We’re still looking for a photograph of Dr. Vincenti.
Walter G. Vincenti (1917–2019) was one of five children born to Italian immigrants in Baltimore. He achieved great success and attained honors in two distinctive careers: engineering and the history of technology.
His first career was aeronautical engineering, where he excelled at problem solving and invention. After his family moved to Pasadena when he was a child, he grew up in the shadow of Caltech and its scientific and engineering fame. In 1927, when Charles Lindbergh made his epochal transatlantic flight, Vincenti—then ten years of age—like so many others became “airminded.” For a boy, this meant building and flying model airplanes. (“Today, pilots of models, Tomorrow model pilots,” went the motto of the large model airplane club sponsored by publisher William Randolf Hearst and promoted through his newspaper empire.) Vincenti didn’t become a pilot, but he claimed that Lindbergh inspired him to become an aeronautical engineer. His path to that specialty began with admission to Stanford, where in 1938 he received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.
He then took a couple of years of graduate level courses in aeronautical engineering, at the time taught at Stanford only at that level, and then in June 1940 accepted a position at the recently created Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, a branch of the federal National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) located at nearby Moffett Field. The war had begun, so Vincenti was inducted into the Navy, with the rank of chief petty officer, and ordered to continue his research at Ames. He initially worked on sub-sonic flight but around 1944, as military planners contemplated the dawning jet age, he and his Ames colleagues began designing the world’s first supersonic wind tunnel. Walter and his team oversaw the introduction of NACA’s first high-speed wind tunnels at NACA Ames and converted data from the instruments into results of immediate use to airplane manufacturers and researchers in high-speed aerodynamics. Walter’s contributions ranged from installing and operating the new tunnels to designing and executing their research programs, interpreting and promulgating the research results, and applying the new knowledge to the theory and practice of high-speed aerodynamics in general and swept wings in particular. His work led to his classic 1965 textbook, Introduction to Physical Gas Dynamics, jointly authored with a Stanford colleague, which codified the subject of supersonic air flow, the key problem facing builders of jet aircraft operating at higher Mach speeds.
Vincenti’s engineering achievements brought him recognition and fame, including election in 1987 to the United States National Academy of Engineering. The award acknowledged his “pioneering contributions to supersonic aircraft aerodynamics and to fundamental understanding of the physical gas dynamics of hypersonic flow.” In 2016 he was given the Daniel Guggenheim Medal—first awarded to Orville Wright in 1929—for his success in pioneering supersonic wind tunnel research and his professorial contributions to the history of engineering technology.
In 1956, Stanford’s provost and dean of Engineering, Frederick Terman, invited Vincenti to become the first full professor in a newly created Department of Aeronautical Engineering. Walter accepted the position and remained a teacher and researcher for the rest of his long career. It was at Stanford that he transitioned to his second career as a historian of technology. He had always had an interest in history, he told an interviewer late in his life, especially engineering history, and by the 1960s he felt that the important puzzles regarding supersonic flight had been understood and mastered, leaving him somewhat intellectually bereft. Additionally, the social and political unrest spawned by the war in Vietnam moved him to think more deeply and critically about the traditional, vocationally driven curriculum used to educate engineers. Engineers’ academic training, he came to believe, inculcated little understanding of society or the historical processes that shaped and underlay technical decisions. He responded to this problem by creating, with a few Stanford colleagues, a new interdisciplinary curriculum, called Values, Technology, and Society (VTS, which later added “Science” to its name, becoming VTSS), a program that aligned with the national STS movement and survives to this day. Vincenti served a number of terms as director of the program and devised a lecture course, Technology and Society: How Did We Get Here?, that explored the interplay of technological change and societal development from ancient times through the Industrial Revolution.
As a working historian, Vincenti instinctively rejected the entrenched cultural cliché that what engineers did was simply “applied science.” Having worked at the front line of research, creating knowledge about the behavior of material surfaces in high-speed air flows with his supersonic wind tunnel work, he knew engineers produced new knowledge that was very different from what was derived through scientific research. In his historical investigations, therefore, he sought to understand the nature and development of the kind of knowledge engineers created and employed in their work. At the time many historians and philosophers of science were asking similar epistemological questions about the evolution of scientific knowledge, and in 1962 Thomas Kuhn had published his pathbreaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Vincenti’s research on the forms and development of engineering knowledge proved to be equally pioneering.
Unlike many scientists, engineers generally did not pursue knowledge for its own sake, Vincenti noted, but were more often driven to figure out how materials or structures behaved in order to design and build the things desired by their clients. In his first book published as a historian, The Britannia Bridge: The Generation and Diffusion of Technological Knowledge, appearing in 1978 and co-authored with Stanford economic historian Nathan Rosenberg, Vincenti excavated the process of designing and constructing the Britannia Bridge. This was a mid-Victorian railway span across the Menai Strait separating Anglesey Island in Wales from the mainland. The British engineers hired to build the bridge at first considered a suspension bridge, a recently introduced technology. Ultimately, however, they rejected that solution, fearing that the weight of trains and their vibrations threatened the survival of such a structure. Robert Stephenson, the lead engineer on the project, thus proposed a novel alternative: two enormous box beams, each with an unsupported span of 450 feet. These beams would be constructed of wrought-iron plates, riveted together, and the trains would run through them inside the box beams. “In building this bridge,” Vincenti later recalled, Stephenson and his team generated “a new body of knowledge” by measuring and assessing the behavior under load of thin-walled metal structures. “Such knowledge proved useful elsewhere,” Vincenti added, in designing and fabricating all-metal aircraft, for example. What was developed in the Britannia Bridge project, he emphasized, was engineering knowledge, something quite different from the knowledge or theoretical insights resulting from scientific investigations.
