There were frequent showers on the train ride from Zürich Airport to Interlaken, but the sky began to clear as my brother and I approached our destination on the track running along the south shore of Lake Thun. The clouds lifted; a rainbow appeared on the other side of the lake; and then, astonishingly, one end of the arc seemed to leap across the water to our railway car, as if seeking us out. My brother and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. It was too maudlin, too corny for words, but there it was, and we were thinking the same thing: “It’s Mom and Dad!”

Chuck and I had last been in the Bernese Alps on a family vacation in 1959. We were returning in July 2010 in part as an homage to our now-deceased parents, and in part to relive an experience that had been among the most enjoyable and memorable of our lives. It was altogether a personal journey, not a business trip. Yet from the moment it began, I could not avoid some professional musings. What historian of technology could, when modern travel is a vast network of large technological systems? The contrast between those of 1959 and those of today struck me even before leaving Logan Airport in Boston. As the Swissair staff struggled to wedge everyone on the overbooked flight, a frustrated desk clerk muttered, “The loaves and the fishes are nothing compared to this.” I inevitably recalled the smaller, calmer Logan Airport of 1959: no commercial jetliners, true, but also no security checks or jostling for overhead bins.

All during our trip, Chuck and I kept comparing and contrasting technologies then and now. As our journey progressed, we found ourselves also thinking about other less visible stories of technological change, those connected with the larger social, political, and economic history of the cold war—with the context, to use the handy professional term. More layers of historical thinking were added as we contemplated the various ways humans, intentionally or otherwise, have altered even the Alps. Most of all, we became conscious of the connections between lifetime and historical time. Fiftieth anniversaries (fifty-first, in our case: close enough) have emotional and intellectual weight because they mark the threshold where individual memory begins to be transformed into collective memory. When fifty years have passed since an event—whether as personal as marriage, or as public as the end of a war—we humans know the odds are overwhelming that we will not be around for another half century. We think about how events of our lives might be reshaped into shared and therefore more enduring meaning. We try to make connections between personal and historical experience.

The story begins with a well-known, and oft-lamented, chapter in American industrial history: the beginning of the decline of American manufacturing. Our father was a General Electric engineer, and in 1956 the Industry Control department in which he worked had been moved from Schenectady, New York, to Salem, a small town in southwest Virginia near Roanoke. In retrospect we can now see that our family was caught up in the great diaspora of facilities and personnel to areas offering cheaper, nonunionized labor. Today, this is being done globally; at that time, “outsourcing” seemed possible within the United States.

Especially in those early years in Virginia, as Yankees we often had the sense of being strangers in a strange land. My brother and I have not forgotten the shock of stepping off the Norfolk and Western train and entering the Roanoke terminal in 1956 to see the rest room signs prominently labeled Colored and White. Chuck pointed to them, exclaiming, “Look at that!” Our mother later confessed that she was instinctively embarrassed by his outburst, while also sharing his dismay at this public reminder of racial segregation.

Nevertheless, the move had some real advantages, especially for our parents. The weather was milder. Our father enjoyed the small-town friendliness of Salem, and our mother was able to teach math in a local community college without a master’s degree. The Salem schools remained segregated during our years in them, as the Commonwealth of Virginia defied the 1954 Supreme Court ruling through a strategy of “massive resistance.” The schools were not very good, but Chuck and I learned what we could in them and made some close friends.

For our first summer vacation in the South, we took a road trip to the North Carolina mountains and Daytona Beach. After that, we headed elsewhere: to the Colorado Rockies for the second summer (the first time Chuck and I traveled by air), and to New England for the third. In early 1959, considering plans for our fourth summer, Dad learned that the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club was arranging a charter flight for members from Boston to Zürich, leaving in early July and returning three weeks later. He had never been out of the country, but his mother’s family was from Germany, and as an engineer he admired Swiss and German engineering. Mom had been to Europe in 1939, on a bicycling trip in the British Isles, and in 1954 had visited England and the Continent with her own parents. In both cases, she had crossed the Atlantic on Cunard liners. She liked the idea of introducing the whole family to some of the sights and places that had impressed her, especially in Paris.

So our parents signed up the family for the AMC charter flight. The four of us went to the main post office in Roanoke to get a family passport (all four on the same document). Dad arranged to pick up a VW Microbus in Zürich and mapped a roughly oval route for the three weeks we had at our disposal. The plan was to arrive in Zürich on July 6, drive west to the Bernese Alps, then east to Austria and southern Germany, west again via Metz to Paris, and finally eastward back to Zürich. On July 28 we would be ready to fly back to Boston via London and Shannon Airport in Ireland.

Nowadays a vacation trip to the European heartland for an American family has become routine. It was not so in 1959. For Chuck and me, the trip did much more than lift us out of a small town in southwest Virginia for a few weeks. For him, the trip encouraged a lifetime of hiking and similar outdoors adventures, culminating in his completion of the Appalachian Trail in three summers from 2006 to 2008. For me, it led to an academic career in the cultural history of technology, focused on Europe.

While technology is an essential ingredient in the sound of rock and roll, its presence in the museum is muted. The museum’s collection and exhibits are dominated by rock-star stage garb, electric guitars, photographs, assorted documents, ephemera, videos, and numerous listening kiosks and interactive exhibits. However, one small exhibit hall on the second floor, a newly reopened and expanded exhibit building on the original installation, features a timeline of audio technology and displays devoted to three individuals whose contributions were bound up in the technology of radio, recording, and performance.

A red-and-blue neon sign marks the entrance to “The Architects of Rock and Roll,” which profiles Les Paul, Alan Freed, and Sam Phillips as “the creative individuals behind the musicians” who exemplify the “technical innovators, mass communicators, sympathetic ears [who were] vital in getting music from the mind of a musician to the audience.” Given the museum’s predominant focus on rock stars, this recognition of those whose contributions have been less celebrated is a welcome addition and hopefully will inspire more attention to the many recording engineers, producers, and technicians who had so much to do with the sound of rock and roll. The term “architect” should be taken in the broadest sense here, but it aptly describes the contributions of these three, as each in his own fashion helped shape the music in some way.

Visitors first encounter Alan Freed, the disc jockey who first named the music “rock and roll” on his radio show in 1951. He went on to organize the first rock and roll concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena in 1952. Peter Hastings’s black-and-white photograph taken from the back of the hall captured the mayhem of that night. Concert promoters sold 20,000 tickets for a hall that seated 10,000, and most concert-goers could barely see or hear what was happening onstage. Freed hosted more Moondog shows and promoted and starred in movies like “Don’t Knock the Rock” and “Mr. Rock and Roll”—posters for these and others paper the exhibit’s walls. Soon Freed was lured to New York and WINS radio, where he dropped the Moondog moniker after being sued by street-musician Louis Hardin, who had gone by the name “Moondog” for years. The urn with Freed’s ashes sits in a glass-covered niche in the wall, a free-standing display case features letters and other documents, and a video tells the story of his career from enthusiastic promoter of the music he believed in despite criticism to the career-ending payola scandal and his early death. Although I thought I knew the story of Freed’s rise and fall, the video enlightened this visitor about his passion and influence. While he was not the only disc jockey in America spinning these records, he was indeed the first to bring this music to a wider, and white, audience. Freed’s passion for the music is evident in the story of how he beat on a telephone book along to the music while broadcasting over WJW radio, purposely leaving the studio microphone on for listeners to hear. I was also fascinated to learn how the audience reacted at his first Moondog concert. Because he had only been heard on radio and not seen, the predominantly black audience at the arena went wild with applause as he and his blonde wife came onstage.

The next stop, “Listen to the Music: Rock and Roll and the Evolution of Audio Technology,” displays artifacts related to sound recording and reproduction in a semi-circular hallway off of the Freed exhibit. Running along the back wall of the glass-fronted display is a timeline in white lettering on black plaques, underneath which sit artifacts ranging from a black-wax Edison cylinder to a white-plastic Apple iPod, representing the range of listening devices from 1877 to the present. The Bell and Tainter Graphophone, Emile Berliner’s flat disc and the mass production of records, Valdemar Poulsen’s Telegraphone, Guglielmo Marconi, and Edwin Armstrong are all either represented or mentioned. But an early phonograph with integral horn and tone arm is mistakenly labeled “Victor Talking Head Machine & Horn 1906” and described as having an enclosed floating horn—an obvious mistake, since the horn is neither enclosed nor floating. Nor, for that matter, is it a Victor, according to two early phonograph experts I consulted. But for the most part, the timeline offers visitors who are unfamiliar with the history of audio technology a reasonable introduction to the range of devices over the first century and a half of recorded sound. Early radios, record players, eight-track players, stereo amplifiers, tape decks, and more recent formats like CD and MP3 players are featured along with photographs, advertisements, and other attempts at contextualizing the artifacts.

However, the inaccuracies, omissions, and unbalanced display will leave those who know something about audio history unimpressed. An example of the skewed representation is the preponderance of Eveready battery displays and an RCA Victor album demonstrating the New Orthophonic recording titled “Hearing Is Believing,” released in 1954 yet oddly placed between Eveready batteries of the 1920s and a Tom Thumb radio of the 1940s. The Tom Thumb radio description claims that “subminiature tube technology was an after-effect of vacuum-tube technology developed during WWII for Allied forces radar equipment.” In fact, subminiature tubes had already been developed for hearing aids in the 1930s and were being produced by Raytheon before World War II, at which point they became a critical component of proximity fuzes, not radar systems. An Ampex portable tape recorder from 1954 is mistakenly identified with a lengthy numerical title and misdated as “ca. 1940s,” although the actual model name “Ampex 600” is clearly visible on the front of the machine. This recorder was commonly referred to as the “suitcase,” because of its casing and portability, and it was the first portable professional unit Ampex produced. It became an important tool for quality location recording, but none of this is mentioned in the display. Another claim on the timeline, that in “1954 Ampex introduces the first multi-track tape recorder,” is at best semi-accurate and misleading. Ampex was producing stereo and three-channel recorders in the early 1950s, but the first true multi-track recorder was delivered to Les Paul in 1956, a fact highlighted just steps away in the adjoining exhibit, “Les Paul—The New Sound.” These inaccuracies distort the history of the evolution of audio technology for unsuspecting visitors, and they undermine the integrity of the exhibit for those who know something about the subject.

The Sam Phillips portion of the exhibit is limited to a recreation of the control room and a small corner of the studio of his Memphis Recording Service (fig. 2). It displays the spinet piano used by Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and other musicians whom Phillips first recorded. Some of the equipment on display is not what Phillips actually used, a fact clearly stated in the description printed on the glass wall enclosing the display. Here, a bit more description would offer museum-goers who have never seen the inside of a studio, much less one with analog- and disc-recording technology, a greater appreciation for how records were made in the pre-digital era. As I stood taking notes, several people wondered if the “turntable” was used to play records. I pointed out that it was a cutting lathe used to cut recordings directly to a disc from the taped performance. Explanations like the use of the lathe, along with the limitations of the four-channel mixing console, and Phillips’s ability to adapt to unforeseen problems in recording would add to the significance of his status as an architect of rock and roll. Much has been written about his contribution in giving untried talent the opportunity to record and his keen sense of how to coax the best performances out of inexperienced musicians, but one sees little of that reflected in the exhibit. Peter Guralnick, late-journalist Robert Palmer, and this author are just a few who have written about Phillips.¹ The studio setup is simply too sterile to convey the kind of excitement that must have taken place when Phillips recorded Elvis doing “Blue Suede Shoes” and Ike Turner’s band cutting “Rocket ‘88’”—the song many consider to be rock and roll’s first.

