History of Technology

The History of Technology Working Group meets monthly to discuss a colleague’s works-in-progress or to discuss readings that are of particular interest to participants.

 

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Upcoming Meetings

  • Tuesday, October 22, 2024 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm EDT

    Henrique Oliveira, Department of Global Studies, University of Lisbon
    "The making of the world's deepest piers - matrix analysis and model testing for seismic design in the Tagus River Bridge project (1959- 1962)"
    Abstract:This paper focuses on the work carried out by Tudor Engineering Company (TEC) and its consultants (led by George Housner), for the seismic design of the foundations for the towers of the Tagus River Bridge (today the April 25 Bridge). Built between 1962 and 1966, the bridge was one of the biggest project’s carried out by the fascist New State regime (1933-1974). It was also a project in which digital computers were used by the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (NLCE) – the public institution responsible for reviewing public works projects, whose international reputation was based on work using physical models. As such, I devote my attention to TEC and NLEC relations during the seismic design process, highlighting their methodological differences, resulting in instances of cooperation and conflict which, in turn, illustrate the political and economic nature of the history of computing in engineering. By focusing on this aspect of the larger design and review process of the project, I argue that digital computers were instrumental in shielding TEC from NLEC’s oversight, providing them with greater autonomy in the process. This was done in two ways: from a technical perspective, given the laboratory’s lack of capacity to properly evaluate the contractor’s project, and a technological one, considering the limited capabilities of the computer they owned. Thus, I argue that TEC’s autonomy ultimately contributed to differences between the project’s initial and final cost, following the contractor’s presentation of a geological study (halfway through construction) deeming structural reinforcements (for withstanding seismic stress) necessary. Lastly, I finish my paper by contextualizing this specific case in larger issues of the post-war New State political economy, and the transnational history of American engineering business, to reflect on the political and economic nature of the history of computing


  • Tuesday, November 26, 2024 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm EST

    Carlo Sariego, Department of Sociology & Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
    “Is Daddy Having a Baby?” Speculation and Race-Making in 20th-century Histories of Male Pregnancy"
    Abstract: In 2008, every major newspaper in the United States bore the same headline: “Pregnant Man Gives Birth to baby girl”. This so-called “new” medical marvel was reported with scandalous fervor, each story displaying a photo of transgender advocate Thomas Beatie and his wife in the iconic couple photo, except the roles are reversed. Beatie’s wife stands behind him, her arms wrapping around his expecting belly, emphasizing the national spectacle of the pregnant man. Such spikes of interest in the phenomenon of transgender people reproducing have had multiple resurgences throughout history, each often claiming that their object of interest is the “first” of their kind. It is a history of continual eureka, evidence of the stuck relationship between sex, gender, and reproductive roles in the United States. The fascination of trans reproduction is an example of how reproduction comes to bear as the deciding factor of trans recognition and national belonging in the public sphere. This article focuses on the social visibility of trans reproduction in the periods directly before and after the widespread popularization of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1978. Much of the historical research on trans reproduction is on the development of trans medicine. Focusing on newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and media demonstrates how innovations in reproductive science are seen through the looking glass of liberal democracy. Instead of focusing entirely on medicine, this chapter considers how changes in reproductive technology prompt speculation about sexual differences. While the world marveled at an embryo created outside the body, the possibilities for sexed roles inside the body transformed. Drawing on the concept of the speculative present (Radin; 2019), I organize my analysis according to three genres of trans-reproductive past: scientific enchantment, citizen sensationalism, and national miracle. Each concept describes a different affective form of reproductive speculation discovered in my analysis.


  • Tuesday, January 28, 2025 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm EST

    TBA


  • Tuesday, February 25, 2025 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm EST

    TBA


  • Tuesday, March 25, 2025 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm EDT

    Enrico Beltramini, Notre Dame de Namur University, California

    "A Modest Proposal for a 4-Criteria Canon"
    Abstract: Instead of questioning whether the history of technology has a canon, I inquire about what characteristics a history of technology canon should possess. A canon typically refers to a set of key characteristics or criteria that define a particular standard or body of work. In this specific case, it means a conception of what history of technology is and ought to be, and of what historians of technology do and should do. I suggest 4 criteria to define a canon of history of technology: (1) a series of canonical authors; (2) a way or style of arguing and writing; (3) a way of relating history of technology to the extra-historical, that is, technology, science, culture generally intended (literature, cinema, art), the public sphere (politics, and public debate); (4) a way of conceiving the historical practice. The four key characteristics are not listed in order of importance. In my presentation, I will provide details on each of these four characteristics and argue that the history of technology may encompass multiple canons, each grounded in distinct methodological approaches and metahistorical perspectives. The proposed paper is the preliminary version of the first chapter of a book on historiography of technology. I hope to discuss the 4-criteria canon and receive as much feedback as I can.

