The 2007 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, from October 17 to 21, began a year-long celebration of the society’s fiftieth anniversary that will conclude with the 2008 meeting it Lisbon. It also marked the society’s return to the location of its first annual meeting in 1958, and of eight more during the next twenty-five years, including its silver anniversary in 1983. Each of those meetings was hosted by the Smithsonian Institution—the first two in its Arts and Industries Building, the others in the National Museum of History and Technology after it opened in 1964. Indeed, Washington and the Smithsonian were for many years sort of a second home for SHOT. While the editorial and secretarial headquarters were located, successively, at Case Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, fully one-third of the annual meetings were sponsored by the Smithsonian, and for fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s the Smithsonian was home to the editorial offices of SHOT’s journal, Technology and Culture.

Arts and Industries Building

The 2007 meeting drew over 600 registrants for more than sixty program sessions, plus a day-long workshop funded by the National Science Foundation, a public lecture and panel discussion at the National Academy of Engineering, a plenary session at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and tours to Harpers Ferry, the National Cathedral, and several other nearby sites at which technology and culture intersect in remarkable ways. What a contrast to that first meeting a half-century ago, when twenty-one men and women signed a sheet of paper that was passed around and there were only two sessions on the program, one with a focus on India and Tibet and the other on the history of technology in America.

John B. Rae

To be sure, both sessions had real sparkle. The first featured Lynn White jr., a future president of the American Historical Association as well as of SHOT, who would soon publish Medieval Technology and Social Change, a cornerstone of the field’s historiography. Among the participants in the second session were two of the society’s three founders, Carl Condit and John Rae, and two future presidents, Rae and Eugene Ferguson.

Carl Condit

But what modest beginnings! A few days before the meeting, Melvin Kranzberg, the man who has been called SHOT’s “mother of all fathers,” penned a press release which concluded thus: “The Society is a pioneering organization aimed at bringing together scholars from many disciplines interested in studying the impact of technology on modern society.” Fifty years later, one remark here needs to be revised: Many, no doubt the majority, of papers slated for 2007 examine not the impact of technology on society so much as their mutual interaction. But what Kranzberg said that was right on in 1958 and still is today was his remark about SHOT “bringing together scholars from many disciplines”—though a lot more of them fifty years later, more by orders of magnitude, than he could have foreseen.

SHOT Annual Meetings, 1958—2008