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n o t e s Introduction • Technology’s Middle Ground 1. “A Stitch in Time, Etc., as Applied to Automobiling,” Horseless Age 8, 8 May 1901, 125–26. 2. Robert Bruce, “The Place of the Automobile,” Outing Magazine 36, October 1900, 65. Outing Magazine was not an auto industry trade publication but a sport and leisure magazine aimed at upper-middle-class readers. 3. This survey may even underestimate the number of motorists who do not work on their own cars because the readers of Popular Mechanics are more likely than most to do their own work. “Owners Reports,” Popular Mechanics, 15 February 1994, 169–211. 4. Thomas Acton and Gary Mundy, eds., Romani Culture and Gypsy Identity (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997); David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Pierre Claude Reynard, “Unreliable Mills: Maintenance Practices in Early Modern Papermaking,” Technology and Culture 40 (April 1999): 237–62; Donald Sharp and Michael Graham, eds., Village Handpump Technology: Research and Evaluation in Asia (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1982); Rama Lakshmi, “Mechanic ‘Sir’ Now a ‘Ma’am’: Low Caste Indian Women Repair Village Water Pumps,” Washington Post, 5 December 2004. 5. Consumers and users who mend or tinker with their own artifacts may, in the eyes of some scholars, be participating in acts of production, blurring the line between production and consumption. But it is not until they perform this work for pay on technology owned by others that their activities bring them into technology’s middle ground. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Nina Lerman, “From ‘Useful Knowledge’ to ‘Habits of Industry’: Gender, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Technical Education” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993); Aldren A. Watson, The Village Blacksmith (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1968); Jeannette Lasansky, To Draw, Upset, and Weld: The Work of the Pennsylvania Rural Blacksmith, 1742–1935 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Oral Traditions Project, Union County Historical Society, 1980); Kenneth Dunshee, The Village Blacksmith: A Story of His Metal and Mettle (Watkins Glen, N.Y.: Century House, 1957). 6. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999); Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York: Viking, 2004); Stephen R. Barley and Julian E. Orr, eds., Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 7. On the limited scholarly studies of the auto repair industry, see the Essay on Sources. 8. The mechanic’s occupation is not stigmatized to the degree Conrad Saunders describes for kitchen porters and sweepers, but as we will see, the occupation’s early and close association with servile status and livery is significant. Saunders, Social Stigma of Occupations: The Lower Grade Worker in Service Organizations (Westmead, Eng.: Gower Publishing, 1981). 9. Microsoft Works version 4.5 running on this author’s computer includes a “task wizard” feature offering a form letter entitled “Your mechanic tried to rip me off”—indicating both widespread distrust and the distinction between “my mechanic” and “your mechanic.” 10. Lesley Hazleton, Confessions of a Fast Woman (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992), 120–24. 11. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid credit psychologist Jerome Bruner for this distinction between “learning about” and “learning to be.” Brown and Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000). 12. See John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); John Margolies, Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993). 13. This passage draws on the title of Walter Vincenti’s study, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 14. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); Douglas Harper, Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 15. While the term skill shows up occasionally in this study, I have tried throughout to refer to the knowledge and abilities that various workers brought to the repair of automobiles as technological knowledge, a phrase that allows for broad interpretation. It avoids the unnecessarily strong male gender connotations of the...

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