Half a century on and the cold war has ended, with great material benefits for numbers of people around the world. SHOT has grown more diverse. It is still concerned about reaching beyond the academy—witness the celebrations of accessible history such as the Dibner Award and the Sally Hacker Prize, as well as the efforts in recent years to address key policy-making audiences. Such initiatives are, if anything, even more pressing than during the cold war years, although to a very different purpose. With capitalism in all its variants now a near-global reality, we cannot risk the ecological consequences of attempts to extend to the rest of the world the same kind of technological materialism the rich north has come to accept as its right. Technology will have a role in the coming shift to sustainability, and SHOT can play an important part in enhancing understanding of present predicaments and perhaps also in identifying ways out. Yet serious efforts to develop new audiences are still tinged with the flavor of the second-best: inferior, that is, to the “real” work of primary research and writing that will appear in the front half of T&C or in a monograph from one of the better academic presses.

Of course, as in any learned society, the greatest accolades will rightly be reserved for those who contribute to the core activity of expanding the field’s intellectual boundaries. But if SHOT is to have any real prospect of wielding the kind of influence we profess to want beyond the academy, that core needs to be redefined. “Public history” differs from traditional academic history by focusing on the task of helping “ordinary people” outside the academy to develop a sense of the past that they find relevant. Hence it also differs from some of academic history’s methods and techniques. It need not be any the less scholarly, rigorous, or challenging, however, whatever the medium.1 As SHOT’s flagship, T&C will never be—should never be—a popular publication, a Mechanics Magazine for our own day. But why should the front half of the journal not be open to research about the ways in which nonacademic audiences engage with the technological past? This would be a radical step indeed, for the “audience advocacy” or “visitor research” I am promoting here forms the basis of entire professional careers. Yet in this way, the goals, values, and methodologies of the public history of technology would be acknowledged as having something like equal intellectual weight with more traditional forms of scholarship. Instead of being regarded as “applied” scholarship, it would be seen more widely as a different kind of historiography, developing in symbiosis with that focused on academic audiences. SHOT’s own creation myth warns against the alternative: if the history of technology only escaped from the shadow of applied science by a rupture with the History of Science Society, what is to prevent frustrated public historians of technology from setting up their own organization and journal? It has already happened to some degree in broader realms of the discipline. Better to mobilize the history of technology for wider audiences from within than to miss the chances for cross-fertilization.

In this essay, I explore these issues in relation to the history of transport and mobility, largely though not exclusively in the UK. First, I introduce the idea of a “usable past,” which should contribute to the efforts being made by scholars studying contemporary mobility to reach out to wider audiences by injecting a historical dimension into such thinking. I argue that SHOT should take a lead in engaging with the stories that people use to justify choices about mobility, and more particularly, with the technological aspects of such stories—the techno-tales, to borrow an expression from Martin Reuss.2 Techno-tales often include narratives about the past, and SHOT has a particular responsibility to delineate and demystify their historical dimensions. In the next section, I argue that SHOT needs to promote research into how nonacademic audiences perceive and understand the technological past. I then turn to ways in which we might help overcome some of the organizational and institutional challenges to demystification. The following section explores intellectual opportunities for a new understanding of contemporary mobility that is better oriented to the future because it is sensitive to the past. Finally, I consider how this new techno-cultural history of transport and mobility might be used to develop a new generation of museum displays.

What Future for the Technological Past?

During the summer of 2007, a British newspaper reported that adding an extra lane in each direction on an overloaded motorway was likely to cost £1,000 an inch by the time the project was finished. This would make it the UK’s most expensive piece of road construction ever. Noting criticism from advocacy groups concerning not only the cost, but also the adverse environmental impacts of this and similar projects, the newspaper concluded that “in the UK, cars are still king, despite efforts to wean people off them. Britain is now one of the most car dependent countries in the world.”3 There was some effort to put this in historical context: a handful of statistics (albeit questionable), and an illustration of a picture postcard dating to the dawn of Britain’s motorway age in the late 1950s. But the analysis looked back only ten years or so. The occasional op-ed piece aside, newspapers are not greatly concerned about the history of today’s car-dependency.

Does it matter? Can historians of technology have anything “useful” to say about the past in relation to the present and future of mobility—or perhaps, more pertinently, immobility? Transport is moving rapidly up the political agenda, which suggests that, given the appropriate voices, we might find any number of ready audiences. Advocacy groups, business people, politicians, and policy makers are all showing concern about the sustainability of rising levels of personal mobility.4 And this is not the only worry, as globalization increases the distances over which raw materials are transported, and as changing patterns of manufacture and consumption demand more-frequent “just-in-time” deliveries operating over larger geographical areas.5 Similar concerns exist in the European Union and the United States, as well as in economic hotspots like India, China, and Brazil.6

But perhaps the scale of today’s challenges precludes any utility for our expertise. What lessons does history have to offer, for example, when it comes to tackling the rapid increase in damaging emissions from commercial aviation? The answer: nothing certain, in a world of complex sociotechnical systems characterized by developments that cannot be predicted from historical trends, however acutely analyzed and empirically well-grounded. But history can help us to see how, over the long term, various combinations of power and circumstance shaped choices at the collective and personal levels; how decisions made long ago tend to lock modern societies into particular ways of moving around; and how apparently impregnable transport systems can eventually unravel and become obsolete. It can explain why the very idea of mobility and certain ways of moving around have continued to exert such a strong hold on the popular imagination. Indeed, a simple awareness that nothing is forever might prove a useful corrective to the kind of complacency that characterizes much contemporary debate about transport’s future. More positively, by identifying the key factors responsible for past change, historians might suggest ways of intervening to influence the way mobility develops. Historians of technology have an important part to play in all of this—not least by disabusing people of their faith in technological fixes.

A “usable past” on these lines would be welcomed in the cross-disciplinary fields of transport and mobility studies, which from different perspectives seek to influence public behavior through engagement with policy.7 At first glance, these fields seem unpromising for the historian of technology: historical sensitivity is rare, and, even though technology is often discussed in transport studies, it is generally treated as hardware in isolation from behavioral norms and practice. Still, there are signs of change. In transport studies, thinking about travel behavior and how to change it results in more emphasis on social and cultural factors, and with this comes an openness to history. In policy terms, the argument is that the difficulties of persuading people to move themselves and things differently (or less, or even not at all) is partly the product of deep-set, socially determined attitudes and expectations, not all of which are obvious or amenable to traditional (and ahistorical) levers of behavioral change, such as pricing. Thus as Eliahu Stern and Harry Richardson conclude on the basis of an extensive review, “cultural and social norms can affect the individual’s perceptions of constraints [on mobility] which will consequently affect the whole decision making process,” resulting in travel patterns that differ between and within societies.8 Analysts increasingly agree that knowledge of these cultures and patterns could help to shape policies aimed at changing attitudes, choices, and practices.9
True, a direct appeal to history is still rare.10 And yet this emerging paradigm implicitly acknowledges temporality; to observe that there is a “certain social inertia built into transport systems that . . . is difficult to change”11 is to recognize that mobility cultures and patterns build over decades, with some aspects becoming more sedimented than others.

Such claims demand careful testing by historians, as well as opening up the possibility of developing a usable past that engages with the production, governance-cum-regulation, and consumption of present and future mobilities. In The Politics of Mobility, Geoff Vigar provides a rare example of how, in the British context, history might thus strengthen policy. He analyzes how different political and policy-making bodies have, since 1945, shaped the struggle between the dominant “predict-and-provide” approach to official transport policy and various alternatives. In this way, he starts to identify forms of organization and other factors that might fruitfully be developed in the pursuit of demand management and other nontraditional measures intended to achieve socially equitable and ecologically sustainable mobility.12

How might technology fit into such an approach? The interdisciplinary “mobility turn” in the social sciences professes a sensitivity to “historical mobilities,” even if Mobilities, the key journal, so far expresses more by way of good intentions than a nuanced engagement with the technological past. But the potential is there, as evidenced by the characterization of mobility as “an ‘orderly disorder’ . . . [of] dynamic or complex adaptive systems . . . [that] develop over time so that national economies, corporations and households are locked into stable ‘path dependent’ practices, such as the steel-and-petroleum car.” Such systems, it is argued, can also undergo radical change, either as a consequence of critical single or closely coupled multiple events, or as that of “the accumulation of small repetitions reaching a ‘tipping point’ as with the explosive growth of mobile phone use or communications between offices using faxes . . . or the small causes that could conceivably tip the car system into a post-car system.”13 Historians of technology should be able to build on this sort of conceptual framework in order to develop a historical analysis of present-day mobility that is better oriented to the future precisely because it is sensitive to the past.14

