A Companion to American Technology (review)

Neither a textbook nor a staid encyclopedic reference work, this volume represents an effort to map out the terrain of the history of American technology, staking boundaries around fields of past and present concern to scholars and pointing toward future explorations. Yet for all its historiographical importance, A Companion to American Technology also serves as a handy reference—particularly for college teachers preparing lectures or for graduate students preparing for exams. Both will appreciate its authoritative summaries of historical themes as well as its treasure trove of bibliographies.

Several of the essays are clearly intended for teachers. In the first of the book's five sections, Robert Gordon and James Williams tackle the period from European contact through the late nineteenth century. Both authors provide rich historical detail in remarkably few pages. Gordon surveys the tools and techniques of the colonial period, while Williams summarizes nineteenth-century industrialization. Historiographical debates remain in the background here; Williams, for instance, takes for granted the concept of an industrial "revolution," although other scholars might argue for an incremental pace of change using the same evidence.

The twentieth century is the focus of this volume, however, and this becomes clear in the second section, "Sites of Production." Still, longer-term historical perspectives are not absent. Joel Tarr's essay on urban technologies contrasts the walking city of the early nineteenth century to the networked and automobile-based cities of later periods, and editor Carroll Pursell traces the roots of modern production practices back to the eighteenth century. Here the "broadly historiographical" approach advertised on the book's dust jacket demonstrates its utility, as scholars reconsider the category of "production" in relation to homes, farms, and hospitals. Gail Cooper makes the important point that homes have always been workplaces, places where distinctions between production and consumption become blurred. Deborah Fitzgerald sees the technologies that transform plants and animals into fibers and foods as powerful lenses on both industrial agriculture and mass consumption. Medical technologies, James Edmonson notes, have made doctors into producers as they search for a "mechanical fix" to illness (p. 156). Betsy Mendelsohn provocatively argues that the relationship between technology and the environment involves the production of knowledge as much as the production of resources or of pollution.

Familiar categories of analysis are likewise reconsidered in the third section, "Sites of Contest," in which Chris Hables Gray and Rebecca Herzig offer the volume's most theoretical pieces. Gray draws on cultural studies to historicize human bodies and cyborgs, while Herzig uses a diverse literature to argue that gender is a consequence, not the cause, of transformations in technological systems and artifacts from early industrialization to the birth control pill. Arwen Mohun problematizes the relationship between the artifactual world of factory production and terms such as "skilled" and "unskilled" that arise from social interactions rather than as "natural" by-products of technological change. Notably absent from this section is an essay on race and technology, which Pursell notes was planned but "proved impossible to include," an unfortunate omission that says much about the field's general neglect of race (p. 3).

Technological systems suffer no such neglect, and are the subject of the 130-page fourth section. In essays that eschew historiography for straightforward textbook-style prose, scholars explore six of the most important large-scale systems of the twentieth century. Bruce Seely covers cars and highways; Roger Bilstein, airplanes; Roger Launius, the space race; Joshua Silverman, nuclear weapons and power; Douglas Gomery, television; and Jeffrey Yost, computers and networking. Inventors and engineers, political frameworks, user adaptations and resistance, and unintended consequences all figure prominently here, affirming the interpretive flexibility of the systems approach.

The final section explores America's emergence as a "technological society" in the twentieth century. In asking how the American engineer was transformed from a masculine hero into the cartoon character Dilbert, Bruce Sinclair demonstrates that engineers, like the technologies they produce, have been socially constructed. Molly Berger and art historian Henry Adams show how producers of popular culture gems...