No Mere Technicalities

How Things Work and Why It Matters

Bibliographic Data

ID4023853
AuthorsRobert C Post (0000-0002-2581-919X, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume40
Issue3
Pages607-622
Publication date1999-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTechnology and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0040-165X • E-ISSN: 1097-3729
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/tech.1999.0151
OpenAlexW284939840
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited22

No Mere Technicalities: How Things Work and Why It Matters Robert C. Post (bio) In 1997 Joyce Appleby told how she “once sat down and read through the AHA presidential addresses in the American Historical Review,” every one of them. While she had “never been able to fathom” why she did this, when she was deciding on a topic for her own presidential address, she reconsidered the others and concluded that they formed “a sequence of statements marking the intellectual development of the field.” 1 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. One assumes that perennial presidential campaigner Eugene V. Debs would have been unfazed by the failure of a microphone, if indeed he ever used one. For a professional orator, this technology was once an option. (Brown Brothers, Sterling, Pa., reproduced with permission.) Last summer, I was having the same difficulty Joyce had with “this last, valedictory act”—she writes of “hunting for my theme, hoping that my fingers would miraculously tap it out for me”—and so I thought it might help to read the addresses made by outgoing presidents of SHOT. It was much less of a job; there have been seventeen of them, many times fewer than for the AHA, and often quite short—six are less than ten pages and only one more than twenty (see appendix). But, yes, those talks do provide an instructive set of “footprints,” in Joyce’s word. For quite a while our presidents opted for narratives, and all of the initial four were set no later than the eighteenth century: about a medieval aeronaut (by Lynn White in 1960), the discovery of carbon in steel (Cyril Stanley Smith in ‘63), the inception of irrigation in the Near East (Peter Drucker in ‘65), and the development of saltpeter production in France (Bob Multhauf in ‘69). [End Page 607] During the 1970s, SHOT presidents remained in a narrative frame of reference, but their topics skipped the nineteenth century and moved right into the twentieth. Bern Dibner considered Herbert Hoover as an engineer, John Rae sought generalizations about the background, education, and status of engineers, and John Brainerd described the genesis of the first large-scale digital computer. This was an overtly biographical phase, or, in Brainerd’s case, autobiographical. In 1977, Gene Ferguson started out in the same vein, describing a device he had created in his own mind’s eye. But then he took a new departure by addressing an abstract proposition—namely, that science influences technology but that there is a closer affinity between technology and art—and this set the tone for the next decade, in which our presidents shifted into a synthetic mode. Tom Hughes considered “convergent themes in the history of science, medicine, and technology,” Brooke Hindle examined the “spatial and analytical understanding offered by artifacts,” Mel Kranzberg reprised his six laws, and Ed Layton did the same with his precepts about the nature of technological knowledge. Then in 1988 Bruce Sinclair took a prescriptive tack, outlining “an agenda for SHOT” whose centerpiece was integrating the history of technology into the teaching of general American history. And for a decade, now, our presidential addresses have had a programmatic flavor. Roe Smith kept partly to the synthetic mode when he framed a way of generalizing “about technology, industrialization, and the labor process.” But Carroll Pursell, in concluding his account of the “appropriate technology” movement, urged us to consider what he termed feminine alternatives to masculine constructions of technology, and Ruth Cowan suggested how feminist theory might help us understand “the history and character of our discipline . . . the history and character of technology.” And then, in London in the summer of 1996, Alex Roland raised a disquieting question—”Why it is that our best scholarship gets so little recognition outside our circle?”—and urged us to transcend our complacency here in “the house that Mel built” and to “hit the road.” Alex also suggested that we ought to “irritate each other” more than we do. While some of us may find certain SHOT colleagues sufficiently irritating already, for me this was a cue to remain in a prescriptive stance. Carroll recently made a dismissive remark about “materialist

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