Four memorials for Thomas P. Hughes were printed in Technology and Culture. What follows are excerpts from all four.No field of scholarship is the product of a single individual, but it can be argued that much of the form and substance of the history of technology was shaped by Thomas Parke Hughes. Involved with the creation of the Society for the History of Technology in the late 1950s, an active scholar who published twelve books in the field (including two winners of the Dexter [now Edelstein] Prize), and the mentor of two dozen Ph.D. students, Tom shaped—and reshaped—the field for forty years. Trained first as an engineer and then as a European diplomatic historian, Tom defined the vocabulary of the history of technology, introducing key concepts such as technological momentum, styles of invention, systems, and social construction. But above all, Tom was a gracious and charismatic person—a Southern gentleman—who brought people together and inspired them to do their best work.
I was fortunate to be one of Tom’s Ph.D. students and studied with him from 1977 to 1984 at the University of Pennsylvania. Hence, in reflecting here on how Tom shaped the history of technology, I am obliged to play the role of the biographer and inquire, as Tom taught me, into how his youth, education, and early career shaped the major themes that he developed across his books and articles. In particular, I will argue that his ideas followed a trajectory from order to messy complexity.
Always proud of his Southern roots, Tom was born on 13 September 1923 in Richmond, Virginia, to Hunter Russell Hughes Sr. (1893–1945) and Mary Quisenberry Hughes (1894–1983). Tom had one older brother, Hunter Jr. (1918–1991). The Hughes family ran a lumber business in Richmond, but during the heady days of the 1920s, Hunter Sr. opened a Ford dealership in Charlottesville, Virginia. The dealership, unfortunately, failed in the early years of the Depression, and Tom’s family moved back to Richmond. Through the 1930s, Hunter Sr.’s business affairs remained unsteady, leading Tom to become a delivery boy so that he could contribute to the family.
Tom responded to the economic disorder of his youth by developing a strong sense of responsibility and self-reliance that permeated all of his personal and professional friendships. But these difficulties also set Tom on an intellectual path to search for order. Underlying much of his writing about inventors and engineers such as Thomas Edison or Bernie Schriever was a strong narrative that these men were seeking to create order out of chaos, to create technologies that would make the world harmonious, peaceful, and productive. One of the most compelling passages in Tom’s biography of Elmer Sperry discusses how Sperry detested the chaos of nature and sought to bring order through his feedback-control inventions (Elmer Sperry, 5).
But writing about Sperry lay twenty-five years in the future. After graduating from high school in the early 1940s, Tom spent a year at the University of Richmond but soon followed his older brother and moved to the University of Virginia (UVa) to study engineering. Tom thrived at UVa, and he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the Raven Society, and the Trigon Engineering Society. He was also president of UVa’s chapter of Kappa Sigma fraternity. UVa conferred on Tom a degree of social respectability, illustrated by the fact that Tom lived in his fourth year on the Lawn, the original part of the University designed by Thomas Jefferson; in later years, whenever Tom visited UVa, he would always make a pilgrimage to his room on the Lawn.
As an undergraduate, Tom’s intellectual life revolved around the Engineering School. One of the unique features of Jefferson’s original plan for UVa was that it included a professor of natural philosophy who was expected to teach engineering. Although it took several decades for the university to organize its engineering curriculum, UVa was one of the first American universities to confer engineering degrees, and it did so in 1836.