Something to liven up this corner and fill out the picture on Phillips would make a huge difference to visitors unfamiliar with him and with how the 1950s recording studio worked. The electric guitars displayed along the back wall to the left of the studio would be of interest to guitar aficionados and perhaps fans of the musicians who owned them, but they tell little about the architects of rock and roll, even of the musician whose name each guitar bears, Les Paul. The space may have been better used to expand on the significance of Phillips as a disc jockey, recording engineer, and producer.

The “Les Paul—The New Sound” display features the guitarist’s instruments, as well as recording devices and the huge amplifier that was modified to become the “Les Paulverizer” in his stage performances (figs. 3 and 4). An old television constantly plays segments from the Les Paul and Mary Ford Show, a short-format television show syndicated widely during the mid-1950s that involved the husband-and-wife duo playing one or two of their hit songs, such as “Vaya con Dios” and “How High the Moon.” Photographs of Paul in his early radio career and his early electric-guitar experiments, as well as the wall of Les Paul guitars that face the display give a sense of this innovative musician. Correspondence between Paul and the Ampex Corporation regarding the design, delivery, and modification of his eight-channel recorder outfitted with “simul-sync,” the earliest attempt at multi-tracking, as opposed to sound-on-sound, is displayed though hard to read because of its distance from the glass. Although some very interesting artifacts document Paul’s innovations, this portion of the exhibit misses the more complex story behind the invention, innovation, and collaboration of artist and manufacturer that surrounded the eight-track and its influence on subsequent recording practice. Paul has often been credited as the inventor of multi-track recording, but it was Ampex engineers who made his vision a reality, and the letters displayed probably convey some indication of the obstacles they had to overcome.

Dedicated to documenting “the history and continuing significance of rock and roll music,” the museum has pursued a strong educational mission, but until now has lacked any scholarly research component, partly because of insufficient space, but also because the curatorial staff had to build a collection. But in 2012 the Rock Hall Library and Archives will officially open to scholars, students, educators, the media, and the general public. Its 22,500 square foot, state-of-the-art facility shares a building with the Center for Creative Arts located on the campus of Cuyahoga Community College, which is about two miles from the museum. In April I attended a conference that held its plenary session in the Rock Hall’s Foster Theater, where library and archives staff members presented a visual preview of the new facility and described the collection, which will be “the world’s most comprehensive repository of written and audiovisual materials relating to the history of rock and roll.” No doubt this will be welcome news to historians of music, popular culture, musicologists, cultural critics, and others who study rock and roll. For historians of technology researching the technological aspects of music—a specialty that those associated with T&C have only fairly recently begun exploring and one that holds enormous promise for further study²—it is unclear how well this collection will be of use until it opens. Books, periodicals, journals, correspondence, business records, artists’ personal collections, and film and videotape are some of the items that will be available to researchers. The Museum’s collection of three-dimensional artifacts (clothing, instruments, etc.) will remain at the Museum, while all archival materials owned by the Rock Hall (documents, photographs, audio, video, etc.) will be housed at the Library and Archives and will be made available for research when not on exhibit. The head archivist announced that they have created very detailed and user-friendly finding aids, which will hopefully be available before the Rock Hall Library and Archives formally opens. Based on the museum’s current displays and its focus on material culture, with little interpretation or deeper interrogation, one can only hope that the opening of the library and archives may encourage a more scholarly approach to analyzing the historical significance of the museum’s wealth of artifacts.

1. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (New York, 1994); Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York, 1981); Susan Schmidt Horning, “Recording: The Search for the Sound,” in The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon, ed. André Millard (Baltimore, 2004), 105–22; and Colin Escott, with Martin Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York, 1991) offers a comprehensive history of Phillips’s career, the technology of his studio, and his method of working with musicians.

2. Hans-Joachim Braun, ed., Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 2002); Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, eds., “Special Issue on Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” Social Studies of Science 34 (2004); Kieran Downes, “‘Perfect Sound Forever’: Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Re-making of Compact Disc Playback,” Technology and Culture 51 (2010): 305–31; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley, Calif., 2004); James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore, 1996); Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005); David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (Piscataway, N.J., 2000); Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); and Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording in America (forthcoming).

Susan Schmidt Horning is an assistant professor of history at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is a cultural historian of the twentieth-century United States, American technology, and sound studies, with particular interest in media, the arts, and popular culture. Her work has appeared in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (2002), The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon (2004), and Social Studies of Science (2004). Her forthcoming book, Chasing Sound, charts the technical evolution of recording studios and the interplay between musical culture and audio engineering during the first century of sound recording.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Moreover, Simon Werrett carries his narrative of the interaction of the pyrotechnic craftsmen and natural philosophers (and the impact of pyrotechnics on experimental science) from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In particular, Werrett considers comparatively the role of pyrotechny in three different eighteenth-century sites: Saint Petersburg, Paris, and London. In so doing, he highlights a second theme of the book, the importance of what might be termed “sociocultural geography” (my neologism). By this I mean that Werrett investigates regional states of affairs with respect to the relations and interactions of artisans, artists, and savants and their impact on the deployment and the scientific import of pyrotechny for each site.

The first part of the book focuses on the role of “gunners,” the fabricators of gunpowder and firearms in the development of fireworks for spectacles to accompany church and courtly festivals. The use of fireworks followed quite rapidly on the introduction of gunpowder itself into Europe. Firework spectacles get vivid treatment both in text and illustrations but Werrett is more interested in detailing how the gunners extended the domain of their craft toward the socially and intellectually more lofty realms of the sciences and the humanities. Some of this followed naturally on the kinds of spectacular items produced in firework displays—particularly celestial ones such as stars and meteors. Alchemy was one such realm, whose idiom the gunners themselves employed to explain the nature and effects of pyrotechny. More particularly, Werrett argues that, in order to “raise the status of their labors during this period” (p. 35), gunners appealed to various domains of the liberal arts and the new humanism: geometry, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as to a distinguished classical origin (the activities of Archimedes). These attributions appeared in treatises on pyrotechny.

This is an extremely interesting section. However, this reader was frustrated by a certain casualness in the accounting of who wrote what and for what purpose. Many of the cited authors, such as Vannoccio Biringuccio and Niccolò Tartaglia were not primarily gunners, although the former published one of the first treatises on “pirotechnia” and the latter wrote on gunnery. There are some treatises by authors who were clearly gunners (such as John Babington, author of a Pyrotechnia of 1633) but we learn little about who he or other gunners were or how they were trained and organized. This is probably not surprising for such artisans, but more attention to the contexts in which authors who were not gunners wrote in elevated language on pyrotechny would have gone a long way to elucidating Werrett’s version of the Zilsel thesis.

Werrett demonstrates convincingly that pyrotechny became a resource for early-seventeenth-century formulators of the new natural philosophical enterprise, such as Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon and, at the end of that century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. However, there appears to be a limitation in pyrotechny’s exemplification of the Zilsel thesis: no scientific “advance” (to use a Whiggish term) seems to have been directly brought about through pyrotechnical activities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The remainder of the book focuses on the second theme outlined above: the comparative account of the differing local circumstances under which pyrotechny was practiced and in which it interacted with natural philosophy. In late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century England (London), there was great ambivalence as to whether pyrotechny should be regarded as public spectacle or as subject for natural philosophical investigation (or both). In the interregnum, the alchemical orientation of many of the radicals lent support to the alchemical connotations and implications of pyrotechny (George Starkey, made famous in recent decades through the scholarship of William Newman and Lawrence Principe, appears here as the author of Pyrotechny Asserted [1658]). But after the Restoration, the old ambivalence asserted itself, particularly in reaction to the perceived Catholic and absolutist implications of spectacular and seemingly miraculous fireworks displays. The Royal Society of London, for one, distanced itself from pyrotechnical experiments. However, by the turn of the eighteenth century, pyrotechny acquired a new practical cachet suited to the growing power of British commerce and empire. These valuations did not come from gunners but rather from those of a more philosophical disposition, such as the theologian William Whiston.

Conversely, in early-eighteenth-century Russia, it was the natural philosophical enterprise of the newly organized Saint Petersburg Academy of Science that evoked ambivalence and suspicion; the savants here utilized the design of pyrotechnical displays for imperial dynastic celebrations to convey the importance and ingenuity of science. In Paris, finally, the context of pyrotechny had important literary dimensions. One of the interesting developments of the eighteenth century was the movement of Italian pyrotechny experts to other parts of Europe. This was particularly marked in Paris, where perhaps the most celebrated of all pyrotechnical families— Italians named Ruggieri—settled in Paris in the eighteenth century and rapidly established their primacy as pyrotechnic artificers.

The activities of Italians inspired a number of fireworks treatises. Werrett contrasts two of these. That by a French artisanal artificer, Jean-Charles Perrinet d’Orval, purported to reveal the “secrets” of the Ruggieris’ skill in pyrotechny, and the other, actually written early in the century by a “learned engineer,” Amédée-François Frézier, attempted to place the subject in more elevated literary and philosophical form. Finally, in mid-century, pyrotechny received treatment in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, in which both Perrinet’s and Frézier’s treatises were utilized by the article’s literary author, Louis de Cahusac.

One of the most interesting sections of this book is the narrative of the role that pyrotechny played in eighteenth-century experimental philosophy. Werrett details how “philosophical fireworks” were deployed in “pleasure gardens” in London and Paris. A changing society and social role for fireworks provided the context: the rise of a commercial middle class, literate and curious. More particularly, fireworks became associated both in popular middle-class culture and in the more specialized scientific culture, with the spread of experimental philosophy, particularly with the dramatic and fashionable electrical experiments of the mid- and late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, pyrotechny received what was its ultimate scientific cachet, association with the new chemistry of Lavoisier. Claude-Fortuné Ruggieri, for example, raised the status of the pyrotechnist, according to Werrett, to that of “an artist skilled in ‘applied chemistry,’ while fireworks recipes appeared in books of ‘chemical technology’” (p. 233).

This exposition of the book hardly begins to do justice to the fascinating observations and insights contained in it. However, I must say that I came away from Fireworks with a feeling of frustration over the nature and role of the fireworks artificers. Although Werrett gives considerable attention to their relative status compared to architects and natural philosophers, I still had little sense of who they were. By the eighteenth century, they clearly were no longer “gunners” as in earlier periods, but we are given very little indication of how (and why) their craft location changed—particularly how it related to the increasingly state-regulated munitions makers and professionalized artillerists of the eighteenth century. I think that it is telling in this connection that Werrett says nothing about who the post-1800 “pyrotechnists” were once they received their scientific cachet.

