Invisible Connections

962 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE such as the United States to give foreign airlines access to domestic routes (cabotage) in exchange for significant concessions abroad. However hard it may be to accomplish such objectives, Sochor’s book will serve as a useful guide to the past for policymakers who will sooner or later be obliged to chart a viable path to the future. W. David Lewis Dk. Lewis, Hudson Professor of History and Engineering at Auburn University, is coauthor of Delta: The History ofAn Airline (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979) and The Airway to Everywhere: A History ofAll American Aviation, 1937—1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988). He is currently Charles A. Lindbergh Professor of Aerospace History at the National Air and Space Museum. Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science. Edited by Robert Bud and Susan Cozzens. Bellingham, Wash.: Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, 1992. Pp. xiv + 306; il­ lustrations, tables, notes. $62.00 (cloth); $56.00 (paper). The basis of this volume was a series of forums held in London in April 1991 under the auspices of the International Society for Optical Engineering’s Institute for Advanced Optical Technologies. The theme of scientific instrumentation tied the disparate group of presenters together, but the similarity ends there. Scientists, sociolo­ gists of science, policy analysts, and historians of science and technol­ ogy made up the international contingent. Some papers are works in progress, others are completed studies; consequently, the level of accomplishment as well as the thoroughness of the individual entries are uneven. This is not untypical of such compendiums, and it is a tribute to the editors that this book hangs together as well as it does. The four papers in the first of the volume’s three sections focus on the historical development between instruments and industry. Early instruments were developed by scientists, but as the need arose for greater numbers of devices (particularly in teaching), industry often became the driving force toward standard, or “black box,” instru­ ments. Nonetheless, it was not a one-way street. The need for new instrumentation created a technical base developed both by scientists and by industry technologists which in turn evolved more specialized instruments. Two notable observations are discerned. Scientists and technologists who are instrument innovators tend to acquire their professional reputations through the artifacts they develop rather than through the more common method of published research findings. The other observation is along national lines. A nation that maintains a strong instrument industry in a particular held of science is also likely to maintain a strong national research presence in that held. If a nation’s research community must go outside its national TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 963 boundaries for its instrumentation, the level of research suffers. Thus, instrumentation appears as an important connection among technology, science, and national prestige. The second section of the volume consists of seven case studies that deal with a variety of specialized instruments. These pieces generally lack any lengthy address to historical evolution (only one author is a historian); instead, they focus on recent and ongoing developments in instrument innovation. The creation and maintenance of an instru­ ment technology base shared by scientists and technologists is brought out in several of the essays. Detector construction for the European high energy physics facility (CERN) provides an example of how scientists seek to retain technology in their respective countries in order to maintain a national technical base. Sharing, or lack thereof, between the military and civilian research enterprises is demonstrated in two papers on the development of ocean scientific instruments and instrumentation for mosaic array astronomy. Two papers that should interest historians of technology deal with the development and refinement of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments. They show how the device and its subsequent refinements have had a major impact not only on scientists who conduct basic research on the phenomenon but also on technologists, instrument makers, and manufacturing companies. They demon­ strate how the players continuously integrate the science, engineer­ ing, and manufacturing processes to produce a better instrument that further enables the work of the basic researcher, the instrument innovator, and the diagnostician. Together, the two essays make a strong case

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