STS scholars are already helping to expand and complete this circle by introducing into transport studies similar ideas about technology, which should then be open to historical analysis. The tendency of transport studies to treat technology in isolation from travel behavior means, as Boelie Elzen argues, that analysts assume that technical innovation can only promote incremental optimization of existing transport regimes.15 In contrast, when understood more broadly and on a longer-term perspective as a sociocultural phenomenon, technology has the potential to generate radical shifts in mobility. More attention to historical analysis of how and why such changes occur would greatly strengthen this line of critique.16 Indeed, we are already hearing requests for such studies in order to provide benchmarks for research into the ways that transport has come to underpin geographically stretched social networks.17

A potentially fruitful input that takes us in the direction of the public’s understanding of technology and the technological past is Malene Freudendal-Pedersen’s study of how some people absolve themselves of responsibility for the externalities resulting from their own mobility. She argues that such individuals invoke stories about what are erroneously taken to be inescapable universal truths: namely, “It’ll always be like that whatever I do.”18 Technology often enters these narratives, and here, adapting Reuss’s terminology, I call them techno-tales. Anecdotal evidence and personal experience both suggest that technical change is an important techno-tale used to justify an individual’s mobility. The decision to continue “binge-flying” over comparatively short distances or to buy an SUV and so on is all the easier if one believes that technical change will deliver social benefits. Airline companies and aircraft and auto manufacturers encourage such beliefs by emphasizing the reduced emissions generated by their latest conveyances, while ignoring the higher total levels of pollutants produced by a transport and land-use system still geared to encouraging—and sometimes requiring—longer, more frequent journeys.19

Implicitly or otherwise, there is usually a reading or perception of the past bound up in such techno-tales, perhaps most often the perception that technical change always delivers positive benefits. Historians need to question such easy assumptions; they also need to ensure that policy analysts, who should know better but often do not, and the wider public both get the message that technology rarely provides a simple fix.20 In doing this, we should be well on the way to developing a history that shows how the sociotechnical means through which mobilities were produced and consumed in the past—transport systems, broadly conceived—have shaped present-day expectations and practices, the “cultures of transport” that are proving so resistant to change. The returns might be considerable.21

Reaching the Public(s)

Top-down approaches to making a usable past will only get historians of technology so far in reaching the wider public—the people who ultimately have to decide whether radical shifts in mobility are needed or desirable. There is not much evidence of enthusiasm for such change, despite the qualified acceptance of the UK’s solitary example of a radical policy shift, London’s Congestion Charge.22 A government suggestion in 2007 that Britain might eventually adopt a national system of road-pricing to reduce congestion and pollution attracted a protest from nearly 1.8 million electronic petitioners—a record number—forcing abandonment of the idea.23 Younger people are becoming habituated to living in spatially complex and extended social networks and are thus heavily dependent upon “cheap transport” (and telecommunications). All of this suggests just how widely held and deeply rooted is the belief that personal mobility is a right, and that we are still locked into the same techno-tales that led Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) famously to proclaim that “every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially.”24

When techno-tales start to look as though they are underpinning claims to rights, we are clearly entering deep waters. Questioning the history implicit in such ideas is fraught with difficulties, because they are often sincerely held elements of an individual’s or community’s sense of identity— not merely techno-tales, but myths. In David Lowenthal’s formulation, “myth” provides stories of origin and continuance through the decades and centuries, narratives that bind today’s individuals and communities together through a sense of common purpose and prestige.25 Therefore, as Patrick Wright has observed, the truth or falsity of public representations of the past are “often peripheral to their practical appropriation in everyday life.”26 Questioning myth can spark reactions that are as likely to be emotional as intellectual; the techno-tale of progressive technical change is probably better described as a “techno-myth” in this sense.27

Moreover, “the public” is far from a homogeneous body, not least in its relationship with media. Books, newspapers, television, radio, the web, museum exhibits: it is difficult to gauge just what audiences take from each of these. Crude numbers are not enough, but these are often all we have. A book aimed at a popular audience and written with one eye on the future, such as Philip Bagwell and Peter Lyth’s Transport in Britain, 1750–2000: From Canal Lock to Gridlock (2006), sells in the neighborhood of 3,000 copies in the UK, a large number by comparison with most academic monographs, yet falling far short of the numbers generated by the mass media or even by similar books written by journalists.28

Of course, the impact of a book is not restricted to its immediate readers, who are perhaps more likely to be engaged than the casual viewer, listener, or web-surfer. However, this is a dangerous assumption—easily made by those of us for whom the printed word remains a priority—and we simply do not know. Do we really understand, for instance, the ways in which younger generations might be reaching the past through blogs, tweets, social networks, and other narrow-cast internet media beyond the web page? Such matters worry media professionals who are interested in history programming for television.29 They should also be of concern to historians of technology if we are not to make the mistake of “retarded borrowing”— that is, taking from other sectors not the best of contemporary practice, but that of one or two generations before. In short, systematic research on how and why the public engages with and understands the past through technotales and related myths has to be a priority if we are to maximize our chances of stimulating fruitful debate.30

Traditional mass media are not going to disappear in the near future, and they offer large audiences, sometimes huge. Whether written by scholars or journalists, popular books can inform professionals in other media about the main contours of historiographical debate. And, despite the accelerating trend on British television toward mediating the past through “celebrity” presenters, there is still a role for the subject specialist behind the scenes. Something as straightforward as pointing to ways in which different kinds of mobility have historically been favored or discouraged can help reveal “cracks” in today’s structural stories that admit the possibility of an alternative—a realization that “it didn’t have to be like that; and it doesn’t now.”31

Technology museums offer another route to popular audiences, one whose size is somewhere between that of books and broadcasting. Such museums have not traditionally encouraged visitors to make connections between the past and today’s mobility choices. But there are signs of change: in 2008, the Science Museum in South Kensington opened an exhibition titled Does Flying Cost the Earth? as part of its science-news gallery;32 the newly refurbished London Transport Museum, still historically oriented, offers visitors the chance to reflect on the future of urban mobility;33 and the National Railway Museum (NRM) and the Riverside Museum in Glasgow plan new exhibitions linking the future of mobility with its past. These efforts are noteworthy for including academic historians in their planning, although in the UK, working relations between the two sectors date back at least to the 1960s.34 A Dutch initiative, the European Centre for Mobility Documentation, aims to pull transport museums into the internet era by bringing historians and exhibitors together to develop a web-based Virtual Mobility Museum.

Challenges and Solutions

Let us then assume for argument’s sake that SHOT-style contextual history has something to contribute to building a “usable past” that will encourage debate and reflection on the future of mobility. How do we make it happen? The absorption of our kinds of history by other academic disciplines and fields might mean that they eventually filter through into policy, but there is no guarantee. SHOT as an organization and we as individuals have to be sensitive to the mindsets of nonacademic audiences, whether politicians, policy makers, and business leaders; or those who serve or seek to influence them as advisers, lobbyists, or advocacy groups; or the broader and much-segmented “general public.” We must recognize that if we are serious about entering into dialogue with these groups, we need to listen to them as much as they need to be persuaded to listen to us. And it is easier to deliver effectively if projects are devised in collaboration with prospective partners, rather than treating the wider audience as a “bolt-on” to research devised for other reasons. In short, we need to do more to get to know our publics better. Some of this may be possible through informal networking; some perhaps through more formalized audience research. Much will depend on opportunity and the nature of the particular public we want to reach.

Even when all sides are agreed in principle, there are still formidable obstacles to building bridges. Despite the involvement of people active in SHOT, the history committee of the U.S. Transportation Research Board is bedeviled by mismatches and misunderstandings between historians and policy-oriented members over fields of interest, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies. My own experience with initiatives that bring together industry people, politicians, and policy makers and analysts is similar.35 Discussions may identify shared concerns, but it is difficult to sustain the dialogue that generates trust and commitment and gives historians some assurance of keeping the ear of those with a channel to the public. In short, the organizational work needed in order to ensure a continuity of dialogue will permit fresh thinking about the intellectual purpose and content of such endeavors. And the same is true of the media, with journalists, broadcasters, and producers, where it can take months if not years to build up fruitful relationships.

How likely from SHOT’s side is such fresh thinking? We should allow ourselves a moment of self-congratulation for supporting the production of accessible knowledge over several decades. Elsewhere, the tide is turning in our favor: Funding in the UK now encourages academic writing that has an “impact” on audiences outside the academy.36 Yet the pages of T&C bear witness to continuing tensions between those who see themselves as producers of original knowledge and those who “popularize” it.37 These are probably perennial—and perhaps constructive—strains, although I have already suggested that partial resolution might lie with a frank acknowledgment that each audience’s needs may shape not only the sort of writing, but also the subject and the way it is tackled.

