Craft Process Research Articles

Signs of resistance: technology re-membering

While it can be demonstrated historically that sophisticated craft processes predate systematic philosophy, we have yet to appreciate the significance of this fact for an approach to tectonics in architecture. If patterns of thought can, ultimately, be seen to arise out of patterns of action, it might be useful to consider the making process as a source of understanding about the physical world. This paper initially proposes an interdependence between this kind of knowledge and our sense of self- the idea that self-consciousness arises, ultimately, from our engagement with the external environment. By considering certain philosophers' work on the phenomenology of perception, as well as the influence of these ideas on the discussion of materiality in the fine arts, this paper suggests the possibility of a 'narrative tectonics', in describing the potential of our engagement with architecture.

Pottery in the Chin Hills

During my research on contemporary pottery villages in Burma, I was given the name of one such village, Lente, by a native now living in the United States. Lente is located in the Chin Hills, a remote area of western Burma difficult to access, inhabited by many tribes speaking a large number of languages. Foreigners are rarely given permission to visit the Chin Hills, and although I obtained permission to travel to Lente, I was ultimately prevented by the authorities from going further than nearby Falam. I was nevertheless able to collect data from Lente in three ways: first, my guide Daw Moe Moe was able to visit Lente and take photographs of the potters there; secondly, Daw Moe Moe was able to return to Falam with a potter from Lente village and with enough of the proper kind of clay to facilitate a demonstration which I photographed and documented; and thirdly, I was given a copy of a videotape showing the potters working in Lente village. This tape was taken by a young man from Falam who is interested in recording local crafts processes. The tape allowed me to observe a process of making pots with which I was totally unacquainted, and which has otherwise escaped recent photographic or video documentation. This was a true "discovery" concerning the ways in which pots can be made, and still another indication of the imagination and ingenuity of humankind.

Toward a Clean Alternative to Friedel−Crafts Acylation: In Situ Formation, Observation, and Reaction of an Acyl Bis(trifluoroacetyl)phosphate and Related Structures

Reaction of acyl trifluoroacetates with phosphoric acid in the presence of trifluoroacetic anhydride (TFAA) leads to the ready formation of acyl bis(trifluoroacetyl)phosphates, which are powerful acylating agents. Formation of these species and the subsequent acylation reaction are carried out, without added solvent, in a single in situ reaction process. In this reaction system, anisole is rapidly acylated at ambient temperature using a variety of carboxylic acids giving the para isomer exclusively. TFAA acts as an activating agent and can be recovered from the reaction system as trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) and converted back to TFAA using a dehydrating agent, while phosphoric acid behaves as a covalent catalyst in the process. This reaction system has many features which are required elements of a clean alternative to the Friedel−Crafts process.

The Temptation of Edgar Toison: Where Twentieth Century Folk Art Led by Julia S. Ardery (review)

