By

James C. Williams

America’s technological experience began with a colonial experience abundant in natural resources and graced by a fertile craft tradition. During the revolutionary era, military necessity and the need to build a strong and independent nation sustained technological change, and settlement of the vast North American continental landmass that followed during the nineteenth century spawned development of powerful technologies and inspired remarkable engineering achievements. By 1900, the rise of a complex urban-industrial society seemed to be the logical outcome of Americans technological enthusiasm, and subsequently, a system-center technological society has characterized American life.

Historians of technology have produced a rich body of historical literature exploring these and many other topics. Interested readers will find numerous works on specific inventions, machines, and technological and engineering achievements that comprise what scholars call the "internal" history of technology. Equally numerous are studies that explore the context of specific technological developments – the resources, social conditions, and the motives, values, and worldviews of the historical actors who shaped technology. Finally, there are many "external" histories of technology – social histories, if you will – which focus on the cultural context of technology and pay little attention to questions of technological design.

The ready availability of resources that were relatively scarce in Europe – in particular, wood – exemplified early American technology. C. A. Weslager, The Log Cabin in America from Pioneer Days to the Present (New Brunswick, 1969) addresses one of the best known icons of these early years, while Henry J. Kauffman, American Axes: A Survey of Their Development and Their Makers (Brattleboro, VT, 1972) looks at perhaps the most important tool of the period. Brooke Hindle focuses more broadly on the importance of wood-based technologies in his edited works, America’s Wooden Age: Aspects of its Early Technology (Tarrytown, NY, 1975), and Material Culture of the Wooden Age (Tarrytown, NY, 1981). More recently Thomas R. Cox, et al., This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln, NE, 1985), explores broader economic, social, and intellectual themes of America’s forest-based technological culture.

A craft tradition supported technology in early America. Products were made one at a time, the entire process carried out by a skilled master artisan, perhaps with the assistance of apprentices. Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (New York, 1950) studies the artisans of this period; Charles F. Montgomery, America’s Arts and Skills (New York, 1957) studies the artifacts produced by American artisans; Silvio A. Bedini Thinkers and Tinkers (New York, 1975) brings both artisan and artifact together; and Brooke Hindle, David Rittenhouse (Princeton, NJ, 1964), tells the story of America’s most celebrated artisan, who worked entirely within traditional technologies. Hindle’s The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1956) weaves American crafts into the era’s cultural context, and an excellent collection of essays that goes beyond this period is Judith A. McGaw, Early American Technology: Making & Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994).

The American Revolution and subsequent independence from Great Britain stimulated inventive activity in America at the end of the eighteenth century. Neil Longley York, Mechanical Metamorphosis: Technological Change in Revolutionary America (Westport, CT, 1985) connects the quest for political independence with that of technological independence through topics such as home manufactures, the munitions industry, the Pennsylvania Rifle, and fortifications. M. L. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492-1792 (Washington, D.C., 1980), covers a specific aspect of military technology during this era as does Wallace Hutcheon, Robert Fulton: Pioneer of Undersea Warfare (Annapolis, MD, 1981).

By the end of the eighteenth century, technology was on the cusp of becoming a defining part of American life. Within another century it had become just that. The magnificent technological constructions that appeared in America awed people, as David E. Nye points out in his book American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA, 1994), and because of the force of technology and technological change, many people fell into the all too easy understanding that technology determined America’s subsequent history. This idea of "technological determinism" has been long debated by historians of technology, and Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds. Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA, 1994) explores the latest thinking on the subject, and the concepts of the technological sublime and technological determinism provide a good foundation for exploring the period of the industrial revolution in America.

The transfer of technology from England to America came most visibly via the immigration of skilled artisans and mechanics, as well as through industrial espionage.

Transportation and communication technologies were especially crucial to the physical, political, and economic development of America. Robert C. Post’s recent contribution to the American Historical Association and Society for the History of Technology’s new pamphlet series on technology, society and culture, Technology, Transport, and Travel in American History (Washington, D.C., 2003) provides a marvelous introduction to the subject.

The telegraph and telephone accompanied and eventually surpassed the railroad in advancing communication between Americans. Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York, 1981) contains a lovely essay on the invention of the telegraph, and Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, MA, 1994) discusses one of the most important social impacts of the telegraph. The invention of the telephone is covered by Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston, 1973), and Neil H. Wasserman, From Invention to Innovation: Long-distance Telephone Transmission at the Turn of the Century (Baltimore, 1985) explains the innovations that permitted the telephone to shrink vast distances between people. The broad social impact of the telephone, issues of race and labor in the telephone industry, and the business context of the telephone are dealt with in three excellent works: Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, 1992); Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Durham, NC, 2001); and George David Smith, The Anatomy of a Business Strategy: Bell, Western Electric, and the Origins of the American Telephone Industry (Baltimore, 1985). Finally, Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York, 1988) examines how these and other new communication technologies affected America’s social habits and customs.