We must take more of the initiative, however. We must do more to encourage the often-undervalued institutional and organizational work that increases the chance of those in power, or with the public’s ear, listening to what we have to say and acting on it. Recognition of public history and policy-oriented history as complementary crafts to that of conventional historiography would be enhanced if T&C (in conjunction with eTC) were to make still more effort to include such work in its pages, much as the Journal of Transport History does with occasional articles on heritage transport’s presentation of the past.38 Worth mention also are T&C’s essays on history, policy, and planning located in a middle section between the conventional articles and the reviews. Such recognition would build SHOT’s efforts to enable members to share contacts and experience with policy makers and the wider media.39

Toward a Usable Techno-Cultural History of Mobilities

Let us then assume that these far-from-trivial challenges can be surmounted. How can SHOT help intellectually to develop an understanding of mobility that is better oriented to stimulating debate about the future precisely because it is sensitive to the past? There is much to be said for the utility of many studies that are already in print. Technology museums rarely pay for primary research (except on audiences) when developing exhibitions, and the mass media certainly do not. But if policy analysts want to know what factors are likely to inhibit or encourage the take-up of new transport systems, in some fields, historians have a lot to offer as it is. For example, mapping both the social meaning and geographical spread of transport networks, as John Hepp has done with regard to nineteenth-century Philadelphia and Colin Pooley and his colleagues in relation to provincial urban areas in England after 1945, might yield the kind of historical benchmarks that policy makers could find valuable.40

But fresh approaches will also be needed if we are to understand the sedimented character of present-day patterns of mobility and, more particularly, the techno-tales that help underpin these. We need to distinguish factors amenable to short-term change from those deeply embedded—the techno-myths—and thus subject only to longer-term transformation, if at all. And we need to do this in ways that can spark public debate. In short, we need an accessible, theoretically assured, richly descriptive history of transport-cum-mobility grounded in the material realities of technological systems and alive to issues of power, social equity, and ecological sustainability. And since all transport is in some degree technological, SHOT can contribute much to this endeavor. Indeed, it is likely to be crucial in reinforcing a (re)turn to technology in a field of inquiry that was for a long time reluctant to embrace this dimension fully.41

The so-called cultural and spatial turns that have remodeled many other areas of the humanities and social sciences open up exciting possibilities,42 for transport is a deeply spatio-cultural act. The physical process of moving from A to B is imbued with socially inscribed meanings such as “driving is freedom” (“the last great freedom,” as President Ronald Reagan once said). These are the cultures of transport, and technology anchors them in the material world. The act (or performance) of moving via objects (vehicles, infrastructures) both requires and helps reproduce or transform the cultures and social organizations that, together with the hardware, constitute transport. This kind of perspective ties the technological history of transport into a broader social semiotics, deconstructing the meanings of mundane objects, built environments, and the everyday mobilities that take place within them.43

Perhaps the historiography is healthy enough to do without further theorizing. But I find it useful to work with a big picture that encourages thinking in terms of a transport system (single mode) or regime (multimode), and about the need to analyze how the various sociotechnical elements of each interact with, or—as I should prefer to see matters—constitute, one another. Broadening Jörg Beckmann’s taxonomy of auto-mobilization is useful here. On this account, transport has three dimensions: mobility-subjects, mobility-objects, and mobility-scapes.44 The first covers the individuals and social groups that use or are otherwise affected by a transport system/ regime; the second refers to vehicles and their associated infrastructures of “hard” physical forms, such as roads and servicing facilities, and “soft” social-institutional ones, such as driving schools, traffic laws, and policing; mobility-scapes are the ways in which time and space are shaped, perceived, represented, and performed (through movement and social interaction) within a transport regime or system, as when we talk of a place being “about ten minutes’ walk” distant.

While there is always a risk with such schemata of “technology” becoming so broadly defined as to lose any analytical purchase—if technology is everything, then everything is technology—the advantage is that one thinks constantly about the co-construction of transport’s material and immaterial dimensions. For instance, Ginette Verstraete explores what she calls the “realm of technology as cultural performance” in a study of how the first North American transcontinental railroad partly constituted the processes through which “mobility and location . . . were intricately intertwined in the technological production of America’s mobile nation.” In a striking reassertion of the importance of the technology’s materiality, Verstraete emphasizes that “the railroad was as much a technology of transportation as it was a technology of representation; that it was as much about literally moving all people in different ways . . . as it was about figuratively emplacing a specific citizenry.”45

Scholars working at the intersection between the histories of transport and technology are delivering much along these lines. An excellent example is David Nye’s enfolding of transport into broader techno-cultural histories of nation-building, as he does in American Technological Sublime (1994) and America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (2003). Another excellent example is cultural geographer Peter Bishop’s examination of how, over several decades, proposals for Australia’s Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway were tied up with the idea of the corridor as both a tool of practical planning and a means of marshalling the hopes and aspirations of competing national identities. Bishop argues that the project’s technologies were implicated in a continuing re-signification as the corridor evolved as a site of difference, struggle, and reconciliation among European, Aboriginal, and Asian conceptions of nation.46

As long-familiar social-constructivist theories embrace geographical spaces and scales beyond that of the nation, so too does the empirical analysis of mobility-subjects, -objects, and -scapes. For example, historians are using theories about large-scale sociotechnical systems to explore how the idea and practice of building transnational infrastructures over the last 150 years have shaped, and been shaped by, both the visions and the limited reality of a European space of free movement.47 Still others are taking up the challenge of articulating how transport has contributed to the production of symbolically rich and politically charged techno-geographies on smaller scales. Barbara Schmucki, Amy Richter, and Barbara Young Welke all emphasize that the traveling spaces of public-transport vehicles were places in which gendered and, sometimes, racialized notions of acceptable behavior were contested.48

These studies also suggest the increasing emphasis on the techno-cultures of everyday mobility, incorporating users’ perspectives—their shared and contested values, attitudes, and norms. The basic methodology is familiar from, say, those historians who argue that the pioneering days of motoring and aviation were characterized by a masculinity wrapped up with the thrills and spills inherent in using these modes, and that these attributes had a lasting influence on mobility patterns after World War I.49 But users, of course, need to be understood in context, and historians of urban transport deliver studies that embrace and yet go beyond users. For instance, Eric Schatzberg’s work on U.S. tramways nicely captures the sense of how wider urban cultures and the hardware of urban mobility were simultaneously reproduced and transformed through technological change.50 Similarly, Clay McShane’s book on the emergence of automobility in U.S. cities analyzes how technological changes in motor vehicles and roads went hand-in-hand with changes in the meanings ascribed to them. Streets came to be thought of more as thoroughfares for motor vehicles than as open public spaces and a locale for neighborhood life. Motors were seen as liberating.51

Treating transport as a historical and spatialized material culture is something that historians increasingly do, but it is less than clear how to develop this historiography in line with questions about mobility choices in the twenty-first century. A history that emphasizes users’ perspectives will have the advantage of addressing such concerns: How could I have traveled in the past? How did other people move? What effect did it have on the way people lived? Why does that way of moving things still affect us today? What can we learn about how to do things differently? Such questions justify a history going back at least as far as Enlightenment notions of modern mobility, but it is the twentieth century that is of great importance in understanding current attitudes and patterns. Microcosmic studies of familiar vehicles might help in questioning the techno-tales people tell about transport, but we also need broad-brush narratives of how the expectation of unrestricted mobility has become so deeply entrenched.

Gregory Votolato’s recent book helps to do this by exploring how the history of vehicle design reflected and influenced changing attitudes about travel.52 More ambitiously, we need a genealogical approach to the technocultural history of mobilities, tracing how transport regimes evolved and how they underpin present-day attitudes, choices, practices, and problems. It would focus on how and why, in capitalist societies, most people treat personal mobility as a consumer good—as a technological service and/or market commodity in which transport’s many externalities are borne as generalized social costs, and not just by those primarily reaping its benefits.

