In 1978 Derek Price remarked that “A Ph.D. who hasn’t spent a year or half a year at the Smithsonian is no historian of technology.” To the extent that this was true, it was due to the efforts of Bob Multhauf. First as a department chairman and then as director of the Museum of History and Technology he assembled a staff of curators that for years at the annual SHOT meetings would substantially exceed the number of participants from any academic institution. They included Silvio Bedini, Monte Calvert, Jon Eklund, Eugene Ferguson, Elizabeth Harris, Otto Mayr, Robert Vogel, Jack White, and myself (plus a smattering of others who were considered historians of science). Not all—not even a majority in the early years—had Ph.D.s themselves, but Multhauf was very effective using carrots and sticks and presenting himself as an example of what scholarship was all about as incentives for strengthening the research orientation and accomplishments of his staff. As a consequence, with the help of well-funded fellowship and consultancy programs, a stream of historians of technology flowed through our doors. In this group, to mention a few familiar names (and using 1980 as a cutoff date), were Price himself, James Brittain, Carl Condit, Susan Douglas, Robert Friedel, Bert Hall, David Hounshell, Thomas Parkes Hughes, David Jeremy, Eda Kranakis, Robert Post, William Pretzer, Harold Skramstad, Merritt Roe Smith. In addition, Bob found time and money and space (which often meant a table in his office) to support, for short periods, a range of nonhistorian specialists to examine and comment on the museum’s collections.
Like many of us, especially in those formative years, Robert Phillip Multhauf fell into the history of technology more or less by accident. He was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on 8 June 1919, and grew up in Newton, Iowa. He graduated from Iowa State College in 1941 with a B.S. degree in chemistry and worked first at Hercules Powder Company (1941- 42) and then at U.S. Rubber Company (1942-43) before joining the U.S. Navy, serving as a shipboard engineering officer. He was in Japan soon after the end of the war, and after his discharge in the summer of 1946 he stayed on for two years as a civilian employee of the army to participate in a project to survey the Japanese scientific and industrial establishment. In 1948 he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a master’s degree in Far East studies in 1950, with a thesis titled “A Study of Diplomatic Relations between Japan and China, 1922-32.” He later recalled that he shifted the focus of his work to the history of chemistry when the professor he intended to study under resigned rather than submit himself to the California loyalty oath. Multhauf then reached across town and arranged to be advised by J. B. De C. M. Saunders at the University of California Medical Center (later the University of California at San Francisco), writing a dissertation titled “The Relationship between Technology and Natural Philosophy, ca. 1250-1650, as Illustrated by the Technology of the Mineral Acids.” He received his degree in 1953, with a major field in the history of medieval Europe and minors in the histories of science, Greece and Rome, and the Far East, and spent a year as a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for the History of Medicine. Late in 1954 he came to the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum as curator of engineering. This was the beginning of the build-up of staff for the new Museum of History and Technology, which would be authorized by Congress in the spring of 1955. Multhauf later recalled that the advice of his university advisors was “don’t stay longer [at the Smithsonian] than two years or you’re dead.” (This was not unlike advice I received eight years later.)
The Museum of History and Technology was largely a consequence of the efforts of Frank Taylor, who had been at the Smithsonian since the early 1920s. Inspired especially by the Deutsches Museum, he had dreamed of creating a comprehensive historical-technical museum, but in the 1950s he settled on a broader concept that included social and cultural history. With no historical training, Taylor relied on his new hires, and on Multhauf in particular, to develop the museum’s content. This Bob proved eager to do, as he in turn assembled a curatorial staff and worked on a series of exhibits—some for the Arts and Industries building and some for the new building, which would open in January 1964.
From the beginning Multhauf was determined that the exhibits would be based on scholarship, and he employed two principal methods to support this goal. One (initiated by Taylor) was to develop an exhibits staff separate from the curators, thus presumably freeing the historians from having to worry about how their ideas and objects were displayed (though in fact the barrier was more often breached than left intact). The other was to encourage publication. A particularly effective weapon for this purpose was a long-standing federally funded series of volumes called the United States National Museum Bulletin, which consisted of clusters of articles—or “contributions,” which usually had been previously published for independent distribution—in various subject areas. Now, with Taylor’s support, occasional Bulletins, starting in 1959, contained sequentially numbered Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology. Some of the contributions occupied complete volumes, which led to the establishment in 1969 of a separate monograph series with the title Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology. A significant consequence of Bob’s approach was that new staff members, especially in the history of science and technology, were hired from academia and not from other museums (fortuitously, as programs in these areas were just beginning to produce graduates in meaningful numbers). A further consequence was that after these scholars arrived they tended to align themselves with colleagues in academia and not with other museum professionals. This made the museum much more flexible in responding to the changes in historical interpretation that would occur over the ensuing decades.
