Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship
Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship
Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize
Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize
IEEE Life Members’ Prize in Electrical History
Abbott Payson Usher Prize
Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits
Sally Hacker Prize
Edelstein Prize
Eugene S. Ferguson Prize for Outstanding Reference Work
Leonardo da Vinci Medal

Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship

This award is in memory of the co-founder of the Society, and honors Melvin Kranzberg’s many contributions to developing the history of technology as a field of scholarly endeavor and SHOT as a professional organization. The $4000 award is given to a doctoral student engaged in the preparation of a dissertation on the history of technology, broadly defined and may be used in any way chosen by the winner to advance the research and writing of that dissertation.

The Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship for 2007 is awarded to Etienne S. Benson for his forthcoming dissertation “Spying on the Wild: Science, Surveillance, and Survival in Cold War America”.

Benson aims to reconstruct the different contexts in which technologies of studying animals was developed. A focus on the development of wildlife telemetry, involving technologies like radio tagging and satellite tracking, gives Benson a new vantage point for discussing the relationship of science and technology to environmental issues.

Benson structures his project chronologically around five case studies from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. He traces how science and scientists function increasingly as mediators between humans and wild animals. Yet even as scientists found out more about wild animals, their technologies of surveillance reshaped our ideas of the wild. This is exemplified by his discussion of the revival of the Californian condor population: is it possible to call a condor bred in a zoo wild if it has been under constant surveillance?

Benson’s project captures an intriguing theme highly relevant to a present discussion and shows a well-developed sense for connections promising a number of interesting conclusions. The Committee is pleased to support Benson with the Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship.

The Brooke Hindle Post-Doctoral Fellowship

The Fellowship honors the contribution of Brooke Hindle to the work of the Society for the History of Technology and is made possible thanks to the generosity of his family. The award is presented to a graduate holding a doctorate in the history of technology or a related field, normally awarded within four years of the commencement of the award year or who is expecting to graduate with such a degree by 1st August preceding the award year. The fellowship is $10,000 and may be used for any purpose connected with research or writing in the history of technology.

The 2007 Brooke Hindle Post-Doctoral Fellowship committee has given this year’s award to Heather Perry, for her research project, “Recycling the Disabled: Army, Medicine, and Rehabilitation in WWI Germany.” Heather Perry’s investigation of the militarization of German medicine is an ambitious, original, and fascinating project. It explores the development of orthopedic and prosthetic technologies in the wake of social and political concerns that accompanied disabled soldiers returning home after the First World War in Germany. As scholarship, it promises to integrate the history of technology with the history of war, the history of medicine, and the history of the body. And given the ravages of today’s wars on both warriors and civilians, it is a timely topic, likely to reach readers in the general public and among policy makers. Dr. Perry has already done impressive work, but her manuscript will benefit from additional time for research and the chance to travel to primary sources. We are proud that the Society can assist this exciting work.

The Robinson Prize

Established in 1980 by Dr. Eric Robinson in memory of his wife, the prize is awarded annually for the best presented paper at the SHOT meeting by an individual delivering a paper for the first time at the Society’s annual meeting. Candidates for the award are judged not only on the quality of the historical research and scholarship of their paper, but also on the effectiveness of the oral presentation. The Robinson Prize consists of a check for $350 and a certificate.

The 2006 Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize is awarded to Anna Storm for her presentation “Interpretation Processes in Re-used Industrial Areas.” In her talk Storm described the complicated afterlife of industrial communities. What do people do with the physical infrastructure left behind when industries shut down? When buildings are too expensive to demolish? Or, when to do so threatens the fabric of a community whose identity had been shaped by the now silent factory? Employing the theoretical insights of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Storm revealed how different communities negotiated “hermeneutical process of preconception, interpretation and re-interpretation” to reconstitute meaning into industrial areas. In an analysis that was transnational in scope, Storm drew upon examples from Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States to demonstrate a range of semantic paths. In the Ruhr Valley, for example, artists were commissioned to design a post-modern factory entertainment park. In another case, a small Scandinavian village harmoniously appropriated the towering factory into municipal representations of its skyline. These choices were far from arbitrary. Storm explored who typically has a voice in the process of interpretation and who is left out. How the meaning of an industrial area came to be reconstituted involved numerous interest groups including the corporations which own the abandoned sites; “middle-class intellectuals” such as industrial archeologists and “heritage” champions; former factory workers; and their wives and children who often have service jobs in support of industrial tourism.

