The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves by Jed Z. Buchwald

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 971 and clean electric light made it possible to reduce the marked differ­ ences between a daytime world and a nighttime world, where light and darkness set boundaries for the things people could do. Electric light, arc light, was used in Sweden from 1876, and elec­ tricity became an important element in the modernization of the nation around the turn of the century. With the help of trademarks and advertisements, Garnert demonstrates how the miracle of the radiant electric bulb was associated with classical symbolic imagery and the goddess of light. But electric light was still relatively exclu­ sive. Not until the introduction ofmetal filament lamps around 1910 did it become economically viable for ordinary people. Garnert argues that the real cultural transformation made possi­ ble by the new lighting technique took place around 1930 in Swe­ den. A number of “display events,” such as the Stockholm Exhibi­ tion of 1930, introduced the concept of “electric light culture,” and electric light began to shape the space of streets, homes, offices, fac­ tories, and shops. What emerged was an electrically lit milieu which meant that the age of point lighting was over. This artificial milieu, Garnert concludes, has transformed our forms of social intercourse and changed our daily rhythm ofwork and leisure. In fact, time and space have changed their meanings. The author follows an established Swedish ethnological tradition focused on the study of artifacts (mainly in agrarian society) and on the human-technology relationship. Although the lighting tech­ niques ofdifferent epochs are taken as more-or-less given, the book should be ofinterest to all historians of technology. Considering the wide field of the study, it is inevitable that it sometimes lacks focus. But Garnertis a skilled observer, and his ability to combine heteroge­ neous source materials—not least the beautifully reproduced pic­ tures from different periods—into a thought-provoking text makes the book highly readable. Bo Sundin Dr. Sundin is professor of the history of science and ideas at Umea University, Sweden. The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves. By Jed Z. Buchwald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+482; tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). In this well-researched, superbly argued, and aptly titled book,Jed Buchwald, a leading historian of physics, turns his attention from explicating the development of “high” theory (the focus of his two previous books, From Maxwell to Microphysics [1985] and The Rise of the Wave Theory ofLight [1989], both published by the University of Chicago Press) to understanding laboratory work, a subject of great 972 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE interest in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science in the past decade. Historians of technology who study scientific instru­ ments and the general relationship between science and technology will also find the book of interest, even though this first volume of a projected two-volume account ends with Hertz’s publication of his electric wave experiments in the late 1880s, a decade before practical electricians began to develop his apparatus into systems of wireless telegraphy. The strengths of the present volume are many. Working under the premise that historians should “act as professional agnostics” (p. 1) toward the validity of scientific claims in the past, Buchwald admirably refrains from using present theories of physics to analyze what Hertz observed in the laboratory. The result is a highly techni­ cal but always readable “thick description” of Hertz’s major work in evaporation, cathode rays, and electromagnetic waves—all set in the context of late-19th-century German physics, the substantial in­ fluence of Hermann von Helmholtz (Hertz’s Doktorvater), and the competitive drive of (the often depressed) Hertz to make a name for himself. Of particular interest to historians of technology will be the rich accounts of the complex relationship among various levels of theory, tacit knowledge, and craft skill in Hertz’s experiments. The reconstruction of how he invented the detector used with his equally novel electromagnetic wave generator, through a “complex route, which was not predetermined in any simple way either by the­ ory or by a well-laid plan” (p. 236), is masterful. The...