Werrett recognizes that there is a problem with the end of his narrative, which he styles “Gone in a Flash: The Disappearing History of Fireworks” (pp. 243–47). He suggests a variety of reasons for this, which would take too long to elaborate here. But we are still left somewhat in the dark regarding the transformation and/or disappearance of those managing fireworks, who had figured so prominently earlier.

Notwithstanding this criticism, I found the book fascinating, sophisticated, and highly enlightening. It adds considerably to our already rich scholarly literature on early modern science, technology, society, and culture—if indeed the boundaries implied by these terms have not been made obsolete by this literature.

Seymour Mauskopf received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in the history of science. His fields of research interest are the history of chemistry [Crystals and Compounds, 1976, Chemical Sciences in the Modern World, 1993] and the history of marginal science (parapsychology) [The Elusive Science, with Michael R. McVaugh, 1980]. Currently, he is working on a book on Alfred Nobel’s interactions with British munitions scientists in the late nineteenth century. He is also co-editing two other books: Integrating History and Philosophy of Science (with Tad Schmaltz) in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science series and Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (with William Newman and Matthew Eddy) in the History of Science Society Osiris series. In 1998, he received the Dexter Award for Outstanding Contributions to the History of Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. He taught history of science at Duke University since 1964 and retired at the end of 2010.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

From this perspective, the “go-between” assumes almost revelatory significance. No single definition of the type is used throughout these essays, but in broad terms the go-between was a mediator between cultures, a broker who brought together by translating between what would otherwise remain separate, or unproductively conflicting, realms. Though usually an individual, the “go-between” is sometimes an object. For example, Juan Pimentel characterizes the bones of what Georges Cuvier named Megatherium americanum (the giant American ground sloth) as a “go-between” in “pursuing the connected stories of human and non-human players” (p. 351). For my money, though, the term is best restricted to human agents.

The essays are a miscellaneous bunch both geographically and topically. An instructive pairing are those on India by Kapil Raj, who provides an overview of how British and South Asian “go-betweens” in Calcutta mediated within the Anglo-Indian world, and by Simon Schaffer, who uncovers how histories of astronomy by British and local scholars rooted Newton within ancient astronomical tradition. That process was both scholarly and of practical significance in “naturalizing” the science through which the survey and control of India was being conducted.

A number of the essays deal with networks of natural historical commerce with a view to elucidating the role of the “go-between.” Margaret Meredith illustrates her astute theorization of the moral economy of communication and friendship in eighteenth-century natural history with the example of Petrus Camper’s investigation of the fossil elephant. In that economy the primary means, and measure, of communication were channels of personal acquaintance and correspondence. Every member of a network of natural historical knowledge exchange was a go-between. Distance was more a function of the channels created by contact through war and commerce than it was of physical separation. Neil Safier examines the botanical and entomological espionage of Hipólito José da Costa, a Luso-Brazilian envoy to the United States in 1798–1800 who was charged with capturing resources of value to Portuguese agriculture. His primary target was living specimens of the cochineal insect and its host cactus. We learn about the extensive instructions issued to Hipólito, his collection of texts and, less successfully, of specimens. A severe shortage of funds drove him on occasion to fabricate journeys that were never undertaken. A Creole collector, Pedro Franco Dávila, is one focus of Juan Pimentel’s contribution. Dávila’s collection of curiosities was purchased by the Spanish crown and became the basis for the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid. Dávila and the non-human go-between already mentioned are considered in relation to, and as agents of, the major shifts in earth and life sciences of the period. While this is a fascinating case study, I would have welcomed a more measured analysis of its significance for the portentous developments with which Pimentel associates it. Emma Spary adds a vital ingredient to our understanding of natural historical travel and collection by examining the sustenance of the bodies of European travelers. She argues convincingly that breaking down the historian’s slavery to the conception of the European as a wandering eye feasting on the Other requires attention to the sustenance of the embodied traveler.

More restricted in its geographical scope is Lissa Roberts’s depiction of the dense undergrowth of steam engineering projects in Europe in this period. She challenges histories of steam that concentrate on the achievements of a few big names and fail to appreciate the crucial contributions of an extended cast of characters who have been written out of the picture. Roberts also questions the Anglocentricity of much steam history, and argues that the Watt engine did not carry all before it. A great diversity of steam devices, Savery-style pumps as much as beam engines, were adopted and adapted by a wide array of practitioners able to mediate between technological development, local circumstances, and the requirements of their clients.

Besides Schaffer’s paper, the standout essays are those by James Delbourgo and David Turnbull. Delbourgo examines the exploits of Edward Bancroft, perhaps the most intriguing, accomplished, and controversial go-between we encounter in these pages. Delbourgo states his aim clearly: “Instead of isolating [Bancroft’s] careers as diplomat, spy, pamphleteer, novelist, natural historian and chemist, the aim . . . has been to take a traveller in the age of revolutions who moved repeatedly between cultures, allegiances and regimes of scientific authority, and examine how techniques of self-translation worked across genres and settings” (p. 317). The point is that Bancroft appeared in all these guises and yet maintained, most of the time, trust and credibility as broker. The clarity of Delbourgo’s theoretical framing would have been welcome in some of the other essays.

David Turnbull is another consummate theoretician, indeed a founding one, of the brokered world. He recounts the stories of four men active in early European settlement of the Australian colonies who neatly exemplify the character of the go-between. He shows how identities and knowledge were created during the process of encounter. Bennelong, of the Eora tribe, was a famous intermediary between his people and the members of the First Fleet, a friend and aide to Governor Arthur Phillip, but also implicated in the governor’s spearing. Through Bennelong many aspects of the tense relations of Europeans and original inhabitants were negotiated. Bungaree was another Aboriginal go-between, whose complex and important role—for example, he assisted Matthew Flinders in the first circumnavigation of Australia—is less well-remembered than the famous portrayal of him barefoot in naval uniform. As Turnbull explains, the latter portrayal lent itself, from the European perspective, to a “simplistic othering” process (p. 423).

Turnbull also considers Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer whose observatory became a place for the study of Aboriginal languages and translation between knowledge systems, especially in the study of the weather. Dawes was not the “meteorologist” that he is often anachronistically characterized as, and was open to hybrid knowledges of such phenomena. The other European go-between, William Buckley, was an escaped convict who had turned native in 1804 and in 1835 walked unannounced into the camp of another landing party. The Europeans saw Buckley as curiously in-between, but essentially a native. His mediation attempts were stymied by the Europeans’ plans of appropriation, which descended into massacre. Buckley abandoned his role.

Importantly, this volume reveals the limitations of Eurocentric, diffusionist approaches to the emergence of modernity. Ironically, it tends to overvalorize, or give antiheroic status to, the “go-between,” both substantively and theoretically. Sanjay Subrahmanyam warns in his afterthoughts that focus on go-betweens can lead us to neglect the larger forces within which they operated, especially if we concentrate on their actions without due regard to outcomes or lack of them. It is easy, in our fascination with these colorful, puzzling, often outrageous characters, to overestimate their agency. Our frantically busy go-betweens operated in the interstices of longer-term, secular economic and cultural change, which constrained their actions. The editors recognize this in their introduction, but the insight is rarely returned to in the body of the work.

The capacious concept of the “go-between” can be applied to almost any historical actor, including the heroes of more conventional accounts. Thus, historians have not ignored go-betweens, but rather selected some for treatment over others. Selection is unavoidable, but what are the criteria for selection—charm, color, or perhaps significance, however we might interpret that? The extent to which go-betweens were also “tricksters” should also give pause for thought. The trickster is often effective and productive by virtue of sleights of hand and mind. But the trickster is also a con man, worth understanding historically, but also worth treating with caution in his claims to be an agent of historical change. These cautions once granted, however, The Brokered World is a most welcome addition to the literature, and its historiographical thrust demands the attention of all concerned with the production of knowledge and technique in the modern world.

Dr. Miller is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of New South Wales and most recently author of James Watt, Chemist (2009).

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Since the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet space program has conjured images of scientific planning, enormous budgets, and a gargantuan, methodical, and conservative military-industrial complex. Walter McDougall cast it as a saga of technocratic ascendance. Siddiqi demolishes the myth that Sputnik resulted from careful long-term planning or guided R&D. He demonstrates that even in the secretive, stodgy, bureaucratic USSR, rocket enthusiasts could develop informal networks to realize their dreams. This is a story of human agency producing a space race. Without mass enthusiasm and public support, the Soviet Union would not have reached the cosmos.

Most accounts of the Soviet space program have focused on the consequences following the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957. While some have provided background for English-language readers on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Russian fascination with spaceflight, Siddiqi’s book is the definitive work on the topic. He chronicles the science fiction writers, science popularizers, and rocket enthusiasts who in unexpected ways kept the passion for space alive in the USSR. But he goes further, exploring the ways independent initiative interacted with government programs to produce Soviet successes during 1957–61.

Some of the material about the 1940s and 1950s was covered in Siddiqi’s earlier, massive Challenge to Apollo (2000). This latest book adds new archival material and extends the story back to the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, Siddiqi alters our understanding of how science was done in the Soviet Union. He demonstrates agency on the part of key individuals, informal groups, and the broader society. The Soviet leadership evinced minimal interest in space until the mid-1950s. Enthusiasts kept the dream of cosmic exploration alive until it could be joined with security needs and Soviet thirst for prestige to create a major program. Ironically, as Challenge to Apollo suggests, once it became a state program Soviet cosmonautics was less successful.

The early chapters of Red Rockets’ Glare tell the story of Tsiolkovskii and other enthusiasts, leading to the “space fad” of the 1920s. This is the most thorough, balanced, and empathetic treatment of Tsiolkovskii we are likely to get. Siddiqi explores Tsiolkovskii’s science fiction and popular science writings, showing that his treatises on rocketry, including his mathematical model demonstrating that rocket flight was possible, provided both evidence and aura, inspiring Russian engineers for decades. Siddiqi does not ignore the less-appealing elements of Tsiolkovskii’s views, including his embrace of eugenics. Tsiolkovskii, the self-educated cosmonautics pioneer, demonstrates the more positive side of Bolshevik egalitarianism and distrust of specialists, even if he was arrested and his pension was paid irregularly. With understated irony, Siddiqi describes how the father of space flight did not want to travel from Kaluga to Moscow for a celebration of his work in 1932 (though he did make the trip later).

The author resuscitates the “space fad” of the 1920s, when Sergei Korolev and other key figures in Soviet cosmonautics developed the networks that underlay subsequent success. He then turns to the Soviet rocket program in the 1930s, and its demise with the loss of Mikhail Tukhachevskii’s patronage and then of Tukhachevskii himself in the purges. Here the story takes an unexpected turn: although the Soviet state abandoned rocketry before World War II and, except for the famous Katiushas, did not explore possibilities during the war, individuals and small groups kept rocketry work alive. At the center of the story is Korolev, the glider pilot who became one of the most dedicated advocates of rocket development and space flight. Lacking garages, the Soviet amateurs used an old church and worked out of private apartments before converting an abandoned wine cellar as their research headquarters. Siddiqi makes it clear that the key to eventual success was symbiosis: the amateurs needed state resources; the state needed their “expertise and innovative ideas” (p. 154).

