Spring of 1977 brought the NCAA basketball finals to Atlanta the same week that Mel welcomed me as his house guest. He celebrated my first evening with a party, wanting his circle of friends to meet the young man who was writing a dissertation on Technology and Culture and had come for research in the journal’s files. Next morning, Mel set me up at a work table, gave me access to the Xerox machine, and led me to a daunting array of four-drawer cabinets, perhaps twenty or thirty of them, packed with manuscripts and correspondence from the journal’s eighteen-year history. One week to read and photocopy; I stood dismayed. Mel took in my appearance and, with characteristic gusto, said something like: ‘‘You can copy anything that you think will be helpful. But there’s so much that you might miss some of the really good stuff. Come down here.” He led me to a cabinet and pulled open a drawer. “This drawer has all the files from the time they tried to get me fired. They thought I acted too much like a clown. It’s all in here and you shouldn’t miss it.”
And there it all was, urgent and sometimes angry salvos fired at Mel by longtime colleagues arguing that his antics too often went beyond the pale of academic respectability. More than any other encounter, that moment introduced me to this man. It mattered to Mel that I get the whole story and that he personally introduce me to one of its least flattering moments. More than that, he seemed to think the whole messy business was very funny, a joke on him at least and probably on the other protagonists too.
This past January when those of us not locked in by the blizzard of ‘96 gathered for Mel’s memorial in Atlanta, I listened to the tributes from his friends and tried to understand this lovely man whole, the way one does at burial time. Mel, it seemed to me that afternoon, lived out a choice that faces each of us as we gradually shape our character with day-to-day decisions. We can define our life mostly as a series of strategic campaigns in which we identify our interests and work to achieve as much of each goal as possible. In that mode, we tend to assess our life by wins and losses, according to measurable achievements. Alternately, we can define our life as a story full of interventions and surprises where receptivity and playfulness often trump our planning. In this mode, it matters less how we or others measure our achievements. The loves of our life ultimately define us.
Mel was like that. Surely he planned and recognized his wins and losses. But no one who knew him, including his five professional colleagues whose remembrances follow here, could miss the play and the passion that meant more to Mel than anything else. His loves—the great women who shared his life, his long-standing friends, ICOHTEC, SHOT, T&C—they resided in him as a habit of affection that has left its mark on all of us who knew him.
John M. Staudenmaier, SJ.
Inventor
With a fresh Ph.D. I spent much of my first meeting of the History of Science Society in 1953 in a Boston bar, commiserating with two others of the disadvantaged, Melvin Kranzberg and Carl Condit. We all had secret yearnings for various aspects of the history of science
and technology, but not only were there “no jobs” (I quote Marshall Clagett, from an interview at that time), but we were unfortunate in our specialties-French and medieval history, and English. And of course we deplored the apparent indifference of the “clique” that “ran” the Society.
Neglect was widespread in those days. As an academic topic, the history of science barely existed, and resided mainly in the mind of George Sarton, whose indignation at the American tendency to ignore “the world of learning” was recorded in virtually every issue of Isis. The history of technology was in a worse condition. If it could be said to exist at all in the United States, it had no significant place in the academic scheme. I consider erroneous the popular notion that Sarton’s prejudices included the history of technology. He was nothing if not ecumenical, having himself written on such topics as “a medieval agriculturalist,” and on the pollination of date palms, and having printed in Isis some of the first really important research on the history of firearms in China.
Within the decade the field of the history of science found more than a niche in the university curriculum. All of the available candidates from Harvard and Cornell found academic homes. Wisconsin, where Marshall Clagett had trained the largest number (despite warning them that there were “no jobs”) seems to have placed everybody. Even the three musketeers from the Boston bar prospered, despite their handicaps: I at the Smithsonian Institution and with the editorship of Isis, Condit as a historian of architecture, in which field he authored learned publications that assure his entry to that not-yet-invented (thank heavens) Valhalla, the historian’s hall of fame. But it was Kranzberg who had the wit and the stamina to invent a new field and to establish it firmly. The history of technology as an academic field, and not only in the United States, is his invention.
Like many another invention, it now seems obvious. One can produce lists of contributions to the history of technology, even in the United States, that appeared before Mel Kranzberg’s invention; but such retrospection ignores the significance of his intervention: an invitation to meet at Case Institute on January 30-31, 1958 to consider the future of the history of technology. Condit and I were among the fifteen who responded, and this group decided on the establishment of a Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), and on the foundation of this journal. Indeed, we discovered, as reported in the first issue, that we were an Advisory Council.” Thus Condit and I found ourselves members of a clique. Naturally, there was no one present who opposed the history of technology, and it included some, notably Lynn White,jr., who were already practicing it. But it is my recollection that Kranzberg was prepared for us, with a carefully worked-out plan that more or less assured its success. My most vivid personal recollection is my opposition to the proposed title of the journal, Technology and Culture, on the grounds that engineers hate culture. I nominated Technologia and other titles that I can no longer recall, all of which Mel countered by discovering, during the night between the first and second days, that every one was already in use-by an Indian news magazine and a provincial journal in Australia, as I recall. Such objections were not pursued very far, out of our awareness that Mel was prepared to do all the work.
The first issue of Technology and Culture published a soberer and more bureaucratic account of the foundation of the journal, but I was not present at any of the committees mentioned. This is what I remember. All the “Advisory Council” really had to do seemed to be to get the journal started by sending something to publish. And we did.
Mel attached great importance to making the journal international. The second volume carried a piece on the history of technology in Russia, by A. Zvorikine of the Soviet Union, and in the seventh (1966) the formation of ICOHTEC was announced (with MK as a member of the founding committee-he told me that he planned to outwit the communists). In 1965 the masthead already announced that T&C was “The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology.” Mel also thought it important that the Society start under the presidency of an eminent scholar, and in this he succeeded. To a degree, the age of the first presidents proved problematic-an obituary to the first, William Fielding Osburn, appeared in the first issue of T&C, and that of the second, Abbott Payson Usher, in volume 6. But these unhappy portents were dispelled by Peter Drucker, the third to hold the office.
Time passed, and Mel showed the traditional reluctance of a parent to recognize that his brainchild had grown up. But he learned to accept this fact of life, and has now left the stage, a founder whose success depended on qualities that should not be as rare as they are: persistence, fairness, good will, and an absence of the egoistic weakness that brings down so many a talented person.
