Forty-second Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology and Fourth Meeting of the History of Electrical Technology: “History of High-Technologies and Their Socio-Cultural Contexts,” Tel Aviv, Israel, 16–20 August 2015

The forty-second annual meeting of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) took place at Tel Aviv University from 16 to 20 August 2015. The conference was held together with the fourth meeting on the History of Electrical Technology (HISTELCON), organized by members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and its History Center. The main theme, “History of High-Technologies and Their Socio-Cultural Contexts,” was not only appropriate regarding the strength of the Israeli high-tech sector but also stands at the core of the research conducted by members of both ICOHTEC and HISTELCON. The presentations covered a variety of topics that, among others, included the diverse roles of computers in sociocultural contexts (one of the main themes of this year’s conference), technological inventions and innovations, environmental pollution, technology in the fine arts, and military history. More than a hundred participants from twenty-four countries, ranging from graduate students to established scholars, engaged in vivid discussions concerning more than ninety academic presentations and participated in daily social events.¹

The conference was organized by Yoel Bergman (an independent scholar associated with Tel Aviv University and ICOHTEC’s treasurer) and Shaul Katzir and their team from Tel Aviv University. Uncommon at conferences of this size, the meeting included at least one plenary session each day: two invited lectures, prizewinners’ sessions, and two plenary sessions. Participants pointed out the contribution of these sessions for the success of the meeting. Still, parallel sessions constituted most of the program.

The conference opened with the Kranzberg Lecture, delivered by Robert Fox (University of Oxford). He reviewed the factors that contributed to the notion that science-based industries appeared to be failing in France at the turn of the twentieth century, explaining why “mentality” or “technological style” are inappropriate analytical categories. Fox convincingly showed that on the one hand, most French scientific inventions were hard to transform into economic enterprises. These circumstances increased the feeling that France was failing. On the other hand, however, companies themselves were innovative in finding new business portfolios. This can easily be overlooked when analyzing only the inventions at universities and at great laboratories.

In a second major event of the conference, the keynote lecturer, Leo Corry (Tel Aviv University), questioned Alan Turing’s alleged fatherhood of the modern computer. While he did not deny that Turing was one of the many contributors to the development of the modern computer, Corry put his contribution in context. He showed that Turing’s mathematical ideas were quite far from the universal flexible machine concept, which is sometimes attributed to Turing. Moreover, while the idea originated with theoreticians, technical people who were working on solving real-world problems, according to Corry, also led to this crucial concept. The talk reminded participants of the important difference between an attractive popular story and history. Corry’s warning against a strong emphasis on concepts in the history of computing notwithstanding, a session held by four Israeli historians and philosophers reexamined the idea of universality in computing from Leibniz’s vision of the universal machine, through Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Turing to contemporary quantum computers (which are not “Turing machines”).

In another contribution on the development of computer technology, Boaz Miller (Bar Ilan University) and Stav Kaufmann (Tel Aviv University) showed that the algorithm later used for “profiling” users was not conceived for that aim, and that this situation led to neglect of the related ethical issues in the technical algorithmic literature for quite a while. In another presentation, Mathias Mutz (RWTH Aachen University) analyzed how computers affected the concept of time. Applying STS methods, Galit Welner (Ben-Gurion University) claimed that due to the various ways by which cell phones store personal information, they became a memory prosthesis. Piotr Marciniak and Agnieszka Rumież (both of Poznań University of Technology) examined...