Methods in the History of Technology

The introduction of the artifacts discussed in this encyclopedia, ranging from the automobile and the radio to the spacecraft and the computer, from wired electric lines to wireless electronic nets, and from the atomic bomb to the nuclear reactor, took place in a century more accustomed to rapid technical change than the nineteenth century—a century marked by the creation of the ‘‘machinery question’’ and the development of political economy to answer it.

By the twentieth century, the question no longer concerned the introduction of one wave of novel machines, but had to be reformulated to analyze the historical pattern of succeeding waves of novel machines. The question could no longer be answered by political economy alone, birthed to make sense of the world of steam engines.

Over the course of the twentieth century, as steam engines were already passe while new machines kept appearing, the study of the past had to be enlisted to help society understand its own relationship to technology. The twentieth century, then, witnessed the emergence and establishment of the history of technology as a distinct historical subdiscipline.

As new machines were coming at an accelerating pace, a mass faith in the equivalence between technical and social progress reposed as the twentieth century’s ideological analog to medieval religious dogma. In response, the methods of the history of technology have been overdetermined by the challenge to interpret the appeal of the so-called ideology of “technological determinism.’’ Noticeably, history of technology as such was logically impossible before the twentieth century because the modern use of the word ‘‘technology’’ was not established before the first decades of the twentieth century.

Satisfied by how much their subdiscipline has advanced by the wise agreement to not force one definition of technology upon its members, the community of professional technology historians now agrees that the vagueness of the word ‘‘technology’’ is only consistent with the protean persistence of technological determinism. In the face of a definitional openness of technology, perceptions of the object of the history of technology, propositions about what its key concepts ought to be, and, correspondingly, suggestions over practices and methods have remained pluralistic and defy any easy act of subsumption under a single theoretical framework.

For convenience, we may distinguish between two historiographical periods, separated by the foundation of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in 1958, with Technology and Culture serving as its journal of record. Melvin Kranzberg is unanimously recognized as the single most important founder of SHOT. By focusing on technological change as the outcome of ‘‘invention,’’ individual contributions before 1958 tended to choose methods that privileged the study of individual agency over social structure.

Yet, debates investigating the proper relationship between the two concerning technical change were also present in schools of thought like the ‘‘sociology of invention,’’ known by the works of S. Colum Gilfillan, W. Fielding Ogburn, and Abbott Payson Usher. Culture was certainly the starting point for Usher, an economic historian (A History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929), the literary and social critic Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization, 1934), and the art historian Sigfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command, 1948); the three individuals commonly credited for being among the most distinguished contributors to history of technology’s pre-SHOT period.

Moreover, the interest on invention survives to the present, quite clearly as an interest in the study of the transformation of inventiveness as a socially situated manifestation of human creativity during the transition from the individual inventor’s workbench to the expansive settings of industrial research.

We now know the importance of history of technology was acknowledged by several other early historiographical currents emanating from outside the U.S. Known for its sensitivity to the history of material civilization, the French Annales school invited historians to favorably regard the history of technology.

As early as 1935, Lucien Febvre called for a tripartite methodological synthesis of a competent understanding of the technology under consideration, of a proper placement of this technology to a series, and of the appropriate move from these series to total history. Subsequent interpretations of Febvre’s manifesto frequently placed the accent on the first or the third of its ingredients, thereby privileging technical and social history respectively. Technical history has been a strength of the long-lived British Transaction of the Newcomen Society, founded in 1920 by the Newcomen Society for the Study of the History of Engineering and Technology.

The publication of an analogously focused German history of technology journal as early as in 1909 by the Association of German Engineers (now called Technikgeschichte) suggests that the interest in enriching engineering studies was a second strong motivation behind the foundation of the history of technology. Evidently, a concern with proper engineering education loomed large even in SHOT’s narrow constitution as a community of professional historians.

Bringing along a rather spontaneous interest in the history of technology as a depository of ideas for solving contemporary technical problems and as a testimony to the scientific nature of engineering knowledge, engineers have tended to support the methodological emphasis on the history of the ‘‘heroic’’ moment of technological change, namely, invention. History of technology is still marked by occasional instances of unbridled antagonisms between scholars with engineering education and with those with a humanities background.

Finally, the development of the history of technology could be stimulated (or blocked) by an overarching ideological orientation. In trying to make sense of the limited development of the history of technology in the socialist societies of the twentieth century, scholars argue that underlying the crude evolutionary interpretation of Marxism emphasizing the primacy of ‘‘forces of production’’ was usually a hardened variant of technological determinism that left little room for historical interpretation of the society-technology relationship.

Technology historians sought to advance the history of technology against the Cold War difficulties in scholarly communication through the 1968 formation of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), a Scientific Section of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS), which is part of UNESCO. The agreed methodological choice of those participating in ICOHTEC was to table issues most likely to reproduce political divisions. Hence, the result was a heightened attention to subjects that appeared more technical, and, as such, less directly subjected to nationalistic interpretations.