If it is to bring out historical alternatives and thus open up cracks in the techno-tales and techno-myths people tell, such a history will explore under-researched areas, particularly those where the market ethos is not so clearly established. A good example is urban walking, with its attendant technologies such as pavements, physical barriers, and “zebra” (pedestrian) crossings, as well as jaywalking laws. The current upsurge of interest, especially among radical activists, in reclaiming highway space for pedestrians might be profitably related to the kind of historical processes of exclusion documented by McShane and at last being analyzed by others in more detail and in various geographical contexts.53 Another neglected area is the environment, although the historical examples of which I am aware show that this neglect is not because actors were indifferent to pollution and landscape degradation.54 Comparative histories embracing the techno-cultures of newly industrializing countries—for instance, the rickshaws of the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere—might help bring alternatives to carbased mobility to public attention.55 And where are the histories of freight? This would demand research into the (extra)ordinary technological systems of distribution networks, such as forklifts and pallets.56

In the UK, my hunch is that the four decades before World War II were when the cultural battle for auto-mobilization was won. If so, it was as significant as the mass-motorization that actually followed after 1945. That the train and bus still dominated mechanized inland transport in 1939 was not a reliable guide to the public’s expectations about mobility. But there are still many gaps in our understanding of this history, and in our understanding of what happened in other countries. Radical transport technologies often have to undergo a lengthy development protected by various actors who believe in (and thereby help construct) their potential. Mass auto-mobilization was constrained during the interwar period partly by the lack of government support for road building, but the “need” for such infrastructure was partly the product of popular and political debate during those decades.57 A recent book by historical geographer Peter Merriman suggests ready connections with public concerns. Merriman brilliantly analyzes the heterogeneous engineering that enabled Britain’s first motorway (the one now so expensively to be reconstructed) to be threaded through the crowded landscape in the late 1950s with surprisingly little protest and, once opened, to be “consumed” by various social groups as the apotheosis of modernity.58 Interestingly, our sketchy understanding of another essential infrastructure of early-twenty-first-century mobility, airports, suggests that in the UK, they developed in a technological niche protected by various actors, particularly the local state. How else was their future to be secured in the face of what was sometimes well-organized environmental opposition?59

Broad-brush histories will mean that we sometimes have to work with evidence that is “good enough” for the immediate purpose of public debate, while not being afraid to admit the limitations of our knowledge and sources. On the other hand, as we seek to fill out the picture, there will be further interchanges with burgeoning literatures on consumption and consumerism and their relationships with notions of citizenship, none of which yet engages systematically with mobility.60 Recent studies show the potential of understanding railway travel as a form of technological consumption in which passenger-consumers’ choices were imbued with cultural considerations, many of them embodied in the material technology of the vehicles.61 Further work might explore how changing ideas and practices about citizen-consumers, such as the historically shifting division between “necessitous” and “aspirational” consumption, related to transport. It would be worthwhile, for example, to revisit the history of Britain’s railways in the twentieth century in the light of arguments that in the nineteenth, they had been forced to provide elements of public service.62

We badly need an overview of how and why attitudes, policies, and practices changed with the rapid rise of the road-based alternative. How significant were users’ views about the railways’ quality of service, and what role did technological innovation have in shaping such attitudes (and vice versa)? Did consumer organizations and popular pressure have any effect on the companies’ provision of passenger services in the interwar period, or afterwards in the nationalized era? And, removed from passenger travel though still addressing the role of transport in a consumer society, to what degree was road distribution adopted because of the lorry’s superior characteristics in relation to the changing needs of industry and retailing? Answers to such questions will help the public to explore the pros and cons of a notion of citizenship that has tended to reduce decisions about mobility to the exercise of a narrow range of market choices.

Using the Usable Past

This might all seem a long way away from bringing technological history to wider publics. Yet people clearly value the freedom to choose whether, how, and when they move, so we are never going to be very far away from present concerns with a history that embraces issues such as consumption and even citizens’ rights (and duties), even if we do not use that language. Although exhibitions are certainly not the only way in which the public can engage with this history, transport museums and their artifacts offer a way of grabbing visitors’ interest to start debate and introspection. Many people like to connect to the past through material objects, and treating transport as material culture offers a way into some of the issues raised here.63 In particular, museums could try to encourage visitors to question the techno-tales that help to sustain present patterns of mobility.

It would be naïve to pretend that this is an easy task, and Harold Skramstad, president emeritus of The Henry Ford, has done a good job of summing up what he calls the “continuing dilemma of exhibition design”:

Content is communicated in a format of free-choice learning to people who pick and choose what to engage—and what to learn and remember—according to personal criteria that are based on individual interests and background . . . the medium is a basic and fundamental way of communicating content; . . . [it] is considered a core institutional competency; . . . [but] the outcome is somewhat unpredictable.64

In short, Skramstad concludes that “the fundamental challenge is to design exhibitions that have a clear and coherent intellectual intent while at the same time providing engaging individual experiences.” Museums must try as best they can and hope for the best, backed up by solid research into how visitors use and understand exhibitions.

The best transport museums recognize that they are spaces in which the past is marked, memorialized, and can even be critically interrogated. Object-rich displays with multimedia interpretation tick all the right boxes when it comes to gaining attention and offering visitors the chance to move beyond their existing knowledge and expectations. But making explicit connections among past, present, and future are things that need careful thought, and I am not convinced that museums have yet got it right. The refurbished London Transport Museum is a case in point. Yes, the laudable decision to dedicate a sizeable proportion of the exhibition’s concluding section to transport’s future highlights the imperative of addressing climate change and encourages hard thinking about how much and what kind of urban mobility we can afford. But there is a disconnect between this and the historical displays that precede it; the futures section makes little reference back to the historical displays through which visitors have already passed. Although it is entirely possible that some visitors make such connections for themselves, what are needed are exhibitions in which content, design, and spatial arrangements come together to encourage visitors to (re-)weave techno-tales about how transport’s past shapes our possible future.

This can be done by building on the historiography of material culture. Visitors understand that vehicles are more than just functional hardware; they already think of them as fully semiotic entities (even if they do not use such words), as bearers and perhaps even as creators of meaning beyond the narrowly utilitarian. Consider, for example, their (and our) emotional reactions to that desirable consumer-durable, the private automobile, or the glamor associated with long-distance luxury trains. So one challenge is to build on this implicit recognition, to draw out continuities and disjunctures between past and present and hence to suggest the long-term cultural patterns that both constrain and open up opportunities for the future by shaping expectations and attitudes about transport. We should be able to do more with history in museums, to suggest that the past could have been otherwise, that it too involved constrained choices, so that we start to disrupt any sense of inevitability.

How might we set about doing this? Museum narratives are always going to be broad brush; no exhibit can deliver the sophistication of academic discourse. Getting visitors to appreciate that their forebears had particular ways of understanding mobility—bringing them up short with the “shock of the old”—and getting them to appreciate that historical actors held certain points of view for good (or even bad) reasons: this is quite a challenge. Transport is, and was, always about tradeoffs. Traveling by train is not the same as making the same trip by plane or car; each mode offers a different experience, takes a different amount of time, costs a different amount, has a different ecological effect, and so on. Therefore we should follow Skramstad’s imperative and focus on microcosmic episodes that personalize history, while offering opportunities to explore some of history’s structural complexities and conflicts.65 The slowness and discomfort of traveling on an antebellum railroad in the United States points to the ways in which British technology had to be refashioned to suit different economic and financial imperatives. Even more radically, the encounter between railroad technology and the very different technologies of, and attitudes toward, mobility exemplified in the National Museum of the American Indian offers the potential for challenging exhibitions.66
But we need to go still further if museums are to spur fresh thinking about mobility’s future. Historians of technology already provide some insights into how the past gets wrapped into today’s techno-tales. Bob Post, for instance, writes engagingly about the disjuncture between historical reality and the way in which technological enthusiasts, called “juicefans,” perceive a golden age of electric-street traction; he argues that their enthusiasm has been built into a politically effective ideology that might crudely be summarized as “Light Rail Good: Buses (and Autos) Bad.”67 It would be a fairly straightforward matter to confront visitors with the contrast between perception and reality, and then ask them whether tax dollars would be better spent on one mode of transport rather than another.

Earlier, I hinted that academic funding in the UK has started to encourage research in which accessible outputs are integral to the work of historians. Let me finish with an example of such a project I am undertaking with the NRM, an exhibition highlighting the disjuncture between historical cultures of transport and the kinds that we arguably need today if we are to minimize carbon emissions and environmental degradation. By the 1880s, Britain’s railway companies had decided that their profitability depended on transporting large numbers of passengers at comparatively low fares and profit margins, a precursor to the sort of business model familiar today from so-called low-cost airlines. In order to turn this plan into a reality, the railways developed a range of marketing initiatives also familiar today to help create a set of cultural expectations that nonessential travel was something to which ordinary people could, and indeed should, aspire. This democratization of railway travel was in many ways of great benefit, and it helped to sustain the railways’ profitability even after World War I, when road competition started to bite hard. Indeed, today’s operating companies are still very much driven by the same kinds of imperatives, and their techniques of persuading us to travel “unnecessarily” are merely more sophisticated versions of those used by their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors.

Many of the objects used in railway marketing are inherently attractive—advertising posters, for example. Posters have often been exhibited before, but as aesthetic objects, with little attempt to convey a sense of their role as key aspects of a material culture designed to inculcate a habit of travel. So the historical element of the exhibition at the NRM will do precisely that. But the project’s real innovation lies in suggesting a possible disjuncture between this mobility culture and another that would be more appropriate if as a society we were to decide that we should seek to travel less. My argument is that present-day attitudes are shaped by a largely unquestioned techno-tale about the desirability of travel, and that as individuals, we should think much more critically about this narrative. While a culture that encouraged travel may have once been appropriate, we might have arrived at a point in history where this is no longer so.