century. Appalachian Studies can only hope that other local presses will find other such useful material to make available to us. —Richard B. Drake Julia S. Ardery. The Temptation ofEdgar Toison: Where Twentieth Century Folk Art Led. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 351 pages; illustrations. Cloth $45.00. Trade paper $19.95. Julia Ardery's study of Campton, Kentucky, folk artist Edgar Toison is also an effort to relate the development and popularity of twentieth century folk art to larger historical forces and to present Toison as a man "who, for a variety of reasons, perpetuated, changed, and betrayed the local culture into which he was born and found a place he could not entirely choose or enjoy in a larger, national culture...a successful artist much like any other: charming, self-absorbed, visually heedful, a person who seized many ofthe aesthetic and commercial opportunities available to him." Toison's story, much like that ofMichael Owen Jones's study ofchairmaker Chester Cornett (Craftsman of the Cumberlands: Tradition and Creativity, 1989, University of Kentucky Press) sometimes tells us more coarse detail than we'd rather know about the artist's personal life, his heavy drinking, depression, his weaknesses, and his "24 to 27" children. Edgar Tolson's work was "discovered" at the first Kentucky Guild Fair in Berea in 1967, first by John and Miriam Tuska and then by Michael and Julia Hall, who guided Tolson's artistic and commercial transition from traditional craftsman to contemporary folk artist. The Halls joined forces with Herbert W Hemphill, founder of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, to build Tolson's artistic reputation, an effort enhanced by Ralph Rinzler ofthe Smithsonian Institution. Toison effectively played out the role either assigned to him or assumed by him, including the always-present striped pants, and was a more willing participant in the marketing effort. In many ways, Ardery helps prove my own unpopular theory that markets fuel the folk art and craft process, but she fairly presents the history without taking sides. This book is a well researched, well written study of a legendary Kentucky whittler turned artist, a character given to excesses and weaknesses but one who displays a certain nobility that often rises above the harsh realities and human frailties. Many collectors profited financially from Edgar Tolson's artistic skills and the wave ofpublicity. Tolson's works now sell for astronomical prices, 72 and certainly he broke the ground for the many contemporary folk artist's who produce and sell works rooted in much the same culture. This is an absorbing study of people, politics, places, and the slightly cockeyed world of art marketing, though some will disagree with the author's conclusions, and it's a "must" book for an overview (or inner view) of folk art, culture, and how one man's talents wound up influencing so many. There are a few factual errors. Ardery repeatedly refers to the Southern "Highlands" Handicraft Guild instead of the correct "Highland" used by the venerable Guild, and she places Berea's Bill Best, a North Carolina native, in West Virginia. I question much ofArdery's interpretation ofinfluences and events, much as she questioned my interpretations of the mountain craft revival in my 1991 study, but the differences are of opinion, not fact. As Ardery once wrote, I tend to view the activity in the mountain art and craft world as driven more by economics than by tribal instincts. The Temptation is well illustrated, particularly in Rick Bell's sensitive, haunting portraits. And it is Bell, throughout, who seems to carry the truest and deepest feelings for the sometimes tortured artist, who gave most freely and expected nothing in return. This is a very valuable, very readable book, one I strongly recommend to all who are interested in the regional culture. —Garry Barker 73 ...

Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft

This paper considers Walter Benjamin's theory of the object in the industrial age. Benjamin's work is replete with images of craft practices. Pot-throwing and weaving appear as paradigms of authentic experience and the processes of memory. Prominent in Benjamin's account of craft practice is the hand that feels and marks its objects; authentic knowledge of the world is envisioned as a 'grasping hold' of the world. The shift from artisan labour to industrial labour, with its growing redundancy of the hand in the processes of production, impacts on modes of memory and experience. Benjamin's delineation of modern, industrialized experience is shown to be redemptive. He re-evaluates Dada and photography as manual craft processes that might rediscover a modern authenticity of experience and memory.

Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France by John R. Harris

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 685 Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France. By John R. Harris. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum (Ashgate Pub­ lishing), 1992. Pp. x + 223; notes, index. $59.95. This important, tightly focused anthology by a leading British histo­ rian of technology, economics, and business presents a major thesis involving two related themes. John Harris is concerned first with craft skills. The role of craftsmen has been neglected in the literature since Samuel Smiles concentrated on heroic engineers, inventors, and selfmade men. This initial bias was reinforced by class snobbery, which found the idea that working people have played an important positive role in industry and technological innovation to be repugnant. Diffusion has been neglected through nationalistic bias that focuses research on a few innovative nations (for their further glorification). But surely the norm is diffusion and the creative grafting of new technologies to old cultures. The time is ripe for new research on the role ofworkers and on the diffusionoftechnology, and therefore this anthology is mostwelcome. Chapter 1 reprints Harris’s classic essay, “Skills, Coal, and British Industry in the Eighteenth Century.” His thesis can be paraphrased briefly: “With the progressive adoption ofcoal as an industrial fuel from the late sixteenth century the technological basis of British industry” diverged from that of the Continent. One industry after another adapted coal fuel, glass, and nonferrous metals among them, reaching a sort of climax with the use of coke to produce cast and wrought iron. It was necessary to prevent contamination of industrial materials by harmful coal impurities, often using variations on the reverberatory (or “air”) furnace and other devices (e.g., covered crucibles for glass). The remarkable success of this series of interlocked innovations was made possible by “the creation of new skills and craft processes” that diffused by spinoff from one industry to another, “but which for any single industry came to depend upon a concatenation of both the specialized skills of separate groups of craftsmen and of new types of plant and equipment unknown, or less known in Europe. The craftsmen came to have a developed knowledge of the varieties of coal and of the vagaries of materials to be used with it.” Dependence on craft skills hampered diffusion and stimulated large-scale, organized industrial espionage on the part of England’s great enemy and rival, France (p. 173). There were many collateral developments associated with coal use, such as canals, long-wall coal mining, and the invention of the steam engine. The transfer of technology was not a one-way street, nor was France the only player. Chapter 2, “Saint-Gobain and Ravenhead,” deals with an interesting case of double diffusion: the British were recruiting French workers in order to learn French methods ofcasting plate glass while the French were attempting to emulate the British use of coal instead of increasingly scarce wood in glass production. Chapter 3, “Attempts to Transfer English Steel Techniques to France in the Eighteenth Century,” shows that the determined efforts by the French government to gain a 686 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE critical technology, crucible steel, were unsuccessful precisely because of the complex range of craft knowledge involved. Despite the conspicuous failure to transfer the technology of crucible steel, French government-organized industrial espionage was very suc­ cessful, as indicated by Harris’s pathbreaking overview, “Industrial Es­ pionage in the Eighteenth Century.” French agents, at some risk, pene­ trated Boulton and Watt’s factory, the Carron Iron Works, and much more; the French were surprisingly well informed concerning British technical advances. They developed successful methods of recruiting craftsmen and gaining knowledge. Indeed, the noted British ironmaster John Wilkinson willingly collaborated with the French, and his brother William went to France to establish a cannon foundry near Nantes and then helped create a great coke-based iron complex at Le Creusot. In chapter 4, Harris presents a detailed case study of one of the most successful transfers, that of the Birmingham “toy” trade (but­ tons, hardware, etc.). This transfer was not arranged by espionage; the mentally unstable (but skilled) Michael Alcock fled bankruptcy to settle in France. Thus his poor head for business and inability...

Acylation of aroyl chlorides via a template Friedel–Crafts process: synthesis of indan-1,3-diones

Variously substituted indan-1,3-diones have been regioselectively prepared in a one-pot synthesis by sequential cross-condensation–cycloacylation of aromatic acyl chlorides and acetyl chloride or malonyl dichloride, electrophilic acylation of aromatic acyl chlorides representing the key step in the process. The synergism of the aromatic carbonyl enolization and the organization of the reacting system promoted by the metal is emphasized to account for the mild reaction conditions.

Invention, Authorship, "Intellectual Property," and the Origin of Patents: Notes toward a Conceptual History

issues involving both old and new technologies are pressing and controversial in contemporary scientific and technical culture.' Yet the historical development of the concept of itself needs far more study. As it pertains to technology, intellectual property involves particular attitudes toward craft knowledge and practice, invention, and authorship, and is properly studied within the context of these intrinsically related issues. A complex background of history precedes the origin of the limited monopoly that is called a patent. Intellectual property, a legal concept, refers to various kinds of intangible property. With reference to technology, it involves the belief that knowledge of craft processes and techniques and the development of technological innovations are forms of with commercial value that are separate from products or devices.2 laws grant limited monopolies under certain conditions for particular kinds of authorship. Most modern legal systems distinguish between patents and copyrights. Yet to project this distinction too DR. LONG is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland. She is working on a book concerning the issues of openness, secrecy, authorship, and in pre-17th-century writings on the practical and military arts. Aspects of the research were presented at the 1990 SHOT meeting in Cleveland. She gratefully acknowledges

Invention, Authorship, “Intellectual Property,” and the Origin of Patents: Notes toward a Conceptual History