Robert P. Multhauf
Case Years
I never saw Mel Kranzberg in full operatic regalia. But in the old days, when the Metropolitan Opera Company travelled to Cleveland on a regular basis, he would volunteer as a super, carrying a spear in some grand production. I was a super myself in my college days, and I know the fun Mel would have had, lavishly costumed as a palace guard in Turandot or made up as a slave in Aïda. It is of course not as a supernumerary but as librettist, composer, stage manager, star performer and, most of all, impresario, that we in the Society for the History of Technology knew him.
The story of the founding of SHOT and of Technology and Culture is an oft-told tale, of which there are several plausible versions, differing slightly in detail. The story of his role in establishing what we continue to call the first graduate program in the history of technology in the United States is less well known, however, and worth telling in at least a short and impressionistic manner.
In justifying the establishment of Technology and Culture as not just another journal, Mel had tackled head-on the charge of “fragmentation!” His essay “At the Start,” in the first issue of the journal, began with that word and he immediately insisted that “the nature of our subject matter requires an ‘interlacing’ of disciplines rather than a further ‘fragmentation’ of knowledge.” It was precisely this same “interlacing” that characterized, and indeed made possible, the early graduate program at the then Case Institute of Technology. In the days before “science, technology, and society” was a commonly recognized rubric, that’s what the program defined.
It is important to remember that in 1956 Mel had been for four years teaching undergraduate science and engineering majors as a part of the Case Division of Humanities and Social Sciences. It consisted of a dozen faculty members, of various disciplines, who shared a total of seven courses, including a two-part ‘‘Background of American Democracy,” one called “Background of Current Affairs,” one on “20th Century America,” one on “Contemporary Latin America,” and finally a two-part course called simply “International Relations.” It was a map, I suppose, of what the profession thought a young American engineer might find useful in the Real World. The faculty tinkered with the curriculum: in 1958-59 “Western Civilization” was added as well as “American Men of Science,” taught by an English professor, Robert Welker. Then in the 1958-60 catalog it was announced that Melvin Kranzberg would teach an undergraduate course entitled “History of Science and Technology, I and II.” The 1960-62 catalog showed that the historian of chemistry Robert Schofield was sharing this course with Mel, and then in the catalog for 1961-63 appeared the momentous announcement: “Beginning in the fall of 1961 the Department will offer a graduate program in the History of Science and Technology, the first in the United States to concentrate on the new and growing discipline of the History of Technology as well as the History and Philosophy of Science. This program provides an essential foundation for the understanding of basic scientific concepts, their technological application, and their interrelationships with social institutions.”
University catalog descriptions are written for diverse audiences and with certain purposes in mind: they must attract students eventually, but first they must run a gauntlet of administrators and faculty committees. It is not possible, therefore, to know to what extent Mel actually believed in this description: the implication that technology is applied science and that it interacts with social institutions without being one itself would hardly pass muster a generation later, but was apparently effective enough to launch something new in the academic world.
Mel’s ability to create and maintain a thriving and innovative graduate program without any undergraduate base whatever was something of a minor miracle, though he did have going for him a national mood that made his work easier. We now suspect that the early 1960s represented the high point of a two-century love affair with technology, an Enlightenment project that saw human betterment in every advance in machinery. The elaboration of nuclear and space technologies especially seemed very close to the national mission. President John Kennedy promised a race to land an American on the moon, and Mel’s boss, Case President T. Keith Glennan, had been appointed the first administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (see Kranzberg’s memorial to Glennan in this issue-ed.). By evoking the excitement and prestige of science and technology in the post-Sputnik era, Mel was able to tap National Science Foundation grants to fund projects, National Defense Education Act (NDEA) funds to provide fellowships for graduate students, and generally hitch the wagon of history to the star of more glamorous disciplines.
When I joined the program at Case in 1963 it was well underway, but still powerfully marked by its environment. The head of the humanities division, our departmental chair in effect, was an art historian, my office-mate a young philosopher, and my first teaching responsibility was western civilization. Whereas six years before the entire division offered only seven courses, in 1962 the program in the history of science and technology alone offered twenty-two, ranging from “Primitive Technology” (given by an anthropologist) through the “Chemical Revolution,” given by Schofield, and the “History of Space,” taught by Mel. In all some sixteen faculty members from a number of different disciplines were contributing.
It was, as Mel had promised, an “interlacing” of disciplines. Like a very modern artist he had created something new out of found objects, as it were. An anthropology course here, a political science course there, a little English and some art history, and he had reconfigured his colleagues into a large and prosperous program, largely without the dreaded new hires which deans never like to authorize and fund. He firmly believed in “interlacing,” but it also proved to be the only way he could have made the program work.
And down the hall was Mel’s office-the very hub of a new and flourishing discipline. Books sent in for review lined the shelves along one wall, and a file cabinet held manuscripts submitted to Technology and Culture (which always threatened to be not enough to make up an entire next issue). Between the two, and the steady stream of correspondence and telephone calls which flowed into and out of the office, one had the feeling of knowing everything that was going on in this small world, and knowing it before anyone else. At his desk in the midst of all this sat Mel, planning SHOT meetings, editing the journal and monograph series, counselling students, begging friends for manuscripts, dreaming up projects (mostly for others to carry out), and above all praising everything anyone did. Not that he was always in his office. In the early 1960s he made regular trips to New York City to attend an ongoing seminar on issues of science and technology, and in 1968 he was a major force in the establishment of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), an organization dedicated to breaking down Cold War barriers that kept historians of technology in the eastern and western blocs from any close cooperation. His regular attendance at these international congresses (he was a vice president of ICOHTEC) added to the value and excitement of the program at Case.
Our two-volume Technology in Western Civilization provides an example of Mel’s mode of operation on both the domestic and international scenes. I can’t now remember how the project came up, but the military wanted a textbook that it could use for a correspondence course for army personnel. The project was administered through the University of Wisconsin and the books published by Oxford University Press. As a very junior faculty member, all this was quite beyond me, most especially the recruitment of an all-star roster of authors for something that Mel saw as an American (and much less encyclopedic) version of the then-new, multivolume British history of technology edited by Charles Singer and his colleagues. The work on the volume was divided in an efficient (and I now realize inevitable) manner: Mel largely chose the authors (I was able to insert several of my friends as well) and dragooned them into sending in manuscripts, which I then edited. No one else could have picked up the phone and recruited most of the leading experts in the field to contribute to a textbook. They would only have done it for someone they knew, respected, and liked.
