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HIS 2129 B
Technology, Society and
Environment Since 1800

Dr. Jean-Louis Trudel

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 HIS 2129 B

History 2129: Technology, Society and Environment since 1800

January 9-April 9, 2008

ART 026, Wednesday, 19:00-22:00

Professor: Dr. Jean-Louis Trudel

Office hours: Wednesday, 14:00-16:00, Room 250, 147 Seraphin-Marion
E-mail: jtrudel@uottawa.ca

Class Overview

The Mandate: An examination of the role of technology in the social, economic, and environmental changes
affecting industrial and "post-industrial" societies.

Presentation: It is natural to take for granted the artifacts that are part of our everyday environment. Yet, to
create this increasingly congenial space for human life, we have displaced or perturbed natural environments,
while straining and transforming our social structures. In this course, we examine the interactions between
technology, society, and the environment since 1800, with an emphasis on North American developments. We
will attempt to characterize their relationships. We will also explore the contrast between technology's benefits
and the price paid for them, both by those who are left behind and by the non-human world. The course aims to
foster a broader view of technology within the wider context of society and of the natural world, sensitive both
to its achievements and to its pitfalls.

Requirements

Most classes will consist of a lecture (or several) and a film. The required readings for each class are found
either in the assigned book or the course reader. All of these (the lectures and films included) will be the basis
for the course assignments and exams. Points may be deducted for spelling from the assignment marks (up to
10% of the total for each assignment). Students can replace two (2) of the assignments with a field report due
on the same dates, based on a personal visit and a bibliography with a minimum of three published sources.
Assignments must be typed, and handed within 15 minutes of the beginning of the designated course; lateness
will not be accepted (at least 1 mark will be deducted). The course reader is available from Rytec Printing (404
Dalhousie). The required textbook is:

Gary Cross and Rick Szostak, Technology and American Society: A History (2005)

Assessment

The final grade will be assessed as follows:

3 assignments, due January 30, March 12, and April 9, worth 10% each 30%
Midterm (February 13) 25%
Final Exam (April) 45%

1
A Word from the Foot Patrol

Do you have a late class or work late on campus? Would you feel more comfortable having someone to walk
with to your destination? The University of Ottawa Foot Patrol believes in "Safety in Numbers" and is
available for your use! Instead of walking alone between 8pm and 2am Monday to Friday, call the Foot Patrol
at 613-562-5800x7433 for a team of two patrollers to escort you to your destination. (Or use the FREE yellow
button on most payphones on campus to call us.) The Foot Patrol will take you anywhere within a 45 minute
walking distance from the University, including vehicles and bus stops. Arrangements can also be made to
have a team meet you outside your class every week. To schedule a team, ask for more information, or inquire
how you can become a volunteer, call ext. 7433 (or ext. 4517 during the day) or stop by the office at UCU 08A.

Course Outline

January 9: Introduction: What Is Technology?

Technology is a surprisingly recent concept. Though the word's roots are ancient, it referred in the past either to a system of
knowledge or the study of technics. Its appearance in the nineteenth century to refer to the practical arts taken collectively expresses
the realization that the individual arts and crafts of old were spawning new ways of doing things, which shared a common set of
methods, goals, and outlooks in spite of their differences. The history of technology is not only about breakthrough inventions. To be
effective, most inventions must function as a part of systems. And the adoption of technological systems is made easier by the active
acceptance of society at large, though we are still struggling with the ecological price that is often paid.

Film: Hoover Dam (PBS, "The American Experience", 55 min.)

January 16: Guns, Bisons, and Starlings

In the nineteenth century, their spread accelerated by steam-powered transportation, new species and technologies transformed North
America's heartland. Firearms superseded the older hunting methods of Native Americans and Canadians. For some, such as the
Metis, this was a boon that made life easier and turned the bison into an economic resource, a source of meat and pelts. However,
canals and railroads then brought hunters and settlers to the central plains. As the bison population crashed and the passenger pigeon
disappeared altogether, modern ranching and farming became possible.

Film: The Great Buffalo Saga (NFB, 55 min.)

