History of Technology ed. by Graham Hollister-Short, Frank James

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 851 means for ending the shortage of housing for low-income families. He concludes that faith in the high-tech solution was misplaced, but there is not nearly enough information in the article to persuade me that he is right. No information is provided about the technology itself—what kinds of building systems he is considering and how they work (there are no illustrations)—and very little on the key question of the cost of units built using industrialized systems compared with traditional methods. It may be that industrialized building is inappro­ priate for capital-poor countries, but it would be interesting to know why préfabrication has not caught on in the United States, for example, except for mobile homes. That public housing authorities in the United States do not use it may reflect, in part, the lack of funding for public housing construction, not necessarily the merits of the technology. In the end, McCutcheon seems more intent on bashing the proponents of capital-intensive construction systems than on evaluating the potential of préfabrication for improving the quality and reducing the cost of housing. Sara Wermiel Ms. Wermiel is a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. History of Technologyi vol. 13. Edited by Graham Hollister-Short and Frank James. London: Mansell, 1991. Pp. xiii + 242; illustrations, tables, notes. $80.00. Marking the bicentenary of the birth of Michael Faraday (1791 — 1867), this annual volume differs from previous ones in that it focuses on a single theme, electrical technology. The rise of electrical tech­ nology featured a new type of connection between science and technology. Thus, for example, the lightning rod and the electric motor could not have been invented without knowledge of the rudimentary concepts of electricity and the basic laws of electromag­ netism, respectively. In contrast, spectacles were invented long before the establishment of the fundamental laws of optics. In the last quarter of the 19th century, it became painfully clear that “scientific knowledge was a necessary, butiiot a sufficient, condition for techno­ logical advance” (p. ix). In the opening paper, “Michael Faraday, Cable Telegraphy and the Rise of Field Theory,” Bruce J. Hunt suggests “that it is to cable te­ legraphy, particularly the emphasis it placed on propagation phenom­ ena, that we should look for clues to the direction British field theory took in the years after Faraday” (p. 15). Developments taking place mainly on the other side of the Atlantic are dealt with by Iwan R. Morus in his paper on Samuel Morse, with special reference to sciencetechnology relations. The author concludes that Morse “owes less to 852 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ‘science’ than ‘science’ does to Morse and his fellow inventors of the telegraph” (p. 36), which sounds somewhat paradoxical. The most technical paper in the volume is “Electromagnetic En­ gines: Pre-technology and Development Immediately Following Fara­ day’s Discovery of Electromagnetic Rotations,” by Brian Gee. The next two articles are concerned with the origins of education in and institutionalization of electrical engineering in Britain in the second halfofthe 19th century: “Teaching Telegraphy and Electrotechnics in the Physics Laboratory: William Ayrton and the Creation of an Academic Space for Electrical Engineering in Britain, 1873-1884,” by Graeme Gooday, and “ ‘The Engineer Must Be a Scientific Man’: The Origins of the Society of Telegraph Engineers,” by W. J. Reader. Two very different British men of the then-new profession are the heros of C. A. Hempstead and A. C. Lynch—Fleeming Jenkin and Oliver Heaviside. “In spite of his talents and his contribution to engi­ neering . . . Jenkin is, by and large, unrecorded in the history of technology” (Hempstead, p. 119). Also, there remain questions on the life and work of Heaviside (Lynch’s hero), who is known to every student of electrical engineering. W. Bernard Carlson performed “a case study in using craft knowl­ edge for technological innovation,” telling us the story of the creation of Thomas Edison’s laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey. In the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, technological innovations flowed from Europe to America. But “American developments in electrical engineering were fundamental to the future growth and flowed back into...