Collections, of course, are at the core of any museum, both as building blocks for exhibits and as subjects for study. Like most of us, Bob had to develop a passion for accumulating objects after he came here. As curator of almost everything in those early years, he did so on a broad scale. With the help of a local collector he cataloged our light bulb collection; he tested water-current meters using a home-made contraption on a nearby lake; and he initiated a very successful practice of scouring the storage closets of vintage colleges and universities for early teaching apparatus. If an unavailable artifact was needed for an exhibit he would have a reproduction made, and while this is a practice that we now discourage (in order not to confuse visitors) the consequence was a collection of fine models by what was even then a dying breed of trained instrument makers.
Bob was never what one might call a museum person, in the sense of plotting long-term goals or developing educational programs in ways that other museums were beginning to do. He became director in 1966 (Taylor stepped down a year after the museum opened and was succeeded for a year by his deputy), largely, as he told me, because he was afraid of the alternatives. Nevertheless, he held on to previous plans to take sabbatical leave (in two six-month stretches), leaving the operation in the capable hands of his deputy, Silvio Bedini. And he was pleased—or at least he said he was—when a suitable successor appeared after four years in the form of historian Daniel Boorstin. From then until his retirement in 1987 Bob held the post of senior historian. During an interview in 1974 he remarked that he was never as interested in being director as he was in his own research, though he also said that it had probably been a mistake to sandwich the sabbatical into his term. Nevertheless, he placed an indelible stamp on the museum, in the form of its commitment to supporting a research-oriented staff and particularly in the development of an understanding that the museum and its collections provide scholars with unique evidence and a special point of view that can enrich the study of history, especially the history of science and technology. Furthermore, his wry sense of humor made him unusually effective at some of the prosaic tasks associated with the job, like accepting objects for the collections from proud donors. A sample of this style can be seen in two articles cited in the bibliography below: his Leonardo da Vinci speech (1988) and his memorial to Mel Kranzberg (1996).
Multhauf himself maintained close connections with the academic world. As early as 1957 he was on the Council of the History of Science Society, and in January 1958 he was one of the gang of fifteen that Mel Kranzberg assembled (some by telephone) at Case Institute of Technology—the opening shot, one might say, in the establishment of SHOT and of Technology and Culture. Bob was one of two scholars (Lynn White was the other) to be elected president both of SHOT (1969–70) and of the History of Science Society (1979–80). For twenty-seven years, ending when he left Washington, he taught a course in the history of science—both semesters—at George Washington University (making him a direct successor, as he liked to say, to George Sarton). But undoubtedly his greatest service to the profession consisted of the three terms (fifteen years) he served as editor of Isis, publishing issues 180 (June 1964) through 248 (September 1978). In the early years the Isis office was also the business office of the society, as I well remember from my time as managing editor. We printed programs for the annual meetings, issued the first directory of members and the first newsletters, and provided continuity as other offices changed hands. I might add that this was also a period of fiscal uncertainty, which Bob’s good sense of balance helped us to weather. Another innovation was the establishment of a serious editorial committee that would come to Washington once a year to examine the operation and cheer us on (and cheer us up). A significant portion of the time would be spent at the Multhauf home, with Lettie as a gracious luncheon hostess.
Bob was especially active in developing the Critical Bibliography into an even more valuable tool. He relished the time he spent (I still don’t know how he did it, on top of everything else) gathering citations, and he cajoled or pressured members of the museum staff (most notably Deborah Warner) into extended trips to the Library of Congress. This enlarged CB ended up playing havoc with the schedule of the regular issues, and in 1967 Bob persuaded the society to let it be published separately. In the following years he (by this time gratefully) turned over responsibility for the bibliography to John Neu at the University of Wisconsin.
Bob brought an author-friendly tone to Isis that was picked up by the rest of us and that I felt to be the hallmark of his editorship. He never imposed himself on contributors, treating them rather as valuable assets—in need, however, of occasional adjustments in language or shifts in emphasis or perhaps further thought which might lead to a better article in another year or in another journal.
