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Donald Cardwell was for forty years the leading British historian of technology. His first book, The Organisation of Science in England (London, 1957), led to his first teaching job as lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds; it was reprinted in the 1970s and remained a recommended text for the Open University for over a decade. His second book, Steam Power in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), led to his appointment as reader in the history of science and technology at the Manchester College of Science and Technology (soon to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, or UMIST), where he stayed until his retirement in 1984.
As the principal of UMIST, Vivian Bowden, guided his college toward international leadership, so Donald developed an international reputation. His books From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1973; published by the University of Iowa Press in 1989) and Technology, Science and History (London, 1972; published in the United States as Turning Points in Western Civilization) brought international recognition in the form of the Dexter Prize (1973) and the Leonardo Da Vinci Medal (1981). Donald is the only non-American scholar to have been awarded both these honors. In building an international reputation Donald did not neglect his adopted home of Manchester. In 1968 he organized a conference and edited a collection of essays on John Dalton and the progress of science to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great Manchester chemist. Six years later he edited another volume to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Manchester Mechanics Institution, the precursor to UMIST. But his most important contribution to Manchester was his championship of a science museum for the region. That idea took concrete form when one of Donald’s research assistants, Richard Hills, was appointed director of the locally funded North Western Museum of Science and Industry. Now, as the nationally funded Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and based around the world’s first passenger railway station, that fledgling institution has evolved into one of the great museums of the world.
Donald Cardwell had a great and mischievous sense of humor. He was also a wonderful mimic. The combination could be devastating. He had great difficulty remembering names, even those of his colleagues. And so he peopled UMIST with piggy men and devils who spoke with Welsh, Scottish, Cockney, and Scouse accents. Once introduced it was impossible to see UMIST without these characters, and it was the better place for that. As an excellent historian, Donald well appreciated the importance of storytelling. His sense of mischief tempted him to embellish those stories. In fact, it was almost a rule for Donald that any story worth telling required improving. The application of this rule enlivened the Honorary Fellowship ceremonies at UMIST, where for many years he was public orator. And, while he was scrupulously accurate in the detail of his published work, his conversational comments sometimes led the unwary astray. Even now there is a television producer searching for the printed version of the extension to the Schlieffen Plan (the First World War German plan for the invasion of Belgium and France) that was to make use of the Sturmpanzerstrassenbahnwagenkorps (the armored tramcar corps). Of course no such plan exists, but from Donald’s description it sounds all too real.
Donald’s childhood love of trains and planes and his need to understand how they worked led him initially to the study of physics. Following the award of a first-class honors degree in physics from Kings College, London, his practical interests and the demands of World War II led him to work on radar. After the war he returned to Ph.D. research at Kings. Far from allowing this to narrow his studies, he took full advantage of the variety of courses available throughout London. At a series of sociology seminars at the London School of Economics he met Olive Grace Pumphrey. They were married in 1953 and have two surviving children, Stephen and Diana.
In 1978 Donald was awarded the Dickinson Medal of the Newcomen Society (the British society for the history of technology). Soon after that he and his colleagues set up the North Western Branch of the society, and for much of his retirement, and at his death, he was chair of the branch. It was another six years before he retired from UMIST. On retirement Donald and Olive moved to a cottage in South Wales that he had repaired and rebuilt during many previous holidays. However, remoteness from the academic world did not suit them, and after a couple of years they moved back to Manchester. Reinvigorated by his return Donald rewrote Technology, Science and History as The Fontana History of Technology (London, 1994). At the same time he drew together the many strands of his thirty-year study of physics in Manchester, and in 1989 he published James Joule, a Biography (Manchester, 1989). Soon after moving to UMIST Donald joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. For many years he served the society, first as editor of their Memoirs and then as joint honorary secretary. In retirement he was elected to a term as president of the society.
One of Donald’s heroes was the nineteenth-century journalist Samuel Smiles. Smiles recognized that his world had been created by a band of hitherto unsung heroes, engineers. And in celebrating the lives of those engineers Smiles chose to emphasize their strength of character, their sense of duty, and their perseverance in the face of adversity. Donald himself was an exemplary Smilesean hero. He was also warm, generous, amusing, and engaging. He will be missed by many.
Joseph O. Marsh
Originally published as Joseph O. Marsh, “Donald Cardwell (1919–1998),” Technology and Culture 41, no. 1 (2000): 184–86. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2000.0024.
Cardwell, Donald. The Norton History of Technology. New York: Norton, 1995.
Cardwell, Donald From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989.
Cardwell, Donald “The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 23, no. 3 (1982): 443–48. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891188.
Cardwell, Donald. “Theory Loaded Terms.” Technology and Culture 20, no. 3 (1979): 688–89. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890567.
Cardwell, Donald. “Science and Technology: The Work of James Prescott Joule.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 4 (1976): 674–87. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891818.
Cardwell, Donald. Technology Science and History. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1972.
Cardwell, Donald. From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age. Ithaka: Cornell University Press, 1971.