A historian of science and technology whose life and works are more than worthy of commemoration, Harold Dorn (1928–2011) was born in that incubator of intellectuals and Nobel Prize winners, Bronx, New York. Although cosmopolitan in outlook, Harold rarely strayed beyond a fifty-mile radius of his native borough. His parents had emigrated from Byelorussia, although he always claimed that his genes—to which he became inordinately attached when he and the world learned of such things—came from the steppes of Asia, a view not belied by his visage. His mother kept a kosher home for him and his sister, but his father, a union man and bookbinder by trade, toed a more liberal and secular line, and Harold was never bar mitzvahed. Assimilation was the order of the day, and Harold Dorn became an Americanized kid growing up in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, his baseball catcher’s mitt a kept and treasured possession from his youth.
Harold’s most distinguishing feature was his keen intelligence. He wasn’t just smart as academics tend to be, but preternaturally smart, so naturally he aced the entrance exam and went to Stuyvesant High School, commuting daily from the Bronx to Lower Manhattan. Then and now, Stuyvesant prides itself as an elite public school for science, mathematics, and technology, in those days particularly serving immigrant communities in the city, and it launched Harold on a path heralded by the school motto, Pro Scientia Atque Sapientia/For Knowledge and Wisdom. The next stop was City College, that hilltop beacon of a public university in Upper Manhattan catering to the best and brightest of the city’s masses, where, already in a nod toward his real career, Harold earned undergraduate degrees first in philosophy and then in the useful and gainful field of civil engineering.
He was too young to fight in World War II, yet as Harold came of age, the war and the intensity of those times marked him strongly. Although more than sympathetic toward the Soviet Union and the coming of world revolution, at City College in the late 1940s and early 1950s he floated ambivalently among various Marxist sects, displaying not only his critical intelligence in debate, but bringing an annoying, contrarian spirit to them, yet another of his defining characteristics.
Harold joined the air force to fulfill his military service, which was ironic because he didn’t fly until late in life. He married Miriam Selchen from the schtetl of Winnipeg, Manitoba, had two fine kids, lived in a nice public-housing apartment just south of 125th Street, and worked serially and listlessly as a designer and engineer in several engineering firms in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He was not happy, however, and to change his life, he enrolled at the Courant Institute and took an M.S. in mathematics while teaching engineering subjects, mathematics, and also the history of mathematics part-time at City College and then at NYU.
All the same, then in his thirties, his life wasn’t going anywhere, until one day in 1960 at the kiosk in the old subway station at Broadway and 116th Street, Harold spotted a number of Technology and Culture, and a new world opened for him: the academic study of science and technology in society. He resolved to go to graduate school and pursue an academic career centered on these fields. I. I. Rabi and Robert Merton had closed off the history of science and technology at Columbia where he first inquired. Derek Price made things difficult at Yale. Mel Kranzberg was delighted to take him at Case, but Cleveland was too far out of Harold’s customary orbit. He next turned to Princeton and Charles Gillispie, who welcomed him not as a lowly graduate student, but as a senior fellow on account of his experience and engineering expertise, which Gillispie admired.
Harold had little previous experience with the formal discipline of history, and his first steps at Princeton, bedeviled by Whiggism and a naive realism taken from his science and technical education, he later recalled with humor. But Gillispie and Thomas Kuhn (with whom he fought mightily) and Princeton taught him, and he added to his credentials with an M.S. in history of science and a Ph.D. in 1970. His dissertation on “The Art of Building and the Science of Mechanics” evidenced one hallmark of his scholarship: probing the historical connections between technology and science cum natural philosophy.
While finishing his Ph.D., Harold began teaching the history of science and technology at Stevens Institute of Technology, conveniently located in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, and so almost inadvertently he began his over-forty-year career at that institution as a faculty member and academic administrator. A new president liked Harold’s engineering and history of science backgrounds and in 1973 appointed him head of what was then the Humanities Department at Stevens. In several reprises Harold ruled that department—now the College of Arts and Letters—with a Stalinesque iron hand and velvet glove for two decades. On one hand, given his working-class background, he thought professors got full-time pay for part-time work, and he dismissed the airs and demands of a faculty who did only undergraduate teaching. On the other hand, he thought seriously about philosophy of education and fiercely defended the humanities and liberal arts, especially for engineers, seeking always to make his a “mini liberal arts college” inside what was then almost exclusively an engineering school, one devoted mostly to mechanical engineering at that. Even before entering Princeton, Harold published “The Place of the History of Science and Technology in Engineering Education” in 1962 in the Journal of Engineering Education, a historiographically remarkable piece that argued for science and technology studies as a two-way bridge across C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Later, in an interregnum period while bureaucratically exiled to a self-proclaimed Siberia, he wrote to the authorities at Stevens about his philosophy of humanities and liberal arts education for engineers. The 1994 memorandum deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
The primary responsibility of the Humanities Department is the humanities education of the undergraduates, the administration, and the [Stevens engineering] faculty. The undergraduate program is well in hand, but the faculty, and especially the administration, are in need of remedial assistance. There has always been the misconception at the Institute that the humanities program is based on what the engineers “need.” Thus, it has been common over the years for administrators to inform us that the students need _______: then follows a litany of psychology, writing, foreign languages, ethics, geography, or what not. We have to get the idea across that the purpose of humanities education is personal development not professional practice. In principle, if the engineers need something in order to be good engineers they should get it in their engineering curriculum. Any student who takes one of these extraneous courses in lieu of a real humanities course (like Shakespeare) will be a less literate engineer. It’s our job to educate the engineering profession to recognize this principle. The fact that they don’t at present is an indication that they have a very impoverished conception of literacy.
