Just prior to the awards banquet on Saturday, SHOT convened a roundtable discussion with recipients of the society’s highest honor, the Leonardo DaVinci Medal. Since the first of these was awarded to R. J. Forbes in 1961, there have been forty-four medalists, seventeen of whom are still with us, and nearly all of them were present for this once-in-a lifetime event.
The aim was to provoke a dialogue about the anniversary theme “Looking Back/Looking Beyond,” and we were delighted and honored that the editor of American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Fred Allen, was able to serve as the moderator. Video of the roundtable, as well as a of series of individual interviews and all of the Wednesday and Thursday events, will be made available online in due course (as well as being archived with SHOT’s papers at the Smithsonian Institution). In the meantime, a podcast is available.
A number of interviews with SHOT stalwarts were published over the years in Invention and Technology, and some of these are already online; see here for a list and links.
Participants
Thomas Parke Hughes 1985
Carroll W. Pursell 1991
Merritt Roe Smith 1994
Bruce Sinclair 1995
Ruth Schwartz Cowan 1997
Walter Vincenti 1998
Robert C. Post 2001
Leo Marx 2002
Barton C. Hacker 2003
David E. Nye 2005
Eric H. Robinson 2006