Readings: Leo Marx, "The Idea of Technology and Postmodern Pessimism", in Does Technology Drive
History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 237-258; Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?",
Daedalus 109, 1 (1980), pp. 121-136; Alfred W. Crosby, "Ecological Imperialism. The Overseas Migration of
Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon", in The Ends of the Earth. Perspectives on Modern
Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 103-117.

January 23: Canals, Raftsmen, and Snakeheads

After the opening of land for cultivation, the next great transformation of the North American landscape was wrought by canal fever.
The success of the Erie Canal stimulated the building of more, down to recent years, and led to the generalized management of
waterways (through dams, levees, channels) to control flooding, generate power, and facilitate commerce. The linking of once
separate hydrographic basins and the access of inland waters granted to sea-going ships have had powerful effects on the natural
environment (wetlands), biodiversity (alien invaders), and the exploitation of natural resources (logging).

Film: Evolving transportation systems ("Industrial Revolution", 20 min.)

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 1, 2 (excerpt), 4, 6 (excerpt), pp. 1-17, 29-32, 53-67, 84-98.

2
 3
January 30: Railroads: An Iron and Steel Web

Railways took over where canals had left off. Freed from some of their geographical and climatic constraints, they were able to link
more towns and villages. They fostered the growth of industry and became a dominant force in the workings of the agricultural sector.
They also transformed the landscape in new ways. Steam locomotives required water and fuel (wood, then coal). Railway bridges had
to be stronger and bigger. Cuttings, embankments, and viaducts multiplied to control the grade of railway tracks.

Film: Taming the Iron Monster ("Locomotion, the amazing world of trains", 50 min.)
Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 6 (excerpt), 9, pp. 98-106, 139-152.

February 6: The Electric Telegraph and the Telephone

Less intrusive than the great transportation systems of the nineteenth century, they catered nonetheless to their needs. Railroad
timetables could only be coordinated by electricity's speed. Canadian railway engineer Sandford Fleming helped to turn railroad time
into world time. Another Scottish-Canadian, Alexander Graham Bell, was the first to patent a telephone. Yet, while telegraphs and
telephones had down-to-earth applications (fire alarms), they also fed communicational Utopias. In 1858, the first transatlantic
telegraph cable was celebrated in Ottawa by speeches and the flight of a balloon a kilometer into the air.

Film: The Telephone (PBS, "The American Experience", 60 min.)

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 2 (excerpts), 3, 5, pp. 18-29, 33-52, 68-83.

February 13: Midterm Exam

February 13: The Electrical System

Electricity made transporting power easy. Previously, waterpower and steam power could only be transferred over short distances.
Mills and factories were sited near sources of waterpower (hence the importance of Ottawa's Chaudiere falls). Steam engines were
connected to belts, shafts, and pulleys crisscrossing factories. With electricity, motive power was delocalized. Electricity also
produced light.

Film: Edison's Miracle of Light (PBS, "The American Experience", 60 min.)

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapter 11, pp. 173-188; Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power:
Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), Chapter 2, pp. 18-46.

February 27: From Mass Consumption to Mass Production

In the second half of the nineteenth century, new technologies bring about a derealization of consumption. It is the age of
commercial empires. Improved food preservation methods and the mastery of the cold chain allow for the export of beef and cereals
from North and South America. The same attention to detail is then brought to bear on manufacturing as consumers a continent away
increasingly dictate the behaviour of farmers and workers.

Film: Stopwatch (57 min.)

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 8,10, pp. 124-138, 153-172.

March 5: In the Year of our Ford: The Automobile Era

Inventing the automobile was easy. Building automobiles for the masses was harder and stimulated the development of the modern
assembly line. The Ford system combined many improvements proposed by efficiency and mass production experts. Providing cars
and trucks with fuel, with roads (eventually snow-free in Canada), and then with highways transformed the North American landscape.
Cities sprawled and the air grew hazy with a new kind of smog.

Films: Divided Highways (PBS, 85 min.), original Gilbreth movies

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 14, 15, pp. 222-254.