Ironically, the program itself never became integrated into the undergraduate curriculum. When I arrived in 1963 undergraduate engineers took about 20 percent of their courses in the humanities and social sciences. In their freshman year they took two semesters of English composition, which were followed by an introduction to the humanities and an introduction to the social sciences. They also took four electives, and in their senior year a two-semester class called “The Contemporary World.” In other words, no work in what was arguably the country’s most comprehensive program in the history of science and technology was required. Some undergraduates did elect to take courses in the field, and a quarter century later some have stepped forward to testify to the help they received from Mel in understanding the technology around them. In fairness, it should be pointed out that, so far as I know, no college in the nation yet requires all its undergraduates to take courses which would help them understand technology.
Graduate students were another matter. Having created a program, Mel worked tirelessly to stock it with students. He couldn’t very well return unspent the money provided by the NDEA for fellowships, and the first cohorts of students were a varied lot. We took some chances on a few students in order to fill the ranks, but at the same time (a sign of the times, and hopefully a measure of how successful feminist efforts since have been) we debated the wisdom of admitting women who would “probably” wind up as wives and mothers, casting no reflected glory on the school which trained them. As it turned out, and very much in consonance with Mel’s expansive vision, the program was also something of an early venture into public history. Among those early students some went into museum work, one to work for an agency of the federal government, some did contract writing for NASA, and many, of course, became faculty members at colleges and universities. Mel, of course, followed all their careers and pushed them forward with his encouragement and endorsements.
With the merger of Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University in the late 1960s, the graduate program faced something of an administrative crisis. Although Case had only a division of humanities, Western Reserve had a full array of the traditional departments, and it was expected that the Case faculty would disperse to their new disciplinary homes. For possibly a variety of reasons, one of which was surely that if the program became interdepartmental as well as interdisciplinary “interlacing” would be that much more difficult, Mel and his colleagues argued that they should stay together, and a new department of interdisciplinary studies was created which until the mid-1980s housed both Mel’s program and American Studies, one of the premier programs at Western Reserve.
But nothing lasts forever. In 1972 Mel packed up SHOT and Technology and Culture and moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology. In large part this was the result of the generous temptations of Georgia Tech, where he became the Callaway Professor of the History of Technology. It was probably also because he was becoming something of a prophet without honor in Cleveland. The years following the merger were difficult at Case Western Reserve University, not least in financial terms, and support for faculty shrank. At the same time, the scientific and technical euphoria of the sixties was being replaced by the more realistic, sometimes even hostile attitudes of the seventies. The generous and unquestioned support of any activity that could claim the mantle of science and technology dried up, leaving a pioneer program if not on its heels, at least no longer a new and topically glamorous enterprise.
But Mel Kranzberg’s legacy on Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue now burns as brightly as ever, and the program he began has flourished anew with students he never taught but whom he always treated as his own. Bruce Sinclair, one of the earliest students in Mel’s program, recently called him the mother of all fathers, and indeed he was-to all of us.
Carroll Pursell
Internationalist
I first met Mel Kranzberg in Paris in August 1968, at the 12th International Congress for the History of Science and Technology. We had already been in correspondence, and he had been very supportive of my efforts to establish a Centre for the History of Technology at the Bristol College of Science and Technology, then being transformed into the University of Bath. He had also entrusted me with the task of reviewing for Technology and Culture the book which he had just edited with Carroll Pursell, Technology in Western Civilization. From the outset, therefore, he put into our relationship that element of generous encouragement which characterized all his friendships with historians of technology in many different countries.
That summer of 1968 was one of considerable sensitivity in international relationships. The Prague Spring had just been extinguished, and Paris still showed the scars of the recent student riots. The Congress had undergone some hasty reorganization to welcome dissidents from the new regime in Czechoslovakia, and Cold War hostilities were palpable. Nevertheless, these apparently unpromising circumstances provided the birthplace for a new effort in international understanding in the shape of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), a Scientific Section of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science, and through it affiliated to UNESCO. Kranzberg was a major architect of ICOHTEC, and he lent it his enthusiastic support for the remainder of his life.
Kranzberg recounted the origins of ICOHTEC to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Committee in volume sixteen of History of Technology (1994). He describes how, as founder and secretary of the newly-established Society for the History of Technology and editor of Technology and Culture, he set out to seek ‘‘more knowledge of what was being done in other countries in regard to the history of technology,” which led him to the 9th Congress of the International Union of the History of Science in Spain in 1959. Here he began to make contact with a small group of historians of technology, and these new friendships were reinforced at the 10th Congress, held in New York in 1962, and at the 11th, in Poland in 1965.
By this time the four chief progenitors of an organization which was to be dedicated specifically to the history of technology had come to a common mind about how to proceed, and it was their plan and constitution which was submitted to the Paris Congress in 1968. The four were Eugene Olszewski of Poland, Semyon V. Shukhardin of the Soviet Union, Maurice Daumas of France, and Mel Kranzberg of the United States. From the beginning, they determined to preserve the Cold War balance as far as possible by having two vice-presidents, one from the Soviet Union and one from the United States, with a “neutral” or Eastern representative as president, while administrative and financial flexibility made it desirable to have a Western representative as secretary-general/treasurer. So Olszewski became the first president and Daumas the secretary-general with Shukhardin and Kranzberg falling naturally into the roles of the two vice-presidents.
All of the four founders gave excellent service to ICOHTEC, but Shukhardin died in 1981 and Daumas, who had already retired as secretary-general, died soon after. Olszewski retired as president in 1974. Kranzberg, who continued as American vice-president until 1989, was then appointed as the first “Honorary President” of the organization. He was thus the longest serving of the founding officers of the Committee, and he always took his responsibilities very seriously. Of the twenty-two symposia held by ICOHTEC, he only missed one, and that was the 10th meeting held in 1980 in Bulgaria, where for the only time in the history of ICOHTEC visa formalities made it virtually impossible for members to attend from the West. On every other occasion, however, the meetings of ICOHTEC have been animated by the presence of Mel Kranz berg, who not only generated enormous goodwill by his lively and generous disposition, but also brought to bear his judicious wisdom and sense of fair play to all the deliberations of the Committee. He made a tremendous effort to be present at the 22nd Symposium, held in Bath in the summer of 1994, and contrived as always to be the life and soul of the meeting. He was sadly missed at Budapest, where the meeting was held in the summer of 1996.
