Exposing Electronics (review)

Exposing Electronics. Edited by Bernard Finn. London: Harwood, 1999. Pp. xiv+199. £35.

Technological artifacts have long served an educational role in museums. Artifacts are important also in scholarly investigation of the past, especially when they are viewed not in isolation but as material expressions of the forces that interacted to produce a technological system. Bernard Finn's Exposing Electronics is the second volume in a series--sponsored by the Deutsches Museum, the Science Museum of London, and the Smithsonian Institution--dedicated to illustrating object-oriented historiography. The subject of this volume, it might be argued, is the characteristic technology of the twentieth century. Electronics made possible radio and television broadcasting, long-distance telephony, sophisticated control systems, digital computers, revolutionary scientific and medical devices, and a great variety of consumer products.

The first essay, by Sungook Hong, elucidates the process by which John Ambrose Fleming arrived at the diode electron tube--an important topic, since Fleming's invention is often seen as the beginning of electronics. Hong shows that the story Fleming later told about this invention, which has been generally accepted since then, was shaped by subsequent events and does not accurately record Fleming's intentions at the time of the invention.

A similar point is made in the next essay, in which Alan Morton discusses J. J. Thomson's experiments relating to the identification of the electron. It was at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 that Thomson's 1897 experiment (measuring the charge-to-mass ratio) was declared to mark the discovery of the electron, and Morton shows that Thomson's recollections of a quarter century later were shaped by contemporary concerns--especially the need to establish the professional identity of physicists--and did not accurately represent his thinking at the time of the experiments.

Hartmut Petzold discusses Wilhelm Cauer's work on an automatic calculating device in the 1920s and 1930s, comparing this with five others being built for a variety of purposes at about the same time. Petzold shows how people engaged in different intellectual pursuits responded to a common need for assistance in solving systems of equations by devising a variety of automatic devices employing different technologies.

David Rhees and Kirk Jeffrey explain the background and circumstances of Earl Bakken's transistorized cardiac pacemaker, the Medtronic 5800. Using this instrument as an example, they point out certain common patterns in medical innovation: transfer of technologies, overlap of the R&D stage and the adoption stage, the mutual dependence of manufacturers and their clients, and the search for new uses of the invention.

Ross Bassett illustrates how the significance of a technological advance may depend on its industrial setting. In 1969 Lee Boysel built an integrated circuit, the AL1, as a component of a series of computers; it was to form one-third of a twenty-four-bit central processing unit. The AL1, as has recently been shown in the context of a patent fight, could have functioned as a microprocessor, though it was not so used at the time. Two years later Intel built a similar integrated circuit, the 4004, and used it and its successors with great success as microprocessors.

The Information Age exhibit at the National Museum of American History, which opened in 1990, is without doubt one of the best attended presentations of electronics history. Finn's volume contains two critiques of the exhibit, one by two of the curators (Finn himself and Jon Eklund) and another by a curator at the Science Museum (Roger Bridgman). The former is an explication of how the designers of the exhibit sought to have it "speak" primarily through its artifacts, rather than through text or graphics. The latter considers how difficult this is to accomplish in any exhibit.

Other essays concern Seymour Cray's style of computer design (by Paul Ceruzzi), I. I. Rabi's efforts to determine nuclear moments (Paul Forman), and the relationship between private and public collecting of historical artifacts (Finn).

As one would hope for a book devoted to object-oriented...