The Cost of Inventiveness: Labor's Struggle with Management's Machine

Historians of technology have spent much fruitful time and effort defining technology and explaining how crucial inventions came to be made. This was a useful exercise when our field was carving out a niche for itself amid other evolving branches of historical inquiry. Less statistically focused than economic history, we insisted on evidence of specific technologies to test theoretical paradigms. More oriented to inventions and their diffusion than labor history, we concentrated less on the dynamics of labor disputes than the tools of manufacture. Borrowing from business history, we paid more attention to the productive elements than techniques of sales and diffusion. Throughout our analysis of the past, our eye was always on the means by which humans transformed the environment, how society gained control of physical realities, and what these efforts achieved or lost.

In the course of these years it was natural that the machine in itself came to have a privileged place. Individuals with special knowledge of gears, steam engines, and industrial tools received an appropriate welcome, and some stalwart members of the society focused primarily on nuts and bolts. There was the person who ran a railroad museum, and whose passion was exclusively the gauge, speed, and size of locomotives, and there were others fascinated by medieval water mills, stained glass windows, or gyroscopes. These were loyal members of SHOT, devoted amateurs, museum curators, and professors, happy to have found a home where others were also dedicated to the study of material culture, and where their preoccupation with the internal workings of their favorite device found standing. It was a time when the history of technology was just becoming a respected field of study, before universities had installed programs of science, technology, and society, before there were named chairs and scholars actually trained in the discipline. In those days the industrial revolution preoccupied us, but there was also occasional consideration of the odd Roman waterwheel or the Babylonian surveying apparatus to suggest that the history of technology reached back further than one might suppose.

It was appropriate for us to concentrate then on defining the field. While building on the foundation laid by Abbott Payson Usher, Charles Singer, A. R. Hall, Charles Ballot, Maurice Daumas, and so many others, our task was to extend the breadth of technology at the same time that we asked what exactly could be included in its definition. We proceeded from focusing on the classic big three technologies that defined the industrial revolution—the Newcomen-Watt steam engine, the Arkwright spinning jennies, and new processes for smelting iron—to an understanding that less dramatic inventions, such as the sewing needle, the potter's wheel, and the screw, have a legitimate place on the roster of technology. Then we widened our view of technological development in human history to encompass both the earliest archaeological discoveries—flint, hammer, the string revolution—and tomorrow's new electronic weaponry. Thanks to the contributions of Thomas Hughes, Lynn White, and other scholars, our definition of technology grew to include systems, and with the legitimization of intangibles we began to understand that educational systems, customs, social hierarchy all played a role in technological advance or the lack of it. "Imagining technological history," as a novelist would put it, took on new complexity and form.

We already had the space to consider technology in its human context, because the founders of our field, led by Mel Kranzberg, insisted that our journal be devoted to technology and culture. This was their effort, to bring technology in from the internalist's workshop, where it was a curiosity at best, to its rightful place as a core motor of human life. We had the space, even before we had the momentum (or the wit) to explore the ramifications of technology's emergence as it grew within the social context.

Our focus is still on the conundrum of industrialization, but we are viewing it...