Technology and culture Book Reviews 1045 position history is an important contribution to the growing histori ography of international expositions. Robert W. Rydell Dr. Rydell is associate professor of history at Montana State University. He is currently completing a sequel to All the World’s a Fair (Chicago, 1984) that carries the history of America’s international expositions through the Second World War. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. By Carolyn Marvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. 269; illustrations, notes, index. $34.50. This engaging book is filled with quotations taken from stories and anecdotes about the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and electric ity at the end of the 19th century. Most were selected from local newspapers and magazines for republication in the trade press, particularly ElectricalReview, Western Electrician, Telephony, and Electrical World. Other examples come from popular magazines. The often bizarre stories concern not only the United States and England but also Europe and colonies of the British Empire. This material is not examined as evidence of cultural variation, however, but is taken to be a discourse addressed to the technical audience, primarily about the naive fantasies and confusions of the general public. Carolyn Marvin argues that electrical engineers used this discourse to define themselves as a textual community and to gain social status. Stories about terrifying natives with electric lights or frighten ing an old black man with a hidden loudspeaker exemplify how “electrical experts caricatured and ridiculed the aspirations and electrical encounters of conventional scapegoat groups, including non-Europeans, Indians, blacks, women, criminals, and the poor. Deception and coercion were accepted sanctions against those who refused to recognize the authority of electrical expertise” (p. 62). Yet if technological literacy defined a new elite, the technol ogies themselves—particularly the telephone and phonograph— penetrated the sanctity of the home and “muddied social distance,” allowing anyone to court, trick, or swindle anyone else. Furthermore, the professional’s abstract knowledge of electricity clashed with the layman’s attempt to understand new technologies through the body, by means of electrical belts, “flash” jewelry, accounts of magical electric powers, and electric dresses. Some showmen and profession als exploited the public fascination with new technologies through hoaxes, spectacular lighting displays at expositions, advertising, and messages splashed across the clouds by searchlights. 1046 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Long before McLuhan’s “global village” was thought of, such new forms of communication seemed to promise the future annihilation of “Space, Time and Difference” and encouraged fantasies of reach ing out to the “others,” both on the earth and on other planets, creating a wider “kinship” and obliterating cultural difference. Over all, Marvin argues that the importance of early electrical communi cation lies “not in the record of cumulative improvements in engi neered devices, not in institutional narratives of how emerging industries built and marketed new devices of communication, but in the history of continuous concern about how new media rearrange and imperil social relationships” (p. 235). Edison and other popular self-taught electrical pioneers do not bulk large in this account, perhaps because they cannot comfortably be called experts or plausibly be seen as laymen. Nor was archival research deemed appropriate for a project focused on public dis course rather than on individuals or inventions. But granting this restriction to published anecdotes and stories, should material re printed in the engineering technical press be granted a special privilege? What of the journals of electrical medicine, of the National Electric Light Association, and the street railway associations? What of electricity in feminist utopian writings or in Mark Twain’s A Connect icut Yankee or in Henry Adams? Why is only one great world’s fair—the Chicago Columbian Exposition—discussed? Other com plaints: the index is too short and the illustrations are not analyzed, two failures of communication. Within the self-imposed limits of her research base, however, Marvin has made a thorough study of long-neglected materials, painstakingly winnowing thousands of pages in the technical press. Without using specialized jargon, she has deployed an original method which converts these forgotten materials into a work where technology, society, and communications intertwine. David E. Nye Dr. Nye...