The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology by Carroll Pursell. 2nd Ed

Abstract

Machine in America: A Social History of Technology Carroll Pursell. 2nd Ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pursell's book first saw publication in 1995, and the fact that it has now gone into a second edition is a tribute to its perdurability. It is comfortably written for the nonspecialist, which, for the genre of history, means it is not intentionally pedantic or tedious or overly laden with technological statistics and detail. author, who seems to know his audience, worries that he might have neglected any given reader's favorite machine, an amusing concern, and worth noting, perhaps, only for the nerdiest of readers, but I found it considerate, and charming. Preface tends toward the mechanical, but the Introduction gives a sprightly survey of the state of technology up to the Industrial Revolution. book's first chapter describes The Tools Brought Over to the American Colonies, and the following chapter explains how the Industrial Revolution was imported to America. next challenge, then, was to provide the means of transporting products to markets efficiently by roads, by rivers and canals, and, finally, by railroads. Being something of a railroad buff, my own favorite machine (after the typewriter, of course!) would be the Baldwin locomotive. Matthew Baldwin set up business in 1825 in Philadelphia. He had only built six engines by 1834, but by 1839 he had completed an astonishing 140 and was selling locomotives abroad in Russia, Austria, in the German principalities, and even to I. K. Brunei in Britain. This achievement seems all the more melancholy 170-plus years later, with the United States rail system, once second to none, in collapse, its infrastructure and maintenance- of-way weakening day by day. I once had in my possession a badge plate cut off a Baldwin H9s locomotive. It was, for me, symbolic of what our nation once was and once could achieve. But to quote a pessimistic Sam Peckinpah movie, Those days are closing fast, I'm afraid. This is a tale well told and then retold of a nation tooled and then re-tooled and then, finally, detooled and outsourced. Bringing the book up to date can not have been easy, given the rise of terrorism and its impact on Neoconservative American culture and government. A whole lot has changed during the past dozen years. sea-change of 9/11 terrorized Americans, who gave their President permission to launch two pre-emptive wars in the Middle East, and in the final pages of this revised book, Pursell attempts to re-evaluate the country's standing, but all is not exactly joyful about contemporary, outsourced America. …