On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passe

The focus of my remarks tonight will be on the need for respect and toleration of seemingly obsolete approaches to scholarship in the history of technology, because these approaches may offer better bridges to certain of our external audiences than our most avant-garde scholarship.

My awareness of this phenomenon stems from my participation in the graduate program in industrial archaeology at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, a program that blends historical archaeology with the history of technology. The industrial archaeology program at Michigan Tech admits students from a variety of backgrounds: from history to engineering to anthropology and archaeology. For roughly a decade I have taught or cotaught a course designed to introduce industrial archaeology students to the history of technology. In that course students get at least a brief exposure to a range of literature from our field, from the old multivolume reference works edited by Maurice Daumas and Charles Singer, to single-volume syntheses like David Landes's Unbound Prometheus and Carroll Pursell's social history of American technology, to specialized monographs and scholarly articles from Technology and Culture and other journals. ¹ In the process, the course introduces students to various approaches to the history of technology, from internalism to contextualism to social construction.

At the end of the course, I have often asked these students what materials they enjoyed reading the most and what materials, apart from enjoyment, they saw as potentially valuable for their future work. The answers that I received to the first question were about what I expected: the anthropologists enjoyed reading work that anthropologists had written on the history of technology, like Anthony Wallace's St. Clair or Rockdale; the engineers enjoyed reading internalist-leaning contextual studies like David Billington's Robert Maillart's Bridges, and so on. ² It was the responses to the second question that sometimes surprised me and prompts this address. An answer that I frequently received from students with a background in historical archaeology, particularly if they already had some work experience, was Charles Singer's much maligned History of Technology. ³ When I asked why, they explained that in their work the first problem they often faced when dealing with technologically oriented sites was simply understanding and roughly dating what they were looking at. Singer was a potential help. It provided an easily accessible source of descriptions and illustrations of technological artifacts. The deeper questions of social context, race, class, and gender came only later, and their own disciplinary background (often from anthropology) helped them in these areas. What their responses suggested to me was that seemingly obsolete approaches to technological history might have more significance and value to certain groups who might have use for our scholarship than our latest, most avant-garde work.

In retrospect, this should not have been a surprise, for, in a way, it simply reflected the nature of technology. Change in technology does not follow the pattern laid down by Thomas Kuhn for the sciences, where significant change occurs not through a series of small adjustments in the knowledge base but through massive theoretical paradigm shifts. ⁴ In effect, instead of repairing, improving, or enlarging an existing structure, the old one is ripped down and replaced. In technology, to continue the metaphor, the old structure is not torn down to begin anew; instead, a new wing is added, and the older portion continues in use, even if more and more activities are moved into the new wing. Jet aircraft did not completely displace their predecessors. Propeller aircraft remain in productive use--as someone from isolated Houghton, Michigan, up on Lake Superior can personally attest--even a half century after turbojets replaced them in most areas of commercial and military aviation. ⁵ Social and economic factors may shift significant activities into the new addition, but the old wing still has utility as housing for guests or for recreation or for storage.

It seems to me...