In keeping with the spirit of the prize, Storm demonstrated exemplary presentation skills. Weaving a story of artifact and memory, Storm employed illustrations and anecdotes effectively as she recounted the mingled reconstruction of object, meaning, and historical narrative over time. In her introductory example, she presented the audience with the picture of a hoisting tower in a declining Swedish mining district, an artifact that stood out in the village’s landscape and psyche as the complicated symbol of industrial society. A source of industrial might and environmental pollution, and a labor site that brought pride and pain to workers, the tower’s original meanings disappeared in a process of economic revitalization, renovation of memory and building, and forgiveness and acceptance. Photographs of the picturesque valley of Britain’s Iron Bridge and the art of the Ruhr complemented Storm’s analytical attention to local context and the kinds of interests driving the interpretive revisions. Capping her skillful presentation with a lively question and answer session, Anna Storm earned the admiration of the Robinson Prize committee with an organized and engaging narrative, a sharp eye for the telling image and example, and an expansive transnational comparison, all done in a non-native language.

The Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize

The Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize, inaugurated in 1985 by Mark Levinson in honor of his parents, is awarded annually for an original essay in the history of technology that explicitly examines in some detail a technology or technological device/process within the framework of social or intellectual history. The prize-winning essay must represent the author’s first work intended for publication. The prize consists of a certificate and $450.

The 2007 Levinson Prize Committee awards this year’s prize to Mr. Eric Hintz of the University of Pennsylvania for his essay, “Portable Power: Inventor Samuel Ruben and the Birth of Duracell.” Hintz tells an engaging story of the invention and commercialization of miniature batteries in the United States during and after the Second World War. Through careful writing and thoughtful analysis, his essay enhances historians’ understanding of the sources of innovation and technological diffusion in the consumer electronics industry.

“Portable Power” traces the origins of the miniature battery to a moment during the Second World War when the United States Signal Corps turned to the National Inventors’ Council for assistance in solving operational problems with zinc-carbon batteries that powered wireless radios and mine detectors on the battlefront. When Samuel Ruben, an independent inventor, developed a more reliable and longer-lasting mercury battery, the Signal Corps practically forced the P. R. Mallory Company, a manufacturer of electrochemical inventions, to produce them. After the war, Ruben and the Mallory Company refined the battery and adapted it for new peacetime applications including hearing aids, watches, and pacemakers as well as satellites and other military equipment. In 1960, the company developed a cheaper alkaline battery, resulting in the transformation of the battery from “a component of other products” to “a consumer product in its own right.”

By emphasizing Ruben and his collaboration with a medium-sized enterprise, Hintz highlights the persistence of independent inventors in an era that historians have generally characterized as dominated by science-based corporate industrial research. “Portable Power” argues for the importance of a “mixed innovation strategy” in which Mallory relied on a long-term relationship with independent inventors and other outside consultants while also investing in its own scientific research laboratories. Hintz further demonstrates that commercialization of the batteries commonly in use today required not only technical innovation but also developments in marketing and, ultimately, the re-invention of a business enterprise. His case study of the emergence of a “quotidian, but ubiquitous technology” demonstrates the importance of the miniature battery both to the history of consumer electronics and to the historiography of technological innovation during the Second World War. For these reasons, “Portable Power” merits recognition through the award of the Levinson Prize.

The IEEE Life Members’ Prize in Electrical Engineering

The IEEE Life Members’ Prize in Electrical History was established by the IEEE Life Members, who fund the prize, and is administered by the Society for the History of Technology. The prize recognizes the best paper in electrical history published during the previous year. Electrotechnology encompasses power, electronics, telecommunications, and computer science. The prize consists of $500 and a certificate.

The committee for the IEEE Life Members Prize is pleased to award the prize for 2007 to Eden Medina for her article, “Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile.” Describing the development of an early computer network to govern the transition of Chile’s economic system from capitalist to socialist, this ambitious and superbly researched article weaves technological and political history within an under-studied Latin American context. Medina examines the evolution of the Cybersyn, a Chilean nationwide management information project, in close connection with broader political transformations in that country in the early 1970s. The article also places the project in a wide international context, demonstrating the significance of circulation of people and cybernetic/computer technologies across national borders and their adaptation to local conditions.

