West Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Bassett follows how the establishment of electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur provided the broad community of engineers across India with access to advanced IBM computers and to the American educational system. Bassett’s analysis builds on postcolonial studies, rejecting the old metropoleperiphery distinction to see agency in a new light. His narrative shows how Indian technical elites strategically aligned themselves with the United States—even at moments when bilateral relations between the two nations’ political elites had soured—in order to fulfill localized agendas.

This study ably demonstrates how histories of technology can provide revisionist frameworks by viewing historical contingencies and emergences through the lens of technological developments, thus disrupting standard narratives of political, economic, and social history. In this case, the diplomatic history of post-independence India has tended to focus on the twin “bipoles” of India versus Pakistan and the U.S. versus the USSR Bassett shows, however, that even “near the peak of anti-American sentiment in India” in 1972, a faculty committee at IIT Bombay, an institution formally aligned with the USSR, proposed a series of educational reforms “whose overall effect was to bring the curriculum more in line with American engineering-education standards.”29 Strategic alignment differs sharply from the transfer (and presumed reproduction) of educational “models” from one country to another.30 Prior to independence, engineering colleges established by the British had a “circumscribed role” to “prepare Indians to work in subsidiary positions under British rule.”31 But after independence, education in controls engineering was a means for acquiring computers and advancing Indian capabilities in the “regulation of systems.”32 The key points of reference were the aspirations and massive challenges in the new country, not simply a potentially replicable model elsewhere. The first director of IIT Kanpur in 1968 gave a talk in the United States on “The Role of the Professional as an Agent of Political, Economic, and Social Change in Low-Income Countries.”33 And notably, Bassett reports, “mass education did not receive the same priority” at the highest echelons of Indian government as did the IITs.34 The focus was on technical elites. Nehru’s legacy thus includes “low levels of education and persistent poverty” as well as the large-scale science and technology projects so often linked to his name.35

A second contribution of this study, especially for audiences of engineers and others beyond the history of technology, is its account of the role played by graduates of IIT Kanpur in the rise of the information technology industry in India and the United States. The millions of readers of journalist Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century can describe the role played in the industrial development of Bangalore by inexpensive communication across unusually cheap (devalued, really) fiber-optic cable.36 Indeed, Bassett reports that the Indian IT industry is not one that makes sense within Indian boundaries, for “twothirds of its business comes from the United States.”37 But while Friedman’s account sinks into ethnocentric xenophobia about new Indian (and Chinese) threats to the United States,38 Bassett maps the operations of a “transnational elite” that has provided “critical intermediaries between the two societies.”39

In “Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887–1972,” Andrés Valderrama and his five coauthors (Juan Camargo, Idelman Mejía, Antonio Mejía, Ernesto Lleras, and Antonio García) locate technology in the background of an account of the role of engineering education “in defining the evolving identities of engineers in Colombia.”40 In a rare Technology and Culture article on a topic in Latin America, Valderrama et al. describe “interdependence” in the “stabilizations” of both engineers and the country itself.41 Colombian history differed markedly from the pattern of other Latin American nations, such as Argentina, Peru, and Mexico—where economic and political authority centered on the capital and reached out to shape the periphery. The emergence of Colombia is an account of regional competition to define the whole. In regional differences lay contrasting images of progress and contrasting trajectories for the formation of engineers at engineering education institutions.

Like Bassett’s case of Indian technical elites, the Colombian engineers Valderrama et al. follow “partially co-invented” the educational practices they advocated and constructed. The Facultad de Ingeniería, building on the Colegio Militar, looked to France in emphasizing mathematics-intensive instruction “for the development of the country’s infrastructure.”42 Like elite French institutions, it was located in the capital city, Bogotá, whose leaders desired for it the centrality long performed by Paris. In contrast, the Escuela de Minas established a “longstanding position” that engineers “should serve as entrepreneurs and managers in [private] companies.”43 It was located in Medellín, a “commercial and industrial center that dominated the [country’s] most important export product of the time, coffee.”44

The dominant narrative in this account is the reconciliation of these two approaches to engineering education in a country-wide structure that ultimately vested the highest authority in Universidad Nacional—to which Facultad de Ingeniería belonged. After 1945, however, that reconciliation was challenged and displaced by a new regime of progress built on the image of development. This emergent image of progress legitimized the development of private-sector institutions, most especially the Universidad de los Andes. While Bassett’s account of engineering institutions in India emphasizes a disconnect between technological and diplomatic histories, for Valderrama et al., the founding of Universidad de los Andes and realignments in older public institutions signaled a convergence of technological and diplomatic histories around explicit alignment with the United States. Although such alignment met with significant, sometimes fierce, resistance, its success also indicated dominance of the “faith in science and technology as vehicles for development” that was “sought and maintained” by both Colombian and American engineers.45

Valderrama et al.’s account has particular significance for Latin American engineering educators today who are attempting to emulate the regional collaboration under way in Europe under the label “the Bologna process.” A contemporary competition exists, for example, between two distinct strategies for collaboration in engineering education.46 On the one side are organizations that align Latin American engineering education with initiatives in Spain and Portugal (e.g, the Iberoamerican Society of Engineering Education). On the other are organizations that frame engineering education in Latin America as “capacity building” in conjunction with multinational corporations based in the United States (e.g., the Engineering for the Americas project).

Taken together, the three contributors to this cluster advance research in the history of engineering education by investigating new normativities. It is especially notable that these articles also have the potential to speak to audiences beyond the readership of Technology and Culture—beyond the membership of SHOT.

This returns us to Terry Reynolds’s concern that the history of technology has become less relevant to external audiences. Another way to think of this: how well do its topics and methods speak to the needs and goals of the scholars, readers, and “users”—beyond regular history departments—that the field needs to sustain its health over the long haul? Reynolds focused on industrial archaeology. Other neighboring arenas making use of work in the history of technology include museums and graduate programs in museum studies and public history. More relevant in the context of this issue of T&C are engineering schools and the engineering professional societies. Such varied users of the history of technology are vital to the ultimate health of the field. On this count, there is cause for concern.

Fifty years ago, engineering amounted to a parent of the nascent SHOT, not merely a neighbor. The first conversations among the cadre of people who would establish SHOT took place at the 1957 conference of the American Society for Engineering Education at Cornell. On page one of the first issue of Technology and Culture, Mel Kranzberg wrote of his aspirations for the journal—“to bring together the engineer, the scientist, the industrialist, the social scientist, and the humanist.”47 In the early years, non-historians published half the articles in T&C, and “the early bias toward engineering and science was even more pronounced than this evidence suggests,” according to John Staudenmaier’s analysis.48 But by the 1970s, historians penned 72 percent of T&C articles.49 For a society of historians this was clearly good news, evidence that the field had advanced far in its professional aspirations. The methodological frames of the 1970s and 1980s— contextualism, Hughesian systems, and social construction—were further evidence of a confident and advancing field. The articles in this theme cluster are all by historians as well, but historians affiliated with academic institutions dominated by engineering. Surely all this is good news, evidence of real strength. So what is the problem?

All is not well in the history of technology—and for that matter in the engineering profession—at least in Europe and the United States.50 Now, more than ever, the two fields need each other. Like all historical subfields that grew up in and after the 1960s, the history of technology clamored for decades to gain currency among “mainstream” history, only to discover that the center had melted away—if it had ever existed.51 For at least fifteen years, the academic job market for fresh Ph.D.s in the field has been tough, even in the (rare) good years for hiring overall. Increasingly, bad years have become the norm, as American higher education undergoes a broad retrenching. A vibrant, international community comes together for SHOT’s annual conferences, but Reynolds was right. Success as an academic discipline of historians has meant the loss of that ecumenical quality that SHOT’s founders sought, achieved, and maintained for decades.52

Trying to counter that trend, a new SHOT special interest group formed after the Munich meeting. Founded by an author and an editor of the present issue (Bassett and Brown), the Prometheans builds bridges between the history of technology generally (SHOT specifically) and various constituencies in engineering. The group has created paper sessions at SHOT on such topics as “History Informing Practice: Using the History of Technology in Engineering” (Washington, D.C., 2007). Thanks particularly to the dedicated work of Atsushi Akera (another historian in an engineering-dominated institution), the Prometheans also sponsor sessions on engineering history at SHOT’s annual conferences. SHOT’s president and secretary have targeted practicing engineers for special introductory invitations to SHOT meetings. All this is merely a start, a sketch of possibilities. Consider it as well an invitation for further initiatives and collaborations by all SHOT members, historians and engineers.

In recent decades, the engineering profession(s) have also struggled. Their challenges lie in such areas as membership, funding, societal roles, and self-identity. In the past half-century, engineering has splintered further, with new specialties in systems, nuclear, computer science, computer engineering, environmental, and biomedical—to name just the major additions among academic degree programs. Rosalind Williams has described this process as the “expansive disintegration” of engineering.53 These new specialties have made it more difficult for engineers to claim “jurisdication” over technology.54 They have also made it harder for engineers—and the general public—to derive a clear sense of whether engineering plays any social role beyond the twinned determinisms of advancing autonomous technical change and serving the profit motive. As we know from Edwin Layton and David Noble, American engineers always had divided loyalties between their employers and their professional colleagues and institutions.55 Less well known is that during the post-1945 heyday of American manufacturing, the big U.S. corporations played major roles in sustaining and funding the activities of the engineering professional societies.56 In recent decades, those supports eroded as the “American century” ended amid a dramatic international reorganization of industrial production. Engineering design work has shrunken in its scale—whether the field is digital, nano, genetic, or biomedical—even as societal dependence on technology has deepened across much of the world. As its scale shrinks, the nature of engineering work becomes increasingly opaque to young people, making it harder to attract their interest in pursuing engineering careers.

These trends may also help explain why interest in technological history has apparently waned among engineers and engineering educators. At a fascinating lunch discussion at SHOT 2007 on the “role of history within engineering,” many SHOT members chimed in with accounts of persistent disinterest in history by engineering students, engineering educators, and working engineers.57 Many agreed that rapid growth in the engineering sciences during the 1960s “killed interest in history.” Textbooks no longer had historical introductions, and the “few efforts to reintroduce history in the seventies and eighties were utter failures.” Suggestions for reinvigorating historical work within engineering ranged from developing case studies that would be useful in engineering courses to insisting on continuing to “mess up the minds” of engineering students by introducing them to “questions that cannot be answered” and teaching them “to appreciate complexity.”

But presenting recent developments entirely as a tale of troubles distorts the full complexity of the picture and ignores the opportunities of complexity. In 2004, the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES) formed in an effort to dramatically expand scholarly investigations into “knowledge and service,”58 with research built around the following question: “What are the relationships among the technical and the nontechnical dimensions of engineering practices, and how have these relationships evolved over time?” In addition, Network participants acknowledge that “[a]ddressing and providing answers to this question can sometimes involve researchers as critical participants in the practices they study, including, for example, modes of engineering formation.”59 In 2009, INES launched its journal, Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies, with the threefold mission: “(a) to advance research in historical, social, cultural, philosophical, rhetorical, and organizational studies of engineers and engineering; (b) to help build and serve diverse communities of researchers interested in engineering studies; and (c) to facilitate contributions from scholarly work in engineering studies to broader discussions and debates about engineering education, research, practice, policy, and representation.”60 The three articles in this cluster originated at the first INES international workshop, “Locating Engineers: Education, Knowledge, Desire,” held at Virginia Tech in 2006. Six additional articles from that INES Blacksburg workshop have been published in Engineering Studies.61 The editorial staff of the journal includes eleven historians of technology.62

The shifting nature and challenges of modern engineering also offer real opportunities to historians of technology (SHOT members specifically) who are willing to embrace new relationships, new goals, and new kinds of research and writing. Histories for engineers can come in different forms. In the inaugural Morison Prize Lecture in 2000, Thomas Hughes offered “A Usable History for Engineers” focused on “drawing analogies from the past to envision future scenarios.”63 Maintaining that “history tends to repeat itself in broad patterns, if not in details,” he made the case that “the future of the Internet will be analogous to the history of electric power systems.”64 In discussions at the 2007 SHOT conference, David Mindell pointed out in reference to the NASA Apollo project that there are “things we did forty years ago that we can’t do today.” “There really is a role for historians,” he continued, in that good history of technology “belies a notion of linear progress” commonly assumed by engineers and “helps provide a sense of humility.”65 History of technology can help prevent or overcome hubris among engineers.

All the engineering professional societies work hard to develop materials—aimed mostly at high-school students—to explain the nature, creativity, and social worth of engineering work. Short and accessible case studies, drawn from history, could make important contributions to this work. If their authors heed Wisnioski’s concern about appropriation, these cases would also bring critical historical analysis to bear in engineering education and practice, in short “messing with their minds” in ways that can improve students’ working lives in engineering. All engineering degree programs must, under accrediting rules, offer coursework in ethics. Here too, historians of technology have already done the work in primary sources. What remains is drafting cases in applied ethics on diverse topics that could range from the collapse of the Quebec Bridge to the legal and ethical ramifications of engineered organisms.66 The engineering societies struggle with their own self-identity: are they still independent professional societies? Or does their search for revenues drive them to become hybrid trade organizations? Advocates for the first view have often turned to history to show the mutual shaping of society and their engineering discipline.67 SHOT members who see a role for themselves in these activities will likely need to hone their skills in grantsmanship, with proposals aimed at the technical societies or sympathetic foundations like Sloan. But they can also work through the history and heritage committees of the professional societies.68 The engineers who staff these committees may have little interest in historiography, but they embrace history, respect rigorous research and knowledge, and can value an academic perspective.69

In considering engineers as users for the history of technology, the biggest challenge—and the biggest opportunity—lies in the accrediting standards that govern the undergraduate engineering curricula in the United States. For many decades, those rules specified that roughly oneeighth of student coursework be taken in “social-humanistic subjects.”70 Critics denounced the formula as “beancounting,” but this requirement did at least assure that students in every engineering program took courses in such fields as ethics and history. Under this accrediting system, the history of technology had a logical appeal to students, engineering deans and faculty, and historians—whether affiliated with history departments or engineering schools.

Beginning in 2000 the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology revamped almost entirely its approach to accreditation.71 Instead of counting off the courses required of students, ABET’s new EC 2000 standards enumerated a list of specific outcomes in student learning, ranging from the obvious (ability to apply math, science, and engineering) to the innovative (examining engineering in its global and social contexts).72 The methodology—to measure results, not just inputs—is itself innovative, as is ABET’s clear goal that schools integrate its required skills and subjects. The EC 2000 guidelines appear to require wide-ranging roles for educators in the “liberal studies” fields, such as history, ethics, STS, and writing. Of the eleven mandated outcomes, liberal studies (as distinguished from traditional engineering subjects) should play a major role in seven areas and a supporting role in all of them.73

In all, the EC 2000 criteria appear to open up a broad entrée to the liberal studies in engineering education. Given their many ties to engineering, historians of technology seem well positioned among the liberal-studies disciplines to capitalize on this opportunity. But historians of technology must undertake deliberate efforts—as individuals and as a society—to build these bridges while preserving the critical analysis that is central to the humanities, and often in tension with engineering’s normativities. Given those caveats, historians in mainline history departments could find real value in understanding the EC 2000 standards and in seeking out collaborations with their colleagues across campus on engineering faculties. It is one thing for the Accreditation Board to desire certain skills and perspectives. It is an entirely different matter for engineering deans, chairs, and faculty to really understand how they can integrate rigorous humanistic knowledge and critical analysis into their curricula. Historians of technology can help. Offering help may open employment doors for graduate students and novel avenues to disseminate research. It can also make history matter in very real ways.

As an organization, SHOT too can play a key role in building bridges for the field. EC 2000 changed most of the rules in accrediting engineering programs in the United States—except in one key area. Accreditors still represent the separate professional societies. After making site visits and reviewing assessment materials, they accredit individual degree programs, not schools as a whole.74 This process has two unfortunate effects for the liberal studies. First, it means that individual departments often develop ad hoc approaches to achieving outcomes dependent on liberal-studies disciplines, to the detriment of real rigor and thorough integration. More problematic, the accreditors who pass judgment on this degree program in Aerospace Engineering or that program in Civil Engineering are well trained in those disciplines and essentially untrained in understanding or assessing the liberal studies.75 If historians of technology want engineering educators to preserve—let alone expand—a substantive role for the field, then the discipline must take the responsibility of showing those educators how historical knowledge and modes of critical inquiry are essential to the education of capable and insightful engineers.76

As editors of this cluster, we are well aware that this introduction appears to stray from tradition, veering from an overview of the historiography to a consideration of the uses of history. But questions of use and audience are—or should be—essential matters for all historians. Anyone who teaches history of technology deals with this duality all the time. Engineering educators pride themselves on viewing their fields as forwardlooking. But as shown in the articles that follow, history always influences engineering formation and its evolving incarnations and concerns.

1 Terry S. Reynolds, “On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 523–30.

2 Ibid., 523.

3 Ibid., 525.

4 Quoted from Gary Downey’s “SHOT 2007 notes” file, typed during the meeting.

5 Ronald R. Kline, “From Progressivism to Engineering Studies: Edwin T. Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers,” Technology and Culture 49 (October 2008): 1019–20.

6 David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977), 323 and 324.

7 Peter Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” Technology and Culture 29 (April 1988): 238.

8 R. A. Buchanan, The Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London, 1989); Kees Gispen, New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815–1914 (Cambridge, 1989); Ronald Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, 1992); A. Michal McMahon, The Making of a Profession: A Century of Electrical Engineering in America (New York, 1984); Terry S. Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress: A History of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, 1908–1983 (New York, 1983); and Bruce Sinclair and J. P. Hull, A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880–1980 (Toronto, 1980). There are a significant number of European national studies on this topic written in local languages.

9 Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America 1870–1945 (Amsterdam, 1999), 168.

10 John K. Brown, “Design Plans, Working Drawing, National Styles: Engineering Practice in Great Britain and the United States, 1775–1945,” Technology and Culture 41 (April 2000): 196.

11 Eda Kranakis, Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-Century France and America (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 304.

12 Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1992), 10. While one can find normativities in Walter Vincenti’s historical case studies, his explicit interests were philosophical and focused on epistemology. See Peter Meiksins and Chris Smith, Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective (London, 1996), and Walter G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore, 1990).

13 Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), 60.

14 Bruce E. Seely, “The Other Re-Engineering of Engineering Education, 1900–1965,” Journal of Engineering Education 88 (July 1999): 291.

15 Amy Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), conclusion, p. 5.

16 Peter Lundgreen, “Engineering Education in Europe and the U.S.A., 1750–1930: The Rise to Dominance of School Culture and the Engineering Profession,” Annals of Science 47 (1990): 33.

17 Some key entry points include Bruno Belhoste, La Formation d’une technocratie: L’École Polytechnique et ses élèves de la Révolution au Second Empire (Paris, 2003); André Grelon, ed., Les Ingénieurs de la crise: Titre et profession entre les deux guerres (Paris, 1986); and Antoine Picon, L’invention de l’ingenieur moderne: L’École des ponts et chaussées, 1747–1851 (Paris, 1992).

18 See Ana Cardoso de Matos, Maria Paula Diogo, Irena Gouzévich, and André Grelon, eds., Les Enjeux identitaires des ingénieurs: Entre la formation et l’action (Lisbon, 2009), and André Grelon, Anousheh Karvar, and Irina Gouzévich, La Formation des ingénieurs en perspective: Modèles de références et réseaux de médiation, XVIIIème–XXème siècles (Rennes, 2004). Another useful entry point is Melvin Kranzberg, ed., Technological Education—Technological Style (San Francisco, 1986).

19 Matthew Wisnioski, “‘Liberal Education Has Failed’: Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 757.

20 Ibid., 758 and 756.

21 Ibid., 777.

22 Ibid., 772.

23 Ibid., 777 and 773.

24 Ibid., 755 and 763.

25 Ibid., 777 and 778.

26 Ibid., 779.

27 Ibid., 781.

28 Ross Bassett, “Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 798.

29 Ibid.

30 For discussion of the dangers of positing transferable “models” in engineering education, see Gary Lee Downey, “Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress,” History and Technology 22, no. 3 (2007): 293.

31 Bassett, 786.

32 Ibid., 791.

33 Ibid., 794.

34 Ibid., 809.

35 Ibid.

36 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005).

37 Bassett (n. 28 above), 809.

38 See also Thomas L. Friedman, “It’s a Flat World, after All,” New York Times Magazine, 3 April 2005, available online at (accessed 27 April 2008).

39 Bassett, 786 and 808.

40 Andrés Valderrama et al., “Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887–1972,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 811.

41 Ibid., 837.

42 Ibid., 829.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 837.

45 Ibid., 835 and 836.

46 For an overview, see Juan C. Lucena et al., “Competencies Beyond Countries: The Re-Organization of Engineering Education in the United States, Europe, and Latin America,” Journal of Engineering Education 97, no. 4 (2008): 433–47.

47 Melvin Kranzberg, “At the Start,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 1–10. For more on SHOT’s early ties to ASEE, see Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.

48 John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 3.

49 Ibid., 4.

50 Rosalind Williams, another SHOT president with deep expertise at the intersection of engineering and technological history, has raised similar concerns in an insightful account of the challenges that grew to confront orthodoxies in engineering and in the history of technology over the past four decades. Her essay “All That Is Solid Melts into Air” also details the widening gap that has come to separate those fields (Technology and Culture 41 [October 2000]: 641–68).

51 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: “The Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), chaps. 15–16.

52 As Wisnioski (n. 19 above, p. 780 n92) says: “STS, history of science, and technology programs still pursue liberal learning for engineers, but often at cross-purposes with their own academization. For a survey, see Stephen H. Cutcliffe, ‘The STS Curriculum: What Have We Learned in Twenty Years?’ Science, Technology, and Human Values 15, no. 3 (1990): 360–72.”