The main exhibit experience will be immersive: travel through five “time zones,” four historical and one in the future. In each zone, visitors enter a space designed to sell travel, such as a booking agency. They seek out marketing materials and learn more about them and their historical context through object-specific labeling, which also directs the more curious to resources elsewhere in the NRM. In each zone, visitors are enabled to “buy” tickets for particular journeys, thus underlining the reducing monetary costs of certain kinds of travel. But the futuristic space reverses these expectations by discouraging travel, because tickets must be paid for in expensive carbon credits. Analyzing visitors’ reactions to this dilemma should be part of the project; reflecting on the wider implications of techno-tales in understanding the past and determining the future is properly a duty of SHOT and its journal.

Conclusion

Over the last fifty years, our society has done pretty well at trying to reach out to wider audiences, and in some degree this reflects the significant number of members who are not primarily academics or who have close professional ties outside the academy. On the other hand, we might question just how effective such efforts have been. As public history has become professionalized as a separate field, may not others be better placed to develop contacts with new audiences? If so, should not SHOT reinvigorate its efforts along these lines?

The short answer is yes, we should. From the beginning, we have told ourselves that the history of technology is central to understanding modern life (“All history is relevant, but the history of technology is most relevant,” said Mel Kranzberg), and the necessity of affirming this truth has certainly not diminished today. SHOT is still well placed to spur public debate. But we shall not succeed unless we put more effort into engaging with nonacademic audiences. To do so effectively, we will need to know much more about such audiences and how their attitudes are framed by technotales. And we will need to stop framing our own efforts along these lines as distinctly inferior to primary research and publication. This is essential for developing a techno-cultural historiography that sustains a dialogue between specialist expertise and diverse public concerns, whatever they may be. The first priority, then, is to research just a little less about the technological past and a little more about the present.

1. See Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000), 141–71.

2. Martin Reuss, “Seeing Like an Engineer: Water Projects and the Mediation of the Incommensurable,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008): 531–46, at 539–40.

3. Guardian, 31 July 2007.

4. Fiona Rajé, Margaret Grieco, Julian Hine, and John Preston, Transport, Demand Management and Social Inclusion: The Need for Ethnic Perspectives (Aldershot, UK, 2004).

5. Alan McKinnon, “Sustainable Freight Distribution,” in Integrated Futures and Transport Choices: UK Transport Policy beyond the 1998 White Paper and Transport Acts, ed. Julian Hine and John Preston (Aldershot, UK, 2003), 132–53.

6. Suzana Kahn Ribeiro et al., “Transport and Its Infrastructure,” in Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change, ed. Bert Metz et al. (Cambridge, 2007), 323–85.

7. Transport studies: Piet Rietveld and Roger R. Stough, eds., Institutions and Sustainable Transport: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Economies (Cheltenham, UK, 2007); Erling Holden, Achieving Sustainable Mobility: Everyday and Leisure-time Travel in the EU (Aldershot, UK, 2007); Lise Drewes Nielsen, Henrik Gudmundsson, and Thyra Uth Thomsen, “Mobility Research—a Growing Field of Social Enquiry,” in Social Perspectives on Mobility, ed. Thyra Uth Thomsen, Lise Drewes Nielsen, and Henrik Gudmundsson (Aldershot, UK, 2005), 1–7; Eliahu Stern and Harry W. Richardson, “A New Research Agenda for Modelling Travel Choice and Behaviour,” in Social Dimensions of Sustainable Transport: Transatlantic Perspectives, ed. Kieran Donaghy, Stefan Poppelreutter, and Georg Rudinger (Aldershot, UK, 2005), 144–63, at 158; Katie Williams, “Spatial Planning, Urban Form and Sustainable Transport: An Introduction,” in Spatial Planning, Urban Form and Sustainable Transport, ed. Katie Williams (Aldershot, UK, 2005), 1–13; Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw, eds., A New Deal for Transport? The UK’s Struggle with the Sustainable Transport Agenda (Oxford, 2003); Hine and Preston, Integrated Futures and Transport Choices; Amanda Root, ed., Delivering Sustainable Transport: A Social Science Perspective (Amsterdam, 2003); Geoff Vigar, The Politics of Mobility: Transport, Environment and Public Policy (London, 2002), esp. 189–220; David Banister et al., European Transport Policy and Sustainable Mobility (London, 2000), esp. 209–31; and Peter Nijkamp, Sytze A. Rienstra, and Jaap M. Vleugel, Transportation Planning and the Future (Chichester, UK, 1998). Mobility studies: Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities 1 (March 2006): 1–22, esp. 1; and John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London, 2000).

8. Stern and Richardson, esp. 144, 157–58.

9. Lise Drewes Nielsen, “Reflexive Mobility—a Critical and Action Oriented Perspective on Transport Research,” in Social Perspectives on Mobility, 47–64; Rajé, Grieco, Hine, and Preston.

10. An exception is Robin Hickman and David Banister, “Reducing Travel by Design: What About Change Over Time?” in Spatial Planning, Urban Form and Sustainable Transport, 102–19.

11. Kieran Donaghy, Stefan Poppelreutter, and Georg Rudinger, “Introduction and Overview,” in Social Dimensions of Sustainable Transport, 1–13, at 9.

12. Vigar, esp. 42–65, 189–220.

13. Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (n. 7 above), 9.

14. As affirmed by mobility scholar Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010): 17–31.

15. Boelie Elzen, “Taking the Socio-Technical Seriously: Exploring the Margins for Change in the Traffic and Transport Domain,” in Inside the Politics of Technology: Agency and Normativity in the Co-Production of Technology and Society, ed. Hans Harbers (Amsterdam, 2005), 171–97, at 173.

16. For example, Rudi Volti, Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore, 2006); Robert C. Post, Technology, Transport, and Travel in American History (Washington, D.C., 2003).

17. Jonas Larsen, John Urry, and Kay Axhausen, Mobilities, Networks, Geographies (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 130.

18. Malene Freudendal-Pedersen, “Structural Stories, Mobility and (Un)freedom,” in Thomsen, Nielsen, and Gudmundsson (n. 7 above), 29–45.

19. For example, the Guardian advertisement (22 August 2007) for a Suzuki 4×4 that claims “Same CO2 Tax Band as Mazda MX5,” a sports car—neither of which (at 205–28 g/km in the SUV’s case) could truthfully be described as low-emission vehicles; or a 31 July 2008 ad for a Lexus RX 400h hybrid drive, “a luxury car with a conscience,” which does only a little better at 192 g/km. The EU’s target for 2012—which many experts say is too high—is 130g/km.

20. Lisa Rosner, ed., The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems (New York, 2004).

21. The Dutch Ministry of Transport is financing the development of policy-oriented history, including international comparisons.

22. See http://www.tfl.gov.uk/roadusers/congestioncharging/ (accessed 25 May 2010); see also Williams (n. 7 above) for remarks on present attempts to reduce urban traffic in the UK and elsewhere.

23. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6381153.stm (accessed 25 May 2010).

24. Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II, vol. 1 (1849), chap. 3, available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1468/1468-h/1468h.htm (accessed 25 May 2010). For comparison, the UK’s Department for Transport argues that “at the international level, the big challenge in terms of CO2 emissions is growth in business travel by air (vital to our competitiveness) and leisure travel (important to people’s quality of life)”; see Towards a Sustainable Transport System: Supporting Economic Growth in a Low Carbon World, cm 7226 (2007), 14, available at http://www.dft.gov.uk/about/strategy/transportstrategy/pdfsustaintranssystem.pdf (accessed 25 May 2010).

25. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (London, 1997), 67, 128.

26. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2009), 173.

27. See Lowenthal.

28. Philip Sydney Bagwell and Peter J. Lyth, Transport in Britain, 1750–2000: From Canal Lock to Gridlock (2002; rept., London, 2006). By comparison, Christian Wolmar’s well-received Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain (London, 2007) sold over 45,000 copies by March 2010. Here I am relying on personal communications from both Lyth and Wolmar.

29. I base these comments largely on my involvement with the advisory board of the UK’s “Televising History 1995–2010,” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; see http://tvhistory.lincoln.ac.uk/ (accessed 25 May 2010). See also “Televising History,” special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2007).

30. The University of York’s Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP) does this kind of research; see http://www.york.ac.uk/ipup/ (accessed 25 May 2010).

31. Even such an ostensibly unpromising prospect as Trains with Pete Waterman, four largely historical programs presented on the UK’s terrestrial Channel 4 by “a pop music impresario [whose] real love of his life is trains,” was shaped in some small degree along these lines by my input; see http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/his tory/n-s/railway.html (accessed 25 May 2010).

32. See http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/flying/ (accessed 25 May 2010). Although evenhanded and nonjudgmental, this exhibition generated a fair amount of controversy for raising the question of whether we should consider flying less often.

