Clio as Physicist and Machinist

Abstract

For the historians of and technology in the United States, 1971 was an annus mirabilis. At the time, we did not realize it. An obvious great event of the previous year was the conference at Northwestern University on the nineteenth-century sciences in America whose proceedings appeared in the following year.1 For a number of us, the conference was a great surprise because so many cared enough to come to Evanston. Although 1971 was not like Newton's great year of 1665-1666 in witnessing overwhelming intellectual feats, it was a year in which the output of articles and books jumped considerably, including a number of works of very high quality in an impressive array of intellectual modes and on a wide range of topics.2 Important works had, of course, appeared earlier. In the previous year Raymond P. Steams published the culmination of a lifetime of research and an epitome of an older mode, Science in the British Colonies of America. A more modish work of 1970 was the undeservedly neglected Dollars for Research: Science and its Patrons in Nineteenth-Century America by Howard S. Miller. As early as 1966, A. Hunter Dupree, a pioneer practitioner, proclaimed that the field had found itself, arousing an antipathy among regular historians of that still lingers.3 But despite the appearance of fine articles and books, a sense of pessimism had spread, a feeling of lost momentum. As late as the Bicentennial, Brooke Hindle could write off the study of the pre-1789 period as a closed historiographic incident. Yet in that year Herbert Leventhal published his In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America, clearly showing the influence of Keith Thomas's work on the decline of magic in England. Three years previously Joan Hoff-Wilson sounded a quite different note in her Dancing Dogs of the Colonial Period: Women Scientists, not only bringing a new gender into the story but calling for a rethinking of what science is. Two years after Hindle wrote, Neil Longley York presented a fresh interpretation of technology in Revolutionary America.4 The history of colonial and technology is alive and well. To return to 1971, in that year Daniel J. Kevles presented two articles on the World War I period that heralded his splendid treatment of that era in his later book, The Physicists, easily the most significant work on the history of