53 Rosalind H. Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

54 Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988); Gary Lee Downey, “Are Engineers Losing Control of Technology? From ‘Problem Solving’ to ‘Problem Definition and Solution’ in Engineering Education,” Chemical Engineering Research and Design 83, no. A8 (2005): 584; André Grelon, “French Engineers: Between Unity and Heterogeneity,” History of Technology 27 (2006): 107.

55 See Kline, “From Progressivism to Engineering Studies” (n. 5 above) and Noble (n. 6 above).

56 Corporations often looked to engineering groups like the Society for Automotive Engineers to resolve technical matters and set industry-wide standards. Major corporations like General Motors or General Electric also subsidized the engineering professional societies by paying the membership dues of their employees and compensating them for time spent on society business—such as attending the annual meeting. These two practices are rare today.

57 Quoted from Downey, “SHOT 2007 notes” (n. 4 above).

58 Gary Lee Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies For? Dominant Practices and Scalable Scholarship,” Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 58.

59 See (accessed 12 August 2009).

60 See (accessed 12 August 2009).

61 Konstantinos Chatzis, “Coping with the Second Industrial Revolution: Fragmentation of the French Engineering Education System, 1870s to the Present,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 79–99; Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies For?”; Vivian Lagesen and Knut Sørensen, “Walking the Line? The Enactment of the Social/Technical Binary in Software Engineering,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 129–49; Juan Lucena, “Imagining Nation, Envisioning Progress: Emperor, Agricultural Elites, and Imperial Ministers in Search of Engineers in 19th Century Brazil,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 3 (2009, forthcoming); Lisa McLoughlin, “Success, Recruitment, and Retention of Academically Elite Women Students without STEM Backgrounds in U.S. Undergraduate Engineering Education,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 151–68; and Carroll Seron and Susan S. Silbey, “The Dialectic between Expert Knowledge and Professional Discretion: Accreditation, Social Control, and the Limits of Instrumental Logic,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 101–27.

62 Atsushi Akera, Maria Paula Diogo, Ann Johnson, Scott Knowles, Ronald Kline, Eda Kranakis, Antoine Picon, Bruce Seely, Amy Slaton, Rosalind Williams, and Matthew Wisnioski.

63 Thomas P. Hughes, “A Usable History for Engineers: The First Morison Prize Lecture,” in Working Papers, Program in Science, Technology, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 3. Thanks to Matt Wisnioski for calling this lecture to our attention.

64 Ibid., 2 and 3.

65 Gary Downey, “SHOT 2007 notes” (n. 4 above), 2.

66 Longtime SHOT stalwart Eugene Ferguson showed one model for this kind of writing in “How Engineers Lose Touch,” American Heritage of Invention and Technology 8 (winter 1993): 16–24—an article widely assigned in engineering design coursework. Two fine sources that explore the ethics of design failure are: Eda Kranakis, “Fixing the Blame: Organizational Culture and the Quebec Bridge Collapse,” Technology and Culture 45 (July 2004): 487–518, and William D. Middleton, The Bridge at Quebec (Bloomington, 2001). For some of the ethical challenges of modern bioengineering, see Michael Bess, “Icarus 2.0: A Historian’s Perspective on Human Biological Enhancement,” Technology and Culture 49 (January 2008): 114–26. Some of these fine studies can work well in the engineering classroom, but others would need reworking to condense historical detail while bringing hard analytic questions to the fore. John Staudenmaier has done this work in his textbook for the University of Detroit Mercy, The Politics and Ethics of Engineering (1998), funded by the Greenfield Coalition for New Manufacturing Education, National Science Foundation, E.E.C. 9630951.

67 McMahon (n. 8 above); Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress (n. 8 above); Sinclair and Hull (n. 8 above).

68 Among U.S.-based organizations, IEEE has the most active role in sponsoring historical awareness and publications through its History Center. But ASCE, ASME, AIAA, and most other engineering societies also see value in history-related activities that mix celebration, public relations, historical awareness, and professional consciousness.

69 These remarks are based on Jack Brown’s service (2000–present) on the History and Heritage Committee of ASME, where he has served alongside another SHOT member, Robert Friedel. The distinguished and prolific engineer/historian Henry Petroski chairs the ASCE’s History and Heritage Committee. Among their many activities, these committees often have a celebratory mission that is alien to academic history, but they also seek legitimacy as sponsors of historical awareness.

70 Dan H. Pletta, The Engineering Profession: Its Heritage and Its Emerging Public Purpose (Lanham, Md., 1984), 127.

71 For a history and overview of ABET, see (accessed 4 June 2009).

72 The criteria can be found at (accessed 4 June 2009).

73 The eleven outcomes are: (A) Ability to apply knowledge of math, science, and engineering; (B) Ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data; (C) Ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs; (D) Ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams; (E) Ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems; (F) An understanding of professional and ethical responsibility; (G) Ability to communicate effectively; (H) The broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context (“economic and environmental” added in 2004); (I) Recognition of the need for, and an ability to, engage in life-long learning; (J) Knowledge of contemporary issues; (K) Ability to use the skills, techniques, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice. The seven areas in which liberal studies are essential are outcomes D through J.

74 A given engineering school undergoes a full assessment and (re)accrediting process once every six years. The professional societies—such as IEEE and ASME—train the accreditors, as ABET itself is a small organization with limited resources. Then the accreditors in turn conduct their campus visit as a team, although each degree program is reviewed separately (albeit concurrently) and accredited individually.

75 ABET has an interest in gauging the effectiveness of its EC 2000 approach, andit commissioned a study that showed overall improvements in student learning. See http://www.ed.psu.edu/educ/ec2000 (accessed 4 June 2009). Liberal studies educators, however, who met at a 2002 conference on EC 2000 at the University of Virginia (funded by the National Science Foundation) had a more nuanced view of the problems and opportunities for liberal studies in the new accrediting system. See (accessed 4 June 2009).

76 One specific proposal: SHOT, in company with other societies including the Liberal Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education, could offer a summer institute to train accreditors to recognize best practices in the uses of history in engineering education.

John K. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. Gary Lee Downey is alumni distinguished professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. Maria Paula Diogo is associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Science and Technology at New University of Lisbon, Portugal.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

—Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine

The young man in this photograph, right hand calmly resting on a traumatically bent and twisted keyed shaft, exudes a comfortable confidence that, bad as it looks, this humpty dumpty is family and will be put back together again. Machinery in its infancy, like an errant child, needed the steady and loving guidance of a parent. And we were a mechanically enamored people. As John Steinbeck observed in 1945: “Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars.”

On a factual basis, not much is really known about the photograph. I found it between the pages of my grandfather’s notebook a year after his death. Nobody recalled ever seeing it. For forty-two years he was the superintendent of the city light company in my hometown of Centralia, Washington, so his interest in power-generating machinery was natural. I have shown the eight-by-ten glossy photograph to dozens of knowledgeable friends, and the best guess that has emerged is that the scene is a water turbine whose governor failed, allowing it to over-rev, to the splendid departure of parts.

An equally if not more interesting question is why we are no longer drawn to be photographed next to the disastrous failures of man-made structures. The past century is littered with pictures of entire families next to derailed steam locomotives, exploded farm tractor boilers, fallen railroad trestles, and beached ocean vessels. Coded within the silver nitrate lie volumes about humankind’s changing relationship with technology. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, unlike other media the photograph isolates a single moment in time. We have the benefit—and the challenge—of studying that moment at a later date.

Putting the harder cultural question to those knowledgeable friends produced even more guarded speculation: You can see it on TV in real time, why drive? Everything is so dependable now that when man-made structures do fail the tragedy overshadows any desire to be associated with it. Who cares? Throw it away and get another. In today’s “me” world, who wants to be associated with failure? Hey, the machines don’t need our help, they can self-diagnose, like a new car with its onboard computer.

Such guesses hint at the disconnect, but they fail to satisfy. My own conclusion is that the machine has grown up. It is no longer the cute baby we love and marvel at, whose transgressions we forgive because of its infinitely bright future. It is an adult child we don’t fully understand, a paradox. Raised in a liberal household, it grew into a conservative whose failures disappoint or even frighten. And for many, it’s simple and sad. As B. B. King sings, the thrill is gone.

Tom Hull teaches manufacturing at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

I said yes (surely confusing him more), just as he eats food for energy, the train “eats” coal. He still seemed puzzled, so I tried a line from one of his books, “The tender carries the coal that burns in the firebox.” With that, he gave up on me and returned to the sounds of a train whistle.

While there are important differences between digestion and combustion, they do indeed both represent the transformation of energy from one form into another. Chemical to kinetic to heat and so on and on—these transformations constrain and enable everything from plate tectonics to photosynthesis to the material development of human societies (and, of course, locomotives). But is it correct to state, as did the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892, that “In the last analysis everything that happens is nothing but changes in energy?”1 Can energy serve as the fundamental common denominator for understanding the universe, from the galactic scale to the cellular and the natural to the social?

Such a comprehensive analysis forms the basis for Vaclav Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society, a complete revision of his General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization, published by Wiley in 1991.2 While the new book is not a work of history, it is informed by Smil’s knowledge of the past. Smil is not himself a historian, but a scholar reaching across disciplines to understand the role of energy in the physical and human worlds, past, present, and future.

Others before Smil have developed holistic studies of energy in natural and social contexts, and their works have proved provocative but also deeply flawed. In the early 1890s, for example, Ostwald constructed an elaborate and controversial theory of “General Energetics” to embrace not only the unification of natural phenomena, but human consciousness, eugenics, and pacifism.3 In the 1970s, the ecologist Howard Odum became the most prominent advocate of a kind of energy determinism in which “energy is the source and control of all things, all value, and all the actions of human beings and nature.”4 Neither Ostwald nor Odum saw their energetic views widely accepted. There is simply too much history—human, natural, and planetary—inexplicable in energetic terms alone.

Unlike Ostwald and Odum, Smil constructs a more plausible analysis by making energy central without being determinative. Smil is unequivocal that the world, natural or social, historical or contemporary, cannot be reduced merely to energy considerations. He justifies focusing on energy as a unit of analysis because “everything in the observable universe can be seen, analyzed, and explained in energy terms.” Tempering this universality, “even such a fundamental entity as energy . . . cannot be an adequate surrogate for valuing space, time, qualitative attributes of materials, biodiversity, mental labor, ideas, social order, cultural riches, and morality” (pp. 366, 345–46). Smil’s work, then, may be read as a demonstration of both the ubiquity of energy and its limits as a conceptual tool for understanding the world.

The chapters of Energy in Nature and Society progress from cosmic to human scales and, as in previous works, Smil makes good on his promise of interdisciplinarity.5 After introducing his (extensive) terminology and providing a potted history of the concept of energy in chapter 1 (in its simplicity one of the weakest in the book), Smil turns in chapter 2 to describing the energetics of planet Earth—its solar fluxes, internal heat, and the geophysical processes powered by these energy flows. Chapters 3 through 5 present energy in living organisms, first in plants (photosynthesis and the ecologies it creates), then animals (metabolism and the forms of life biological energy systems make possible), and finally humans (metabolism and the energy costs of basic activities). Chapters 6 through 9 explore energy in human societies. Smil traces human history through traditional food production; the preindustrial prime movers of muscle, wind, water, and phytomass power and the technologies they made possible; and lastly, fossil-fueled civilization. The final chapters, 10 through 13, present the consequences and challenges of contemporary energy consumption.

At the factual level, the book is impressive. Open nearly any page and discover gems: as a consequence of improved nutrition, the average height of eleven-year-old Japanese boys has increased almost twenty centimeters during the twentieth century (p. 126). Running barefoot consumes 4 percent less energy than with footwear while also preventing some ankle and lower leg injuries (p. 139). The Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 does not rank even in the top thirty largest oil spills since the 1960s (the largest was nearly eight times larger), but the larger spills were located either outside the United States or in deep water (p. 323). Taken individually, this material is little more than trivia; in the framework of the book as a whole, it points to the omnipresence of energy as both a constraint and an enabler for natural and social phenomena.
The book has its limitations, however. Readers familiar with Smil’s previous works may be disappointed at times (as I was) by the recycling of examples, charts, and illustrations. New material and new citations are there, but the book also absorbs what has already appeared elsewhere.

At times, the onslaught of facts and data prevents Smil from rendering a clear judgment. Take his account of coal in the twentieth century. He begins by noting the extraordinary increase in global coal production between 1900 (800 megatons of hard coals and lignites) and the year of peak production, 1989 (4.9 gigatons), a more than fourfold increase. New machines like walking draglines and new modes of production like longwall mining increased productivity while dramatically decreasing the required labor. At the same time, with the rise of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, coal’s share of the global energy mix decreased from about 95 percent in 1900 to a low of 23 percent a century later (pp. 217–21). Yet if we are to draw any conclusions from “coal’s absolute rise and relative decline,” Smil does not tell us. What factors shaped the introduction of new mining technologies? What was the connection between governments, corporations, and labor in this process? Even more basically, did coal become more or less important between 1900 and 2000? These may not be the right questions, but, if not, we are not told what we should ask instead. While coal has decreased its relative share of the energy mix, this seems to me a far less significant fact than its absolute increase. Americans alone today burn more than twice the coal they did in 1950, with all the labor and environmental problems this consumption entails, but with much less awareness of the fact.

Historians of technology may be particularly troubled as well by the relative absence of social, political, or economic context for much of the history covered in the book. In this regard, the historical portions of Energy in Nature and Society remain more a classic history of machines. For example, Smil describes various waterwheels and windmills from antiquity through the nineteenth century with about six pages on their design, efficiencies, geographic diffusion, power they produced, and marvelous illustrations from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, but the closest we come to how they were used and why is Smil’s observation that “both kinds of machines eventually assumed important roles in the economic life of preindustrial Europe, which helped to energize the beginnings of industrialization” (p. 180). This focus on machines helps explain the bibliographic absence of important historians of energy-related topics who adopt more social, cultural, and political approaches, and why “Standard Oil” and “United Mine Workers” do not appear in the index.6

Nevertheless, this is a valuable book that I anticipate referencing often. Smil has not written a work of history, or of thermodynamics, or even a blueprint for dealing with the vexing social and technological problems of energy use in the twenty-first century. He has produced more of a work of philosophy, a way of contemplating the interconnectedness of the world. Our future choices about energy use are constrained by the choices of the past, which were themselves constrained by physical law. Within those constraints lie enormous ranges of action. In our choices, we will be wise to profit from Smil’s erudition.

1. Wilhelm Ostwald, “Studies in Energetics: II. Fundamentals of General Energetics,” trans. R. Bruce Lindsay, in Applications of Energy: Nineteenth Century, ed. R. Bruce Lindsay (Stroudsburg, Pa., 1976), 339.

2. Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, pp. xi+480, $32).

3. After all, once Ostwald adopted his “energetic imperative”—“Do not waste energy, but convert it into a more useful form”—war appeared as a terrible “waste of energy.” Niles R. Holt, “A Note on Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energism,” Isis 61 (1970): 386–89; R. J. Deltete, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energetics 1: Origins and Motivations,” Foundations of Chemistry 9 (2007): 3–56.

4. Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature (New York, 1976), 1–2.

5. For Smil’s other works, see for example Energy in World History (Boulder, Colo., 1994), Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), and Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

6. For examples of recent works in energy history, see David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990), Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), Allison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, 2000), and James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, 1997). Williams, in fact, made a similar point in his review of Smil’s Energy in World History for Technology and Culture (July 1995, pp. 690–92).

Dr. Shulman is an assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, where he is working on a book about energy and U.S. foreign relations in the nineteeenth and early twentieth centuries.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

“The Relativity of History” appeared in the Political Science Quarterly for June 1933, the same year that Charles Beard delivered his presidential address to the American Historical Association, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” and not long after Carl Becker’s equally iconoclastic presidential address, “Every Man His Own Historian.”1 Beard and Becker were among the preeminent historians of their time, Charles Cole a twenty-seven-year-old assistant professor at Columbia, but no less committed to the emerging school of interpretation called historical relativism. The times they were a-changin’. In 1935 Cole would move on to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where the students who answered roll on his first day in class included a youngster named Melvin Kranzberg. He saw at once that Mel was a prize. Their relationship would evolve from teacher and pupil into friends and colleagues. Mel would be Cole’s assistant at a wartime agency in Washington and would then join his faculty when Cole became Amherst’s president after the war. They would remain close even as Cole became vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, then ambassador to Chile. In later years Mel would thank Cole many times over for having opened so many doors, for taking “so large a role in shaping my destiny.”2

After Mel, Cole may have influenced nobody else quite so directly, though his vivid exemplification of chance and contingency would endure. More than a half-century later, Peter Novick would take note of his article in the context of “a more general breakdown of agreement on the meaning of the past” that was occurring in the 1930s.3 The larger question concerned the possibility of recounting “the past as it actually was, somewhat as the engineer describes a single machine.” This was the twist that Beard put on Leopold von Ranke’s storied remark about “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” and many historians would have agreed with him that it was simply not possible. Others, still a majority, remained committed to the “noble dream” of objectivity. About the conditional element in history, however, there would have been more accord. Historians would cite “providence” and write of events being “fated,” and yet there was so much evidence for the pervasive role of happenstance. What follows is a case in point.

That Charles Cole and Mel Kranzberg both showed up at Amherst, Cole a protégé of Columbia’s immensely learned Carlton J. H. Hayes and Mel the son of an immigrant merchant in Saint Louis—that would have entailed deliberative choices. But both of them at the same time? That was a matter of chance, as was Cole’s decision to do more than usual with the Industrial Revolution in his Economics I course because he could now assign a provocative new book by Lewis Mumford titled Technics and Civilization. And for many years afterward very little of Mel’s life story would seem to have been fated, and certainly not his decision to foster an organization called the Society for the History of Technology.

Today, fifty years after its founding, we see SHOT as the cornerstone of Mel’s legacy, a matter of invention and enterprise: first, putting a new discipline in academic cloaks (invention) and, second, securing its institutional foundations (enterprise). Had he not done this, would there still be a collaborative effort among scholars concerned with technology in historic perspective? Probably there would, although it seems unlikely that the intellectual ambience would be the same, nor the institutional configuration, with SHOT and with another slightly younger society fulfilling a somewhat different role, ICOHTEC.4 Here, I have no intention of trying to address a riddle basic to any and all historical inquiry, inevitability, nor to argue for Mel’s indispensability to this collaborative effort. I have only a modest aim: to set forth the evidence that he might have lived quite a different life, never to have become the inventor and entrepreneur whose results are epitomized in this journal.

Mel’s papers, archived by the Smithsonian Institution, indicate that he might well have gone on to finish his career as he began it under the tutelage of Charles Cole, in a history department somewhere, as a European political and social historian interested especially in nineteenth-century France—never to retool, never to begin pondering the relationship of technology and culture, never to set forth what is after all quite an elegant insight: Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.

This essay considers Mel’s career as a study in contingency, a word that resonates in our literature and that the Random House Dictionary defines as “dependence on chance or on the fulfillment of a condition; uncertainty; fortuitousness.”5 Back when he was a modern European historian, Mel edited an anthology about the insurrections of 1848. He began the introduction by quoting George Trevelyan’s remark about 1848 being “the turning point at which history failed to turn.” To use the expression “turning point” is to imply that events can be fated, but to say that events failed to turn as expected is to admit the role of contingency, the element of chance—“randomness,” to borrow from the title of a best-seller by physicist Leonard Mlodinow.6

Mel Kranzberg was born in November 1917 and died in December 1995. Episodes from his life story were already in print by then, notably his “Informal Personal Reminiscences,” published in History of Technology on the occasion of ICOHTEC’s silver anniversary in 1994, and an interview published in Invention and Technology a few years earlier when he retired from teaching. Other parts were recounted by old friends after he died, often with due attention to contingency, as when Carroll Pursell told how Mel put together the graduate program at Case Institute by interlacing disciplines, like “a very modern artist” might create something “out of found objects.”7 But much of his odyssey has remained buried in the Kranzberg Papers.

When one reads in Mel’s correspondence, what’s obvious is that he did not start out sixty or seventy years ago to be an academic historian of technology; nobody did that. He did, however, start out in an extraordinary way, at least for a Jewish kid from Saint Louis whose father owned a firm that bought and sold glass bottles.8 There was Amherst College, then as now ranked as one of the nation’s best, and there was Charles Cole, who influenced him in many ways, but perhaps most fatefully by imparting to Mel his trust in Carl Becker’s observations about every generation writing its own history and every man being his own historian.9 Mel was an exceptional student, as is evident from the dozens of blue-book exams he saved and from undergraduate essays of rare maturity, all duly archived with his papers.10 These enabled him to go from Amherst right into one of the world’s most distinguished graduate programs in history.