Based on substantial original research in international archives and oral history, this article integrates technology and politics by showing that the design of the Cybersyn reflected political ideals and tensions of Allende’s socialism. At the same time, political ideals were subtly redefined in accordance with technology, as a push for regulation gradually replaced a revolutionary agenda. This article makes important connections between the history of technology, political history, and Latin American studies by demonstrating the importance of a vision of technological modernity for Allende’s policies. It also contributes to management studies by illustrating the interdependence of technology and management in efforts to effect organizational change. The article is elegantly written and will be of interest to a wide audience of historians of technology and beyond the field.

The committee for the IEEE Life Members Prize would also like to cite for honorable mention Kelly Joyce’s article, “From Numbers to Pictures: The Development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the Visual Turn in Medicine.” This article examines how a new technology emerges at the intersection of several distinct disciplinary contexts with their own professional languages and traditions of data representation and analysis, and how this technology is also shaped by broader cultural trends, such as public attitudes toward nuclear technology and the “turn to the visual.” Well researched and clearly written, this article presents a fruitful interaction of the history of technology with cultural studies and the history of science.

The Abbott Payson Usher Prize

The Abbott Payson Usher Prize was established in 1968 to honor the scholarly contributions of the late Dr. Usher and to encourage the publication of original research of the highest standard. It is awarded annually to the author of the best scholarly work published during the preceding three years under the auspices of the Society for the History of Technology. The prize consists of $400 and a certificate.

Carlo Belfanti’s article, “Guilds, Patents, and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge: Northern Italy during the Early Modern Age,” is an innovative and insightful international study of the circulation of technical knowledge in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. Using the case of northern Italian silk manufacturing, he makes concrete a much cited but often nebulous concept—tacit knowledge. Belfanti gives exceptional insight into how tacit knowledge was constructed. He argues, “the expertise of the artisan was tacit knowledge, transmitted from master to apprentice in the daily routine of the workshop and inseparable from the artisan himself.” By analyzing networks and patterns of such traveling craft workers, Belfanti sheds new light on the processes of the transfer of know-how. Following the movement of people and development of institutions, he shows how states encouraged the transmission of useful skills.

With command of a vast literature, Belfanti dramatically revises our understanding of guilds, using research into patents to historicize the activities of early modern guilds, overturning traditional notions of them as stagnant, secretive bodies of technophobes. As he shows, guilds in the commercial crossroads cities of Northern Italy contributed significantly to the acquisition and diffusion of knowledge and technique. Guilds “elaborated, consolidated, and transmitted the stores of knowledge” that turned cities and towns into specialized manufacturing centers.

Belfanti also shows how changes in fashion and taste forced producers to find new strategies to attract craft workers who could provide greater creativity and novelty to meet consumers’ new needs and desires. Eventually, the spread of knowledge and know-how, combined with changing consumer tastes, undermined the system of knowledge diffusion built around cities, guilds and patents as operated in Northern Italy.

By reexamining what historians thought they knew about institutions and the narrative of progress, Belfanti forces us to rethink theories and generalizations about technological change. For this invaluable contribution, we are pleased to award Carlo Belfanti the 2007 Abbott Payson Usher Prize.

The Dibner Award

The Dibner Award, established in 1985, recognizes excellence in museums and museum exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry, and engineering to the general public. The prize consists of a certificate and a plaque prepared with the assistance of the Dibner Fund.

The 2007 Dibner Award is presented to Brunel’s ss Great Britain, the re-launch of the world’s first screw-propelled, iron-built passenger liner now situated in its original dry dock alongside a new exhibition hall at Great Western Docks, Bristol, for its approach to the preservation and interpretation of the ship that in 1843 pioneered reliable mechanically powered transoceanic voyages. The exhibition’s use of modern technology brings vibrantly to life a globally important engineering monument that illuminates the genius of renowned Victorian engineer, Isambard Kindgon Brunel while telling a far wider story of the contribution of ship-building in the industrial revolution and how engineering and technology transformed our world. The committee would like to thank Mark Horton of the University of Bristol for his review of the exhibit from which this citation draws.