In the 1990s, ICOHTEC published its own journal, ICON. In addition to the journals already mentioned, an historian wishing to publish his or her research on the history of technology can now consider two more international journals, History and Technology and History of Technology. The history of technology has by now matured enough to support special interest groups and their publications. For example, an historian interested in the history of computing technology may consider the IEEE Annals for the History of the History of Computing, or, for example, assuming a special interest in the history of computing with the slide rule, the American Journal of the Oughtred Society or the British Slide Rule Gazette will prove satisfactory.

Another sign of the maturity of the history of technology is its sustained support by specialized museums and, with increasing frequency, even the general museums will offer particular thematic displays of interest to those in the history of technology. Also, the availability of textbooks on the history of technology, with several focused on twentieth century technology, either from a national or an international perspective, are finding their way into print. Thomas Hughes’ 1989 American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 is already considered a classic in the field.

From the perspective of the methodologies tried, the post-1958 period can be conveniently split into two subperiods, one that ended with the mid-1980s acknowledgment of the victory of variants of ‘‘contextualism’’ over the couple ‘‘internalism’’- ‘‘externalism,’’ and a second, lasting since then, which started with the cautious experimentation with versions of ‘‘social constructivism.’’ In his analysis of the methodological profile of Technology and Culture between 1959 and 1980, John Staudenmaier, the third (and present) editor of SHOT’s journal after Melvin Kranzberg and Robert Post, found that ‘‘methodological style’’ already favored was ‘‘contextual’’ (50 percent), followed by almost identical shares of the ‘‘internalist’’ (17 percent) and the ‘‘externalist’’ (14 percent) approach, and by ‘‘nonhistorical analysis’’ and metastylistic ‘‘historiographical reflection’’ representing the remaining percentage (12 percent and 7 percent respectively).

Internalism and externalism, represented the emphasis on agency and structure respectively, or, as Staudenmaier put it, technological ‘‘design and ambience.’’ Contextualism stood for a synthetic consideration of both. If contextualism prefigured in the works of Usher, Mumford, and Giedion, internalism was dominant in the multivolume histories of technology published in Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The History of Technology, edited between 1954 and 1958 by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, and A. Rupert Hall, just before the emergence of SHOT, was the most influential of all.

All available historiographical balance sheets point toward an extreme variation of contextual- ism. Having set as its methodological standard to retrieve historical correspondence between technical relationships and social relationships, contextualism frequently stopped short after starting from either end. As the successful opening up the black box of technology proved difficult, the contribution of contextualism, according to scholars sympathetic to such thought, consisted in setting a standard that allowed the community of professional historians to evaluate what exactly was achieved when the black box remained closed or was unpacked only partially.

The acknowledged difficulty to get close to that standard was proposed as the reason for the distinct and peculiar existence of the history of technology. In his 1996 SHOT presidential address, Alex Roland stated regarding the difficulty of penetrating deep into the black box, technology historians were unique in that they were at least trying to get inside.

This difficulty generated second guesses about the value of the history of technology as a distinct subdiscipline. First came the challenge from historians who argued that the isolation of the historical study of technology from the rest of history perpetuated the risk of the spontaneous reproduction of technological determinism within the history of technology, constantly blocking the history of technology as such from providing broader historical interpretations.

Far more important was the opposite challenge, that of seeking to avoid the risk of reproducing technological determinism by abandoning the attempt at broader historical interpretation altogether. As it should be expected, this challenge took the form of the invasion of the history of technology by sociology, now known as ‘‘social constructivism.’’ Following things to their logical conclusion, social constructivists came to question the necessity of assuming a border between the inside and the outside of the black box.

In the Social Construction of Technology framework (SCOT), Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker’s variant of social constructivism, such a border is missing as long as an artifact is subject to “interpretative flexibility’’ by various ‘‘relevant social groups,’’ before ‘‘stabilization’’ and ‘‘closure’’ is achieved. In Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law’s actor-network theory (ANT) variant of social constructivism, the very demarcation between nature and society is turned into a question. To SCOT’s attention toward technological success and failure, ANT adds a symmetrical treatment of human actors and natural phenomena as ‘‘actants,’’ thereby making the historian’s interest in social causality altogether irrelevant.

While contextualism starts with methods to understand causes, social constructivism sees the method as an end-in-itself. While both agree on a symmetrical treatment of success and failure from a synchronic perspective, they differ in their interest for patterns. For example, the contextualist historian of the bicycle is interested in the connection between the history of the bicycle and that of the Fordist automobile whereas the social constructivist sociologist of the bicycle is interested only in the high-low wheel bicycle connection within the history of the bicycle (contrast, for example, the history of the bicycle in David Hounshell’s 1984 From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 and in Wiebe Bijker’s 1995 Of Bicycles, Bakellites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory ofSociotechnical Change).

Social constructivism has then been blamed for a constitutional inability to consider the long run. Its focus on the history of the short run has been charged with restricting the study of the transformation of technology in use. Accordingly, social constructivism has been accused by David Edgerton for conflating the history of technology with the history of invention, thereby reproducing in effect the pre-SHOT methodological emphases of internalism that cuts the technical from the social to reinvite technological determinism. In his 2003 update of the historiography of technology, Staudenmaier interprets the outcome of the contextualism-constructivism encounter positively by arguing that it has shown that critiques of technological determinism are now more forced to:

"... take a laborious route, seeking historical contingency deep in the gears and circuits of technological design itself.'' [Staudenmaier, 1992, p.170.]

