In This Issue

The Ocean Steam Ship Company of Liverpool (better known as the Blue Funnel Line) is celebrated by maritime historians and historians of marine engineering for having introduced the compound engine to the Far East cargo trade, thereby dooming the famous China tea clippers. In "'Avoiding Equally Extravagance and Parsimony': The Moral Economy of the Ocean Steamship," Crosbie Smith, Ian Higginson, and Phillip Wolstenholme argue that the local culture within which the Blue Funnel Line's founders, brothers Alfred and Philip Henry Holt, built their steamship line was characterized by a "moral economy" they shared with their fellow members of Renshaw Street Unitarian Chapel in Liverpool. The Holts sought to design and operate vessels whose "scientific" characteristics of economy and reliability would aspire to, and reflect, the natural and moral perfection of Creation. Reading earlier lessons of steamship practice in the light of their Unitarian belief, they worked to steer a middle course, prioritizing "not profit and competition but wider concerns—such as the design and operation of strong, reliable, safe, and simple ships."

In "The Rockets' Red Glare: Technology, Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union," Asif Siddiqi notes that scholars have tended to treat the history of Soviet rocketry as an episode of linear technological evolution interrupted only by the Great Purges of 1937-38, when the Soviet secret police arrested and shot several engineers. But, writes Siddiqi, new evidence that has become available in the post-Soviet era suggests that bitter conflicts over the adoption of specific technologies plagued RNII, the Soviet rocketry institute, even before the Purges; indeed, these technical disagreements contributed to the terror at the institute. Although conflicts over technology are common in most research and development milieux, Soviet R&D institutions in the 1930s were unable to resolve technical dissension in a way that facilitated radical innovation. Debates over technological choice, Siddiqi argues, affected the trajectory of Soviet rocketry more profoundly than did the Purges. Moreover, he suggests, this new picture of the history of Soviet rocketry in the 1930s provides for a broader understanding of how radical innovation evolves under great social, political, and economic strain.

During the course of the twentieth century, Dutch hydraulic engineers developed different types of models for tidal calculations in an effort to predict the propagation of ocean tides into bays and estuaries and up tidal rivers. Their aim was to estimate the effects of ever more ambitious hydraulic works on water levels and currents at inshore locations. Cornelis Disco and Jan van den Ende contend in "'Strong, Invincible Arguments'? Tidal Models as Management Instruments in Twentieth-Century Dutch Coastal Engineering" that these models were motivated not primarily by technical considerations but rather by engineers' need to manage the networks of stakeholders in their hydraulic projects. As the scale and risk of those projects grew, engineers' ability to mobilize support depended increasingly on establishing public trust in their predictions of tidal propagation. Early models developed for the Zuider Zee had only to assuage fears about the effects of an established plan; they could be slow and laborious. In the Delta region during the 1930s, where different engineering and political options had to be weighed, rapidity, flexibility, and accuracy all became more important, and the management potential of the tidal models became their most salient feature.

Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld suggest that debates surrounding the introduction of new musical instruments illuminate the norms underlying musical practice and culture. In "'Should One Applaud?' Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music," they detail the introduction of three twentieth-century instruments: the player piano, the "noise instruments" of the futurists, and the electronic music synthesizer. The responses to these new instruments by classical performers and in the realm of popular culture reveal how traditional norms of musical creativity associated with personal achievement have been supplemented with new norms of democratized leisure and how, with the emergence of the noise instruments and synthesizer, a new value has been placed upon "uncertainty recontrolled." In the end, the gradual alignment of old values and...