33. Colin Divall, “The London Transport Museum,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008): 1010–17.

34. Jack Simmons, one of the Journal of Transport History’s founding editors, promoted such links partly by introducing museum reviews—roughly coeval with their inception in Technology and Culture—and he even wrote a book titled Transport Museums in Britain and Western Europe (London, 1970). Although museum reviews did not survive beyond Simmons’s editorship, in 2001—partly inspired by SHOT’s exemplary practice in noticing museums—they were revived. See Colin Divall, “Exhibiting Transport History,” Journal of Transport History 22 (2001): 155.

35. See, for example, COST340, “Towards a European Transmodal Transport Network: Lessons from History,” available at http://www.ahicf.com/cec2/cost340_siteoffi ciel.htm (accessed 25 May 2010); the European Science Foundation’s new EUROCORES program, “Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present (Inventing Europe),” available at http://www.esf.org/index.php?id=386 and http://www.histech.nl/ inventing/ (both accessed 25 May 2010); and the annual conferences of T2M, available at http://www.t2m.org (accessed 25 May 2010).

36. See http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/ImpactFAQ.pdf (accessed 25 May 2010).

37. See, for example, Frederic D. Schwarz, “We Should All Be Friends,” Technology and Culture 48 (2007): 407–10.

38. At its launch in 1953, this journal aimed to bring together transport professionals, policy makers, and historians, but without much success; see Michael Robbins, “Jack Simmons, 1915–2000,” Journal of Transport History 22 (2001): 1–5, at 4.

39. In the UK, the History and Policy network, founded in 2002, attempts more generally to bring historians and the media (as well as policy makers) in touch; see http:// www.historyandpolicy.org (accessed 25 May 2010). One might also ask, in this context, whether it may be time for SHOT to reconsider the range of its prizes. What is it that makes a popular book or exhibition, but not a television program or website, worthy of an award?

40. John Henry Hepp IV, The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926 (Philadelphia, 2003); Colin G. Pooley, Jean Turnbull, and Mags Adams, A Mobile Century? Changes in Everyday Mobility in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, UK, 2005).

41. Note then-deputy-editor Gijs Mom’s comments in 2003 on the lack of a systematic treatment of technology in the Journal of Transport History, and social historian John Walton’s reduction of technology to an economic phenomenon: Gijs P. A. Mom, “What Kind of Transport History Did We Get? Half a Century of JTH and the Future of the Field,” Journal of Transport History 24 (2003): 121–38, at 131–32; and John Walton, “Transport, Travel, Tourism and Mobility: A Cultural Turn?” Journal of Transport History 27 (2006): 129–34, at 129.

42. See Colin Divall and George Revill, “Cultures of Transport: Representation, Practice and Technology,” Journal of Transport History 26 (2005): 99–111; Michael Freeman, “‘Turn If You Want To’: A Comment on the ‘Cultural Turn’ in Divall and Revill’s ‘Cultures of Transport,’” Journal of Transport History 27 (2006): 138–43; Colin Divall and George Revill, “No Turn Needed: A Reply to Michael Freeman,” Journal of Transport History 3rd ser., 27, no. 1 (2006): 144–49; Walton; and Günter Dinhobl, “Keep on Turning: A Note from the European Continent,” Journal of Transport History 29 (2008): 125–30.

43. Mark Gottdiener, Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, “A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Non-Human Assemblies,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 259–64.

44. Jörg Beckmann, “Automobility—a Social Problem and Theoretical Concept,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001): 593–607, at 593–94.

45. Ginette Verstraete, “Railroading America: Towards a Material Study of the Nation,” Theory, Culture and Society 19 (2002): 145–59, at 147, 149, 150 (emphasis added).

46. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Peter Bishop, “Gathering the Land: The Alice Springs to Darwin Rail Corridor,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002): 295–317.

47. Irene Anastasiadou, “Networks of Powers: Railway Visions in Inter-War Europe,” Journal of Transport History 28 (2007): 172–91; Erik van der Vleuten, Irene Anastasiadou, Vincent Lagendijk, and Frank Schipper, “Europe’s System Builders: The Contested Shaping of Transnational Road, Electricity and Rail Networks,” Contemporary European History 16 (2007): 321–47; Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser, eds., Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe 1850–2000 (Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2006). Such a history addresses a matter of considerable concern among Europe’s political elite: namely, the building of public support for a unified Europe.

48. Barbara Schmucki, “On the Trams: Women, Men and Urban Public Transport in Germany,” Journal of Transport History 23 (2002): 60–72, esp. 60–65; Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women and the Railroad and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005); Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge, 2001).

49. For example, Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, N.C., 2009), 111–56; Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008), 36–68; Deborah Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 2007), esp. 41– 72; Liz Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–1937 (Montreal, 2007), 3–16; Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany 1890–1945 (Cambridge, 2005); Kurt Möser, “The Dark Side of ‘Automobilism,’ 1900–30: Violence, War and the Motor Car,” Journal of Transport History 24 (2003): 238–58; and Sean O’Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester, 1998).

50. Eric Schatzberg, “Culture and Technology in the City: Opposition to Mechanized Street Transportation in Late-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 57–94. This kind of research has a long pedigree: John P. McKay’s 1976 study of the influence of aesthetics on electrification, Tramways and Trolleys, formed a basis for Schatzberg’s work.

51. Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994); see also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986). More recent examples of urban-transport technologies include Gijs P. A. Mom, The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Electric Age, trans. Jenny Wormer (Baltimore, 2004 [first published in Dutch, 1997]); and Barbara Schmucki, Der Tram vom Verkehrsfluss: Städtische Verkehrsplanning seit 1945 im deutsch-deutschen Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main, 2001).

52. Gregory Votolato, Transport Design: A Travel History (London, 2007).

53. Derek Wall, Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements (London, 1999); Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Muhammad Ishaque and Robert B. Noland, “Making Roads Safe for Pedestrians or Keeping Them Out of the Way?” Journal of Transport History 27 (2006): 115–37; Bill Luckin and David Sheen, “Defining Early Modern Automobility: The Road Traffic Accident Crisis in Manchester, 1939–1943,” Cultural and Social History 6 (2009): 211– 30.

54. Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, 2005); John Sheail, An Environmental History of Twentieth-Century Britain (Houndmills, UK, 2002), chap. 7; David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore, 1999).

55. John Whitelegg, Critical Mass: Transport, Environment and Society in the Twenty-First Century (London, 1997), 46–48.

56. On containerization, see Mark Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, N.J., 2006).

57. For example, Gijs P. A. Mom, “Roads without Rails: European Highway-Network Building and the Desire for Long-Range Motorized Mobility,” Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 745–72.

58. Peter Merriman, Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway (Oxford, 2007). The UK’s television channel BBC4 has broadcast a three-part history of Britain’s motorways that was drawn in part on Merriman’s work; see http: //www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007xr62 (accessed 25 May 2010). In Government, the Railways and the Modernization of Britain: Beeching’s Last Trains (Abingdon, UK, 2006), Charles Loft analyzes the political shifts that moved national funding from railways to roads.

59. Viv Caruana, “Manchester Airport: From Provincial Aerodrome to International Gateway: A Local Authority Challenge to Central Government Policy, 1934–1980,” in Moving Manchester: Aspects of the History of Transport in the City and Region since 1700, ed. Derek Brumhead and Terry Wyke (Manchester, 2004), 230–54; David Pascoe, Airspaces (London, 2001).

60. See, for example, Colin Divall, “Transport, 1900–39,” in A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Chris Wrigley (Oxford, 2002), 286–301; and Sheryl Kroen, “A Political History of the Consumer,” The Historical Journal 47 (2004): 709–36, esp. 717–20, 723–25. See also James Livingston, “Modern Subjectivity and Consumer Culture,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge, 1998), 413–29; John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880–1980 (London, 1994); Gary S. Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London, 1993); Frank Trentmann, “Bread, Milk and Democracy: Consumption and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Britain,” in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford, 2001), 129–63, at 130; and Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in 20th-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2003), 1–24, at 1–2.

61. Hiroki Shin, “Business Strategy and Corporate Image: Britain’s Railways, 1872– 1977,” in Railways as an Innovative Regional Factor, ed. Heli Maki and Jenni Korjus (Helsinki, 2009), 63–81; Colin Divall, “The Modern Passenger: Constructing the Consumer on Britain’s Railways, 1919–1939,” in Railway Modernization: An Historical Perspective (19th and 20th Centuries), ed. Magda Pinheiro (Lisbon, 2009), 109–22; D. C. H. Watts, “Evaluating British Railway Poster Advertising: The London & North Eastern Railway between the Wars,” Journal of Transport History 25 (2004): 23–56; Ralph Harrington, “Beyond the Bathing Belle: Images of Women in Inter-war Railway Publicity,” Journal of Transport History 25 (2004): 22–45.

62. See Timothy L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London, 1998). On public policy and transport in the United States, see Mark H. Rose, Bruce E. Seely, and Paul F. Barrett, The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines, and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (Columbus, Ohio, 2006).

63. Colin Divall and Andrew Scott, Making Histories in Transport Museums (London, 2001); and Colin Divall, “Transport Museums: Another Kind of Historiography,” Journal of Transport History 24 (2003): 259–65.