Studying in Thornton Hall, Tom encountered Frederick T. Morse (1902–90), a charismatic professor who deeply influenced him. Tom was enthralled by Morse’s course in electric power-plant design. If we take Morse’s textbook as our guide, we can see that the good professor emphasized that power was at the heart of the modern industrial world. In a manner paralleling Lewis Mumford’s argument in Technics and Civilization, Morse observed that, while the growing availability of mechanical power in the nineteenth century had created new industries, it had de-skilled workers and forced them into crowded cities. Electricity in the twentieth century, promised Morse, could eliminate these social ills while allowing the economy to grow and prosper. But for this to occur, engineers had to design entire systems; as Morse stated, “The power plant must function as a unit, not as a collection of individual pieces of equipment.” (Morse, Power Plant Engineering, 3) Moreover, electric power systems, insisted Morse, could not be viewed in isolation but should be designed with an awareness of the social, financial, and political environment in which they would operate. Morse showed Tom that it was possible to use engineering to create orderly systems; Morse, Tom later recalled, “had the intellectual strength to use elegant electrical science in solving problems within a context of economic, political, and geographical factors. He solved not by excluding variables but by bringing to bear powerful and complex analysis and order.” (Networks of Power, ix)
Like other students attending college during World War II, Tom’s studies were accelerated and he wrote his undergraduate engineering thesis in 1942. However, he was not able to finish his degree before being called to active duty as an officer in the navy. Tom commanded a supply lighter during the Kwajalein campaign and returned to Charlottesville to complete his degree in mechanical engineering in 1947. Tom took a job selling roofing materials in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he met and fell deeply in love with Agatha Chipley. Born to a Southern family, Agatha had travelled North to study at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing, and while there, had developed a passion for the arts and the life of the mind. Tom and Agatha were married in 1948.
Together, Tom and Agatha decided that they wanted to live a life of ideas and art, and that to do so, Tom should return to UVa to study Euro- pean diplomatic history. However, the ideas of order and system imposed by engineers never left him, and he “continued the search for expressions, however tremulous, of man’s constructive power in a chaotic world.” (Networks of Power, ix) Graduate school was a challenge for the young couple—while Tom was partly supported by the GI Bill, he also had a business of selling sandwiches to students, and Agatha worked at the University Hospital as a nurse. Studying with Julian Bishko and Orón J. Hale, Tom wrote his master’s thesis on “The British Publicists and the Austro-Hungarian Nationality Problem, 1907–1914” and then his dissertation on the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London.
As Tom was finishing his dissertation, he lectured in the Engineering English Division at UVa (what is now the Engineering & Society Department). Once he earned his Ph.D. he taught European history first at Sweet Briar College (1954–56) and then Washington and Lee University where he earned tenure. Still fascinated by what Professor Morse had taught him, Tom began studying the history of electric power systems in Europe and America. To support this research—and to have the opportunity to travel regularly in Europe with Agatha—Tom energetically pursued travel grants from the National Research Council and secured a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Tom and Agatha also started a family, with Tommy Jr., followed by Agatha Jr., and later, Lucian. For all intents and purposes, it would appear that Tom and Agatha had created the gracious life that they desired.
Yet their life was soon turned upside down, challenging Tom’s notions of order. In 1959, while Tom and his family were in Munich on a Fulbright Fellowship, Tommy Jr. suddenly developed leukemia. Since the best medical care for leukemia at the time was in Germany, the family chose to stay there, even though that put Tom’s university position at risk. After a year, Tommy Jr. died. He was only six and remained a cheerful, loving child to the very end. The death of a child can easily cause a marriage to fail, but Tom and Agatha’s love for each other and for their other children gave them the strength to overcome this tragedy.
Staying in Germany for an extra year without Fulbright support was a hazardous professional move, but Tom and Agatha took an even bigger gamble a few years later. In 1963, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. invited Tom to join the faculty at MIT, but to make this move, Tom had to give up his tenured position at Washington and Lee. While in Cambridge, Agatha studied art history and architecture at Radcliffe College. MIT, however, chose not to grant Tom tenure, and he suddenly found himself forty years old and without an academic post. Fortunately, Chandler had heard that the family of Elmer Sperry wanted to commission a biography and he arranged a three-year research position for Tom at Johns Hopkins University.
Together, Tommy Junior’s death and the tenure denial at MIT taught Tom that one cannot simply impose order on the world; one survives by recognizing that life is complex, unfair, and unpredictable. Rather than avoid life’s messiness, Tom learned that one had to immerse oneself in the confusion, for only then could one see the larger patterns and meanings. “Technology,” he later wrote, “is messy and complex . . . In its variety, it is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences.” (Human-Built World, 1)
Tom proceeded to write a biography of Sperry that probed not only the intricacies of Sperry’s feed- back-control inventions but also the inventor’s mindset. Sperry: Inventor and Engineer not only helped Tom land a tenured appointment at Southern Methodist University but it also caught the eye of Arnold Thackray who brought Tom to the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 to help build a new department devoted to the social history of science, technology, and medicine. In Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood, Agatha drew on her knowledge of architecture and spotted the first house designed by Robert Venturi; together, Tom and Agatha made this house into a gracious home for family and friends.
