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Some Thoughts on the History of Technology
from Leading Scholars

The following interviews with eminent historians of technology appeared in the pages of American Heritage of Invention and Technology from 1985 to 2004, and are still accessible on-line.

Elting E. Morison, Technology and the Human Dimension: "Technology is the entire system of things and forces that we have put together to create not only new machinery but a sort of new world that, in its sophistication and in its present development, pretty well displaces much of the natural environment."

Thomas P. Hughes, America's Golden Age: "There are other historians who are interested in politics and economics. I do not wish to see our field become—or continue to be—a field of specialization. It should be recognized as a part of general history, and a very important one. I think technology and science are at the core of historical developments in the twentieth century."

John H. White, Jr., A Life with Trains: "Many teachers jump right into the literature, into the big issues, into theory. These matters are extremely important, but so are the fundamentals, like materials and fabrication techniques. You need to have some kind of handle on that. Otherwise, technical artifacts are just a bunch of old stuff.... practical experience and formal training are both essential to the making of a good technical historian."

John Kouwenhoven, Made in America: "...the vernacular designer is working not just with new materials but for a new purpose. The steam engine, for example, had to be adaptable to the manufacture of a great many products, in order to reduce the price. No sense in designing a steam engine to make Fabergé eggs for the csar of Russia. You’ve got to have a mass market in mind, otherwise the expense of that kind of machine isn’t worth bothering with."

Walter Vincenti, What ENGINEERS Know: "...technology has to be seen as an integral part of today’s culture.... Most people, whether in the academy or outside, have the notion that technology is something out there. It either solves problems for the culture or lays problems on the culture, but whatever it does, it’s out there somewhere. But the view we should have is that our culture, modernday culture, is a technological culture. It will be so viewed... four or five hundred years from now—in the same way that we now look back on medieval culture as a religious culture. Our culture can be understood only in those terms.

Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: "It’s striking to me how little scholarship has actually been generated by [the] notion [that 'all history was the history of unintended consequences'], which you would think would be so fecund. Maybe it’s because we live in a culture that sanctifies will and choice and the mastery of fate. We shy away from the implications of this subversive idea.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, This is the History People Often Care Most About: "Even in the early 1980s students would come into my class expecting a history of computers. The engineering students didn’t even think of the automobile as a technology. Once I realized this, I began my courses by making that point. In high schools in New York there was a course called “Technology,” and it was a course in keyboarding. When I was in school it had been called typing and only girls took it. I think they changed the name when boys had to take it too."

Walter A. MacDougall, How the Space Race Changed America: "I believe that in theory technology is quite neutral. But in practice, big technological systems are never entirely neutral.... the very presence of giant systems requires society to make major political adjustments to adapt to them.... And once you’ve adjusted your entire economy or political structure to fit a certain technological base, you are captive to it, and the secondary effects, bad or good, have to be lived with. It’s not that technology in itself challenges our values, but rather that the things we have to do to accommodate a technological revolution can inadvertently undermine our values."

John M. Staudenmaier, The Frailties and Beauties of Technological Creativity: "You couldn’t pick up the journal [T&C] without being hit over the head with internalism, the approach focused directly on technological design. That was ancient; it has a long tradition—fascination with hardware and the design of technological things. But there were also historians who were interested in how technology and culture intersect. They wanted to situate technology in its historical context."

Thomas P. Hughes, The Secret Triumph of American Engineering: "What I’m interested in is the evolution of the ability to design, develop, and deploy very large-scale information systems, communication systems, highway systems, and weapons systems in a democratic society in which a number of interest groups want to participate and influence the design."

Pauline Maier and Merritt Roe Smith, Inventing America: "If you look at anything about technology or science in textbooks, it’s almost always separated from politics and society.... These things needed to be integrated. That was what we tried to do. We call ourselves a technological society, yet we don’t pay much attention to technology in our texts. And we surely don’t relate it to the politics and the social issues that are important in our society."

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