This Issue

January's cover features the riveting image of a spindly-legged, large-bellied Brownie peering intently at a camera resting on two books. A child's fingers in the act of taking its picture complete the image. When Eastman Kodak introduced its one-dollar camera in 1900, Brownies had migrated from the realm of Scottish folklore to become the diminutive heroes in Preston Cox's immensely popular Brownie book series. They had also become ubiquitous icons for dozens of product endorsements. Cox's Brownies, Marc Olivier tells us, embodied turn-of-the-century America's passion for new technologies, democratic convictions, and global ambitions. In "George Eastman's Modern Stone-Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie," Olivier explores the century-old and now mostly forgotten marketing campaign for the little camera that could. The Brownie campaign built deliberately on Cox's reinvention of the Brownie's folkloric identity, and in the process it presented the camera as a link between twentieth-century high technology and a primordially reassuring evocation of magical force. In a long 1902 advertisement, George Eastman appears "in a city near the great inland seas" (Rochester, N.Y.) as a demiurge "having power over light and darkness." The Brownie would also allow children and women to bypass the male-dominated world of printed text and create the snapshot's simultaneously instantaneous and ancient archive of everyday life. "Rather than a hobby handed down to the masses by the leisure class," Olivier explains, "photography becomes a universal language, one that recalls the cave paintings of Lascaux more than the oil paintings of the Louvre." Olivier ultimately renders a mixed verdict. The camera puts creativity into the hands of nearly everyone in the society where Kodak operated; Kodak's bare-knuckled marketing campaign aimed at "junkies hooked on a brand before they learn to tie their shoes." From 1900's snapshots to today's camcorders, popular photography operates in a liminal zone, a powerful new oral culture of sensual imagery side by side with an anxious drive to maintain an archive that captures and stores the immediate intimacies of human beings and human events.

Boel Berner ("Rationalizing Technical Work: Visions and Realities of the Systematic Drawing Office in Sweden, 1890–1940") returns T&C readers to the study of technical drawing, a matter of more than occasional interest in these pages. She studies a half century's efforts to move Swedish industrial design toward the modernist goal of precise, standardized drawing practice. The move to specialized design drawing is best seen by comparing the individualized and almost casual drawing practices of the nineteenth century, where design and production operated in the same close quarters and often in the same human beings, to the mid-twentieth-century draftsmen "who worked with standardized components and used a specialized language unintelligible to the uninitiated." Driven by increasingly global competition, Sweden's larger industries introduced hierarchically organized teams that produced vast numbers of precise and specialized parts drawings according to agreed drafting standards. One of the many benefits of Berner's project is the eye-opening detail with which she describes the tools of the drawing trade and the negotiations aimed at establishing national and even global standards. The modern drawing room implied both a compliant production workforce schooled in the new iconography and a growing distance between the place where designing occurs and the place where production happens. Decades of attention to standardized regularity in industrial drawing offices foundered repeatedly on the temptation of what one 1937 textbook called the "splendid isolation from the workshop." The half-century transformation was irregular and contentious, and the older style of close relations between designers and producers remained vigorous in a host of smaller engineering firms.

Sally M. Horrocks ("Industrial Chemistry and Its Changing Patrons at the University of Liverpool, 1926–1951") follows Thomas Percy Hilditch (1886–1965) through a lifetime as chemist and eventual director of The University of Liverpool's Industrial Chemistry Department. Hilditch's career begins in Liverpool's industrial hinterland, Merseyside, whose global seaport oriented many of its chemical firms toward processing raw materials from the far flung Empire and whose local research connections...