Awards

The Edelstein Prize

The Edelstein Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology published in the preceding three years. Established as the Dexter Prize in 1968 through the generosity of the late Sidney Edelstein, a noted expert on the history of dyes and dye processes, founder of the Dexter Chemical Corporation, and 1988 recipient of SHOT's Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the Edelstein Prize is donated by Ruth Edelstein Barish and her family in memory of Sidney Edelstein and his commitment to excellence in scholarship in the history of technology. The winner of the 2001 Edelstein Prize was Gabrielle Hecht, for The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). The citation read:

In The Radiance of France, Gabrielle Hecht delivers a stirring and sophisticated tale about modern nuclear technology and modern culture in France. The narrative begins with the country defeated and disgraced at the end of World War II and extends though 1970, as France struggled to regain "grandeur" or "radiance" (in translation her title, "le rayonnement de la France," refers to "radiation" as well as "radiance"). More impressively, she gives a virtuoso historiographic performance in exploring the "mutual construction of technology, politics, and culture" (p. 10). Historians of technology will find in The Radiance of France an approach that takes us beyond the contextual and social-construction methodologies that have typified our field, one that deals forthrightly with technology's consequences for politics and culture without flirting with any strain of technological determinism.

Our citation spotlights her achievement in comprehending the place of technology in modern society. She opens up three black boxes--technology, politics, and culture--and shows how to understand them by tracing their complex interactions. The question asked by technologists in the 1950s and 1960s--"what was French about the French nuclear program?"--cannot be answered, she finds, in terms of a simple, homogeneous national style. Rather, Hecht uses this question to explore what French people thought about their nation, their technology, and themselves. Opening the black box of technology allows Hecht to take her readers inside the designs for French nuclear plants, and to see when and where they were meant to produce heat for electricity or plutonium for weapons. Opening the black box of politics allows her to show the ways French politicians and engineers alike converted discussions of French nuclear power into debates about the role of France in the postwar world. She shows that engineers working on the early gas-graphite reactors fully accepted that they were doing politics right alongside and inseparable from their practicing technology. Later, in their campaign for light-water reactors, French advocates of these (U.S.-derived) systems strove to separate "technology" from "politics," constructing new criteria to define the "one best way" forward. And opening the black box of culture permits her to delve with equal facility into shifting national identities, labor-union discourse, as well as local citizens' responses to a nuclear plant looming over their vineyards. Her treatment of these disparate realms is impressive enough. Her real achievement is to give her readers subtle insights into technology, politics, and culture without using one to mechanistically "explain" another.

Hecht, then, deftly integrates narratives about workers, engineers, and politicians at several levels, using her investigation of technological changes as a lens to comprehend social and cultural changes. Her history of the French nuclear program is an exemplary work, at once "a history of technology and a history of France" (p. 4). In recognition of this twin achievement, The Radiance of France received the American Historical Association's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize "for a distinguished book by an American author in the field of European history," and we are proud indeed to award her the 2001 Edelstein Prize.

The Sally Hacker Prize

The Sally Hacker Prize was established in 1999 to recognize the best popular book written in the history of technology in the three years preceding the award. The prize recognizes books...