3
March 12: Technology in Daily Life

Technology's effects are easy to recognize when species go extinct and landscapes are transformed wholesale by highways.
Technology also entered our daily lives in subtler fashions, shaped in part by industrial designers and by the users themselves.
Sometimes overlooked, domestic technologies have raised our expectations (running water), changed our daily habits (washing
machines), and fed our pastimes (radio). The debate over technological determinism is most acute in this private sphere.

Film: Playtime (excerpts)

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 13,16, pp. 207-221, 255-269; Marc Olivier, "George Eastman's Stone-
Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie", Technology and Culture, 48, Number 1 (January 2007),
pp. 1-19.

March 19: The Atomic Age

In North America, the technological imagination at mid-century proposed captivating visions of the future, embodied in the 1939-1940
New York World's Fair. Many were turned into reality during the ensuing decades as planners and organization men gained
increasing sway. The hopes for better living through technology even survived the shock of Hiroshima and atomic power was
incorporated in North American dreams of a clean and shining Jetsons future. The menace of nuclear weapons prompted
extraordinary efforts to find a silver lining: atomic cars, artificial suns, cancer-curing isotopes, radioactive farms...

Films: To New Horizons (GM), Nuclear Dynamite (NFB, excerpt)

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 17, 18, pp. 270-307.

March 26: Remote Control: The Information Revolution

Modern electronic computers were conceived during the fevered years of World War II, though their mechanical and conceptual
ancestors go back to the counting machines of the seventeenth century, the analytical engine of Babbage, and the census counter of
Hollerith. The invention of the Internet was very much a Cold War story, part and parcel of the rise of the "military-industrial-
university complex" in the wake of nuclear weapons research, though it has only come to prominence in the last couple of decades.
The effects of the information revolution are still being measured. Instead of transforming the broader environment, it is affecting the
structure of our daily lives.

Film: Networking the Nerds ("Nerds 2.0.1, a brief history of the Internet", 60 min.)
Reading: Cross and Szostak, Chapter 20, pp. 326-340.

April 2: Modern Technology and the Ecological Threshold

The use of technology had environmental consequences long before the twentieth century, but the pace of technological development
after World War II made them more and more visible. By 1962, Rachel Carson was able to identify the disastrous side-effects of
widely used pesticides and herbicides. The modern environmental movement crystallized in the following years. Paradoxically, the
exploration of alternatives to a single-minded reliance on pesticides has led to the development of genetically-modified plants whose
benefits are still debated.

Film: Deconstructing Supper (48 min.)

Readings: Cross and Szostak, Chapters 1 2 , 1 9 , 2 1 , pp. 189-206, 308-325, 341-359; Rachel Carson, Silent
Spring (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), Chapter 7, pp. 85-102.

4
April 9: Biotechnology, Old and New

Without the development of new wheat varieties, the settlement of parts of Canada would have been far more difficult. Even earlier,
the discovery of the Americas led to numerous biotechnology transfers resulting in the spread of many crops once native to the
Americas, such as maize, tobacco, and the potato. The artificial selection of crops by pre-modern plant breeders has given us much of
our food, but the ambitions of biotechnological giants are not limited to the plant kingdom. Modern biochemistry has turned the
human body into a technological arena and this raises hard questions about risks, as we now live in a society dominated by risk
assessment.

Film: The Pill (NFB/CBC, 45 min.) or The Pill (PBS, "The American Experience", 60 min.)
Reading: Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), Chapter 13, pp. 301-327.

