I first met Ann Johnson, fittingly, at a joint meeting of several professional societies to which she contributed. It was the 4S-HSS-PSA meeting in Milwaukee in 2002. Davis Baird had corralled me in the hotel lobby to talk about a conference on nanotechnology that he was organizing in South Carolina the next March. I’d never met Davis before; I was a graduate student, he was a department chair and soon to be a dean and endowed professor. Fortunately, he was accompanied by Ann, whose goofy grin and eager questions soon put me at ease and hinted that while I should take Davis seriously, I shouldn’t take him too seriously.
That was the Ann many of us first encountered. She was always ready to help out young scholars, and to make the academic life a bit more fun and human. She didn’t put much stock in academic rank or pedigree or discipline—since good ideas often come from unexpected places, she preferred to create an environment in which all kinds of people would feel comfortable contributing their expertise. I saw her put that philosophy into practice when we organized two conferences together (the second along with Patrick McCray). Her first principle of conference planning was: no jerks! She used saltier language, of course. Instead of “jerks,” she wanted a mix of men and women, young and old, acquaintances and strangers, inside the academy and outside it, close to her discipline and far from it—all having fun telling their stories.
As I got to know her through the nano studies community and then through the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), though, it became clear that playful Ann—always ready to crack a joke at her own expense, hoist a beer, complain about our profession’s graybeards—was not the whole story. She worked unbelievably hard, without ever making a show of working hard. Every time we met, the natural flow of conversation would reveal a half dozen or more projects she had going, over an incredible range of topics: anti-lock brakes; nanotechnology policy; R&D road-maps; computational modeling in chemistry, engineering, and nanotechnology; arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh; superconductivity; engineering in the early American republic; air pollution. She always had some new source of funding she’d acquired, and she always had some new collaborator she was working with: other historians of science and technology, of course, but also philosophers, non-S&T historians, physicists, engineers, education scholars, etc. She never hesitated to dive into a new area, learn enough to become an expert, and start contributing. I’m fairly confident that some practitioners of the fields she dove into were put off by her lack of respect for their customs. Others, though, recognized a truly original mind and were lucky to collaborate with her.
In fact, the history of technology was itself one of those fields that Ann leapt into from the outside. Although she did double-major in history and theater as an undergraduate at William and Mary, it was the theater path that she originally traveled down, not history. And she got pretty far down that path: after receiving an MFA from Yale’s School of Drama, she became an associate professor of theater technology at the University of Southern California. Then in 1995 she quit to become a graduate student again, this time in the History of Science program at Princeton. That fearlessness in starting something entirely new was a lesson she tried to pass on to me, and I suspect to many of the other scholars she mentored. Unfortunately, because of that fearlessness, her interests were so diverse that it would be impossible to sum up her scholarship in its entirety. All I can do here is point to some of her main contributions to the history of technology, in the hope that T&C’s peer journals will publish tributes that sketch her contributions to other fields.
One way to summarize Ann’s oeuvre would be as a sequence of big projects with published output. She wrote a philosophically informed history of anti-lock braking systems for her dissertation and first book. She wrote a few early and important articles and chapters on the recent history of practices and policies in nanotechnology. She co-edited, with Carol Harrison, a volume of Osiris on science, technology, and national identity, and co-edited with Jim Fleming a book on social constructions of air pollution. At the time of her death, she was working with a philosopher, Johannes Lenhard, on a book on computer simulation, as well as her own monograph on (proto) engineers as nation-builders in the early-nineteenth-century United States.
That list doesn’t really reflect the Ann I knew, though. A more authentic depiction of my own acquaintance with Ann’s work, and perhaps a more accurate indication of her importance to our field, would be to sketch a few of the Big Ideas that cut across most of her projects. So here goes:
Applied science: In a book review in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Ann asked “What if we wrote the history of science from the perspective of applied science?” Quite a few T&C readers may offer their own work as an answer to that question. And yet, it took Ann to ask it. She wanted to move past the old battles over whether engineering is an autonomous body of knowledge and technique or mere “applied science.” She took for granted that yes, engineers and engineering scientists have their own indigenous expertise, that they are as autonomous as any other profession. What was important today was to see if the arrow could be reversed. Maybe scientists are “merely” engineers who aren’t very good at designing artifacts? Possibly Ann wouldn’t have put it so pejoratively, but she did want us to try looking at the history of science from a vantage point that takes technology and engineering as primary. What happens, for instance, if you look at Ford Research not just as a place that was trying to make better cars, but as the source of the superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), a technology which has transformed scientific fields from condensed matter physics to epilepsy search?What if we acknowledged the early American republic’s empirical achievements in engineering, agriculture, and public health as scientific achievements, rather than lamenting nineteenth-century Americans’ disinterest in advancing theory in the disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology) that historians of science have traditionally focused on?
