SHOT Founders’ Themes and Problems

What did SHOT’s founders believe were the major themes and problems that should be explored? It will be interesting to compare the founders’ problem choices with those Wiebe Bijker identifies today and those Rebecca Herzig envisions for the future. To explore the founders’ choices, I shall begin with the formation of a Kranzberg-organized advisory committee in 1957 and continue through 1959 using the correspondence I have on file. Then I will turn to the first issue of Technology and Culture to find what themes and problems were raised there.

On 29 May 1957, Melvin Kranzberg invited nineteen persons, including me, to serve on an advisory committee to guide the establishment of a research center in technology and society, the formation of an organization for the history of technology, and an accompanying learned journal. This was several weeks before the legendary meeting of Kranzberg with Henry Edward Guerlac at Cornell on 17 June, and Kranzberg’s supposed decision then to found a journal.

Among those invited to serve on the all-male advisory committee were Lewis Mumford; Carl Condit, then associate professor of history at North-western University; Robert Multhauf, acting head curator, Department of Engineering and Industry, Smithsonian Institution; John Rae, professor in the humanities at MIT; and Lynn White, medieval historian and president of Mills College.

Kranzberg asked committee members to gather during the American Society for Engineering Education meeting to be held at Cornell University on 17 June 1957. Among those in attendance at Cornell were Kranzberg, Condit, Rae, and me. Attempting to define in discussion the history of technology, we divided it into five broad and overlapping categories: technology and science; technology and society; technology and industry; technology and the arts; and the technological process (engineering).

Kranzberg later asked committee members to summarize in writing their definitions of technology. Multhauf took a hard-line internalist view. He emphasized the study of engineering, arguing that this would help engineers better understand themselves. He believed sociologists would interpret the facts that historians provided in the research center and journal. Multhauf was skeptical about the extent of interaction of technology and the arts.

Condit, in contrast, gave an extended definition of the relationship of technology and the arts, arguing that technology satisfies not only material needs, but intellectual and emotional ones as well. He added that historians of technology should understand culture, especially its ethical and aesthetic role in all human activities.

Lynn White did not wish to categorize, but wanted to plunge in and let “substance splash” wherever it will. William Fielding Ogburn, an eminent Chicago sociologist whom Kranzberg asked to join the committee, wanted to concentrate on the impact of technology on society. He also wanted to study the invention process. I wanted to emphasize the relations of technology and society, as did Kranzberg, perhaps because both of us were trained in European history. I suggested three categories for the history of technology instead of five: technological processes; social relations of technology; and biography (the last would ensure humanistic emphasis, I believed). Countering Multhauf, I insisted that history is not a handmaiden (a digging out) for the social scientists (sociologists). Historians, I insisted, would interpret the so-called facts that they discovered.

Mumford later weighed in on the definition of the field. He insisted that technology does not evolve in isolation, but in relation to other societal activities. He was interested in the interactions that promote or retard technology. He believed that even the crudest tools could not have been invented without the coordinate development of symbolism. He wanted the new journal to be interested in the sociology and philosophy of “technics.” Following German practice, he contrasted technics (the whole field) and technology (methods). Technics, he continued, impinges on every aspect of society and especially on the symbolic arts, “as I tried to elucidate in Art and Technics.”

The committee’s choice of problems for the research center was indicative of the state of the field. White wanted the research center to systematically record interviews with prominent living technologists. Rae suggested that the center study specific industries. Others suggested that the center should explore...