(American Heritage of Invention and Technology, winter 1989)
By Robert C. Post
When the history of technology donned academic cloaks in the United States, some three decades ago, the man most directly responsible was a professor at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland. His name was Melvin Kranzberg. For quite a while afterward Mel (almost everyone calls him Mel) remained directly responsible for sustaining the new field’s two key institutions, the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the society’s quarterly journal, Technology and Culture (T&C). He served as the society’s secretary for fifteen years and edited eighty-eight issues of T&C between 1959 and 1981. Along the way he received SHOT’s highest award, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal.