1120 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Students of technology and culture will find Wall’s study both absorbing and frustrating. Although Alfred’s life is filled with inter esting and important activities, it has neither a straight line nor a pinnacle of accomplishment to give it focus. Wall makes a persuasive case that Alfred was not a reactionary devoted to black powder at Du Pont, and that he could be an innovative thinker, but after the power struggle he ceased to be a factor in the company. His later business endeavors, especially his banking and development work in Florida, and his political forays in Delaware were significant and enduring but left no giant imprint. The result is a revealing portrait of a difficult and complex subject who was neither attractive nor a shaper of his age. What ultimately makes the book worthwhile to readers of this journal is the range of insights it offers into the ways human foibles intrude on affairs that scholars prefer to package as tidy, logical developments. Where Chandler and Salsbury stress the role played by Pierre du Pont in the creation of the modern corporation, Wall demonstrates through Alfred’s life how passion, ambition, greed, vengeance, family con flicts, and other irrational forces can shape the larger structure of events. At first glance the modern enterprise may look to be rational, the decisions of its managers rational, and the role of technology imper sonal, but behind this neutral facade the guiding hands are often flawed by raging contradictions and influences that are neither linear nor logical. The strange career of Alfred du Pont suggests that the human imprint on modern material society is most definitely alive, if not always well. Maury Klein Dr. Klein is professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He has published a biography of Jay Gould (1986) and is presently completing a biography of E. H. Harriman. The American Synthetic Rubber Research Program. By Peter J. T. Morris. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Pp. xii+ 191; notes, appendix, bibliography, indexes. $34.95. Of the various synthetic substances that have played an important role in the technological development of 20th-century America, rubber has been among the most important. Surprisingly, however, the historical literature concerning the evolution of synthetic rubber research is exceedingly sparse. To be sure, several company histories touch on the subject in rather fragmentary fashion. Select articles in technical journals deal with special aspects of the subject. But among book-length studies only the comprehensive volume by Vernon Her bert and Attilio Bisio (1985) and the essays in the edited work by G. S. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1121 Whitby, C. C. Davis, and R. F. Dunbrook (1954) stand out. This new work by British historian of science Peter J. T. Morris, thus fills a gap and is a welcome addition to the history of rubber in the United States. In five tersely written chapters, Morris surveys the development of the American synthetic rubber industry. He begins with a broad survey of the federal government’s synthetic rubber program from 1929 to 1985. Major wars of this period played a crucial role in stimulating government-sponsored research in the field from 1940 to 1953. Thereafter, government interest atrophied as private corpora tions took the initiative in developing the industry. Morris recounts the technical problems they encountered and the innovations they devised to meet the demands of a burgeoning market for the product. In his third chapter, Morris focuses on the role of the universities in the synthetic rubber program and their relations with government research agencies and also the industrial laboratories of the major corporations in the industry. Of greatest interest to chemists and historians of chemistry will be chapters 4 and 5 because they deal with the technical problems researchers encountered in the improvement of synthetic rubber. Chapter 4 has a cogent discussion of quality control and polymer evaluation, issues with which the Bell Telephone Laboratories, the National Bureau of Standards, and the U.S. gov ernment laboratories were concerned. Chapter 5 analyzes rubber research programs and polymer science and traces the spin-offs that synthetic rubber programs produced for the wider held of...