In the dockside exhibition hall, a reused industrial building, original massive and imposing artifacts that were once part of the ship form the basis of giant interactive exhibits, making unfamiliar objects and their functions comprehensible to visitors. The ship’s 1857 yardarm dominates the exhibition hall, suspended on a replica mast section which visitors can climb for a view from above as the nineteenth century crew might have done. A bridge replicating the original gangplank extends from the exhibition hall and serves as an interestingly realistic entry onto to the ship.

The SS Great Britain is itself the main exhibit. It is displayed and simultaneously conserved in a highly innovative and original way that is also visually awesome; a large de-humidification chamber provides the solution to the ship’s corrosion and gives the illusion that it is afloat on a glass sea where a layer of rippling water supplies necessary cooling for the environmental
control system. Visitors can descend under the glass sea by way of an airlock for an underwater view of the aged hull and experience the exciting sight of the great bow with the water above it. There, they will encounter information and graphics that describe the state of the art conservation process.

Aboard the ship, where visitors are encouraged to explore at will, the experience is completely immersive. Interiors are reconstructed using the best available evidence from primary sources so that it is possible to understand what it was like to make an oceanic voyage in the 1850’s. The banqueting area, promenade deck, cabins, kitchen galley, and third class areas are accurately recreated. Full-scale working replicas of the engines are in place, a work of engineering scholarship of the highest order undertaken in partnership with Rolls Royce. The SS Great Britain charitable trust, has achieved a site of world-class significance through its substantial fund-raising and Director Matthew Tanner and his staff oversee a museum that is of universal appeal and also of scholarly integrity.

The Sally Hacker Prize

The Sally Hacker Prize was established in 1999 to recognize the best popular book written in the history of technology in the three years preceding the award. The prize, consisting of $2000 and a certificate, recognizes books in the history of technology that are directed to a broad audience of readers, including students and the interested public. The book should assume that the reader has no prior knowledge of the subject or its method of treatment, and should provide an elucidating explanation of technological change in history, with a minimum of technical or academic prose.

The Sally Hacker Prize Committee of the Society for the History of Technology is pleased to announce Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, by Mark Katz (University of California Press, 2004), as the 2007 winner of the Hacker Prize.

The Hacker Prize rewards exceptional scholarship that reaches a broad audience. The audience so captured by Capturing Sound is primarily an undergraduate one, thus Katz has presented the Committee with a welcome opportunity to reward pedagogical writing. Textbooks are a genre that always challenge, and usually defeat, even the best of writers. Breaking the mold of the seemingly objective, chronologically-impelled narrative, Katz has produced a very different kind of work that succeeds on three different levels, all of which are important to historians of technology.

First, Katz presents a compelling account of the phonograph and it relationship to musical culture. He presents a series of case studies that explore and analyze the complex ways in which the phonograph has been situated within larger systems of music making and music-consuming. From early twentieth-century debates over whether the device would assist or destroy conventional musical culture; to the ways that recordings contributed to the development of a new genre of music – jazz – that did not exist prior to the machine’s invention; to the transgressive transformation of the device into an actual musical instrument in the hands of late-twentieth-century DJs; to the legal and creative challenges posed by the limitless reproducibility of digitized sound, Katz’s case studies add up to a rich historicization of the technology. They additionally draw the reader into the issues at play in each example: What is music and where does it exist? Who gets to produce (and reproduce) it? What do we gain by listening to it? These issues remain fully in play in today’s iPod-oriented world, and by focusing on them, Katz connects his history to a vital aspect of his readers’ own lives, bringing the past to life and enlightening their understanding of their own musical culture.

Throughout, Katz’s style is personal, even conversational, in a way that documents for the reader a dedicated scholar at work. His arguments are presented as the result of conversations – with historical documents and recordings, with musicians and engineers, with other scholars, and with his own students too. The conversation thus extends naturally to include the reader, and important questions are elicited yet never pedantically posed. By including a CD of recordings relevant to his arguments, Katz additionally teaches his readers how to listen to recordings in newly inquisitive ways, thus providing readers with the tools to answer their own questions.

The second accomplishment of Capturing Sound is that its lessons are fully applicable to technologies other than the phonograph. Katz, a musicologist, wrote this book to train students of music to think in complex ways about the role that technology plays in musical life. Not every historian of technology will choose to teach a course on the phonograph, but Capturing Sound would be a welcome addition to the syllabus of any survey course that strives more generally to teach socially and culturally embedded ways to understand technological developments. Its topical resonance, combined with the ease and success with which it demonstrates this embeddedness, promise to open students’ eyes to the ways that all technologies are similarly constructed.

