Robert P. Multhauf, 1919-2004

In 1978 Derek Price remarked that "A Ph.D. who hasn't spent a year or half a year at the Smithsonian is no historian of technology." To the extent that this was true, it was due to the efforts of Bob Multhauf. First as a department chairman and then as director of the Museum of History and Technology he assembled a staff of curators that for years at the annual SHOT meetings would substantially exceed the number of participants from any academic institution. They included Silvio Bedini, Monte Calvert, Jon Eklund, Eugene Ferguson, Elizabeth Harris, Otto Mayr, Robert Vogel, Jack White, and myself (plus a smattering of others who were considered historians of science). Not all—not even a majority in the early years—had Ph.D.s themselves, but Multhauf was very effective using carrots and sticks and presenting himself as an example of what scholarship was all about as incentives for strengthening the research orientation and accomplishments of his staff. As a consequence, with the help of well-funded fellowship and consultancy programs, a stream of historians of technology flowed through our doors. In this group, to mention a few familiar names (and using 1980 as a cutoff date), were Price himself, James Brittain, Carl Condit, Susan Douglas, Robert Friedel, Bert Hall, David Hounshell, Thomas Parke Hughes, David Jeremy, Eda Kranakis, Robert Post, William Pretzer, Harold Skramstad, Merritt Roe Smith. In addition, Bob found time and money and space (which often meant a table in his office) to support, for short periods, a range of nonhistorian specialists to examine and comment on the museum's collections.

Like many of us, especially in those formative years, Robert Phillip Multhauf fell into the history of technology more or less by accident. He was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on 8 June 1919, and grew up in Newton, Iowa. He graduated from Iowa State College in 1941 with a B.S. degree in chemistry and worked first at Hercules Powder Company (1941- 42) and then at U.S. Rubber Company (1942-43) before joining the U.S. Navy, serving as a shipboard engineering officer. He was in Japan soon after the end of the war, and after his discharge in the summer of 1946 he stayed on for two years as a civilian employee of the army to participate in a project to survey the Japanese scientific and industrial establishment. In 1948 he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a master's degree in Far East studies in 1950, with a thesis titled "A Study of Diplomatic Relations between Japan and China, 1922-32." He later recalled that he shifted the focus of his work to the history of chemistry when the professor he intended to study under resigned rather than submit himself to the California loyalty oath. Multhauf then reached across town and arranged to be advised by J. B. deC. M. Saunders at the University of California Medical Center (later the University of California at San Francisco), writing a dissertation titled "The Relationship between Technology and Natural Philosophy, ca. 1250-1650, as Illustrated by the Technology of the Mineral Acids." He received his degree in 1953, with a major field in the history of medieval Europe and minors in the histories of science, Greece and Rome, and the Far East, and spent a year as a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for the History of Medicine. Late in 1954 he came to the Smithsonian's United States National Museum as curator of engineering. This was the beginning of the build-up of staff for the new Museum of History and Technology, which would be authorized by Congress in the spring of 1955. Multhauf later recalled that the advice of his university advisors was "don't stay longer [at the Smithsonian] than two years or you're dead." (This was not unlike advice I received eight years later.)

The Museum of History and Technology was largely a consequence of the efforts of Frank Taylor, who had been at the Smithsonian since the early 1920s. Inspired especially by the Deutsches Museum, he had...