The Professionalization of History of Science and Technology in the Post-WWII Era

The extraordinary advancements in basic science during the early twentieth century were paralleled by growth in industrial research and development. These trends synthesised dramatically during the Second World War, yielding transformative productions like antibiotics, radar, and atomic weapons. The post-war period climaxed with the space age, inaugurated by Sputnik in 1957. The 1950s witnessed the birth of molecular biology and computer science, alongside expanded industrial R&D and unprecedented government funding, ushering in the age of ‘big science’. This prominence spurred historical investigation into Western scientific hegemony and the nature of technoscientific change.

The professional identity of the history of science was largely shaped by the entrepreneurial scholar George Sarton. Educated in Belgium but based at Harvard, Sarton founded the journal Isis in 1912 and established the History of Science Society (HSS) in 1924. Academic accommodation followed, with programmes at University College London (1924) and Harvard University (1936), where President James Bryan Conant created a dedicated committee. The first Ph.D. in the field was granted by Harvard to I. Bernard Cohen in 1947, shortly after another programme began at the University of Wisconsin.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the field gained coherence in the United States and Great Britain. Harvard remained central due to Conant's post-war pedagogical initiatives, which used history to teach the dynamic nature of science. Key publications from this effort included Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science and Thomas S. Kuhn’s "The Copernican Revolution" (1957). A pivotal conference organised by the Wisconsin programme allowed scholars to assess the state of the field, confirming the Scientific Revolution as a central focus for research and teaching.

This focus was reflected in influential post-war studies like Herbert Butterfield’s "The Origins of Modern Science" (1949) and A. R. Hall’s "The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800" (1954). Butterfield, a European historian, hyperbolically claimed the Revolution "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity." Though both works took Alexandre Koyré’s idealistic vision as a point of departure, they broadened the scope considerably. These scholars, while scrupulous, generally held a positivist and progressive view of scientific development.

This viewpoint was epitomised by Charles Coulston Gillispie, founder of Princeton's programme, in his ambitious synthesis "The Edge of Objectivity" (1960). Gillispie aimed to situate the history of science within the wider historical profession, tracing the diffusion of an objective, geometrical conception of nature from physics to chemistry and biology. His work, while not triumphalist, firmly saw science as epistemically progressive, dismissing older frameworks like Aristotelian physics as simply incorrect.

No comparable synthesis emerged for the history of technology in the post-war years. Scholars largely worked independently, with patterns visible only in retrospect. The atomic bomb tempered earlier triumphalism but also fed Cold War narratives celebrating Western technology as a bulwark against communism. While Siegfried Giedion’s "Mechanization Takes Command" (1947) echoed Lewis Mumford’s concerns, most post-war historians simply accepted technology as a defining reality and set out to trace its roots.

The most prolific author was R. J. Forbes, a chemical engineer and self-taught ancient historian. His popular overview, "Man the Maker" (1950), argued that toolmaking distinguished humans from animals. His multi-volume "Studies in Ancient Technology" (1955) remains a standard reference, illuminating pre-historic technological importance and avoiding Eurocentrism, though not to the global extent of Joseph Needham’s work on China. Forbes also co-authored an early synthesis on science and technology with E. J. Dijksterhuis.

Other historians turned to compendia to map the field. Charles J. Singer launched an eight-volume "History of Technology" (1954), followed by Maurice Daumas’s French series and the American "Technology in Western Civilization" (1967) by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell. These multi-author works, while comprehensive and authoritative, often exhibited nationalistic biases and a topical rather than conceptual focus, sacrificing synthesis for breadth of coverage.

Professional organization solidified in the post-war decades. In the United States, historians initially worked under the History of Science Society (HSS), before the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) was founded in 1957. Similar institutions formed globally. These societies, with their journals and conferences, shaped professional identity. Following Sarton's lead, historians of science often pursued a positivist, progressive intellectual history. In contrast, SHOT's founder Melvin Kranzberg emphasized social context, titling the society's journal "Technology and Culture" to assert the field's independence from being merely the history of applied science. The Sputnik-era growth of university programmes further institutionalized these fields, granting them cachet while occasionally isolating them from mainstream historical scholarship.