At Amherst, he had studied economics as much as history, and it would have perhaps been more likely for him to pursue economics at Harvard.11 But instead he would concentrate—at Cole’s insistence, or at least his urging—on modern European history and particularly France since 1789. His “master” (the Harvard expression) was Cole’s good friend Donald Cope McKay.12 McKay was also master to David Pinkney, who would play an essential role in establishing the Society for French Historical Studies in the 1950s and then in 1980 deliver an AHA presidential address, “American Historians of the European Past,” that will bear analysis presently. In scholarly realms, McKay was best known for his 1933 book The National Workshops: A Study in the French Revolution of 1848, and 1848 was a subject to which Mel later turned his own attention with his contribution to D. C. Heath’s widely assigned Problems in European Civilization series.13

Mel’s other advisors included the Americanist Oscar Handlin (only two years older), the émigré Russian historian Michael Karpovich, and two modern-Europe scholars later to be presidents of the AHA. There was Sidney Bradshaw Fay, whose Origins of the World War (1928, 1930) became one of the chief origins of the term “revisionism” that was so closely linked to Becker’s remark about every generation writing its own history. And there was Crane Brinton, who published his classic The Anatomy of Revolution just before Mel came to Harvard and who seems to have influenced him in part by showing how it was possible to combine “profound conservatism with sharp criticism of traditional epistemology.”14

Among Mel’s graduate-school cohort were Pinkney and several others who achieved eminence as European historians, including Carl Schorske and H. Stuart Hughes. Hughes was likewise at Amherst when Mel was there, and—even though the two of them were much different in background and style—they would find cause to be engaged with one another for a long time.15 That cohort also included Henry Guerlac, who would wear the black hat in a tale that Mel enjoyed telling in his later years—namely, that the new discipline, history of technology, was formed in a stunned response to Guerlac’s assertion that so-called “tinkers” were simply not worthy of serious attention. “Thinkers” of the sort who concerned the mandarins of the History of Science Society are all that matter in retrospect because they provided the “shoulders” on which lesser men would stand.16

Kranzberg and Guerlac received their degrees one year apart, in 1942 and 1941, though Mel was six years younger, only twenty-five. Then as now that would help affirm him as the whiz kid his three older brothers had always known him to be, destined for the life of a scholar, and now seemingly bound for glory in a field of inquiry that had scarcely been touched from an American point of view. But one must note the possibility of a stumbling block. The upper echelons of the American historical profession were not hospitable to Jews, certainly not when Mel was starting out.17 Handlin on the Harvard faculty was very much an anomaly. I. B. Holley, a classmate of Mel’s at Amherst, writes that “Because he was Jewish he was not pledged to a fraternity but belonged to a club organized for all non-fraternity men, the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club, which had a large meeting hall but no living quarters.”18 That was in the 1930s. Mel would later tell friends that he had been touched by anti-Semitism in the 1950s and even in the 1980s, when he sought the directorship of the National Air and Space Museum. But if you had asked him at the time he completed his doctorate, I believe he would have said that he felt confident of his future because he knew how to take matters into his own hands: Holley marveled at how quickly Mel had become “the heart and soul” of the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club.

A decade afterward, in 1952, Mel would have said the same thing—if perhaps less assuredly, having had a close call during the war, for one thing. By then, the field of modern Europe was starting to take off, “fueled by a variety of potent forces,” as Pinkney remarked in his AHA presidential address, when “a generation of historians fresh from graduate school had the experience of participating in rapidly moving history.” By then, Mel had a revised version of his dissertation in print.19 He was a presence in the AHA. He knew he would soon have tenure. He had a second book under way, this one on the Second Empire, and he was even talking of plans for a big book on France since the Restoration.

The one major detour during the intervening decade was not so much a detour as it was the essence of that participatory experience mentioned by Pinkney. Of course it was the war, and Mel was one of those scholars whose “knowledge and skills gave them opportunities of privileged observation.” With Mel there was something else, something remarkable considering how his career ultimately turned out. He was trained as a technological practitioner long before he became a technological historian, long before the thought ever crossed his mind that there could be any such line of work, at least in academic realms.20

When the United States declared war in December 1941, Mel was finishing his dissertation while earning money as a teaching assistant (he called it “paper-marking and section work”) for Laurence Packard, who was described by Stuart Hughes as Amherst’s “most forceful and (deservedly) popular teacher.”21 Early in 1942, Charles Cole was called to the capital to become chief of the Services Trades Branch of the Office of Price Administration (OPA), the agency empowered to put wartime ceilings on commodities and ration consumer goods. In June, Cole summoned Mel as his administrative assistant. With the title of associate economist, he had a civil service rating of P-3 and a salary of $3,800, more than he would make as a teacher for many years after the war. His duties included liaison with OPA field offices, but what Cole remembered best was Mel’s “unusual administrative ability,” notably in setting up a mail control system that was widely emulated.22 For a while, Mel worked with a woman a few years older by the name of Patricia Ryan Nixon. He liked everything about Pat Nixon except when they were chatting and she would say “Well, [my husband] Dick said . . .” He never agreed with what Dick Nixon said, but these conversations did alert him, later, to the possibilities for networking with politically connected people as well as writers and academics.23

When he moved to Washington, D.C., Mel also enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps Reserve and so began his initiation as a technician. He thought “the enlisting officer wasn’t much impressed with my Harvard Ph.D. in European history, but at least it suggested to him that I might be ‘educable.’”24 With an assurance of an eventual commission, he was assigned to electronics training in night school at Catholic University, then sent to Johns Hopkins for an accelerated course in electrical engineering (three years compressed into sixteen weeks), and finally to Philco Radio Laboratories in Philadelphia for another crash course, this one in radar. By the summer of 1943 Mel Kranzberg—who knew nearly all he knew about the history of technology from having read Mumford when he was an undergraduate, and from having audited A. P. Usher while at Harvard—was rather thoroughly trained in hands-on technics.

Armed forces muddle through, and after Mel finished his three months at Philco Labs the Signal Corps decided it already had enough officers with expertise in electronics. Expecting a commission, Mel had proposed to a young woman he met in Baltimore while at Hopkins, Nancy Fox, and they were married. But there was no commission. Instead, he was put in the infantry and sent to basic training. After a time, someone realized that this was a pretty unusual foot soldier and he was shuttled around some more, to Indiana University for study of German and Turkish (he was given to understand the possibility of an Allied invasion through Turkey), and from there into military intelligence service (MIS) training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. And then he was deployed to France with George Patton’s Third Army during the Battle of the Bulge, charged with interrogating German prisoners about the location of artillery emplacements. Several of these prisoners “were shot out from under him,” and Mel came close to getting killed himself. During the Wehrmacht’s last-ditch offensive in the fall of 1944, he would recall that, of the six MIS men in his unit, “three were killed, two were wounded, and I was the only one who escaped unscathed.”25

In 1946, Mel was discharged as a master sergeant with three battle stars, a Combat Infantryman Badge, and a Bronze Star, the medal reserved for soldiers who qualified for “hostile fire/imminent danger pay.” Before mustering out, he studied for three months at the University of Heidelberg and for three more at the Sorbonne and the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.26 When he returned to teaching, it was as a quintessential representative of what William Palmer calls the World War II generation, “eager to make up for lost time and driven to succeed as quickly as possible.”27 After a brief stint at Harvard tutoring advanced students in historiography, he spent a year at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey.28

At Stevens, Mel taught Western Civilization, “that great curricular innovation of the postwar years.”29 “Western Civ” became integral to the curriculum at nearly all engineering schools, the result of a growing concern about the need for graduates who were “well rounded.”30 He also published an article titled “The Humanistic-Social Studies in Engineering Education: Some Basic Fallacies.” But that was as far as he would stray from European history; there was no reason to stray, for it was a season of youth and here was yet another contingency, the exploding undergraduate population. In his 1980 AHA presidential address, Pinkney told how “the upsurge of university and college enrollments . . . created a market for historians, and European history became an economically viable occupation for all, losing its aura of a gentlemen’s avocation.” “Jobs were waiting,” he adds. “French history was an important and lively subject to many Americans, especially to those whose wartime duties had taken them to France or involved them in the study of France in military or political intelligence agencies.”31

This was Mel Kranzberg to a fare-thee-well, though his “wartime duties” were altogether different from those of Pinkney, Schorske, Brinton, or Hughes, all of whom were involved with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Hughes was in charge of the Research and Analysis Branch for the entire Mediterranean theater and finished the war as a lieutenant colonel, then spent two years as chief of European research for the State Department. Brinton headed the OSS’s European operation in London and then made a 1,600-mile tour of France after the Liberation.32 But Mel Kranzberg: Mel was never more than an E8 non-com in the infantry, and he actually put his life on the line.33

In 1947 Mel left Stevens to return to Amherst, joining the faculty at the invitation of Cole—by then Amherst’s president, and in the process of implementing a major change in curriculum—as an assistant professor of modern European history. While carrying the heavy teaching load of a young new hire (Mel was thirty), he worked nights revising his dissertation. He also worked to expand his circle of professional contacts by chairing a faculty committee that arranged for guest speakers. His correspondence suggests a sustained effort to get to know everybody in the history profession, especially in European history but far into other realms as well. By the time he got involved in organizing the fateful American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) meeting at Cornell and the visit to Guerlac in June 1957, he could write to potential speakers the likes of Herbert Muller, Kenneth Boulding, Clinton Rossiter, and even Margaret Mead with relaxed self-confidence.34

Mel’s contract with Amherst was renewed three times, but toward the end of his fourth year in 1951 he knew that his fifth would be his last. Whether this was entirely disappointing is not certain. Although he later told Cole that he “made only one mistake” as president of Amherst, meaning the mistake of not keeping him, Mel had a research agenda and—as was often true of elite colleges—faculty research was not emphasized at Amherst. In any event, he began filing applications along with letters from Cole that were powerfully supportive even if filled with academic circumlocutions. To the chair of a search committee at the University of Illinois, Cole wrote: “I would very much like to have Professor Kranzberg stay at Amherst, but I cannot feel justified in trying to keep him here because the departmental set-up does not, in the immediate future, provide the kind of opportunity and advancement that he ought to have.”35 To Robert Shurter at Case Institute in Cleveland: “We have been planning to keep Kranzberg with us next year and we would only let him go (with deep reluctance) because of our basic rotation policy in the younger brackets and also because of certain departmental road blocks ahead of him, which have nothing to do with him, but are with the structure and nature of our department.”36

Case is of course where Kranzberg ultimately landed, but not before going after several other jobs that were in history departments, not engineering schools. A tenured position at any one of these places might have precluded the emergence of the history of technology in an institutional guise that we would easily recognize. Think contingency.

Mel even flirted with the idea of leaving academe for the federal government, where year-round jobs paid better and attracted quite a few historians during the early years of the cold war. In March 1951, he was contacted by George Pettee, deputy director of the army’s Operations Research Office (ORO). Pettee, who had himself been at Amherst, was the author of a monograph on The Future of American Secret Intelligence said to have been instrumental in establishing the Central Intelligence Agency. He explained that the ORO was concerned with “operational problems of ground warfare, extending from what we call ‘hardware studies’ to psychological warfare and military government.” At Donald McKay’s suggestion he was writing to Mel, he said, partly because of his book on the Siege of Paris, which suggested a “bent towards military subjects,” and partly because of the need for social scientists who could work on “unfamiliar and unusual” problems “under high pressure,” an allusion to his wartime experience.37

Mel was flattered. He filled out an Application for Federal Employment—known then as now as a Standard Form 57—and sent it to Washington along with a letter saying that his interest “in the social and political implications of military operations” made the job appear to be “right up my alley, or at least very close to it.” He was about to go to D.C. for an interview when he got good news from another quarter: he had been awarded a Social Science Research Council Grant-in-Aid for a summer in French archives. Opportunities for primary research were treasured by nearly all French historians in America, so Mel put on the brakes with Pettee, telling him that he planned to go to Paris and then return to Amherst in the fall and use his spare time to organize his notes. He stayed in contact with the ORO, however, and later contracted to write historical memoranda for a group of men and women he got to know as “the gang” in its Connecticut Avenue offices. Mel’s primary engagement was with “Project Parabel,” an effort to address the relationship between Marxist-Leninist theory and the tactics employed by guerrilla fighters in French Indochina. Henry Kissinger became a casual acquaintance.

Part of what Mel learned from his interaction with the ORO was that there were “hardware studies,” a genre he decided he did not much care for.38 But the payoff for a would-be biographer is immeasurable, for the copy of his Form 57 tucked away among his papers at the Smithsonian provides the most fine-grained record of his educational and employment history before he went to Case. There is also evidence in his papers of a passing interest in various positions with the State Department and the Department of Defense. While he never looked into the Central Intelligence Agency, the frequent involvement of historians, especially European historians, with the CIA around this time provides background for another turning-point scenario, the most ironic moment in Mel’s career.39

As he was finishing up his final term on the Amherst faculty, Mel was negotiating with another top-tier liberal arts college, Oberlin, and things were moving along quickly. In March 1952, Oberlin’s dean, Blair Stewart, had sent Mel a letter that began: “Professor Crane Brinton has given us your name in connection with a vacancy in European history.” Mel would be filling in for Charles Cremeans, Oberlin’s Reformation specialist, who was taking leave to accept a CIA appointment, probably temporary, as most were.40 Within a few days, Mel was boarding the New England Wolverine in Springfield for an overnight train trip to Ohio. He spent a long day on the Oberlin campus being squired around by Frederick B. Artz, distinguished already for his scholarship in European political and intellectual history and whose canonical The Mind of the Middle Ages was then in press with Knopf. Shortly, Mel got an offer from Stewart, a one-year appointment as an associate professor, with a possibility of another year but a caveat to have “no expectation” beyond that. Much about the offer was tempting, not least the prospect of having “Freddie Artz” as a colleague and also having students who were truly engaged: Oberlin had a reputation for sending more men and women “on to professional careers in history than any other undergraduate institution in the country.”41

Mel seriously considered the offer, but declined. To Stewart he wrote that he felt he needed a position affording “some opportunity to establish myself on a more permanent basis and to grow in responsibility.” To Artz he explained further, saying that he did not “feel it fair to impose upon my family [Mel and Nancy now had two sons, Steven and John] the prospect of a series of moves.” He would prefer success to “depend primarily upon my own abilities, and not upon the action of outside forces [i.e., the likely return of Cremeans]. I am willing to gamble upon my own ability; I do not think it wise to gamble upon the action of forces over which I have no control.”42

Now irony. After Mel declined, Oberlin hired a Harvard student who was just finishing his dissertation, Barry McGill. A year passed, then two, and Cremeans did not return. Indeed, he became the man who never returned, instead serving the CIA for many years in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, most notably during the Cuban missile crisis. And McGill? Despite a publication record described as “spare,” he spent more than thirty years at Oberlin, finally retiring in the 1980s.43

Mel had told Artz that everything about Oberlin pleased him, that it was a place where “I should have liked to be able to pursue the rest of my academic career.” If he had “gambled,” would he have continued to pursue French history? Would he have never gone to Case Institute, where there had previously been no historians at all? Never have begun thinking about something new and interdisciplinary? We’ll never know. Mel might have left Oberlin anyway. For one thing, there was no “silent generation” at Oberlin, where the campus atmosphere was politically charged even in the 1950s. While Mel had been an ardent partisan of FDR and admired Stuart Hughes for his political passion, some of his deepest instincts were conservative, and he was brought to tears by campus upheavals later on. Moreover, he seems to have looked most longingly toward universities with graduate programs. And yet Oberlin was an extraordinary place, as any of his European-history cohort who had been there as undergraduates would have confirmed—David Pinkney, for one.44 If Mel had taken a chance, it is tempting to think he would have stayed “for the rest of his academic career,” never to retool.

After he knew that Amherst was letting him go, Mel had also interviewed for European history jobs with several midwestern universities, and when Brinton made inquiries on Mel’s behalf at Penn State he told of getting “a nibble.”45 But when Mel turned down Oberlin he had only one bird in hand, and that was in Cleveland. While serving on a committee to advise the Case administration on curriculum reform, Cole and Brinton had both been talking Mel up to the head of the Division of Humanities and Social Studies, Bob Shurter (Amherst ’28), emphasizing his inspired teaching and his experience at an engineering school. “When we got him from Stevens,” Cole told Shurter, “it was clear that he had made a really distinguished record there with engineers.”46

Case already had a general education program with required courses on “man’s cultural accumulation.” The foundation had been laid before the war by President William Wickenden, a notable figure in the annals of curriculum reform. Though Wickenden’s dream of transforming Case had been thwarted, he was succeeded in 1947 by a man determined to carry through, T. Keith Glennan. First, Glennan would address concerns of the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development about the “social knowledge” and “human skills” of graduate engineers. Bruce Seely writes that Glennan “wanted to build a reputation for the best general education program in the country.”47 In 1951 Case was awarded $150,000 by the Carnegie Corporation for the Advancement of Education to bring in a new faculty contingent. In addition to those who were already teaching “English for Engineers,” there would now be teachers drawn from diverse branches of the humanities and social sciences, including several historians.

The goal was defined by Shurter: In order to grasp the complexity of problems he would face, “the engineer as a citizen will have to study all the history, economics, government, and human relations he can muster.”48 As soon as he heard about the availability of Melvin Kranzberg from Cole and Brinton, Shurter was interested, and in the spring of 1952 Mel sailed into a job, with tenure a certainty. Time and opportunity to advance in his scholarly specialty would be limited; Mel knew that. But he was finally, at age thirty-five, in a position that would enable him “to grow in responsibility.” Oscar Handlin wrote warmly from Cambridge to tell him that he’d made a wise choice.

First, Shurter assigned Mel a major share of responsibility for reprogramming Case’s two-year course in The Development of Western Civilization. In a different academic climate a generation later, Western Civ would be depicted by William McNeill as “the record of progress of reason and liberty; and the place where it happened was Greece, Rome, western Europe and latterly the United States.”49 But in the 1950s, with communism on the march, any hint of sarcasm would have been lost on Mel Kranzberg, who called himself a “Gallophile” but was above all an unabashed patriot who had no qualms about imparting this progressivist narrative to undergraduates.50 Mel’s specific area was Greek civilization, and at first he envisioned his task in straightforward terms: to identify source materials and devise a new set of lectures on the birth of democracy. Before long, however, Shurter had him out talking to publishers about a textbook, and in early 1955 he signed a contract with Macmillan.

With two colleagues, Mel committed to delivering the manuscript for a two-volume Western Civ textbook within three years. The other signatories were John Culver, a Roman Empire specialist, and Harvey Buchanan, a Renaissance-Reformation specialist. Culver, like many of those hired with the Carnegie funding, was the furthest thing from a “producer,” and he was soon replaced on the textbook project by medievalist Dirk Jellema. Both Buchanan and Jellema published substantial scholarship (in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte and Speculum, respectively). So did Mel. It seemed like a promising trio.

Their goal was to compete effectively in a crowded field that included Prentice Hall’s History of Civilization, coauthored by Brinton; A History of the Modern World, coauthored by Robert Palmer and Joel Colton; The United States in World History, coauthored by John Rae; and even included another text in the works at Macmillan coauthored by Cole and Carlton J. H. Hayes. Part of the competitive edge would supposedly be imparted by a text designed to “encompass everything: history, literature, art, music, religion, philosophy, science, technology, what have you.” Science and technology would appeal both to engineering students and those in the liberal arts: “Do not forget,” Mel wrote, “that the coming generation of college students is a generation of ‘hot-rodders’ and ‘space cadets.’”51 As the project went forward, however, science and technology proved to be pretty much a “what have you.” Jellema had studied history of science at Wisconsin, but none of the three authors really had time to stay current with the literature.

At one point, Mel received an inquiry from Purdue’s Herbert J. Muller, who was helping develop a course for engineering majors that would “emphasize the technological bases of Western Civilization.”52 Mel knew that the history of engineering was an elective at Clarkson College in New York state and at Michigan State, MIT, and the University of Detroit. At Fenn College, right in Cleveland, Sara Ruth Watson offered a popular course on the history of civil engineering, and Mel often brought his friend Sally Watson over to Case as a guest lecturer.53 But even with promise for getting the attention of students by teaching the history of their chosen profession, Mel had to confess that his textbook was not really going to “do the job” much better than others already in print, which did very little. He ended up steering Muller to R. J. Forbes’s Man the Maker, James Kip Finch’s Engineering and Western Civilization, and especially Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, calling it “extremely provocative” but warning of its “difficult vocabulary for students.”54

In order to fulfill Glennan’s plans, it seemed clear that Case needed a historian who specialized in science and technology (the two were invariably linked), and in the spring of 1953 Shurter had put Mel in charge of a search for a scholar who would be inspiring and productive but not “‘dilettantish’ and ‘arty’ since he will be teaching embryonic engineers who fancy themselves to be ‘he men.’”55 Over a period of several years, there were overtures to L. Pearce Williams, Edward Lurie, Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Hughes, among others. Williams stayed at Delaware, Lurie opted for Wayne State, Kuhn for Berkeley, and Hughes (who, like Mel, had a Ph.D. in European history) was set on going somewhere he could teach about modern technology rather than courses “oriented according to the interests of the history of science society.”56 Finally, in 1958, Shurter handed the assignment to Mel himself, at least to “keep the seat warm.” He was to develop a course in an area of inquiry that he had long insisted was “only a sideline.” Again it is tempting to pose a counterfactual. What if Case had landed someone else and Mel had not ended up with this course by default?57 “Somewhere in my career,” he had once told a publisher when sending in a manuscript critique, “I appear to have established a totally unjustified reputation as an expert in the histories of science, technology, and engineering, but it would be nice to review a book in a field where I feel I have a moderate degree of competence.”58

Mel’s competence—now far beyond “moderate,” as evidenced by the lecture and reading notes included among his papers—lay in European history, and after arriving in Cleveland he often got opportunities to advance his status. In 1953, the University of Pennsylvania’s Lynn Case, on behalf of the AHA program committee, asked him to plan a session on modern France. Mel proposed recruiting Artz, Pinkney, and Stuart Hughes, and Case’s overture evolved into two linked retrospectives on the centennial of the Second Empire. At around the same time, Mel played a lead role in a Festschrift for Amherst’s Laurence Packard, which eventually appeared under the editorship of Hughes and with an introduction by Cole, who remarked that the book was “quite possibly, unique in that it was designed to do homage to an undergraduate teacher by students he inspired to pursue the difficult but rewarding vocation of historian.”59 With teachers and teaching as the theme, it was published in 1954 to the credit of each of the fifteen contributors, Mel among them. Without exception, the AHR reviewer wrote, they “handle the tools of their craft expertly and command a luminous and disciplined prose.” For once, here was a Festschrift notable for “the exceptionally high level of style and scholarship.”60

But Mel knew that his own contribution, “An Emperor Writes History: Napoleon III’s Histoire de Jules César,” owed a lot to Hughes’s editorial judgment when there was nobody at Case “trained in modern history . . . to whom I could turn for such advice.”61 While this may have been true, at nearby Western Reserve University there were several well-regarded historians including John Hall Stewart, a Revolution-Restoration specialist who had been a student of Carl Becker’s at Cornell. Mel was inclined, however, to keep wishing for kindred spirits right down the hall. His appetite whetted by teaching summer sessions at Washington University in his home town of Saint Louis, he made repeated efforts to secure a position in a university history department.62

There was the University of Nebraska, for example. After being urged to apply for an opening designed for a historian “of sufficient maturity that he could qualify immediately for the Graduate Faculty,” he responded: “I am not unhappy at Case—the job is a challenging one, and Case has been quite generous—[but] the Nebraska situation sounds very interesting. I am especially attracted by the prospect of the Graduate Faculty; at Case we don’t even have undergraduate history majors!”63 Mel fretted about needing to ask for time away from specialized research while finishing his textbook. Not to worry, said Cole, advising him to make an all-out run at a job that would clearly be a step up professionally because it promised “a good deal of graduate teaching.”64 Cole could not have couched a recommendation to the chairman in more glowing terms:

Kranzberg is one of the ablest of the younger historians I know. He is a top-notch teacher, both in small and large classes, and his course in 19th century European history was both a demanding and a most popular one here at Amherst. I have read his book on the Siege of Paris and some of the things he has written on the Second Empire. They seem to me sound and incisive history and good writing at the same time. Before very long I expect that he will produce a major work on the Liberal Empire. . . .