Finally, Capturing Sound can serve as a model for authors of future textbooks on histories of other technologies. By setting aside the distant “objective” voice, by balancing comprehensive historical chronology with issue-oriented essays, by documenting the social processes of scholarship-at-work, any historian of technology may tune their work to resonate with a larger audience. Undergraduates are eager for this kind of work, as are general readers.

The Hacker Prize rewards intellectual merit combined with an accessible style that, in the broader popular press, is often associated with publications like The New Yorker. It is thus noteworthy that Katz’s book constituted the focus of an essay on technology by that magazine’s music critic. This is a good sign that similarly conceived and constructed histories of technology can become part of a public conversation that is both rigorous and highly visible.

The members of the 2007 Hacker Prize Committee hope that Mark Katz’s example will stimulate other historians of technology to engage with the challenge of producing work that simultaneously teaches undergraduates and reaches a wider audience of intelligent and discerning readers. We are pleased to celebrate Capturing Sound for accomplishing this goal.

The Edelstein Prize (formerly the Dexter Prize)

Established in 1968 through the generosity of the late Sidney Edelstein, a noted expert on the history of dyes, founder of a successful specialty chemical manufacturing firm, and 1988 recipient of SHOT’s Leonardo da Vinci Award, the Edelstein Prize is awarded by SHOT to the author of an outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology published during any of the three years preceding the award. The prize, donated by Ruth Edelstein Barish and her family in memory of Sidney Edelstein and his commitment to excellence in scholarship in the history of technology, consists of $3500 and a plaque.

The winner of the Edelstein Prize is Gregory Clancey for his original and compelling book, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 (University of California Press, 2006). In this richly researched study, Clancey examines the role of earthquakes in molding Japanese identity and practice as the nation sought to modernize rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Clancey weaves together an impressive number of strands to create his story, including technology, science, architecture, philology, culture, and politics.

These strands unite in the incident with which Clancey begins his book, Great Nobi Earthquake of 1891. Anxious to adopt Western knowledge as quickly as possible, Japan in previous years had imported British professors to staff an architecture program in a new school of engineering. For the British professors, and soon for their Japanese students as well, the contrast in building materials between Britain and Japan captured the differences between the two civilizations. The British prized their native stone for its strength. The durability of buildings made of stone, even if later reduced to ruins, testified to the advanced state of the European civilizations that made them. The professors and their students saw wood, the main structural material in Japanese buildings, as fragile. It embodied for them the poorly developed and weak state of Japanese civilization. The professors and their students set to work creating a strong new nation built of stone.

The Nobi earthquake shattered this understanding of civilization along with the buildings these architects had designed. The “strong” stone buildings collapsed, while “fragile” wooden structures survived. What followed was the development of a revised understanding of the relationship between earthquakes, materials, and modernization that melded ideas from the East and West. Out of the ruins of the earthquake developed a view that wood was more flexible than fragile, and a deepened appreciation for traditional knowledge held by master builders. But Japan did not simply return to old ways; it continued to engage ideas and practices from the rest of the world as it forged its own course into the twentieth century.

In one of the many ironies of Clancey’s story, the rebuilding of Japan with more flexible structures posed a technical challenge for earthquake scientists. In Europe, where this science developed, stone buildings themselves were seismographs. Scientists located the epicenter and periphery of earthquakes by examining cracks in the buildings afterward. The wooden buildings of Japan denied the scientists this instrument, which led them to develop new devices for measuring earthquakes. Japan became a leader in worldwide earthquake science partly because its architecture pushed scientists in new technological directions.

Clancey’s book is filled with illuminating analyses such as these, which the author weaves together to make his insightful argument. It is a most worthy recipient of the Edelstein Prize.

The Ferguson Prize

Established in 2005, the Eugene S. Ferguson Prize honors outstanding and original reference work that will support future scholarship in the history of technology. The Ferguson Prize recognizes work that is in the tradition of scholarly excellence established by Eugene S. Ferguson (1916-2004), SHOT’s pioneering bibliographer, a founding member of the Society (President, 1977-78; da Vinci medalist, 1977), museum curator and exhibit catalogue author, editor, annotator, university professor, and scholar of the history of engineering and technology. The prize consists of $2500 and a plaque.

