In This Issue

The historical conditions that favor or inhibit technological innovation have long been staple fare in the pages of Technology and Culture. T&C readers might immediately think of the remarkable articles by Cyrus Mody (January 2006) and Yasushi Sato (July 2005). Karen Freeze now adds a striking and original case study, "Innovation and Technology Transfer during the Cold War: The Case of the Open-End Spinning Machine from Communist Czechoslovakia." A quarter century of research leads Freeze to argue that Czech innovators, working during the core years of the Soviet Union's centralized command economy, would leap dramatically ahead of the global state of the art to solve the truculent problem of reliable high speed spinning. Freeze argues that the success of their BD 200 machine "can be attributed in part to effective project management practices that would later become de rigueur in the West (translated: Japan did not initiate "cross-disciplinary research and development teams working on parallel projects with overlapping problem-solving"). The article will reward the reader with fresh insights into Soviet era innovation at the leading edge of practice. In addition, Freeze explores the feedback loop that linked the central research and development center in rural Czechoslovakia and the BD 200's most important lead user client, the British textile firm Courtaulds Ltd. Production-level use of the new technology fed problems and insights back to the central lab, where in turn the lab's technical insight educated Courtaulds' team. Be prepared as well for some remarkable illustrations.

In 1945 a battered Japan began the painful process of recovering. In "War, Peace, and Nonweapons Technology: The Japanese National Railways and Products of Defeat, 1880s– 1950s," Takashi Nishiyama explores one part of the larger story of postwar Japan by studying the country's move to an all-steel national railcar fleet. Nishiyama finds that two groups of actors were particularly important in this process. First, rail passengers began to exert pressure to replace aging and dangerous railcar stock. Postwar ridership was up, as were accidents, and lurid media coverage of railway disasters pushed the national rail company (JNR) toward innovation. At the same time a significant number of out-of-work aeronautical engineers migrated to JNR, bringing with them years of experience designing strong metal structures while minimizing weight. The resulting surge in design and production creativity at JNR began to put all-steel cars on Japanese tracks by the mid 1950s, and it fed into the world-class Shinkansen high-speed bullet train project during the 1960s. Nishiyama calls the reader's attention to several notable T&C themes: the shift from wood to steel in materials design, the role of consumers in fostering innovation, and the importance of engineers' wartime experiences for innovation in sophisticated, nonweapons technological systems.

The Canadian Shield spreads like a vast, irregular scarf all around the Hudson Bay. Its nearly eight million square kilometers are an Arctic treasure trove of mining potential. Prior to the 1910s, the far-flung wilderness made traditional topographical surveying economically impossible for locating promising mine sites. But in the wake of World War I, Canadian mining developers urged the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Topographical Surveys Branch to use aircraft to open the territory. The aircraft served two key purposes: to ferry prospectors and surveyors to inaccessible but promising sites (often with water landing gear) and to use aerial photographic technology for creating maps. The aerial maps were subject to distortions of various sorts, but in such a difficult environment they provided the best data possible, a technological style sometimes called "good-enough epistemology." In Marionne Cronin's words ("Northern Visions: Aerial Surveying and the Canadian Mining Industry, 1919–1928"), "the conditions . . . encouraged an emphasis on efficiency, robustness, speed, and utility over rigorous accuracy." Cronin sees Canadian Shield aerial mapping not only as distinctively Canadian, but also as distinctive for frontier technologies generally.

T&C readers might casually think that the contest for defining the city street has more to do with recent "cool cities" initiatives than with well policed walk signals at traffic light corners. Over the past several decades, due in part to Jane Jacobs's iconic...