A Tribute to Carl W. Condit

Abstract

A Tribute to Carl W. Condit MELVIN KRANZBERG Carl Condit and I go back a long way. From my vantage point of historian and colleague, I am well situated to document Carl’s devel­ opment as a scholar and teacher. His studies in the history of tech­ nology have assured his eminence in this discipline, but, perhaps more important, he helped shape the field itself as one of the founders of the Society for the History of Technology more than thirty years ago. Condit, with others, also ensured SHOT’S influence on the scholarly world through its publication, Technology and Culture. His earliest writ­ ings have aged well, in part because he remained an active scholar, teacher, and participant in professional causes. We are proud to rec­ ognize him in our midst, by means of this special issue of Technology and Culture. Not that other societies and journals might not pay similar tribute to Condit, for he has written and taught in the history of other broad fields such as urban development, architecture, and civil engineering. He has always been a man who enriches his writing and teaching by connecting disciplines with one another and by presenting knowledge, as few of us can, in its wholeness. A quick look at Condit’s background helps explain the breadth of his interests. Born in Cincinnati in 1914, he grew up during a period of maximum activity in commercial building and railroad construc­ tion. He graduated from Purdue University in 1936 with a combined degree in mechanical and civil engineering. During his college years he had avidly attended English and history courses and had written for student publications. He subsequently taught at the University of Cincinnati while obtaining his master’s and doctoral degrees, the latter in 1941. The war years were given over to teaching mathematics and mechanics for the U.S. Army and to applying his earlier engineering training as a designing engineer ofbuildings for the New York Central Railroad in Cincinnati. With the end of the war came Condit’s first job as a teacher of English at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he Dr. Kranzberg, professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology, was founding editor of Technology and Culture.©1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3002-0009$01.00 255 256 Melvin Kranzberg has remained ever since except for brief interludes at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard Uni­ versity, and the University of Pennsylvania. At Wisconsin, in 1951 — 52, Condit took up formal study of the history of science under Mar­ shall Clagett and Robert Stauffer. Upon his return to Northwestern he inaugurated the history of science program there and taught in it for twenty-four years. He also introduced courses in the history of building technology and the history of urban form. These were among the first of their kind, if not the first, at any American university. There were few precedents and textbooks to follow, so Condit’s own research provided much of the substance for the students who took these courses. From his arrival in Evanston, Condit had been observing critically the building and planning achievements going on in postwar Chicago. Lewis Mumford’s laudatory New Yorker review of his first book, The Rise of the Skyscraper (1952), established an intellectual relationship with that eminent critic, whose investigations on connections between technology and culture had inspired some of Condit’s own thinking. His enthusiasm for cross-disciplinary endeavors had led him to the Humanistic-Social Research Project of the American Society for En­ gineering Education in 1949. This project brought him into contact with those who shared similar concerns, such as the late John B. Rae, Thomas P. Hughes, and myself. The story of how our combined ef­ forts led to the formation of the Society for the History of Technology has been told elsewhere.1 Condit’s services to SHOT have covered virtually every aspect of its activities. As chairman of the program committee in the early days, he arranged SHOT sessions at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the ASEE’s Humanistic—Social Research...