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Introduction to Chapter 5 Theriot's essay, itself a sophisticated contribution to its own field of interest, serves also as a bridge to the age of hierarchy in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his suggestive essay about James Emerson, Edwin T. Layton has revealed the notions and actions of a vanquished faction of inventors in one of the age's most terrific cultural struggles, between champions of early and mid-nineteenth-century democratic folk culture on the one hand and those of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century expert culture on the other. The professionalization of science and the emergence of so-called science-based technology in that era undermined the position of the independent craftsman or mechanic, that celebrated folk hero of American culture. James Emerson fought for the tinkerer, who typically made so-called emulative devices, that is, relatively small improvements on preexisting devices without the assistance of special scientific knowledge. Indeed, the invention for which Emerson was best known was a trivial example of the craft-based invention of emulation, the mustache cup. Its purpose was to keep facial hair out of a beverage cup; Emerson's idea was to install a comb across the cup's mouth, definitely a small, commonsensical improvement on an existing device. Clearly this was the independent mechanic 's turf. Born in New Hampshire, Emerson was a self-taught mechanic and inventor . He worked at a variety of trades, including that of millwright. In the later 1860s he was invited to use his relatively crude dynamometer at Lowell, Massachusetts, to measure power and efficiency in water turbines; throughout the 1870S he tested the claims of turbine manufacturers as to the virtues of their products, chiefly for the water company of Holyoke, in 91 Introduction: Chapter 5 western Massachusetts. In 1880 he was replaced by an engineer, even though his measurements had had a rough-and-ready utility and accuracy. In sum, he could not compete with the credentials and prestige of the new scientific engineers. Layton suggests several reasons for Emerson's dismissal, including his radical politics and the superior precision of the engineers' devices and methods. Emerson went to contest the new breed of scientific engineers' claims to precise measurement of the power and efficiency of the region's industrial water turbines. Precise measurement was the scientific engineers' substitute for the rule-of-thumb methods that independent mechanics such as Emerson used, and the battle was symptomatic of the struggle, not over technical knowledge and its utility as a general proposition in industry and technology, but over whose technical knowledge, and which technical community -the new scientifically trained engineers or the traditional craftsmen -would triumph. Emerson's strategy was to offer what Layton dubs a reasonable measurement for far less money in this contest, appealing all the time to the old-time virtues of democratic craftsmanship and knowledge. Emerson thus wished to advance the interests of the entire class of inventors to which he belonged, the traditional craft-oriented mechanics. Layton perceptively draws parallels between the independent inventor, or the craftsman -mechanic, and the yeoman farmer, yet another American cultural hero. He argues further that Emerson's populist technology was a kind of cultural construct as myth, for clearly he, as a craftsman-inventor, was fighting a rearguard action in his own time on behalf of his millwright colleagues. Of course his argument that craft-based inventors could still meet the nation's technical needs was undercut by his own adoption of some of the new scientific techniques. Here indeed was a battle royal, at least symbolically, over what kind of technical knowledge mattered and whom it benefited and whom it did not. Layton insists that the importance of the craftsman or mechanic was increasingly a myth, although it was one that Emerson continued to invent or even reinvent. Emerson railed against those important cultural constructs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hierarchy , centralization, standardization, and, above all, expertise. EDWIN T LAYTON The Inventor of the Mustache Cup: James Emerson and Populist Technology, 1870-1900 James Emerson was one of the inventors of the mustache cup. It was a trivial example of an important class of inventions. Brooke Hindle has reminded us ofa craft-based type ofinvention that Adam Smith and other eighteenthcentury figures categorized as "emulation."1 For our purposes "emulation" refers to relatively small improvements in existing artifacts based on craft knowledge, common sense, and experience but without any significant aid from science. Though Emerson...

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