Recent Trends in the History of Technology

Abstract

THE FIRST RECORDED MEETING OF THE Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) took place at the 1957 annual convention of the American Society of Engineering Education at Cornell University. Four members (John Rae, Carl Condit, Thomas Hughes, and Melvin Kranzberg) used the occasion to ask Cornell historian of science Henry Guerlac whether the History of Science Society's journal, Isis, might make room for articles on the history of technology. According to Kranzberg, the meeting with Guerlac proved to be a disaster and led to the formal foundation of SHOT in 1958 and the creation of a separate journal, Technology and Culture. Several decades later, SHOT-now numbering three to four hundred active members-and its journal are still the primary institutional outlets for historians of technology in the United States and Western Europe. SHOT is a tightly knit organization, and, among its members, the distinction between outsiders and insiders remains highly salient.' In part, SHOT's self-perception of marginality goes back to its origins as an unappreciated rump group within the History of Science Society. Nor is it surprising that a field whose ideological and intellectual limits are difficult to identify and establish should be so concerned about its sociological boundaries. Because of the peculiar nature of the Western world's love affair with progress and its identification of progress with science and technology, the question of who is best suited to tell the story of technological change has been and continues to be hotly contested by an ideologically diverse array of individuals and institutions.2 That debate is particularly intense within the United States, where interpreters of the history of technology include museum curators, corporations, and the mass media, as well as academic scholars. Companies such as General Motors and Exxon