President: 1981–82 da Vinci Medal: 1984 Co-creator of Engines of Change, which received SHOT’s Dibner Award, 1987
With Brooke Hindle’s death, the Society for the History of Technology lost another of the small group who shaped our organization in its formative years and continued to offer guidance and direction as we grew and developed. We are fortunate that Brooke was given several significant opportunities to reflect on a professional career that began during World War II and continued productive for well over a half century. His 1983 essay in the William and Mary Quarterly’s “Early American Emeriti” series surveys scholarship on the early American period, Brooke’s initial concern and his continuing, although by no means exclusive, interest. Appropriately, he examines all three fields—science, technology, and material culture—to which his work made fundamental contributions. Shortly thereafter, Technology and Culture published his “Intellectual Autobiography,” prepared when he received the society’s Leonardo da Vinci Medal and tracing with characteristic modesty salient aspects of his career. In addition, Robert Post’s 1994 retrospective, part of a volume that revisited and extended Brooke’s pioneering Technology in Early America, offers a judicious appreciation of important aspects of his career.
Rather than reiterate what these works already offer, it strikes me that I can usefully remember Brooke by reaching out, as he perennially did, to a new audience: the many current and future members of this society whose concentration on more recent technological history means they know little about his life and work. What might those privileged to know and work with Brooke wish to tell those who have yet to discover his legacy? Or, to use a term to which Brooke gave renewed life, what about Brooke’s career should we encourage young historians to emulate?
First, I offer a few chronological facts, the historian’s essential scaffolding. Brooke was born and raised just outside Philadelphia, quite near the scenes of the early American scientific and technological dramas he came to study. He began his undergraduate career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed it at Brown, where he found in Carl Bridenbaugh a valued, continuing mentor. Richard H. Shryock directed his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where Brooke’s career bracketed an interlude of World War II naval service. He then rejoined Bridenbaugh, now at the fledgling Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia; Brooke became its second research associate (they are now known as fellows). Thereafter he served two major institutions long and well. At New York University (1950–74) he was a professor, dean of University College, and head of the All-University History Department. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of History and Technology (later renamed the National Museum of American History) he was director (1974–78) and senior historian (1978–85). Along the way he authored or edited a dozen books and dozens of articles, book chapters, introductions, reports, and other short pieces. And he helped create a number of museum exhibits, notably the Smithsonian’s Engines of Change, which received SHOT’s 1987 Dibner Award. In sum, Brooke valued and exemplified the virtues of productivity and hard work.
What we especially remember is the quality of that work. Those who studied with Brooke or have read much of what he wrote know his fondness for Douglass Adair’s definition of history: “a dialogue in the present with the past about the future.” This sense of history’s “relevance,” a word that gained currency only in the later 1960s, informed Brooke’s work from the outset in such works as The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789 (1956) and David Rittenhouse (1964). As Hunter Dupree astutely noted when reviewing Brooke’s final book, Lucky Lady and the Navy Mystique: The “Chenango” in WW II (1991), a study of the escort carrier on which he served as radar maintenance officer and Combat Information Center watch officer: “In his classic works on early American science and technology and in his biography of David Rittenhouse, Hindle has built the insight gained as an actor on Chenango into the historical literature of his generation.” Thus, Brooke’s earliest work offers an especially good place to deepen our sense of historical relevance, to experience the insight offered when we examine humans creating technology in a temporally remote culture that has profoundly shaped our own.
More generally, his personal experience of science and technology as integrally entwined and broadly connected to the larger culture informs a body of scholarship that conveys the vitality of an eighteenth-century tradition that thought broadly about “useful knowledge” and organized “Societies of Arts” that encompassed technology. Because he so thoroughly appreciated these traditional approaches, his work comprehended technological change in a broad context long before SHOT members began talking about a “contextual” approach. Politics, economics, the fine arts, military events, religion, and contemporary science all find their place in his earliest work as well as in his masterpiece, Emulation and Invention (1981).
Brooke’s sense that useful knowledge, both historic and contemporary, emerges from organizations that value inclusiveness and accessibility also informed his prescriptions for scholarly organizations such as SHOT and for the museum personnel he often addressed. In an article that would be noteworthy merely for its title, “How Much is a Piece of the True Cross Worth?” Brooke offers a sensitive brief for the ordinary museum visitor’s simple desire “to touch the past.” And, characteristically, he places that wish in a larger context: “Somehow many objects belong to the viewer and are firmly a part of his understanding of history in a way that would have been totally impossible had he never seen them. This is the important and valid insight which folk culture expresses in placing high value upon not only the true cross and the true sword of George Washington but upon the sharecropper’s cabin and the manacles of a slave.” The broad communication of technology’s history could have no firmer foundation than such willingness to honor the nonhistorian’s unsophisticated and legitimate uses of the past.
Each of those who have read and reread Brooke’s work over the years has a favorite among the resonant phrases he coined. Indeed, even if one’s education has neglected scholarship on early America, no historian of technology can avoid encountering the importance of “spatial thinking,” discussions of how much to emphasize technology’s “dark side,” or concern with whether there is “an elemental force within technology itself.” It is easy to forget the real venturesomeness Brooke demonstrated in these and countless other instances. As the history of technology settles into being an established field with a received set of questions and concepts, younger scholars can best emulate this distinguished pioneer not by reiterating old scholarly issues but by embracing his willingness to venture onto new terrain, urged by a recognition that “history cannot attain a settled state because, as collective memory it serves [a constantly changing] society.”