The business of ICOHTEC has been conducted mainly through the series of international symposia it has held in most years since 1968. These have been of two types: those held in conjunction with the Congresses of the International Union which, for all its independence of organization and activity, the Committee has continued to regard as its parent body, and those held separately. The first meeting was held as part of the large Congress in Paris, but the second established the pattern of independent meetings, convening in 1970 at Pont-a-Mousson in France. Daumas managed to secure substantial support from the French government for this pioneering symposium, which allowed ICOHTEC to spend a week at an attractive conference centre with an excellent range of papers subsequently published as L‘aquisition des techniques par l,es pays non-initiateurs. Kranzberg led a strong team from the United States (Ferguson, Hindle, Susskind, Cameron, Rosenberg) and demonstrated his great talent for enlivening the proceedings of such international occasions.
The themes chosen for ICOHTEC symposia have not all been as specific as that which focussed attention at Pont-a-Mousson, and some have tended to be rather general-such as “Technology and Society” (1976), or “Technology, Humanism, and Peace” (1981). The most productive meetings have been more specific, such as that on “Scottish Engineers and Engineering” held jointly with the British Newcomen Society at Stirling, Scotland, in 1977; “Energie in der Geschichte,” at Lerbach, Germany, in 1984; and “Technological Training and Education-National Comparisons,” at Berkeley, California, in 1985. Kranzberg contributed to all these, and in particular to the Berkeley symposium, which he organized and subsequently edited for publication. Kranzberg summed up ICOHTEC’s achievement as “the collegial relationships and personal friendships” it fostered; they taught, he wrote, that “just as technology itself is a very human activity, so is the history of technology” a human activity-and an enjoyable one. There can be no doubt that it was his presence and his enthusiasm which sustained this remarkable conjunction across the sociopolitical divisions of the Cold War. Although the abatement of that particular ideological conflict has removed many of the tensions acknowledged in the structure of lCOHTEC, making necessary a reappraisal of its constitution and the status of its members, Kranzberg’s qualities of intellectual zest and spirited bonhomie have continued to animate the proceedings of the Committee.
Over the past quarter century there have been many positive developments in the history of technology. Museums have undergone a creative transformation in the display of technological artifacts, both in response to greater interest in aspects of industrial and transport history, and as a result of the growing expertise in the presentation of such material. National societies for the history of technology have grown up in many parts of the world. Many universities have adopted the history of technology as a viable “bridge” discipline between the sciences and the humanities. And above all, the history of technology has become a subject of intense international discourse ranging over the prerequisites of innovation, the growth of managerial organization, the priorities of environmental concerns, and the outreach of the human species to the planets and beyond. In all these aspects of the subject, Mel Kranz berg has made a substantial contribution by his lively presence and trenchant participation. In ICOHTEC, in particular, he found a forum and a fellowship to which his talents were most appropriate, and members in many widely different countries have good cause to remember with gratitude the help and encouragement which they have received from him. In the early years of the Committee, he helped Czech scholars seeking refuge to assimilate into the West; and more recently, when some prominent members of ICOHTEC lost status with the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, he tried strenuously to support their reintegration into society.
It must be regretted that Kranzberg gave too little attention to his own scholarly career, for although he was an excellent editor and collaborated successfully with colleagues on many publications, his own thoughts were expressed in editorial essays and conference papers and have not, as yet, been made available in a unified form. This is a pity, because he wrote about technology and society with a pithy topicality that made his style illuminating and even, on occasion, inspiring. I remember being pleasantly surprised in the course of giving a series of lectures in the People’s Republic of China when a student asked me with great seriousness what I thought of “Kranzberg’s First Law.” Happily, I was able to discourse to the satisfaction of the class on the stimulating, though somewhat gnomic, quality of the epigram: Technology is neither good nor bad—nor is it neutral.” The fact that Mel’s words could be taken up in this way was a sure indication of the international scope of his work.
Mel was deeply attached to the women in his life, on whom he relied greatly for emotional support. At Edinburgh (1977) and Freiburg (East Germany, 1978), Deaux made her impressive presence felt, as she invested in romantic tartan fabrics, highly unsuitable for wear in Atlanta, and wielded her bow successfully in an archery contest to become “Diana” the champion. Mel was shattered by her tragic death. Good fortune, however, had not abandoned him, and when he met and married Les in 1984 he achieved the calm domestic support and loving attention which enabled him to live to the full for a further happy decade. He came close to death at the ICOHTEC meeting in Vienna in 1991 when, in the course of an outing across the Hungarian border to the technical museum at Sopron, he was called upon to pilot a small steam train and inhaled a near-lethal dose of fumes. More than anything, on that occasion, it was the devoted attention of Les which brought him around, so that by the following day he was bubbling over with energy as usual, while his friends felt worn out. All his many friends in all parts of the world will thank Les for ensuring Mel’s happiness for so long, and share with her in her sad loss.
Mel Kranzberg was a great American scholar, academic, and historian of technology. Through ICOHTEC and his other international contacts he made a significant contribution to understanding and goodwill between nations. His ebullience, good humor, and wise counsel will be sadly missed by all those people who had come to depend on him, and to enjoy meeting him. He was, in short, a wonderful man, and it is a privilege to have known him.
Angus Buchanan
Georgia Tech Years
By the time Mel Kranzberg came to the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1972 to take up the post of Callaway Professor of the History of Technology he had already established himself as a sort of Godfather to the history of technology in the United States. Indeed, he brought with him from Cleveland both the secretaryship of the Society for the History of Technology and the editorial offices of Technology and Culture. In an institutional sense, he was the history of technology. But the Kranzberg years at Georgia Tech coincided with significant changes at the school and within SHOT. It was during this period that Mel gradually devolved his formal administrative positions with the society, relinquishing the secretary’s job to Carroll Pursell in 1974 and turning over the editorship of T&C to Bob Post in 1981. For SHOT, the change in leadership was a necessary step from adolescence to maturity. Although there were some separation pains at the time, I know that Mel understood SHOT’s need to develop new leadership among a younger generation if the field were to continue to grow.