Invention, Authorship, “Intellectual Property,” and the Origin of Patents: Notes toward a Conceptual History PAMELA O. LONG Intellectual property issues involving both old and new technolo­ gies are pressing and controversial in contemporary scientific and technical culture.1 Yet the historical development of the concept of intellectual property itself needs far more study. As it pertains to technology, “intellectual property” involves particular attitudes to­ ward craft knowledge and practice, invention, and authorship, and is properly studied within the context of these intrinsically related issues. A complex background of intellectual history precedes the origin of the limited monopoly that is called a patent. “Intellectual property,” a legal concept, refers to various kinds of intangible property. With reference to technology, it involves the belief that knowledge of craft processes and techniques and the develop­ ment of technological innovations are forms of property with com­ mercial value that are separate from products or devices.2 Intellectual property laws grant limited monopolies under certain conditions for particular kinds of authorship. Most modern legal systems distinguish between patents and copyrights. Yet to project this distinction too Dr. Long is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland. She is working on a book concerning the issues of openness, secrecy, authorship, and intellectual property in pre-17th-century writings on the practical and military arts. Aspects of the research were presented at the 1990 SHOT meeting in Cleveland. She gratefully acknowledges the support of National Science Foundation grant SES-8607112. ‘For an introduction to recent issues and controversies with extensive further bibliography, see Dorothy Nelkin, Science as Intellectual Property: Who Controls Research? (New York, 1984); Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 10 (Spring 1985), an issue devoted to openness and secrecy in science and technology; and Vivian Weil and John W. Snapper, eds., Owning Scientific and Technical Information: Value and Ethical Issues (New Brunswick, N.J., 1989). 2A useful discussion of conceptual issues is Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, “General Overview of the Intellectual Property System,” in Weil and Snapper, eds., pp. 17-40. Because intellectual property is a form of property, the idea of private property itself is germane. For an introduction, see Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History ofan Idea (1951; reprint, New York, 1973).© 1991 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/91/3204-0008$01.00 846 Invention, “Intellectual Property,” and the Origin of Patents 847 sharply into the historical past is anachronistic. Authorship can refer to written authorship or the authorship of making and inventing material things. Historically, patents appeared before copyrights, but the concept of “intellectual property” (a kind of intangible property) emerged prior to either form of limited monopoly. Novelty (that which is new) preceded originality (that which originates in a partic­ ular author) as thejustification for patent awards.3 Yet the connection between individual authorship and intellectual property had been made by the 15th century at the latest, first with regard to material inventions and later (in the 16th century) with regard to writings.4 ’The distinction between novelty and originality, crucial for modern intellectual property law, is also useful for historical investigations. For instance, a U.S. patent must meet tests for both originality and novelty. The invention must originate with the inventor (it must be original). Yet it must also be novel, i.e., it cannot have been invented independently by someone else. On the other hand, a U.S. copyright must be original but does not have to be novel. In the unlikely event that I wrote a play called Hamlet exactly like the one written by Shakespeare without any knowledge or influence of the prior work, I would own the copyright in that work as my own original (but not novel) expression. This is why the U.S. Patent Office (presumably) does not have a file on people who claim to have invented the wheel, whereas the U.S. Copyright Office does have a file on people who insist that they have written an “original” song called “Happy Birthday to You.” For further discussion of the distinction, see Arthur Kuflik, “Moral Foundations of Intellectual Property Rights,” in Weil and Snapper, eds., pp. 219—40, esp. 236—39. 4Thus author...

Optimization of inoculum draw‐off volume for repeated fed‐batch fermentation process

Dealing with operation modes of microbe fermentation process, repeated fed-batch (RFB) fermentation is relatively a newer kind of fermentation craft process. The object of this study is to develop an optimal draw-off volume for RFB fermentation process by means of computer simulation for a specific industrial antibiotic fermentation process with a 20-L fermentor, on the basis of some theoretical analysis

The Technology of Historic American Buildings: Studies of the Materials, Craft Processes, and the Mechanization of Building Construction

Inspired by the success of Building Early America (to which the present book bears some resemblance), the Association for Preservation Technology and the Foundation for Preservation Technology have produced The Technology of Historic American Buildings. Unlike its predecessor, this book tends to focus primarily upon nineteenth century architectural technology. Thus, its subject matter complements that of the earlier book, although not nearly in as complete or exhaustive a manner. Seven areas are treated in an in-

The Technology of Historic American Buildings: Studies of the Materials, Craft Processes, and the Mechanization of Building Construction

Inspired by the success of Building Early America (to which the present book bears some resemblance), the Association for Preservation Technology and the Foundation for Preservation Technology have produced The Technology of Historic American Buildings. Unlike its predecessor, this book tends to focus primarily upon nineteenth century architectural technology. Thus, its subject matter complements that of the earlier book, although not nearly in as complete or exhaustive a manner. Seven areas are treated in an in-

Template catalysis via non-transition metal complexes. New highly selective syntheses on phenol systems

Abstract