On March 18, 1984, Professor Maurice Daumas, one of the founders, indeed, the founder, in France, of new disciplines—the history of technology and industrial archaeology—died suddenly in Paris. His work was not confined to these disciplines but embraced many others: the history of science, technical museology, and scientific/technical journalism.
He was born in Béziers on December 19, 1910, into a family of local teachers who were to instil in him a taste for intellectual scholarship and culture. He went to secondary school at the lycée of Montpellier and continued his studies in Paris at the Faculté des Sciences. He graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1936.
From 1935 to 1942, he worked as a chemist at the Paris Municipal Laboratory and later at a factory in Corbeil. At the beginning of 1944, he changed his sphere of activity and went to work at the Fondation Française pour l’Etude des Problèmes Humains, known as the Alexis Carrel Foundation, afterward moving to the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques.
At the beginning of his professional career, Maurice Daumas took an active part in the trade union movement (in liaison with the Front Populaire) and produced his first articles as a scientific journalist—articles which are still to be found in contemporary journals. His talent as organizer resulted in his becoming one of the founders of the well-known “Que sais-je?” collection of popular science books published by the Presses Universitaires de France. One of his first books, Les Matières plastiques, was published in this collection in 1941.
By this time, his interest in history had begun to surface, with biographies of Lavoisier (1941) and Arago (1943). He soon decided to become a professional historian and was fortunate to work under the guidance of the famous philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whose influence is evident in Daumas’s L’Acte chimique: essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie chimique (Brussels, 1945). Bachelard was also responsible for directing his doctoral thesis, published in 1953 and entitled Les Instruments scientifiques aux 17 ème et 18 ème siècles. The thesis clearly bears the stamp of Daumas’s interest in the history of science and technology.
In 1947, when Daumas was appointed assistant curator of the prestigious CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers) Technical Museum, the oldest technical museum in the world, his interests began to coincide with his professional career. From that time on, his career was to be associated with the conservatoire.
Until his appointment in 1960 as chief curator (with the title of head of the technical museology department), he devoted a large part of his time—in addition to his work at the museum—to research into the history of science. In 1955 he published Lavoisier, théoricien et expérimentateur, a fundamental study based on firsthand sources and stressing the importance of Lavoisier’s work as a pioneer of modern chemistry. In 1957 Daumas published, at Gallimard’s, his important Histoire des sciences in the Pléiade encyclopedia directed by his friend, the famous Raymond Queneau. He had also been one of the founders in 1947 of the French History of Science Group, renamed in 1978 at the instigation of Pierre Gostabel the Société Française d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques. The founding of the “French Group” was backed by the International Academy of the History of Science and in particular by its permanent secretary of the time, the Rumanian mathematician and political refugee Petre Sergescu.
Maurice Daumas’s work at the GNAM Technical Museum—not always given due credit—involved the refurbishing of certain galleries and the organization of several temporary exhibitions, including: “Clockwork Masterpieces,” 1949; “Clocks and Automata,” 1954; “Diesel and the Conquest of Energy,” 1959; “The Century of the Motorcar,” 1961; “Technology at the Time of the 18th-Century French Encyclopedia,” 1963; and “History and Prestige of l’Académie des Sciences,” 1966. He also organized more efficient archives on the objects in the museum’s collection and on the history of technology in general. Indeed, thanks to his appointment as chief curator, he was able, in 1960, to set up at the conservatoire, with the aid of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Centre de Documentation d’Histoire des Techniques (CDHT), which was responsible for publishing the journal Documents pour l’histoire des techniques. In 1975, he published in this collection Etudes pour un traitement automatique des sources en histoire des techniques, which contains the results of several years’ work (1969–75) on the computerization of the history of technology archives.
On the subject of museum activities, the organization of exhibitions (for institutions other than the CNAM) such as “French Patents 1791–1902: A Century of Progress in Technology,” and his important work with the International Council of Museums, where he served on the Executive Committee as treasurer from 1958 to 1971 should also be mentioned.
It was at this time that he began to specialize in the history of technology, a discipline to which he sought to give an intellectual identity. For Daumas, the history of technology was first and foremost a technical history, as understood by the “internalist” school of which he was a representative—a position hardly surprising in one trained initially as a specialist in the history of science, a discipline well established in France since the time of Paul Tannery. But he was aware of the limits of his approach and, indeed, was the first to stress them, at the same time setting out his reasons for having “chosen to study the technical history of technology, leaving aside nontechnical factors, in spite of the fact that these were no doubt responsible in part for the development of technology.” A desire to circumscribe a new area of research and to establish appropriate techniques for investigation were certainly important factors which prompted him to adopt this approach.
Between 1962 and 1979 he was responsible for the publication by the Presses Universitaires de France of the monumental five-volume Histoire générale des techniques, bearing the following significant subtitles: Les Origines de la civilisation technique, Premières étapes du machinisme, L’Expansion du machinisme, and Les Techniques de la civilisation industrielle.