Siddiqi’s treatment of the purges is a masterful combination of social history, including the role of epistemic communities, with the history of technology. It overturns the Stalin-centric explanations that prevailed both in the Soviet era and during glasnost. Siddiqi recounts the absurdity of Valentin Glushko being sentenced to the camps for favoring “Trotskyite nitrogen” over “Bolshevik oxygen” as a rocket fuel, while demonstrating how individual decisions to politicize scientific and technical differences intensified the terror. Korolev’s fate shows how close the USSR came to losing the man most responsible for its success in the space race. Sentenced to the camps during the Yezhovshchina, Korolev’s case was selected for review when Lavrentii Beria took over. Bad luck caused him to be already en route to Kolyma when the decision to review his case was taken. He finally was summoned to Moscow. Walking and hitching to Magadan, he arrived too late to embark for Moscow. The ship he would have taken ran aground, killing hundreds. The seriously ill Korolev was tended by a physician and finally reached Moscow on a later boat, only to have his eight-year sentence reaffirmed. Before he could be sent back to Kolyma, he was saved by assignment to Tupolev’s sharashka (research institute for imprisoned specialists) in Kazan. Reunited with the cream of the country’s surviving aviation designers, Korolev was in a position to join the teams sent to Germany after the war.

Following victory over Germany, the USSR sought reparations in the form of both hardware and know-how. The story of how groups of Soviet engineers and officers in Germany developed an informal network that became the core of the Soviet space program again demonstrates the absence of an official project and the key role of social actors. Stalin’s mania for control frequently produced administrative gridlock, making informal networks crucial to achievements in science and technology.

The final three chapters describe the ways the military’s interest in developing ICBMs was married to the enthusiasts’ dreams of space flight. Siddiqi shows how missile designers were able to translate the nativism of the Andrei Zhdanov era into glorification of Tsiolkovskii and Russia’s role in space science. Accident was as important as design. In 1953, Andrei Sakharov badly miscalculated what a thermonuclear charge would weigh. As a consequence, Soviet rocket design focused on a much heaver payload than proved necessary for a nuclear device. But it meant that Soviet ICBMs were well suited to launching satellites and eventually human payloads (pp. 273– 74). Only after Korolev’s team convinced the USSR’s leaders to launch a satellite did the Soviet propaganda apparatus create the now-familiar narrative of long-term development under the party’s astute tutelage. Siddiqi shows that Stalin cared about nuclear weapons and delivery systems, not satellites or space flight. Khrushchev did not pay attention to the cosmos before 1955, and was shocked at the Western response to Sputnik. He was, however, clever enough to take advantage once he comprehended its impact.

Reviewers are “paid” to quibble. Siddiqi’s excellent prose is sometimes marred by editing that is poor for a major university press book. His account of Korolev’s surprise when Sputnik provoked a global media frenzy is difficult to square with Korolev’s emphasis on the importance of being first; his criticism of a worker for not polishing the satellite, given that it would eventually be on exhibit in a museum (recounted in Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo, p. 163); or the chief designer’s insistence that the satellite be visible as well as audible while in orbit. The final chapter buries an important change from the Stalin years in a quotation (p. 344): that the repeated R-7 missile launch failures in the summer of 1957 did not result in purges and punishments represented a significant alteration of the climate for priority projects. In this case, tolerating setbacks preserved the team that went on to launch Sputnik. In the longer term, it may have contained the seeds of stagnation: abandoning sticks, the Soviet system proved incapable of providing sufficient carrots. Siddiqi’s previous work shows that once the state “owned” the space program, cosmonautics suffered from the flaws familiar to students of the Soviet system. But that story goes well beyond Siddiqi’s outstanding contribution in this volume. Red Rockets’ Glare is mandatory reading for historians of technology and of Russia.

Given that “We launched Sputnik” is the stock reply by Russian officials when the decline of their science and education systems is discussed, Russian readers are not going to welcome a concluding chapter that begins, “Sputnik was not a triumph of Soviet science.” This is precisely why they need to read Siddiqi’s superb monograph. That the Soviet Union’s most famous technological accomplishment was not a product of a top-down state program is the most important lesson in a book full of valuable insights and challenges to conventional wisdoms.

Harley Balzer is an associate professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University. In 1992–93 he served as executive director of the International Science Foundation for the former Soviet Union and Baltic States.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The book opens with a review of the ubiquity in human affairs of risks, which science and technology attempt to overcome. Using the risk of asteroid impacts as an example, Petroski proposes that “scientists warn, engineers fix.” The next four chapters give the distinction nuance. Engineering is more complex than it may appear. As much or more than medicine, engineering deserves credit for two centuries of improvements in human health. Although science sometimes and to some extent can precede engineering, the opposite is also the case. The first six chapters of the book conclude with reflections on how, even when engineering fixes, the fixes can sometimes have unintended consequences that need their own fixing. Petroski calls these “speed bumps,” noting that speed bumps themselves illustrate the problem: while slowing traffic they also increase fuel consumption, pollution, and noise (as cars slow and resume speed) and impede emergency vehicles. Good speed bump design requires systems engineering that takes more into account than the simple bump itself.

Two transitional chapters on the ideas and practices of research and development before World War II (chapter 7) and after (chapter 8) provide deft overviews and insightful, measured reassessments of the linear model—i.e., that autonomous science necessarily precedes development into military, medical, and economic applications—which has been a default belief among politicians and the public when considering science-society relations. Indeed, the linear model has been utilized especially by scientists for their own benefit when appealing for increased public funding of science and engineering in terms of both research and education. After all, if basic research autonomously managed by the techno-scientific community itself is the reservoir from which development and economic innovation draws, should research not receive substantial support to keep the reservoir full? Moreover, to grow the scientific community and the scientific literacy of a democratic citizenry, should science education not be accorded pride of place in public education? These two chapters would function especially well to introduce science and engineering students—and those in the humanities and social sciences as well—to science policy questions, broadly construed.

The second half of the book then turns to public policy challenges themselves and how science and engineering might serve to address them. Leading off is a chapter on “Alternative Energies,” the longest in the book by almost a third. It provides a broad if somewhat conventional overview, focused on the United States, of the past half-century of public policies affecting energy developments related to nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal systems, and batteries, oceans, pedestrian power, biofuels, conservation, fuel cells and hydrogen, and natural gas. In the middle of these overviews Petroski reiterates his brief for a systems engineering approach by quoting “the legendary engineer-educator Hardy Cross” to the effect that engineering practice is involved with three trilogies: “The first is pure science, applied science, engineering; the second is economic theory, finance, and engineering; and the third is social relations, industrial relations, engineering” (p. 145). But engineering is more related to social problems than to pure science, because “engineering is all about designing devices and systems that satisfy the constraints imposed by managers and regulators” (p. 155).

Chapter 10, “Complex Systems,” draws initially on the history of dam construction and its discontents to show how science-engineering-society relations are becoming increasingly complex. The “windshield wiper” input from science on dams—one moment science supports dams as a source of power, the next it criticizes them as causes of environmental damage—is equally well-illustrated by a back-and-forth movement in healthcare debates, when one study points up the benefits of something that another study indicates is harmful. In truth, “the solution to problems involving complex systems can be expected to require the involvement of complex systems of people and approaches” (p. 172). A following chapter carries the argument forward by commenting on the two-cultures distinction, arguing that “a calculus of values must accompany any mechanics of function” (p. 182). Another chapter, using the examples of earthquakes and hurricanes, distinguishes uncertainty in science and in engineering. “Generally speaking, the responsibility of the scientist qua scientist ends with the warning, which is where the responsibility of the engineer begins” (p. 185). Science can predict earthquakes and hurricanes with some level of probability attached, to which engineers can respond with designs utilizing safety factors, which are in effect efforts to mitigate uncertainties in design. But then policymakers must decide how to allocate resources among competing predictions, designs, and financial pressures.

The concluding two chapters reemphasize the engineering and society theme by reviewing engineering achievements of the twentieth century, challenges for the twenty-first century, and the newly emerging science and technology policy of seeking to meet challenges by offering large-scale prizes for doing so. The review of achievements, as cataloged by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), highlights the degrees to which great achievements, such as electrification, the automobile, and airplanes, all depended on interdisciplinary work, can never be perfect or finished, and did not come without costs. “These are important lessons to remember when engineers look to tackling and are looked to for tackling the global problems that threaten planet Earth” (p. 211) as itemized in another NAE list of fourteen challenges judged essential to future human flourishing. At the same time, “as much as the inadvertent harmful by-products of technological achievement might be blamed for everything from local smog to global warming, it is also solid engineering and enlightened public policy that will be necessary to reverse the negative effects and bring forth new achievements for a new time” (p. 212).

The crucial, central role of enlightenment in public policy is brought home by the idealistic vision of a “2,000-watt society” advanced initially at the turn of the century by some public-spirited faculty at ETH Zurich and since given official recognition by the Swiss government. The goal is to reduce energy consumption to 2,000 watts per person (the world average) in Europe (where usage is 6,000 watts per person) and the United States (a 12,000-watt society) while allowing such countries as China (a 1,500-watt society), India (a 1,000-watt society), and Bangladesh (a 300-watt society) to increase consumption. No serious technological breakthroughs are needed to achieve the goal, since Switzerland actually was a 2,000-watt society as recently as the 1960s. As Moritz Leuenberger of the Swiss Federal Department of Environment stated at the G8 Energy Efficiency Conference in 2007, “The difficulty in enforcing these standards has nothing to do with technologies. The necessary political will has to exist in order to ensure that this vision can be turned into reality.” But what evidence is there, from Petroski or anyone else, that such a political will exists or is likely to exist in forms able to engender such change on a broad scale in the foreseeable future?

The use of prize incentives is a neat concluding chapter, though it unfortunately offers nothing by way of a positive response to this question. Petroski begins by noting how, among others, Senator John McCain, as a Republican presidential candidate, argued for shifting from standard research and development funding to the offering of large cash prize incentives for particular inventions. He notes in passing the failure of Nobel Prizes to properly honor engineering, something of a long-standing complaint among engineers. He then reviews the proliferating number of X PRIZE Foundation and related challenges and the so-far problematic outcomes. In relation to science (including engineering) policy, most of Petroski’s book has been concerned with science for policy—that is, the use of science and engineering to help inform policy decision making or meet publicly recognized needs. The other primary dimension of science policy research and practice—that is, policy for science or ideas for how best to fund or manage science—has been dealt with less fully. But the idea of incentivizing without funding research and development is a remarkable new policy for science that deserves more critical assessment than Petroski offers. Is it not possible that X prizes are simply the product of an inordinate faith in technology combined with a coarsening public desire to get something cheap? Does such a competitive market-based policy for research not deserve a systems engineering assessment of costs as well as benefits?