5
The Idea of " Technology" and Postmodern
Pessimism
Leo Marx

Leo Marx holds that the boundless optimism that bolstered Ike hopes of Amer-
icans until the Second World War has dissipated into "widespread social
pessimism." The reasons for this change in attitude, according to Marx, are
complex. They are to be found in specific technological disasters (Chernobyl
and Three Mile Island), in national traumas (the Vietnam War), and more
generally in a loss of faith in technology as "the driving force of progress."
Marx places this change of expectations in historical context by examining the
role of the mechanical arts in the progressive world view and showing how
"both the character and the representation of 'technology' changed in Ike
nineteenth century" from discrete, easily identifiable artifacts (such as steam
engines) to abstract, scientific, and seemingly neutral systems of production
and control. With its "endless reification" in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the newly refurbished concept of "technology" became
invested with a "host of metaphysical properties and potencies" that invited a
belief in it as an autonomous agent of social change. By mystifying technology
and attributing to it powers that bordered on idolatry, mid-twentieth-century
Americans set themselves up for a fall that prepared "the way for an increas-
ingly pessimistic sense of the technological determination of history." Marx
concludes that postmodernist criticism, with its ratification of "the idea of the
domination of life by large technological systems," perpetuates the credibility
of technological determinism.
 238 L. Marx
The factor in the modern situation that is alien to the ancient regime is the
machine technology, with its many and wide ramifications.
—Thorstein Veblen (1904)'
"Technological Pessimism" and Contemporary History
"Technological pessimism" may be a novel term, but most of us seem
2
to understand what it m e a n s . It surely refers to that sense of dis-
appointment, anxiety, e v e n m e n a c e , that the idea of "technology"
arouses in many people these days. But there also is something par-
adoxical about the implication that technology is responsible for
today's growing social pessimism. T h e m o d e r n era, after all, has b e e n
marked by a series of spectacular scientific and technological break-
throughs; consider the astonishing technical innovations of the last
century in medicine, chemistry, aviation, electronics, atomic energy,
space exploration, and genetic engineering. Isn't it o d d , then, to
attribute today's widespread g l o o m to the presumed means of achiev-
ing all those advances: an abstract entity called "technology"?
A predictable rejoinder, of course, is that in recent decades that
same entity also has been implicated in a spectacular series of disas-
ters: Hiroshima, the nuclear arms race, the American war in Vietnam,
Chernobyl, Bhopal, the E x x o n oil spill, acid rain, global warming,
o z o n e depletion. Each of these was closely tied to the use or the
misuse, the unforeseen consequences or the malfunctions, of rela-
tively new and powerful science-based technologies. Even if we fully
credit the technical achievements of modernity, their seemingly
destructive social and ecological consequences (or side effects) have
b e e n sufficiently conspicuous to account for m u c h of today's "tech-
nological pessimism."
r O n e reason we are ambivalent about the effects of technology in
• general is that it is difficult to be clear about the consequences of
!
particular kinds of technical innovation. Take, for e x a m p l e , m o d e r n
1. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (Scribner, 1904; Mentor,
1932), p. 144.
2. I don't recall ever seeing the term in print, but I did contribute a paper,
("American Literary Culture and the Fatalistic View of Technology") to a
conference on "Technology and Pessimism," sponsored by the. College of
Engineering at the University of Michigan, in 1979. See Leo Marx, The Pilot
and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in tlte United States
(Oxford University Press, 1988).
Postmodern Pessimism 239
advances in medicine and social hygiene. T h i s is perhaps the most
widely admired realm of science-based technological advances; n o n e -
theless, it is often said today that those alleged advances are as m u c h
a curse as a blessing. In privileged societies, to be sure, medical
progress has curbed or eliminated many diseases, prolonged life, and
lowered the death rate; in large parts of the underdeveloped world,
however, those very achievements have set o f f a frightening and
possibly catastrophic growth in the population, with all its grim ram-
ifications. Is it any wonder, in view of the plausibility of that gloomy
view, that advances in medicine may issue in pessimism as well as
optimism?
On reflection, however, such inconclusive assessments seem crude
and ahistorical. T h e y suffer from a presentist fallacy like that which
casts doubt on the results of m u c h public opinion polling. It is illusory
to suppose that we can isolate for analysis the immediate, direct
responses to specific innovations. Invariably people's responses to the