64. Harold K. Skramstad, “The Exhibiting Dilemma,” Technology and Culture 48 (2007): 603–11.

65. An exhibit that goes some way to accomplish this is the Smithsonian’s America on the Move; see http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/ (accessed 25 May 2010). For reviews from the perspective of, respectively, a museum exhibitor and an academic historian, see Kirsty Devine, “America on the Move,” Journal of Transport History 26 (2005): 114–17; and Clay McShane, “America on the Move,” Journal of Transport History 26 (2005): 123–24.

66. See http://www.nmai.si.edu (accessed 25 May 2010).

67. Robert C. Post, “Urban Railways Redivivus: Image and Ideology in Los Angeles, California,” in Suburbanizing the Masses: Public Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Colin Divall and Winston Bond (Aldershot, UK, 2003), 187–209.

Colin Divall is professor of railway studies at the University of York and head of the Institute of Railway Studies and Transport History, run jointly by the University of York and the National Railway Museum, UK. This essay was first presented at the 2007 SHOT/ National Science Foundation Workshop in Washington, D.C., supported by NSF Grant no. 0623056. He thanks Bob Post for the many suggestions smoothing the transition from the oral to the written argument.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Then there is the building that graces the front cover of this, the last issue of Technology and Culture to originate from Detroit: the beautiful and desolate shell of the abandoned Michigan Central Station. It rises eighteen stories above Roosevelt Park, next to Corktown, the city’s oldest neighborhood. To its front are Michigan Avenue—the old Chicago Road—and two interstate highways, I-96 and the long concrete line of I-75, which runs from Lake Superior to Miami. Behind it lie Ontario, the Detroit River, and the Ambassador Bridge, which with the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel carries the traffic of the busiest commercial border crossing in the world. It isn’t easy to approach the city’s center from the east, south, or west without using one of these routes, and the nearest building more than fifty feet tall is a quarter-mile away, so the station stands out. The sight is a shock to the first-time visitor, and can catch a local unawares.

A likely place to contemplate both the building and the shock is Slows Bar-B-Q on Michigan, sometime haunt of the T&C editorial team, the city’s best barbeque. It opened seven or eight years ago, not long after the Detroit Tigers abandoned their historic ballpark nearby: part restaurant, part “third place,” part arts collective, part civics project, a testimonial to the power of unconventional thinking. A different perspective can be found on the other side of the station, in the general area of 17th and Howard. From that corner on a summer night the Ambassador Bridge sparkles, and the line of semis idling at customs stretches out of sight. To the right the Michigan Central seems even bigger and emptier than it does in the daytime, its windows as dark as deep space. The occasional wiseass suggests lighting it up like Rome does with the Coliseum.

It is really two buildings, a depot and the tower, which housed the railroad’s offices. The Michigan Central was an independent subsidiary of the New York Central, and the station was designed by the same architectural firms responsible for New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, at about the same time and in the same Beaux Arts style, with soaring ceilings, sumptuous marble and crystal, gleaming wood and polished tile. The grand entrance, facing the park, led into a magnificent waiting room modeled, like the rest of the interiors, on a Roman bath. But the intended main entrance was on the east side of the building, the side facing downtown two miles away, where there was a loop for streetcars and the electric railways that fanned out through southeastern Michigan. It opened the day after Christmas, 1913, nine days early because of a fire at the old depot—and ten days, in one of those coincidences, before Henry Ford announced the five-dollar day. In 1914 Ford would build more than a quarter-million Model Ts.

The station saw hundreds of trains a day during the First World War, as the city burgeoned, but in the 1930s the regional electric railways failed. The big trunk lines boomed during the Second World War and for a little while after, but then came the interstates and intercity air travel. In the 1950s the New York Central tried to sell the building for peanuts, and couldn’t. In 1967, fateful year of riot and war, the waiting room was closed. From there the angle of decay grew steeper. In 1971 Amtrak picked the station out of the wreckage of the failed merger of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania and limped it along to serve a few trains a day until 1988, when it closed entirely. Since then it has been part of the backdrop for a running satire of transportation policy and even self-government. The most recent, desperate idea is to rehabilitate the building and use it to house an office of the Department of Homeland Security. In short, it tracks Detroit’s rise and fall with an eccentric faithfulness, throwing back echoes of technological, social, and cultural changes that punctuated the last century.

The Michigan Central Station in winter.

Any building that stands empty for long is eventually a playground for delinquents and arsonists, a canvas for graffiti taggers, a shelter for vagrants and the homeless, a magnet for artists and other melancholy types. But the Michigan Central is a singular ruin in a city that epitomizes decline. And so it has become not just another trashed building for planners and developers and cops to think about but a stop for drive-by journalists and an ideal subject for what is sometimes called ruins porn, a genre that needed digital photography and the internet to flower and that thrives in the formerly industrial American Midwest.1 The attention is not always welcome. Detroit is a byword for capitalism’s supposedly creative destruction among those who celebrate it and those who decry it. Both seem content to leave the city to its own fate, confident that they do not share it. The BBC and PBS, Harper’s and the New York Times visit as tour guides for people who mostly see the place as exotic and regard its not-so-slow disintegration with the same kind of attention as they would a mine accident or an earthquake. Time titled a running feature “Notown.”

But the gawking documentaries and complacent stories and voyeuristic photos eventually do convey some part of the profound uneasiness of Detroit, which settles over nothing more deeply than the abandoned train station. It is ironic that in the Motor City the single thing that most eloquently symbolizes the decline of a technological system, and the whole culture in which it thrived, has far less to do with cars than with what cars displaced— doubly so now that the city is putting its hopes for the future partly in transit, after decades of contemptuously ignoring it. Regardless of that, the automobile is still what principally occupies our thoughts and our plans, not only in Detroit but in Washington and Berlin and Tokyo and Beijing and Delhi. A second billion cars already exist in the mind’s eye of auto manufacturers and oil industry executives and policy makers on four continents. What that will most likely mean really ought to be clear enough. We do not lack the information we need to anticipate the future more accurately, more prudently, more humanely than those who set Detroit on its course did. It remains to be seen if we lack the imagination.

1. Not to lump the good with the bad: Two websites well worth the time are buildingsofdetroit.com and “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit” at www.detroityes.com. On the bad, with attitude, see Thomas Morton, “Something, Something, Something, Detroit,” at www.viceland.com (vulgarity alert).

Joe Schultz, a native Detroiter, was T&C’s managing editor for the first dozen years the editorial offices were located at the Henry Ford Museum and has been an associate editor since. He works for the International Council on Clean Transportation in Washington, D.C.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The Transportation Revolution appeared as volume 4 in a series, The Economic History of the United States, edited by Henry David, Harold Faulkner, Louis Hacker, Curtis Nettels, and Fred Shannon. Eight of the nine volumes originally projected were published, and several served the precise purpose of the editors—namely, that of synthesizing the existing scholarship on the developing American economy. At least two other titles in the series were widely read and exercised significant influence on multiple generations of students and scholars: Paul Gates’s The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860, and Edward Kirkland’s Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860–1897.{2} These three volumes reflected the intense interest among postwar economic historians in nineteenth-century American economic growth. Prime evidence of this is Harvard’s Center for Research in Entrepreneurial History, which flourished through the efforts of such scholars as Arthur Cole, Joseph Schumpeter, Fritz Redlich, and Hugh Aitken.{3} But Taylor’s approach in The Transportation Revolution is especially emblematic.

Born in the small central Wisconsin town of Beaver Dam, Taylor earned his initial degree in economics at the University of Chicago in 1921. His first position at Earlham College in 1923 was followed a year later by an appointment at Amherst. He earned his doctorate at Chicago in 1929 with a thesis on agrarian discontent in the Mississippi Valley preceding the war of 1812, and he spent nearly his entire career at Amherst, the last twenty-six years as George D. Olds Professor. His research included the role of tariffs and the development of banking, and he also edited the Problems in American Civilization series that Amherst’s American civilization department developed and that Heath published and distributed widely. In 1965, he moved to the position of senior resident scholar at the Eleutherian Mills– Hagley Foundation. While there, he published a seminal two-part article on “The Beginnings of Mass Transportation in Urban America” and edited, with Lucius Ellsworth, a compilation of papers titled Approaches to American Economic History.{4}

Yet, all his other work notwithstanding, Taylor’s reputation rests upon The Transportation Revolution. This 400-page study manages to cover a complicated era of economic and technological development with wonderful ease and beautifully clear writing. After opening with a short chapter on the nature of merchant capitalism in the young republic, he devoted six chapters to transportation: five examined roads and bridges, canals, steamboats, railroads, and the merchant marine, with another reviewing the changes in cost and speed of transportation. But these took Taylor less than halfway through his study. The next two chapters focused on domestic trade (surveying not just the patterns and volume of trade, but also the comparative advantages of the different modes of transportation) and foreign trade. Then Taylor turned to manufacturing for two chapters, one of which was devoted to the factory system; and then to workers for another two chapters, in which he discussed the emergence of wage labor. The final chapters covered banks and financial institutions, money and prices, and the role of government. A concluding section reviewed the national economy that had begun to develop by 1860. Taylor noted that the economic axis of the country exhibited a “new orientation,” one in which “the great cities of the East no longer faced the sea and gave their chief attention to shipping and foreign trade. Their commerce centered increasingly now at the railroad stations rather than at the docks . . .” (p. 398). A fully national structure was not completely in place, but huge strides had been taken in all key areas of the economy.