As indicated, this volume is a worthy addition to the Petroski canon of engineering literacy, case studies, autobiography, popularization, and promotion. Petroski is especially adept at building bridges between technical and historical knowledge; science, technology, and society scholarly research; and science journalism. To some degree he is heir to that classic stage of the social criticism of technology manifested in figures such as Rachel Carson, Lewis Mumford, and E. F. Schumacher. Yet in contrast to Mumford and others there is a tone of complacency in Petroski that perhaps reflects the state of engineering itself. In comparison with other recent arguments for science-society relations such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (2009) and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010), Petroski might be read as sanguine to the point of irresponsibility. Ironically, in a discussion of one potential “astronomical engineering” project—nudging Earth into a larger orbit to escape a heat death caused by the red giant expansion of the Sun in some billion years—Petroski quotes with approval another engineer who criticizes the “complacency” of a society that fails to think quantitatively about potential major catastrophes. Is there not also a complacency in more evenhanded analysis that fails to bring some passion to bear on challenges that would seem to call for qualitative analysis and vigorous commitment?

The basic problem may well be traced back to the claim that conceptual clarification of the science/engineering distinction will make public policy more rational. Engineering is essential. Yes. But even more essential, this book would seem to argue, is an enlightened public. Yet there is nothing in the present argument or its presentation that gives much reassurance that the many will become enlightened, so that placing the powers of global engineering in their hands may only increase irrationality—a potentiality that fails to be addressed with the seriousness it deserves.

Dr. Mitcham is professor and director of the Hennebach Program in the Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines, a faculty affiliate of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and adjunct professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Its first incarnation was as the ram, the iconic weapon of Greek and Roman war galleys, but its utility faded with the rise of gun-carrying sailing warships. Reborn during the 1800s in the image of those galleys, the ram became the weapon of choice for early ironclads of limited firepower. Its symbolic hold over naval planners and pundits as the emblem of Roman-era heroism ensured its continued existence, even as it became obvious that the ram was deadlier in accident than in war, and long after warships had acquired the improved gunnery that made ramming an anachronism. In the early twentieth century, a new type of bulbous bow—the bulbous forefoot—became the maritime equivalent of Art Deco streamlining that captured the public imagination. The modern Inui bulb found on almost every vessel is held up as the embodiment of applied science in contemporary shipbuilding, although the danger of wreaking severe underwater damage when one ship accidentally rams another remains a major problem.

This article examines both the social and cultural contexts in which the bulbous bow has evolved over the course of three millennia. “Guns, like everything else, have their social history,” noted John Ellis in The Social History of the Machine Gun. In the years since Ellis’s groundbreaking study, historians have been investigating and retelling the social and cultural stories surrounding technological artifacts. The works of Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch, in particular, have examined the social factors that influence the course of their technological development; other authors, notably Eric Schatzberg, demonstrate how technologies can be shaped by culture and ideology. The case of the bulbous bow shows how, during the nineteenth century, the cultural symbolism attached to the ram inspired a military mindset that rejected firepower in favor of the nautical equivalent of the bayonet charge; and in the modern age, how its imagery as a work of both aesthetic and scientific progress has all but blinded the public to its potential as an unintended weapon.

This article is available to subscribers via T&C’s full-text electronic edition at Project Muse.

The Minneapolis mill explosion provides a touchstone for this essay on the intersection of the history of technology with environmental history. Interest in the intersection of these fields has grown rapidly over the past decade. Envirotech, a group of scholars in both the history of technology and environmental history, is one of the largest interest groups in the Society for the History of Technology.₂ Our goal here is not to review the burgeoning “envirotech” literature in any exhaustive way, which was first covered a dozen years ago in a Technology and Culture review essay that remains fresh in its coverage and insight. This now-classic review has recently been updated in a historiographic article included in a new collection of essays on specific themes sited at the intersection of the two fields.₃ Instead, in this essay we zero in on a concept that links the two fields and, we believe, could be used to develop fresh insights into history.

The concept is power. The idea for this essay began with the observation that historians use the term “powerful” in two senses. One sense is physical: the mill in Minneapolis experienced a powerful explosion. The other sense is social: the mill belonged to a powerful proprietor, formerly a Union general and Wisconsin governor. Usually, we think of physical and social power as distinct phenomena, a habit encouraged by the disciplinary structure of academic research. Physicists study physical power, social scientists study social power, and the two disciplines use different language and concepts to express their understanding. One can easily assume that physical power and social power are unrelated. If true, then the use of “powerful” to describe physical and social processes is simply a case of a word having more than one meaning: “powerful” might happen to work in both the physical and social contexts, just as “fast” describes both a rate of movement of an object and a hard-partying group of friends.

We wondered, though, if the use of the same term in two contexts might be more than a coincidence. Might the common use give us some analytical purchase on history? Might physical and social power have some common features? Might physical and social power originate, function, and affect the world in similar ways? Might they have some causal connection, with one influencing the other? Might they be two faces of the same coin? We were not the first to ask these kinds of questions, and this essay capitalizes on the insights of other scholars to develop an analytical framework for understanding power.

Our thesis is that all power, social as well as physical, derives from energy. From that insight, we can improve our understanding of the past by tracing the flow of energy and its application as power. This argument rests upon several propositions:

1. Most of the energy used by life on earth arrived as sunlight.
2. History is largely the story of the capture, transformation, and application of this solar energy.
3. Nature, technology, and people have all played essential roles in these transformations and applications.
4. Power is energy put to work, and all organisms use energy to stay alive, so all organisms exercise some power.
5. Energy can be concentrated, which has enabled some people to deploy more power than others.

These ideas can lead to a reconsideration of major events in history, as we demonstrate by reassessing some familiar chapters in the Industrial Revolution.

With their common interest in the material world, the history of technology and environmental history make a good team for assessing the links between physical and social power. Picture, for a moment, a chain that represents a product’s lifetime. The chain begins with extraction of natural resources and ends (in the United States, at least) with consumer waste in a landfill or river. Roughly speaking, the median tendency of environmental historians has been to explore the beginning and ending links in the chain (resource extraction and waste), while the median tendency of historians of technology has been to study its intermediate links (product design, manufacturing, and consumption). Some scholars have done both.₄ Our task is less to articulate some new theory of power and more to highlight an area where important scholarship exists, but remains isolated. To remove unhelpful disciplinary boundaries, we suggest a study of power that takes from sociologists a passion for exploring the social manifestations of power, appropriates from physicists a definition of power that recognizes its energetic basis, borrows from historians of technology a commitment to revealing all factors influencing sociotechnical systems, and embraces environmental historians’ interest in the manipulative powers of energy flowing through both human and nonhuman actors. We hope to encourage more such work.

Energy and Power

What are energy and power? In common parlance, people often use the terms “energy” and “power” interchangeably, and dictionaries define the words as synonyms. The authors of this essay have found it useful to distinguish the two concepts by using definitions from physics. Physicists define energy as the capacity to do work;₅ they define power as energy put to work, and quantify it as the rate at which work is done or energy is transformed.₆ Note the contrasts: energy is a quantity, power is a rate; energy is a capacity, power is the use of that capacity; energy can be stored, power cannot be; power is a process, energy is not.

We can discern the difference between energy and power in the ruins of the Minneapolis mill. First, let us walk through the ruins to trace the path of energy. Nuclear fusion in the sun sent energy to earth in the form of light. Wheat plants captured solar energy and transformed it into chemical energy by storing it in bonds between atoms in carbohydrate molecules. It was this stored energy that made wheat valuable to people. When the system worked as intended, chemical energy stayed in wheat molecules as the grain was ground into flour, baked into bread, and eaten by a person. Then cells in the person’s body used the energy to fuel the body or stored it in the bonds of other molecules (glycogen or fat). As energy flowed in one direction, money flowed in the opposite one.

Now let us trace instances of power in the wheat-milling system. Wheat plants exercised power when they converted solar energy into chemical energy. Farmers used chemical energy in wheat to power their bodies while harvesting the wheat. The mill used energy to turn machinery that ground the wheat into flour. Railroads used stored solar energy in coal or wood to transport the flour to markets. Consumers of the wheat used the stored energy to do work. When money flowed upstream to the hands of mill owners, they could use it to exert power over the human or natural world— for example, by building houses intended to impress people with their grandeur. But people did not completely control the energy or power of the system. When a source of heat, such as a spark, ignited the dust in the air of the mill, so many molecules released their energy as heat that the mill exploded and people died. People benefited when they retained control over the energy in wheat and used it for power; they suffered when they lost control over the energy and saw it transformed into destructive power.

The social power of mill owners and the physical power of the explosion flowed from a common root: the ability of mill owners to concentrate wheat in one building, which enhanced their control over a high value–added link in the product chain and increased their social power. If all of that wheat had been ground in hand-mills scattered among thousands of homes, the Minneapolis mill owners would have had little power, and any individual explosion would have been relatively weak. Indeed, Karl Marx argued that forcing people to abandon hand-mills and bring their grain to centralized water-mills was one way in which capitalists gained power in Europe.₇

In discussing his labor theory of value, Marx recognized the necessity of physical energy flows to sustain work, writing that “the minimum limit of the value of labour-power is determined by the value of the commodities, without the daily supply of which the labourer cannot renew his vital energy, consequently by the value of those means of subsistence that are physically indispensable.” Further, in linking his concept of value to physical energy flows, Marx also hinted at the modern law of entropy, noting that labor, consisting of “a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, &c., is wasted, and these require to be restored.” This entropy is the locus of class conflict for Marx, as contests arise over who controls labor power, and such control over energy dictates social stratification and power.₈

Other, more recent work has tended to elide the connection between physical and social power. For example, Sidney Mintz’s wonderful study on sugar and its use among Britain’s working class notes the important caloric boost sucrose provided to laborers, but the focus remains on how “powerful” British mercantilists and industrialists spun “webs of signification” to make sugar’s consumption seem natural and beneficial to workers, thus enhancing their position in relation to the “weaker” laboring masses. Likewise, the eminent historian of technology David Nye recognizes that America’s massive sociotechnical energy systems are “social constructions that demand energy” from the humans who construct them, but then offers culture as a better explanation for America’s energy choices.₉

Material needs for thermodynamic energy continue to act upon systems throughout their existence. It is not enough to say that cultural or social factors shape systems until they reach a stage of “technological momentum,” where the systems then do more to shape society; instead, we must recognize the continual need for energy to make these systems operate—perhaps maintaining or continuously re-creating their momentum— and investigate how this constant demand shapes the systems.

Our emphasis on the essential and integral nature of energy in systems contrasts with the concept of energy put forth by a pioneer of systems thinking in the history of technology. In Networks of Power, Thomas Hughes emphasizes that people were just as essential as technology for this system (leading to the term “sociotechnical systems”)—an important conceptual advance. Hughes had less to say about the role of nature in systems; he excludes energy sources from his systems, because systems, by definition, control all their elements. To Hughes, energy supplies are exogenous, assigned to the category of environment.₁₀ But as our walk through the ruins of the Washburn A Mill illustrates, energy is an essential part of every system; it is what enables the system to work at all. Moreover, systems never exert complete control over their elements, partly because energy sometimes does things that systems designers do not wish. The mill exploded because operators lost control of energy essential to the system.

