Cyril Stanley Smith lent his scholarly style and his prestige to the Society for the History of Technology when they were sorely needed. His enthusiastic support of the society and his deep interest in the history of technology helped Melvin Kranzberg as he labored imaginatively to attract new members into the society and to persuade others to perform the various chores of society affairs. When Cyril accepted the presidency of the society in 1963, he took an active role in shaping policies that helped determine its intellectual and organizational character then and even today. Respectful of the professional historian, he nevertheless believed that engineers and scientists had special and important roles to play by writing the history of science and engineering. They could, he believed, provide authenticity and rigor in their essays and books by stressing intellectual clarity, the deep satisfaction to be gained in manipulating materials and energy, and the aesthetic fulfillment of finding beauty and pattern in the natural and the human made. In 1966 the members of the society recognized his contributions and his intellectual vision by naming him recipient of the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. From then until he died on August 25, 1992, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cyril continued to take an active interest and part in the intellectual development of the field and the society.
Cyril came to SHOT with a background different from the professional historians who founded the society. From 1927 to 1942 he worked as a research metallurgist at the American Brass Company, taking out some twenty patents and contributing numerous papers to technical organizations. At Los Alamos during World War II he led the team preparing the fissionable materials for the atomic bombs. For this he was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit. In 1946 he became the first director of the University of Chicago Institute for the Study of Metals. He left in 1961 to become Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a joint appointment in the Departments of Metallurgy and of Humanities until he retired as emeritus in 1969.
His approach to the history of technology differed from that taken by those of us trained as professional historians. When I was a professor in the Humanities Department at MIT from 1961 until 1965, Agatha Hughes and I were often guests of Alice Kimball Smith and Cyril in their Cambridge home. Through these occasions we became intimately acquainted with the Smiths’ academic style and interests. Alice had the Ph.D. from Yale University in history and was author of a distinguished work, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945—47, in which she described the efforts of leading scientists to inform politicians and the public about nuclear science and politics. Cyril learned much about the historian’s craft from Alice, but his approach to history was essentially that of a highly imaginative materials scientist. While Alice accepted the messy complexity of history, Cyril always looked for the aesthetically satisfying patterns that would bring clarifying order to his world of experience. He found these through his analyses of atomic and microscopically visible structures in solids; he could not rest until he found analogous patterns in the history of technology. In 1979 he wrote: “Almost all fields today are concerned in one way or another with hierarchical structure, and a theory, or perhaps more usefully a metaphor, common to all may emerge if the features of many are compared . . . patterns of communication are common to all, with aggregation leading to diversity or unity, and the clumps of unity themselves serving in turn as units in larger structures based upon more complex but still direct communication” (A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History, vii–viii). Cyril never ceased to be amazed that nature revealed itself to him in such patterns; I never ceased to be amazed that he believed that the history of complex technological change should reveal itself to me in analogous patterns.
I doubt if Cyril’s vision of change has or will markedly change the way history of technology is written, but his views on art and technology certainly have and will. The Smiths’ Cambridge home contains many fine Japanese prints as well as Eschers. Cyril collected exquisite early Oriental porcelain as well as Japanese ceremonial swords. Anyone who sees one of Cyril’s photographs of an aggregate of bubbles—that to him illustrated the structure of metals on an atomic scale—will immediately recognize the similarity of the Japanese prints and the photographs. His move from metallurgy to art is not difficult to follow.
Encouraged by Brooke Hindle, Cyril organized for the National Museum of History and Technology in 1978 a handsome exhibition of seventy-two objects including masterpieces of art and the workaday objects made by potters, metalsmiths, and other craftspeople “to illustrate his ideas about the nature of discovery and the prehistory of science” (From Art to Science, 6). Spurred by his belief that material artifacts represented congealed culture, he established in 1967 the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology at MIT. His enthusiasm reinforced the commitment of historians of technology whose primary sources were artifacts. His study of art, craft, and technology persuaded him to propound the engaging thesis that innovation and discovery arise from aesthetically motivated curiosity, not under the pressure of need. As a result of this belief, he found the institutional and economic explanations of invention sometimes used by me and other historians beside the point, but I found it extremely stimulating to argue with him about it.
Most conversations with Cyril were stimulating. Alice and he created an environment that sustained the intellectual and aesthetic exchanges that idealists have often imagined in faculty homes. Agatha Hughes and I can remember a memorable dinner prepared by the author of A Peril and a Hope for guests that included Nobel prizewinners, gifted artists, talented writers, prudent science policy makers, and, as usual, young faculty newcomers who were quickly persuaded that Cambridge was the center of the universe.
Not only will Cyril be remembered for helping other historians of technology to see more clearly the aesthetic richness of technology, but he will also have a lasting influence as a staunch defender of the intellectual history of technology and science as written and cultivated by engineers and scientists. His A History of Metallography: The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metals before 1890 won the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society. In addition, he edited or helped prepare for publication several of the outstanding sources on the history of metallurgy, including Reaumur’s Memoirs on Steel and Iron and Theophilus’s treatise On Divers Arts. Cyril donated his collection of approximately 2,500 books dealing with the science, technology, and history of materials to the Burndy Library.
An elegant, thoughtful, and imaginative man, he will be grievously missed by friends and colleagues, but we will be reminded of Cyril when we find historians of technology approaching their subject with intellectual rigor and aesthetic sensibility.
Thomas P. Hughes
Originally published as Thomas P. Hughes, “Cyril Stanley Smith (1903–1992),” Technology and Culture 34, no. 3 (1993): 716–19, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1993.0083.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. A Search For Structure: Selected Essays On Science, Art, and History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. “A Jeweler’s Shop (1533).” Technology and Culture 8, no. 2 (1967): 207–09. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894461.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. From Art to Science: Seventy-Two Objects Illustrating the Nature of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. Metallurgy as a Human Experience: An Essay On Man’s Relationship to His Materials in Science And Practice Throughout History. Metals Park: American Society for Metals, 1977.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. “Architectural Shapes of Hot-Rolled Iron, 1753.” Technology and Culture 13, no. 1 (1972): 59–65. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/893432.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. “Art, Technology, and Science: Notes on Their Historical Interaction.” Technology and Culture 11, no. 4 (1970): 493–549. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1970.a894042.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 8, no. 2 (1967): 310–13. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894483.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. Mining and Metallurgical Production, 1800–1880. Madison: The Regents of the University of Wisconsin, 1967.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. “Granulating Iron in Filarete’s Smelter.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 3 (1964): 386–90. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894856.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. “The Discovery of Carbon in Steel.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 2 (1964): 149–75. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894890.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. “The Interaction of Science and Practice in the History of Metallurgy.” Technology and Culture 2, no. 4 (1961): 357–67. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895434.
Smith, Cyril Stanley, and Anneliese Sisco. “Iron and Steel in 1621: The “Fidelle Ouverture de l’art de Serrurier” of Mathurin Jousse.” Technology and Culture 2, no. 2 (1961): 131–45. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895548.
Smith, Cyril Stanley. “Methods of Making Chain Mail (14th to 18th Centuries): A Metallographic Note.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 1 (1959): 60–67. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895238.