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  • In This Issue

The three articles in this issue of Technology and Culture all concern the history of technology in Scandinavia, and all are contributed by Scandinavian scholars—testimony to the gathering strength of the discipline in that part of the world. In “Skill and Technical Change in the Swedish Iron Industry, 1750–1860,” Göran Rydén engages an issue of enduring interest, the interaction of technique and technological change, of skill and machine. Drawing on the insights of a diverse array of scholars to construct a framework for a case study focused on a single county in Sweden in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Rydén argues that the “story of bar iron manufacture in Sweden . . . exemplifies the tenacity of skill in the midst of technological change.” It is a point somewhat at odds with prevailing views among historians of industrialization, he observes. “The causes of the industrial revolution are conventionally located either on the supply side, in technological innovation, or on the demand side, in an expanding market.” In the conventional view, “[s]hifts in this relationship between supply and demand will then, through technological change, lead to a drop in demand for skill and a resultant de-skilling of workers.” But the interplay between technology, skill, and market has in fact, Rydén contends, been much less linear and neat.

P. S. Krøyer’s painting The Industrialists is a turn-of-the-century paean to industry, as Henry Nielsen and Birgitte Wistoft observe in their article “Painting Technological Progress.” It is also, they suggest, a guide to “a powerful network of businessmen, academics, and government officials who seem to have played a hitherto unsuspected role in Danish industrial development.” The linchpin in that network was the man who commissioned the painting, Gustav Hagemann. Working in part from Hagemann’s own account of the genesis of the painting, which they have lately rediscovered, Nielsen and Wistoft outline the dimensions of that network of industrialists, which “transcended traditional boundaries between technological segments of society.”

Lars Olsson’s “‘To See How Things Were Done in a Big Way’: Swedish Naval Architects in the United States, 1890–1915,” explores the story of Swedish engineering and naval architecture students who, following graduation, left home to work for a while in the United States and then returned [End Page i] to Sweden to apply the skills garnered from that experience in the industrializing Sweden of the early twentieth century. Their influence on Swedish shipbuilding was significant, Olsson argues, as the knowledge they gained of production technologies and organizational techniques was crucial to the great expansion of Swedish shipbuilding between the world wars.

Time does not really heal all wounds, but it does allow the smoke of battle to clear, and that permits a clearer view of the fought-over ground. Such perspective is one of the things we sought in putting together a special section on The Last Act, the Smithsonian Institution’s ill-fated exhibit (never mounted) on the Enola Gay and the end of the Second World War. We asked a distinguished group of historians of technology, Otto Mayr, Alex Roland, and Pamela Walker Laird, to read a selection of the books that appeared in the wake of that controversy and then to comment on the books, the course of events leading up to the exhibit’s cancellation, and the implications for historians. Donna Braden’s companion essay on the planning of the Clockworks exhibit at Henry Ford Museum extends the reach of this section beyond the sometimes narrow precincts of the national capital. The result is a thoughtful and thought-provoking, reasoned and reasonable contribution to a debate that will most certainly revive in future.

The history of technology provides a frame of reference for both the phenomenon of cyberspace and the stream of commentary on it. Geoffrey Bowker illustrates the latter with his essay “Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage” (the title a double play on words worth a virtual doubletake). The literature of cyberspace is removed from the history of computing artifacts, Bowker observes; rather, it undertakes the task of outlining “what might be called the cultural ecology of Internet technologies.” From it he...

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