The ubiquitous computer, the pervasive environment: Ann was a student of Mike Mahoney, one of the founders of the history of computing. If you want to know what she valued professionally and personally, read her tribute to Mahoney in Hitting the Brakes. And yet at first glance, you didn’t see the influence of Mahoney or any other historian of computing in her work, except perhaps in her studies of simulation and modeling with Johannes Lenhard. At second glance, though, the computer was everywhere in her work, but surreptitiously, almost invisibly. That might make her Mahoney’s most faithful student. She wasn’t interested in researching the history of binary logic or computer architectures or software or integrated circuits—though she encouraged those of us who were interested, and she could show, in passing, that she was incredibly well-informed about such things. For her, the computer was of interest insofar as it contributed to historical change over time in some technology or in the “knowledge communities” around which her work revolved. Put a computer in a car and the possibility emerges for its relationship to the road, the atmosphere, the driver, and the law to change dramatically. Make a computer available to the knowledge communities of civil and mechanical engineers, and suddenly finite element analysis seems feasible; to chemists, suddenly quantum chemistry seems feasible. Similarly, at first glance one would never have called Ann an environmental historian. And yet at second glance, the environment—and engagement with environmental history—were everywhere in her work. She showed how environments of the past mattered for cars, nanoparticles, and engineers, in ways that reframed the questions and assumptions of environmental history just as sneakily as she reframed those of the history of computing.
Cultures of prediction: Many T&C readers are, of course, interested in the relationship between technology and the future, as put forward in science fiction, world’s fairs, or the speculations of Patrick McCray’s evocatively named “visioneers.” The future was also a thread running through Ann’s scholarship, but—as usual—in her own way. She was interested in knowledge communities where concrete events in the definable future are folded into institutions and practices in the present. The paradigmatic examples for her were technology roadmaps. For years she collected these curious documents, and argued that they were instruments of high modernist simplification—a means for governments to “see [science] like a state.” But she was also interested in other places where the future was made calculable and mundane—i.e., where the future has moved from the realm of traditional or charismatic authority to that of bureaucratic authority. Engineers in the early American republic, for instance, invented what they believed to be a distinctively American science of the strength of materials in order to know how American rock, metal, and mortar would behave year-by-year in American heat, cold, and humidity. Similarly, she and Johannes Lenhard argued that the widespread availability of cheap, fast computers has helped move science away from a culture of explanation and theory to a culture of prediction, modeling, and synthesis of new materials and structures.
Non-linear narratives: Most of us pay lip service to the notion that change over time is complex and impossible to reduce to a unidirectional flow. But Ann was more successful than most in pointing out how historical actors repeatedly double back, move the goalposts, or suddenly switch from one trajectory to another. That theme shines through in her work on anti-lock brakes, where she debunked car companies’ triumphalist narrative to show that the problem ABS supposedly solves (too-long braking distances) was always approached from many different directions, that the problem was continually “solved” in piecemeal fashion and then re-invented in a different guise, and that technological failures (apparent steps backward) contributed as much to the development of ABS as successes (apparent steps forward). Impatience with linearity was, I think, part of what motivated her fascination with roadmaps, where a simplistic vision of development from the past into the future is imposed on action in the present. It’s also what underlay her irritation with talk of “emerging technologies,” a concept that usually incorporates some linear vision of emergence. She would ask, slyly, whether the automobile is an “emerging technology.” If not, why not, since after all, the car is still the site of a great deal of innovation? Conversely, if the car is still “emerging,” what’s the analytic use of saying that a more than century-old technology hasn’t “emerged” yet? Crucially, she was as hard on pessimistic linear narratives as optimistic ones: as she and Jim Fleming put it in Toxic Airs, “the strong declensionist narrative of environmental historians is too simplistic for the complexities of toxic air.” Linear stories fail because historical actors—scientists and engineers as much as anyone—are thrown into a world that they must make the best of in the moment. That “best” might continue the path charted by predecessors, but is more likely to retool to focus on the complications those predecessors left behind. Her favorite example of this was the problem of Bangladesh’s water supply. In the ‘70s, international development agencies saw Bangladesh as a classic public health catastrophe due to waterborne infections, and encouraged the widespread drilling of tube-wells to supply clean water. Since the ‘90s, though, Bangladesh has faced a different catastrophe: arsenic leached from aquifers contaminating the drinking water in those same tubewells. Neither declensionist nor triumphalist narratives fit that case—or most others.
