Toward a Discipline of the History of Technology

Eugene S. Ferguson

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Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis History of Science and Medicine Philosophy, History, and Historiography

Abstract

The history of technology, one of the latest threads to be pulled out of the seamless web of history, has all the appearances of an academic field, yet it is difficult to find in it a discipline or conceptual framework that guides the work being done in its name. We can point to a Society for the History of Technology, a quarterly journal, an annual current bibliography, and a hardcover bibliography, but when we try to demonstrate what it is that sets it apart, or ought to set it apart, from antiquarian chronologies of water mills, steam engines, or airplanes, we have an embarrassingly small number of books written for the intelligent general reader and the nontechnical historian rather than for the subject-matter specialist. This paper is concerned with some of the issues that appear to be involved in building a discipline in this field.' It opens with a few words about the state of the history of technology when it recently entered the academy-entering, I might say, through a postern gate; next, it tries to explain why I believe that the discipline can fill an academic need; and finally, it suggests an organizing theme that is attractive to me, particularly in the writing of history intended for the general reader and the nontechnical historian. Until less than a generation ago the history of technology was pursued almost entirely by technologists, museum curators, and writers of popular books of inventions. For many people, the field is defined by the five-volume A History of Technology, which was designed and edited by the late Charles Singer and published in the late 1950s. This extensive and expensive set of books, which is chiefly concerned with how things are commonly done or made, has served us well

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References

2020Technology and American Economic Growth 1971Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in 19th-Century America 1972On Discipline Building: The Paradoxes of George Sarton

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1984The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other 1999On the relationship between old and new technologies 1995Hughesian history of technology and Chandlerian business history: Parallels, departures, and critics 1999No Mere Technicalities: How Things Work and Why It Matters 1976C. P. Steinmetz and E. F. W. Alexanderson: Creative engineering in a corporate setting 1985Early history of the OSU ElectroScience Laboratory 2012The concert hall as a medium of musical culture: the technical mediation of listening in the 19th century 1991The Persistence of Memory: Dynamics of Sociocultural Evolution

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