Cole added that he had known Mel for twenty years and knew him to be “a fine team man, but also a leader. He gets on with students and with colleagues. I have heard from the people at Case . . . that he has done wonders in invigorating their history program there.”65

Everything about the job sounded like an ideal fit, and yet Mel never even went to Lincoln for an interview. What happened? The paper trail runs cold. Why miss this chance to get connected to a fine graduate program in European history? Partly if not entirely it was a different sort of contingency: His personal life—not for the only time—was in shambles. People writing on his behalf had often remarked that “Mel and Nancy” were a popular duo in faculty social circles. But Nancy was not a happy spouse, and in the summer of 1955 she sued Mel for divorce and moved back to Baltimore with their two sons, leaving him to pay off her $580 sheared beaver coat, with alimony and child support that amounted to more than half his earnings, and apparently disinclined to risk anything uncertain in his daily life.66 Instead, he tried to keep busy every waking moment seven days a week, and friends would repeatedly warn him to slow down and “draw a breath now and then.”

In the mid-1950s two different institutional initiatives consumed great amounts of Mel’s time and energy. For one, there was a new society designed to serve the needs of French historians in North America, the Society for French Historical Studies (SFHS): French history à l’américaine. Although the lead was taken by a professor at New Paltz State College (now SUNY New Paltz), Evelyn Acomb, it was Mel’s old graduate-school comrade Pinkney whose career was “intimately interwoven with the life of the society.”67 As secretary-treasurer (de facto chief executive), Pinkney wanted to dispel an image of a narrow East Coast alignment and sought volunteers to host meetings in other parts of the country. In 1959, when the society was five years old, Mel and John Hall Stewart took joint responsibility for a meeting in Cleveland, both the program and local arrangements, and in the bargain they were named the society’s vice president and president. Social events included a cocktail party cosponsored by the Western Reserve Historical Society and the French consular agent in Cleveland, as well as a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra featuring Chausson, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy.68 Though it had been assumed there might be only fifty registrants, the number was well over a hundred, and afterward people wondered whether it would ever be possible to match “the unusual hospitality” Stewart and Kranzberg offered in Cleveland.69

As he watched Pinkney marshal his resources over a period of several years, the SFHS startup made a big impression on Mel, affording him a glimpse of a similar role for himself with a new organization of his own invention.70 At around the same time, he also rose to leadership with a project sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education, which had secured Carnegie Corporation funding for a study of the nontechnical elements of the curriculum, “the stem.” It was called the Humanistic-Social Research Project. Mel had been disengaged from the ASEE since his year in Hoboken, but Glennan and Shurter were both active and they drew Mel in. By the time its report was published in 1956, he was vice chairman of the ASEE’s Humanistic-Social Division, soon to become chairman. In that interim he had become a “field worker,” contacting historians “who were teaching courses in the history of technology at other engineering schools,” such as John Rae at MIT.71 Through the project Mel met several of his closest friends, not only Rae (who spent a year at Case and eventually moved on to Harvey Mudd in California) but also Carl Condit, a professor at Northwestern, and George Gullette, the director, who was a professor at North Carolina State.72 Years later, after Gullette died, Mel told his widow that “I found myself inspired by his ideas and ideals, and the result was that I changed the whole direction of my academic and professional career. A whole new world of scholarship opened before me—the history of technology— and ever since then I have been committed to its propagation.”73

Can we take a letter to a bereaved widow at face value, along with the remark that “it was George’s wisdom and encouragement that provided direct inspiration”? Perhaps so, for it was not long after publication of the ASEE report, when Mel accepted Gullette’s appointment as a liaison with the History of Science Society and with its president, Guerlac, that he first mentioned “a History of Technology Society,” and the idea of perhaps “getting one started.”74 A month after that, he received his now-fabled note from Lynn White jr., in which White remarked that “It has long seemed a matter of high comedy that the United States, probably the most technological nation in all history, has so far exhibited so little interest in the contemplation of technology as a human activity.”75 And a week after that Mel wrote Marie Boas to say that “Public pressure might actually force me to get going on the deal—as if I didn’t have enough to do already!”76

French political and social history, or history of technology? Or both? We can only imagine Mel’s ambivalence throughout the late 1950s. He would hear one day from White about his enthusiasm for a new society, but he would also be cautioned by Condit and Gullette about the dangers of “fragmentation.” Another day he would end up on an airplane flight with Bernadotte Schmitt, long-time editor of the Journal of Modern History, Pulitzer Prize winner, and soon-to-be AHA president—who would be enthusiastic about Mel’s future in European history.77 When he ran into Schmitt, he was in the process of exploring a move with the University of Pittsburgh’s Robert Carlson, who taught a new course in the history of American technology. One of his “gripes” about Case, he told Carlson, was that “it does not give me the opportunity to teach history majors or graduate students, as I would normally be doing if I taught elsewhere than in a specialized engineering and scientific institution.”78 And in the same vein, there had been this remark to Cole, whose confidence he always kept: “As an engineering educator, I have gone just about as far as I can go, but I am primarily a historian, and a liberal arts college or large university affords me greater opportunity for teaching and research in history.”79

When inquiring about job postings, Mel became less and less reticent about assigning himself a stature comparable to scholars in the top ranks of European history, and he would outline an ambitious research agenda: after his Second Empire monograph, a synthesis of French history since 1815. He worked and reworked a paper titled (with variations) “What Constitutes an Industrial Revolution?” and a presentation to the AHA in Chicago drew attention from several major newspapers. Editors were after him for a book of readings. He contributed substantially to several encyclopedias, not least William L. Langer’s canonical Encyclopedia of World History.

In addition to his yen for a position congenial to a research agenda, there was another push in the direction of “a liberal arts college or large university,” personal. In January 1957 Mel married Eva Mannering, whom he had first met while at the Sorbonne after the war. Eva was a poet, essayist, and editor of elegant folio volumes of prints showing fruits, flowers, and tropical birds. She was English and had an interest in a London publishing house. (In two unfortunate phrases that Mel would often utter with reference to spouses, she was “a person in her own right,” both “decorative and talented.”) Eva thought Cleveland an “ugly city, quite devoid of charm or grace,” and she was particularly keen on Mel’s prospects in California. Mel would get long letters from Lynn White proposing a move to UCLA, and there was also a prospect in the Humanities Department at Harvey Mudd, the new engineering school affiliated with the Claremont Colleges. The atmosphere at Claremont struck Mel as a world away from “a business or a factory,” a dig at Case.80

Eva loved the idea of sunny California, and California was almost as appealing to Mel as New England was. Even after chartering SHOT in mid-1958, he told Cole that he hoped “to wed my interests in the history of technology with my interest in French history.”81 Within the next year or so, however, he felt a strong push away from French history and a pull toward “a whole new world of scholarship.” The Society for French Historical Studies got the first issue of its new journal into print even as Mel was still searching for the means to publish what he envisioned as “a quarterly of 150–200 pages with a circulation of 1,000 to 2,000.” Mel had to be impressed by Pinkney’s enterprise and especially that of publications-committee chair Lynn Case and editor Marvin Brown, who had managed to get his journal through the print shop at the University of North Carolina, where he taught. And there was something else, an article by Pinkney in that premier issue of French Historical Studies, an article that Mel would have felt was speaking directly to him. Pinkney spotlighted the dilemma of a specialist who lacked ready access to French archives: Beyond a dissertation, he wrote, there was “little chance of making a significant original contribution.”82

Mel knew this, of course, just as he knew the answer to a rhetorical challenge posed by Pinkney: “Have American scholars produced any books of original research in modern French history that rank with many monumental works by our colleagues in American history?”“Outside the fields of international relations and intellectual history,” the answer was no. Sure, there were important works “of synthesis and interpretation” by scholars like Brinton—and now Pinkney himself, whose Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris was garnering unanimous praise from reviewers, Mel in the AHR among them, and would go through many printings. Mel had been uncommonly youthful when he published his first book, and perhaps he had in his power a worthy synthesis of his own. But his correspondence increasingly suggests that he was feeling the seductions of an original contribution and realizing that his main chance for originality would not be in books he might write, but rather as an academic entrepreneur with “unusual administrative ability” (remembering Cole’s remark in 1943)—and for that realizing that he might be best positioned at an institution where he could construct an interdisciplinary foundation.

Carroll Pursell remarks that what Mel had in mind for Case sounds like an STS program, long before anyone had ever heard of any such thing. He wanted to make certain it would not bear the stigma of “hardware studies” that afflicted the multivolume Oxford History of Technology edited by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, Trevor I. Williams, and A. R. Hall, nor have the shortcomings of the literature produced by sociologists that seemed insufficiently anchored. It would be, à la Carl Becker, a new generation writing its own history.

When he chartered SHOT in May 1958, Mel still planned to keep his original bonds with French history. Shortly after the SFHS met in Cleveland, however, that changed, in part the result of a contingency familiar to all academics, a turf war. Case’s President Glennan had departed for Washington to head up NASA, a huge loss for Mel because he had always been able to count on Glennan’s good will and support. Then he had lost the support and even the friendship of Shurter, who was apparently in the throes of a personal crisis. And then, after a confrontation involving the curriculum and assertions that “the historians” were gaining an unfair advantage, Shurter lost a lopsided vote of confidence and was replaced as chair by Morrell “Bo” Heald, a student of Ralph Henry Gabriel’s at Yale who had come to Case shortly after Mel and was his staunch ally. (Bo had presented a paper at the seminal ASEE meeting in Ithaca in June 1957 and was one of the three signatories to SHOT’s articles of incorporation a year later). As chair, he expressed full confidence in Mel’s initiative, and he also provided him with tangibles—making sure he got his own secretary and sufficient office space to accommodate an editorial operation as well as the affairs of a learned society.83

“Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” This remark—Laurence Peter called it the “theory of entrepreneurial aggressiveness in higher education”—has been attributed to everyone from Woodrow Wilson to C. P. Snow, but of course most often to Henry Kissinger. Now, hold on, Professor Kissinger! Secretarial help and office space: small stakes, maybe, for a man who called power the ultimate aphrodisiac, and yet for Melvin Kranzberg the contingency that finally made the difference. To paraphrase Lynn White, a door had already been opened and now Mel stepped through, into the SHOT office whose crackling energy became legendary. The history of science traced its origins as an academic discipline to George Sarton, who edited Isis for forty years and also taught at Harvard when Mel was in graduate school. Mel would tell Sarton’s disciple Guerlac in 1957 that he had no ambitions as an “operator” and tell his editor at Macmillan even in late 1958 that the history of technology had “no Sarton.”84 But he really meant “not yet,” and in 1959—with a new friend in a high place—he finally elected to reprise Sarton’s role with a new specialty that was immensely relevant to current events, unlike the history of science, a branch of intellectual history whose concerns were, in a word, academic.85

In the late 1950s Mel created a new institutional matrix, SHOT. A decade later there was a second matrix, ICOHTEC. Pursell remarks that SHOT “was not only very Mel but very American,” meaning very American in a good sense—its lack of rigid hierarchy and “the stifling bureaucracy of international science congresses.”86 It was American in a more literal sense, as well. Even though it was formally chartered as an “international society,” the membership was almost entirely from the United States. SHOT was parochial: “an international society with a few foreign members,” as Svante Lindqvist recalls someone saying. And yet Mel was deeply committed to something more. He may have chosen to turn away from a career in European history, but he had no desire to part with Europe, nor with the rest of the world.87

Missionary, ambassador, all the one-word tags that befit Mel Kranzberg carry an implication of “internationalism.” When ICOHTEC met at Metz in 1970, he was taken back to 1944, when he fell under fire from soldiers of the Third Reich. But he was also taken back much farther, to 1870 and the fog of war again—to the surrender of Marshal Bazaine, one of the most compelling passages in a book full of passion for European history, The Siege of Paris. After he moved to Atlanta to assume the Callaway Professorship at Georgia Tech, his colleagues would joke that “the Callaway chair was really an aisle seat on Delta Airlines.”88 How often someone trying to reach Mel by telephone would hear a secretary say, “Dr. Kranzberg is away in Europe.”

In 1958 Mel had applied for a second SSRC travel grant, this one for a trip to Barcelona. The specific purpose was to deliver a paper at the Ninth International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. But he had a more general purpose, and that was “to make international contacts.”89 In Barcelona he met the Polish scholar Eugeniusz Olszewski, and this was the start of a friendship that eventually led to a proposal for a History of Technology section within the framework of the International Union, soon to be called ICOHTEC. Years afterward, Bob Multhauf got it right: “Mel Kranzberg had the wit and stamina to invent a new field and to establish it firmly . . . and not only in the United States.”90

But ICOHTEC is a story for another day, and, with the tale just told in mind, it’s time to conclude with some more “what if” questions like those posed in the epigraph. What if Mel’s arrival at Amherst had not coincided with Charles Cole’s? What if, a decade later, he had died under enemy fire somewhere on the Rhine? What if, a decade after that, Amherst had kept him, or he had gotten a job at Oberlin, or Penn, Illinois, Nebraska, Harvey Mudd, or UCLA? What if he had not been involved with the Society for French Historical Studies or the American Society for Engineering Education? What if Case had landed Ed Lurie or Tom Hughes, and the job of developing a course in the history of science and technology had not gone to Mel by default? What of his topsy-turvy personal life, what of his professional relationships—if he had not hit it off so famously with Lynn White, or not had a falling out with Robert Shurter, and Bo Heald not been there to watch his back? What about the influence he attributed to George Gullette? And Keith Glennan: Not even mentioning “the time and material assistance” Glennan provided, what if Mel had never had the opportunity to observe and learn from a great academic entrepreneur in action?91

What if? Chance and contingency. For many reasons, there might today be no Kranzberg Prize or no Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship. No Kranzberg Lecture or Kranzberg Professorship. No Technology and Culture. But the history of technology as a discipline? Was Mel essential for that? As Art Molella points out, “a vigorous scholarly tradition” dates to the turn of the twentieth century, with Ludwig Beck, Franz Maria Feldhaus, and Conrad Matchoss.92 Usher’s History of Mechanical Inventions was published when Mel was twelve years old and Mumford’s Technics and Civilization just before he started Amherst. When he was a freshman there was the special issue of Annales d’histoire économique et sociale that Pam Long calls “a landmark in the historiography of technology.”93

Without Mel, would the history of technology exist within a context something like what we have? It is worth remembering that a notable sociologist had an idea for a “Society for the Social Study of Invention” several years before Mel thought of juxtaposing “technology and culture”:

SOCIAL STUDY OF INVENTION—Organization of a Society for the Social Study of Invention was achieved at the AAAS meeting in Chicago. According to the organizational procedures, which were proposed by S. C. Gilfillan (research associate in sociology at the University of Chicago) and adopted with certain amendments, the aims of the Society are “to study, promote, rationalize, and economize invention and its utilization, and incidentally to build the structure of culture generally.”94

Gilfillan had lined up a stellar array of advisors concerned with “the structure of culture,” including Robert K. Merton and William F. Ogburn. But he did not know what to do next, and, when Mel inquired several years later, Gilfillan had to confess that his society “died a-borning” because “it appeared that there was no one else much interested.”95 What if Gilfillan had kept after Merton and Ogburn and the others, as we can imagine Mel Kranzberg would have done?

When Stuart Hughes went to Amherst, his fraternity brothers were a “natural constituency,” a world away from the “makeshift existence in the interstices of the system” (a ghetto, if you will) where Mel Kranzberg was.96 But, for Mel, the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club became an opportunity to infuse an organization—recalling the words of I. B. Holley—with “a heart and soul.” With a heart and soul of its own, the Society for the Social Study of Invention might have fared differently, but there was always the element of chance. Oscar Handlin, who joined the Harvard faculty during Mel’s second year in graduate school, writes about how much his career depended “on luck in timing”: “Had I turned up a decade earlier, some doors would have been closed to me; a decade later they would have opened upon rooms either empty or crowded.”97

Everyone confronts different doors and finds different rooms, and yet the point about luck in timing so often applies. With Mel, on one level it was Keith Glennan and then Bo Heald flying his banner at Case, on another level it was Yuri Gagarin and then John Glenn flying off into space—it was all the factors that put questions and concerns about the relationship of technology and culture in the air as never before. Contextualism, writes Hayden White, is “surpassingly modest in what it asks of the historian and demands of the reader.”98 Perhaps, but it is hard to understand White’s remarks about contextualism lacking explanatory power. Was Mel Kranzberg “fated” to establish a collaborative effort among historians seeking to analyze and explain this relationship of technology and culture? No—his correspondence is crowded with evidence for the possibility of a different outcome. Once he did take responsibility for such a collaborative effort, however, there is equally voluminous evidence that many other men and women would have had different careers had he not done so, more than a few readers of this essay, I imagine—indeed I’m sure—along with the author. The lengthened shadow of one man: A shopworn expression, yes, but in the case at hand—Mel Kranzberg’s influence on the style and substance of a new discipline—no other expression fills the bill nearly as well.

1. Every AHA presidential address from 1884 to the present can be found online at http://www.historians.org/info/aha_history/pres_index.htm (accessed 13 July 2009).

2. Melvin Kranzberg to Charles W. Cole, 4 November 1977, Kranzberg Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Box 77 (hereafter KP and box number: KP77). Cole and others who would affect Mel Kranzberg’s destiny to one degree or another are pictured on pages 846–47 and 870.

3. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 239–40.

4. For a resourceful effort to define differences, see R. Angus Buchanan, “From Cold War Peacemakers to Environmental Crusaders: The Development of ICOHTEC over Forty Years,” in International Committee for the History of Technology, 1968–2008, ed. Wolfhard Weber (Bochum, 2008), 7–15.

5. A collection of essays about contingency, including George M. Trevelyan’s classic from 1907, “If Napoleon Had Won Waterloo,” had been published just before Cole’s article appeared—J. C. Squire, ed., If It Had Happened Otherwise (London, 1932)—and Cole had posed his own version of this question: “What if Grouchy had obeyed his orders at Waterloo?” I appreciate Bart Hacker bringing the Squire book to my attention, as well as his own article, coauthored with Gordon B. Chamberlain, “Pasts That Might Have Been: An Annotated Bibliography of Alternative History,” Extrapolation 22 (1981): 334–68.

6. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Affects Our Lives (New York, 2008). In the 2008 Academy Award–winning movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, there is an enumeration of random events that destroy the heroine’s career as a dancer.

7. Carroll Pursell, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Case Years,” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 407–12. See also the remarks by John Staudenmaier, Robert P. Multhauf, R. Angus Buchanan, August Giebelhaus, and Robert C. Post in this same issue, and also Howard P. Segal’s “Technology, History, and Culture: An Appreciation of Melvin Kranzberg” in Virginia Quarterly Review 74 (1998): 641–52.

8. According to a 12 July 1961 article in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Mel’s grandfather Mordecai emigrated from Kiev in 1892 along with his second wife Rose and thirteen children, including Mel’s father Samuel, who founded the Northwestern Bottle Company in Saint Louis in 1902. As a distributor for Owens-Illinois, the Alton firm that pioneered the manufacture of blow-molded glass bottles, the company was later headed by Mel’s brother Mickey and then by Mickey’s son Kenneth, greatly expanding with the introduction of high-density plastics into the “rigid container” industry. As Kranson Industries, it became the world’s leading distributor of such containers, with annual revenue in the 1990s near $400 million. Mel never had anything to do with the bottle business, but he did many favors for his nephew Kenny (such as putting in a word with college admissions offices), and in 2008 Kenny and his wife Nancy provided funding which, along with a larger amount from the Stern Foundation, established a permanent Kranzberg Professorship at Georgia Tech.

9. Cole’s paraphrase of Becker was that “every age writes its own history according to its own beliefs and ideas” (“The Relativity of History,” 165). His Columbia mentor, Hayes, was a Catholic convert whose politics alarmed some younger men in the AHA so much that there was an effort to block his path to the presidency: hating liberalism, perhaps sympathetic to Franco, profoundly anti-Marxist. Cole shared Hayes’s aversion to Marx, at least, and imparted this aversion to Mel, but he was also attuned to Becker’s moderation and allegiance to relativism, and Mel would later demonstrate his own allegiance by quoting Becker’s famous spoof of “factualism,” the question of “whether Charles the Fat was at Ingelheim or Lustnau on July 1, 887” (Kranzberg, “The Newest History: Science and Technology,” Science 136, 11 May 1962, 463).

10. Mel attended Saint Louis’s Soldan High, a secondary school for unusually promising students who were told that “you are here because you believe in higher education as the avenue to greater opportunity and larger service.” As a college freshman, he does not appear to have been daunted by exam questions like “What elements in the career of Petrarch illustrate his reaction against the spirit of the Middle Ages?” or “Why is it difficult to determine the causes for the breakup of the Roman Empire?”

