Like many members of SHOT, I was in Atlanta on April 14, 1994, attending the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. It was spring in Atlanta, which may seem a trite (and obvious) thing to report. But for those of us from up north, having been clobbered by one of the most relentless winters on record, the azaleas and magnolias of Atlanta were the first convincing sign that we were going to make it, that the snow was going to melt, that new beginnings were possible. So it was especially surreal and unbelievable when the phone message came from back home. Hugh Aitken was dead, the message went. Just like that—final, flat, matter-of-fact.
How could this be? He had just finished an article for Technology and Culture, as well as an essay for Antenna that outlined an entire book proposal. He was planning other essays on the history of radio and on the spectrum. He had just finished making a fresh batch of beer. He was looking ahead. The news just didn’t seem real. It still doesn’t.
To those of us who were his friends—and he had so many friends in the field—Hugh’s death is a terrible personal loss. We have also lost one of our major intellectual leaders and a gifted writer. Hugh Aitken was awarded the Dexter Prize twice, first in 1976 for Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio, and then in 1988 for The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932. (He probably also would have won it for Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915 if there had been a Dexter Prize in 1960.) In 1986, he received the highest honor our society awards, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. He was elected vice-president and president-elect of SHOT in 1991 but stepped down because of concerns about his wife’s health and about his own stamina. He donated the prize money from his second Dexter Prize back to the society to establish a travel fund for graduate students and junior scholars who might not be able to afford to attend the annual meetings without some assistance. He was, in sum, a major figure in the field, intellectually and financially generous to us individually and to SHOT as an organization.
Hugh Aitken was born in Deal, England, and raised in Aberdeen, Scodand. He attended the University of St. Andrews, but his studies were interrupted by World War II when he served as an airplane mechanic, and he then began cultivating a lifelong interest in mechanical and then electronic tinkering. (The word “tinkering” hardly seems to do justice to a man who could assemble his own ham radio station or build his own color television set and computer.) In 1947 St. Andrews awarded Hugh an M.A. with First Class Honours in economics and philosophy, and the next year he went to study economic history at the University of Toronto, where he worked with Harold Innes. He then moved to Cambridge and received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1951.
Two critically important things happened in Cambridge: he met his wife, Janice Hunter, and he became centrally involved with the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard, which played a key role in revitalizing economic history in the United States. Hugh became a key figure in the center, where Arthur Cole, Joseph Schumpeter, Tom Cochran, Alfred Chandler, Leland Jenks, Harold Passer, and others began moving the study of entrepreneurship away from the deductive theories of neoclassical economics and into more empirically based work that drew from sociology, history, and social psychology. In 1965, Hugh edited Explorations in Enterprise, a classic collection which summarized the pathbreaking work of the center. In 1955, Hugh joined the economics faculty at the University of California, Riverside, and was hired away in 1965 by Amherst College, where he was George D. Olds Professor of Economics and American Studies. He remained active in college affairs until his death.
While Hugh’s early writing focused on economic history, U.S. and Canadian, and on the study of entrepreneurship, his mechanical aptitude began to influence the direction of his scholarship. Economics and economic history paid lip service to the importance of technology and the study of organizations, yet invariably these factors wound up in those black boxes of which economists are so fond. This approach would simply not do for someone who was a keen observer of organizational dynamics and who was becoming increasingly fascinated by the study of technical and scientific creativity. The basic question that began to drive his work was, “How do new things happen?”
This deceptively simple-sounding question is, as we all know, extremely difficult to answer, and it is made even more challenging if the historical record is spotty or incomplete. Hugh’s efforts to help us all understand better the process by which change—and newness—occur were marked by several distinctive characteristics. He had that rare ability to get inside and understand the actors in his stories, to empathize with their concerns, to grasp what drove them, and thus to bring them to life. Hugh’s special gift, in the words of Merritt Roe Smith, was “portraying the complex technical and human relationships” at work in technological change with “clarity, insight and originality . . . Aitken understands,” wrote Smith in his preface to the 1985 edition of Scientific Management in Action, “that technology and management are inseparable and that one can not study one without studying the other.” Hugh was also a highly sophisticated and skeptical reader of the historical record, testing his evidence for the ring of truth and exposing what he considered to be counterfeit. And he was dedicated to interdisciplinary work, to the interweaving of history, economics, technology studies, sociology, and management studies.
