Forty-fourth Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology: “Science, Technology, and Medicine between the Global and the Local,” Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 24–29 July 2017

The forty-fourth ICOHTEC symposium took place in Rio de Janeiro as part of the twenty-fifth International Congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST). Traditionally, the two organizations meet together every four years. The ICOHTEC theme this year was “Science, Technology, and Medicine between the Global and the Local.” As the society of professional historians, ICOHTEC contributed more in terms of scholarship, originality of the themes proposed, and number of sessions and participants. Fifty-one research results were presented in various papers of the following thirteen ICOHTEC panels.

• • History of Tourism: What Can the History of Technology Contribute? (Organizers: Stefan Poser and Per Lundin)

• • West–East Transfer of Technology during the Cold War (Organizers: Timo Myllyntaus and Elena Kochetkova)

• • Twelfth Annual Symposium of the Social History of Military Technology (Organizers: Bart Hacker and Ciro Paoletti)

• • Visions of Urban Mobility in the Global Age from the 1890s to the 1970s (Organizers: Eike-Christian Heine and Sławomir Łotysz)

• • Environmental and Energy Issues: Global and Regional, Long-Term and Short-Term (Organizers: Anthony Stranges and Ana Paula Silva)

• • Epidemics and Technologies, Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries (Organizers: Catarina Caetano da Rosa, Anne Rasmussen, and Nils Kessel)

• • The Workflow of Oil: Upstream, Midstream, Downstream Technologies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Organizers: Francesco Gerali and Basil Evangelidis)

• • Unconventional History: Sixty Years of Science and Technology in Hydraulic Fracturing (Organizers: Francesco Gerali and Raechel Lutz)

• • Problems in Introducing New Energy Technology (Organizers: Timo Myllyntaus and Sławomir Łotysz)

• • Science, Innovations, and Patents (Organizers: Timo Myllyntaus and Sławomir Łotysz)

• • Politics in Constructing Infrastructure (Organizers: Timo Myllyntaus and Sławomir Łotysz)

• • Taking New Directions (Organizers: Timo Myllyntaus and Sławomir Łotysz)

• • Visions and Realities of Automation in the Twentieth Century (Organizers: Lars Bluma and Timo Myllyntaus)

ICOHTEC’s travel grant committee awarded seven travel grants to scholars from Belgium, England, Germany, Romania, Scotland, South Korea, and the United States. Two awardees were first-time presenters with ICOHTEC and, following a 2016 decision by the Board of Officers, they are eligible for a one-year membership free of charge.

As we do every four years, when our symposium is a part of the ICHST, ICOHTEC elected its new officers. This year we organized an electronic ballot prior to the meeting in Rio, so the new officers could swiftly take on their new duties just after the congress ends. The officers for 2017–21 are:

• • President—Sławomir Łotysz (Poland)

• • Secretary General—Stefan Poser (Germany)

• • Vice President—Yoel Bergman (Israel)

• • Treasurer—Timo Myllyntaus (Finland)

• • ICON Editor—Hermione Giffard (United States/Netherlands)

• • Newsletter Editor—Francesco Gerali (Italy/United States)

In a special session ICOHTEC awarded our two annual prizes to young scholars. The Turriano ICHOHTEC book prize was awarded to Brice Cossart for his dissertation “Les artilleurs et la Monarchie Catholique: Fondements technologiques et scientifiques d’un empire transocéanique” (“The Gunners and the Catholic Monarch War: Technology and Science in the Shaping of a Transoceanic Empire”), defended at the European University Institute (Florence) in 2016. The Maurice Daumas article prize was awarded to Gemma Cirac Claveras for her paper, “Factories of Satellite Data Remote Sensing and Physical Earth Sciences in France,” which was published in ICON 21 (2015): 24–50. As Cossart was present at the conference, we organized a panel to discuss his book, after an extensive comment by Dr. Patrice Bret.

On Monday 24 July, ICOHTEC’s opening meetings explored several aspects of East–West technology and know-how transfer in the cold war decades. The first session, approached the theme from the point of view of a minor political entity, Finland, and one specialized industry, shipbuilding. Aaro Sahari, University of Helsinki; Timo Myllyntaus, University of Turku; and Saara Matala, Aalto University, presented...