11. Novick (n. 3 above), 172, writes that “Selig Perlman, a professor of economics at Wisconsin, is said to have regularly summoned Jewish graduate students in history to his office and warned them, in a deep Yiddish accent, that ‘History belongs to the AngloSaxons. You belong in economics or sociology.’” At Amherst, Mel studied economics not only with Cole but also with Colston Warne, who cofounded Consumers Union in 1936 and was later summoned before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. Controversy aside, the success of Warne’s organizational initiative surely impressed Mel.

12. McKay had been a student of Harvard’s William L. Langer (he later edited a Langer Festschrift titled Essays in the History of Modern Europe) and was strongly influenced by Langer’s idea that historical knowledge was “fluid,” as was Mel. Just as Mel credited Cole with fostering his interest in the Industrial Revolution, he told of McKay “getting me involved in the Second Empire—when industrialization really began to hit France” (Kranzberg to Charles Cole, 3 June 1971, KP77). After McKay’s death at age fifty-seven in 1959, Mel took the initiative in establishing a memorial fund along with a group of scholars that also included Langer, Cole, and Pinkney, as well as David Landes and Elizabeth Eisenstein.

13. Melvin Kranzberg, ed., 1848: A Turning Point? (Boston, 1959). During the 1960s and 1970s, I’ll wager that no graduate student in European or American history ever escaped an encounter with “Heath pamphlets.”

14. Novick, 266. During Mel’s years in graduate school, most of the history faculty was politically conservative, though—as with Brinton—this would not necessarily coincide with an adherence to factualism. On the “comparative quiet of Harvard’s political scene,” see Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, 1998), 22–24. See also William Palmer, Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians (Lexington, Ky., 2001), chap. 2.

15. The grandson of a Republican presidential candidate and Supreme Court chief justice, Hughes’s social milieu could not have differed more. Nor, in many ways, his politics: During the 1960s Hughes would cochair, with Dr. Benjamin Spock, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and because of his activism the FBI would instruct the State Department to monitor his affairs while he was in Europe on sabbatical. In a blurb for Gentleman Rebel: The Memoirs of H. Stuart Hughes (New York, 1990), Irving Howe called the book “the story of a certain kind of American who may be disappearing from the scene: the native patrician intellectual with a strong social conscience and intense moral convictions.”

16. Had Guerlac actually said something of the sort (he probably did not), he would have been quoting Harvard’s George Sarton. Guerlac’s student Marie Boas Hall tells how Carl Stephenson, the Cornell medievalist, “turned seriously to the history of medieval technology, writing an excellent little article ‘In Praise of Medieval Tinkers.’” When he received an offprint, Sarton “replied brusquely, indeed rudely, that he was interested in medieval thinkers, not tinkers.” “Recollections of a History of Science Guinea Pig,” in Catching Up with the Vision: Essays on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the History of Science Society, ed. Margaret W. Rossiter, a supplement to Isis 90 (1999): S72. An understanding that there is a fanciful element to Mel’s tale—indeed, that it partakes of a classic “creation myth”—is owing to the research of Bruce Seely, the first scholar to investigate the Kranzberg Papers at the Smithsonian: Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 739–72.

17. Novick’s That Noble Dream is full of evidence, as is William Palmer’s From Gentleman’s Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of History Departments in the United States, 1940–1980 (http://www.booksurge.com, 2008). Novick quotes Arthur Schlesinger Sr. writing a letter on behalf of Oscar Handlin in 1935 and saying that he “has none of the offensive traits which some people associate with his race,” and another on behalf of Daniel Boorstin in 1934 saying that he “is a Jew, though not the kind to which one takes exception.” Novick also tells of Kranzberg’s advisor Brinton mentioning his fear that J. H. Hexter was “unemployable” (Novick, 172, 173). John Hope Franklin, who received his Harvard doctorate in 1941, along with Guerlac, writes that “the most traumatic experience I had there was not racist but anti-Semitic”—opposition to the idea of a Jewish president of the club for graduate students in American history, the Henry Adams Club (quoted in Jeremy Popkin, “The Historian-Autobiographers: Harvard in the Memoirs of Its Own History Scholars,” Harvard Magazine, November–December 2004, available online at http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/11/the-historian-autobiog.html [accessed 13 July 2009]).

18. I. B. Holley to the author, 29 August 2008. Holley adds that he, too, “joined the LJA Club,” and this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. When Mel finally decided to give up the editorship of Technology and Culture in 1979, a very difficult decision, he entrusted Holley with chairing the search committee. Mel addressed anti-Semitism in print only once, in an article for The Reconstructionist (5 October 1956), a periodical that appeared under the aegis of a Jewish group influenced by John Dewey.

19. Melvin Kranzberg, The Siege of Paris, 1870–71: A Political and Social History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950). Concluding a joint review with Jacques Desmarest’s La Défense Nationale, 1870–71 (Paris, 1949), Edward L. Katzenbach Jr. wrote that both books were “judicious, vital accounts, and deserve to be read widely” (American Historical Review 56 [1950]: 103). Katzenbach would later be instrumental in the publication of Technology and Western Civilization, edited by Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell under the aegis of the United States Armed Forces Institute, as well as contributing an essay to the second volume of that publication titled “The Mechanization of War, 1880–1919,” 548–61 (see Paul Ceruzzi, “‘A Broad Canvas’: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell, eds., Technology and Western Civilization,” Technology and Culture 50 [July 2009]: 658–68). The Siege of Paris was reprinted by Greenwood in 1971 and still holds up well, even in the context of more ambitious books such as Alistair Horne’s The Fall of Paris (New York, 1965).

20. Guerlac is probably the first historian Mel knew who actually had a vital interest in technology; his dissertation was on the engineering school of Mézières under the Old Regime, and he would later write the official history of the U.S. radar program during World War II.

21. Gentleman Rebel (n. 15 above), 96. Hughes, who was two years ahead of Mel, writes of his “twinge of nostalgia for the simplicity of the Amherst I knew.” The faculty, about sixty in number, “resembled traditional French lycée professors in living, breathing, and serving to perpetuate as best they could the classics of the subjects they taught.”

22. Charles Cole to George Pettee, 19 March 1952, KP77. Because it touched the life of every citizen (unfairly, many felt), the OPA “had the stormiest history of all the wartime agencies” (Thomas G. Manning, The Office of Price Administration: A World War II Agency of Control [New York, 1960], xiii; see also Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy [Princeton, 2008], 70–82). Perhaps Mel’s mail control system served him well later on when his own volume of mail reached titanic proportions. His correspondence archived by the Smithsonian fills 359 manuscript boxes, exclusive of hundreds more in a separate collection concerned with SHOT. A 141-page Register of the Melvin Kranzberg Papers, 1934–1988, compiled by Robert S. Harding, is available from the Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

23. Mel sent a copy of the first issue of T&C to Mrs. Nixon, asking her to call it to the attention of her husband, who was vice president. Mrs. Nixon wrote back to tell him that she would pass it on and also that she “enjoyed ever so much hearing from you again and your letter truly brought back very many memories.” Kranzberg to Mrs. Richard Nixon, 6 April 1960; Mrs. Nixon to Kranzberg, 11 May 1960, KP163.

24. “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg by Robert C. Post,” Invention and Technology, winter 1989, 36.

25. Kranzberg to Lynn White jr., 19 December 1984, KP217. Mel told about his MIS experiences many times but rarely mentioned the death of his three comrades. His thirty-year correspondence with White fills nearly an entire manuscript box and serves as a reminder of how fortunate historians are that long-distance telephone calls used to be expensive.

26. The lecturers at the École included Charles Morazé—author of The Logic of History—with whom Mel would later be involved in editorial work for UNESCO’s six-volume History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, published by Allen and Unwin between 1963 and 1968.

27. Palmer, Engagement with the Past (n. 14 above), 91. The extensive roll of important historians born at nearly the same time as Mel and “tempered by war” (John F. Kennedy’s expression) includes William McNeill and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a few weeks older, and Eric Hobsbawm, a few months. JFK himself was born on 29 May 1917, Mel on 22 November, the day JFK died.

28. Among Mel’s “tutees” at Harvard was Bradford Perkins, who had also fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Later an honored historian of international relations at the University of Michigan, he first taught at UCLA. There, because he liked a senior thesis I wrote on Henry Lane Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to Mexico, Perkins suggested that I consider graduate school, and I now enjoy contemplating this fortuitous two-degrees-of-separation from Mel Kranzberg. Hoboken was not quite the barren island it might seem: Joseph Strayer, who later chaired the Princeton history department for two decades, taught at Stevens in the early 1930s.

29. Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 717. For a revisionist take on the inception of Western Civilization courses, see Daniel A. Segal, “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 770–805.

30. Mel loved telling how Robert Frost, having been informed of such a program, remarked,“Why? Are you going to roll him down a hill?” To which Mel replied, “No, uphill, and it helps to remove the square corners.”

31. Pinkney, “American Historians on the European Past” (see n. 1 above).

32. After long remaining classified, Brinton’s “Letters from Liberated France” were published in French Historical Studies 2 (1961): 1–27 and 133–56.

33. I appreciate Steve Thompson’s observations about Mel’s military service, that it was “no joke to be promised a commission and then denied it,” and that “they didn’t hand out Bronze Stars and CIBs to just anybody back then.”

34. With Pamela Laird’s superb Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006) in mind, one can readily think of Mel’s career as a case study in the acquisition and deployment of social capital. (In the 1980s his Rolodex file was so immense that it always put me in mind of a ferris wheel.) The classic account of the SHOT creation story (“we were crestfallen as we walked down the hill from Guerlac’s home in Ithaca,” and so on) appears in John Staudenmaier’s Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Mel embellished in 1991 when he was awarded the Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

35. Charles Cole to Frederick Dietz, 14 May 1951, KP77.

36. Charles Cole to Robert Shurter, 14 May 1951, KP77. Did a “basic rotation policy in the younger brackets” simply indicate that Amherst would offer its graduates “a running start on their careers,” but rarely promoted from within? Probably so, though Mel may have found it difficult to dismiss anti-Semitism as a contingent factor. In a review of Richard M. Cook’s Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven, Conn., 2007), Edward Mendelson quotes Sir Isaiah Berlin: “There isn’t a Jew in the world known to me who somewhere inside them does not have a tiny drop of uneasiness vis-à-vis THEM, the majority among whom they live. They may be very friendly, they may be entirely happy, but one has to behave particularly well, because if we don’t behave well THEY won’t like us” (“New York Everyman,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 2008). In his Amherst memoir, English Papers: A Teaching Life (Saint Paul, Minn., 1996), 42, William H. Pritchard writes that at midcentury there were “very few Jews” on the faculty, and that the English department was “WASP to the core.” That soon changed: In 1957 the English department would appoint Leo Marx, and he would become dean of the Amherst faculty.

37. George S. Pettee to Kranzberg, 19 March 1951, KP240. Pettee was a Harvard Ph.D. who had taught there as well. The ORO, later known as the Research Analysis Corporation, initially operated under contract to Johns Hopkins University. See U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, A History of the Department of Defense Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, OTA-BP-ISS-157 (Washington, D.C., June 1995), available online at http://www.dau.mil/educdept/mm_dept_resources/reports/ OTA-History-FFRDC.pdf (accessed 13 July 2009).

38. Kranzberg, often short of worthy articles of any sort during T&C’s early years, usually kept this opinion to himself, but in a 1961 letter to Peter Drucker (18 May, KP88) he lamented “the constant struggle I must wage against those who want to limit the history of technology to a narrative account of the development of the ‘hardware.’” Yet T&C had hardware studies galore, often with a compelling problematique, as with Silvio Bedini’s “The Compartmented Cylindrical Clepsydra” and Robert Woodbury’s “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts,” which won the first two Usher Prizes in 1960 and 1961. In his March/June 2007 issue, the editor of History and Technology published an article in which the author alleged—with evidence nonexistent—that Mel sought to impose a “disciplinary orthodoxy” on the historiography of technology. For my response, see “Forman: An Exchange between Bob Post and John Krige,” History and Technology 24 (2008): 379–81.

39. On the involvement of historians with the CIA (and before that with the Office of Strategic Services), see Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York, 1987), and In and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Autobiography of William L. Langer (New York, 1977).

40. Blair Stewart to Kranzberg, 8 March 1952, KP50. Cremeans was the author of The Reception of Calvinistic Thought in England (Urbana, Ill., 1949), whose reception in the AHR had been rather lukewarm.

41. Oberlin College LGBT Community History Project, “Behind the Masks— Professor Frederick Artz and the Cultural Stance of the ‘Queer,’” available online at http://www.oberlinlgbt.org/content/Behind-the-Masks/Professor-Frederick-Artz-/Cultural-Stance/professor-fredrick-artz-and-the-cultural-stance-of-the-queer-b-1894d-1983-page-1-of-2.html (accessed 13 July 2009).

42. Kranzberg to Blair Stewart, 11 April 1952, and to Frederick Artz, 15 April 1950 [sic, actually 1952], KP240.

43. Harry Dawe, “Barry McGill Revisited,” available online at http://www.oberlin. edu/alummag/oampast/oam_winter/barrymcgill.html (accessed 13 July 2009).

44. In collaboration with the Duke University military historian Theodore Ropp, also an Oberlin graduate, Pinkney later edited a Festschrift for Artz, who had been a mentor to literally dozens of top-tier scholars.

45. Donald McKay to Kranzberg, 13 February 1952, KP240.

46. Charles Cole to Robert L. Shurter, 20 April 1951, KP77

47. Seely (n. 16 above), 750 and passim.

48. Robert L. Shurter, “Today’s Education and Tomorrow’s Engineer,” General Electric Review 55 (September 1952): 8, quoted in Seely, 75.

49. William H. McNeill, quoted in Novick (n. 3 above), 313.

50. In November 1954, Mel got a letter from a Radcliffe junior who had been assigned to make a “qualitative analysis” of his book and had written him asking “What are your prejudices?” and “How has your background influenced the manner in which you write history?” Mel told her that he was “a solid bourgeois, New Deal-ish and anti-Marxist,” or at least “skeptical” of Marx, perhaps the result of “my work under Crane Brinton at Harvard.” Mel did not elaborate, but no doubt his reference was to moral absolutes and political abstractions, the same skepticism that runs throughout Brinton’s writings, notably The Lives of Talleyrand (New York, 1936). (Patricia Van Doren to Kranzberg, 19 November 1954; Kranzberg to Van Doren, 23 November 1954, KP240.) In his own book, Mel included an epilogue on the Paris Commune in which he refuted Marx’s attempt to foster a revolutionary mythology, calling this “unhistorical” because “it involved lifting the Commune out of its context in French history and conceiving it as an episode in socialist history occurring in a vacuum” (Kranzberg, The Siege of Paris [n. 19 above], 181).

51. Kranzberg to William H. Mitchell, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 13 January 1954, KP283. Several other publishers had been interested in the textbook.

52. Herbert J. Muller to Kranzberg, 3 January 1955; Kranzberg to Muller, 25 January 1955, 9 May 1955, KP240. Mel was thrilled to hear from Muller, whose recently published The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies had garnered extravagant attention from reviewers, notably H. Stuart Hughes in the AHR (58 [1952]: 73–74): “If Toynbee has been likened to St. Augustine, Professor Muller may with no greater injustice be compared to Gibbon—a Gibbon chastened by a century and a half of turmoil and disaster, but still girded for battle with forces of barbarism and religion.”

53. Fenn College became part of Cleveland State University in 1965. On Watson, who was the very first person to send Mel a check for a SHOT membership, see Robert C. Post, “The Bridge at Mackinac Straits: Another Fiftieth Anniversary,” Technology and Culture 49 (July 2008): 755–56. The University of Detroit was offering courses in “Industrial Economic History” as early as 1930. My thanks to Pat Higo, archivist at the University of Detroit Mercy, for a rich yield of information from her search through course catalogs.

54. Kranzberg to Herbert J. Muller, 9 May 1955, KP240.

55. Kranzberg to Robert Stauffer, 20 April 1953, KP240.

56. Thomas P. Hughes to Kranzberg, 31 December 1957, KP122.

57. Harvard’s I. Bernard Cohen was recommending his student Robert Schofield as early as 1954, before he had finished his Ph.D. But Schofield was not hired by Case until 1960, to share with Mel “History of Science and Technology I and II” as well as to teach courses in the history of chemistry. See Pursell, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg” (n. 7 above), 408–9.

58. Kranzberg to W. Webster, 30 March 1955, KP167. The manuscript was John W. Oliver’s History of American Technology, which the Ronald Press subsequently published even though Mel said he was “very disappointed.”

59. Charles W. Cole, “Introduction: Laurence Bradford Packard, Anson D. Morse Professor of History at Amherst College,” in H. Stuart Hughes, ed., Teachers of History: Essays in Honor of Laurence Bradford Packard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954), 1. Mel chaired a steering committee that identified seventy Packard students between 1927 and 1950, with Cole the earliest. A Packard honor student in 1940 was Mel’s friend Bill Holley, whose 1953 book, Ideas and Weapons, “remains fundamental to the current understanding of military technology” (Timothy Moy, “Structure Ascendant: I. B. Holley, Ideas and Weapons,” Technology and Culture 46 [October 2005]: 797–804, quote on 804).

60. Geoffrey Bruun, review of Teachers of History, in American Historical Review 60 (1955): 576–77. Among the other contributors were Paul L. Ward, who would become president of Sarah Lawrence College and executive director of the AHA, and John Whitney Hall, who would reinterpret the Tokugawa period in terms of Japan’s modernization and become director of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. Another was the prolific American historian Edwin Rozwenc. In his own essay, Hughes cast a revisionist eye on the political theorist Gaetano Mosca.

61. Kranzberg to H. Stuart Hughes, 26 June 1953, KP240.

62. In this he was like Stewart’s Americanist colleague at Western Reserve, Harvey Wish (the first member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who was Jewish, as was Mel in Humanities and Social Studies at Case), whose attempts to relocate are said to have “become chronic.” “History of the Department: The Mid-Twentieth Century, the War Years to the 1960s,” available online at http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/hsty/hsty4.html (accessed 13 July 2009).

63. Thomas LeDuc to Kranzberg, 6 April 1955; Kranzberg to LeDuc, 8 April 1955, KP140. The opening at Nebraska had been created by the departure of the charismatic Eugene Anderson for UCLA, which, with others soon to come, was building one of the strongest history departments in the country.

64. Charles Cole to Kranzberg, 9 April 1955, KP77.

65. Charles Cole to James Lee Sellers, 22 April 1955, KP77.

66. Mel’s monthly take-home pay was $485. “My financial situation is terrifying,” he confessed to an official of his temple, and his nephew Kenneth tells how “the company sent him money every year,” sometimes several thousand dollars. Mel never passed up a chance for extra income: lectures, summer sessions, manuscript critiques. At one point he had an idea for reinventing himself as a news analyst and tried to interest a Cleveland radio station in a program called “Behind and Ahead of the Headlines.” He discussed with Glennan a plan for writing a history of Case, which Shurter advised against because of Mel’s commitment to the textbook. Here was real irony, for the textbook was the one project that promised substantial income . . . and it was never finished. There is nothing sadder in the Kranzberg Papers than the records of the Macmillan project, with two boxes of correspondence and a dozen boxes of draft manuscript. After things had dragged on for thirteen years—with Case’s director of public relations brought in as a rewrite man and with Mel’s fabled optimism stretched beyond all reason—Macmillian dropped the project, its history editor telling the authors that they simply did not understand “historical writing at this level” (Robert J. Patterson to Kranzberg, Buchanan, and Jellema, 26 January 1968, KP284). While this remark was rather unfair to the authors, they certainly did need to be taught a lesson about deadlines.

67. Gordon Wright, “In Memoriam: David H. Pinkney,” French Historical Studies 18 (1994): iii–vii, quoted in “David Pinkney, French Historian,” available online at http:// www.washington.edu/research/showcase/1966c.html (accessed 13 July 2009). Pinkney was the secretary-treasurer for the first six years. He was also the second editor of the society’s journal, from 1967 to 1976, and served on the editorial board for twenty-seven years. See Edward Berenson and Nancy L. Green, “The Society for French Historical Studies: The Early Years,” French Historical Studies 28 (2005): 579–600.

68. Unlike most less gregarious people, Mel actually seems to have enjoyed making local arrangements, and only a month later he took a similar role for a Cleveland meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

69. David Pinkney to Stewart, Kranzberg, et al., 28 March 1959, KP279.

70. Once he had decided to start a new society, Mel was strikingly frank about his ambitions, telling Lynn White that he “should like to occupy the same position in relation to the Society [SHOT] as Boyd Schaefer does with the AHA, i.e., secretary of the organization and editor of its journal, both on a permanent basis” (Kranzberg to White, 31 March 1958, KP217). (The SFHS was in many ways a mirror image of SHOT, even to a creation story about French historians having been slighted by the AHA, just as historians of technology were said to have been slighted by the History of Science Society.) Eventually, and probably inevitably, there would be a perception that Mel had “too much power,” and for what happened at that point see Robert C. Post, “‘A Very Special Relationship’: SHOT and the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 401–35, esp. 432–33.

71. Seely (n. 16 above), 753. The ASEE report was published as “General Education in Engineering” in the Journal of Engineering Education 46 (1956): 619–750.

72. Records of the ASEE Humanistic-Social Research Project are archived with the North Carolina State University Libraries Special Collections Research Center in Raleigh. In the summer of 1956, Mel arranged a symposium at Iowa State with a session on pedagogy that featured Condit, Alfred Chandler, and several other notables, including Henry Guerlac!

73. Kranzberg to Mrs. George Gullette, 11 February 1970, KP112. Italics added.

74. Kranzberg to Marie Boas, 16 October 1956, Records of the Society for the History of Technology, Record Group 400, Box 1, Archives Center, National Museum of American History (hereafter SHOT and the box number: SHOT 1). Boas, whom Mel had known when they both lived in Amherst, had just succeeded Thomas Kuhn as HSS secretary and was shortly to join the faculty at UCLA and later to be joined by her new spouse, A. Rupert Hall. Boas, who first stirred my own enthusiasm for historiography, died in March 2009, as did Hall.