Inventors, entrepreneurs, and engineers played three crucial roles in the industrialization of America. Inventors created entirely new things, entrepreneurs (or innovators) introduced to the marketplace the things inventors invented, and engineers designed things and completed projects that inventors and entrepreneurs initiated. Not surprisingly, they emerged as national heroes, and biographers have studied many of their lives.

Other American contributors to technological change are covered in Rayvon Fouché’s excellent new study of Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson (Baltimore, 2003), Autumn Stanley’s useful compendium of women inventors, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), and Robert Sobel, The Entrepreneurs: Explorations within the American Business Tradition (New York, 1974). And, W. Bernard Carlson, Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of G.E., 1870-1900 (New York, 1991), and Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977) offer important insights into how technological innovation occurs and how American business operates.

The process of invention is something that has long fascinated historians of technology. Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute, 1824-1865 (Baltimore, 1974) explores how inventors and designers learned from each other through institutions such as the Franklin Institute. The mechanics who met in Philadelphia and at mechanic’s institutes all across America became the backbone of the engineering profession, which is recounted by a number of historians: Daniel H. Calhoun, The American Civil Engineers: Origins and Conflicts (Cambridge, MA, 1960); Monte A. Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830-1910 (Baltimore, 1967); Bruce Sinclair, A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880-1980 (Baltimore, 1974); A. Michal McMahon, The Making of a Profession: A Century of Electrical Engineering in America (New York, 1984); and Terry S. Reynolds, ed., The Engineer in America (Chicago, 1991). Finally, Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland, OH, 1971), examines an important movement among engineers early in the twentieth century.

But just what is the process of invention, of engineering? Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (Cambridge, MA, 1992), examines how inventors and engineers actually invent and design, using visual thinking and communication. His work, along with Walter Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It (Baltimore, 1990), is essential to understanding how sophisticated invention and engineering really are. Meanwhile, over time the place in which invention occurred changed, as Paul Israel discusses in From the Machine Shop to the Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830-1920 (Baltimore, 1992),

Finally, the patent system has played a crucial role in encouraging invention while at the same time disclosing information about inventions that are patented. Bruce W. Bugbee, Gensis of American Patent and Copyright Law (Washington, D.C., 1967) introduces the American patent system, while Carolyn Cooper, Patents and Invention (Chicago, 1991), explores the connection between patents and invention. Robert C. Post, Physics, Patents, and Politics: A Biography of Charles Grafton Page (New York, 1976), offers an illuminating look at Charles Grafton Page, who practiced medicine, experimented with electromagnetic machinery, and served as one of two senior examiners in the U.S. Patent Office for much of the nineteenth century.

Mechanization and industrial manufacturing existed in synergistic relation to inventions, innovations, and the transportation revolution of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1790s, machines increasingly began to substitute for manual labor. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, patented in 1794, and Oliver Evans automated flouring mill stand as an excellent early examples of a laborsaving technology. Greville Bathe and Dorothy Bathe, Oliver Evans: A Chronicle of Early American Engineering [1935] (New York, 1972) is still the best study of Evans’s pioneering work, and Constance M. Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (New York, 1956), although a bit overreaching, is the best read on Whitney.

The factory system of manufacturing resulted from the growth of mechanization, and most famously took shape in the textile industry, the early years of which Barbara M. Tucker traces in Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1984). Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York, 1978) gives a classic account of life in an early Pennsylvania textile community, and Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885 (Cambridge, MA, 1983) provides a business perspective. Judith A. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885 (Princeton, NJ, 1987) offers an insightful look into the factory system in another industry.

Americans actually struggled over just how manufacturing should fit in their evolving republican society. How could an industrial factory system that by its very nature seemed to depersonalize all the people involved in the manufacturing process exist in a society that valued above all individual liberty and egalitarianism? Particularly important in teasing out this issue is John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, 1976), who builds on the essential work of Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964).

Finally, the physical and visual record of American manufacturing is found across the nation in historical sites, buildings, and structures. Robert B. Gordon and Patrick Malone, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America (New York, 1994) shows the centrality of industrial archeology to understanding America’s industrial revolution, and in work, A Landscape Transformed: The Ironmaking District of Salisbury, Connecticut (New York, 2001), Gordon, skillfully blends technological change with social history to tell the story of this important iron-making region in New England. When these works are connected to social histories such as Anthony F. C. Wallace, St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town’s Experience with a Disaster Prone Industry (New York, 1987) and Ronald L. Lewis, Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715-1865 (Westport, CT, 1979), a truly full picture of life and work in nineteenth century industrial America emerges.

