Reviewed by: Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867–1914, and: Culture and Technology: A Primer Ian Petrie (bio) Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact. By Vaclav Smil . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. vi+350. $35. Culture and Technology: A Primer. By Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise . New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pp. xiii+226. $25.95. Each of these books might have been created to raise the hackles of the other's author(s). One could imagine a future edition of Slack and Wise singling out Smil for exemplifying the celebration of "progress" they deplore; Smil, for his part, likely would dismiss Slack and Wise as fashionable yet ill-informed critics of technological advances. In their proclaimed accessibility, the works (or their publishers) declare their candidacy for course reading lists. Read with this destination in mind, both seem wanting. Smil's book commemorates an era of revolutionary technical transformation which he believes to be unjustly neglected in popular understandings of the world in which we live. In Smil's view, innovations from the period 1867–1914 fundamentally shaped modern life, bringing about nothing less than a new civilization. He argues that this "Age of Synergy" consisted of a series of interconnected scientific and technical advances notable for their rapid improvement, commercialization, and diffusion. He illustrates this argument through topical chapters concerning electricity, internal combustion engines, new materials and syntheses (ranging from steel to synthetic ammonia), and communication and information technologies. Much of Smil's story, such as the connections between iconic products of the age like sewing machines, bicycles, and early automobiles, will be familiar to scholars and general readers alike and, while some of his heroes may be unsung, it is hardly the case that this period of transformation or its implications have been neglected in either the academic or the popular literature. But even specialists will learn new things. His chapter on communication and information includes a section on papermaking and the rise of paper as a modern industrial commodity—a nice example of a taken-for-granted technical change underpinning our conventional social and political histories of modernity (the rise of mass publications, elements of state formation, aspects of consumer culture, and so on). Smil accumulates abundant material in support of his contention for the "Age of Synergy," but otherwise his argument provides little structure to individual chapters or the work as a whole. The result is a barrage of information, the author's frequent references to his restraint notwithstanding. The chapter on electricity, for example, ends with a dryly factual survey of the array of global power standards and plug shapes, concluding that "the [End Page 639] only solution when using incompatible devices and plugs is to buy appropriate transformers and adapters" (p. 97). Useful advice for travelers, but adduced to what end? It is easy to imagine students readily taking to Smil's opening premises but then feeling overstuffed with facts. Instructors, for their part, may feel analytically and conceptually underfed. At his best, Smil is a learned and even witty guide. Yet his impatience with the ignorance of the average modern person, or, more specifically, the average American, grates, even if often justified. Consider this opening and closing of a paragraph: Even reasonably well-informed people do not usually mention explosives when asked to list remarkable innovations that helped to create . . . the modern world. . . . How many Americans would even guess that during the late 1990s coal extraction . . . accounted for 67 per-cent of all industrial explosives used annually in the United States? (p. 180) At moments such as this, Smil's insights are obscured by his hectoring pedantry. The book's abundant images and figures (more than 120) are a potentially rich resource. Graphs are attractively presented, while each chapter is complemented by diagrams and pictures gleaned from patent filings and contemporary periodicals (principally Scientific American and The Illustrated London News). These sources are hardly novel, but such a trove of visuals is welcome. Smil, however, offers only scanty comments on the collective significance of these images and such periodicals' coverage of scientific and technological advances. His general lack of interest...
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Jan 1, 2011
Dev Paul + 2
Open Access