75. Lynn White to Kranzberg, 14 November 1956, SHOT 1. The correspondence from this period with White, Boas, Guerlac, Gullette, and many others is online at the SHOT website (“Looking Back: Selections from the Kranzberg Papers,” http://fiftieth. shotnews.net/?cat=15> [accessed 13 July 2009]).

76. Kranzberg to Marie Boas, 20 November 1956, SHOT 1.

77. Kranzberg to Bernadotte Schmitt, 13 March 1959, KP240. Mel had led off his Heath pamphlet with Schmitt’s “1848—as Seen from 1948,” reprinted from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

78. Kranzberg to Robert E. Carlson, 20 February 1959, KP50. This is one of the more remarkable letters in the Kranzberg Papers, some 4,000 words of history and autobiography. Of course nothing came of Mel’s proposed move to Pitt, though Carlson became a faithful reviewer for Technology and Culture and Mel repaid his loyalty with an upbeat review of The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Project, 1821–1831 (New York, 1969) in the American Historical Review 75 (1970): 2056–57, one of many reviews he wrote for the AHR throughout his career, as well as reviews for The Historian and Journal of Modern History.

79. Kranzberg to Charles Cole, draft, January 1958, KP77.

80. Kranzberg to William H. Davenport, draft, 11 March 1958, KP82. Although this position went to John Rae, Mel remained in close contact with Davenport, chair of the department and one of the “Seven Samurai” who comprised the original Harvey Mudd faculty. Later they would collaborate on an anthology from Technology and Culture, and Mel would become a candidate for provost at Claremont. As for UCLA, Lynn White did not abandon his enthusiasm for getting Mel to Westwood for a long time, asking him as late as 1967 (3 April, KP 217), “In specific and realistic terms, what would be necessary to move you and your shop here?”

81. Kranzberg to Charles Cole, 9 March 1959, KP73.

82. David H. Pinkney, “The Dilemma of the American Historian of Modern France,” French Historical Studies 1 (1958): 19–20.

83. Mel described the bleak situation with Shurter (the two had not spoken in nearly a year) and Heald’s rescue in a letter to White (9 July 1959, KP217). And in a memorable conversation during SHOT’s fiftieth-anniversary meeting in October 2007—with Carroll Pursell, Bruce Sinclair, Darwin Stapleton, Donna Stapleton, Bo’s wife Barbara, and me present—Bo recounted the crisis from his own perspective. As he relived the bustle of the society’s formative years, when he taught a course he called “Technology in American History and Thought,” all of us realized that this remarkable man was the unsung hero in SHOT annals. Before coming to Case, Bo had been an author of the so-called Yale Report commissioned by the CIA’s Sherman Kent (also a Yale history professor) to show how much the USSR could know about U.S. military preparedness just from unclassified sources: see Winks, Cloak and Gown (n. 39 above), 457–61. Though Winks identified Heald as “an instructor in history with an interest in technology,” he would largely make his mark as a scholar in American studies. Bo arrived at Case in 1953 and retired as Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities in 1988, which was also the year that Pursell returned to Case, where he had first taught between 1963 and 1965 and had played an essential role in the launch of a pathbreaking survey, coedited with Kranzberg, Technology and Western Civilization (see Ceruzzi, “‘A Broad Canvas’” [n. 19 above]).

84. Kranzberg to Henry Guerlac, 28 June 1957, SHOT 1; Kranzberg to Roger Howley, 22 October 1958, KP284.

85. At the time of the departmental crisis, Mel confessed to being “mentally exhausted,” one of the unusual occasions when his correspondence reveals something of his private state of mind, which must seldom have been tranquil in his Case years. On the verge of retirement from Georgia Tech, he wrote to an old friend: “Looking back on my own career, I sometimes wonder whether I did the wise thing in moving from Case 15 years ago. But there were developments in my personal life—especially a new wife—that made the move seem very attractive” (Kranzberg to W. David Lewis, 6 January 1987, KP142). The new wife was Deaux, who died at age fifty in 1979, breaking Mel’s heart. Mel would find Les, a love as dear as Deaux, and they would marry in 1984. But to try and understand what it means that there were three other wives while Mel was at Case, Nancy, Eva, and Heidi? Charles Beard once cautioned that he could “never write the life of anyone” because of his awe for the complexity of human personality. In The Nature of Biography (New York, 1957), 11, John Garraty quotes Beard and also these lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk: “There’s always something one’s ignorant of/About anyone, however well one knows them/And that may be something of the greatest importance.”

86. Carroll Pursell to the author, 19 May 2008.

87. Mel’s concern about parochialism is echoed in the Richard Cook biography of Alfred Kazin (n. 36 above, e.g., 94), a book that continually engenders reflections about Kranzberg. Kazin, two years older, many times married, with spouses who may have “felt trapped in the role of duty-bound faculty wife” (Cook, 191), began a teaching stint at Amherst—at Cole’s invitation—three years after Mel left.

88. Gus Giebelhaus, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Georgia Tech Years,” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 417. Mel might have written as compelling a World War II memoir as Brooke Hindle’s Lucky Lady and the Navy Mystique or Henry May’s account of the battle of Okinawa in his Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History. (May was similarly charged with interrogating prisoners about gun emplacements.) Mel understood that “a great many Americans put on a different personality in wartime and took it off with their uniforms” (May, p. 294), and yet, when ICOHTEC met in Lerbach nearly forty years after the end of the war, he still found it difficult “not to visit the sins of the fathers upon their sons.” My heartfelt appreciation to Karen Freeze for sharing with me Mel’s letters about the war; you are missed.

89. Mel boasted to Cole that there were only three such grants, the others going to Harry Wolfe, the editor of Isis, and to Bernard Cohen, “a big name in the history of science” (7 May 1959, KP77). Mel soon stepped right into a leading role with the IUHPS as secretary.

90. Robert P. Multhauf, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Inventor,” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 406 (emphasis added).

91. Melvin Kranzberg, “T. Keith Glennan (1905–1995),” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 659.

92. Arthur P. Molella, “The First Generation: Usher, Mumford, and Giedion,” in Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, eds., In Context: History and the History of Technology—Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 88.

93. Pamela O. Long, “The Annales and the History of Technology: Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 7 (November 1935), Les techniques, l’histoire et la vie,” Technology and Culture 46 (January 2005): 178.

94. Isis 41 (March 1950): 47.

95. S. Colum Gilfillan to Kranzberg, 15 March 1957, SHOT 1.

96. Gentleman Rebel (n. 15 above), 95.

97. Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 417. Nearly all the contributors to a new book edited by James R. Banner Jr. and John R. Gillis, Becoming Historians (Chicago, 2009), make similar remarks. On “timing” and the postwar trajectory of history in academe, worth noting is the membership of learned societies. In the first years after Mel went to Case in 1952, membership in the AHA was flat at around 5,600; in the five years after 1956, there was an increase of 3,000 members to nearly 9,000. Was history of technology a specialization with a “dubious” rationale (per Leo Marx), merely a manifestation of “careerism” (per David Noble)? Believe what you will, but, when T&C had reached only its fourth year, circulation topped 1,300, a remarkable indication of Mel’s success in bringing together a large and diverse group of men and women “who were but slightly conscious of their common interest” (Brooke Hindle, foreword to Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers [n. 34 above], ix).

98. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 19.

This is the 200th issue of T&C and the ninety-fifth with which Bob Post has had an editorial role, a contingency he could never, ever have imagined when he first sent Mel Kranzberg a manuscript in 1970. For help with this essay, he wishes to express his deep appreciation to Alison Oswald and her colleagues at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History; thanks to Hans-Joaquim Braun, Jim Williams, Timo Myllyntaus, Wolfhard Weber, David Zimmerman, and Wendy Tyler for facilitating the pres- entation of an early version at ICOHTEC’s annual Kranzberg Lecture at the University of Victoria, B.C., in August 2008; thanks to Mia Clark, Chris Eareckson, Joyce Macijeski, and their colleagues at the Talbot County Free Library for their interlibrary loan alacrity; and thanks for many different reasons to Edward Berenson, Larry Bird, Angus Buchanan, Paul Ceruzzi, Steve Cutcliffe, Mimi Dakin, Gus Giebelhaus, Bart Hacker, Daryl Hafter, Bo and Barbara Heald, Pat Higo, Bill Holley, Kenneth Kranzberg, Miriam Levin, Art Molella, Carroll Pursell, Alex Roland, Len Rosenband, Matt Roth, Joe Schultz, Bruce Seely, Howard Segal, John Servos, Bruce Sinclair, Harold Skramstad, John Staudenmaier, Jeffrey Stine, Jody Thompson, Steve Thompson, Steve Usselman, Eugene Uyeki, Roz Williams, Julie Wosk, and most especially Dian Post. He also wishes to take this opportunity to correct two errors in previous articles about the history of SHOT: Marie Boas Hall was related to Franz Boas but was not his daughter, and Bo Heald was a signatory to SHOT’s charter but did not accompany Mel to the Cuyahoga County Courthouse when it was filed.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The Record

Born in Scotland in 1911, Rae moved to the United States with his family when he was twelve.4 He studied at Brown University, where he received his B.A. in history in 1932, his M.A. in 1934, and his Ph.D. in 1936. His dissertation focused on the history of railroad land grants, but when he took a position at MIT in 1939, he considered himself an economic historian without portfolio. During the war he taught army and navy courses on military and naval history, which nudged him toward the history of technology, but his busy schedule kept him from seriously contemplating his next research steps. After the war he worked with Thomas H. D. Mahoney on a textbook, The United States in World History, which was published in 1949. This project prompted Rae to think more broadly about the role of technology in the development of the United States, as did an early-1950s collaboration with Lynwood Bryant to produce an MIT course reader on the industrial history of Lowell, Massachusetts. By the early 1950s, then, due in part to his work on these classroom texts but also to his everyday experiences teaching and working with engineers at MIT, Rae had very nearly decided to focus his future research on the role of the engineer in economic history.

The clincher came in 1953, when the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard invited him to conduct research on the engineer as entrepreneur. His work at the center—and, notably, his contact there with Hugh Aitken, Arthur Cole, and others working on technological matters— convinced him of the value of the engineer as a subject of historical inquiry. Rae was now certain that he had found his next general area of study, but he still lacked a definite focus. As he later explained, he “was convinced that the best way to proceed was to select a single industry for intensive investigation, one that had a reasonably rapid pace of technological change and could be presumed to have engineers well represented in its management.”5 Notice his dual interest in engineering and management: what Rae was really after was a way to study the relative importance of managerial savvy and technical expertise in the success or failure of industrial enterprises.6 He considered the railroad industry but decided against it after realizing that “every railroad spike in the United States already had at least one book written about it.”7 And so he turned to an area of investigation that was still very much the domain of the amateur enthusiast and largely untouched by serious scholars: the automobile industry.

He published the first of two important articles on the subject, “The Electric Vehicle Company: A Monopoly That Missed,” in Business History Review in 1955. In it he explored the attempt made by the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC) to monopolize the turn-of-the-century automobile industry on the basis of its expertise in electric traction; its considerable knowledge of manufacturing methods, by way of the Pope company; its absorption of electric-vehicle competitors and urban-traction lines; and its de jure, but ultimately not de facto, control of the internal-combustion market through the Selden patent. The EVC was a colossal failure, and Rae placed the bulk of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the firm’s management for committing several “avoidable errors of judgment.”8 Of these, the most important (or at least, the most commented-on in subsequent years) occurred at the firm’s founding in 1899, when its management picked the wrong horse by deciding to focus on electric traction rather than internal combustion or steam. This was an unfortunate but understandable error, according to Rae. For at the time, “the technical future of the horseless carriage was quite uncertain,” and “no one could say with assurance whether steam, electricity, or the internal combustion engine would prove to be the most acceptable substitution for the horse.”9 Electric traction was a viable option in 1899, and no one ought to fault the EVC for having chosen it at that time.

However—and this is the critical point, for Rae—the EVC’s decision to attempt to monopolize the industry on the basis of electric traction at a time of great technical flux, enormous market uncertainty, and minimal barriers to entry was a grave and less forgivable error. And when the internal combustion engine began to demonstrate its superiority to electricity and steam in the early 1900s—both because of its greater range compared with electricity (an important consideration when viewed in the context of an emerging market for personal vehicles based on the expectation of wideranging freedom of movement) and because of its relative simplicity of assembly and ease of maintenance compared with steam—the EVC compounded its electric-monopoly blunder by attempting to use the Selden patent to control the growth of the internal-combustion industry through an ineffective and arguably poorly managed patent pool known as the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. So for Rae, managerial miscues easily toppled the EVC, for although the firm was blessed with considerable technical expertise, at least on paper, its management lacked a sense of practical and technical balance. Hence its many blunders and its eventual, spectacular collapse.

In 1958, Rae followed up with a brief biographical sketch of William C. Durant.10 Here he momentarily set aside his general interest in the role of technical expertise, using the colorful and controversial career of Durant to explore instead the importance to successful managerial outcomes of a healthy balance between promotional skills and product enthusiasm, on the one hand, and administrative savvy, on the other. (Durant possessed an unhealthy surplus of the former and deficit of the latter.) This insight informed his approach to the larger, book-length project he was working on at the time; so too did the year he spent (1956–1957) as exchange associate professor at the Case Institute of Technology. There he met Mel Kranzberg and became involved in the endeavor to establish an academic society for the fledgling field of the history of technology. Rae, as is often said, had now cast his lot with SHOT. Perhaps more to the point, it was at Case that he completed the bulk of his work on that first monograph, which he finished in 1959 with the assistance of a grant from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. (Shortly thereafter he moved to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, where he would remain for the rest of his career.)

Published by the Chilton Company—best known today for its automobile repair manuals—Rae’s American Automobile Manufacturers was an attempt to understand the technical and managerial dynamics of the early automobile industry in the United States from its origins in the 1890s through the mid-1930s. More specifically, it was an industry-wide case study of entrepreneurship, and Rae’s central concern throughout its 208 densely packed pages was to highlight the importance of a working managerial balance between technical skill, product enthusiasm, and business savvy. Successful automobile companies (the vast majority of the firms founded in the 1890s and 1900s were anything but) were therefore those that were run by entrepreneurs who understood the technology of the automobile but were not obsessed by it—by those, that is, who were able to channel their enthusiasm and their technical expertise toward the creation of vehicles that could actually be produced and sold at a profit. Too much enthusiasm for a particular idea spelled doom for many a company; conversely, business savvy alone was rarely enough to sustain firms founded on anything but a technically solid basis. Put another way, one had to know cars, one had to know how to produce them, and one had to know how to sell them. Although this may not sound like a particularly profound insight, consider the record: of the hundreds (possibly thousands) of firms that entered the business in the 1890s and 1900s, only a tiny percentage survived for more than a few months, let alone years. Those that did not make it, as Rae carefully documents in his text, were those that did not possess the requisite balance of technical accomplishment and good managerial sense.11

To be more precise, nearly all of those that did not make it were run by individuals with plenty of technical expertise and automotive know-how but far too little practical managerial ability—those who would rather have gone broke building cars than become rich doing something else.12 Sufficient technical expertise was nearly universal among the early companies: this was a critical insight, one which raised serious doubts about the role of the mythical, learn-as-you-go tinkerer at the dawn of the automobile age. To support this point, Rae begins his narrative, following an introductory overview, with two detailed chapters painstakingly tracing the origins of literally hundreds of early automobile firms. Most, he demonstrates, were launched by entrepreneurs who were either accomplished technicians or, slightly less commonly, college-educated engineers.

Clever packaging enabled him to present a wealth of material on these firms and their founders without getting bogged down: chapter 2 covers those which began in the bicycle or carriage business and then moved on to cars, while chapter 3 examines those whose founders started off as machinists or engineers before attempting to move into the automobile business. Subsequent chapters carry the story through the mid-1930s, covering the evolution of the early market for cars and the gradual emergence of larger automobile firms, especially in the Midwest; the EVC and the Selden patent (Selden, Rae contends, was not an evildoer looking to bend the rules of patent law to his advantage, but rather an earnest man whose ultimately advantageous patent-issue delay had more to do with his honest inability to perfect his working model than with anything resembling a nefarious sense of good timing); the formation of the first successful combinations; Ford’s development of mass production and the cultivation of a mass automobile market; the industry’s contributions to World War I; the postwar recession and the declining role of smaller, independent firms; the maturation of the mass market and General Motors’s (read: Sloan’s) eclipse of Ford; and the triumph of the Big Three. Throughout, Rae emphasizes the substantial rate of attrition during the industry’s first forty years and the critical role of managerial savvy, as a counterweight to technological enthusiasm, among the leaders of the precious few firms that thrived.

The book was well received, for the most part. Reviewers responded positively to Rae’s detailed research into the backgrounds of so many individuals, to his documentation of the importance of technical and managerial balance, and to the clear and concise manner in which he presented the story of hundreds of men as they entered into the industry via the carriage, bicycle, and machine trades. One reviewer wished that Rae had been able to include more biographical depth on the many figures mentioned in the book, while another believed that Rae should have tried to use his wealth of empirical material to better address the philosophical question of the nature of entrepreneurship. Perhaps most significantly, one also criticized him for failing to do more to cover the role of organized labor and ordinary workers—for having written a book, that is, which focuses far too much attention on the accomplishments of industry leaders and does so in an overly kind and even glorifying manner.13

Indeed, Rae’s take on the early automobile industry and its pioneers is overwhelmingly positive. It is also openly celebratory in its nostalgia for the freewheeling, largely unregulated, pre–New Deal era of automobility it covers. “The growth of motor vehicle manufacturing in the United States,” Rae concludes, represents “as convincing a case for freedom of enterprise as can be found. . . . The most fitting summation seems to be to paraphrase Patrick Henry and say, ‘If this be Capitalism, make the most of it.’”14 Over the next quarter-century Rae would valiantly stick to his guns on this point, defending the automobile industry, the automobile itself, and the system of automobility they spawned against a rising tide of critics.15 Much more so than anything else, his positive attitude toward the car and his consistent defense of it would serve as an underlying, unifying theme in his three subsequent books on the automobile in American life.

Automobility’s critics remained few and far between in 1965, however, when Rae released his second monograph on the car, The American Automobile: A Brief History. Published in Daniel J. Boorstin’s University of Chicago Press series on the history of American civilization, this book built on Rae’s earlier work on the car and expanded it in two key ways. First, it covered a lot more ground, charging through the Great Depression—where his 1959 book ended—and carrying the story of the American automobile industry through the early 1960s. Second, and more significantly, the book dealt not simply with the automobile industry and its internal dynamics, but also with the automobile and its broader context—in the language of the time, the automobile’s “impact” on American society. Rae achieved all of this in a book scarcely fifty pages longer than his first by masterfully condensing his material from 1959 into the new book’s first seven chapters. This reserved the final seven for material on the New Deal; the automobile industry in World War II; the labor-relations and structural problems of the 1940s and 1950s; the postwar boom in road construction, including the interstates; the era of chrome and tailfins; the role of highway policy and automobile use in the reconfiguration of urban and suburban America; and a concise conclusion examining the road ahead.

The American Automobile is replete with talk of the car’s “impact” and “effects” on American life, but the book does not present a simple determinist narrative. Indeed, Rae normally goes to great lengths, even when writing that “modern suburbia is a creation of the automobile” or lamenting that “the automobile brought blight to the inner city,”16 to explain that the car itself does not and cannot do such things. Instead, the automobile is an enabler, and the widespread availability of automobiles has simply made it possible for Americans to indulge a number of behavioral impulses already present in their psyche. “It would be an exaggeration to say that the automobile made Americans a more mobile people,” Rae explains at one point. “It would be more accurate to say that an already mobile people was given the means to travel farther, faster, and more freely.”17 Thus the accelerated growth of suburbia in the age of the car is simply an extension of a much-longer-term trend toward population dispersal that began in the age of the railroad and streetcar.18 Likewise, the automobile did not simply create a demand for improved roads that was gradually met through the efforts of local, state, and federal authorities. Instead, the road and the car evolved in a mutually influential fashion, or so Rae hints on more than one occasion19 (this point would later serve as the interpretive anchor of his 1971 book, The Road and the Car in American Life). In short, the presentday reader who simply skims this text is likely to come away with the false impression that Rae is writing about a one-way street.

What is apparent at a glance is that Rae’s assessment of the automobile and the automobile industry’s impact on American life is nearly always positive. To those who bemoan the advent of Ford’s assembly methods for ushering in an era characterized by the “manufacture in quantity of cheap articles, inferior in quality to the product of handicraft methods and acceptable only because they are lower in price,” for example, Rae answers matter-of-factly that “the alleged sacrifice of quality to quantity is a myth.”20 And to those inclined to complain that suburban life is monotonous and its housing numbingly uniform, Rae explains that the impersonality of big city life is far worse than monotony and that suburbanites have by and large been justified in exchanging their crowded urban tenements for individual dwellings sited on small patches of green.21

Likewise, to those for whom mass automobile-based tourism is a blight rapidly destroying the natural beauty of America’s national parks through litter and excessive tireand footprints, Rae counters by pointing to the inherently democratic appeal of mass access and the implicit elitism of those who wish to eliminate it: “it [is] difficult to deplore the social revolution which opened recreational travel to the many instead of the privileged few.”22 And, finally, to those who by the mid-1960s had begun to contend that public investment in mass transit was a more sensible solution to the problem of urban congestion than the construction of additional highway miles, Rae explains at great length that

the automobile will be an extraordinarily difficult contender [for transit] to eliminate. Its disadvantages as a means of commuting between city and suburb can be freely conceded; nevertheless no existing or proposed system of mass transportation offers any real promise of dissuading the inhabitant of Metropolis from using his car if he possibly can. Whether the trip in town is made to go to work or to shop or for entertainment, the automobile allows flexibility of schedule, it avoids the nuisance of getting to and from stations or bus stops, and it is invariably pleasanter than riding in crowded, uncomfortable, and usually dingy public vehicles.23

Flexible in time and space and individually oriented, the automobile is simply better-suited to go where Americans want to go, and when, than any form of transit. Though he admits it has its flaws, the automobile is for Rae the cornerstone of an American way of life that is on balance worth embracing.