Energy systems particularly illustrate the sorts of networks to which Americans have become so accustomed that they rarely think about them, even though they sustain their very lives. Thomas Parke Hughes focused historians attention on the subject of technological systems with his prize-winning book, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, 1983), and he introduced the important idea that large socio-technological systems develop a "momentum" that is very difficult to redirect once it takes hold. Following him Richard F. Hirsh, Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry (Cambridge, MA, 1989) explored technological changes within the industry that led to larger and larger generating systems; Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930 (1991) and Mark H. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in American Homes (University Park, PA, 1995) explored electrical systems in terms of urban life; and James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, OH, 1997) illuminated the complex character of the networked energy systems within a single state. Finally, David E. Nye marvelously synthesizes a wide variety of features of the electrical systems story in Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA, 1990), and he deconstructs America’s penchant for using enormous amounts of energy in Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

The idea of systematizing not surprisingly found its way into manufacturing and labor. The mechanical engineering Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the idea of scientific management of manufacturing at the end of the nineteenth century, and "efficiency" became the watchword throughout every aspect of American society. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison, WI, 1980) and Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York, 1997) are both readable and worthwhile examinations of this story. The application of scientific management in industry became known as "Taylorism," and it had a great impact on manufacturing labor. Hugh G. J. Aitken, Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at the Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915 (Princeton, 1960) look at scientific management in the arms industry, and David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977) looks more broadly at the negative impact of scientific management and related ideas on American society.

Recently, historians of technology have joined environmental historians in looking at issues related to America’s complex urban society. Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH, 1996), represents one of the best works in this vein, as does Martin Melosi’s prize-winning The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 2000), which studies the urban water, sewer, and solid waste infrastructure in the U.S. and consequences of the decisions made. David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore, 1999) examines how coal-related smoke-control efforts evolved, and

Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, 2000) combines landscape history, the history of technology, environmental history, and urban history in his examination of the early oil industry. Finally, Thomas R. Wellock, Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958-1978 (Madison, WI, 1998) examines the social movement that brought about a moratorium on nuclear power in California.

Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, 2000) also reveals that rural people may have adopted new technologies, but they did so on terms established by the rural, not the urban, context. No matter the terms, science and technology clearly found their way into agriculture, as revealed in Dan Charles’s rewarding journalistic history of genetic engineering in agriculture, Lords of the Harvest (Cambridge, MA, 2001), and in Edmund Russell’s linking of chemical warfare and twentieth century pest control, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York, 2001).

The range of day-to-day technologies is enormous. One really does not have to stray outside their home to see this, although until just a few years ago, historians thinking about technology hardly paid attention to the home. Ruth Schwartz Cowan refocused historians of technology with her classic investigation of technology in the home in More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology, from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983). Subsequently, many excellent works stemming in part from a broader interest in women’s history have looked at domestic as well as other less visible technologies. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990) looks at domestic life during the colonial and early American eras, while Barbara Clark Smith’s After the Revolution: The Smithsonian History of Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century (Washington, D.C., 1985) is based on the artifacts of day-to-day home life. Jeannette Lasanky, Pieced by Mother: Over One Hundred Years of Quiltmaking Traditions (Lewisburg, PA, 1987) examines a particular domestic craft tradition; Priscilla J. Brewer, From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America (Syracuse, N.Y, 2000) traces the evolution of domestic cooking technology; and Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999) focuses on role of women in determining household disposal behavior.

The issue of gender has become one of the most interesting and significant in the history of technology in recent years. Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohen, eds., His & Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology (Charlottesville, VA, 1998) contains a series of excellent essays that explore the way gender influenced the interaction of consumers, both male and female, with new and evolving technologies. Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgewood to Corning (Baltimore, 1999) also focuses on the intersection of technological design and consumer taste, while Alison J. Clarke explores technology and consumption in Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Washington, D.C., 1999). Margarete Sandelowski’s book, Devices and Desires: Gender, Technology, and American Nursing (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), takes the issue of gender and technology outside the home in an insightful case study of the complex and unintended consequences of technological change, as does Arwen P. Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Baltimore, 1999), which is valuable both in the way it advances our understanding of the relationship between technology, gender, and culture and in its national comparative approach. Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America (New York, 2001) reminds us that gender includes masculinity as well as femininity, while Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam, 1999) reveals the presence of women throughout the history of engineering even as engineering became the preserve of middle-class, white men.

The impact of technology on everyday life also is seen in advertising, art, literature, and the way we envision the future. Pamela W. Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (1998) and Lawrence R. Samuel, Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream (Austin, 2001) are crucial to understanding advertising in America’s consumer society. Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth Century America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), is a marvelous exploration of the impact of technology on art, and Cecilia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature and Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987) opens a door to the impact of technology in literature. Finally, the future and technology seem inextricably linked together, a topic well studied by Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago, 1985) and Joseph J. Corn, ed., Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future (Cambridge, MA, 1986).

Carroll Pursell’s The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore, 1995) is a stimulating textbook, and his edited volume, Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1990), offers a survey of technology in American history through vignettes of historical figures. Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s A Social History of American Technology (New York, 1997) is one of the most readable survey histories and puts technology fully in the context of other aspects of the American experience. Alan I. Marcus and Howard P. Segal, Technology in America: A Brief History, 2^nd ed. (Ft. Worth, TX, 1999) gives thorough coverage to the subject as well.

Two periodicals also focus on the history of American technology: Technology and Culture is the official journal of the Society for the History of Technology, and American Heritage of Invention and Technology is a popular magazine featuring excellent articles. Finally, readers who want to know how the history of technology has developed as a topic of historical study over the years should consult John M. Staudenmaier’s Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, MA, 1985).