Why Technology Matters

14 Historically Speaking · July/August 2006 Why Technology Matters David E. Nye Last year a bright student came to me to talk about her interest in the history of bells and timekeeping in Britain from ca. 1300 until the 18th century. She had some interesting materials about the social history of bells and hoped to write a dissertation on this topic. But when I inquired, she had no answer to a whole series of crucial questions: where the centers of bronze bell manufacture had been; where the ores were smelted; what was their composition (23% tin and 77% copper was best to avoid cracking ); how bells were transported, hoisted into position, and tuned; and whether bells became cheaper to make, transport, and install over time (which could help explain why they became more numerous). Her otherwise excellent training had not prepared her to think about such matters, and village bells were just part of the historical landscape. How they got to the bell tower was not part of the story she had planned to tell. Until quite recently, a good deal of historical work proceeded on similar assumptions. For generations, historians wrote about slaves growing rice in the Carolinas without asking how Englishmen, with no history of growing rice, had reshaped the swampy coastal land, introduced the right agricultural technologies, and taught slaves how to plant, care for, and harvest this new crop. Judith Carney's seminal Black Rice showed that planters imported rice plants and slaves accustomed to tending them from what is now Sierra Leone. Tools, plants, and technical knowledge, like bells, came from somewhere . Technologies are not marginal to knowing the past. People have woven them into every aspect of experience, and it can be perilous to ignore them. Yet some historians limit their definition of technology to steam engines, automobiles, airplanes, and other large machines that have emerged since industrialization. They do not realize they are dealing with technology when they write about the home, the landscape, the city, the workplace, transport , energy systems, and cultural reproduction, to cite just a few examples. As this list suggests, however , historians of technology routinely include in their field the working systems of material culture, from ancient tool making to the microchip. Few are interested in objects in isolation; most argue that technologies are socially constructed. For researchers unfamiliar with this field, the following sketch may be useful. It is an inherently interdisciplinary field, shading off at its edges into social history, material culture, museum studies, business history, labor history, engineering, the history of science, literary history, the arts, and area studies programs. The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) began in the 1950s as a crossroads where scholars from all these areas met. Rice culture on Cape Fear River, N.C. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, October 2O1 1866. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LCUSZ62 -96954]. SHOT members established their credentials with an innovative journal, Technology and Culture, developed doctoral programs by the 1970s, and grew into an international community of scholars. Because SHOT members emerge from many disciplines, their specific methods vary, but most can be considered either contextualists or internalists . These are not so much opposed schools of thought as different emphases. Internalists more closely fit stereotypes of the history of technology, although they are in the minority. Internalists reconstruct the history of machines and processes, focusing on inventors, laboratory practices, and the state of knowledge at a particular time. They chart the sequence that leads from one physical object to the next. Their approach has some affinities with art history, but it grew out of the history of science . Internalists establish a bedrock of facts about individual inventors, their competition, their technical difficulties, and their solutions to particular problems. An internalist may be a feminist working on Madame Curie or a railroad historian interested in how different kinds of boxcars developed. The internalist writes from the point of view of an insider who looks over an inventor's shoulder. Such studies, whether of the light bulb, computer, or atom bomb, culminate at the moment when the device first works, and do not take as much interest in marketing, adoption, use...