The Time Museum Historical Catalogue of American Pocket Watches by Donald R. Hoke

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 713 some concrete and specific form of human knowledge. Because of this, Cooper repeats the old mistake of confusing technology with science or assuming that technology is simply the application of knowledge generated by science. Therefore much of his analysis and criticism of technology is really directed toward science. This book might be useful to philosophers but most historians of technology may still find the works of Ellul and Arendt more useful and certainly more accessible. David Channell Dr. Channell is professor of historical studies at the University ofTexas at Dallas. His most recent book is The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). He is working on a book on the scientific and technological origins of postmodernist thought. The Time Museum Historical Catalogue of American Pocket Watches. By Donald R. Hoke. Rockford, Ill.: Time Museum, 1991. Pp. xiv + 330; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $79.95+ $5.00 handling. The Time Museum Historical Catalogue of American Pocket Watches describes Seth Atwood’s extremely comprehensive collection at the Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois. Lavishly illustrated in color and beautifully produced, the large-format book includes descriptive annotations and historical essays by Donald Hoke. Most of the catalog details the production of various manufacturers; Hoke’s essays, especially his detailed and original recounting of watch production at Waltham, Massachusetts, will be of most interest to readers of Technology and Culture. The Waltham Watch Company, Hoke maintains, played the crucial role in developing the technology for mass production of fine machin­ ery. “In the interchangeable manufacture of watches at the Waltham Watch Company between 1849 and 1910,” Hoke writes, after David Hounshell, “the American System of Manufactures reached its zenith” (p. 98). Hoke’s account here is the best I have seen on this crucial subject. It is especially useful in its illustrations of the gauges used in Waltham’s plant. Hoke quotes Waltham’s master mechanic to the effect that watch manufacturing was the most complicated industrial process in the 19th-century world, requiring “so much brain work and careful management” (p. 93). The essays would go beyond an antiquarian interest if they focused on the human aspects of that manufacturing system—the kinds of training workers required, for example, and how it might have changed, or the degree of worker resistance to management control. Where did Waltham recruit its workers? Did they employ women for their supposed manual dexterity or for their lower resistance to poor wages? There is little or no information about the workers themselves, 714 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and the problems of watch manufacture are here treated as purely technological. In that sense the appeal is limited to the enthusiast and specialist. The catalog also includes a number of beautifully reproduced advertisements from the 19th and early 20th centuries, along with illustrations of watch making. These are presented with minimal comment, and again the relationship between technology and culture would have been better served by some analysis of the content of these representations. For example, on page 80 an 1882 illustration from Century magazine depicts a woman operating a lathe at the Waterbury Watch Company factory. The caption notes the “upright gauge” visible on the bench but ignores the fact that the woman herself looks miserable. Given the specialized nature of the catalog, however, such an approach may have been unavoidable. Those without a specific interest in timepieces would be better served by Hoke’s Ingenious Yankees (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). But readers interested in American watch manufactur­ ing will find this a very useful, if limited, account of this vital industry. Michael O’Malley Dr. O’Malley teaches in the Department of History at Vassar College. Technopoly: The Surrender ofCulture to Technology. By Neil Postman. New York: Knopf, 1992. Pp. xii + 222; notes, bibliography, index. $21.00. The popular image of books on tape usually evokes thoughts of the latest Stephen King opus read with gusto or Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time read slowly on a cassette while we wait for the exit ramp to clear. Neil Postman’s new book elicits another image, that of the putative

Art history · Index (typography) · Mistake · Political science · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · History · History of Computing Technologies · Law