In This Issue

Serendipity brings a pair of articles on lighthouses together to lead off this issue, though the two are quite different in focus, geographic and otherwise. In "The Electric Lighthouse in the Nineteenth Century: Aid to Navigation and Political Technology," Michael Brian Schiffer notes that while lighthouses were the first commercial application of generator-powered electric-arc lighting, beginning in 1859, by the end of the century only about thirty electric-arc lights had been installed in the thousands of lighthouses dotting the globe. Schiffer explains this rate of adoption through a comparison of the performance characteristics of electric-arc lights and a competing technology, oil lamps. Although oil lamps enjoyed an advantage by such utilitarian measures as costs of installation and maintenance, the electric arc was an adequate light under most conditions and excelled in haze and light fog; it could also uniquely symbolize a nation's command of cutting-edge electrical science and technology. Most nations, giving greater weight to utilitarian factors in their decision making, adopted no electric lights. For those that did, especially France and England, symbolic performance was a prime concern, for the electric light was both an aid to navigation and a political technology.

Eric Tagliacozzo's "The Lit Archipelago: Coast Lighting and the Imperial Optic in Insular Southeast Asia, 1860-1910" uses the lighthouse as a lens through which to view technology and colonialism. Tagliacozzo seeks to gauge the contribution that lighthouses, beacons, and buoys made to British and Dutch programs of colonial state-formation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The article begins with an examination of where these structures fit into the larger picture of maritime technology and expansion in Southeast Asia during the period, then shifts focus to their geographic and temporal dispersion, the politics of lighting, and an examination of changing lighting technologies. Tagliacozzo argues for a connection between technology and hegemony in this case; the "scores upon scores of lighthouses stretching to the East Indies horizon," he writes, "meant greater navigational safety, but . . . also symbolized the unfolding of an increasingly coercive world."

In "Antibiotics, Big Business, and Consumers," Robert Bud explores a regulatory campaign to promote access to antibiotics in the United States during the 1950s. Bud tracks a decade-long attempt to prevent the drug industry from replicating a perceived pattern of behavior by big business that policymakers blamed for underconsumption. The Depression-era Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) had located the cause of low consumption in artificially high prices associated with excess profits, excessive marketing, and restrictive patents held by large companies. In the postwar years a group of TNEC veterans including Walton Hamilton, Irene Till, and John Blair sought to protect the drug market from these factors through a Federal Trade Commission inquiry, which led to a judicial investigation, and through hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. Their campaign, aided by the thalidomide scare, culminated in a radical expansion of Food and Drug Administration powers in 1962. Ironically, this response to the problem of underconsumption came just as the novel problem of overconsumption of antibiotics was becoming serious.

The story of the connection between airports and parks during the 1920s and 1930s, which Janet Daly Bednarek details in "The Flying Machine in the Garden: Parks and Airports, 1918-1938," weaves together a number of threads in the history of land use and the history of technology. As Bednarek notes, the meaning of the term "park" changed over time, from an idealized rural landscape to a location for multiple forms of public recreation. Those changes intersected in the early twentieth century with developing perceptions of the airplane as not only a practical machine but also a source of mass entertainment. Arguments that public parks and airports were compatible uses of the same land shaped the establishment of airports in a number of American cities, including Omaha, Nebraska, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bednarek uses case studies of those two cities to describe the spectrum of approaches taken by local governments in the 1920s and 1930s to the problem of developing that part of an aviation infrastructure.

"Almost from the day it collected its first fare the street railway...