The Ferguson Prize Committee has unanimously decided to award the 2007 prize to The Papers of Joseph Henry.

Volume 11, (January 1866-May 1878: The Smithsonian Years) was published this year and concludes the documentary history project started forty years ago, first under the editorial leadership of Nathan Reingold (volumes 1-5) and then Marc Rothenberg (volumes 6-11).

From the very first volume, the project has consistently met superior standards for documentary history. Reviewers and scholars consulting the volumes over the decades have agreed: the editions have illuminating introductory essays, a careful selection of documents, and extensive annotations. The project will of course serve as an enduring, indispensable guide for exploring the life and work of Joseph Henry and the earliest days of the Smithsonian Institution, where he served as its first leader. Henry’s experiments with electromagnetism, where he made his research reputation, and his influence on the American scientific community are documented meticulously. But more than this, the papers paint a richly detailed picture of how science and technology actually worked in the culture and national politics of nineteenth-century America, and in the crucial decades when the nation transformed to an international power.

Through the volumes, readers can follow Henry (1798-1878) chronologically from his early years in Albany through his career in teaching and research at Princeton University to his tenure as the first head of the Smithsonian Institution. Especially from the Smithsonian, Henry promoted his vision for national support for basic research, played an enormous role in shaping the science community in the United States through both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Science, and enhanced the country’s reputation in science abroad. With his stature as the country’s premier man of science came a heavy burden of consulting on myriad technical problems. Henry advised on a range of subjects, from Morse’s electric telegraph to lighthouses.

The volumes make rich primary resource materials accessible from about 300 different repositories, but they also provide absorbing reading. In the documents of Volume 11, for example, the reader meets an elderly Henry, the mature statesman of American science who had already spent two decades struggling to shape the young Smithsonian. The introductory essay evokes sympathy and sadness as it sketches out Henry’s huge workload, his declining health and death.

Like the Smithsonian’s own exhibitions, often described as the tip of the iceberg in terms of revealing the depth and breath of the national collections, the published documents represent only a tiny fraction of Henry-related documents located by the staff. For Volume 11, for example, they report having found a staggering number–100,000 documents dated between 1866 and 1878 written by, to, or about Henry.

Researchers can consult the published volumes as well as an on-line database available through the Smithsonian Archives. A cumulative index to the published volumes is expected next year.

The staff of the Henry Papers deserves high praise and congratulations for their well researched and superbly organized editions.

Leonardo da Vinci Medal

The highest recognition from the Society for the History of Technology is the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, presented to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the history of technology, through research, teaching, publication, and other activities. Andras Beck (formerly of the Hungarian Academy of Arts) designed the medal, the face of which shows Leonardo’s head modeled after the artist’s self-portrait. The reverse design shows (in the words of the sculptor) “the basic sources of energy: water, wind, and fire.” A certificate accompanies the medal.

Announcing the recipient of the da Vinci award, SHOT’s highest, is always a special occasion, and no more so than when this coincides with the occasion of SHOT’s 50th anniversary. The award was instituted in 1962 and has been given each year since then, with two exceptions, for a total of 43 times. The list of awardees includes many of the founders of the discipline and Society. On this doubly special occasion, it is fitting to award the da Vinci medal to a historian who embodies the generational continuity of our field, one who studied with the founders and who has self-consciously and successfully dedicated himself to scholarship, teaching, and institutions that will benefit historians of the future. In honoring David Hounshell with the da Vinci medal, we also honor the generational understanding that underlies our work, celebrating three generations of the history of technology knowing there will be countless more in an endless chain.

David Hounshell came to the history of technology from the West and from engineering: both backgrounds are of lasting importance to his identity. It matters that he grew up with the vast skies and high plains and nearby oil fields of Hobbs, current population around 30,000, in southeast New Mexico, due east of the site of the Manhattan Project. It also matters that Hounshell earned his bachelor’s degree at Southern Methodist University in Electrical Engineering, near Dallas, Texas, entering a year before the first moon landing, at a time when Texas was a center of the space program. It matters even more that at SMU he drifted from engineering studies to historical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Hughes.

This relationship influenced Hounshell in profound and multiple ways. The most obvious way was that it directed his attention eastward to what was in the 1970s the heartland of the history of technology: the grandes écoles of the Eastern Seaboard, the network of institutions in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and New Jersey, with links southwest to Blacksburg and north to Cambridge. An important node was the University of Delaware and the affiliated Hagley Program, and it was at Delaware, as a Hagley fellow, that Hounshell earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in history.

