Panelists:
Darlene Rivas, Pepperdine University
“If Not for the Politicians:  The Vision of Panamanian and U.S. Agriculturalists in the Early Cold War”

Eve Buckley, University of Pennsylvania
“The TVA and Regional Planning in Brazil”

Bess Williamson, University of Delaware
“Small-Scale Technologies for the Developing World: Volunteers for International Technical Assistance, 1959-1971”

Commentator: John Krige, Kranzberg Professor, School of History, Technology, and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology

This panel brings together three papers on American technology projects in the developing world during the Cold War.  The first United States aid programs, from Harry Truman’s “Point IV” to the establishment of US AID in 1961, drew on the “modernization theory” developed by an influential cadre of social scientists who identified specific “stages” for economic and technological advancement.  Though modernization theory used American achievement in technology as a model, its formulators were economists and anthropologists, not engineers, physical scientists or other technical experts.

These papers examine the relationship between this social-science theory and the actual management and implementation of modernization.  What did modernization theory mean in practice?  What role did engineers and other technical professionals play in the policies and projects that sought to fulfill the myriad goals of international assistance, including humanitarian aid, economic development, and diplomacy? Each paper examines a different group working in the United States or the developing world during this time period.  In looking at agriculturalists in Panama in the earliest years of U.S. technical assistance, economists and engineers in Brazilian water management projects, and private-sector American engineers who worked independently on developing-world technologies, these scholars begin to fill in a larger picture of modernization as it engaged professionals outside of social science research institutes and policy committees.

The panel also raises some questions related to the fiftieth anniversary of SHOT. Though the organization does not explicitly feature in the research to be presented, modernization theory developed concurrently to SHOT’s first decades, and demonstrates a similar interest in tracing the roots of American technological achievement.

Panel organized by Bess Williamson, University of Delaware

Adelheid Voskuhl’s case deals with two android automata from the 1770s and 1780s that both display music-playing women. She identifies the automata’s mechanical motions as replicating musical and bodily practices that were a crucial part of the sentimental culture surrounding the emergence and establishing of civil society on the European continent. On the basis of analyses of artifacts and texts, she demonstrates how uncertainties over realness, falsity, and artificiality materialized at the time both around the human-machine-boundary and around novel sentimental practices in a novel social order.

John Tresch is also concerned with the relationship between machines and feelings, his case being situated in the French Industrialization. He analyzes the Saint-Simonian engineers’ industrial projects from the 1830s in relation to the metaphors they used to articulate their vision of a universe that was made up of energetic fluids. Finding one of these fluids to be love, he contextualizes this phenomenon into a larger analysis of an industrial system that was imagined to be held together by passion and affect.

Emily Dolan investigates artificiality and realness on the basis of the relationship between “natural music” and “musical technology” as they were being discussed in musical practice and aesthetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She traces the search for a device that would produce an indefinitely lasting voice-like tone, and its effects and affects on mainstream music of the period, on the basis of texts that deal with questions of musical aesthetics as well as with questions of contemporary machine intelligence.

Our aim for this panel is twofold. On the one hand, we want to explore how technical histories coincide with cultural histories and the types of sources, interpretations, and historiographic sensibilities necessary to understand appropriately these coincidences. Our papers identify underlying connections in fields that are otherwise divided along traditional disciplinary boundaries, and we want to do probe how historiographies usually associated with the history of technology of the last decades mesh with, enrich, and are enriched by, historiographies from cultural and intellectual history and music. We are, on the other hand, interested in the specifics of the period often referred to as “around 1800.” All our papers deal with characteristics of this time of profound social and technical change, and we seek to understand historically the place of pre-industrial and industrial technology in it.

Names and paper title of the presenters:

Emily Dolan: “Forging the Infinite Melody: Hoffmann and the Technology of the Perfect Sound”
John Tresch: “Love and Industry: Saint-Simonian Technotheology”
Adelheid Voskuhl: “Mechanical Musicians and the Human-Machine Boundary in the Sentimental Culture of Eighteenth-century Europe”

Commentator: Langdon Winner

Panelists:

Lynn Catanese, Curator, Manuscripts and Archives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE

Ginny Kilander, Reference Archivist, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Cheyenne, WY

Martin L. Levitt, Librarian, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA

Thomas Rosko, Head, MIT Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, MA

Jeffrey R. Yost, Associate Director, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

This panel will bring together representatives of several major archival and manuscript American repositories that have important holdings in the history of technology.  The repositories hold archival materials dating from the 18th through the 20th centuries, and represent a spectrum of subject areas, including engineering, industry, laboratory research, and interfaces with science and medicine.  Most of the collections document American topics, but half of the institutions represented on the panel also have significant collections bearing on of non-American topics.