Through all these experiences, Tom’s writing about technology became, over time, more humane and more nuanced; he was no longer writing just about machines but about how systems builders embraced complexity and wove together the technical and social. These experiences set the stage first for the comparative and contextual approach that Tom took in Networks of Power (1983), then for his support of the social construction approach developed by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch, and ultimately for his articulation of postmodern engineering in Rescuing Prometheus (1998). In his later books, Tom’s heroes became those men and women who realized that real progress in technology required moving beyond a reductionist assertion of order through mathematics or science and instead a willingness to live with, listen to, and learn from the interplay of technical elements and social groups.
Because of the challenges and tragedies that Tom confronted in his youth and early career, he learned how to think about the order and messiness of both life and technology. Because of his journey from the orderliness of Professor Morse’s power plant analysis to his son’s death and his setback at MIT, Tom was able to see how to integrate technology and society. Now that Tom is gone, it’s up to us in the history of technology to continue the journey and seek to understand the human passions, wishes, and foibles that inform the human-built world. As Tom would have said emphatically in his Virginia drawl, “I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this task.
Bernard Carlson
Originally published as W. Bernard Carlson, “From Order to Messy Complexity: Thoughts on the Intellectual Journey of Thomas Parke Hughes,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (2014): 945–52, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2014.0108.
Prior to coming to Penn, Tom had a peripatetic career. From the perspective of the current constricted job market and resources in academia, the 1960s and 1970s can easily appear to be a golden age of plentiful jobs and easy tenure, but Tom’s unsettled early career is a reminder that it was not always so. He had been at several schools, including MIT and Johns Hopkins, and then spent four years at Southern Methodist University prior to coming to Penn in 1973. SHOT members know the apocryphal story of Tom’s and others’ failed attempt to get more history of technology included in history of science journals and conferences, leading to the founding of SHOT in 1958. However, in the 1970s Tom was still struggling for acceptance of his own work on technological systems, the social and cultural context of technology, and the nature of technological change. At Penn his intellectual commitments and his originality came into full bloom, and it was there that he wrote the books for which he became famous.
The president of Penn when Tom arrived was Martin Meyerson, who had a strong commitment to integrating work across disciplines, and between the university, the city, and the larger society. In this context, Arnold Thackray, working with Loren Eiseley and others, created a new department out of a graduate program in the history and philosophy of science, giving it a unique title, History and Sociology of Science, and a unique mission of bringing together science, technology, and medicine in an interdisciplinary program. At the time, this approach was considered innovative, possibly radical, and according to some within the history of science community, wrong. Thackray assembled a faculty that eventually included (among others) Tom Hughes, Robert Kohler, Nathan Sivin, Rosemary Stevens, Charles Rosenberg, Henrika Kuklick, and Mark Adams, creating an interdisciplinary program of modern historical focus in science, medicine, technology, the history of disciplines, and the production of knowledge.
What is important here is how Tom Hughes fit into this team of scholars, and how the alchemy between them produced a different kind of departmental culture. An interdisciplinary department faces the challenge of producing a coherent program while composed of specialists, allowing discretionary power to people who were successful in their fields. This faculty moved away from a narrow view of the history of science to a broader view, backing a three-way approach of science, medicine, and technology. They emphasized good teaching. As one long-time faculty member said, “Everyone was busy, and they didn’t get in each other’s way. That became the department ethos: being busy at scholarship and teaching.”
Tom’s stance toward the department was that of an old-fashioned gentleman scholar with a strong sense of service—the department came first. He was levelheaded but could be demanding. Tom worked to prevent the balkanization of the department into subfields. He did not try to turn History and Sociology of Science into a history of technology department while chair, but he wanted to keep the history of technology in balance with the history of science and of medicine. A major accomplishment was hiring Henrika Kuklick as the first woman professor in the department. When Tom became chair there were no women on the faculty, but he was able to convert Kuklick’s contingent position into a full-time tenure-track position. At the memorial for Kuklick in September 2013, the women who were graduate students in the 1970s and 1980s spoke of how important it was to them, as young female scholars, to have Kuklick in the department. Later, in another important hire, Tom brought Rosemary Stevens on board. As one colleague remembers, “He wanted to change the world,” and he was entrepreneurial about building the department and graduate admissions.