“The purpose of humanities education is personal development not professional practice” is a phrase that could be applied to Harold’s own trajectory. As a scholar and intellectual, Harold wrote a number of biographies of British engineers for Gillispie and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Newcomen, Smeaton, Wedgwood, Watt, and lesser folks), and he did his share of reviews and referee jobs over the years, including regularly for T&C, but he never felt pressured to publish. When he did, however, he had important things to say. “Hugh Lincoln Cooper and the First Détente,” appearing in T&C in 1979, was one of those pieces. Contacted by Cooper’s grandson, Harold gained access to the family papers that included a remarkable photograph of Cooper, the American engineer and entrepreneur, with Joseph Stalin at an outdoor luncheon in 1930. Harold published this picture, and taking up Harold’s argument, Thomas Parke Hughes reprinted it in his 1989 American Genesis. The beauty of Harold’s piece was to suggest, among other ambiguities of technology transfer, that the needs of technological systems transcend ideology and drive political change, be that for the Dnieprostroy hydroelectric dam in the Soviet Union or the Tennessee Valley Authority in capitalist America. This key point in Harold’s intellectual development, while reinforcing his materialism as primary for historical explanation, divorced him further from traditional Marxology. His article won the Abbott Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology in 1982. As a historian of technology, Harold enjoyed teasing out ambiguities involved in invention and innovation, and he did so in several other articles and reviews, notably in his study of the Kelly-Bessemer process, “Simultaneity, Serendipity, and Steel,” published in 2008.
Harold’s major contribution was undoubtedly The Geography of Science, published in 1991. He was led to write the book from his reading of Marxist theory and notably from following the ideological twists and turns evoked to deal with Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production.” Taking off from Karl Wittfogel’s heretical Oriental Despotism (1957) and the “hydraulic hypothesis” for the origin of civilization, Dorn argued that geographical and material factors decisively shaped the history of science. He identified two distinct scientific traditions unfolding in the history and geography of science. One reflected the demands of state-level governance that from the beginning of civilization required scientific and technical expertise; the other, disinterested natural philosophy, that almost inexplicably arose as intellectual play in Hellenic Greece. For Dorn, the “oriental,” hydraulic pattern that first arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia repeated itself in China, India, the Americas, and elsewhere, whereas in the Hellenistic, Near Eastern, Islamic, and Western European worlds science embodied a distinctive, bimodal blend of theoretical natural philosophy along with the practical needs of state-supported applied science. His concluding example of the astonishing link of science, practical expertise, and hydraulic engineering among the Mormons in arid Utah was a persuasive tour de force. This example he elaborated in a 2010 article, “Saints and Scientists,” published in the Journal of the Historical Society, emphasizing the point that “history without geography is an incomplete discipline.”Harold’s lifelong interest in theoretical Marxism culminated in the historiographically landmark, but overlooked, article “Science, Marx, and History: Are There Still Research Frontiers?” that appeared in Perspectives on Science in 2000.
Miriam Dorn, a professor of education, long ago suggested that Harold and I write a textbook, but it was Robert Brugger at the Johns Hopkins University Press who brought us together for what became our Science and Technology in World History (1999; 2nd ed. 2006). Stephen F. Mason’s A History of the Sciences, originally published in 1953, was still the best general survey available, but we wanted to avoid an encyclopedic treatment like Mason’s, and so, on Harold’s advice, we adopted two analytical cuts to sharpen our presentation: first, to exploit the argument from Geography of Science concerning science and civilization in global, comparative, and geographical perspective, and second, to focus on the twin histories of science and technology and especially their intersection in applied science. Although just a survey and not a rigorous scholarly work, the result, we hoped, would be of historiographical interest in giving new emphasis to technology and science in pre-history, as well as non-Western traditions, including test cases of Mayan civilization and the Anasazi Indians of the American Southwest. We hoped also to emphasize the independence, dignity, and historical import of technology and the crafts before the science-based technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and today’s cliché of technology as applied science.