Although the panelists will not be interpreting history, their presentations nonetheless will engage two of the themes of the 50th anniversary conference.  Certainly the panelists will speak to historiographic issues in that they will suggest how research into specific collections could bear on historians’ understanding of particular historical events and currents. And, given the repositories represented by the panelists, they certainly will address the changing context of the history of technology, particularly information technology and the development of biotechnology.

Each panelist will speak for 10-15 minutes, describing significant collections that are new or underutilized, and will use PowerPoint to illustrate the nature of the documents in the collections, as well as to introduce researchers to the particular repository. Half of the repositories (APS, Hagley, and MIT) potentially will be well-known to the audience for their resources; the valuable resources of the other half are probably less-recognized.  But it is unlikely that the audience will know of the newest acquisitions or the untapped veins of gold at any of the repositories: the goal of each of the speakers thus will be to draw attention to archival and manuscript collections of substantial historical significance that either are new or that, in the view of the panelist, have been underutilized by scholars, so the presentations by each panelist should be revelatory.

For example, the Rockefeller Archive Center has in recent years opened up the archives of the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC, 1947-1985), a global corporation founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller to promote new technologies, as business propositions, in the developing world.  An astonishing array of enterprises in food production and distribution, housing and general construction, and manufacturing were created or invested in by IBEC; and although its focus was in Latin America, it also had substantial initiatives in the United States, Puerto Rico, Italy, and Iran.  The reports, correspondence, photographs and other documents in the IBEC archives are unique windows on industrialization and innovation over four decades, and relate to larger themes of globalization, technological change and transfer, and socio-cultural influences on technology. Although a few researchers have examined elements of this collection, no one has yet examined it from the perspective of the history of technology.

This panel is intended to draw attention to similar research resources of high value, and to stimulate new scholarship.  The presentations should be of particular interest to graduate students, and to graduate student advisors, but should also be of interest to individuals who are not familiar with archives that have strong traditions of promoting scholarly research in the history of technology.

Paul Edwards, University of Michigan: “Ideology and Irony in Technopolitics: Computers and Apartheid Revisited.”

Eden Medina, Indiana University: “Fighting the Status Quo: Marx’s Capital and the Cybernetics of Beer.”

Rebecca Slayton, Stanford University: “The Politics of Progress: Computerniks as Activists and Professionals in the Era of Vietnam.”

Discussion: Ronald Kline, Cornell University

Chair: Nathan Ensmenger, University of Pennsylvania

Session Description:
The field of computing came into its modern form through a period of dramatic social and political change around the world. This panel addresses recent historiographic calls for more attention to the mutual shaping of computing and politics, by examining how complex tensions in the social and political interests of research sponsors, computer designers, and users shaped the public representation of computing. How did early computer developers express their social and political values as these came into tension with the commitments of their institutions? What implications did these expressions hold for public representation of the political and social significance of computing? This panel examines these questions in diverse times and places, collectively exploring computing over five decades and four different nation-states, revealing cross-cutting themes. Taken together, the panel will show how computing, as science, technology, and work, has been represented alternately as a source of revolutionary change or as a means for keeping the status quo, while its practice has been far more ambiguous.

Janet Abbate takes up the politics of computing as a new and ambiguous field of work. She shows that American and British programming between the mid-1940’s and mid-1960’s both enabled and limited women who sought professional recognition and advancement. Women carved out a niche in a field that had not yet been explicitly gendered as male; yet the initial invisibility of programming within a broader system of male-dominated employment discouraged more public and radical advancement.

Paul Edwards demonstrates a similar contrast between the public representation of computing and its more hidden effects as a field of work and as a technology, but in the context of apartheid South Africa during the 1970’s and 1980’s. As he shows, the majority of anti-apartheid activists characterized computing as a tool for government oppression; yet ironically, black Africans were able to advance in the new field, and anti-apartheid activists were able to turn computing technology to their own uses.

Eden Medina also explores the role of computing in revolutionary politics, but in the context of Salvador Allende’s Chile from 1970 to 1973. She shows how the influential cybernetician Stafford Beer worked to align his science with Allende’s vision of democratic socialism and Marx’s critique of capital, as well as his attempts to persuade Allende and other computer workers of the revolutionary potential of technological systems grounded in cybernetic science.

Returning to the U.S. context, Rebecca Slayton will explore similar tensions between government uses of computers and the political commitments of computer developers. She examines a seeming paradox – that anti-war activists were deeply rooted in military-sponsored computing research – and shows how commitments to technological progress both helped resolve this paradox and shaped collective action at a time when computer workers were struggling to find a cohesive professional identity.