Tom’s commitment to interdisciplinary studies at Penn extended beyond the department. In the 1980s he and Alfred Rieber from the History Department developed an interdisciplinary seminar on “Technology and Culture” that was one of several funded by a special grant from the Mellon Foundation. The seminar lasted for five years and drew from faculty of several schools (Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Annenberg, and Wharton) and half a dozen departments (History, History and Sociology of Science, Economics, Anthropology, German, and Sociology) as well as invited guests from nearby institutions and other Ivy League universities. Some of the papers were published in an issue of Science in Context. Tom, who was an editor, contributed an afterword. Tom’s curriculum vitae reveals how, from the department at Penn, his interests and contributions radiated out to other Philadelphia institutions, such as the American Philosophical Society, and to other universities, research institutions, learned societies, and museums in the United States and abroad. He received many awards, medals, and honorary degrees.
Tom was appreciated but not necessarily idolized at Penn; the nature of department and university life, and the challenges of being department chair, meant that neither Tom nor his actions were always universally liked or welcomed. As one colleague remarked, Tom had the courtly style of a Virginia gentleman but carried a rapier, which was usually, but not always, sheathed. Tom was always willing to mix it up intellectually and could be intense in those discussions. He had high expectations for the department regarding scholarship, productivity, and quality of teaching, and he could be hard on people. Yet he could also be empathetic with faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. He wrestled with his ego and self-esteem; the struggles of his early career left him with a strong desire for approval and recognition, and occasionally a streak of bitterness.
Tom was deeply committed to the life of the mind. He was singular, even in the academic world, for the intensity of his commitment to his work as well as the originality of his work. In the words of a long-time colleague, “Tom had an exceptional way of thinking.” He was interested in virtually everything, especially the humanistic implications of science and technology. Colleagues remember that after a few minutes of talking with Tom, they would find themselves immersed in deep intellectual conversation. A former student remembers the big ideas from class “about where creativity comes from, whether it is too chaotic and unwieldy to be tamed by method, and how much it can be influenced by our times and situations.”
Ann N. Greene
Originally published as Ann N. Greene, “Reflections on Tom Hughes,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (2014): 958–63, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2014.0120.
I can think of no other non-European historian of technology with the same appreciation among his European colleagues as Tom Hughes—and this appreciation stretched far beyond our discipline. My remembrance will reflect on why and how Tom became such a renowned international scholar.
First of all, it has to do with his writing. When I looked through his books on my shelf while preparing this article, I remembered my enthusiasm and excitement when I read Networks of Power the first time. I was studying the history of energy systems in Sweden at the time and became thrilled already at the very first sentence: “Of the great construction projects of the last century, none has been more impressive in its technical, economic, and scientific aspects, none has been more influential in its social effects, and none has engaged more thoroughly our constructive instincts and capabilities than the electric power system.” The margins in my copy of the book are full of comments and exclamation marks, for example, when Tom writes: “This book is not simply a history of the external forces that shape technology, nor is it only a history of the internal dynamics of technology; it is a history of technology and society” (Networks of Power, 2), and when he states that “The technological, or man-made, world awaits a Darwin to explicate the origins and dynamics of the forces that pervade it” (Networks of Power, 5).
In Networks of Power (what a magnificent title, too!), Tom does his very best to explain the origins and dynamics of electrical power systems by introducing a number of fruitful concepts and an overall model of system evolution. He also applies a transnational perspective, in which processes of technological transfer from one region and society to another are very important, and in which a focus on the economic, political, cultural, and geographical conditions in different regions forms a crucial part of the analysis. Moreover, he explicitly encourages the study of other technological systems—”It is hoped, therefore, that this history of a particular kind of system will be of some assistance to those historians who wish to study other systems” (Networks of Power, 7)—and of other parts of the world—”Limitations of time, resources, and language prevented explorations of the sources pertaining to France, Italy, Sweden, the Benelux countries, Russia, Japan, and other industrializing regions of the world” (Networks of Power, x).
Many younger scholars, not least in Europe, indeed became encouraged to pursue studies of other systems and other regions, and Tom actively supported them. In 1986 he and the German sociologist Renate Mayntz took the initiative to a whole series of conferences on the evolution and dynamics of large technical systems (in Cologne 1986, Berkeley 1989, Sydney 1991, Vadstena 1992, Paris 1995, Durham 1998). And when the Tensions of Europe network was established in 1999 and started a program called “Networking Europe,” Tom enthusiastically supported it, and he continued doing so as long as he could.
Why, then, did Tom take on the challenge to write a pathbreaking book like Networks of Power? In his very informative preface to the book, he gives part of the answer. He highlights the importance of Professor Frederick Morse, one of his teachers when he was an engineering student at the University of Virginia in the late 1940s. In a course on electrical engineering, Morse combined “elegant electrical science in solving problems within a context of economic, political and geographic factors” (p. ix). In graduate school Tom turned to history to learn more about such societal factors, and here his mentors Oron Hale and Julian Bishko introduced him to the political, economic, and diplomatic history of Europe. Thus the seeds for his book were sown almost a quarter-century before it appeared.
Tom’s writing, however, is not the only explanation for why he became such a renowned international scholar. His international orientation and personal characteristics were also important. His deep interest and knowledge about European history and culture go far back. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in modern European history, and his first position as an associate professor was in European history at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He was thus a scholar of European history before he became a historian of technology, and he maintained and developed this interest throughout his life. Tom also frequently visited Europe. He received a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to go to Munich for a year in the late 1950s, and he made a number of other longer research visits to Germany in the following decades, always accompanied by his wife Agatha. Their travels to Europe increased in the 1980s and 1990s, and in addition to Germany, they began to visit Sweden almost annually.
Tom was not an international scholar in the sense that he was fluent in many languages. He knew German well, but I never heard him speak anything but English. Still, he had a rare talent for communicating with those who did not have English as their mother tongue. I realized this when serving as his teaching assistant for a course he taught in Stockholm to about 150 graduate students. A charismatic lecturer, Tom spoke calmly in his Southern accent and repeated the key concepts—”messy complexity,” ”reverse salient,” and the like. This made it easy for all the students to follow him. However, the most distinctive aspect of his lectures arose from his way of answering questions. When a student raised his or her hand, Tom would listen attentively while the student tried to phrase a question in sometimes rather halting English. When the student was ready, Tom would think for half a minute and then rephrase the question very elegantly and ask the student if he had understood it correctly. The student would of course nod approvingly, feeling proud of having posed such a smart question. And then Tom would spend a few minutes giving a thoughtful answer to the question.
This highlights a distinctive characteristic of Tom—he was an especially attentive listener. I experienced this the very first time I met him, in May 1983. Tom was invited to give a lecture at the University of Linköping where I was a Ph.D. student, and I accompanied Tom and Agatha on the train from Stockholm to Linköping. To my surprise, Tom and I spent the whole three-hour train ride talking about my thesis. It was Tom who was curious and made me talk. In retrospect, I realize that this conversation was of decisive importance for me. It made Tom an informal mentor to me, and gradually this mentorship evolved into a deep friendship. I have a number of European friends who have similar experiences of Tom becoming an informal mentor and also a friend after he first showed a genuine interest in their work.
An additional example of Tom as a listener derives from the abovementioned conferences and workshops dealing with large technical systems. On these occasions Tom enjoyed high prestige as a leading world scholar. But he was always very humble and humorous and had a rare ability to put all participants at ease, which made the discussions constructive and exciting. He also listened attentively on these occasions, in particular when the most junior scholars raised their voices, and he made sure that they became involved in the discussions.
There is another aspect of Tom’s international scholarship; with his broad knowledge and Southern gentlemanly charm, he became an outstanding ambassador for the history of technology both inside and outside the academic world. He was held in high esteem in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other countries, but probably his greatest influence was in Sweden. One important event occurred when Tom gave a lecture at the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1983, presenting Networks of Power to an audience of leading industrialists and electrical engineers. They were fascinated both by his elegant presentation and not least by his way of answering tricky questions. He became famous in Sweden for his lecturing talents. He also showed a rare talent for convincing university rectors and funding agencies of the relevance of our field and played a decisive role in establishing history of technology as an academic discipline in Sweden. In fact, he was the very first professor in the field in Sweden; from 1986 to 1991, he served as a visiting professor at the Royal Institute of Technology.