His own major publications were The Origins of Chemistry (1967), developed from his doctoral dissertation, and Neptune’s Gift: A History of Common Salt (1978), which clearly demonstrates the breadth of his historical interest—geographically and temporally—as well as his concern over the loss of a sense of proportion in this last century of technical civilization. He also authored, or instigated and coauthored, a number of object-oriented shorter articles and monographs, receiving the Usher Prize in 1965 for his article “Sal Ammoniac: A Case History in Industrialization,” which appeared in T&C that same year. He edited a special issue of the journal, also in 1965, dealing with museums of science and technology. It remains a valuable source for museum studies. He had a long and close relationship with Mel Kranzberg, as is revealed in those portions of their correspondence preserved in the Smithsonian Archives. Of particular note is a letter from Mel to Margaret Rossiter, warmly nominating Multhauf for the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 1981. Apparently that wasn’t enough to do the trick, though Bob was given the much-deserved award in 1987.
After retirement Bob and Lettie moved to San Rafael, California, where he continued an ambitious, demanding effort to evaluate the significance of gunpowder in late-medieval and early modern warfare by quantifying the extent of its use, based on historical records and accounts of battles. When he determined (as he told me) that his new drafts of sections didn’t measure up to the ones they were intended to replace, he reluctantly gave up the effort. Throughout his life he was a passionate book collector, with an intimate knowledge of the bookstores (old and new) of Europe and America. In 1997 he sold more than three thousand volumes that he had assembled on topics in the history of science and technology to form the core of the library of the fledgling Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. He then turned around and replaced them, this time on subjects ranging from architecture to art history to gardening—reflecting his broad interests, which were now free to range unfettered by any specific historical project.
His papers have been given to the Smithsonian Archives, where they join a substantial body of material related to his career at the institution. A collection of some four thousand slides, which he had assembled over several years and which formed the basis for a series of lectures on the history of technology at Arizona State University in 1982, was given (with modest documentation) to the Program in the History of Technology and Science at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Bob Multhauf died peacefully, and I am sure with a feeling of considerable satisfaction, at home on 8 May 2004.
Bernard S. Finn
Originally published as Bernard S. Finn, “Robert P. Multhauf, 1919–2004.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 1 (2005): 265–73. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2005.0015.
Links and Major Works:
Multhauf, Robert P., John L. DuBois, and Charles A. Ziegler. Invention and development of the radiosonde: with a catalog of upper-atmosphere telemetering probes in the National Museum of American History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Read it at archive.org.
Multhauf, Robert P. “Review of Communicating Chemistry: Textbooks and Their Audiences, 1789–1939.” Technology and Culture 42, no. 3 (2001): 564–65. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2001.0129
Multhauf, Robert P., and Gregory Good. A Brief History of Geomagnetism and a Catalog of the Collections of the National Museum of American History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 29, no. 3 (1988): 644–52. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1988.0117
Krätz, O., and Claus Priesner. “Review of Neptune’s Gift, by Robert P. Multhauf.” Technology and Culture 21, no. 4 (1980): 648–50. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890761
Multhauf, Robert P. Neptune’s Gift: a History of Common Salt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Read it at archive.org.
Multhauf, Robert P. “Geology, Chemistry, and the Production of Common Salt.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 4 (1976): 634–45. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891815
Multhauf, Robert P. “The French Crash Program for Saltpeter Production, 1776–94.” Technology and Culture 12, no. 2 (1971): 163–81. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1971.a893953
Multhauf, Robert P. “Sal Ammoniac: A Case History in Industrialization.” Technology and Culture 6, no. 4 (1965): 569–86. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/894639
Multhauf, Robert P., compiler. Catalogue of instruments and models in the possession of the American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. 1961.
Multhauf, Robert P. “A Museum Case History: The Department of Science and Technology of the United States Museum of History and Technology.” Technology and Culture 6, no. 1 (1965): 47–58. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/894778
Multhauf, Robert P. “The Scientist and the ‘Improver’ of Technology.” Technology and Culture 1, no. 1 (1959): 38–47. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895236
Multhauf, Robert P. “The Historiography of Technology: Some Observations on the State of the History of Technology.” Technology and Culture 15, no. 1 (1974): 1–12. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/892820