The years from 1972 to 1995 at Georgia Tech were good to the discipline of history there, and to the social sciences more generally, as Mel’s prominence became a foundation upon which to establish greater credibility and campus presence for the Department of Social Sciences, a small, multidisciplinary unit composed of history, political science, philosophy, and sociology. History had been part of the undergraduate core requirements since the first Georgia Tech entering class in 1888, but the department’s role was historically and structurally one of a service unit within what was predominantly an engineering school. Although there were degree programs in architecture, the sciences, and management, the engineering college was (and still is) the dominant player on the campus, and when Mel arrived there were no undergraduate majors in the social sciences, nor graduate students. Jim Brittain—who had come to Georgia Tech in 1968 from the Case graduate program, and had played a key role in recruiting Kranzberg to Atlanta when the Callaway chair opened-had established upper division courses in the history of technology and the history of science, and Mel readily moved into teaching the three quarter sequence in the history of engineering that he later recast as “Technology in Western Civilization.”
Kranzberg immediately became a campus presence, identified by his workaholic habits and outgoing personality. He quickly became chief raconteur of a regular cross disciplinary group known as the “lunch bunch,” and he would chastise me and other colleagues for not socializing more with the engineers and the scientists. Some joked that the Callaway chair was really an aisle seat on Delta Airlines, as Mel maintained a daunting pace of travel to and from invited lectures and national committee meetings. He took great pleasure in his work with ICOHTEC, and exerted much effort on behalf of his colleagues abroad, particularly those within the Soviet bloc.
Mel’s arrival in Atlanta followed by one year that of Georgia Tech’s new president, Joseph Mayo Pettit. Pettit, an electrical engineer who had been dean of engineering at Stanford and a disciple of Frederick Terman, was already a member of SHOT and an acquaintance of Mel’s when he arrived on campus. Pettit’s support of the department’s first degree program, a master’s degree program in Technology and Science Policy begun in 1980, was crucial to its success, and up to his death in the fall of 1985 the president remained a strong supporter of the history of technology.
Kranzberg’s strong support of research programs within his department also meshed well with President Pettit’s campaign to upgrade the research profile of the Institute. Mel played an important role in obtaining a National Science Foundation grant in 1973 on “Technological Innovation,” a project that paired faculty from Social Sciences with engineering and management colleagues in a high profile effort on the campus. Mel had also been very active for many years in Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, before coming to Atlanta, and he continued his involvement with that group both nationally and locally. The Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi, originally the “Research Club,” had played an unusually important role in promoting research on the campus after World War II, and its members were movers and shakers. Mel had been a national Sigma Xi lecturer in the mid-1960s and he served as Bicentennial Lecturer in 1975–77. In 1979–80 his many Sigma Xi activities culminated in the national presidency of the organization. Kranz berg had already made a big impression on the engineering and science faculty through his active proselytizing for the history of technology; his presidency of Sigma Xi furthered both his own exposure and the credibility of his home unit.
When I joined the department in 1976, Mel brought me in as an editorial assistant to the journal on a trial basis. I was on the receiving end of what I would later observe in Mel’s dealings with so many others—a whirlwind pace coupled with concerned mentoring. Jim Brittain, who had served for a critical time as assistant editor of T&C when the journal arrived at Tech, was anxious to devote more time to several research projects and wanted relief from his journal obligations. I succeeded Jim as assistant editor, and as I gradually took on more responsibility the society promoted me to associate editor upon Mel’s recommendation. It was a wonderful if excruciatingly wild ride! Manuscript conferences and extensive Kranzberg memos demonstrated what a very skilled editor Mel really was, a gift that is sometimes overshadowed by his great organizational abilities. Discussions over the assigning of book reviews were like a succession of never-ending Ph.D. oral exams on the historiography of the field. Whether he had already decided in his mind on some issue or not he would continuously ask my advice. Perhaps the question “do you think that’s a good idea?” was merely Mel’s way of making me feel included, but its impact was substantive in building confidence.
My experiences were not unique, for Mel put countless hours into promoting the careers of others, particularly assistant professors. The stories are legion of his writing to the department chair, dean, and even president of the institutional affiliate of every young SHOT presenter telling them what a wonderful paper that individual had given ( even if, as Mel sometimes confided, the paper was a bit pedestrian). The important thing was that this person had devoted his or her time to important scholarship in the history of technology. The Georgia Tech analogue was the way that Mel promoted every member of his department on the campus. Even when he was very ill Mel continued to send letters to the dean, president’s office, or public relations department every time someone in the unit gave a paper, published an article, or was simply mentioned in print. Mel did this for me and everyone else for years.
Mel and I interacted in several other areas outside of T&C. We jointly presented a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Professions Seminar on the history of technology for three straight summers from 1978 to 1980. Only Mel Kranzberg would have had the chutzpah to make the argument in our original grant proposal that by including me as codirector the government would save money because “two months of summer support for Giebelhaus is still much cheaper than one month for Kranzberg.” Graduates of the summer seminar will remember fondly the images of Mel as pitcher in our softball games and as enthusiastic if somewhat limited practitioner of the “frug” at a local Atlanta watering hole.
We did not always agree. I twisted Mel’s arm to teach an undergraduate course in 19th century Europe in an attempt to regularize our offerings. Even though Mel had not taught in this area of his original specialty for many years, he reluctantly agreed to take on a course that in the end proved very successful. I resisted for years Mel’s efforts to reshape the department as an STS unit, with a dominant curricular emphasis on technology-related courses. Although we never agreed on this issue that became a major departmental tug-of-war in the mid-1980s, our differences never interfered with our personal relationship.
As he did with everything in his fast-paced life, Mel embraced Georgia Tech with unbounded enthusiasm. He loved to work into his many outside speeches the fact that he was “a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech and not even an engineer.” He was a football season-ticket holder who loved to go to home games, and he actively supported many campus activities including honor societies, theater presentations, and campus lecture series. Just as Mel had embraced the bully pulpit to preach the gospel of the history of technology, he became a champion of Georgia Tech in his many outside activities.