Our emphasis on the energetic basis for social power also diverges from the way that the patriarch of sociology, Max Weber, defined power as a function of social position. He wrote of power as “the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action.”₁₁ In his view, power is socially determined, related to but not necessarily dependent on material inputs, and defined in relation to the ability of others.₁₂ This view conceives of power as a zero-sum game in a world of finite power; some must lose power for others to gain it in this closed system.₁₃

Critiques emerged within sociology to challenge the notion that power derives from social structure.₁₄ Sociologists of science and technology assert that power is not something that can be held, but must be created through action. This observation rejects a priori assumptions that power is generated by some preexisting social organization, and shifts the focus toward the process through which power gets constructed. Ridiculing sociologists who had “mistaken the effect for the cause,” Bruno Latour argues that “[a]ppealing to a reserve of energy, be it ‘capital’ or ‘power’, to explain the obedient behavior of the multitudes, is thus meaningless.”₁₅ Instead, Latour explains that “[t]hose who are powerful are not those who ‘hold’ power in principle, but those who practically define or redefine what ‘holds’ everyone together. This shift from principle to practice allows us to treat the vague notion of power not as a cause of people’s behavior but as the consequence of an intense activity of enrolling, convincing, and enlisting.”₁₆

The Washburn A Mill also illustrates the value of bringing another concept from physics—entropy—into the analysis of technological systems. Entropy is disorder, or the tendency of systems to lose energy and fall apart. The only way to stall or reverse entropy is to invest energy in a system. The Washburn A Mill needed continued investment of human labor to keep machinery and labor in order while the system operated. Despite these efforts, entropy prevailed when the system blew up, releasing energy and leaving disorder behind. Cadwallader Washburn reversed the entropy by investing more energy in the mill, rebuilding it in 1880 as the largest and most technologically advanced mill in the world. Management and workers continued to invest energy to keep the system functioning until 1965, when it was shuttered due to obsolescence. Entropy returned spectacularly in 1991 when a fire almost destroyed the mill. Another investment of energy in the 1990s rebuilt part of it, this time in the form of a museum.₁₇ Because of entropy systems do not stand still; they need the continual input of energy simply to hold the parts of the system together, even when the system is operating as designed.

Whence the energy for power? The source often goes unstated, but some scholars make it explicit. In his explanation of Portuguese naval expansion, actor-network theorist John Law includes forms of energy—wind and ocean currents—in a technological system. These forces stymied Portuguese efforts to sail in certain directions until sailors learned to follow a circular route that enabled them to use the wind and currents to accomplish round-trip voyages. Law contends that the Portuguese succeeded by converting currents, winds, and other forces from opponents into allies.₁₈

Law’s example illustrates that people use solar energy in forms other than for food. The winds that drove Portuguese ships developed because the sun heated air unevenly, which created pressure differentials, which led air to rush from one place to another. The energy that mills and hydropower plants capture from falling water is the result of the sun causing water to evaporate. Water vapor rises, condenses, falls as rain and snow on high places, and runs downhill in streams and rivers. The energy in fossil fuels originated in sunlight captured by plants eons ago and stored underground. Not all energy that people use is solar; for example, tidal energy derives from the gravitational pull of the moon, and nuclear fission comes from the splitting of atoms. Still, solar energy has powered the great majority of history.

Humans’ reliance on solar energy led environmental historian Alfred Crosby to label our species “children of the sun.” Like Crosby, several historians have made the need for energy central to their analyses of history, often detailing the various sociotechnical regimes that emerged to harness this force to do work.₁₉ These authors provide important reminders that while cultural and social factors influence the choices we make in organizing our societies to channel energy, energy itself is the lifeblood of these structures. As Rolf Sieferle explains: “Energy flows are basic features of [all interconnected] systems. It is energy that propels all material processes. When the energy systems of the past have been reconstructed, we will understand the natural framework that determines the physical boundaries of economic [or social, cultural, and so on] development.”₂₀ Recognizing the necessity of energy in human systems does not mean energy is the only important factor. Vaclav Smil argues that it is “profitable and desirable to view energy use as a principal factor in analysis of human history. But not as the principal factor.” Instead, “[t]he only rewarding and revealing way to assess energy’s importance in human history is to find a path that neither succumbs to the simplistic, deterministic explanations buttressed by recitals of countless energy imperatives—nor belittles energy use by reducing it to a marginal role compared to other history-shaping factors, be they climatic changes and epidemics or human whims and passions.”₂₁ These scholars offer the uncomplicated though crucial observation that energy makes possible the work of all systems; thus our histories must include a close investigation of the actions taken to obtain and manage this essential element.

Environmental historian Richard White analyzes the relationship of humans and nonhumans on the Columbia River through their exchanges of energy, defined as the “capacity to do work” by acting upon another body and moving it in the direction of the force. While White recognizes that both nature and humans have energy and do work, thereby shaping their environments and knowing each other in the process, he differentiates human work, in that it is “socially organized and given cultural meaning.” White then investigates how energy flows influenced the way that human groups organized themselves to become powerful, adding that “[t]o be powerful is to be able to accomplish things, to be able to turn the energy and work of nature and humans to your own purposes.”₂₂

In a similar vein, environmental historian Elliott West looks at how groups organized to reap the energy resources of the midwestern plains during the nineteenth century. Recognizing that humans’ unique ability to develop “visions” about their environment and act on those imaginings grants them “enormous manipulative power over their surroundings,” West argues that energy flows existing beyond people’s “perceptive environment” influenced how such dreams were carried out. People can imagine paths to power—which West defines as energy “captured and set to a purpose”—and organize themselves and their environment to effectuate that vision, but energy flows existing in the “effective environment” also work to structure society in unforeseen ways.₂₃ Native Americans of the Plains learned this lesson the hard way during the nineteenth century, as their imagined path to power depended upon the same precious energy sources— water, grass, bison, and timber—that migrating whites usurped for their own visions of power.

Struggles over power are the stuff of politics (and its extension, war). We cannot develop this theme in depth in a short essay, but we hope that energy and power become the twin foundations for a bigger bridge between environmental and technological historians, on one side, and political historians on the other. Individuals and organizations have gained and lost political power by virtue of gaining and losing control of energy, whether they accessed energy directly (in their food) or indirectly (by controlling energy in other people’s bodies and in machines). Some scholars have suggested that certain energy regimes have inherent political properties. James Williams’s study of energy in California builds on the argument of Lewis Mumford (and others) that the secular trend of technology has been from democratic to authoritarian forms. In energy history, Williams points to water, wind, wood, and animal power as democratic, while fossil fuels and nuclear fission led to authoritarian energy regimes.₂₄ We hope more scholars will trace the sources, paths, and consequences of energy used by political organizations and regimes.

The Industrial Revolution Reconsidered

To illustrate how our framework can lead to new interpretations of history, we draw on the research of co-author Thomas Finger in the following case study.₂₅ Imagine a cotton mill in Manchester, England, circa 1880—a factory amid the Industrial Revolution. Under a single roof large numbers of workers tend machines that integrate all stages of cotton-textile production from raw materials to finished and dyed cloth. Imagine also that you are able to visualize the energy inputs that make this all possible. The most obvious input is the fossil fuel. You are able to see exactly where those fuels are burned; you see and smell the smoke rising from the factories, producing a dense cloud of smog hovering over the city. You can see pistons moving as a result of this burned energy, and you see how those pistons turn line shafts and belts throughout the vast structure, producing motion and, ultimately, work.

Historians of the Industrial Revolution have focused their attention on this kind of energy. Kenneth Pomeranz argues that industrialization in Britain occurred partly because it sat upon rich coal reserves.₂₆ David Landes outlines a progressive improvement of machines and knowledge that allowed humans to best channel those fossil fuels.₂₇ E. A. Wrigley goes so far as to say that the Industrial Revolution represented a near total switch from “organic” to “mineral” energy sources.₂₈ Our purpose here is not to refute these stories, but to emphasize that they focus only on one part of the energy equation. Think back to the mill and its energy inputs. Pomeranz, Landes, and Wrigley help us understand about how machines consumed energy and turned it into power. But what of the other energy consumers in that factory? What about the workers themselves?

To think more deeply about the sources of energy that fed those millworkers, we move from the history of technology to environmental history. Here, we find a chain of historical connections that brought energy out of nature for human consumption. In fact, if we want to talk about the energy inputs required for work in a Manchester mill, we must journey to an American wheat field. Industrialization in Britain succeeded not only due to fossil fuels, but also because it tapped American solar energy.

It is not surprising that this energy input has gone largely unnoticed. Fossil fuels are more dramatic and visible, and a greater departure from what came before; in short, they lend themselves to a great story. But calories for human consumption were no less important as an energy input— they were foundational to industrialization. That humans need to eat is not our novel claim here; rather, we argue that the way people eat has far-reaching implications in the reciprocal relationships among humans, nature, and technology. In order to tap American solar energy, British and American merchants constructed a technological system designed to convert solar energy trapped inside grains of wheat. The bodies of industrial workers converted this energy into work.

Using the frameworks of energy and power, we can begin to envision large-scale connections between the development of the nineteenth-century U.S. economy and British industrialization. This connection is not one of mere temporal alignment, but of active involvement and construction of a sociotechnical system designed to move energy from one place to another. Links in this chain—a railroad from farm to depot, a grain elevator in a milling center, or docks at an Atlantic port—were all essential in moving this energy. But they did not share equal parts of the power that derived from this system. This is because those who constructed and controlled this system had disproportionate access to the energy coursing through it; access increased their ability to convert that energy into power.

In their drive to obtain a steady supply of calories for industrial workers, British investors envisioned the United States as a fruitful place for their investment in agriculture and transportation.₂₉ This investment, however, was risky—one reason why it could also prove remunerative. The U.S. economy suffered from periodic panics and depressions, it lacked a sufficient transportation infrastructure to ensure that commodities could cheaply flow from interior to coast, and rudimentary communications systems raised transaction costs, particularly when droughts, floods, frosts, or pests brought sudden fluctuations in the price of grain.

To mitigate these problems, merchants built technologies that allowed them to influence the flow of energy. Grain elevators, railroads, and steel sailing freighters out of Scotland were all designed to ensure a steady flow of caloric energy from the United States to Great Britain.₃₀ Such technologies also increased the power of those who controlled them, which left other vital chains, such as farmers, with less power. But this does not mean that they had no power.

Let us take a moment to view this system from the perspective of an American farmer involved in the Patrons of Husbandry in the 1880s. By that time, a farmer in Iowa produced more wheat, owned more land, and worked it with more machines than had his father a generation ago in the fields of New York and Ohio. Because of this, the farmer found himself trapped in his own success: while he produced more wheat, each grain was worth less due to the sheer size of lands then being coaxed into production. In addition, railroad companies had re-created the grain market to favor the shippers rather than the producers. Understood from the perspective of this essay, while the farmer harvested more energy, the sociotechnical system that transferred that energy to England concentrated the power in the hands of those who controlled the flow of energy from one place to another. This was due in large part to the business strategies employed by grain merchants and railroad executives to ensure larger profits in a notoriously risky business.

