In This Issue

No one at all familiar with the history of SHOT needs to be told that the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History has over the years been important to the development and work of the society. But the connections between them reward examination, as Robert Post demonstrates in "'A Very Special Relationship': SHOT and the Smithsonian's Museum of History and Technology" (the MHT was the forerunner of NMAH). Museum and society were founded in the same year, "linked at birth," Post writes, in ways both personal and institutional. In the decades that followed they would be "crucially important in validating one another." In view of present uncertainties about the future directions of the Smithsonian, Post's examination of the synergistic relationship between these two institutions is timely indeed.

One is sorely tempted to observe that in "Dickens's 'The Signalman' and Information Problems in the Railway Age" Norris Pope takes a novel approach to the study of information technology--but "The Signalman" is only one of Charles Dickens's lesser-known short stories, which further cripples an already lame joke. Nevertheless, Dickens offers insights into mid-Victorian attitudes toward railway signaling and safety of which Pope makes good use. The railways, he writes, "demonstrated the need for rapid information transfer and unfailingly accurate information management, just as they demonstrated in new ways the possibilities for system overload and for breakdowns in human and machine interaction." The development of railway signaling was only one element in the broader development of information technology needed to support the growth of complex modern technological systems, but, Pope argues, one that "clearly anticipates central aspects of modernity--a world that Victorian railways did a great deal to bring about."

Gary Frost notes that while Reginald Fessenden's work in early radio has received considerable attention from historians, his contributions in the field of underwater acoustic technology have not. In "Inventing Schemes and Strategies: The Making and Selling of the Fessenden Oscillator," Frost redresses that imbalance somewhat. Fessenden invented the oscillator, "a versatile electromechanical device that launched two revolutionary maritime technologies: underwater telegraphy and underwater echo ranging," while working as a consulting engineer for the Submarine Signal Company just before World War I. Its subsequent development was intricately bound up with the war and its aftermath, and Frost carefully draws out the "complex interplay of influences--personal, political, commercial, and institutional" that over the course of a decade and more shaped the ways in which the Fessenden Oscillator was interpreted and used.

In "Technologies in Tension: Horses, Electric Trucks, and the Motorization of American Cities, 1900-1925," Gijs Mom and David Kirsch ask whether the initial success and eventual demise of the electric truck offers "a window into the complex evolutionary process by which trucks gradually displaced horses." For a variety of reasons, electric trucks held a place in some commercial fleets well into the 1920s in the United States. Mom and Kirsch outline the factors behind that persistence, and the network of influences that subsequently brought about the failure of the electric truck as an urban commercial vehicle. In the end, they argue, the needs of small businesses proved crucial, an outcome that illustrates how the constraints of time, place, and intended application may operate to limit the process of rational choice.

...