My favorite of Brooke’s resonant images is his injunction that we must “stand at the center of the technology—on the inside looking out” if we would begin to see its history. He specifically enumerates our penchant for looking “through the eyes of science, economics, political reflections, social results, or literary antagonisms” as common but limiting perspectives. Before we dismiss this as a call for narrow “hardware history” it is well to note his simultaneous assertion that “the social relations of technology must not be neglected; they represent the historian’s highest goal, but they are attainable only after the historian has developed a direct understanding of the men and their works.”
We would do well, then, to emulate Brooke’s practice of looking again and again at the objects and images that play a central role in technology’s history, sources that resist reduction to words and concepts and require long and close engagement to reveal their many facets. Brooke’s work shows him looking anew at objects as disparate as David Rittenhouse’s scientific instruments, the many features of a fast tanker that became an escort carrier, the diverse characteristics of wood evident in its various early American uses, and the pre-telegraph artistic canvases of Samuel F. B. Morse.
Simultaneously, we need to remember that Brooke stood at the center in order to convey the ways of technology to those lacking an intimate sense of objects and their creation and uses. Few have recognized so fully the challenge of writing about things. We can turn for inspiration to his creative ventures in communicating the insights born of looking, notably in the pairing of carefully crafted pictorial essays with the “Steamboat” and “Telegraph” chapters of Emulation and Invention and in “Technology through the 3-D Time Warp,” his SHOT presidential address.
But I also believe Brooke taught the virtues of “standing at the center” in a more general sense. SHOT is a richer and more balanced place because Brooke and others consistently recognized the value of standing at the center amidst normally separate worlds: the university and the museum, the exhibit and the archive, the visual and the literary, the historian and the technologist. Brooke’s gift for standing at the center also prompted repeated calls toward what he considered a more balanced approach. Although it is easy to understand some of his concern as the longing of a consensus historian for a synthesis no longer easily imaginable, it can also prompt us to examine and reexamine whether we have grown doctrinaire, unresponsive.
What these aspects of Brooke’s legacy share is an honesty and courage that made his life and work coherent and whole. Honesty and courage enabled him to take unpopular positions and repeatedly to pursue unfashionable aspects of technology’s history. Indeed, they enabled him to pursue the study of technological history and the history of American science at a time when most scholars dismissed these subjects as intellectual backwaters. They also enabled him to continue a productive life of scholarship, teaching, and professional service despite four bouts with different life-threatening illnesses that punctuated his career. Honesty and courage continue to echo through a prose characterized by simplicity and directness, a style that sounds understated in its resolute commitment to expressing only what Brooke believed he knew. Often he selectively rephrased in pursuit of even greater clarity.
Honesty and courage are hard and painful disciplines. I have been struck repeatedly in reviewing Brooke’s career by the way in which a lively, wide-ranging curiosity continually refreshed and energized his efforts. It extended as well to his personal struggles. Among his publications from the 1960s is a piece written for the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in which he turns his analytic perspective on his own responses to the therapies that helped him live with the effects of polio. Later, in the 1990s, his involvement in a photography club enabled him to construct a file of images and names, one of several imaginative responses he made to the challenges of aphasia.
As I reflect on his life and career, I find that I still have much to learn from Brooke Hindle. His scholarly work continues to reward reading and in many areas remains the best or only examination of its subject. And his commitment to a history that is venturesome, current rather than merely fashionable, and centered amidst diverse sources and constituencies continues to inspire emulation. We need such mentors to remind us that creating the best history requires that we be honest, courageous, and curious. Only then can we fully engage the past while standing in a present that is deeply troubled about the future.
Judith A. Mcgaw
Previously published as Judith A. McGaw, “Memorial: Brooke Hindle, 1918–2001,” Technology and Culture 45, no. 1 (2004): 241–46. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2004.0031.
Hindle’s personal papers are held at the Smithsonian American History Museum. SIA RU007363, Hindle, Brooke, Brooke Hindle Papers, circa 1944-1985 | Smithsonian Institution Archives
Hindle, Brooke. Technology in Early America: Needs and Opportunities for Study Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.
Hindle, Brooke. The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789.New York: Norton, 1956, 1974.
“How Much is a Piece of the True Cross Worth?” in Quimby, Ian M. G. ed. Material Culture and the Study of American Life, 5–20. Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. New York: Norton, 1978.
Hindle, Brooke. Emulation and Invention. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983.
[SHOT presidential address] Hindle, Brooke. “Technology through the 3-D Time Warp.” Technology and Culture24, no. 3 (1983): 450–64. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891387.
Hindle, Brooke. “Bridge to the Future: A Symposium Commemorating the Centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge—New York City, May 18–20, 1983.” Technology and Culture 25, no. 2 (1984): 294–98.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture26, no. 3 (1985): 584–89. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889722.