In short, this panel will demonstrate several themes which are under-explored in current historiography of computing: tensions between the political commitments of computer developers and state uses of their technology; contrasts between the public representations and local practices of computing; flexible alignments of computer “science” with political ideology; and finally contradictions between the revolutionary potential of a new technology and the established institutions nurtured its growth.

The three papers in this session are responsive to the program committee’s call for papers that focus on the question of “The Historian and Other Disciplines.”   We propose to focus attention on the enduring connection between SHOT and its members and engineers.  The linkages exist at several levels, including institutional ties (SHOT and the American Society for Engineering Education), a common intellectual interest in the history of technology, and shared personal concerns about the education of engineering students.  We propose to explore how these ties and connections have changed over time.

The opening paper in the session (Seely) will explore the deep roots that founding members of SHOT had with engineering education and the ASEE during the 1950s.  Primary attention will be devoted to Mel Kranzberg, who held a key position in ASEE during the years he worked to create the Society for the History of Technology.  The patterns visible at that time have continued to play a role in the work of historians of technology both as scholars and as participants in the education of engineering students.  Two other papers will examine both the continuities and the changes in this relationship during the intervening decades, focusing on activities within the specific orbit of ASEE.  The first (Pfatteicher & Lohmann) will provide a Staudenmaier-like analysis of the primary publication of ASEE, the Journal of Engineering Education.  The intention is to examine how engineers have seen their roles changing — and the implications of those changes for historians of technology.   The final paper (Neeley) will consider the changes and continuities between engineering and the history of technology from the perspective of the ASEE’s Liberal Education Division (LED).  This is the group that Mel Kranzberg chaired in the 1950s and which provided a springboard for his efforts to form SHOT.  Moreover, historians of technology have remained active in LED ever since.  This paper will consider how the organization’s goals, as well as the roles of historians of technology within LED, have changed.  The paper will focus on the period since 1980.

Gary Downey, an anthropologist with a career-long interest in engineers and engineering education, will chair and comment on the session.  He has been active in the effort to establish the Prometheans as a special interest group within SHOT.

Reply
Paul Forman

Chair and Organizer
Eric Schatzberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison

From the founding of SHOT into the 1980s, the relationship between science and technology was one of the principal historiographic issues discussed in the society’s journal and at its meetings. Since the 1980s, however, explicit discussions of the science-technology relationship has become less prominent in SHOT, although empirical studies have continued to address this issue. A new article by Paul Forman, however, has thrust this issue back to the forefront. Forman’s article contains a bold reformulation of the debate over the science-technology relationship, in which he argues that the cultural primacy of science over technology that prevailed in modernity has been replaced by the cultural primacy of technology over science in postmodernity. But more important for the SHOT community, Forman’s long and ambitious paper contains a major challenge to SHOT’s science-technology historiography. Forman argues that the society’s perverse quest for autonomy from the history of science has blinded its members from recognizing the cultural shift to the primacy of technology. Forman makes his case through an analysis of a number of key figures in SHOT historiography, claiming that their work demonstrates not just a misunderstanding of the science-technology relationship but rather a systematic neglect of science.

This proposed session will address and respond for Forman’s critique. The session is not meant to consist primarily of SHOT insiders defending the society, although some defense is certainly to be expected. Rather, the principal aim of the session is to assemble a diverse set of historians who will take Forman’s article as an opportunity to reframe what has become a stale debate over the science-technology relationship. The session includes five prominent historians who will comment on Forman’s article: 1) a past president of SHOT who participated in the early years of the society, 2) a historian of science whose work has dealt with both scientific practice and industrial culture, 3) a historian of both science and technology who has been active both in SHOT and in the History of Science Society, 4) a historian of technology who has worked on both the technical and cultural history of the intersection of science and technology, 5) a historian of technology from Britain where the organization of the history of science and technology is quite different than in the United States. Each panelist will give a comment on the article, followed by a reply from Paul Forman.

