In this Issue

Clarity, predictability, strategy—defining qualities of technological thinking—have long been familiar to readers of Technology and Culture. Hundreds of articles and scores of books tell creativity stories with decisive actors in the foreground. They define problems, marshal resources, try to overcome obstacles, all in hopes of getting something difficult to work. Increasingly, however, historians and sociologists have thickened their descriptions of the actors’ context, arguing an essential contingency in any technical outcome. Not surprisingly, attention to the unpredictable, and to the large cast of characters capable of surprise initiatives, raises questions about the nature of technological cognition. Best-practice thinking focuses on the unsolved problem, and the clearer the project’s goal definition the better. Recently some scholars have taken a different tack; they see actors whose creativity shows in surveying the existing context and understanding the available resources therein, while searching for a solution that is good enough rather than best. Goals, in this good-enough epistemology, follow events more than lead. Defining an epistemic polarity—best practice versus good enough—risks ignoring the obvious fact that most scholars recognize both kinds of thinking. Nevertheless, the shift in emphasis, and the number of serendipitously related authors who appear to be making it, warrants our attention. The five articles in this issue provide an informal symposium on the epistemology of technological practice.

David McGee (“From Craftsmanship to Draftsmanship: Naval Architecture and the Three Traditions of Early Modern Design”) distinguishes three traditions of premodern creativity: craft, mechanical, and architectural. In a “feedback loop with the object,” the craftsman designs as he makes. Innovative mechanical thinking begins with concept sketches (think of Leonardo’s many drawings) but requires craft-style production. In contrast, from the sixteenth century on the British navy used measured drawings to predict ship performance and govern shipyard workers. McGee concentrates on the navy story, but he is most concerned with a “blunt conceptual tool,” the commonplace notion that all premodern design is craft work, bound to the object in hand, innocent of predictive sophistication. His tripartite matrix encourages asking why a given actor adopted one or another method and presents early modern designers in the act of making sensible choices in light of their different situations. “This . . . yields a narrative in which similar human beings struggle with different contexts of risk, rather than one in which different human beings (‘craftsmen’) struggle but fail to deal with the same context as well as we do.”

In “Unreliable Mills: Maintenance Practices in Early Modern Papermaking,” Pierre Claude Reynard departs from the field’s usual preoccupation with new technologies to study maintenance in eighteenth-century French paper mills. Mill records reveal a pervasive “operate-to-failure” style, regular minor repairs, and postponed major renovations. Mill operators considered severely unbalanced water wheels, crumbling masonry, and leaking vats as unexceptional and sometimes used them for years. Their ordinary practice, Reynard argues, reflected rational choices in a market context that did not reward what colleagues of a bankrupt producer described as his “excessive repairs.” Like McGee, Reynard uses his survey of eighteenth-century paper manufacture to make a larger epistemological point about the powerful influence of long-enduring if not elegant technologies. “Historians studying the performance of a productive apparatus cannot assume that it was exploited uniformly under optimal conditions of repairs.” How good, in short, is good enough?

Mark Aldrich (“The Peril of the Broken Rail”: The Carriers, the Steel Companies, and Rail Technology, 1900-1945”) and Martin Reuss (“The Art of Scientific Precision: River Research in the United States Army Corps of Engineers to 1945”) explore twentieth-century testing and theory-building. Rail failures and river behavior defied precise theoretical analysis in great part because of the complex mix of factors that coalesced to produce catastrophic events. Floods and rail accidents, with their sometimes tragic loss of life, generated cries for solutions. Both articles show us engineers and other technical experts making gradual, humbling, progress in theoretical understanding and testing equipment. Effective recommendations for change came slowly. Aldrich shows us two industries on the defensive. Railroad carriers blamed steelmakers for poor-quality steel; steelmakers blamed the carriers for running trains too heavy and too fast...