The Transportation Revolution is clearly the work of an economic historian, as evidenced by the appendix of statistics on various aspects of economic activity—and many of the subjects Taylor dealt with remain central concerns for those working in these fields. Yet it is also apparent that Taylor was interested in questions of wider interest to other sorts of historians, including those studying technology. In that sense, this book demonstrates one of the principal academic influences that helped shape the history of technology as it formally emerged after 1955: scholarship in economic history. Taylor was more interested in the consequences of technology than in its origins, and he measured many of those consequences in economic terms, using very solid research. Yet we do not find a deterministic account in Taylor. And his book seems to recognize the significance of technological change as a subject worthy of attention.{5}

For historians of technology, Taylor’s discussion of transportation, and the priority he ascribes to it, best reflects this outlook. His decision to structure the book as he did sent a signal that reached beyond the ranks of specialists in transportation history. Indeed, this emphasis on transportation constituted an important and original contribution by Taylor to the literature on economic and (as it would turn out) technological history. He set forth the argument that the economic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century were tied to the development of internal transport, and then he demonstrated the revolutionary or transformational consequences of those changes. While he examined the basic technological developments related to the growth of each mode of transport, his main goal was to show how newfound capabilities for moving people and goods proved pivotal for the development of the economy.

This idea hardly seems earth-shattering now—and it was not completely unknown before Taylor—but neither was it self-evident. In a review in Pennsylvania History, for example, historian Louis Hunter observed that

the distinctive feature of Professor Taylor’s treatment is the emphasis on the development of transportation, to which approximately one-third of the text is devoted. In his preface the author defends this emphasis on the grounds that “transportation developments were so revolutionary and . . . so fundamental to the economic growth of the country.” Yet one can argue with equal force that developments in manufacturing during these decades were hardly less revolution-ary and fundamental. To have allotted six chapters to the one theme and but two to the other seems to me a little extreme, but since Professor Taylor handles the two on manufacturing with such skill I shall not press my complaint unduly.{6}

The point is, however, that Taylor believed that the changes in transportation were the key feature of economic development during this forty-five-year period, thereby elevating the significance of technology in accounts of economic change. It is important to realize that Taylor’s book appeared before publication of many of the specialized studies that raised our estimation of the role of transportation in the history of economic and technological development. True, Taylor could draw upon the handful of solid histories of individual railroad companies by authors such as Edward Hungerford, Paul Gates, and Edward Mott; he also had Robert Albion’s works on maritime history and Hunter’s own classic account, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technical History (Taylor thanked Hunter in the acknowledgments).{7} And as the notes and bibliography demonstrate, Taylor utilized a solid base of books and articles by many others. But many now-standard works had not yet been written: John Stover’s and Robert Fogel’s studies of railroads, Carter Goodrich’s on canals, Harry Scheiber’s books and articles on internal improvements, and Alfred Chandler’s initial articles and book on the role of railroads in the nation’s business and economic history all were in the future.{8} Certainly, Taylor’s argument concerning the essential importance of transportation to economic growth provided a necessary foundation for the many scholarly studies of transportation that emerged from the mid-1950s onward.

Hunter’s comment also draws attention to the portions of Taylor’s study that were not focused on transportation. It is easy to forget that Taylor opened his book with chapters on transportation in order to emphasize his point, but then explored topics that moved in other directions; he was interested in the much wider question of the overall pattern of economic development during these early decades of the U.S. industrial revolution. And several points can be made about his efforts. First, he sought to highlight patterns and connections. Thus Taylor was concerned not only with the interrelatedness of transportation and manufacturing, but also with the interconnection of capital and workers and with the overall linkage of the government with the economy. He made the last point in a number of places throughout the book by highlighting the ways in which government activities shaped all manner of economic activities. For those who harbored a nostalgic affection for a time when government did not interfere with business, he noted that “the following pages which describe the actual practice of governmental intervention lend no support to those who place the heyday of laissez faire in the United States during the period of this study” (p. 354).

The Transportation Revolution also foreshadowed the ways in which historians of technology would eventually attempt to analyze and understand the changes taking place in the United States after 1800. This is most apparent in Taylor’s discussion of the factory system. His account is perhaps not as nuanced as we would now offer, given several generations of additional scholarship. Not surprisingly, he adopted the classic account of Eli Whitney’s role in the American system of manufactures—Robert Woodbury’s correction came later.{9} And in his discussion of labor, he followed John R. Commons’s approach to workers and unions. Today, we would be more inclined to ask about those who used the technology—factory workers as well as those citizens who relied upon the transportation system—and less inclined to focus on the supply of innovations. But in more general terms, Taylor’s analysis of the factory system and of most of his other subjects stands the test of time. Subsequent scholars have fleshed out the details, but the outline still holds.

Without intending to do so, Taylor presented aspects of the process of economic development between 1815 and 1860 in ways that set the stage for the central concerns of historians of technology. This is not surprising, perhaps, since he examined those pivotal years in which the momentum of industrial and technological change grew into a process that was seemingly permanent. And within that process, transport and manufacturing became two of the enduring issues for technological historians. Agriculture only was not addressed in Taylor’s volume, but that omission is a product of the structure of the series itself, which featured a separate volume on the subject. Thus we find in Taylor’s book attention to the factory, to innovations in textile technology, and to the workforce—topics that under the umbrella of the American system of manufactures animated so many of SHOT’s members and so much of Technology and Culture‘s audience during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, one also finds in Taylor’s work comments and analysis that align with later scholarly developments; for example, his attention to the role of public policy resonates as an increasingly significant thematic focus among present-day historians of technology. Taylor’s reference to alternative ways of organizing corporate manufacturing enterprises foreshadowed the findings of Philip Scranton, while his discussion of the importance of state and local governments in the development of transportation opened the door for the ideas developed by Colleen Dunlavy and William Childs.{10}

But perhaps most importantly, Taylor presented his analysis of transportation and economic development against a broader context that included social as well as economic factors. As he described the nation’s situation in his final chapter,

Americans of that age, especially in the northern states, met the rapidly developing opportunities for material gain with unusual energy and enthusiasm. The spirit of adventure, aggressiveness, and willingness to make sacrifices in the hope of economic advantage, which characterized American merchants in the foreign trade and drove settlers to develop the West so rapidly despite all obstacles and uncertainties, also dominated the businessmen who played so active a part in planning, organizing, financing, and managing the new ventures in transportation and manufacturing. (p. 394)

This description is not only reminiscent of the views of nineteenth-century America developed by economic historian Thomas Cochran and social historian Daniel Boorstin, but it also anticipated Eugene Ferguson’s discussion of the technological community of the mid-Atlantic region during these years. All of these scholars shared an interest in the way that values and outlooks helped drive economic and technological developments.{11}

Overall, Taylor’s analysis has held up amazingly well; in fact, few historical studies have possessed such staying power. The durability of this book merits special recognition, as others have also noted. In another retrospective essay published in Business History Review thirty years ago, Harry Scheiber and Stephen Salsbury—themselves noted scholars of American transportation history—correctly remarked that “few scholarly works have defined an era and provided a conceptual framework for its analysis more successfully than Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860.”{12} This still holds true. One reason is Taylor’s impressively accurate and careful research and his grasp of the literature of his field as of 1950. Writing in American Economic Review, John Hutchins remarked that he had “found very few statements of fact or of interpretation with which to quarrel.”{13} Certainly, recent scholarship has altered some of Taylor’s interpretations, refined some of his statistical analysis, and clarified certain of the events he examined, yet the general conclusions underlying his study remain impressively useful. Indeed, a review of Taylor’s fifty-page bibliography and careful footnotes helps us to appreciate both the volume and the type of research that had already touched upon technological topics at mid-century, and upon which the modern historiography of technology would build after 1960. Taylor’s work, in the end, laid out many of the topics that would attract the attention of historians of technology during SHOT’s formative period. For this and many other reasons, it remains a classic in our field.

13. John G. B. Hutchins, review of The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, by George Rogers Taylor, American Economic Review 42 (1952): 622–23.

Dr. Seely, professor of history and chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University, is a former secretary of SHOT. His scholarly interests have included American transportation and the history of engineering education.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology