In This Issue

One of the earliest power generating technologies, windmills have long proven their historical importance in tracing the elusive paths of Medieval European technological practice. John Langdon and Martin Watts ("Tower Windmills in Medieval England: A Case of Arrested Development?") contribute to that history by revisiting textual and archeological evidence with the help of recent linguistic research into Medieval technical terminology. They argue the existence of several tower windmills (a stone tower supports a cap-like housing which rotates to face its sails into the wind) in 13th and 14th century England, a period dominated by the cheaper but less durable post-mill (rotating housing supported on a post). Why, if tower windmills were technologically available, is there evidence of so few on the English landscape? It would be reasonable to assume that feudal elites with access to investment capital would build the more impressive tower mills, for both their operational efficiencies and the architectural prestige they brought to their owners. Langdon and Watts suggest, however, that we look less at the lords and more to the skilled craftsmen who built the mills. Extant records suggest that carpenters, who were often given the title of "millwright," frequently held supervisory roles in tower construction projects. Their predilection for timber over quarried stone may prove with further research to best explain English architectural preferences in mill design. Historians "have been too inclined to accept top-down theories, such as those based upon seigneurial power, to explain early technologies. We need instead to view these technologies through the eyes of those who actually built or created them."

Set in the post World War II context of technological optimism about miracle technologies such as DDT and Penicillin, J. L. Anderson's "War on Weeds: Iowa Farmers and Growth-Regulator Herbicides" tracks the strategies of Iowa farmers as they adopted herbicides (initially 2,4-D dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) for weed control. The story's background—postwar farm labor scarcity and the tight squeeze between input costs and crop sale revenue—helps explain the farmers' enthusiastic embrace of the new chemical technologies. Extant weed control methods, in particular plowing, growing season re-cultivations, and fence line mowing, were labor and fuel intensive. The new herbicides killed targeted weed species without damaging crop plants. It gradually became clear, however, that herbicides also created ecological vacuums that opened the fields to invasions of herbicide-tolerant weed species, such as foxtail and quackgrass. These required, in their turn, a blend of more tightly focussed herbicides at a growing annual cost. Farmers absorbed the higher costs as they redesigned weed control technologies from their user perspective. Anderson's study contributes a statewide, fine grain analysis of the costs, uncertainties and successes that led farmers to invest money and their creative attention in continually evolving chemical strategies to reduce their dependence on the tractor drawn plow and its attendant costs. "Exploring the agency of farmers in addition to the contributions of manufacturers and experts provides a richer understanding of the late-twentieth-century industrialization of America's rural landscape." Readers of Technology and Culture who have been following recent studies of user influence on technological design will find this a helpful case study.

Roads are, by definition, contested technologies. Where to put them? How wide to build them? How to balance surface durability and drainage against speed-oriented width, gradient and curve radius? In his "Roads without Rails: European Highway-Network Building and the Desire for Long-Range Motorized Mobility," Gijs Mom traces a century long and multi-nation debate about the primary technological purpose of Western Europe's roads. Legacy roads—by 1900 essentially dust-free public spaces allowing access to adjacent shops, offices, churches and homes—were increasingly seen as competing for funding with broad thoroughfares designed to move traffic through ambient surroundings as quickly as possible. Mom reminds us, however, that "unlike railroads, highways were not built 'from scratch'; rather, . . . they were superimposed on an existing hierarchical system." Mom argues that centralized governmental forces tended to sell high-speed highways, often at the expense of the older, locally-oriented roads, by invoking the fantasy of long distance travel opening Europeans to a wider world...