Failed Innovations—ICOHTEC Symposium, Hamburg, August 1989

Abstract

Conference Report FAILED INNOVATIONS—ICOHTEC SYMPOSIUM, HAMBURG, AUGUST 1989 GAIL COOPER AND BRUCE SINCLAIR At the level of international congresses, the history of technology still acts through the medium of the history of science. So, according to that tradition (and the Unesco charter, which gave such interna­ tional organizations their life), the International Committee for the History of Technology, ICOHTEC, met at the eighteenth Interna­ tional Congress of History of Science, held—peripatetically—in Ham­ burg and Munich, Federal Republic of Germany, August 1—9, 1989. More than 1,000 people attended this conference, coming from forty-eight different countries. From August 1 to August 5 the meeting took place at the Congress Centrum in Hamburg. Then on the sixth a special train carried the participants down through the Federal Republic of Germany to Munich, and from the seventh to the ninth the sessions were held at the Deutsches Museum. Besides the history of technology and history of science, the congress also included sessions on the history of mathematics and of medicine and on the philosophy of science. According to Mel Kranzberg’s content analysis, of the 790 papers presented at the conference, 177, or 22 percent, concerned the history of technology. The ICOHTEC program, which took place in the Hamburg venue, focused on the theme of failed innovations. During a daylong session organized by Hans-Joachim Braun of the University of Hamburg, scholars from England, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the United States discussed the nature of innovation and its relation to economic factors, to government policy, to stages of technical devel­ opment, and to what one might call cultural response. Alexandre Herlea (France) opened the meeting with some general considerations, pointing out the key role that innovation plays in most analyses of technical change. As he put it, that is where the “socialDr . Cooper teaches in the Department of History at Lehigh University, and Dr. Sinclair teaches in the School of Social Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology.© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3103-0004$01.00 496 Failed Innovations—ICOHTEC Symposium, Hamburg, 1989 497 ization” of an innovation begins. Yet if, as Herlea suggested, it was difficult to identify failure in technologies that subsequently proved useful, papers made the matter seem straightforward enough in certain cases. Early attempts to solve problems of power transmission —for instance, the efforts of Denis Papin to move pistons by creating vacuums in very long tubes (6 miles), described by Graham HollisterShort (Great Britain)—seem to fall into the category of ideas that simply outstripped the means for their successful development. Two hundred years after Papin, I. K. Brunel’s atmospheric railway— discussed by Angus Buchanan (Great Britain)—depended essentially on the same concepts, and, while it came closer to practical applica­ tion, it more persuasively demonstrated the persistent appeal of the concept than the ultimate working out of technical problems. Conversely, some innovations appear technically superior but prove uneconomic in practice. Rotary engines, for example, have long held a seductive appeal to technical minds. But their palpable advantages over reciprocating models, as Hans-Joachim Braun (Federal Republic of Germany) pointed out in his paper on Chrysler’s efforts to develop automotive gas turbine engines, still left unsolved a number of problems—such as the successful machining of expensive alloys—that remain crucial to economic success. The “Wisconsin” process for nitrogen fixation was another such instance, according to Anthony Stranges (United States), and one might say the same of the airmail pickup system discussed by David Lewis and William Trimble (United States). The idea originated in a plan to bring the benefits of airmail service to small communities without airports by suspending the mailbag between two upright poles, so that a low-flying plane could swoop down to snag it with a special grappling hook. The notion caught on, and its developers imagined extending it to passenger service. But wider application proved uneconomical, and, even though the tech­ nique saw wartime use in glider pickup, it was abandoned by the late 1940s as its developers moved into a more “regular” form of passenger service. Simple as these examples appear in summary description...