From, Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830–1920 by Paul Israel

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 413 began with brass buttons. His sons found a small but steady market for rolled zinc. They learned the idiosyncracies of working zinc few others would bother with. As demand for one product declined, they shifted to another: the Platts made, successively, zinc tent buttons for the army in the Civil War, riveted zinc fly buttons, the zinc strip for shoelace ferrules, and precision strip for the fusible links of electrical fuses. They made all the iron-cored zinc rod that provided cathodic protection for the steel in the Alaska pipeline. Roth used the records kept by the Platt family to show how Alfred and the following generations survived wartime dislocations, the mo­ nopolistic practices of the large brass mills, and the worst flood in Connecticut history. These records detail business and real estate transactions, and relations between family members. (Readers would have found it easier to follow Roth’s sources if the publishers had allowed him to include a bibliography and had keyed the endnotes to page numbers.) The Platts, like most Waterbury entrepreneurs and mechanics, left few records of the techniques they used. Only in the 1920s, as they began to manufacture fuse wire for the electrical industry, did they ask professional metallurgists for advice and, con­ sequently, generate a record of some of their techniques. Even then, the Platts preferred to leave the finer points of rolling in the hands of experienced artisans rather than professional engineers. The pau­ city of the documentary record of the techniques that the Platts devel­ oped meant that Roth could not tell us as much about this aspect of their entrepreneurship. Robert B. Gordon Dr. Gordon is professor of geophysics and applied mechanics at Yale University. From, Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context ofAmerican Invention, 1830—1920. By Paul Israel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Pp. viii + 251; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $38.50. Each generation imposes its own mental models on the history of prior generations. Historians writing in the shadow of Big Science saw the early history of industrial research as characterized by the corporate laboratory staffed by professional engineers and scientists. Now historians are rediscovering the role of “practical man” as inven­ tor, and the critical connection between workshop, technology, and innovation that was fostered by the American patent system. The Edisonian approach to invention that a whole generation of post— World War II Ph.D. physicists derided as “cut-and-try” has regained credibility. In this book Paul Israel deals with the evolution of telegra­ phy from original invention to technology-based industry until it was displaced as the cutting-edge electricity-based technology by radio and telephony. Israel skillfully locates telegraphy in the several con­ texts that shaped this progression—the social, intellectual, commer­ 414 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE cial, and technological environments that characterized the United States as it moved from a society chiefly oriented toward agriculture and westward expansion to an urban society geared for mass pro­ duction. Drawing on the trove of materials available in the Edison Papers project at Rutgers University, this particular story of telegraphy de­ rives much of its interest from the accounts of the careers of many individuals—men and women—whose collective contributions made telegraphy what it was. Myths of republican individualism notwith­ standing, the author, an editor of the Edison papers, shows that these inventors, operators, manufacturers, investors, and corporate tycoons rarely functioned alone, but formed communities of expertise whose practices developed around, as they also shaped, both telegraphic technology and the communications services it enabled. At the institutional level the book depicts the evolution of telegra­ phy both as a technical system and as an industry. In Europe telegra­ phy was linked to the scientific elites and their fascination with the intellectual problems of electricity. European telegraphy served gov­ ernment communications and the upper echelons of society, and its technologists were well educated in the science of electricity. In the United States, by contrast, the development of telegraphy had its initial impetus from the practical problems of users in a rapidly ex­ panding economy with a republican ideology. Telegraphy grew first in partnership with the...