As he himself has often acknowledged, Hounshell benefited in countless ways from the programs, teachers, and mentors associated with this network. His deepest debt is to Eugene S. Ferguson—“teacher, scholar, and friend,” as he writes in the dedication to his first book. Along with fellow graduate students, he participated in an annual August road trip described by one of those students as “traipsing around the eastern U.S. (via van) to look at museums.” His fellow students still recall his store of knowledge (especially in electrical engineering), his cooking skills, his voracious reading, his interest in museums and material culture, his story-telling ability, his feistiness, and above all his seriousness. It was not to anyone’s surprise that at a relatively early age Hounshell himself became associate coordinator of the Hagley Program, which celebrated its own 50th anniversary in 2004.

This is the context, as we would say, of the scholarship that David Hounshell began to publish while still in graduate school and which continues in a steady stream to this day. Not surprisingly, some of his earliest work dealt with pioneers of electrical engineering such as Bell, Gray, and Edison. His first article in Technology and Culture was published in 1975 under the intriguing title “Elisha Gray and the Telephone: On the Disadvantages of Being an Expert.” In this piece the reader can already see some of the distinguishing traits of Hounshell’s work: the deft use of telling quotations and of telling illustrations, the ability to tell a good story, and behind it all careful archival work. It also sounds a theme that will reappear in later works: how much technologists are driven by powerful ideals, and how so often these ideals are disrupted and even battered by historical reality. In the T&C article, the technical expert Gray is bested by the amateur Bell, who has a better understanding of the human requirements of the system. Another early article by Hounshell, published in 1980 in Science sounds this theme in its very title: “Edison and the Pure Science Ideal in 19th century America. It is one of his most-cited publications.

On a much larger scale, and in a more subtle mode, this emphasis on technical ideals and their limits is also evident in Hounshell’s two big books, appearing within a few years of each other: From the American System to Mass Production 1800-1932 (1984) and, co-authored with John Kenly Smith, Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902-1980 (1988). The book on the origins of mass production traces in exquisite detail, and with extraordinary technical mastery, the evolution and diffusion of production technologies from the mechanical ideal of armory practice to less obvious and considerably messier sites such as woodworking and sewing machines, with other unexpected twists and turns to agricultural machinery and bicycles. The story culminates in Henry Ford’s assembly line, but this is by no means presented as a necessary, much less triumphalist, outcome. Indeed, a key chapter is the penultimate one, titled “Cul-de-sac: The Limits of Fordism and the Coming of ‘Flexible Mass Production,” which shows how regimes of production, connected with new regimes of marketing, were already showing the limits of assembly line mass production back in the 1920s.

Having moved from electrical to mechanical technologies, David Hounshell next addressed–in collaboration with Smith, as he would remind us–chemical technologies. Science and Corporate Strategy shows how the Du Pont corporation assembled an outstanding group of researchers for ultimately commercial purposes–but had a hard time keeping them focused on market outcomes when their very talents and abilities meant that they could be assigned, or assign themselves, to other purposes. This book is a masterly study of R&D as a management challenge and of the creative tensions between research goals and management strategies—between two ideals, as it were. It is also a product of considerable diplomatic skills in negotiating with Du Pont over the terms of accessing and storing archival material. Any effort to understand the “linear narrative,” so-called, linking scientific research with technological applications, must confront this essential study, by far the most detailed examination of a single corporation’s research program.

It is unnecessary to remind SHOT members about the influence of these books in our field. They are classics on the reading lists of graduate seminars everywhere in the history of technology. From the American System won SHOT’s Dexter Prize in 1987, and Science and Corporate Strategy, in its turn, received the 1992 Newcomen Prize in business history. In roughly a dozen years after degree, Hounshell had tackled some of the most prominent figures and events in the history of American technology and American history more generally: Edison and the independent inventors of communications and electrical systems; the American System and mass production; the rise of corporate research and the Manhattan Project. This work, grounded in imposing empiricism, spans two centuries and three distinct areas of engineering. It is expressed in prose that is a model of lucidity and organization. His topics are vast but the details never swamp the reader. The larger argument and connecting threads are always clear.

