The Chicago Meeting, December 26-30, 1970

Organizational Notes THE CHICAGO MEETING, DECEMBER 26-30, 1910 PROGRAM NOTES Thirteen was not an unlucky number for SHOT. The Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology was the largest and most successful in its history. Held December 26-30, 1970, at the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, the meeting was notable for the variety of its stimulating papers which evoked heated discussions from enthusiastic audiences. Program sessions were held in conjunction with the History of Sci­ ence Society and Sections H (Anthropology) and L (History and Philosophy of Science) of the American Association for the Advance­ ment of Science. So absorbed were the SHOT members in their own meetings that they were oblivious to the demonstrations by “militants” who disrupted some of the other AAAS sessions; for their part, the demonstrators created no disturbances in the SHOT meetings, even though prominent members of the Establishment, against which they were protesting, participated in the SHOT program. Since the demon­ strators were aware of the details of the SHOT program, perhaps their avoidance of these sessions signified their reliance on history, or at least historians of technology, to render meaningful judgments on the past without the need for coercion by disruptive tactics. Or, to put it less kindly, perhaps the demonstrators, in the typical fashion of the New Left, are so completely a-historical that they were indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, our proceedings. # # # The first session, held on the morning of December 27, was devoted to “Electrical Technology, 1870-1900,” with Otto Mayr (Smithsonian Institution) in the chair. Three papers were given in the chronological order of their subject matter. The first speaker, Bernard S. Finn (Smithsonian Institution), in a paper on “Cable Telegraphy, 1870— 85,” investigated the role of science in the advances in this field, with special attention to telegraphy through marine cables. He showed that, after some initial contributions by scientists like J. Henry, C. Wheat­ stone, C. F. Gauss, and W. Weber, the field was dominated by practi­ 238 Organizational Notes 239 cal men. The failure during the 1850s to connect Britain with North America by a transatlantic telegraph cable presented a new scientific challenge. By applying Fourier’s mathematical analysis of heat conduc­ tion to the electrical phenomena in the cable, William Thomson was able to suggest improvements regarding the materials and cross-section of the cable and the size of the electrical pulse that contributed sig­ nificantly to the ultimate success in 1866. Thomson also became deeply involved in the practical aspects of laying the cable, and his contribu­ tions were as much technological as scientific. While the scientific community maintained an interest in cable telegraphy, its actual con­ tributions were minor until Heaviside’s proposal of inductive loading of the cable in the late 1880s and the discovery of high-permeability metals in the 1920s. James E. Brittain (Georgia Institute of Technology), in his paper “From Rowland to Hopkinson: Science and the Dynamo,” traced the evolution of scientific methods of dynamo design from 1870 to 1890. The basis was laid by Henry Rowland between 1870 and 1875 in his work on magnetic circuits; although he was mainly interested in the mathematical description of physical phenomena, he was aware of the applicability of his theory of dynamo design. Next, Brittain turned to Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, established in 1876. With the help of such scientists as G. Barker, F. Upton, and E. Nichols, Edison devel­ oped a dynamo (1879) that was far superior to its rivals. If this machine had the benefits of truly scientific design, these were limited, however, to the electrical circuit, as opposed to the magnetic circuit which had been obtained by the traditional method of trial and error. When Edi­ son introduced his system to England, he enlisted the help of a British consulting engineer, John Hopkinson, who had recently published a remarkable graphical method of describing dynamo performance. Working on Edison’s dynamos, Hopkinson developed the theory of dynamos to a degree of maturity that enabled him to predict the per­ formance and to optimize the magnetic circuits of dynamos from the design data by purely mathematical means. This method was published in

Art · Demon · Library science · Literature · Media studies · Session (web analytics) · Shot (pellet) · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · History · History of Science and Medicine