In This Issue

Scholars have largely ascribed the rise of "virtual community" to the widespread adoption of computer networking technologies. In "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: Revisiting the WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community," Fred Turner examines the history of the system from which the term "virtual community" first entered everyday language, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (or WELL). Turner argues that as both an idea and a social formation, virtual community emerged at the intersection of three forces: the appearance of public computer networks, the persistence of countercultural social ideals from the 1960s, and a shift toward networked forms of economic activity. In the process, he brings together analytical frameworks from organizational sociology, American cultural history, and science and technology studies to illuminate the complex ways in which technological, social, and cultural forms coevolve.

The use of DDT for disease control is one of the major public health events of the twentieth century. DDT's insecticidal capabilities were discovered in Switzerland in 1939, and applications for the control of human diseases were pioneered by American researchers in 1942–44. As Darwin Stapleton shows in "A Lost Chapter in the Early History of DDT: The Development of Anti-Typhus Technologies by the Rockefeller Foundation's Louse Laboratory, 1942–43," Rockefeller Foundation scientists played a key role by collaborating with a Rockefeller field team in Algeria that was focused on preventing typhus outbreaks. Jointly, they developed the technologies needed to make DDT an effective lousicide, technologies that were soon tested and proved in quelling a typhus outbreak of in Naples.

In the early days of the American ice and refrigeration industries, most operators used ammonia-compression technology to create cold. Jonathan Rees's "'I Did Not Know . . . Any Danger Was Attached': Safety Consciousness in the Early American Ice and Refrigeration Industries" examines the fire risks posed by this technology and the path by which these industries came to use it more safely. Rees observes that the initial push toward safety came from high insurance costs, but because of frequent explosions at refrigeration and cold-storage facilities states and municipalities began to pass safety codes by the mid-1910s. During the 1920s, as new refrigerants were developed and new domestic uses for refrigeration (such as air conditioning) proposed, manufacturers made safety a top priority so that consumers would be comfortable bringing these technologies into their homes.

In "Local Engineering and Systems Engineering: Cultural Conflict at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, 1960–1966," Yasushi Sato examines NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center as a local engineering community in the period during which the Saturn launch vehicles for the Apollo program were developed there. The center, whose roots can be traced back to prewar Germany, had established a mature, organically integrated capability for rocket building by 1960. With Wernher von Braun as director, it was a unified, stable, self-sufficient community, in which particular local values and assumptions prevailed. During the 1960s, NASA headquarters promoted systems engineering, a different approach than von Braun's, and one that prized clarity, predictability, and accountability. Sato argues that systems engineering was out of place at Marshall, whose engineers maintained hardware-oriented, conservative, unarticulated engineering practices. While the Marshall engineers gradually and reluctantly changed their practices in response to the pressure brought to bear on them by NASA, Sato seeks to demonstrate that they held to their engineering style where it was inseparable from the social foundations of their community.

Lastly, Paul Ceruzzi contributes a meditation on technology and historians. In "Moore's Law and Technological Determinism: Reflections on the History of Technology," Ceruzzi notes that while historians of technology generally object to determinism in their writing and teaching, they validate it in their attitudes toward the very instruments they use in their work. The implications of that contradiction are the subject of this thought-provoking essay.