Organizer: Tiago Saraiva, University of Lisbon
Participants:
Prakash Kumar, Colorado State University
Donna Mehos, Eindhoven University of Technology
Tiago Saraiva, University of Lisbon

Comment: Kenneth Lipartito, Florida International University

Papers:

“The Telegraph and the Emergence of International Standardizing Institutions”
JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Wellesley College
“Standardization Across the Boundaries of the Bell System, 1920-1938”
Andrew L. Russell, The Johns Hopkins University
“Creating Fax Standards: Technology Red in Tooth and Claw?”
Jonathan Coopersmith, Texas A&M University
“Technical Standards and the FCC: Changing Patterns”
Christopher H. Sterling, George Washington University

Session Description:

Technical standards provide the common bonds that sustain communication networks. However—ironically—there is no standard method for creating technical standards. The papers in this session describe a variety of institutional settings—including monopoly firms, national governments, and international organizations—that have produced standards for communication technologies, and evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of these institutional alternatives. As a whole, the session addresses a number of important questions for historians of technology: What factors influenced governmental decisions to create or mandate standards? How did non-governmental bodies devise procedures to establish broad consensus around a single standard? When have specific firms been able to impose a standard through market competition? Finally, to what extent did the choice of standardization venue influence the success or failure of a given technology?

The first paper, by JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy, examines the emergence of two international organizations—the International Telecommunications Union and International Electrotechnical Commission—that sought to set standards for telegraph networks. As a technology that crossed national boundaries and was managed by a variety of firms and nations, the electric telegraph provided an early impetus for organizing at an international level to coordinate technical standards. Moreover, it helped catalyze the emergence of the complex voluntary consensus standard-setting system that still exists.
The second paper, by Andrew Russell, looks at AT&T’s standardization activities between 1920 and 1938. Although it exercised monopoly control over standards in the telephone network, AT&T engineers and executives were active in industry groups that set standards for other important aspects of AT&T’s business, such as safety standards and specifications for acoustics, mechanical devices, and raw materials. The central question of the paper is, what was the character of AT&T’s involvement with these industry standards groups? Do these activities indicate the limits of AT&T’s influence, or do they suggest ways that AT&T shaped technologies that lay beyond its monopolistic grasp?

The third paper, by Jonathan Coopersmith, discusses two different strategies for setting standards for fax networks between 1970 and 2000. The first efforts to establish standards through market competition led to incompatibilities that hindered the growth of the fax market. Subsequent efforts to negotiate standards between proprietary rivals and across American, Japanese, and British interests found some success in the 1980s, but once again fragmented as computer technologies altered the fax market. These examples demonstrate how neither the market-based approach nor the negotiated approach were obviously superior.

The fourth paper, by Christopher Sterling, looks more closely at the changing role of the American Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in an era of “deregulation.” Before the 1980s, the FCC unilaterally selected standards for technologies such as FM radio and color television. During the 1980s, however, the FCC changed course and experimented with a “market-oriented” approach to standardization for services such as AM stereo and teletext—before reversing course once again to impose standards for high-definition television. This paper evaluates factors that influenced the changing patterns of standard-setting at the FCC, including politics, ideology, technology, economics, and lobbying.

Taken together, the four papers do not offer a prescription for any “one best way” to set standards. Instead, these histories consider how alternative institutional approaches to standardization can shed new light on the political, economic, and cultural values that shaped the design and use of networked communication technologies.

1] Chandra Mukerji, University of California at San Diego, “The Mindful Hands of Peasant Women: Design of the staircase lock at Fonseranes for the Canal du Midi”
2] Alette Fleischer, University of Twente, “Trick and truths:
Constructing a garden and examining nature in a 17th century Dutch grotto”
3] Lissa Roberts, University of Twente, “Generating knowledge and know-how:
Dutch-Japanese trade during the second half of the eighteenth century”
4] Ian Inkster, Nottingham Trent University, “Comparative and Global Reflections on Mindful Hands in Sites of Endeavour”

Abstract: At the time of SHOT’s establishment, it was usual to associate theoretical knowledge with science and to consider its production in terms of mental work.  Technology, on the other hand, was generally associated with practical, manual skill and the application of (scientific) knowledge.  We have come a long way since then, but the historiographical division between science and technology remains, despite broad recognition that the history of science is as much a history of skillful practice as it is of theory development and that the history of technology involves both contemplation and dexterous skill. This session represents the work of an international network of historians of science and technology who have come together to reconsider the historical relation between theory and practice during the period extending between the so-called scientific and industrial revolutions.  The first product of their collaboration is the recently published volume of essays, entitled The mindful hand: inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialization (2007).

