Organizational Notes: The Pasadena Meeting, October 16-19, 1997

Some three hundred people attended the fortieth annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, held October 16–19, 1997, at the Huntington Library and the Doubletree Hotel in Pasadena, California. The meeting was sponsored by the Huntington Library, Art Galleries, and Botanical Gardens and supported by the Dibner Fund, the Claremont Colleges Science, Technology, and Society Program, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Miriam Levin chaired the program committee; other members were Peter Morris and Brett Steele. Ron Brashear (chair) and Rudi Volti took care of local arrangements.

Sessions

Doing it Electrically: The State of the Art in Electrical History

Organizer: Mark Rose (Florida Atlantic University)

Chair: Bernard Finn (Smithsonian Institution)

Speakers: JoAnne Goldman (University of Northern Iowa), “The Infrastructural View”; Carolyn Goldstein (National Building Museum), “The Gendered View”; Richard Hirsh (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), “The Political Systems View”; Daves Rosell (University of California, Berkeley), “The Built Environment View”; Rudi Volti (Pitzer College), “The STS View”

Respondents: W. Bernard Carlson (University of Virginia), Mark Rose (Florida Atlantic University), Ronald Tobey (University of California, Riverside), James Williams (DeAnza College)

Controlling the Computer

Chair: Robert Seidel (University of Minnesota)

Speakers: Eric S. Boyles (University of Minnesota), “The Crafting and Control of Knowledge Systems: The Recasting of Electronic Data Processing Through Time-Sharing, 1960–1980”; Amy Ione (independent scholar), “Imaginative, Applied, and Virtual Technologies”; Ted Friedman (Duke University), “Apple 1984: The Introduction of the Macintosh in the Cultural History of PCs”; Aristotle Tympas (Georgia Institute of Technology), “Essentialist Ideology and Technological Demarcation: Analog Computing as the Invention of Digital Computing”

Commentator: Walter Kaiser (RWTH, Aachen University of Technology)

Technological Imperialism in Asia

Chair: Benjamin Elman (University of California, Los Angeles)

Speakers: Takehiko Hashimoto (University of Tokyo), “The French Engineering Connection at Yosuka Dockyard, 1864–1877”; V. R. Muraleedharan (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras), “Electrification of Madras City, 1905–1914”; Suzanne M. Moon (Cornell University), “The Trouble with Mechanized Farming: The Colonial Politics of Technological Change and Social Responsibility in the Netherlands East Indies circa 1920”; Gail Cooper (Lehigh University), “Technology and Ideology in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952”

Commentator: Ravi Rajan (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Technology, Imaginative Spaces, and Cultural Design

Chair: Rosalind Williams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Speakers: Paul Kosidowski (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), “Steele MacKaye’s Spectatorium and the Technology of National Memory”; Catherine Bertho-Lavenir (Conservatoire national des arts et metiers, Paris), “Automobile Touring Clubs in Belgium, Italy, France, 1890–1940”; Arthur Molella (National Museum of American History) and Robert Kargon (Johns Hopkins University), “Culture and Technology in Disney’s New Town: Techno-Nostalgia in Historical Perspective”; Lisa Rubens (University of California, Berkeley), “The Mestiza and the Cyclotron: New Technologies of Race, Gender and Science in Modern America”

Commentator: Miriam Levin (Case Western Reserve University)

From Hands to Head: Technical Education Revisited

Chair: Ed Layton (University of Minnesota)

Speakers: Catherine Kelly (Case Western Reserve University), “Embellishing the Republic: Gender, Gentility, and Decorative Arts Education in the United States, 1790–1840”; David Harmon (Iowa State University), “Collegiate Conflict: Internal Dissension at Land Grant Colleges and the Failure to Establish Engineering Experiment Stations, 1887–1920”; Anne-Catherine Robert-Hauglustaine (University of Paris I—Sorbonne), “From the Welding Institute to the Welding Engineering School: The Education of the Welder Engineers in France between 1930 and 1960”; Mark Levinson (University of Washington), “Encounters Between Engineering Science and American Engineering Education: The Postwar Textbook Revolution”

Commentator: Amy Bix (Iowa State University)

Biography and the History of Technology

Organizer: G. Pascal Zachary (independent scholar)

Chair: Thomas P. Hughes (University of Pennsylvania)

Speakers: Neil M. Cowan (freelance writer), “Always More Than One: Oral Histories of Women Engineers and the Value of Group Biography”; Robert Kanigel (independent scholar), “Popular Biography and Frederick Winslow Taylor: An Alternative Agenda for the History of Technology”; G. Pascal Zachary (independent scholar), “The Perils of Biography: Vannevar Bush and the Engineering of an American Life”

Commentator: John Staudenmeier (University of Detroit Mercy)

Playing the Electricity: Guitar Technology and Society in Twentieth-Century America

Organizer: Rebecca McSwain (University of Colorado)

Chair and Commentator: Andre Millard (University of Alabama...