Mel’s Tech colleagues would affectionately comment on his voluminous correspondence with the observation that Mel was the only person we knew who answered his junk mail! But he faced a crisis when he retired. His Callaway chair and T&C editorship had carried with them a personal secretary to take his dictation. Tech provided him with a small office and general use of the staff clerical pool in retirement, but not someone to take dictation and type. He had been using a manual typewriter for years for his own memoranda, but had resisted the challenges of the word processor. When survival instinct forced him to make the transition, he embraced it with vigor, and hundreds of people would receive letters written by Mel on his Apple computer over the next seven years.
Mel remained a great communicator of the history of technology to the nonhistorical community, whether it be to an academic or a popular audience. He urged his colleagues to talk not just to themselves but to present papers at interdisciplinary and engineering society meetings. Sometimes he stepped on people’s toes. A typical Kranzberg public lecture on the New South, entitled “From Carpet Baggers to Cotton Mills,” annoyed some Georgia industrial leaders by pointing out the low-wage consequences of industrial labor policies in a right-to-work state. We all winced when Mel repeated an old piece of technological optimism in a talk about the automobile self-starter doing more for women’s liberation than any organized feminist movement in the 20th century. But we knew as well of his strong support of the organization Women in Technological History (WITH), and the personal encouragement he gave to many individual women working in the field. This was all part of the Mel package, and we loved him for it.
When it came time to step down from his jobs as SHOT secretary, in 1974, and editor-in-chief of Technology and Culture, in 1981, Mel had mixed emotions. I think that in many ways he welcomed giving up the secretarial burden. Although he would grumble about all of the things he had to do, he relished being close to the action; but he had been doing the job since 1959 and it was time for new blood to take over. Mel was certainly conscious of a potential “Kranzberg legacy,” and he understood that it could only be as positive as the institutions that he had helped to create. Thus he did everything that he could to insure that his followers succeeded. I know that Carroll Pursell, Alex Roland, and Bruce Seely benefited greatly from Mel’s counsel during their terms as Secretary, and I am sorry that Lindy Biggs will not have the same opportunity.
Turning over the journal editorship was a more painful matter. T&C had really been Mel’s baby, and he found it difficult to give up. But he worked extremely well with Bob Post during the editorial transition and I know that Mel became terribly pleased with the way that Bob successfully directed the fortunes of the journal during his tenure at the helm. Mel had opened his files to John Staudenmaier when John was researching the dissertation that evolved into Technology’s Storytellers, and he warmly welcomed John as Bob’s successor in the more recent change of editorship.
Upon Mel’s retirement in 1988, the Institute, with the support of then President John P. Crecine, established the Kranzberg Professorship in the History of Technology in his honor, and Bruce Sinclair came from the University of Toronto to become its first holder. But it was hard to tell that Mel was officially retired. Right up to the summer of 1995 Mel remained the only history faculty member who still came into the office every day including weekends. He continued his exhausting travel schedule, attending ICOHTEC conferences and other gatherings around the globe. While emeritus, he chaired a key committee in the period leading up to a major reorganization of Georgia Tech in 1990, which eventually resulted in the creation of the School of History, Technology, and Society, an undergraduate major in historical studies, and the present graduate program in the history of technology. Just three days after Mel’s death, on December 9, 1995, David Morton became the first recipient of a Ph.D. in the history of technology at Georgia Tech, a fitting tribute to Mel’s longtime promotion of the field at the Atlanta school.
SHOT remained dear to Mel’s heart, and the love and affection expressed to him during and after the 1995 Charlottesville meeting buoyed his spirits. On one of my visits in October, he was busily answering each and every person who had written him a message on the collected banquet programs that Bruce Sinclair and I brought back for him. On my last visit, shortly before the end when he was taking heavy doses of pain medication, he had fallen asleep with his glasses on, a pencil still in one hand and the New York Times crossword folded in the other. We did not awaken him; Mel needed the rest and for me the image will always be a most pleasant remembrance.
August W. Giebelhaus
Founder
In Reader’s Digest there used to be a feature-perhaps still is titled “My Most Unforgettable Character.” For me, the choice would be easy. I distinctly recall the first time I heard Mel Kranzberg’s name: it was when I was assigned to read his Heath pamphlet, 1848: A Turning Point? in a course on European political history. I was a senior at UCLA in 1958, and this would have been at almost exactly the same time that Mel was convening the group at Case Institute who endorsed incorporation of the Society for the History of Technology. That is, I was introduced to Mel Kranzberg the modern European historian just as he was himself making a decisive career move that might in retrospect be titled “1958: A Turning Point.” Although he had been thinking about this matter for several years, in essence what he was doing was responding to an observation of Lynn White’s not long before: “It has long seemed to me to be a matter of high comedy that the United States, probably the most technological nation in all history, has thus far exhibited so little interest in the contemplation of technology as a human activity which we must understand in great detail if we are to understand the central enigma of human culture.’’ Mel was leaving the historical field in which he had been formally trained for new and largely uncharted territory—”the contemplation of technology as a human activity”—not to revisit it until his latter days at Georgia Tech, as a favor to Gus Giebelhaus.
While Mel was energetically building a journal and putting wheels under SHOT, I was away from academia, not returning to graduate school until the latter half of the 1960s. There I was ultimately and inevitably introduced to the history of technology, to Technology and Culture, by John Burke. After that it was a certainty that I would now be confronting Mel Kranzberg face to face.
Although many, perhaps most, SHOT members can recall the first time they met Mel, I’m not absolutely certain about that. But the first image I have is of a man hurrying through a crowded lobby, obviously late for something important but with the air of someone who knew that nothing could begin before he got there. In one hand was an expandable briefcase expanded to its utmost, and under the other arm a bundle of manila envelopes, stapled manuscripts, and papers, the whole thing so bulky that he barely had control and a loose sheet would occasionally go swirling along in his wake. These would be retrieved by one or another member of an entourage churning along behind, who already had enough to do just to keep pace. Or so it all seemed, anyway. Is this really how it was? I’m not sure anymore, but it doesn’t really matter (just as it doesn’t really matter that SHOT may not owe its inception directly to a disheartening admonition from Henry Guerlac that “so-called ‘tinkerers’ were simply not worth considering”). What I know I did see was a man larger than life, and Mel Kranzberg remained a wondrous meld of larger than life and thoroughly human for all the many years that I knew him.