As railroad companies tapped into British capital to expand into the American interior, they were beset with further managerial challenges. Railroad lines often extended into unsettled land, and the consequent high cost of construction resulted in higher risk to investors. To reduce this exposure, railroads promoted settlement along their lines, sold new settlers wheat seed, and constructed grain elevators to hold the newly produced wheat. These mechanisms facilitated greater wheat production, but also effectively shifted much of the risk from those who transported the grain to those who harvested it.

Due in part to these strategies, in 1880 the United States exported over ninety-five million bushels of wheat to Great Britain. This total represented nearly one-quarter of all wheat production in the United States, 53 percent of its total wheat exports, and 65 percent of all wheat imports into Great Britain.₃₁ Farmers were quick to realize the implications of these numbers. As early as the 1860s and early 1870s and coinciding with a dramatic growth in the grain trade with Great Britain, their clamor to reform grain shipping and storage practices grew stronger.

Responding to a perceived loss of social and economic power, farmers banded together in communal organizations that sought to solidify their status as energy-harvesters. They proposed an alternate system, one where the extension of credit, land-use practices, and agricultural knowledge favored—in their own words—the producers over the shippers. The Granger movement, and later the Populist revolts of the 1890s, can thus be viewed in a wider context as social movements responding to the loss of power within a sociotechnical system designed to make solar energy harvested in one area available to another. By the very act of organizing, farmers transferred their status as energy-harvesters into political and economic arenas, and they did achieve some temporary success in bringing about legal changes to shipment and storage methods within the United States.₃₂

Back to our Manchester cotton mill. Who would have guessed that we could have traced, in broad strokes, its energy connections back to the sun-baked fields of the U.S. Midwest? In doing so, we have glimpsed how tracing a chain of energy “upstream” can allow historians of technology and the environment to outline new connections. And we need both the history of technology and environmental history to completely tell that story. A chain of energy requires the management of humans, nature, and machines. And as we follow that chain, human action remains present a long way back. Humans devised baking to make calories more digestible in the human body. They constructed mills to grind out insoluble fiber, thus allowing their bodies to better absorb that energy. They constructed elaborate dock systems, canals, and railroads to reduce the cost of transporting the energy from one place to another. They built warehouses and elevators to ensure that the energy would be available year-round. They constructed threshing machines and mechanical reapers to raise the productivity of the energy harvest. And they took wild grasses and selected their grains to hold greater amounts of energy. In fact, the only section of this chain humans did not play an active part in shaping was the burst of energy from the sun.

Our point is that the ways in which human energy needs are satisfied have real implications for the ways in which sociotechnical actors manage nature, technologies, and other humans. In telling this story, we have highlighted, within the narrow constraints of a short essay, connections among well-known historical events. Crucially, our focus on energy flows helps us tell an integrated story, whereas previously these events and actors had been considered in isolation. The Industrial Revolution, the growth of the Atlantic economy, the rise of internal improvements and railroads in the United States, and midwestern agrarian revolts in the late nineteenth century were all parts of a chain that fed British industrialization with American solar energy. To this end, humans who participated in this chain organized and channeled energy to create power. This power was contested and shared unequally, but it was based ultimately on the basic need of all humans to consume energy and convert it into power.

Conclusion

We have suggested that the study of energy and power offers a rich common ground for the history of technology, environmental history, and science and technology studies. A simple observation makes this intersection possible: all power derives from energy—it is energy put to work. Ultimately, this power must originate in nature, especially the sun’s solar energy. This energy is neither gained nor lost from the whole system, but it does change forms and moves within and across sociotechnical systems here on earth. People gain power by enlisting other people, nonhuman nature, ideas, and technology into networks supporting their goals, and energy courses through these networks. By following the energy flows, we can understand better the internal structures of sociotechnical regimes, as well as their power in relation to other systems. Certainly, energy does not determine the internal structure or overall effectiveness of these systems, but power derives from the particular way by which relationships are structured to harness energy. An analysis of energy flows and power through a sociotechnical system can help us understand, for example, why the Industrial Revolution, the Corn Laws, and the U.S. Granger movement sparked one another and changed the world. Such an analysis can provide similar insights to other histories.

1. Stephen F. Peckham, The Dust Explosions at Minneapolis, May 2, 1878, and Other Dust Explosions (New York, 1908); Ole Schei and August Smith, “The Washburn A Mill Explosion,” Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery History Page, http:// www.friendsofthecemetery.org/history/alley_articles/MillExplosion_March2005.shtml (accessed 10 September 2010).

2. In addition to gathering at SHOT conferences, Envirotech meets at conferences of the American Society for Environmental History, the European Society for Environmental History, and the World Congress of Environmental History.

3. Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, “At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment,” Technology and Culture 39 (1998): 610–40; Hugh S. Gorman and Betsy Mendelsohn, “Where Does Nature End and Culture Begin? Converging Themes in the History of Technology and Environmental History,” in The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, ed. Martin Reuss and Stephen Cutcliffe (Charlottesville, Va., 2010).

4. The emergence of envirotech scholars seeking to blur these traditional disciplinary boundaries has produced important works that broaden their scope to examine the entire chain of a product’s life. See, for example, William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995); Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle, 1999); and David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001). At least with White’s study, this broader examination includes tracing energy flows through the socio-enviro-technical system constructed to harvest salmon on the Columbia River, as well as an analysis of the resultant power dynamics.

5. Joseph F. Mulligan, Introductory College Physics (New York, 1985), 138.

6. Ibid., 157.

7. William H. Shaw, “‘The Handmill Gives You the Feudal Lord’: Marx’s Technological Determinism,” History and Theory 18 (1979): 155–76.

8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867; reprint, New York, 1936), 190, 192.

9. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 5.

10. Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1983). Hughes writes: “Two kinds of environment relate to open technological systems: ones on which they are dependent and ones dependent on them. In neither case is there interaction between the system and the environment: there is simply one-way influence. Because they are not under system control, environmental factors affecting the system should not be mistaken for components of the system.” See Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Trevor J. Pinch, Wiebe E. Bijker, and Thomas Parke Hughes (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 53.

11. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1962), 180.

12. At least one scholar argues that Weber included “status” as an indicator of power precisely because he wished to refute Marx’s materialism as the only determinate of power; see Gordon Marshall, “Power,” in Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed., ed. John Scott and Gordon Marshall (New York, 2009), 591.

13. John Scott, Power (Malden, Mass., 2001), 2.

14. Weber’s ideas about power remain so dominant in the sociological literature that a review of fifty sociology textbooks in the early 1980s found the Weberian interpretation used 63 percent of the time, with no other conception of power cited in more than two textbooks; see Warren R. Paap, “The Concept of Power: Treatment in Fifty Introductory Sociology Textbooks,” Teaching Sociology 9 (1981): 57–68.

15. Bruno Latour, “The Powers of Association,” in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law (London, 1986), 276.

16. Ibid., 273 (emphasis in original).

17. Minnesota Historical Society, “Building History,” Mill City Museum, http:// www.millcitymuseum.org/building-history (accessed 25 September 2010).

18. John Law, “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems (n. 10 above), 120.

19. Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York, 2006); Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934); Martin V. Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia, 1985); Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder, Colo., 1994); James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, Ohio, 1997); Nye (n. 9 above); John Robert McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000).

20. Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, trans. Michael P. Osman (Cambridge, 2001), viii.

21. Smil, 243 (emphasis in original). 22. White (n. 4 above), 6, 13–14. 23. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, Kan., 1998), xviii–xxiv. West explains the connection between “visions,” “energy,” and “power”: “Of the imaginings that have made a difference, some of the most consequential have involved power, broadly defined. Part of an effective environment is the energy that moves continuously around us. All organisms draw on that energy, convert it, and use it in order to live. As energy is captured and set to a purpose, it becomes power. The application of energy is power in its widest meaning” (xxi).

24. Williams, 3–4.

25. Thomas Finger, “Harvesting Power: American Agriculture and British Industry, 1776–1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia [forthcoming]).

26. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 66–68.

27. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (London, 1969).

28. E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988), 5–6.

29. Nathan Miller, The Enterprise of a Free People: Aspects of Economic Development in New York State during the Canal Period, 1792–1838 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962); L. H. Jenks, The Migration of British Capital to 1875 (New York, 1938); Morton Rothstein, “A British Investment in Bonanza Farming, 1879–1910,” Agricultural History 33 (1959): 72–78.

30. William J. Brown, American Colossus: The Grain Elevator, 1843 to 1943 (Cincinnati, 2009); Harry Fornari, Bread Upon the Waters: A History of United States Grain Exports (Nashville, 1973); Daniel Morgan, Merchants of Grain (New York, 1979); Cronon (n. 4 above).

31. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Report on the Internal Commerce of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1881); W. Page, Commerce and Industry (London, 1919).

32. Most notably in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Munn v. Illinois (1877).

Edmund Russell is an associate professor in history and science, technology, and society at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (2011). James Allison is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. A former energy and environmental attorney, his forthcoming dissertation “Sovereignty and Survival: American Energy Development and Indian Self-Determination” explores the effects of the 1970s energy crises on American Indians and explains how tribes possessing valuable energy resources seized this moment to fundamentally reshape their role within the federalist system. Thomas Finger is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. His forthcoming dissertation examines the nineteenth-century Atlantic grain trade to trace the connections between the development of American commercial agriculture and British “factory-style” industrialization. John K. (Jack) Brown has taught the history of technology at the University of Virginia since 1992. Brian Balogh is Compton Chair and professor of history at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (2009). W. Bernard Carlson is a professor at the University of Virginia with appointments in history and science, technology, and society. He has just completed a biography of the inventor Nikola Tesla that will be published by Princeton University Press. The ideas in this essay developed over several years of discussion among faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students associated with the Committee on the History of Technology and Environment at the University of Virginia. The National Science Foundation (grant no. 0241889) funded graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow associated with the committee. Postdoctoral fellow Alex Checkovich co-wrote an unpublished essay on energy and power in 2006. This is a new essay, but we are grateful for Alex’s contribution to our thinking.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Given their common primary source heritage, the books generally parallel each other in the description of Sprague’s life and accomplishments. Sprague was born in 1857, attended the United States Naval Academy, was something of an Edison apprentice, and subsequently became an inventor in the burgeoning electric industry. He mostly worked as an entrepreneurial inventor, with most success prior to World War I. For his major endeavors, including electric traction, elevators, and multiple unit control, Sprague founded a company to develop and possibly manufacture the products. Within several years he sold it to larger manufacturers. Both biographies depict Sprague possessing drive, meticulousness, discipline and self-confidence, and a vigorous penchant for promotion of his products. He repeatedly bet his slim resources on his inventive abilities, taking commissions to build a system before having tackled much of the invention and development work, and then working under intense pressure to meet deadlines.

