Ted Wertime (1919–1982) was trained as a historian and spent most of his professional life as an official of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency. He had an uncanny knack for understanding technology and a deep appreciation of the way in which social and intellectual change often has its roots in some simple workshop discovery that develops into a transmittable, valued skill.
I first encountered Wertime in 1954 through the pages of his article “The Discovery of the Element Carbon.” In this he pointed out that the recognition that carbon was a chemical element in its own right and not simply a fuel or phlogiston carrier was nearly as important as the discovery of oxygen, which was regarded as the keystone of the 18thcentury Chemical Revolution. This was squarely in the history of science, but its background was in technology: The metallurgy of steel was central to his argument, and he went on to illuminate many other phases of it. His book The Coming of the Age of Steel, published in 1962, followed a detailed study of a vast number of primary sources in many languages and fields and was completely free from the usual national or geographic boundaries of the historian. Typical of much that followed, this was a highly original interweaving of themes from technical, scientific, social, and economic history.
Wertime was born on August 31, 1919, at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where his father was professor of music at Wilson College. He graduated in history from Haverford College in 1939, with later graduate work at American University and Johns Hopkins. In World War II he served with the U.S. Army and the OSS in China. In 1945 he was employed by the Department of State, working on China and Korea. He served as cultural attache in Iran (1960–63) and Greece (1969–72). On each assignment, he developed some proficiency in the language of the region and established close contacts with local leaders, and he came to have an intimate knowledge of the cultural and economic life and the geopolitics of East and West Asia. In the late 1950s he was second in command of the U.S. Information Agency’s entire research service, with responsibility for studies of the attitudes and opinions of peoples throughout the world. Through most of the 1960s he was editor of the “Voice of America” radio program, and he also promoted the publication of some fifty books dealing with intellectual and social aspects of American life for distribution abroad. On leaving the foreign service in 1975, he became a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution and concentrated on the exposition and promulgation of the rich view of history that his diverse experience had engendered.
Most of his reports on international politico-economic problems remain unpublished, but his writing on the history of technology was deeply influenced by his experience in the foreign service. He became fascinated with the traces of ancient techniques still to be seen in the markets in the Middle East.
His temperament and his professional assignments combined to make him an effective intellectual entrepreneur as well as a productive and innovative scholar. The field of the history of technology was greatly enriched by the conferences he promoted and especially by his taking small international teams of specialists to study the surviving technologies in Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Cyprus.
My view of history was profoundly affected by two journeys with Wertime into the heart of Iran for what he termed metallurgical reconnaissance. His knowledge of the geography, history, language, and customs of the country enabled him to map out a series of visits to places where there were still traces of the very earliest metallurgical techniques, some in the form of archaeological ruins, some in the movements of artisans at work, and others in the organization of industries in the process of transition. He was a superb leader for such excursions. We followed technical skills from the ancient mines in the mountains fringing the great deserts to the furnaces and tools in the shops of the smiths, potters, and dyers at work today. I saw many techniques that I knew about by reading and even by doing myself, but the real meaning of metallurgy as a human experience came home to me while talking to him and the craftsmen he sought out.
Just as earlier he had seen something about iron and carbon that had escaped notice by metallurgists and historians of chemistry, now he pointed out the interdependence of all the generally separate professions using fire—and it was he, not the metallurgist on the expedition, who saw in the discarded iron bear in the lead smelter at Anjileh the key to what is now generally regarded as the most plausible route to the discovery of the smelting of metallic iron. Because he understood the craftsmen and their language, he was always able to get them to display their own “secrets” and to tell us where other interesting old techniques were still being practiced. And, of course, such intellectual curiosity would have led nowhere if it had not been combined with skill in negotiating the labyrinths of government, both United States and foreign. At all levels, he was the ideal cultural attache.
Ted Wertime would have agreed with Joseph Glanville, who in 1650 wrote that “iron seemeth a simple metal but in its nature are many mysteries and men who bend to them their minds shall . . . gather therefrom much profit, not to themselves alone but to all mankind.” The last book published during his lifetime, The Coming of the Age of Iron, has the same siderurgical center as his first, though in the intervening eighteen years his viewpoint had broadened and had moved from history to archaeology. His introductory essay in this is a preview of the posthumous book Early Pyrotechnology: The Evolution of the First Fire-using Industries, edited by Ted and his son Steven F. Wertime.
In the last few decades a virtually new discipline, “materials-science and-engineering” has grown out of, and has partly replaced, the old, more narrowly specialized, studies of the physics and chemistry and technology of individual metallic, ceramic, and organic materials. Somewhat similarly, Ted’s historical studies, which began with metals, widened in scope as he emphasized the interdependence of all materials in history as well as in science. Both cement and glass-and the sources of energy necessary to process them-are essential parts of the story of human civilization as he tells it, and he coined the word “pyrotechnology” to encompass it all.
Ted Wertime died in Chambersburg on April 8, 1982, but the stimulating ideas that originated in his mind remain to influence not only historians of technology but anyone concerned with the development and change of human culture.
Cyril Stanley Smith
Originally published as Cyril Stanley Smith, “Theodore Allen Wertime (1919–1982),” Technology and Culture 25, no. 4 (1984): 907–10, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1984.a889987.
Wertime, Thodore A., and Steven F. Wertime, eds. Early Pyrotechnology: The Evolution of the First Fire-using Industries. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982.
Wertime, Theodore A. The Coming of the Age of Iron, edited with James D. Muhly. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Wertime, Theodore A., Alan D. Franklin, and Jacqueline S. Olin, eds. The Search for Ancient Tin. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978.
Wertime, Theodore A. “Culture and Continuity: A Commentary on Mazlish and Mumford.” Technology and Culture 9, no. 2 (1968): 203–12. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894300.
Wertime, Theodore A. “A New Look at Ancient Technology: The Smithsonian Program.” Technology and Culture 8, no. 4 (1967): 485–89. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894400.
Wertime, Theodore A. “Marshall Mcluhan and the Extensions of Man.” Technology and Culture 7, no. 4 (1966): 504–10. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894534.
Wertime, Theodore A. “Human Resources and Manpower Needs.” Technology and Culture 7, no. 1 (1966): 67-68. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/893854.
Wertime, Theodore A. “Asian Influences on European Metallurgy.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 3 (1964): 391–97. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894857.
Wertime, Theodore A. The Coming of the Age of Steel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Wertime, Theodore A. “The Origin of Agriculture and Technology: Aarhus, Denmark, November 21–25, 1978. I. Introductory Note: Whence Early Technology? East, West, or Nowhere?” Technology and Culture 22, no. 1 (1981): 122–24. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890801.