Vincenti continued this exploration of innovative engineering knowledge in his acclaimed second book, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, published in 1990. There he explained that what and how engineers learned through five case studies, all informed in part by his long-standing proximity to aeronautics, covering matters such as propeller design, control volume analysis, and flush riveting of metal aircraft components to reduce drag. Just as had happened in his engineering career, Vincenti’s historical work won him significant recognition, most notably the Leonardo da Vinci medal from the Society for the History of Technology in 1998, the Society’s highest award for his lifetime of achievement.
I first met Walter in the summer of 1980, when my wife and I were deliberating on whether she should accept a faculty appointment in Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History. At the time we were living in Washington, D.C., and I was the leading candidate for a newly created position as a social historian of aeronautics at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, a slot I eagerly sought, so moving to Stanford and foregoing the still exciting world of Washington proved a tough family decision. Walter, however, played a key role in negotiating a place for me at Stanford, and thus my wife and I moved West together, each continuing at the university for over a quarter of a century and comfortably becoming Westerners. Walter, as he insisted on being called, arranged for me to teach half in his VTS Program and half in American Studies, another interdisciplinary program. He was a fabulous colleague and person. Even with all the honors he had gathered over his lengthy twin careers, he was without pretense. His integrity was unimpeachable. Always soft spoken, he nevertheless firmly voiced his beliefs. Indeed, I chuckle recalling his skepticism after listening to a lecture by a visiting scholar wedded to theorizing about the social construction of technology: “Does that man really think gravity or friction are socially constructed?”
In 1983 Stanford awarded Walter the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award, the school’s most prestigious undergraduate teaching honor. The citation beautifully captured this prince of a human being:
For the uncluttered vision and the clarity of intellect this aeronautical engineer has brought to the epistemology of technology; for a devotion to students and a skill as a teacher so extraordinary that he is called saint by some, moving spirit by others, and teachers’ teacher by his colleagues; and for the courage and imagination that enabled him, a dozen years ago, to give up a discipline in which he had attained distinction in order to lend that distinction to another.
Vincenti died in Palo Alto on October 11, 2019, at the age of 102.
Joe Corn
Newman, William M, and Walter G. (Walter Guido) Vincenti. “On an Engineering Use of Engineering History.” Technology and Culture 48, no. 1 (2007): 245–47. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2007.0034.
“Awards.” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 623–37. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1999.0159. [Leonardo da Vinci medal.]
Vincenti, Walter G. “Engineering Theory in the Making: Aerodynamic Calculation “Breaks the Sound Barrier”.” Technology and Culture 38, no. 4 (1997): 819–51. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1997.0003.
Levinson, Mark, and Walter G. Vincenti. “Comment and Response on “The Retractable Airplane Landing Gear”.” Technology and Culture 36, no. 2 (1995): 451–54. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1995.0132.
Vincenti, Walter G. “The Retractable Airplane Landing Gear and the Northrop “Anomaly”: Variation-Selection and the Shaping of Technology.” Technology and Culture 35, no. 1 (1994): 1–33. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1994.0116.
Florman, Samuel C. Review of What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter G. Vincenti. Technology and Culture 33, no. 1 (1992): 140–42. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1992.0152.
Vincenti, Walter G. What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Vincenti, Walter G. “The Davis Wing and the Problem of Airfoil Design: Uncertainty and Growth in Engineering Knowledge.” Technology and Culture 27, no. 4 (1986): 717–58. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889497.
“The Abbott Payson Usher Prize.” Technology and Culture 26, no. 3 (1985): 581–81. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889720.
Vincenti, Walter G. “Technological Knowledge without Science: The Innovation of Flush Riveting in American Airplanes, ca. 1930–ca. 1950.” Technology and Culture 25, no. 3 (1984): 540–76. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889992.
Vincenti, Walter G. “Control-Volume Analysis: A Difference in Thinking between Engineering and Physics.” Technology and Culture 23, no. 2 (1982): 145–74. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891142.
Vincenti, Walter G. “The Air-Propeller Tests of W. F. Durand and E. P. Lesley: A Case Study in Technological Methodology.” Technology and Culture 20, no. 4 (1979): 712–51. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890572.
Dorn, Harold. Review of The Britannia Bridge: The Generation and Diffusion of Technological Knowledge, by Nathan Rosenberg, Walter G. Vincenti. Technology and Culture 21, no. 1 (1980): 100–1. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890616.
Rosenberg, Nathan, and Walter G. Vincenti. The Britannia Bridge: The Generation and Diffusion of Technological Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978.