     


  • Tuesday, April 22, 2025 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm EDT

    TBA


  • Tuesday, May 27, 2025 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm EDT

    TBA



Past Meetings

  • September 24, 2024

    SHOT REDUX! 
    Join us for the popular review of the annual SHOT meeting, MC'd by our own Ben Gross. SHOT (Society for the History of Technology) held its annual meeting this past July in Viña del Mar, Chile; usually it meets during the fall. Come prepared to tell us what you found interesting, controversial, problematic, eye-opening. 
    If you were not able to attend the meeting, this is a great way to learn what went on and to get some of the vibe. 
    Hoping to see you soon!
     


  • June 18, 2024

    [No meeting scheduled. Have a great summer!]


  • May 21, 2024

    IS THERE A CANON IN THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY II: Identity of the field
    At the request of TWG members, we will continue our fall discussion of the idea of a canon in the history of technology. We had a great discussion last September, and people have wanted to follow up. So: does a canon of sorts operate in the history of technology?
    At issue, really, is the identity of the field. This includes considering how identity and canon can constrain a field, and how coherent such an identity is or needs to be. As we wrote last fall, "[a] canon can help a field develop a unique and deep identity; a canon can also constrain work and artificially limit a field's boundaries. There may well be something to be said for a certain amount of incoherence in a discipline."
    Last fall we moved toward considering canon as having two facets, affecting work that gets published and also work that is chosen for teaching, especially graduate teaching. But we by no means exhausted the discussion. Also of importance are changing valences of the central term "technology", which, as Steven Walton pointed out, increasingly refers to computing and nothing else.
    Please join us for a wide-ranging discussion. Bring along any syllabi or reading lists you are willing to describe or share, and think about the works you think important for people in the field to know.


  • April 16, 2024

    Sean Seyer (Verville Fellow, National Air and Space Museum; Associate Professor of History, University of Kansas), "Battle Lines Drawn: The Postwar Continuation of the Air Trust Narrative"
     
    Sean Seyer is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas who specializes in American aviation history and aviation policy. He is the author of Sovereign Skies: The Origins of American Civil Aviation Policy (John Hopkins University Press, 2021) and recipient of the 2023-2024 Verville Fellowship from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. His current book project looks at how persistent charges of monopoly within the interwar aviation industry shaped US patent and procurement policy.
     
     
     


  • March 19, 2024

    Roger Hart (NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology; Professor of History, Texas Southern University), "China, the U.S., and the Global Race for Quantum Supremacy"
    “China’s rise is the story of the century in science,” Nature Index declared in 2018. China is now competitive with the U.S. in many fields, including 5G, high-speed rail, renewable
    energy, artificial intelligence, robotics, supercomputing, nanotechnology, space, and quantum technologies. This presentation focuses on the Second Quantum Revolution, arguably the most important revolution of the twenty-first century, and in particular quantum communication, an area in which China is currently ahead. In 2017 Dr. Jianwei PAN 潘建伟 of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) created the first quantum-encrypted intercontinental video conference using a Chinese satellite called Micius; China currently has the most developed quantum communications network. For the Chinese context, I will analyze the imperative of secure communications, state-sponsored science, state-strengthening, and global circulations of Chinese scientists. For the U.S. context, I will focus on the relation between science and defense, especially the legacy of the Cold War: DARPA and defense funding of science; NSA surveillance (from PRISM to tapping telecommunications cables in Denmark); and free-market ideologies (venture-capital, Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum, and the “valley of death”). My working hypothesis is that U.S. Cold War strengths have become twenty-first century liabilities, with the result that the U.S. will likely cede the economic and technological windfall of quantum communication technologies to China. To summarize in one sentence: my overall project will trace the global circulation of science from European philosophical debates over quantum mechanics to China’s quantum internet; as part of this project, this paper outlines a preliminary explanation for how the U.S. lost its early lead in the development of the quantum internet to China.
     


  • February 20, 2024

    Timothy Stoneman, Georgia Tech Europe, "American Evangelical Global Imaginations by Radio, 1920-70"


  • January 16, 2024

    Javier Poveda Figueroa, Independent researcher, "The dispute between Herbert Simon and Hao Wang concerning the future of artificial intelligence during the Cold War"
    During the 1960s, political scientist Herbert Simon and philosopher Hao Wang entered into a scientific dispute concerning automatic theorem proving. While Simon defended the concept of heuristics for proving mathematical logic theorems, Wang said that Simon’s approach was insufficient because heuristics had limitations. Instead, Wang suggested using Herbrand’s theorem as an approach to prove them efficiently. Wang was correct because his approach solved all mathematical logic theorems in Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), while Simon’s could just solve 38.
     
    Even though Wang obtained better results than Simon’s, the artificial intelligence community ignored his contribution. Why Wang’s approach to proving mathematical logic theorems was not considered by the artificial intelligence community? One of the answers may lie in the tense relations between China and the USA during the Cold War.
     
