Awards

The Dexter Prize

Since 1968 the Society for the History of Technology has annually awarded the Dexter Prize to the author of an outstanding book in the history of technology published in any of the preceding three years. The prize is funded by the Dexter Chemical Corporation of New York City, manufacturers of industrial chemicals. The 2000 prize was awarded to Paul Israel for his biography Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley, 1998). The citation read:

Thomas Edison was a celebrated and mythic figure in his own time, and very much has been written about him during the last century or so. The encrustation of supposed knowledge about a famous inventor poses a challenge for new interpretation and a temptation to diverge into debunking. Israel has overpowered this challenge by sheer concentration on what the primary records have told him, remaining immune both to mythology and to iconoclasm. As an editor of the Edison Papers, he has been immersed in a rich collection indeed--millions of pages in laboratory notebooks, patent and business records, and letters. From these and background sources he has distilled an eminently readable account of Edison's families, education, and career from newsboy to crack telegrapher to technological system builder.

Edison, Israel makes clear, was a child of his time, whose sphere of activity expanded along with late-nineteenth-century corporate business and finance. When he made a mistake, as with his venture into magnetic ore separation for the iron and steel industry, he made it big. As originator and impresario of the industrial laboratory or "invention factory," however, his successes were even bigger. Israel shows in knowledgeable detail how the bright young "electrical" men under Edison's direction in his laboratory actually worked on his inventions, and provides plentiful annotation to open up the subject for future scholars.

Forty years ago, in the third issue of the infant journal Technology and Culture, Thomas Hughes highly praised the recently published biography of Edison by Matthew Josephson, but cautioned that the author had "by no means exhausted about a quarter million items and 3,400 notebooks" still providing opportunity for further study. Hughes added, "The Edison inventive process will only be explained when the technological environment in which he worked is better understood." Paul Israel's book, both informed and informing, now provides that better understanding.

In his fresh and balanced interpretation, Israel has not only reinvigorated the writing of biography, showing how to combine detailed archival research with cultural history, but also given us a durable portrait of the world's preeminent inventor.

The Sally Hacker Prize

The Sally Hacker Prize was established in 1999 to recognize the best popular book written in the history of technology in the three years preceding the award. The prize recognizes books in the history of technology that are directed to a broad audience of readers, including students and the interested public. The 2000 Sally Hacker Prize went to Susan J. Douglas for Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos 'n' Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Random House, Times Books, 1999). The citation read:

In Listening In, Susan Douglas has joined meticulous research with irresistible exposition, precisely the combination that defines a Hacker prizewinner. She tells the story of a technology that over a century has enabled people to engage in the pleasurable process of creating their own mental images and then imagine themselves as part of invisible communities--devotees of Jack Benny or Fred Allen, or rock 'n' rollers, or Rush Limbaugh Dittoheads, among many others.

While telling this tale, Douglas explores matters ranging from radio's commodification to the creation of the idea of the "audience" to the ways listeners have constructed images of race, ethnicity, class, family dynamics, gender, and generational differences. And, most compellingly, she probes the intertwining of different radio technologies with different radio cultures, from the use of Western Union dispatches to "recreate" baseball games to the new auditory, political, and cultural world that flowered with the...