TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 417 Ingenious Yankees, however, asserts that elements of the system were developed in the private sector before their use in armories, and that private-sector mechanics adapted innovations developed in armories only selectively. Hoke’s analysis of wooden clock making and type writer production, for example, shows that mechanics built in adjust ability to allow for lack of precision that was simply not needed. The result in the case of Terry’s wooden clocks was a cheap, dependable, and more easily assembled product that broadened the lower end of the market. Hoke believes, quite correctly, that the history of technology should be grounded in a thorough understanding of machines and process, and his analysis of complex production processes is outstanding. However, he does not spend the time or space to make the reader comfortable with the details before getting to larger issues. In addition, one wishes that this book had focused more on the people who helped create and worked in these industries. Waltham, for example, was a city where nearly everyone worked in the watch industry. Who were they? Were they native born? Immigrants? Men or women? Who held the skilledjobs and who held the unskilled? The mechanization described in these pages created many jobs that did not require Yankee ingenuity. Why did the Irish and FrenchCanadians take work as grinders at Collinsville? How long did they stay? Was it economic necessity? Paternalism? Social cohesion? Social and cultural historians like Anthony Wallace and Merritt Roe Smith have demonstrated the importance of such questions for the economic and technological historian because without such willing workers there would have been no “operatives” to run the machines and not much for ingenious Yankees to do. Hoke’s discussion of the evolution of the American system of manufactures has largely neglected the system’s effect on work and skill. The system created new skilled workers, such as machinists, engineers, and managers, but also produced an army of semiskilled and unskilled industrial workers whose tasks were repetitive, boring, and often dangerous. Technological change took place in a human setting, not a strictly material world, and must be explored in its social and cultural context. Dennis Zembala Dr. Zembala is director of the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Possible Dreams: Enthusiasmfor Technology in America. Edited by John L. Wright. Dearborn, Mich.: Henry Ford Museum, 1992. Pp. 128; illustrations, bibliography. $14.95 (paper). This lavishly illustrated collection ofessays was published in connection with an exhibition on enthusiasm for technology at the Henry Ford 418 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Museum, prompted in part by the ninetieth anniversary of Popular Me chanics magazine. The contributors confront such issues as the growing gap between increasingly complex technological systems and users (no matter how enthusiastic), the relationship between colonialism and do mesticity, the problem oftechnologicalenthusiasm in an increasingly toxic world, and the role of language and of literature in technological devel opment. Nonetheless, the thread thatjoins these splendidly written and often exciting essays is the gendering (and class specifying, and racializing ) ofenthusiasm for technology as a white, male, middle-class attribute, a quality shared by the millions of guys who have formed the primary readership of Popular Mechanics. The subjects of these essays range from how-to books and their role in popularizing technological knowledge, “boy engineering,” audio technology and its enthusiasts, domestic technology in the 1950s, land speed racing, the presentation of nuclear technology, and, of course, the history of Popular Mechanics. Those by Joseph J. Corn, Mary L. Seelhorst, and Robert C. Post are snappily written and thoughtful. Corn describes a “dynamic symbiosis between texts and technics,” Seelhorst relates the hits, misses, and influence of Popular Mechanics, and Post shows how drag racing embodies a desire to create machines not because they are useful, but because they are possible. The essays I found most compelling shared the view that technological enthusiasts are also anxious people, seeking to create order in a scary world. Carroll Pursell provides a framework for interpreting the cultural politics of technology, which he memorably calls a “wise-man’s burden” engineered to give “scientifically and technically trained men the respon sibility for leadership and control to stem the rising...
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Jan 1, 1994
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