The goal of the book and of this session is to help reveal the complex history in which collaborative efforts of hand and mind were responsible for both material and knowledge production, while surrounding socio-political and institutional struggles sought to separate and reorder the processes, personnel and products of such economies.  The method involves selecting individual sites that served as points of intersection for networks of individuals, the productive coalescence of whose various talents and purposes both derived from and accounted for developments in the seemingly separate fields of material and knowledge production.  The specific sites chosen for this session include the construction of a portion of the Canal du Midi in seventeenth-century France, a garden grotto in seventeenth-century Netherlands and the artificial island of Deshima (in the harbour of Nagasaki) during the second half of the eighteenth century, where representatives of the Dutch East Indies Company were housed.  The first two help deconstruct the claim that the seventeenth century was characterized by a theory-centred scientific revolution, the consequences of which disciplined contemporary technological practice.  Rather, on-site collaboration between mental and manual manipulation furthered both engineering capabilities and the understanding of nature.  It remained for spokesmen of the socio-political and institutional order to nonetheless assert their thoughtful authority over these developments.  The third paper is situated more than a century later and a world away as it directs its attention to Dutch-Japanese trading relations, centred on the artificial island Deshima during the late eighteenth century.  Beginning with local interactions between members of the Dutch East Indies Company and their Japanese counterparts, this paper moves between Japan and Europe to examine the ways in which local cultures appropriatively interpreted relations between the work of the hand and mind in the related processes of material and knowledge production during the period usually associated with both the origins of modern industrialism and European imperialism.  Finally, the fourth paper reflects more generally on how the approach developed in The mindful hand, especially its focus on the local economies of mind and hand that shaped material and knowledge production, can be used profitably for appreciating the global context in which the history of science and technology needs to be set.

Roundtable participants
Thomas Zeller (University of Maryland), “Landscapes of Envirotech.”
Sara B. Pritchard (Cornell University), “Envirotech Methods: Looking Back, Looking Beyond?”
Hugh S. Gorman (Michigan Technological University), “STS and the Co-Evolution of     Technology and Nature.”
Sylvia Hood Washington (UIC School of Public Health and Institute for Environmental Science
and Policy), “Reflections on the Integrative Historical Scholarship of Environment,     Technology and Health Disparities in America.”
Pat Munday, (Montana Tech), “STS and Environmental History as a Foundation for
Environmental Activism.”

Discussant    Edmund P. Russell, III (University of Virginia)

Panel abstract
Although technology is central to environmental history, and nature to science and technology studies (STS), these categories often remain implicit, not explicit.  Moreover, the two fields have forged less common ground than one might expect at first glance.  Scholars in STS and the social and historical studies of technology more specifically have tended to focus their analysis on the relationship between technology and society, technology and culture, or technology and politics while environmental historians have concentrated on the interaction between human and non-human nature.  In other words, there is a critical gap between the fields’ central categories of analysis.  Perhaps more importantly, their parallel intellectual paths may be due to their differing epistemological stances on science and nature.  Over the past decade, however, scholars have begun not only to place science, technology, and the environment at the center of their studies, but also to demonstrate how the interplay between technology and nature is critical to wider historical and conceptual issues in both fields.  While this work has begun to forge common ground, tensions between the fields do remain.

This roundtable aims to contribute to this emergent body of scholarship by examining some of its historical roots, questions, and approaches.  In short, it places the integration of STS and environmental history in historical perspective, examining some of the major historiographies, methodologies, and conceptual tools that have been developed thus far.  It also considers limits to and gaps in this work.  Finally, it studies the relevance of the fields’ intersection for not only scholars, but also historical (and hence contemporary) actors engaged in socio-ecological struggles.

This session seeks to complement the Envirotech “case study” panels proposed at the 2007 SHOT meeting, but it foregrounds conceptual, methodological, and analytic issues in historical perspective.  The panel thus develops one of the themes highlighted by this year’s Program Committee: historiography.  In particular, the first two session participants (Zeller and Pritchard) discuss how scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have thought about the intersection and interaction of “nature and technology.”  They analyze and assess the contributions (and limits) of these approaches while proposing some potentially fruitful alternatives.  Building on this work, Gorman maintains that STS methods have helped reframe work within the history of technology and environmental history, enabling scholars in these fields to move away from declentionist narratives of technology towards the possibilities of socio-environmental reform through technology.  The final two panelists, Washington and Munday, consider these issues in light of their relevance to historical and contemporary struggles over socio-environmental (in)equality.  Washington argues that environmental justice, including human health disparities should be central to work at the intersection of STS and environmental history while Munday asserts that elements of STS and environmental history offer environmental activists important tools for political mobilization.

Format
We propose a roundtable session based on shorter presentations with plenty of time for discussion across the papers and with the audience.  We have included five participants in order to incorporate a range of perspectives and approaches.  Each roundtable participant would have 10-12 minutes to present several key points.  After all of the panelists have made their remarks, our discussant would highlight some common themes and issues in order to jumpstart discussion.  Then the floor would be opened for general discussion among the panelists and audience members.  We hope that this format offers more of a “seminar” experience for those participating in and attending the session.

This session is sponsored by SHOT SIG Envirotech.