Harold and his colleague at Princeton, Robert Mark, won an NEH grant to study science and architecture that allowed for the first of his several sailings to Europe aboard the QE2. (A later trip included a sobering visit to the Soviet Union.) This one resulted in a 1981 publication with Mark in Scientific American that treated the architecture of Christopher Wren and that undermined putative connections between science and praxis as part of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Harold’s materialism and inquisitiveness naturally led him to ponder human origins. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Neanderthals aside, we forget how vague our picture of human evolution was before the 1960s. Carleton Coon’s The Story of Man (1954) was about the best available. Then, of course, came Watson and Crick, the 1974 discovery of the australopithecine Lucy, and all else, as the real details of human evolution began to fall into place. Harold followed these developments closely. In this connection E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) was a revelation for Harold as for many of us, and Wilson’s work, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology rounded out Harold’s vision of the world.
But Harold’s connection to Wilson went beyond a philosophical accord. From his undergraduate days, Harold was passionate in defending free speech and “questionable opinions” against vigilantes and politically and ideologically inspired intimidation. In 1976 he wrote forcefully in the pages of Technology and Culture in support of the editor and a controversial review in T&C of John Baker’s contentious Race (1974). Later, when Wilson was attacked by “liberal fascists,” Harold sprang to his defense in the London Review of Books, and Wilson’s letter of thanks to Harold became another treasured possession. Harold knew Raul Hilberg, and much in the spirit of Hilberg’s seminal The Destruction of the European Jews (1961; 1985; 2003), Harold’s “toxic” article on the origins of the Holocaust, although documented and sober and occasionally well-commented on by referees and editors, sadly, but for Harold tellingly, never found an outlet.
Harold rose to full professor and was a devoted teacher of students who attended to his words. One or two in every class would always find inspiration, and his courses on World War II, the engineer in history, historical materialism, or “From Ape to Adam” always received solid reviews. Stevens awarded him an honorary degree in 1981; he became professor emeritus on his retirement in 2002, but he continued teaching up until just a few weeks before his death, a beloved, if irascible, part of our community. Back in the 1970s Harold founded the lecture series at Stevens, the Humanities Forum, and in later years Harold himself gave a talk each semester, wherein he presented subjects of interest to him, many dealing with World War II, that pushed the envelope of what his audience could tolerate: the Holocaust as initially directed not so much against Jews as against Communists, Allied bombing of Germany and Japan as war crimes, Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer, female sexuality as evolutionary junk, and like, provocative topics.
Harold and family moved to Hastings-on-Hudson and a suburban existence in Westchester County, twenty miles north, but a world away, from the Bronx. A Depression-era baby, he agonized over spending fifty cents for a box of paper clips, but he came to enjoy (and willingly pay for!) fine dining, which, unlike paper clips, was not part of the culture of his youth. His personality was vibrant and equanimous. He lingered over the New York Times every morning. He loved dogs and whales, chess and photography. He deeply mourned his wife Miriam after her death in 2005, but he then boldly took up air travel and, more significantly, connected with a new partner, Dr. Avril Brenig, in a loving relationship that too soon came to a close when cancer took him quickly. He leaves behind his son and daughter, and seven grandchildren, each of whom shares one quarter of his genes. Harold was proud of the fact that he bequeathed more than one-and-a-half times himself to the generation of his grandkids, although I always suspected such pride was a substitute for an overt expression of love toward his progeny. Harold Dorn was a serious and creative thinker and scholar, a hell of an editor, and a faithful friend.
James E. McClellan
Originally published as James E. McClellan III, “Harold Dorn, 1928–2011,” Technology and Culture 53, no. 3 (2012): 671–77, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2012.0102.
Dorn, Harold. “Technology as Destiny.” Technology and Culture 48, no. 3 (2007): 598–602. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2007.0106.
McClellan, James E., and Harold Dorn. Science and Technology In World History an Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Dorn, Harold. “The ‘Military Revolution’: Military History or History of Europe?” Technology and Culture 32, no. 3 (1991): 656–58. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1991.0088.
“The Abbott Payson Usher Prize.” Technology and Culture 24, no. 3 (1983): 466. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891389.
Dorn, Harold. “Hugh Lincoln Cooper and the First Détente.” Technology and Culture 20, no. 2 (1979): 322–47. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890494.
Dorn, Harold. “‘Questionable Opinions’ Defended.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 3 (1976): 523–25. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891763.
Dorn, Harold. “The Rejoinder.” Technology and Culture 9, no. 3 (1968): 427–29. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894259.
Dorn, Harold. “A Note on “Structural Antecedents of the I-Beam”.” Technology and Culture 9, no. 3 (1968): 415–18. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894257.