In This Issue

This issue of Technology and Culture covers considerable ground, topically and chronologically. We begin in ancient Assyria—in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, to be precise. Stephanie Dalley and John Peter Oleson were involved in a 1999 British Broadcasting Corporation production that examined a theory that the water screw, famously attributed to Archimedes, might have been known much earlier. Dalley, an Assyriologist, brought forward evidence that suggested the Archimedean screw might in fact have been used by Sennecherib in the seventh century B.C. to irrigate his palace garden at Nineveh. Oleson, a professor of Greek and Roman Studies, made the case for Archimedes. "Neither of us having succeeded in convincing the other about the chronology of the water screw during the filming," they write here, "we subsequently decided to collaborate on this article, presenting the evidence in a more scholarly fashion and with a focus on the cultural context of invention and innovation in both periods." The results are intriguing, not only for their bearing on the topic of invention or the history of mechanical devices but also for the play of argument.

Energy technologies' connection to broad, not to say momentous, political and social concerns has been deeply underscored in the past two years or so, but it is, of course, not new. Frank Laird, in "Constructing the Future," observes that "during the middle decades of the cold war era, energy technology policy served as an arena for political conflict about the future of the body politic" in the United States. In the decades following World War II, renewable-energy advocates sought to develop alternatives to fossil-fuel-based energy technologies. For some advocates, more broadly critical of American society, energy policy became a site for conflict over values permeating that society and its technological systems. Laird focuses on the debates that occurred among the various "policy communities"—technical experts, policy analysts, advocates, and others—engaged in forming U.S. energy policy during those years.

Success and failure are themes that figure in the work of many historians of technology. In "Picturephone and the Information Age: The Social Meaning of Failure," Kenneth Lipartito calls these categories into question. Picturephone was Bell Laboratories' postwar attempt to make video telephony practical; it was also, in most accounts, a thorough and spectacular failure. But Lipartito suggests that "the. . . terms 'success' and 'failure' do not capture the full import of this story." Picturephone, he argues, illustrates how failures are "constructed by contingent social conditions," demonstrates that "even so-called failed technologies can construct technical systems," and "raises troubling questions about freedom in the constitution of technological society." Failures, he writes, "far from being dead ends. . . may reinforce rather than undermine technological paths."

Rumor and myth share certain traits, observes Carolyn Cooper: simplification, exaggeration, fabrication, colorful detail, and, in the case of myth, a tendency to ascribe gradual human achievement to a single heroic individual. History is the enemy of myth, or so it is usually thought, but myth persists in creeping back into history. Cooper details the case of Eli Whitney, the Yankee Whittling Boy, and the demolishing of the myth of Whitney the heroic inventor by historians of technology in the 1960s and 1970s (much of which took place in the pages of T&C). But in its place has risen another myth, "featuring Whitney as charlatan instead of hero," a "fast-talking arms contractor whose only distinction was his earlier invention of an improved cotton gin." "[M]yths and legends," writes Cooper, are "not merely . . . false history but . . . stories from which to learn about the story-tellers." They should be analyzed at more than one level, and it is time, she proposes, for that process to begin with the myths and legends of inventors.