Culture and Technological Transformations

Abstract

Lindy Biggs. The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 169 and notes, bibliographic essay and index. Mark H. Rose. Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Pp. xviii + 201 and bibliographic essay and index. Maureen Ogle. All the Modem Conveniences: American Household Plumbing 1840-1890. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp xii + 160 and notes, bibliographic essay and index. These recent books in the history of technology chronicle the development of some defining material commonplaces of twentieth-century American life: indoor plumbing, gas and electricity, and the mechanized factory. John Staudenmaier, in a 1990 American Historical Review essay on the history of technology highlighted historiographical struggles against the traditional "master narrative" of "the whig reading of Western technological evolution as inevitable and autonomous" (Staudenmaier 1990, 725). Since then, his- torians have redoubled their efforts to understand technology as a product made by human cultures, rather than as an autonomous force determining the unfolding of human history. These three books treat hard cases for tech- nological antideterminism—cases in which we are most inclined to see im- proved quality of life and industrial efficiency as inherent in technologies shaped unproblematically by obvious material needs. The books examine rich bodies of sources and fill important gaps in the history of everyday life and, for this reason alone, are worthwhile and useful contributions. In addition, all three, both through their historical methods and their explicit theoretical discussions, call attention to central historiographical dilemmas concerning the imperatives, limitations, and power of constructivist technology studies. In doing so they make clear the persistent difficulties in exorcizing the determinist ghost from the machine.