Talk about high energy! My image dates from 1969, from one of the first SHOT meetings at the National Museum of History and Technology, and also my first time inside the portals of that institution where I would later go to work and SHOT would often meet again. It was during Christmas recess ( this was in the days when SHOT used to convene every other year in conjunction with the American Historical Association). Where Mel was headed was to the council meeting, to report on the current affairs of both the society (as its secretary) and its journal (as its editor). And of course the meeting couldn’t possibly have started without him there.
Who else could have mattered? The president, perhaps? Well, not long before, SHOT’s newly inaugurated president, Robert P. Multhauf, had written Mel requesting “a little official stationery” and confessing “that I don’t really know what my duties are.” Not to worry, Mel responded. “I attend to all routine matters, as a secretary should, and you will be disturbed only when it comes to policy matters.” Continuing in this same vein, he told Multhauf that he would write various letters in his behalf. “Also,” he added, “you may not know it, but a number of routine letters go out somewhat as follows: ‘Dr. Robert P. Multhauf, President of the Society for the History of Technology, has asked me to write you to . . .’ “ With respect to “policy,” Mel indicated that it would be necessary to consult the executive council, as a matter of courtesy, “especially if some expenditure of funds is involved.’’ “Otherwise,” he concluded, “ things go along pretty smoothly.’’
The implication was clear. Mel was not patronizing his longtime friend, far from it, but he was telling him in so many words that he had the affairs of the society well in hand, all by himself. It was just as it had been a decade previously, as Multhauf notes in his reminiscence of SHOT’s inception: “Mel was prepared to do all the work.” Indeed, watching Kranzberg in action had so intrigued John Burke (who became one of my two major professors) that one year he sent the members of his graduate seminar on a mission: each was to investigate the origins of some professional society to see whether or not it was typical for one individual to “do all the work” at the outset, and to see how long that situation normally persisted before others realized that the organization had attained some momentum and started coveting control. In the case of SHOT it was about fifteen years (John Staudenmaier has already recounted what happened when the realization dawned on other members) but, in 1969, everyone was still quite content with the (non)division of labor that Mel had established.
In 1969—even though the society had only half the membership it has now, even though T&C was typically only about half as big as it is now—keeping everything in hand, along with fulfilling a fulltime teaching assignment in Cleveland, would have been a tall order for just about anyone. But with Mel Kranzberg, SHOT, T&C, and Case were just a starting point. A couple of years before, in concert with Carroll Pursell, he had completed Technology in Western Civilization, a formidable two volumes published by Oxford, and an even larger publication project (with Macmillan) on which he had worked for many years had sadly come a cropper. In 1968 he had been instrumental in the founding of ICOHTEC. He had been publishing articles here, there, and everywhere. He had been back and forth across the country as a Sigma Xi National Lecturer. He had been involved as consultant and writer with several encyclopedias, and with a National Academy of Sciences Technology Assessment Study Group. He had been chairing the NASA History Advisory Committee, and was about to become vice-chairman and then chair of the U.S. National Committee of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, an organization he had served in various capacities for many years. And, as he did routinely year after year, he had written hundreds upon hundreds of letters-three-, four-, five-, six-page letters-aimed at boosting SHOT and the professional fortunes of its members, as well as drumming up material for T&C and counseling its contributors. To mention these activities is really only scratching the surface-and, moreover, in 1969, at age fifty-two, Mel Kranzberg was just getting rolling.
As to “the work”—expanding in every direction far beyond its hub at Case—Mel was becoming more adept at delegating. Carroll Pursell describes, for example, the “efficient (and I now realize inevitable) manner” in which tasks were divided up with respect to Technology and Western Civilization. Mel kept not one but two secretaries fully occupied. Still he maintained an extraordinary schedule of his own, always seeking (as he himself put it) “to reach out, to convert people.” The fundamental job, as he saw it, was “to make sure that people—lots and lots of people—understand technology’s central relationship with technology and culture.”
Along the way, Mel acquired many, many devotees, and he imparted some of his own enthusiasm to countless others. In the preceding pages Bob Multhauf, Carroll Pursell, Angus Buchanan, and Gus Giebelhaus—dear friends of Mel’s, all-have recounted various epochs in which they were particularly close to him: SHOT’s founding era, the period during which the Case program flourished, the inception of ICOHTEC a decade after SHOT, and Mel’s years at Georgia Tech. John Staudenmaier has begun with an account of how he got to know Mel while researching the dissertation that eventually became Technology’s Storytellers, his analysis of SHOT’s first quarter century as reflected in the pages of its journal. But, as affecting and informative as each of these reminiscences is, in sum they still sketch only an episodic outline of Mel Kranzberg’s biography. There are major gaps. Fortunately, one has already been discerningly filled by Bruce Seely, in his October 1995 T&C article “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education.” Another, about Mel’s school days, his exploits in the Military Intelligence Service, his first professorships at Amherst and Stevens Institute, his crucial involvement with the American Society for Engineering Education, and his early years at Case, was covered nicely by Mel himself during a 1988 interview in Washington that was subsequently published in American Heritage of Invention and Technology.
But what’s still missing is a sense of the singularly broad range of his activities, even though each of his eulogists mention many of them. None of them notes that he lectured at dozens of universities in addition to the ones where he taught, or at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, or at the National Humanities Center, or for the United States Information Agency on nearly every continent; or that he was involved as an advisor or consultant with dozens of periodicals, book series, radio and television productions, institutes, endowments, congresses, and councils; or that he received numerous honors, awards, medals, prizes, and citations, or that he was active in at least fourteen professional societies from the Society for French Historical Studies to Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and the Royal Society of Arts; or that he published an infinitude of articles and essays in addition to books that were translated into Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. (His Japanese translator, Tatsuya Kobayashi, thought of Mel as “one of my best teachers and friends.”) Much of the rich detail of an extraordinarily rich and full career is inevitably missing from these brief memorials.