Engagement: One of the Big Ideas Ann put in writing was that many ideas are carried by practices, communities, and artifacts, and not by writing at all. And so I’ll finish with a Big Idea that was wrapped up in Ann’s practice and community membership as well as her writing: engagement. She was constantly at work building a better history of technology community. Among many other things, she was an associate editor of both Technology and Culture and Engineering Studies, a member of the SHOT executive council, and co-chair of the Prometheans SIG. But for Ann, working for the history of technology also meant working with people who think differently about technology. That was most apparent in her immersion in the philosophy of technology. She probably extended the tradition of historically sensitive philosophy of engineering associated with people like Walter Vincenti further than any of her contemporaries. Her appointment at South Carolina was in both the history and philosophy departments, she supervised almost as many Ph.D.s in philosophy as history, and she was as much a community-builder in the Society for the Philosophy of Technology as in SHOT. David Brock suggests that if she had a core professional identification, it was as a “historical epistemologist” interested in “things, and their people”—an interest that combined history and philosophy equally. But her bent toward engagement could also be seen in her work with engineers, physicists, environmental scientists, and nanotechnology educators, and in her enthusiastic support for historians of technology working in or with museums, such as Brock and Allison Marsh. She was a prodigious community-builder across the University of South Carolina and no doubt would have done the same at Cornell, where she was hired in 2015. At both schools, her energetic approach to teaching and her attention to and respect for her students, both graduate and undergraduate, brought her a devoted following. She also helped construct a number of international networks, particularly linking South Carolina with universities in Darmstadt and Bielefeld in Germany as well as the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (to which she left much of her personal library).
And somehow, she also managed a full personal life. She was superbly matched, wisecrack for wisecrack, by her husband Mark Stevens. She always had some story to show how fond she was of her sister, Katie Lewandowski. And while most parents are proud of their children, Ann wanted you to know—again, without making a show of it—that she was proud of her son Evan for who he was and what he had accomplished, and not just for being her son. The rest of us—her colleagues, students, and friends—owe them for how often we borrowed Ann away. A memorial is planned in South Carolina for 29 April 2017.
Cyrus C. M. Mody
Originally published as Cyrus C. M. Mody, “Ann Johnson, 28 May 1965 to 11 December 2016,” Technology and Culture 58, no. 2 (2017): 570–77. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2017.0049.
Johnson, Ann. “Environmental Regulation and Technological Development in the U.S. Auto Industry.” Report for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. 2016. equitablegrowth.org/report/environmental-regulation-technological-development-u-s-auto-industry/.
Johnson, Ann, and James Rodger Fleming, eds. Toxic Airs: Chemical and Environmental Histories of the Atmosphere. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
Johnson, Ann, and Johannes Lenhard. “Towards a Culture of Prediction.” In Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break, edited by Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder, and Gregor Schiemann, 189–200. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
Johnson, Ann. Hitting the Brakes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Johnson, Ann. “Material Experiments: Environment and Engineering Institutions in the Early American Republic.” In Harrison and Johnson, eds., “National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology,” 53–74.
Johnson, Ann. “From Boeing to Berkeley: Civil Engineers, the Cold War, and the Origins of Finite Element Analysis.” In Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science, edited by Norton M. Wise, 133–58. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Johnson, Ann, and Carol E. Harrison, eds. “National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology.” Special issue, Osiris 24 (2009).
Johnson, Ann. “Review of The Making of the Chemist: The Social History of Chemistry in Europe, 1789–1914.” Technology and Culture 41, no. 1 (2000): 136–138. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2000.0019.