In his work, Maurice Daumas uses the concept of “technical complexes” to underline the interdependence which, he says, arises out of internal factors which command the processes of evolution; this evolution is the result of a continuous search for equilibrium.” The dynamic impulse is given to this evolution by the presence of “tension networks” and “bottlenecks,” themselves caused by the “interaction of different technologies” so that equilibrium is never in fact achieved permanently. Although he does not deny the importance of economic, social, or political factors, Daumas confines himself to internal factors in his analysis of technological progress. He also challenges the concept of technological revolution, claiming that this is merely an accelerated version of normal technological evolution.
In 1967, Maurice Daumas started teaching the history of technology, first as associate professor at Nancy University and then as professor at the conservatoire, where the first history of modern and contemporary technologies chair in France was set up for him in 1969. He remained in this post until he retired in 1976.
In 1968, he was cofounder, together with Melvin Kranzberg (U.S.A.), S. V. Shukhardin (USSR), and Eugeniusz Olszewski (Poland), of ICOHTEC (International Committee for the History of Technology) and was its first secretary-general; indeed, he was responsible for organizing the first ICOHTEC conference, held in Pont-à-Mousson (France) in 1970.
Aided by Jacques Payen, his successor as director of the CDHT, Daumas oversaw various research projects: Evolution de la géogrphie industrielle de Paris et sa proche banlieue au 19 ème siècle (1976), Analyse histroique de l’évolution des transports en commun dans la region Parisienne de 1855 à 1939 (1977), and Infrastructures de transport et développement urbain: le cas de petites villes “ enclavées” 1842–1975 (1980). In this same period, he launched industrial archaeology in France, aided once more by Jacques Payen. Daumas began by having the CDHT publish a thesis on Les Bâtiments à usage industriel en France (1978) and then publishing his own book, L’Archéologie in industrielle en France (1980). Both books deal mainly with 18th- and 19th-century architecture, which Daumas saw as just as important for the period as feudal castles and cathedrals were for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
His talent for organizing was apparent in the held of industrial archaeology, too. Under the auspices of the Historic Works Committee, he was founder of the publication Archéologie industrielle en France (1976), and one of the instigators of the national seminars on industrial archaeology (1979). (Both activities are pursued by the Comité d’information et de Liaison pour l’Archéologie Industrielle [CILAC] chaired by Yves Malecot.) From 1978 to 1980 Daumas also taught an introductory course on industrial archaeology at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Maurice Daumas’s contribution to scholarship and learning earned recognition both at home and abroad. In France, he won the Paul Pelliot Prize in 1953, and in 1957 the Freycinet Prize awarded by l’Académie des Sciences. Abroad, he was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal by the Society for the History of Technology, of which he was a corresponding member.
Daumas spent the last years of his life working on texts giving a global view of the history of technology: Les Grandes étapes du progres technique in the “Que sais-je?” collection, Presses Universitaires de France, 1981, and Le Cheval de César, due to be published soon. He also worked on the formerly unused family archives of Marc Séguin, archives that should throw an interesting light on French industrial development in the first half of the 19th century.
Maurice Daumas was no ivory-tower academic but a responsible citizen. He was greatly interested in the education and training of young people and was the organizer of the Young Technicians’ Club at the CNAM Museum and a member of the editorial board of Vers l’éducation nouvelle, a publication on summer camps for young people.
His attitude was that of a humanist tinged with the Socialist ideals of his time, a man fiercely opposed to totalitarian movements, whether Fascist or Communist.
I shall always remember his warm and helpful welcome on my arrival in France. It is thanks to him that I am working today in the field of the history of technology: he guided my Ph.D. thesis, arranged to have my first works published, and gave me the opportunity of collaborating on the Histoire générale des techniques, his masterwork.
Alexandre Herlea
Originally published as Alexandre Herlea, “Maurice Daumas (1910–1984),” Technology and Culture 26, no. 3 (1985): 698–702. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1985.a889760.
Daumas, Maurice. Etudes pour un traitement automatique des sources en histoire des techniques. 1975.
Daumas, Maurice. A History of Technology and Invention: Progress Through the Ages. Vol. 3. The Expansion of Mechanization, 1725–1860. New York: Crown, 1969.
Daumas, Maurice. A History of Technology and Invention: Progress Through the Ages. Vol. 2. The First Stages of Mechanization, 1450–1725. New York: Crown, 1969.
Daumas, Maurice. A History of Technology and Invention: Progress Through the Ages. Vol. 1. The Origins of Technological Civilization to 1450. New York: Crown, 1969. [Translation of: Histoire générale des techniques.]
Forbes, R. J. “Review of Histoire générale des techniques ed. by Maurice Daumas.” Technology and Culture 4, no. 3 (1963): 336–37. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894977.
Daumas, Maurice. Histoire générale des techniques. Vol 2. Les premières étapes du machinisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962.
Daumas, Maurice. Histoire générale des techniques. Vol 1. Les origines de la civillisation technique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962.
Daumas, Maurice. “L’Histoire Generale des Techniques.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 4 (1960): 415-418. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895623.