    Using the “entangled history” approach, I suggest that Simon and Wang’s dispute can be framed in the project of modernization of China, and the  ideological dispute between capitalism and socialism blocks during the Cold War.
     


  • December 19, 2023

    Daniella McCahey, Texas Tech University, "A Model for Extraterrestrial Settlement: Antarctica as an Analogue for Space"
    This paper will explore how Antarctica is conceived as an analogue for space environments. It will focus on how, since the 1960s, scientists and engineers consciously design technologies eventually intended for space travel or extra-terrestrial environments, and then test them in the Antarctic. The paper argues that through their travels to Antarctica, these material objects are transformed into ones suitable for ‘other worlds,’ despite any practical limitations. 
     


  • November 21, 2023

    SHOT MEETING REDUX!
    The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), the most prominent society in history of technology, recently held its annual meeting. Join us for a discussion of the meeting, the themes and papers, and behind the scenes insights. This is a great way to share opinions on what is happening in a fast-growing field, and to learn what went on if you were unable to attend. These Redux discussions are among our most popular .


  • October 17, 2023

    Aaron Mendon-Plasek, Yale Law School, "Creativity in an irrational world of inexhaustible meaning: early 1950s origins of machine learning as subjective decision-making, disunified science, and a remedy for what cannot be predicted."
     
    Abstract
    This paper explores why and how early 1950s machine learning researchers concerned with questions of pattern recognition came to see a range of ‘machine learning’ practices as a superior strategy for employing digital computers to perform creative non-numerical tasks and for identifying what was important in any decision-making process, including political decision-making, scientific inquiry, and self-knowledge. While ‘machine learning’ as a term-of-art and a set of practices constituted a trading zone well into the 1990s, for those working on pattern recognition the term ‘machine learning’ begun to take on a far narrower set of meanings by 1953 in which a learning program’s capacity to perform ‘creative’ work was its ability to redefine the scope of the tasks it was assigned. This paper investigates the local research problems, epistemological commitments, institutional contexts, and transnational exchange of what early 1950s researchers called ‘machine learning’ through three cases studies of early-career researchers imagining, building, and programming digital computers to ‘learn’ from 1950 to 1953. These physicists- and engineers-turned-pattern recognition researchers saw learning programs as potential interlocutors alongside humans to help identify significant differences, resolve contextual ambiguity, and explore epistemic possibility. In doing so, these and other researchers saw machine learning as rooted in a constructivist epistemology in which the possibility of machine ‘originality’ necessarily precluded machine (and even human) objectivity. While these appeals to nominalist strategies for handling poorly-understood, extraordinary complex, or even contradictory systems were often local contingent responses for expanding the uses of digital computers in the early 1950s, these responses quickly came to define what constituted both legitimate problems of knowledge in machine learning and a conception of efficacy rooted in the capacity to make meaning from contradictory information.
    This article is a much revised and expanded version of the first chapter from my 2022 history dissertation entitled Genealogies of Machine Learning, 1950-1995 . I am looking for fresh perspectives on this work, including alternative empirical and computational approaches I might use to explore the networks of scientists, engineers, and institutions that I discuss. While I wrote this piece for a history of computing audience, I am actively examining other methods and mediums to share these ideas with a larger audience of historians of technology interested in the relationships between quantification, innovation and maintenance, and infrastructure, and how such technical practices play a role in the imagining of categories like race, gender, social problems, and political possibility. I am also interested in exploring how I might communicate the historical insights my article develops about early machine learning to a general audience interested in what contemporary AI can and can’t do, and how such debates say as much about us as they do about how AI might be regulated. Finally, I am interested in learning novel strategies media scholars have used in showing how the materiality of objects has served as a contingent but crucial component to the creation of abstractions used to imagine what Ian Hacking has called “human kinds.” I also hope that sharing my work with a working group will be an opportunity for me to begin to develop relationships with members affiliated with the Consortium who might be able to alert me to others working on complementary scholarly projects examining the links between quantification, computation, and creation, stabilization, and remaking of social categories.


Group Conveners

  • jalexander's picture

    Jennifer Alexander

    Jennifer Alexander is an Associate Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, with specialization in technology and religion; industrial culture; and engineering, ethics, and society.  Her publications include The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Her current project is a book manuscript analyzing the international religious critique of technology that developed following WWII.  She asks how religious and theological interpretations of technology have changed over time; how, over time, technologies and engineering have extended their reach into the human world over time through a developing technological orthodoxy; and how these changes have affected each other.

     

  • grossbLHL's picture

    Benjamin Gross

    Benjamin Gross is Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri. He is responsible for managing the Library’s scholarly outreach initiatives, including its fellowship program. Before relocating to the Midwest in 2016, he was a research fellow at the Science History Institute and consulting curator of the Sarnoff Collection at the College of New Jersey. His book, The TVs of Tomorrow: How RCA’s Flat-Screen Dreams Led to the First LCDs, was published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press.

     

     

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