Social constructivist methods of studying technological change may be comfortably placed under the inter-trans-cross disciplinary methodologies of science and technology studies, which grew on philosophical critiques of positivism to differentiate between historical, sociological, and anthropological studies of science and technology.

By contrast, authors of the contextualist school are concerned with pursuing methodologies that will facilitate the firm recognition of the discipline by the historical profession in large. Accordingly, contextualist studies of historical change tend to merge with cultural and intellectual histories of technology.

Having endorsed pluralism as their methodological principle, technology historians have experimented with sharing and borrowing from other historical subdisciplines. Their methodological focus on opening technical black boxes is now shared by business history, influenced now by schools competing with neoclassical economics, known as ‘‘evolutionary’’ or ‘‘institutional’’ economics. In pointing to habituation rather than rationality as a source of economic action, these schools of thought favor the substitution of historical study of technological ‘‘trajectories’’ and firm ‘‘routines’’ for the assumption that technological change is the automatic result of profit-maximizing decisions on the basis of perfect market information.

At the other end of the spectrum, technology historians have also developed methodological ties with labor historians, especially towards a shared focus on the puzzling issue of the relationship between mechanization, employment and unemployment, and the skilling (deskilling or reskilling) processes. The methodological ideal of this mutually beneficial interaction has been a history of workers not stripped from machines and of machines not stripped from workers.

Problematic for as long as technology was assumed to be the mere application of science, the relationship between the history of technology and the history of science has dramatically improved after the most recent generation of science historians added the study of scientific practice to scientific theory, and after the corresponding generation of technology historians started to retrieve the importance of the whole of technical knowledge instead of exhausting themselves at establishing the epistemic status of engineering knowledge.

Arching toward the other end of the spectrum, where the study for the knowledge of artifacts is replaced by the study of artifacts for knowledge, history of technology has enriched its methodological apparatus by a new relationship to material culture and similarly included fields (e.g., industrial archaeology).

Technology historians have been helped by their encounter with material culture to detect a contradiction in that they themselves have been methodologically studying the history of artifacts by relying on documents rather than artifacts. Against the programmatic consensus on opening the black box, the majority of technology historians continue to privilege texts over experiential sources, thereby hesitating to agree that documents are only one of the many classes of artifacts.

Joseph Corn’s own reading of the Technology and Culture articles that Staudenmaier read for his review of the methodological transition is suggestive; preferring to write about ideas or institutions related to technical change, slightly more than half of the authors did not write about objects at all; of those who focused on the history of technical artifacts slightly more than 70 percent relied exclusively on primary and secondary textual sources, only occasionally supplemented by oral interviews; and, more importantly, only 15 percent of those considered employing some reference to material evidence.

Authors focused on objects were more likely to disappear as one moves from ancient, medieval, and early modern history to the twentieth century. Scholars who focused on objects usually worked in museums and disproportionate numbers of them were trained in archaeology. As far as the methods of those who attempted to learn from things goes, Corn identified and classified five of them: ordinary looking, technical analysis, simulation, testing through use, and archaeological science.

Finally, technological determinism in the recent decades was challenged by the findings of the study of previously invisible experiences with technology: women, children, handicapped, non-whites, and non-Westerners. The list also includes the study of the relationship between technological change and ecological destruction, and the study of technological change from the perspective of use in war by a state (as opposed to its invention within an enterprising firm).

Critical here is the general methodological invitation to consider technological change in consumption rather than in production, technology as changed in use rather than through invention. The issue is not one of neglecting the study of technical change at the laboratory and the factory in favor of studying the reconfiguration of technology at the world fair and the house, but on integrating the study of the two.

Novel as this methodology may seem, it was suggested by Lewis Mumford, who, as Carroll Pursell has reminded us, argued against the exclusive identification of technology with tools and machines, which, in Mumford’s count, had left out hearths, pits, houses, pots, sacks, clothes, traps, bins, byres, baskets, bags, ditches, reservoirs, canals, and cities. To which Pursell adds cupboards, packing cases, ship containers, trailers, and suitcases before noting that these ‘‘static containers’’ (Mumford) or ‘‘containers’’ (Pursell) are associated with domestic and agricultural work, historically the domain of women.

Pursell’s list of technologies rendered invisible includes the seismic engineering that is designed into the built environment in California, the highly mechanized kitchen adjacent to the swank hotel dining room, and tableware, chairs and everything that is usually not seen as technology. A variant of the methodology aiming at seeing the invisible has been tried by looking at actors mediating between production and consumption of technologies that we would all recognize as such. Included in these actors are technological enthusiasts, from audio outlaws to computer hobbyists.

The orientation to the mismatch between what a technology was thought to be and what it turned out to be in use has produced great insights on some of the technologies that defined the twentieth century—the gap between the imagined and the real uses of nuclear energy and the rest of the crucial twentieth century technologies included in Joseph Corn’s 1986 collection in Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology and the American Future is a case in point.