The respect and appreciation for Tom Hughes had to do with his deepest personal qualities—his warmth, his gentle and generous manner, and his endearing humor. I know that I speak for many European scholars when I say that Tom has been a strong source of inspiration to us for many years.
Arne Kaijser
Originally published as Arne Kaijser, “Tom Hughes—International Scholar,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (2014): 953–57, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2014.0114.
In the last decade or so a surprising theory for identifying early human life on an archaeological site began gathering attention in some scholarly circles. It treats the remains of flowers at a burial site as more compelling evidence of humanity than finding tools on the site. Beauty offered to memorialize someone who has died as sacred and beloved may run more deeply human than the ability to set goals and marshal resources to achieve them.
Twice I talked with Tom about the place of beauty in terrible goodbyes. The first conversation happened one spring morning near the end of my first year at Penn. I had turned back my M.A. exam book unopened, telling the proctor that I would work this out later with the department. I wandered across campus and found myself knocking on Tom’s office door. I only knew him a little then. “Bill died about 5:30 this morning,” I said, “we sat all night with him.” Bill Moody was a Jesuit with whom I lived; he was thirty-four like me when he died of peritonitis after diverticular surgery. I was heartsick and exhausted. Tom got up from behind the big desk in his office and went to make us tea. We sat at the tea table in front of the desk and talked about Bill’s death that morning, and he told me about the death of his young son. We talked about losing someone too young, that terrible grief. That was, I think, when we began to be friends.
The second conversation began soon after Agatha died. I flew to Philly to spend some time with Tom. Agatha was a soul friend to me; her sudden, shocking death opened a loss in me that made it natural to be with Tom without talking very much. Words limp sometimes. Even so, and with some hesitation, I invited Tom to consider letting me keep him company as he grieved. It still moves me deeply that Tom took me up on that offer. Once a week or so, for the better part of a year, Tom told me ordinary day-to-day stories as he lived his way into the absence of his partner and soul friend, into savage loss and tenderness woven together. Today, as I live into Tom’s absence from my life, those conversations about Agatha and Tom help me.
Whether he had heard about the theory of burial flowers as archaeological evidence or not, I think Tom would understand the point. Humans try to do justice to loves that have become sacred in them; flowers help say such love better than efficiency. So does storytelling. So we who gather here use our presence with one another, our stories, our singing, as ways to offer beauty that treat Tom as sacred and beautiful and beloved.
We live gradually into intimacy with the people we come to love. Sometimes we have intense moments of closeness when we grasp how deep the one we love runs in us. But most of the time our intimacies deepen when we aren’t paying attention, busy as we are with our lives. And the more the one we love becomes embedded in our life, the more readily the deepening of our intimacy can escape notice except for privileged moments of insight once in a while. So with Tom. In the weeks since he died, we have been telling each other stories about Tom. It’s what humans do when we lose someone so close to us. We listen to one another tell about Tom.
Here are two more of mine.
The first story unfolded over decades of friendship. Now and again, Tom and Agatha asked me to dinner while I was a graduate student and in our later years. Through those years Millman Street became a place where I expected wonderful conversations. Sometimes we visited in the kitchen and talked about Agatha’s combinations of flavors, textures, and colors in a work of art that became our meal. Sometimes we talked about substantive matters. We talked in the kitchen, at table, in the living room before the fire. Sometimes we would look out through the wall of windows into the yard and admire the grace Robert Venturi designed into his “Mother’s House.” Many of us gathered here to say our goodbyes know the place they created at Millman Street. There, Tom and Agatha gave us access to the lives they lived as two powerful individuals who grew to be soul friends. I miss them. We miss them.
