Alexanderson: Pioneer in American Electrical Engineering by James E. Brittain

Abstract

TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 875 Alexanderson: Pioneer in American Electrical Engineering. By James E. Brittain. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Pp. xv+381; illustrations, notes, appendix, index. $45.00. In Alexanderson, Jim Brittain has provided a detailed account of the life and work of a leading figure in the development of 20th-century electrical technology. As a source for details of ErnstAlexanderson’s life it is not likely to be superseded, and as such it supplements the work of other scholars who have explored the origins and growth of power and radio engineering in the laboratories and corporations of 20thcentury America. Alexanderson is much more the story of an engineer than his creations; although Brittain clearly understands the technical aspects of Alexanderson’s work, the reader will not learn what phase conversion or electrolytic iron is. The level of technical exposition in engineering and scientific history is always a problem for an author— technically sophisticated readers will want more and general historians will usually want less—and Brittain has tried to find a satisfactory medium. He turns a nice phrase, too, as when he describes Alexanderson ’s patenting of a particular device as “the opportunism of the inveterate inventor” (p. 91). Brittain’s telling of Ernst Alexanderson’s story is permeated with the corporate culture of 20th-century America generally and General Elec­ tric (GE) specifically, sometimes hinted at and sometimes openly noted and discussed. Some aspects of that culture are hardly surprising, such as a “gag rule” imposed on Alexanderson and his co-worker Irving Langmuir in 1915, which prevented their discussing their work at professional meetings, or the importance of the company’s patent department. Others, such as Alexanderson’s callous recommendation that GE infringe the radio patents of Reginald Fessenden, serve as reminders of the reach of that culture—it might be expected that the company would infringe willingly, but not that the suggestion should come from a working engineer with a keen appreciation of the personal value of intellectual property. (Ironically, Alexanderson is described by a co-worker as “a very honest man about patents” concerning his own and his assistants’ work at GE [p. 175].) Another strong point of the book is Brittain’s careful illustration of the many rifts and differences within engineering, a collection of professions too often casually treated as a monolithic whole. He makes a case, for example, that even inside General Electric there existed a significant “cultural divide . . . between power and wireless engineering in the early twentieth century” (p. 36). There are also interesting and important threads woven into the text, covering such subjects as the relationship of engineers to physicists and engineering to physics (both the author’s and subject’s observations), Alexanderson’s thoughts on the role of consulting in engineers’ careers, and the place of patents in technological development. 876 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Unfortunately, the telling suffers from a pervasive structural flaw. Brittain has chosen to relate Alexanderson’s life and career largely by serially summarizing and paraphrasing letters, articles, technical mate­ rials, and other documents. Too often he presents items from those documents without sufficient context, analysis, or indication of where they came from or what they led to. The one-sidedness of the account results in tremendous frustration for the reader, who is left with a continuous series of unanswered questions. What does it mean that the Radio Engineering Department spent $108,680 in 1919, and what came ofAlexanderson’s suggestion for the transmitting station at New Bruns­ wick, New Jersey? What was the upshot of Alexanderson’s 1939 memo about cooperative education? Did GE, RCA, and Westinghouse convene the radio research luncheons he proposed? Perhaps the range of his subject’s activities prevented Brittain’s chasing down the answers to all the open questions, but, whatever the cause, the biography is very open-ended, a substantial research undigested. Robert Rosenberg Dr. Rosenberg is the managing editor of the book edition of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. Pauper and Prince: Ritchey, Hale, and BigAmerican Telescopes. By Donald E. Osterbrock. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. Pp. xv+359; illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $45.00. George Ellery Hale and George...