When The American Automobile hit the shelves, the reception was mixed—and indeed, the book’s useful life as a “must read” turned out to be remarkably short. One reviewer complained that Rae was once again too brief in his discussion of labor and too kind in his analysis of industry leaders in what is otherwise a well-researched and notable contribution to the field. Another generally liked the book but believed it would have benefited from a more thorough comparison with developments in Europe, a fair complaint, while another simply noted that the book’s great weakness is that it is too concise. At least one other was much less kind, judging that “by far the greater part of the material presented is entirely lacking in freshness,” that “many of [the book’s] interpretive observations are either trite or truistic,” and that “for the business historian or economist there is very little here.”24 Ouch.

Mixed reviews had very little to do with the book’s short shelf life, though. This was due instead to what in hindsight cannot but be judged a most unfortunate matter of timing. Written in the early-to-mid-1960s and released in 1965, The American Automobile appeared at the very tail end of the 1940s–1960s zenith of American automobility. Against a mid-to-late1960s-and-early-1970s backdrop that featured Ralph Nader’s scathing Unsafe at Any Speed (1965); the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966); the advent of mandatory pollution-control devices on vehicles sold in California (1966) and the 49-state market (1968); violent riots (those of 1966–1968, most notably), which took place in the very areas of urban blight Rae attributed to the growth of mass automobility; the federal Clean Air Act (1970); and the OPEC crisis (1973), Rae’s positive appraisal of the automobile as a source of social and economic progress rapidly came to seem far out of step with reality.

Following a brief flirtation with the history of aviation in the late 1960s—begun, he would later explain, under the mistaken impression that the aircraft business was a close technical and managerial relative of the automobile industry25—Rae therefore turned back to the history of the automobile at the end of the 1960s, at least in part to return to its defense. This effort resulted in what is arguably his best-known and certainly his most ambitious book, The Road and the Car in American Life, sponsored by the Automobile Manufacturers Association and published by the MIT Press in 1971. In it Rae broadened the scope of his earlier inquiries into the role of the car in American history by treating the automobile and the highway as a single transportation system. More precisely, his primary goal in this text was to explore the ways in which the state of vehicle technology have influenced the art of road construction—and vice-versa—over time. But this is not a work of co-construction. Instead, Rae leads his readers through a number of historical eras, each characterized by a particular direction of influence in this road–car dialectic: at times the state of road building has spurred innovations in wheeled-vehicle technology, while at others, innovations in the latter sparked improvements in the former. His coverage of this ongoing developmental race between the road and the car begins at the dawn of civilization and runs through ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and colonial America en route to the late-nineteenthand twentieth-century United States, where the bulk of his tale is set.

The impact of this ongoing race on American development is a central concern of The Road and the Car in American Life. And not surprisingly, Rae’s overall assessment of the social and economic effects of the automobile-highway system is positive—often unapologetically so. He argues that its maturation has been a critical source of economic stimulus and upward mobility in the twentieth century, for example, both because of the expanded opportunities for employment available to a mobile population and because of the greater flexibility in the movement of goods and raw materials associated with shortand long-haul trucking.26 Returning to a theme he addressed in 1965, Rae also praises the road-car system for having opened new possibilities in long-distance tourism and national-park access, for “the growth of such driving for pleasure is certainly a social benefit in that it gives an increasingly urbanized civilization a ready outlet for recreation.”27 Good roads and cheaper, more reliable cars have also transformed rural American life for the better, helping to diminish the rural-urban divide in terms of access to quality health care, education, and broader markets for ideas and goods. Suburban housing, suburbanized industry, and the Interstate Highway System receive glowing coverage as well.28

This is not to suggest that Rae was somehow unaware or unconcerned with what was by 1971 an ever-expanding list of complaints against automobility. On the contrary, The Road and the Car in American Life expands Rae’s earlier coverage of the problems associated with mass tourism and the growing specter of urban blight. It also includes detailed examinations of traffic congestion, air pollution, and other blemishes on his subject’s record. But he wasn’t willing to blame the road-car system for having caused all of these problems, and he certainly wasn’t ready to give up on the system altogether because of those that it had.

Urban congestion, for example, existed long before Model Ts, White trucks, and eight-lane superhighways. If the road-car system has indeed made urban traffic worse, he explains, this has been due not to any fundamental flaw in the theoretical ability of the road and the car to move people and goods efficiently. Instead, it is due to the blunder made by earlytwentieth-century urban officials when many of them, especially in older cities, failed to grasp the revolutionary potential of motorized transport. We would not be in the mess we’re in, that is, “if the nature of automotive transportation had been recognized sooner and if prompter measures had been taken to adapt to it. Instead motor vehicles were expected to merge into existing traffic and transportation patterns and to share the same streets with trolley cars, wagons, bicycles, and pedestrians,” leading to makeshift solutions to regulate the flow of traffic that have prevented us from realizing the full potential of the road-car system.29 This lapse into counterfactual speculation—rare for Rae—does of course beg the question of why metropolitan areas that grew up in the age of the automobile (Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit) aren’t the free-flowing motorized utopias envisioned by the enthusiasts and boosters who laid out their extensive networks of highways and roads.

Rae returns to the question of urban congestion several chapters later to discuss the range of proposed solutions bandied about in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here his analysis is commendably evenhanded. He begins by explaining that, because urban congestion is a problem dating back long before the advent of the automobile,30 one then-popular proposal to ban automobiles from urban areas altogether is likely to do little in the long run to alleviate congestion. It might help alleviate the urban air-pollution problem, but it won’t make getting from point A to point B in and around our cities any easier. Instead, he argues that what we need is a more balanced approach that aims to limit the number of cars entering a central business district on any given day without restricting the flow of cars so much that easy access to the urban core is jeopardized. Public transportation can and should play an important role in this, he explains, especially in older areas where extensive transit infrastructure already exists. And for metropolises built up during the age of the road-car system, he suggests that buses are a better option than rail-bound transit because they are cheaper and better able to meet the transportation needs of a dispersed population. More careful attention to the regulation of automobile traffic is important as well, and here Rae recommends improvements ranging from functionally separated streets to intelligent signals and reversible lanes. Whatever policies we choose to adopt in the years to come, however, Rae cautions that none of these solutions should be forced on an unwilling public. “In a free society, public acceptance of a policy is a vital element.”31

Here he is harking back to a key argument he introduces a few chapters earlier in his discussion of suburban development. Responding to those who criticize suburban America and claim that we would all be better off if tract housing and cul-de-sacs had never materialized, Rae admits that suburbia has its drawbacks in everything from community and aesthetic values to metropolitan-area taxation policies. But he remains convinced that “none of this can alter the plain fact that American suburban life is here, that it is a major and integral part of American society, that this is so because a sufficient number of people prefer suburban existence as a way of life, and that it is a way of life with positive qualities,” particularly when compared with densely packed urban living. His conclusion? “Americans who wish to live in apartment clusters close to public transportation should certainly have the option of doing so,” but the preferences of those who “vote decisively for suburbs” must be respected as well. The key, that is, is to allow for the development of a natural balance in urban policymaking, a balance grounded at all times in individual free choice rather than political manipulation.32

In his concluding chapter, however, Rae’s evenhandedness recedes, and he adopts a bold and decisive stance in defense of mass automobility the likes of which would rarely appear again in academic texts on the subject:

There is nothing automatic about the growth of modern highway transportation. It is neither an inevitable consequence of inexorable, impersonal forces, nor is it the end product of a sequence of unrelated accidents. It is the result of human activity responding to unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied needs, and its phenomenal growth has been due to the fact that it has filled these needs better than anything else that has appeared so far.33

Returning to the theme of egalitarianism a few pages later to better explain his point, Rae claims that in the automobile’s unique ability to satisfy our transportation needs, “there is more than just convenience” at work.

The mobility conferred by the automobile has benefited ordinary people most. The wealthy could afford coaches and carriages and so had some freedom of movement, . . . [but o]rdinary people seldom ranged any distance from home; if they did, they had to go by some form of public conveyance, provided it was available, or they walked. This is where the automobile has been an instrument of social revolution, first in the United States and now extending throughout the world. Perhaps this social revolution explains the distaste of so many self-appointed “elite” groups for the automobile, or more accurately for automobile ownership by people other than themselves. It is one thing to profess concern for the “common man” but quite another to have to accept him on terms of actual equality
. . . . In this whole general attitude there is a curious affinity between the “old guard” and many of those who identify themselves as “intellectual liberals.” The affinity may well arise from the fact that both groups consider themselves to be elites, better qualified to judge what is good for the common man than the common man himself and therefore entitled to impose this good regardless of how the recipient may feel about it.34

“The individuality of automobile transportation,” he concludes, “is something that Americans, and others, are not going to give up except under a degree of compulsion completely unacceptable in a free society.”35 Like it or not, Americans tend to prefer the road-car system to any of its alternatives. And this, he argues, is a fact with which politicians, academics, and other pundits need to come to terms—assuming, of course, that they actually believe in the democratic values they publicly embrace.

The Road and the Car in American Life was widely received precisely as Rae must have intended: as a controversial slap in the face to automobility’s knee-jerk critics, especially those in the academy. At least one reviewer welcomed the book’s intervention, “at a time when there is a strong tendency to emphasize the adverse features of highway transportation,” for providing “a more balanced view of its benefits, without denying the crucial concerns of the critics of automotive transportation.”36 Others also praised the book’s balance, especially for the way it covers the disasters attributable to the car (urban blight and the deteriorating state of the national parks, most notably) while also demonstrating that the auto-centric world of the early 1970s exists precisely because people have chosen to make it so.37

Others were less convinced that Rae was aiming for balance. In Technology and Culture, Reynold M. Wik pointed out that the book’s origins in an Automobile Manufacturers Association grant were likely to raise doubts about its objectivity. Wik also noted that automobility’s critics would find little of value in Rae’s assessment and recommendations, “which seem to promise more cars, more concrete, more black top, and more Chamber of Commerce speeches”—more of the same. Wik’s review concluded with the observation that the problems associated with mass automobility were far more serious than Rae admits. Solutions “rooted in the political clout of governmental agencies” were therefore likely to remain the demand of a public increasingly fed up with the car and its ill effects, regardless of whether or not that same public also preferred individual mobility.38

James J. Flink’s assessment was more damning. Writing in Business History Review, Flink began by praising Rae for “treating the road and the car . . . as an integral unit, integrating two distinct bodies of historical literature to the mutual benefit of both.”39 He also wrote that Rae is correct in his overall evaluation that “mass automobility has been on balance beneficial,” and that “any viable transportation system for the foreseeable future must be based primarily on the road and the car.”40 But Flink was deeply troubled by Rae’s defense of automobility and his inattention to the arguments of its critics. Too much of Rae’s perspective is based on “traditional, valueladen assumptions,” he wrote, assumptions that ought to be thoroughly questioned, including “the primacy of consumer need” and “the existence of consumer democracy.” That is, even if consumers have freely chosen automobility over its alternatives (and Flink hints strongly that this choice was in fact not made freely), then we still must question whether this preference actually outweighs the need to deal with its unanticipated consequences. More condemning was Flink’s dismissal of one of Rae’s most important critiques of the road-car system’s foes.

Professor Rae . . . seems fairly oblivious to the decimation of the scenic beauty of the American countryside and our free-flowing streams and remaining wilderness areas by the incursions of the road and the car. His lopsided view of the benefits of urban sprawl and his simplistic characterization that people are undemocratic who protest against the threat that uncurbed automobility poses to our national parks illustrate this.41

Flink nevertheless concluded by recommending The Road and the Car in American Life because it promised to “raise the quality of debate over the faults and merits of the American automobile revolution.”42

And for a brief while it did. But in the end, this was a debate that the automobile’s critics were all but destined to win in a decade marked by worsening pollution, reprehensible behavior on the part of the Big Three, economic stagnation, and two major oil crises. The 1970s would belong not to Rae and his optimistic defense of the road and the car, but to those like Flink, whose personally and politically charged condemnation of the automobile, The Car Culture (1975), ended with the suggestion that nothing less than a cultural revolution was necessary if the shackles of the age of the car and all it entailed were ever to be shed. For Flink, the automobile belonged to an era of “self interest, greed, and waste,” whereas the automobile-free society of the future would be one of “true community and expanded democracy, free from . . . privatism, materialism, escapism, and exploitation.”43 Clearly Rae and Flink did not agree on the meaning of the word “democracy,” Rae preferring an interpretation in which individual choices and individual lives are paramount and Flink one valuing community and collective effort instead.

Flink mellowed out a great deal by the time he produced what came to be the first truly long-lived and nearly universally assigned synthesis of American automobility some years later, 1988’s The Automobile Age. Prior to that book’s appearance, though, John Bell Rae took one more crack at the elusive goal of producing an enduring synthesis with The American Automobile Industry, published in Albro Martin’s Twayne series on the evolution of American business in 1984.

With this book, Rae returned to where it all began for him two-and-ahalf decades earlier by producing a volume focusing squarely on the automobile industry. The result is not entirely devoid of social context, but it is demonstrably less ambitious than his contributions of 1965 and 1971. And, unlike his narrowly tailored 1959 examination of the industry’s first forty years, The American Automobile Industry endeavors to carry the story through to what was then the present. Divided into four chronologically oriented sections—the period of origin and growth (chapters 1–5), the period of American dominance (chapters 6–9), the period of governmental regulation and foreign competition (chapters 10–12), and the then-current era of the “international automobile industry” (chapters 13–14)—the book seeks above all else to highlight what Rae saw as the industry’s chief contributions to global business: its techniques of mass production and its innovations in the realm of business organization. The book also revisits some of the major concerns of Rae’s prior work on the industry, most notably its long-term trend toward oligopoly and the importance of individual personalities to its early growth and maturation.

By far the biggest departure from his earlier work evident here, apart from a more ambitious chronological breadth, is the book’s effort to place the American automobile industry within an international context. This was due in part to what Rae learned while writing a history of Nissan’s presence in the United States—a project the firm commissioned on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its involvement in the North American market in 1980, and which McGraw-Hill published in 1982.44 Thus one finds a great deal more here than in his previous volumes about the early American industry’s growing export trade in the 1920s and its decision to work around German, British, and French import restrictions by establishing or acquiring European subsidiaries (Ford of Europe, for example, and GM’s Vauxhall/Opel).45 One also finds a much more satisfactory discussion of the first American “compacts” of the late 1950s, developed as a half-hearted response to American market-share gains by Volkswagen and Renault, among others, as well as an informative look at the ways in which Japanese brands managed to nudge aside VW as the imported-car leader in the American market in the 1970s.46

Perhaps most intriguing is Rae’s chapter on “the international industry” of the 1980s. Here he recaps the international expansion of Americanbrand production into Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as similar moves by VW into Latin America, South Africa, and the United States in the 1970s. Beginning with Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant, Japanese manufacturers followed VW’s lead in the early 1980s by establishing plants of their own in the United States. All of this resulted in the emergence of a truly international industry, Rae concludes, one in which the market for cars “has come to transcend national boundaries completely.”47 He explains that this is most clearly evident in the emergence in the 1980s of the so-called “world car,” a philosophy of manufacturing in which a single model of car is designed globally, produced at numerous plants, and sold for use throughout the world. In his discussion of the world car concept, though, his choice of the Ford Escort as an example is unfortunate, for the Escorts sold in North America differed notably (in powertrain and in body design) from those sold elsewhere.

Indeed, this points toward a more substantial shortcoming of Rae’s analysis of the international industry: notably absent here is any real discussion of the many ways in which government regulations and market preferences gave rise to major differences between a given car as sold in the United States and as sold, for example, in Western Europe. This was true even of cars much more similar in their international variations than the Escort, everything from the humble VW Beetle to the exotic Lamborghini Countach. Market-specific differences in these vehicles were many, though the most common were variations in bumper structures and shapes, seat contours, ride heights, headlight configurations, exhaust systems, and engine displacement and tuning. Rae is not alone in overlooking marketspecific variations, of course—the same basic oversight mars Flink’s The Automobile Age, too—but given the importance Rae attributes to the international character of the 1980s automobile industry, it is an unfortunate stumble.48

The American Automobile Industry ends with a return to some of Rae’s trademark arguments regarding the indispensability of the car to American life, including the familiar refrain that “no form of public transportation, existing or in prospect, can compete with the private automobile in economy or . . . door-to-door convenience.”49 But he seems to lack the same sense of conviction that was evident in his earlier monographs.50 Thus, while he clearly reaffirms his belief in the future of our auto-centric society, he also at least hints that the automobile itself is due for a makeover, at least in terms of our choice of fuel.

Twenty-five years and one SUV boom later, a revolution in fuels does at long last appear to be in the offing: electric vehicles are beginning to reappear, and hybrids and clean-diesel power at least seem to promise a future for the automobile not characterized by a gluttonous appetite for liquefied dinosaurs. Interestingly enough, however, our best present-day solution to the problem of battery range—a critical electric-vehicle bottleneck Rae emphasized in his 1955 article on the EVC and also toward the end of The American Automobile Industry twenty-nine years later—appears to be the use of an auxiliary gasoline engine to recharge short-lived electric cells on longer trips (as in the much-ballyhooed and much-delayed Chevrolet Volt). One wonders what Rae might have thought of this and many of the other trends within the present-day industry not evident in the mid-1980s, but in the end, The American Automobile Industry would be his final word on the subject; John Bell Rae passed from this life on 24 October 1988.

The Legacy

While working on this essay I obtained a copy of John Heitmann’s new synthesis, The Automobile and American Life. Reading through its introduction, I was not surprised to find that Heitmann’s goal was to produce a new industry-standard volume to replace James Flink’s long-in-the-tooth The Automobile Age on undergraduate and graduate reading lists. Flink’s text is after all the standard go-to volume, the one book on cars that everyone involved in the business, technological, economic, and cultural history of the United States is likely to have on his/her shelf—and, by extension, the one book most are likely to recommend as a point of departure to students eager to learn more about the history of the car. And this has been the case for more than twenty years. (Gus Giebelhaus and Steve Usselman both recommended Flink’s survey to me when I was cutting my teeth at Georgia Tech in the 1990s.)

What was a bit surprising as I worked my way further into Heitmann’s text is that his first mention of John Rae’s work appears in his twenty-eighth footnote, well past his introductory coverage of the historiography and well into his detailed discussion of the early automobile industry. A quick glance at Heitmann’s bibliography revealed entries for four of Rae’s books—his monographs of 1965, 1971, and 1984, as well as his edited volume on Henry Ford from 1969—and a more thorough examination of his footnotes did reveal a number of nods to Rae’s work. But Heitmann’s references to Rae all deal with matters of detail rather than historiographic significance. And this observation in turn prompted me to wonder what the authors of some of the other volumes and papers on the automobile currently occupying valuable real estate on my office shelves actually have to say about John Rae’s work. What exactly is his legacy?

The shelf- and cabinet-emptying exercise that followed was neither quantitatively precise nor comprehensive. But it did suggest that with a handful of exceptions, most of which date to the 1970s and 1980s, Rae’s body of work on the automobile has by and large been relegated to the status of deep-background reference—it has come to be recommended for its strength as a general starting point, that is, rather than for its specific historiographic contributions. The exceptions largely prove the rule. Flink engages Rae extensively in his first two books, for example.51 Bruce Seely does the same when setting up Building the American Highway System (1987), while Clay McShane, in Down the Asphalt Path (1994), lumps Rae and Flink together as important contributions which nevertheless smack of technological determinism.52 And then of course there’s the work of David A. Kirsch and Gijs Mom on the history of the electric car, work in which they chastise Rae both for characterizing the turn-of-the-century electric car as a technological dead end and for concluding that the EVC was a monopoly that was destined to fail.53 Bruce Epperson takes Rae to task for misreading Albert Pope’s attitude toward electric and gasoline power as well.54 But the vast majority do little more than point to Rae for a bit of background reading here, or for a specific point of fact there.55 Indeed, more than one recent survey fails to mention Rae at all.56 Why this essay, then? Why revisit John Rae’s work as “classic” if its long-term relevance appears to be on the wane? I could opt for the easy way out and simply say that Rae’s work warrants mention among the classics because he got the ball rolling in the realm of automotive history and, in the words of James J. Flink, “legitimiz[ed] automotive history as a specialized field of scholarly inquiry.”57 Or I could simply point once more to Rae’s place among the founding figures of our field. Both, I think, are valid justifications.

But for me it’s the substance of John Rae’s work itself that has earned it a place among the classics. Speaking as one who was raised, literally and intellectually, long after the American automobile’s heyday had come and gone and long after skepticism and on occasion outright disgust had come to be the norm in discussions of the car and all that it has wrought, I must confess that there is something inherently appealing about Rae’s progressive optimism. And I think I know why. Read against the backdrop of more than forty years of negativity, Rae’s work brings a welcome measure of balance to the discussion. This is why I think it’s a shame that Rae’s books aren’t read all that closely anymore. Are they behind the times on more than a few points of fact and interpretation? Certainly, as most works of history in their third, fourth, and fifth decades are apt to be. Are they overly optimistic? Perhaps, if read in isolation. Are they worth the effort required to arrive at a level of historical and sociological imagination sufficient to appreciate them as they were intended? Absolutely.

Call the man’s work what you will—dated, naive, romantic. I call it classic. And if this be scholarly treason, to return to Henry, then I plan to make the most of it.

1. John Bell Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers—A History of the Automobile Industry: The First Forty Years (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959). Rae’s first book was a joint enterprise—a textbook coauthored with Thomas H. D. Mahoney—that had appeared ten years earlier: The United States in World History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949).