The second story happened about fifteen years ago in Manhattan. Tom and I were part of a group asked to Judy Crichton’s West Side apartment for a consultation about future directions at American Experience. Later, the two of us found a coffee shop and a free hour before he headed to Philadelphia and I to Detroit. That’s when Tom told me, nearly two decades after the fact, how he and Agatha labored over what to tell me about my draft first dissertation chapter. They talked for days, trying to discern what to do. It was hard on them, Tom said. I was ten years older than most of his grad students, and we were by then more peers than student and teacher. But the draft was shockingly bad on all counts, wretched work. Finally they decided that Tom had to hammer me to get my attention and convince me that a dissertation is orders of magnitude more challenging than a seminar paper. Tom led off that 1978 conference by telling me that the writing process “will be much more difficult than I had thought and we will be fortunate if we are on speaking terms when we are finished.” Hindsight says this was great mentoring for me. I recognized that when I left his office in a daze that day. I take it as real kindness that he told me the story, that Manhattan afternoon years later, of what it had cost Agatha and him to confront me.
These weeks, and actually since the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, we have begun to live the way into intimacy with Tom’s absence. In the process of saying this goodbye, we will have moments of intense awareness, when we grasp our loss at a depth that shakes us deeply and begins to do justice to our connection to this man whom we have loved so long. Intimacy is not always about presence and touch; we also grow intimate with absence. Most of the time, as was true while Tom lived, intimacy with his absence will grow mostly without our noticing, in passing awarenesses of the marks he has left in us. We will be interrupted, sometimes, by moments where our love for Tom and the depth of our loss will come in on us more powerfully, when tenderness matches grief in depth and power.
While Tom lived among us we had moments when we perceived him whole; much as we have helped one another these days to recognize some of what he meant to us. It is the work of love to expect our memories to surprise us and to treat them reverently. It is the work of love to trust them despite their elusive frailty. It is the work of love to forgive the poverty of our attention spans and to cherish moments of presence to this beautiful man, trusting our love and our memories, frail as they must be.
It seems remarkable to me that flowers left by gravesites have left their traces where recent tools of precision measurement could find them, left millennia ago by people who reached deep to say their sorrow for someone they had loved with flowers, such delicate witnesses.
John Staudenmaier
Originally published as John S.J. Staudenmaier, “Notes for Tom Hughes’s Funeral Homily: University of Virginia Chapel, 6 April 2014,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (2014): 970–72, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2014.0132.
Hughes, Thomas P. “SHOT Founders’ Themes and Problems.” Technology and Culture50, no. 3 (2009): 594–99. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.0.0299.
Hughes, Thomas P. Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Hughes, Thomas P. “Lessons From Soviet Science and Technology.” Technology and Culture 41, no. 2 (2000): 348–52. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2000.0067.
Hughes, Thomas P. Rescuing Prometheus. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
Hughes, Thomas P. and Agatha C. Hughes, eds. Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual. New York: 1990.
Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. New York: Viking, 1989. [Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.]
Hughes, Thomas P., and Renate Mayntz, eds. The Development of Large Technical Systems. Boulder: Campus Verlag; Westview Press, 1988.
Hughes, Thomas P., Wiebe E. Bijker, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Hughes, Thomas P. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Hughes, Thomas P. “Convergent Themes in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.” Technology and Culture 22, no. 3 (1981): 550–58. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890887.
Hughes, Thomas P. “Emerging Themes in the History of Technology.” Technology and Culture 20, no. 4 (1979): 697–711. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890571.
Hughes, Thomas P. “The Electrification of America: The System Builders.” Technology and Culture 20, no. 1 (1979): 124–61. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890456.
Hughes, Thomas P. “Conceptual Definitions: Order Out of Chaos.” Technology and Culture 18, no. 3 (1977): 512–14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891949.
Hughes, Thomas P. “The Development Phase of Technological Change.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 3 (1976): 423–31. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1976.a891750.
Hughes, Thomas Parke. “The Science-Technology Interaction: The Case of High-Voltage Power Transmission Systems.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 4 (1976): 646–62. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891816.
Hughes, Thomas P. “Hitler, I.G. Farben, and Synthetic Gasoline.” Technology and Culture 7, no. 4 (1966): 514–14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894537.
Hughes, Thomas Parke. “British Electrical Industry Lag: 1882–1888.” Technology and Culture 3, no. 1 (1962): 27–44. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895412.