Donald Cardwell (1919-1998)

Abstract

Donald Cardwell was for forty years the leading British historian of tech nology. His first book, The Organisation of Science in England (London, 1957), led to his first teaching job as lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds; it was reprinted in the 1970s and remained a recommended text for the Open University for over a decade. His second book, Steam Power in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), led to his appointment as reader in the history of science and technology at the Manchester College of Science and Technology (soon to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, or UMIST), where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. As the principal of UMIST, Vivian Bowden, guided his college toward international leadership, so Donald developed an international reputation. His books From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1973; published by the University of Iowa Press in 1989) and Technology, Science and History (London, 1972; published in the United States as Turning Points in Western Civilization) brought interna tional recognition in the form of the Dexter Prize (1973) and the Leonardo Da Vinci Medal (1981). Donald is the only non-American scholar to have been awarded both these honors. In building an international reputation Donald did not neglect his adopted home of Manchester. In 1968 he organ ized a conference and edited a collection of essays on John Dalton and the progress of science to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great Manchester chemist. Six years later he edited another volume to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Manchester Mechanics Institution, the precursor to UMIST. But his most important contribution to Manchester was his championship of a sci ence museum for the region. That idea took concrete form when one of Donald's research assistants, Richard Hills, was appointed director of the locally funded North Western Museum of Science and Industry. Now, as the