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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) v-vi



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In this Issue


Much ink and many pixels have already been spent on the centennial of flight, and a few more pages here will not be amiss. Guillaume de Syon leads off a special section with a deft tour through some of the many books published over the past year on the history of flight in general and the centennial specifically. Catherine Allen profiles the newly opened Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, and Deborah Douglas and Russell Douglass Jones review new exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum and the Henry Ford Museum. (Elsewhere in this issue, Robert Casey debuts a new occasional department on some of the interesting artifacts to be found in the collections of the Henry Ford with a piece on a noteworthy experimental aircraft of the interwar period, the Dayton-Wright RB-1.) And Robert Post offers an extended reflection on the long-drawn-out saga of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution. Whether or not that tale has now come to a close with the famous plane's unveiling at the Udvar-Hazy Center, Post's essay is a reminder that though we may concern ourselves with the past, we must not lose sight of our obligations to the future.

Lissa Roberts observes that "while historians usually tie the early history of steam engines to mining, manufacturing, and the growth of urban water supply systems, they actually owed much of their development to the gardening interests of inventors and their patrons." Dutch interest in steam power, in particular, was "intimately connected to the country's preoccupation with land reclamation and water management." In "An Arcadian Apparatus: The Introduction of the Steam Engine into the Dutch Landscape," Roberts outlines the events leading up to the construction of the first Dutch steam engine, at Groenendaal, the country estate of the Amsterdam banker John Hope. She examines "this concern with the landscape--whether on a private estate or in the 'national garden'" to assess "the historical significance of placing such a novel apparatus in the Dutch landscape, both physically and symbolically."

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, reformers in southern Europe sought to revitalize the political economy of the region. As Massimo Mazzotti puts it in "Enlightened Mills: Mechanizing Olive Oil Production in Mediterranean Europe," they believed that "political and social advancement . . . would follow naturally from economic liberalization and the introduction of new technologies." Olive oil production dominated commercial activity around the Mediterranean, so reformers naturally concentrated their attention on that industry. Traditional oil-manufacturing technology "was a constitutive element of southern European societies," Mazzotti writes, and the production of oil was thoroughly bound up with traditional landscapes and customs; reformers made headway "only where [they] succeeded in reshaping traditional ways of life as well as traditional machinery." Mazzotti traces the many points of conflict--"such issues as the nature of olive oil, trade, control of the production process, the conditions of ownership of land and machinery, work discipline and labor organization, and the forging of new power relations in southern European society"--that conditioned the technical features of mechanized oil production in Mediterranean Europe.

During the 1920s Sidney Pressey, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, developed and tried to market a machine he called the Automatic Teacher, a typewriter-like device that allowed students to drill and test themselves. It was, in Stephen Petrina's words, "a rich example of failure in the midst of modernist commitments to scientific and technological progress." In "Sidney Pressey and the Automation of Education, 1924­1934," Petrina details Pressey's effort to liberate teachers from the burdens of routine, repetitive tasks and free students from the straitjacket of conformity--not an intuitively obvious aim for a machine designed to automate education in a mass market. [End Page v]

Nasir Tyabji's "Gaining Technical Know-How in an Unequal World: Penicillin Manufacture in Nehru's India" is a case study in the dynamics of technology transfer. Tyabji notes that, while Jawaharlal Nehru believed science and technology to be keys to comprehensive economic development, he "understood...

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