What’s not missing, fortunately, is a sense of the man’s supreme generosity-in one way or another everyone suggests how central it was to Mel’s character-and his wonderful humor. The latter could be illustrated a million times over, but I don’t think any more succinctly than in an exchange of correspondence with Multhauf in 1980. Multhauf had published Neptune’s Gift in 1978 and it had already been widely reviewed, but not yet in T&C. “Aren’t you ever going to review my salt book?” Multhauf finally queried Mel on April 7. “It would be a pity if I had to lead a protest march on Atlanta, by ex-Presidents of SHOT.” Mel responded with his usual alacrity a week later:
Dear Disgruntled Member,
Publication of the review of the salty Multhauf book was originally delayed because we turned down three reviews as not being favorable enough, inasmuch as the book was written by an ex-president of SHOT. We finally received a favorable review—at least we think it’s favorable, but it is written in German, so nobody can understand it. We are now in the process of having the review translated into English. If we learn that it is favorable enough, we will publish the English translation in Technology and Culture. If we discover that it is unfavorable, should we look for still another reviewer or should we publish it in the German translation (so nobody will know it is unfavorable). A perplexed editor needs your guidance in this matter.
Sincerely yours,
A year or so after Mel wrote this letter, he would be turning T&C over to a new editor after twenty-two years, while “smiling through his tears.” That new editor was me, and I needed Mel’s guidance plenty. He was absolutely unstinting, even though this was a very difficult time for him, something I can see more clearly now than I could then. While I might be stepping into his shoes, Mel promised that he would never say anything about “which direction” he thought I ought to go, and he never did. But when it came to sharing his knowledge and wisdom, his generosity was awesome. And those famous “booster” letters-perhaps Mel’s most signal trademark kept going out until very near the end-as late as the summer of l995 he was writing to Smithsonian Secretary Michael Heyman urging him to stand firm in support of curators who were getting pummeled by supercilious op-ed pundits.
When word came two months before the Charlottesville meeting that Mel and Les had canceled their hotel reservation, we suspected the worst, and at the meeting we learned from Gus and from Bruce Sinclair that it was only a matter of months, perhaps weeks. Gus sketches a touching picture of his last visit to Mel, early in December 1995, when he had fallen asleep with a crossword puzzle and pencil in hand. I last saw Mel in Lowell in 1994, but talked with him a few weeks before the end, before he was taking such heavy doses of pain medication. Robert Friedel was with me as a Fellow at the Dibner Institute and we decided to call him together. First we chatted for a moment with Les, then she put Mel on. He was absolutely his old self, inquiring eagerly about life in Cambridge, about how we were each doing in our Dibner research projects, about how we thought the Charlottesville meeting had gone (it was only the second SHOT meeting he had ever missed in thirty-five years). He was full of laughter and delight when describing the bundle of messages that Gus and Bruce had brought back to him from Virginia. And he was overcome with pride and emotion at having heard a few days before, from Ruth Cowan, about the creation of the Kranzberg Fund, the fund named in his honor for assisting graduate students with dissertation research. Mel always wore his heart on his sleeve, and about this he was no different. There was so much we could have talked about, but after about twenty minutes Robert and I knew it was time to say goodbye and I think we both understood that it was a final goodbye. Not long afterward, on a sad, snowy December day, Mel was buried in St. Louis.
“How,” John Staudenmaier has asked me, “can the long-term identity of SHOT be read in the life of Mel Kranzberg?” Mel had so many remarkable qualities: he was warm and open, generous and forgiving. He had a zest for life, for snappy repartee, for good fun. He was quick to laugh (who could forget Mel’s laugh?), but also quick to shed tears. Someone who merely saw him at the podium as an after-dinner speaker might say that his most obvious attribute was bluster. But actually I think it was modesty. In 1987 Mel wrote that he would be satisfied if it were remembered “that I endeavored to promote the history of technology by showing its importance to other fields and by helping scholars in our field receive recognition for their efforts to advance scholarship.” What a simple wish for someone who accomplished so much. Members of SHOT’s older generations have a tendency to congratulate one another about how warm and open, generous and forgiving our society is in its general tenor. Well, there are individuals who lack modesty, to be sure, and others a bit short on generosity and forgivingness. And yet, and yet, there is definitely something to the aphorism about an organization being the lengthened shadow of one person. At least there is in the case of SHOT. True, it requires a large number of us to take care of the business he once handled “pretty smoothly” on his own, but that’s partly because there is so much more worth doing, one of Mel’s legacies. And if we no longer reflect all of Mel’s most admirable qualities to quite the extent that he reflected them, they are still a big part of what we are like, and in the end that is his most important bequest to the society he founded and has now left to the rest of us to carry forward with his ideals in mind.
Robert C. Post
Originally published as John M. Staudenmaier S.J., Robert P. Multhauf, Carroll Pursell, R. Angus Buchanan, August W. Giebelhaus, and Robert C. Post. “In Memoriam: Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995).” Technology and Culture 37, no. 3 (1996): 403–27. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1996.0032.
Kranzberg’s personal papers are held at the Smithsonian American History Museum. Melvin Kranzberg Papers | Smithsonian Institution
Buchanan, R. Angus. “Melvin Kranzberg (1917—1995).” ICON 2 (1996): 9–13.
Kranzberg, Melvin, and Leo Marx, “Comment and Response on the Review of In Context.” Technology and Culture 33, no. 2 (1992): 406–7. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/888335.
Kranzberg, Melvin. “Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws.” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (1986): 544–60. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/889531.
Kranzberg, Melvin. “Let’s Not Get Wrought Up about It.” Technology and Culture 25, no. 4 (1984): 735–49. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/889944.
Kranzberg, Melvin. “Passing the Baton.” Technology and Culture 22, no. 4 (1981): 695–99. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/890935.
Kranzberg, Melvin. “Foreword.” Technology and Culture 14, no. 2 (1973): Part II, v–vi. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/893255.
Kranzberg, Melvin. “The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Centuryby Paul Mantoux (review).” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 81–82. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/894927.
Kranzberg, Melvin. “Commentary.” Technology and Culture 3, no. 4 (1962): 519–23. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/895108.
Melvin Kranzberg. “At the Start.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 1 (1959): 1–10. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/895232.
Van Gelder, Lawrence. “Melvin Kranzberg, 78, Historian of Technology.” Technology and Culture 37, no. 3 (1996): 401–2. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/887428/pdf.
The Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship is presented annually to a doctoral student engaged in the preparation of a dissertation on the history of technology, broadly defined. 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.