The long shadow cast by this phase of his career should not obscure the profound impact of the many articles and book chapters that Hounshell has also published, especially on the development of automation in the auto industry after 1932, and on economic thought about investment in R&D. His range continues to amaze. Three of his most-cited articles cover the early history of the semiconductor industry, the effects of government actions on innovation in anti-pollution technology, and the generation of knowledge at the RAND Corporation in the postwar years. (A fourth most-cited article is the 1980 one on Edison.) He is especially interested in the intersection of science, industry, and technology in Cold War history, as he was instrumental in establishing and now in directing the Carnegie Mellon Cold War Science and Technologies Studies Group. In this recent work, he is again tracking a technological ideal, one of total management, as it confronts the complex and ultimately unmanageable realities of Cold War societies and politics.

Especially after moving from the University of Delaware to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1991, Hounshell has collaborated with colleagues in related fields to explore topics such as innovation and regulation in the area of environmental controls and decision-making in situations of uncertainty. It is important to note that other disciplines and decision-makers have come to Hounshell: he remains a bedrock historian of technology, not seeking attention from other disciplines but attracting it through the clarity and empirical power of his work. For example, in his review of From the American System, David Landes expressed his disagreements with its thesis but even more emphasized its importance for economic historians, praising it as a “monumental contribution” to economic history precisely because historians of technology “come to this story [of mass production] from another angle.” (Apparently the lesson of the value of that angle sunk in: Landes himself received the da Vinci medal from SHOT in 2004.)

As a teacher and mentor, David Hounshell has played a pivotal role in passing on to a third and even fourth generation of students the research and expository skills that he learned from his own teachers. Not to mention the work ethic: for the ten Delaware students he supervised, the length of the average dissertation was 460 pages, many of them two-volume works. The average is somewhat lower among his Carnegie Mellon students (386 pages) but the point is still clear: Hounshell expects a lot of his students, in many dimensions. What cannot be measured is the degree of attention and rigor that Hounshell brings to his graduate teaching, as well as his ability to point his students towards promising topics and professional opportunities. Their gratitude and respect for him are broad and deep.

While David Hounshell is a member of many professional and honorary societies, his deepest affiliation has been with the Society for the History of Technology. Beginning in the early 1980s he served SHOT in multiple capacities, most notably as committee member, committee chair, and as vice-president from 2001-02 followed by his presidential term of 2003-04. Hounshell’s contributions to SHOT are not well captured by the usual service list, however. He is not unique, but he is certainly a prime example, of a SHOT leader who is conscious of the role of the society in connecting generations. For example, upon the passing of his mentor Eugene Ferguson, Hounshell devoted loving care to organizing the Ferguson Prize in his honor in all dimensions, including the details of designing the award plaque. To take another example, he understands that one tangible expression of generational solidarity is through building an endowment. With energy and persistence, he played a key role in creating an endowment for the editorship of Technology and Culture, so that our flagship journal can retain its editorial strength and independence into the indefinite future.

In the same spirit, Hounshell has repeatedly challenged SHOT to think strategically about new models, resources, and initiatives as we confront changing circumstances in museums, colleges and universities, publishers, and governments. Nowhere was this strategic vision more evident than in his constant and still-very-active prodding for SHOT to use the web for all aspects of the society’s activities. Yet while looking to SHOT’s future, Hounshell, ever the archivally-oriented researcher, has been keenly involved in getting SHOT to retain and learn from its own history. As SHOT president, he combed all the back issues of T&C for accounts of annual meetings, read all the annual reports to members in the last 25 years of SHOT Newsletters, and prepared summary of strategic plans distributed to Executive Council members in a 3.8 MB file. In these ways and many more, he has tried to provide SHOT with a “usable past” so current members can make the society an even stronger organization for its next fifty years.

The Eastern Seaboard moment in the history of technology– that particular cluster of founders and their students, speaking in a shared language of shared concerns– will not come again. Many more institutions, themes, and people are involved in the history of technology. This year we meet in Washington; next year, in Lisbon. But this year, in Washington, is the appropriate moment to honor David Hounshell, and, through him, the extraordinary lineage of scholarship, teaching, and service of the first fifty years of SHOT. We honor his achievements as a researcher and writer, teacher and mentor, institutional leader, and, most of all, as a clear-minded, idealistic, serious person in a world where these qualities are too rare and much needed.