In considering how new things happened, Hugh, in his two Dexter Prize-winning books, analyzed the flows of information among various subcultures of American society. He found that a certain kind of individual—what he called a “translator”—played a critical role in encoding and translating information between two or three very differently oriented spheres of knowledge and action. These translators, who have the ability to see commonality of interest where others may see only separateness (or even animosity), operated at organizational interstices and were “bilingual” in that they spoke the language of each different subculture. Thus, Guglielmo Marconi was successful because he translated back and forth between the realms of engineering, science, business, and government to take wireless telegraphy out of the lab and into the marketplace. In many important ways, Hugh was such a translator himself, showing those in business history the importance of considering the role of technical change while demonstrating to us in the history of technology just how felicitously business history, the study of entrepreneurship, intellectual history, and the history of technology could be combined.
After the publication of The Continuous Wave, Hugh promised, in a memorable talk at the 1985 SHOT meeting, that “there will be no more large, heavy, expensive books; that would be too much to inflict upon the profession. But the occasional small essay—that may still come.” The last essay, published in the newsletter of the Mercurians, Antenna, just before he died, was no essay at all. It was, in Hugh’s highly efficient and elegant style, a complete research proposal for a book—and it would be a large, heavy book—on the history of the spectrum. “Human beings used the spectrum—light and radiant heat—before they knew the spectrum existed,” he wrote. “This means that there is a story to be told: a story of how we learned to think about the physical world in a new way by inventing the concept of the electromagnetic spectrum. And, by having invented that idea, how we used it to explore areas of the spectrum not previously known, and how we made those spectral domains serve human ends.”
He saw the book being composed of three parts. The first section, “Discovering the Spectrum,” would focus on the scientific history of the spectrum, on the accrued ideas, insights, and discoveries that revealed that light, sound, and radio waves were not separate phenomena but united along a continuum. He chose to use a topographic metaphor to show how discoveries of isolated “landfalls” eventually led to realization that there was an “entire continent.” The second section, “Exploring the Spectrum,” would cover the technological innovations that allowed exploration of the spectrum and eventually led to its more efficient uses. The final section, “Allocating the Spectrum,” would explore the interactions of technological change, ideological biases, and spectrum regulation as people sought, over the years, to deal with spectrum scarcity. It is a classic Aitken project, and he felt it to be possibly his most ambitious yet, which is why he found it daunting and why he wanted to share the idea with others in case he could not finish it. It is a loss indeed that he was barely able to start it. But it is an enormous gift that he bequeathed his ideas—and his very outline—to future generations of scholars.
Hugh Aitken was regarded with enormous fondness by members of SHOT. He made it quite clear that he did not suffer fools, but he was also one of the most generous and supportive of SHOT’s senior members, especially when it came to encouraging and cultivating graduate students. Hugh’s hallmark—in fact, his mission—was to seek out, and serve as a mentor to, younger people in the field. Many of us (who really were young once) cannot imagine how we would have completed our manuscripts or gotten through various professional crises without Hugh’s advice, criticism, and care. (I still have the five-page, single-spaced letters he would write to me about a thirty-page dissertation chapter. How I dreaded getting those letters, and how they transformed each and every chapter.) And like many of SHOT’s other senior scholars who have made the society such a welcome place for women, Hugh treated female scholars with the same rigor and compassion as he would any man, and encouraged women to be the very best they could. More recently, he was corresponding with graduate students on E-mail, in his totally self-effacing way, so that some of them with whom he exchanged criticisms, bibliographies, and ideas had no idea they were talking with such an eminent scholar.
Hugh Aitken was to me a mentor, a dear friend, and a neighbor. Being able to walk around the corner, drop in on him and Janice, and share a drink and conversation was one of life’s pleasures that my husband and I will miss terribly. But his legacy lives on with all of us who knew and admired him. He insisted that writing history was as much a literary project as it was an archival, fact-finding one, and he was fond of citing
Santayana’s advice, “Run it through the typewriter one more time.” He never took historical sources at face value but always interrogated them, asking what they concealed as well as what they revealed. He demanded that historical writing never be frivolous, glib, or superficial. And he showed, through his writing, teaching, and his personal example, that an intellectual life without a generosity of spirit was an empty pursuit, that compassion and altruism do not just make for good friends and great teachers—they make for superior history.
Susan J. Douglas
Originally published as Susan J. Douglas, “Hugh G. J. Aitken (1922–1994),” Technology and Culture 35, no. 4 (1994): 906-911. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1994.0034.
Aitken, Hugh G. J. “Allocating the Spectrum: The Origins of Radio Regulation.” Technology and Culture 35, no. 4 (1994): 686-716. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1994.0004.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 28, no. 3 (1987): 615-618. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889352.
Aitken, Hugh G. J. The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Aitken, Hugh G. J. Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 1976.
Aitken, Hugh G. J. Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908–1915. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.