In 1888 at Richmond, Virginia, Sprague constructed a successful electric streetcar operation. Others had developed electric streetcars, but Sprague’s scheme thereafter supplied widespread electric traction operation. Equally important for railways, Sprague developed multiple unit or “MU” control, enabling trains of powered railway cars to be operated from a single controller, allowing more efficient and versatile rapid transit. He also developed electric-powered elevators, and systems for electrically powering heavier railroads. During World War I, Sprague joined the Naval Advisory Board, created by navy secretary Josephus Daniels in order to harness America’s cadre of professional inventors as well as inventive spirit and ability among the general population. Between 1914 and 1930, Sprague developed a system of automatic train control for preventing railroad accidents, but then engaged in a long and bitter struggle to obtain a patent for it. Frank Sprague died in 1934, still active as an inventor to the end.

The Middletons explicitly regard Sprague as a hero. Their narrative is a comprehensive and well-illustrated chronicle of his accomplishments. Of particular value is their elaboration of Sprague’s doings in World War I and the 1920s, periods that Dalzell summarizes (too) briefly. The Middletons detail meticulously the technical aspects of Sprague’s (and his rivals’) work, and they include a list of Sprague’s patents in an appendix. They describe Sprague’s “system” of invention as a combination of daring, spontaneous creativity, meticulous experimentation, teamwork with colleagues and employees, and public promotion. They note that through a comprehensive patent, Sprague forced General Electric to deal with him for his MU enterprise. But in the 1920s, his tortuously long efforts to secure a big patent for an Automatic Train Control (ATC) system meant that he effectively lost out to corporate rivals. Sprague conceded much to get the ATC patent in 1930, but by then the Interstate Commerce Commission no longer required extensive installation of ATC systems.

The Middletons’ project might have better employed, and contributed to, recent scholarship on invention, business, and technology development more generally. Their chapter on Sprague’s inventive process is a good idea, but could have been stronger with more explicit comparison with other inventors besides Edison. They occasionally offer tantalizing political or financial details or briefly note Sprague’s decision to sell his enterprises, but they do not develop these parts of his work, which surely were complex and had implications for Sprague’s inventive efforts. Their account of Sprague’s elevator activities does not say much of his equally herculean efforts to get capital during the 1890s depression, nor does their telling of the MU saga say much about Sprague’s struggle with fellow investors or his efforts to retain control of his creation, beyond noting General Electric’s competition.

Dalzell, in contrast, contextualizes Sprague’s work as part of the emerging electrical industry, organizing his biography around several central themes. Dalzell notes that social constructionist views in history of technology have downplayed biography and individual agency; historical context takes precedence over individual characteristics or behaviors in explaining inventors’ success. But Dalzell argues for restoration of biography and for measured recognition of inventors’ agency within, and accounting for, the subject’s milieu. Sprague constructed himself as a flamboyant individual who created technology solutions with daring, cleverness, and skill. However mythical, the hero-technologist model was a decisive motivating goal and ethos. Dalzell views Sprague’s repeated efforts, including electric traction, elevators, and MU, as attempts to self-consciously style himself as a “heroic inventor.” Later in life, Sprague recounted these efforts as legendary technology adventures.

The Middletons and Dalzell both note that Sprague boldly sought high-profile projects that, if successful, would prove the technology to investors or buyers. He repeatedly offered to assume the risks in order to get a working system in front of the public. Dalzell calls this “staging,” noting that it was critical both in moving technology out of the pilot stage and into widespread use and in establishing Frank Sprague as a renowned, trusted, and heroic inventor-entrepreneur.

Dalzell describes Sprague’s activities, interactions, and difficulties within the electrical business and its financial underpinnings. In so doing, he describes Sprague’s ongoing relationship with ever-larger corporate interests that attempted to control and rationalize the electric equipment business. Sprague the inventor was compelled also to be an entrepreneur, increasingly answerable to investors, and he finally had to come to terms with corporations that proved more capable of innovation—or reverse engineering—than he initially anticipated. Dalzell views Sprague’s sale of his MU enterprise to General Electric, for example, as at best a stalemate: GE sought an exclusive license from Sprague while he sought instead to integrate his own MU firm vertically. Pressured by his own unhappy investors and by aggressive GE legal and market competition, Sprague got the best terms he could, but in the process lost control of his creation. Dalzell suggests that in the New York Central’s electrification project, Sprague worked for the railroad as a technical consultant, rather than heroic inventor, less an adventurer and more a conservative engineer. As do the Middletons, Dalzell declares Sprague’s later efforts as an independent inventor less rewarding.

Dalzell could have discussed Sprague’s later life in greater depth, and some might quibble with Dalzell’s analysis on some points. He identifies Thomas Hughes as a proponent of context in explaining invention, which is not wrong, but Hughes is also known for his retooling of inventor agency, an approach that seems quite relevant to a biographical study of a great inventor. In his 2009 biography Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, for example, Kurt Beyer also attempts to vindicate biography in history of technology, drawing on Hughes as an advocate of inventors’ agency. On the historical rather than historiographical level, Dalzell asserts that there was no “business model” to manufacture, buy, sell, or operate electric railways, and so financial and managerial innovation was as important as technical engineering. While this claim is true to an extent, the assertion requires significant qualification. When railway managers embarked on electrification of their “roads,” they indeed learned new things about running transit operations, but they also drew on existing methods from horsecar, cable car, and big railroad companies. Many electrified street railways underwent consolidation into bigger and bigger city systems, in conscious imitation of railroads, and the “trolley” companies marketed securities in ways pioneered by the steam roads as well. Decades later, this practice had implications for streetcars’ regulation by government, their political problems, and their financial health.

Both books also might have explored how Sprague the inventor felt about the subsequent financial troubles of his chief product, electric railways. Sprague touched on the subject at least once, in testimony before the Federal Electric Railways Commission in 1919. What might Sprague’s take on the trolley industry, three decades after Richmond, reveal about his views of technology and politics? Had Sprague himself identified a sector where heroic invention no longer had a place?

These criticisms aside, two good Sprague biographies are a welcome thing. Those interested in technical aspects and more thorough narrative of Sprague’s projects should consult the Middleton volume; those interested in invention in the context of the early development of technology industries should read the Dalzell book. In spite of overlap, those interested specifically in electrical and railway history might read both with profit.

Mark Gallimore is at work on a book on the business and politics of mass transportation in the Pittsburgh region.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Everette Lee DeGolyer and fellow geology students mapping the Arbuckle Mountains, Oklahoma, 1905.

We chose this image for the cover of the first issue of Technology and Culture produced entirely by the new editorial team at OU because the story of the image resonates with the notion of new beginnings. For OU, the field trip was sponsored by the then-young Department of Geology, marking the beginning of its identity as a leading (and at the time, the only) center for applying the science of geology to the problems of oil prospecting and drilling in the booming, oil-rich state.1 For geology students, field trips like these were a shared experience of new beginnings, as they worked through a rite of passage into the professional world. For Everette DeGolyer, this humble field trip launched an impressive career as an oil businessman, a scientist and innovator in geophysics, and a leading patron of the study of the history of science and technology in the United States. For T&C, DeGolyer’s successful career, no more than hoped for at the time of this photo, and his wider interests and passions would ultimately play an important role in bringing the journal to OU.

Born to John William and Narcissa Kagy Huddle DeGolyer in 1886, young Everette Lee first found himself in Norman, Oklahoma, at the start of the century. As an amateur mineral prospector, Everette’s father had looked to capitalize on the many Oklahoma land-runs that began in 1889, ultimately securing the rights to settle on land originally belonging to the Kiowa tribe of Native Americans.2 Possibly driven by his father’s lack of “boom” success in this “boom or bust” period, Everette enrolled in OU in 1904, working odd jobs to pay his tuition as he studied under Charles Gould in the geology department. Promises of making their fortune through geological training attracted many students to the university during this period.3 In 1906, at the behest of Gould, DeGolyer began a three-year summer excursion working for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana. Starting out as a camp cook, he eventually worked his way up to field assistant. The chief geologist for the USGS, Charles Willard Hayes, was impressed enough with DeGolyer that he offered him a job in Tampico, Mexico. Temporarily leaving his studies behind, DeGolyer headed a geological expedition for the Mexican Eagle Oil Company in 1909. During the trip, he located one of the world’s largest oil fields, prospecting and building the well-site at Portrero del Llana (no. 4) and subsequently amassing a fortune. Two years later, in 1911, DeGolyer returned to OU to finish his degree. Now the richest student on campus, he had no more need of odd jobs.4 Upon graduation he would become a leader in the oil business, maintaining a particular interest in innovative technologies and techniques, including reflection seismology, for which he provided crucial financial support during the early years of its development.

DeGolyer’s interests were not limited to oil, however; he also loved collecting books on the history of science. In 1949 he loaned OU 129 rare books on the history of the physical and natural sciences, including a number of important first editions. By the time of DeGolyer’s death in 1956 he had donated a sizeable number of volumes to the university, which he expressly designated for active use in teaching and research on the history of science. Convinced that education in the histories of science and technology were crucial, his gift formed the heart of a collection that became one of the finest of its kind in the United States (today totaling more than 92,000 volumes). Further, it inspired the university to create a Department of the History of Science, where his books, as well as those acquired through the gifts of many other patrons, are to this day in active daily use in teaching and research.5 The DeGolyer family supported the history of technology in the next generation as well, when DeGolyer’s son, Everette Junior, joined the Society for the History of Technology in the late 1960s. Like his father, the younger Everette loved rare books: he became the director of a library at Southern Methodist University specializing in books and archives on the history of railroads and the broader history of the trans-Mississippi West and the Spanish borderlands.

The tradition of support for the historical study of science and technology at OU started by DeGolyer has been extended to T&C, as we spent 2010 settling into our new duties. This cover essay benefited from the help of History of Science Collections curator Kerry Magruder and librarian JoAnn Palmeri, as well as from OU’s Western History Collections and librarian Jacquelyn Slater, who provided this rare photograph of DeGolyer in the field. Charles Gilbert, a retired professor of geology, explained the kind of fieldwork that geology students would be doing in the Arbuckles in 1905, as well as the details of contact-point mapping and its value for oil drilling. It makes for a good beginning as we look forward to the next five years of T&C at the University of Oklahoma.

1. Lon Tinkle, Mr. De: A Biography of Everette Lee DeGolyer (Boston, 1970), 33.

2. There were four major land-runs in Oklahoma between 1889 and 1893, with many more minor ones occurring during the next decade. For their connection to the DeGolyer family, see ibid., 4–6.

3. Ibid., 6–7.

4. Ibid., 60–83; Kevin J. Hayes, “Everette Lee DeGolyer (9 October 1886–14 December 1956),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 187, ed. Joseph Rosenblum, American Book Collectors and Bibliographers, 2nd series (Detroit, 1997), 61–66.

5. More detailed information can be found on the collection’s website at . Since no “official” history has yet been written on the history of science collection at the University of Oklahoma, much of the above information (including what is on the website) is taken from the collection’s archives of its history, written by various faculty and staff, including former curators Duane H. D. Roller and Marilyn B. Ogilvie and former librarian Marcia M. Goodman.

Petar Markovski is a graduate student in the history of science at the University of Oklahoma and graduate assistant at T&C during the 2010–11 academic year. Suzanne Moon is editor-in-chief of T&C.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.