2. On Rae’s role in SHOT’s formative years, see Thomas Hughes, “SHOT Founders’ Themes and Problems,” Technology and Culture 50 (July 2009): 594–99, and Robert C. Post’s essay in this issue of Technology and Culture, “Chance and Contingency: Putting Mel Kranzberg in Context,” 839–72. Rae’s 1959 book was reviewed by K. E. Boulding on pp. 104–5 of the first issue of T&C.

3. In addition to his coauthored work of 1949 and the aforementioned monograph of 1959, Rae published the following books in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: The American Automobile: A Brief History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); (as editor) Great Lives Observed: Henry Ford (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969); The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); The Development of Railroad Land Subsidy in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1979), which was based on his 1936 dissertation; Nissan/Datsun: A History of Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A., 1960–1980 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982); and The American Automobile Industry (Boston: Twayne, 1984). At the time of his death in 1988, Rae was working with Rudi Volti on a history of the engineering profession, which Volti completed and published several years later (Rae and Volti, The Engineer in History [New York: Peter Lang, 1993]). Leaving aside his many reviews and comments, Rae’s contributions to T&C include “The ‘Know-How’ Tradition: Technology in American History,” Technology and Culture 1 (spring 1960): 139–50; “Science and Engineering in the History of Aviation,” Technology and Culture 2 (autumn 1961): 391–99; and “Presidential Address: Engineers Are People,” Technology and Culture 16 (July 1975): 404–18. Significant contributions that appeared in other journals from the early 1950s on include “The Great Northern’s Land Grant,” Journal of Economic History 12 (spring 1952): 140–45; “The Railroad Land-Grant Legend,” Journal of Economic History 15 (March 1955): 112– 13; “Engineering Education as Preparation for Management: A Study of M.I.T. Alumni,” Business History Review 29 (March 1955): 64–74; “The Electric Vehicle Company: A Monopoly That Missed,” Business History Review 29 (December 1955): 298–311; “The Fabulous Billy Durant,” Business History Review 32 (autumn 1958): 255–71; and “Financial Problems of the American Aircraft Industry, 1906–1940,” Business History Review 39 (spring 1965): 99–114.

4. On Rae’s background I am drawing principally on John B. Rae, “John B. Rae: An Intellectual Autobiography,” Technology and Culture 22 (July 1981): 564–69, and James J. Flink, “Memorial: John Bell Rae (1911–1988),” Technology and Culture 30 (July 1989): 718–22.

5. Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography,” 567.

6. His early publications on the automobile industry, discussed in detail in the pages that follow, bear this out.

7. Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography,” 567.

8. Rae, “The Electric Vehicle Company,” 298.

9. Ibid.

10. Rae, “The Fabulous Billy Durant” (n. 3 above).

11. Indeed, Rae explains in his introduction (p. 3) that part of what attracted him to the early automobile industry was the fact that records of failed companies are abundant. This, he explains, made it possible to determine not simply what successful firms seemed to share in common, but also what those that failed shared. Failures were extremely common; lowball estimates of the total number of firms that tried to get into the business of automobile production stand at about 750, while highball estimates (such as that which Rae cites in this book, on page 5) stand closer to 2,900. Of these, Rae closely examined the fate of more than 500 in preparing this book.

12. This is a point on which Donald Finlay Davis would later build in his work on the technical and social—as opposed to purely profit-seeking—aspirations of the industry’s early pioneers. See Conspicuous Production: Automobiles and Elites in Detroit, 1899–1933 (Philadelphia, 1988), esp. 2–3.

13. Reviewers included Thomas C. Cochran, who critiqued Rae for failing to include more detail on the hundreds of individuals mentioned in the book (Business History Review 33 [autumn 1959]: 454–55); George Maxcy, who critiqued the book’s inattention to labor and its overly celebratory tone (Economic History Review 12, no. 2 [1959]: 344– 45); A. K. Steigerwalt (Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 [December 1959]: 548); Harold G. Vatter (Journal of Economic History 20 [March 1960]: 137–40); and K. E. Boulding (n. 2 above), who critiqued Rae in T&C for failing to do more to tackle the nature of entrepreneurship.

14. Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers (n. 1 above), 206.

15. He also came to be a consistent (but when appropriate, skeptical) defender of the notion that technological change can and often does lead to material progress; see, for example, his comments on the occasion of SHOT’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1984: “What Did We Expect SHOT to Wrought?” Technology and Culture 25 (October 1984): 731–34.

16. Rae, The American Automobile (n. 3 above), 220 and 226.

17. Ibid., 92.

18. Ibid., 92, 220–21, and 228.

19. Ibid., esp. 107 and 179.

20. Ibid., 53.

21. Ibid., 228.

22. Ibid., 195.

23. Ibid., 225.

24. Reviewers included Glen A. Niemeyer, who complained of its pro-business and anti-labor slant (Journal of American History 53 [June 1966]: 145–46); Asa Briggs, who noted its dearth of international context (English Historical Review 82 [July 1967]: 636– 37); Allan Nevins, who complained that the book was too brief (American Historical Review 71 [July 1966]: 1461–62); and Dwight E. Robinson, author of the scathing review quoted at length here (Business History Review 40 [spring 1966]: 121–24).

25. This flirtation resulted in a critically acclaimed and for many years definitive study of the American aircraft industry, Climb to Greatness (n. 3 above). For Rae’s take on the motivations behind (and the end results of) his brief shift into the world of aviation, see Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography” (n. 4 above), 568.

26. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (n. 3 above), chaps. 5 and 6.

27. Ibid., chap. 7 (quote on 141).

28. Ibid., chap. 8 (rural life), chap. 11 (suburban life), chap. 12 (suburbanized industry), and chap. 9 (interstates).

29. Ibid., 207.

30. However weak his aforementioned explanation for the worsening traffic problems of the twentieth century, he is certainly on solid ground on this more basic point.

31. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, 276.

32. Ibid., chap. 11 (quoted material appears on 246–47).

33. Ibid., 359.

34. Ibid., 361–62.

35. Ibid., 371.

36. Harold F. Williamson, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Journal of American History 59 (June 1972): 195.

37. Peter D’A. Jones, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in American Historical Review 77 (December 1972): 1516–17, and S. B. Saul, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Economic History Review 25 (November 1972): 736–37.

38. Reynold M. Wik, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Technology and Culture 14 (April 1973): 310–11.

39. James J. Flink, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Business History Review 46 (spring 1972): 123.

40. Ibid., 124.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. James J. Flink, The Car Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 233. A glance at Flink’s dedication to this 1975 volume reveals why an academic responsible for the evenhanded and well-received America Adopts the Automobile, 1895–1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) would turn out such an explosive polemic five years later: his young niece was struck and killed by an automobile on his thirty-ninth birthday.

44. Rae, Nissan/Datsun (n. 3 above).

45. Rae, The American Automobile Industry (n. 3 above), chap. 6.

46. Ibid., chaps. 10 and 12.

47. Ibid., chap. 13 (quote on 175).

48. For Rae’s take on the world car, see ibid., 170–75. Flink’s failure to recognize the importance of international market variations is most apparent on pages 324–26 of The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), where I count no less than nine errors of fact in his brief discussion of the Volkswagen Beetle and the Porsche 914 in the American market; each of these errors stems from his use of European-model data.

49. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, 185.

50. At least a couple of reviewers took note of this; see Stuart W. Leslie, review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Technology and Culture 27 (October 1986): 892–93 (esp. 893), and Joel W. Eastman, review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Business History Review 59 (autumn 1985): 503–5 (esp. 505). Charles K. Hyde, on the other hand, believed that Rae’s take in this book remains decidedly optimistic (review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Journal of Economic History 45 [June 1985]: 506–8 [esp. 507]).

51. See Flink, America Adopts the Automobile (n. 43 above), 5 and 296, and especially Flink, The Car Culture (n. 43 above), 158–59 and 212.

52. Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), 298, and Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994), xi.

53. See especially Gijs Mom, Geschiedenis van de Auto van Morgen: Cultuur en Techniek van de Elektrische Auto (Deventer, 1997), esp. 165; David A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 4, 20, and 170; Gijs P. A. Mom and David A. Kirsch, “Technologies in Tension: Horses, Electric Trucks, and the Motorization of American Cities, 1900–1925,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 489–518 (esp. 490n2); and Gijs P. A. Mom and David A. Kirsch, “Visions of Transportation: The EVC and the Transition from Serviceto Product-Based Mobility,” Business History Review 76 (spring 2002): 75–110 (esp. 75–76).

54. Bruce Epperson, “Failed Colossus: Strategic Error at the Pope Manufacturing Company, 1878–1900,” Technology and Culture 41 (April 2000): 316.

55. Among the many references I found are Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Baltimore, 1979), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 volumes as deep background; Jean-Pierre Bardou et al., The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, trans. James M. Laux (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), which cites Rae’s 1959, 1965, and 1971 contributions in its bibliography but refers directly to his work in but 1 of its 149 (admittedly quite sparse) footnotes; Donald F. Davis, “The Price of Conspicuous Production: The Detroit Elite and the Automobile Industry, 1900–1933,” Journal of Social History 16 (autumn 1982): 21–46, which cites Rae’s work on the Selden patent; T. C. Barker, “The International History of Motor Transport,” Journal of Contemporary History 20 (January 1985): 3–19, which cites Rae’s 1959 and 1965 volumes as important background reading; Carlos A. Schwantes, “The West Adapts the Automobile: Technology, Unemployment, and the Jitney Phenomenon of 1914–1917,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (July 1985): 307–26, which cites Rae’s 1965 book on a specific matter pertaining to jitneys; I. B. Holley Jr., “A Detroit Dream of Mass-Produced Fighter Aircraft: The XP-75 Fiasco,” Technology and Culture 28 (July 1987): 578–93, which cites Rae’s 1959 and 1965 books as deep background; Davis, Conspicuous Production (as discussed in note 12 above); John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore, 1994), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 volumes as important background reading; Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture 37 (October 1996): 763–95, which cites Rae’s 1965 book alongside Flink’s contributions in its coverage of the historiography; Robert Lewis, “Local Production Practices and Chicago’s Automotive Industry, 1900–1930,” Business History Review 77 (winter 2003): 611–38, which cites Rae’s 1959 book as deep-background material; Rudi Volti, Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, Conn., 2004), which cites Rae in its bibliography; Kathleen Franz, Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (Philadelphia, 2005), which does not deal with Rae in its introduction but does cite his work on a number of occasions on specific points; Robert C. Post, The SAE Story: One Hundred Years of Mobility (San Diego, 2005), which opens with an epigraph from Rae’s 1965 book; David N. Lucsko, The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990 (Baltimore, 2008), in which I cite Rae’s books as deep-background material and also inadvertently do Rae’s 1965 book a disservice by failing to list it among the handful of academic works that take note of hot rodding (Rae mentions the phenomenon on pp. 215–16); Jeremy Packer, Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (Durham, N.C., 2008), which cites Rae’s 1971 book as deep background in its bibliography; and Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 books in its introduction and goes on to cite his work on several specific points. Again, let me emphasize that this brief list is by no means intended to be read as anything remotely resembling a comprehensive enumeration of Rae’s footnote appearances over the years. It is instead a qualitative sample intended to hint at (but certainly not to definitively prove) a more general pattern.

56. I cannot locate a single reference to Rae in either Tom McCarthy’s Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven, Conn., 2007) or Brian Ladd’s Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (Chicago, 2008).

57. Flink, “Memorial” (n. 4 above), 720.

Dr. Lucsko, managing editor of Technology and Culture, teaches history of technology and transportation history at the University of Detroit Mercy. His book, The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990, appeared in 2008. He thanks Bob Post, John Staudenmaier, and Joe Schultz for encouraging him to undertake this revisit.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Robert Gwynne

Most museums reinvent themselves periodically. The process is never easy, and it becomes more difficult and costly when displays are built around such massive objects as steam locomotives. The Cité du Train in Mulhouse and the Nederlands Spoorwegmuseum in Utrecht have accomplished this dramatic reinterpretation.1 They are appropriate venues for such a transformation. France not only introduced the widely emulated high-speed Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) some thirty years ago, but its TGV Est, which stops in Mulhouse on its way to Switzerland, is the fastest passenger train in the world.2 The rail system in the much smaller but more densely populated Netherlands is the most intensively used on the Continent.

The French museum opened at its permanent site in 1976 to display steam locomotives and historic rolling stock formerly housed at the Mulhouse Nord railway depot. Although its geographic location in Alsace was not a natural tourist destination for either French nationals or foreign visitors, this Musée Nationale du Chemin de Fer became a popular attraction. Attendance fell over time, however, and the museum closed in December 2003 when work started on an extensive reconfiguration designed by architect (and former scenographer) François Seigneur. That process, which increased the size of the museum to 15,000 square meters and cost €8.6 million (over $12.3 million at current exchange rates), is the subject of a four-minute film shown on-site. Administration of the transformed facility was transferred to the entrepreneurial culturespaces,3 which performs this service for a number of French museums and historical sites. Since the typical French museum is staffed by government employees and closes one day each week, both the outsourcing and the “7 sur 7” schedule seem almost as radical as the actual recasting of the display.

Fig. 1 An 0-3-0 “Bourbonnais” locomotive welcomes visitors to the striking new building at the French National Railway Museum, now called “Cité du Train” (author photo).

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Rhine, the National Railway Museum of the Netherlands was undertaking its own renewal project. The museum had begun humbly enough in the mid-1920s to display rail-related ephemera. It was another decade before it began to preserve historically significant equipment, and some items were destroyed during the Second World War. It opened at its permanent site—the remodeled Maliebaan station—in 1954, but despite renovations in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, most of its collection of rolling stock—now augmented by a number of trams— was open to the weather. Major renovations began in 2003, when the station building was restored to its nineteenth-century appearance, and a new facility was built on the other side of the still-existing tracks to contain the “four worlds” described below. The complex reopened in 2005, at a cost of €35 million (over $50 million in today’s currency).

This review will compare the two facilities, presenting what typical visitors will see (and miss seeing) in each of these museums dedicated to the history of the train.

Visitors to the French museum may arrive by automobile (Michelin’s Guide Vert calls it “worth a detour”) or, more appropriately, by train. Both the high-speed TGV Est and the slower Train Corail halt in Mulhouse, where the utilitarian station is decorated with posters of the British-built, nineteenth-century, brass-clad, and flag-draped PO locomotive that pulled the train used by the president of France. After that brief introduction to the “golden age” of rail, however, passengers must board a city bus for the uninspiring ramble through residential and industrial zones to the edge of Mulhouse before they reach the museum where “Cité du Train” is spelled out in neon over the entrance, and a plinthed tank engine serves as a threedimensional logo (fig. 1). The Nederlands Spoorwegmuseum, on the other hand, is located near the city center, one of a cluster of museums and churches in Utrecht’s museum district, and is accessible by taxi, by bus, or—for the energetic—by foot. Its exterior gives few signs of the function the station has served for more than fifty years, restored as it is to the solid and unassuming character popularly associated with the Dutch, and as suitable to a shipping company or a law firm as to a museum (fig. 2).

Fig. 2 The entrance to the Nederlands Spoorwegmuseum at Utrecht seems understated, given the experience the museum offers (author photo).

In both cases, the step through the doorway is a revelation. Seigneur may have expended little architectural energy on the decorated shed that encloses the Cité du Train, but his scenographic experience is clearly in evidence inside its walls. After paying an entrance fee of €7.60 to €10 (children under seven are admitted free) and receiving audioguides, visitors pass through double doors, first into a bright orange space that heightens excitement, and then into what could be the set of a cinematic extravaganza. Within this vast, darkened “studio,” brightly lit scenarios are introduced by character mannequins that “come to life” when visitors approach. Peasants go off to market, a French president is left behind in his nightgown, the railcar arriving at the seaside in “The Holiday Train” is escorted by flying seagulls, and the engine in “Railways and Mountains” pushes through “snow” formed from polystyrene (fig. 3). Like “Official Trains,” “Railways and War,” “The Railway Workers,” and “The Journey,” these scenes reinforce the cinematic nature of the museum with archival film footage and fully dressed sets that include railway paraphernalia and equipment such as notice boards, distinctive seating, and water columns. The total is charming and— often literally—dazzling. Visitors in fact have cause to be grateful for the audioguides that free them from trying to read the (excellent) guidebook in the near dark. (The visual fatigue stemming from the extreme contrast in light levels is another story.) The guides are an excellent application of modern technology on one of the linguistic boundaries of Europe, since they may be tuned to French, English, or German and can even translate the “conversations” held by the mannequins. Despite their advantages, they do suggest that the displays were created with an adult audience in mind, a notion reinforced by the strictly linear progression from one scene to another, and overall, the spectacle rarely accommodates the social interaction that so often marks a museum visit. The locomotives themselves are spectacular, particularly—although its effect may be read as somewhat gruesome—the “Consolidation” steam engine, shown on its side as if the French Resistance had just blown up the track. The accompanying film fleshes out the work of the railways in the Second World War, but visitors are advised to read the guidebook to fully understand the story. At the end of this experience, visitors exit through a set of double doors and a second bright orange corridor into a glassed-in space where the café is located, and they may then enter the original museum building that houses “The Railway Adventure.” Here the overall impression is that little has changed since the original museum opened: large technical diagrams and ranks of locomotives and rolling stock prevail, intermittently punctuated by the sound of the 1949 Caso “Hudson” steam engine on rollers clanking into action, accompanied by a soundtrack of it steaming away. An adjoining play area is a nod to interactivity for families whose children have been bored by too much “spectacle.”

Fig. 3 The “Railways and Mountains” display features a Snow-Plough ZR1 “Aurillac” (built by the American Locomotive Company in 1908) pushing through a simulated snow-covered line (author photo).

The Nederlands Spoorwegmuseum is a generally more family-oriented experience. Upon entering the Maliebaan facility, one sees (and may photograph) the grand and quietly ostentatious “Royal Waiting Room,” transplanted from the Staatsspoor station in The Hague that was demolished in 1973. (Given the unassuming character of most stations in the Netherlands, this may be a greater surprise to Dutch visitors than for those accustomed to the glories of the Gare de Lyon, Grand Central Station, St. Pancras International, or even York.) The Royal Waiting Room itself is physically offlimits to visitors, but everywhere else there are a variety of playful means of connecting with the history of railways in the Netherlands. Kept luggage is open to view, and “Pepper’s ghost” gives a glimpse of rail travel in the nineteenth century. Life-sized cutouts of uniformed railway staff invite visitors to climb aboard, look inside, and play with interactive devices that are cleverly placed and camera-friendly. Admission (€9.50 to €12.50) is transacted, appropriately enough, at a ticket window in the station, and tickets-inhand visitors then exit the station and cross the railway tracks to explore the four different “worlds” in the new section. The first world of “The Great Discovery” (early nineteenth century) is not actually the first to be encountered, that location being unaccountably occupied by what is technically World 4, a large hall with trains called “The Workshop” (fig. 4). It is, however, brilliantly lit for the cameraphone generation, and it allows visitors to walk under a steam locomotive raised high on a gantry, so that its workings are easier to examine than would be the case were it displayed over an inspection pit as happens at Mulhouse, York, and other railway museums eager to exploit a locomotive’s hidden parts. Human “edutrainers” are on hand to explain what visitors are seeing. “Great Discovery” also uses an audioguide and a lift that “journeys back in time” to introduce the first passenger train in the Netherlands. As at the Cité du Train, the initial effect is cinematic, but the audioguide commentary, replica buildings, and range of objects combine to shape how “Die Arend” came to haul the first passenger train out of Amsterdam in 1839. “Great Discovery” visitors exit through rooms seen peripherally upon entry, an idiosyncratic gallery showing pictures of early railways in the Netherlands. World 2 is called “Dream Travels”—international trains at the turn of the twentieth century—and, somewhat oddly, uses the theme of the Orient Express to convey the possibilities of this kind of transportation. Visitors in need of a respite will appreciate the comfortable theater in this world and its films of certain aspects of railway history. Visitors in need of a sandwich will head toward the café, where they sit at tables decorated with locomotives while they look at real locomotives visible in “The Workshop” next door. World 3 presents the “Steel Monsters” of the 1930s and 1940s, but it does so via “Grandfather’s Attic,” an eclectic display of railway memorabilia, models, posters, and other ephemera, as well as via a “dark ride.” This is less a ghost train designed by social historians than an enjoyable—and unusual—three minutes of real trains and mannequins in dramatic interaction. Throughout, the displays and simple interactives allow adults and children to experience trains and railways together.

Fig. 4 Glasgow-built Nederlandsche Rhijnspoorweg-Maatschappij (NRS) number 107 of 1889 dominates “The Workshop” part of the Nederlands Spoorweg- museum (author photo).

Overall, both museums have opted for spectacle but have done so in ways reflective of their culture. The Cité du Train appears both somewhat grand and somewhat exclusive; the Dutch, as practical as their rail network is functional, have nuanced their approach to appeal to a family-centered audience. The “dark ride” borrows from theme parks, while the excellent miniature railway that goes around a lake and through a tunnel appeals to the kid in all of us. The Cité du Train hopes to add its own miniature train system, and it also wants to connect to the existing railway when another section of the TGV network is complete. Utrecht, meanwhile, has its own station and runs regular trips with historic railcars from the museum onto the main line. Neither facility brings the history of the train into the twenty-first century—or even into the late twentieth, for that matter. Still, both museums are well worth the journey. For nonspecialists, however, especially those visiting with children, Utrecht’s interactive displays and activities are more appealing—certainly, its “dark ride” is guaranteed to excite even the most jaded of museum goers, regardless of age.

2 The success of TGV transport has spelled the end of low-cost flights from the local airport to the capital, Paris.

3 The collapsed spelling and partial-boldface type convey the company’s intent to unify culture and espace (space).

Robert Gwynne is exhibitions and creative content developer at the National Railway Museum, York, UK, and a member of the team planning that museum’s £20 million redisplay, scheduled to open in 2012. He thanks the Trevor Walden Trust for funding his study-visit to the facilities reviewed here.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.