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  • In This Issue

The thesis that an industrial revolution occurred in the European Middle Ages was first advanced in the 1930s and 1940s by Lewis Mumford, Marc Bloch, and Eleanora Carus-Wilson. It was subsequently taken up by other well-known historians of technology, including Bertrand Gille and Lynn White Jr. The argument in favor of this thesis rests to an important degree on an apparent rapid increase in the use of nonhuman sources of power in Europe from the tenth or eleventh century onward, and especially on an increase in the number of water mills and their application to industrial processes. In "Industrial Milling in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: A Survey of the Evidence for an Industrial Revolution in Medieval Europe," Adam Lucas examines this argument in the light of recent scholarship on medieval milling. Lucas argues that a careful assessment of the evidence reveals that innovation in medieval industry was highly restricted geographically, and that future research might profitably focus on such exceptional areas to better understand the transition from medieval to modern industry.

In "The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Printed Banknotes as Industrial Currency," Frances Robertson considers questions raised by the introduction of printed banknotes in Britain between 1800 and 1855. For Robertson, the key problem, suggested by the work of Walter Benjamin, lies in the apparent tension between two contradictory requirements: a bank-note must be perceived as authentic, yet must also be endlessly reproducible. At the time, in the context of new industrial papermaking and print production technologies, the fear of not being able to discriminate between a good note or a forgery was well justified. Robertson questions the opposition of authenticity and technical reproducibility posed by Benjamin through an analysis of how trust was established in paper currency during the period that witnessed the "miracle of new credit creation" in Britain. Although published texts contributed to a rhetoric of official and technological policing of production, Robertson argues that the material qualities of the banknote itself, by virtue of its appearance as a product of mechanical mass reproduction, helped equally to build belief in its authenticity.

Using as a case study the introduction of floating pneumatic grain elevators into the port of Rotterdam between 1901 and 1907, Hugo van Driel and Johan Schot seek to develop a multilevel perspective on radical innovation. Changes in what van Driel and Schot call the sociotechnical landscape—specifically, the strong growth of the grain trade and in bulk grain shipments—created windows of opportunity for the mechanization of grain handling in the port. However, important users—the traders in particular—were content with the existing technological regime and tried to optimize it instead of permitting it to be displaced. Innovators responded by attempting to find or create niche applications for the new technology, but were met with continued opposition. Eventually, labor resistance transformed a conflict over the merits of a new technology into a battle for control of the port of Rotterdam, which led in turn to a reappraisal of the technological regime by the major groups of employers. In the end, a new, sector-wide joint venture mechanized grain handling at Rotterdam within a couple of years after 1907—an unusually rapid process of radical innovation.

Holography, the technology of three-dimensional imaging, has repeatedly been reconceptualized by new communities of users since its beginnings in 1947, a process that Sean Johnston details in "Shifting Perspectives: Holography and the Emergence of Technical Communities." Conceived as a means of improving electron microscopy, holography was revitalized in the early 1960s by engineer-scientists at classified laboratories. The invention promoted the transformation of a would-be discipline (optical engineering) and spawned [End Page i] limited artist-scientist collaborations. However, a separate artisanal community promoted a distinct, countercultural form of holography via a revolutionary technology: the sandbox optical table. Their tools, sponsorship, products, literature, and engagement with the wider culture differentiated these communities, which instituted a limited "technological trade" between them. The story strikingly illustrates the coevolution of new technology along with highly dissimilar user groups, neither of which fostered the secure establishment of a profession or discipline. Johnston's case study generalizes the concept of "research technology" and extends the ideas...

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