History and the Art of Hand-pump MaintenanceReflections on My Working Life

It has come as a great surprise to me that, for a second time, SHOT has offered me an award. The first time, in 1973, it was the Abbott Payson Usher Prize, offered jointly to myself and co-author Richard Hills for a paper published in Technology and Culture.¹ I like to think that award was deserved because I had a co-author with high scholarly standards who kept me up to the mark, and there was some good historical research in what we did. I would like to have done more work as rigorous as that, and if I had produced three or four books of that quality, I would understand why a second award might be merited.

As it turned out, however, I ceased to be a historian of technology soon after that and instead became a sort of journalist, or amanuensis, often writing up other people's work, as when I edited the results of a series of conferences held at the University of Sussex in the 1980s or helped Adrian Cullis write up work on rainwater harvesting in the Turkana district of Kenya, a place I never visited. Indeed, I have done so little original work, that I feel certain that I do not merit an award as distinguished as the Leonardo da Vinci Medal.

In order to explain why I may give the impression of being a historian of technology, and why I ceased to be a historian almost as soon as I began, something first needs to be said about my mother and her influence on me. She grew up in a small town on the east coast of England and then went to work in a department store in London. There she discovered a vocation to train as a nurse and midwife and work in missionary hospitals in China.

Her influence gave me (and my sister also) a strong sense of direction, pointing us to careers that would have direct humanitarian application, like her work as a nurse among very poor people, or my sister's work with children who had severe learning difficulties.

I felt that I too should be seeking a career with a humanitarian application. I thought about studying medicine, but that did not work out, and it was hard to know which way to turn. I drifted, first into studying physics at university, and eventually into a job at the former Manchester College of Science and Technology (later known as UMIST and now part of Manchester University).

After two years teaching physics there, I was transferred to a new department for the history of science and technology at the college, headed by Donald Cardwell. I learned the subject partly from him, partly in seminars at Leeds University, and partly through the collaboration I've mentioned with Richard Hills, a colleague who was working hard to establish what emerged as the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

My work included teaching engineering students, and led in a stimulating direction when one or two third-year students wanted to do projects concerned with engineering in developing countries. I was helped in advising them when, in 1966, a leaflet arrived in the post announcing formation of what was then called the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) by Fritz Schumacher, a German economist living in London, whose interest was in forms of technology appropriate for the needs of poor communities.

That was the moment when I suddenly saw a way of using my training in science to follow a vocation with the kind of humanitarian application that my mother's example had represented. I had already been thinking that the history of technology ought to be providing insights into how technology was developing today—and how it might evolve in directions that would help poor communities rather than just making the rich even more wealthy and powerful. The idea of "intermediate technology" (despite the awkwardness of this term) seemed directly relevant, and soon I visited London to meet some of Schumacher's colleagues.

I discussed it also with the students who wanted...