new—to changes effected by, say, a specific technical innovation—are
mediated by older attitudes. Whatever their apparent spontaneity,
such responses usually prove to have been shaped by significant
meanings, values, and beliefs that stem from the past. A group's
responses to an instance of medical progress cannot be understood
apart from the historical context, or apart from the expectations
generated by the belief that m o d e r n technology is the driving force
of progress.
Technological Pessimism and the Progressive World Picture
T h e current surge of "technological pessimism" in advanced societies
is closely b o u n d up with the central place accorded to the mechanic
arts in the progressive world picture. That image of reality has d o m -
inated Western secular thought for s o m e two and a half centuries.
Its nucleus was f o r m e d around the late-eighteenth century idea that
m o d e r n history itself is a record of progress. (In the cultures of
modernity, conceptions of history serve a function like that served
by myths of origin in traditional cultures: T h e y provide the organiz-
ing frame, or binding meta-narrative, for the entire belief system.)
Much of the extravagant h o p e generated by the Enlightenment proj-
ect derived from a trust in the virtually limitless expansion of new
knowledge of—and thus e n h a n c e d power over—nature. At bottom
this historical optimism rested u p o n a new confidence in humankind's
I i I
240 L. Marx
capacity, as exemplified above all by Newtonian physics and the new
mechanized motive power, to discover and put to use the essential
order—the basic "laws"—of Nature. T h e expected result was to be a
steady, continuous, cumulative improvement in all conditions of life.
What requires emphasis here, however, is that advances of science
and the practical arts were singled o u t as the primary, peculiarly
efficacious, agent of progress.
In the discourse of the educated elite of the West between 1750.
and 1850, the idea of progress often seems to have been exemplified
by advances in scientific knowledge; at m o r e popular levels of culture,
however, progress m o r e often was exemplified by innovations in the
familiar practical arts. Whereas "science" was identified with a body
of certain, mathematically verifiable knowledge—abstract, intangible,
and recondite—the mechanic arts were associated with the c o m m o n -
sense practicality of everyday artisanal life as represented by tools,
instruments, or machines. N o t h i n g provided m o r e tangible, vivid,
compelling icons for representing the forward course of history than
3
recent mechanical improvements like the steam e n g i n e .
A recognition of the central part that the practical arts were
expected to play in carrying out the progressive agenda is essential
for an understanding of today's g r o w i n g sense of technological deter-
minism—and pessimism. T h e West's dominant belief system, in fact,
turned on the idea of technical innovation as a primary agent of
progress. N o t h i n g in that Enlightenment world-picture prepared its
adherents for the shocking series of twendeth-century disasters
linked with—and often seemingly caused by—the new technologies.
Quite the contrary. With the increasingly frequent occurrence of
these frightening events since Hiroshima, m o r e and more people in
the "advanced" societies have had to consider the possibility that the
progressive agenda, with its promise of limitless growth and a con-
tinuing i m p r o v e m e n t in the conditions of life for everyone, has not
4
been and perhaps never will be realized. T h e s u d d e n dashing of
3. Thus, Diderot's Encyclopedia, a work that epitomizes Enlightenment wis-
dom and optimism, is a virtual handbook of technologies, most of them of
modern origin.
4. In the United States, politicians like to call the progressive agenda "the
American Dream." It is worth noting that in the 1992 election campaign a
stock argument of the Democrats was that the current generation may well
be "the first whose children are going to be less well off than themselves."
Postmodern Pessimism 241
those long-held h o p e s surely accounts for much of today's widespread
technological pessimism.
All of this may be obvious, but it does not provide an adequate
historical explanation. To understand why today's social pessimism is
so closely b o u n d up with the idea of technology, it is necessary to
recognize how both the character and the representation of "tech-
nology" ^changed in the nineteenth century. Of the two major
changes, o n e was primarily material or artifactual; it had to do with
the introduction of mechanical (and, later, chemical and electrical)
power and with the c o n s e q u e n t development of large-scale, complex,
hierarchical, centralized systems such as railroads or electric power
systems. T h e second, related development was ideological; it entailed
the atrophy of the Enlightenment idea of progress directed toward
a m o r e just, republican society, and its gradual replacement by a
politically neutral, technocratic idea of progress whose goal was the
continuing i m p r o v e m e n t of technology. But the improvement of
technology also c a m e to be s e e n as the chief agent of change in an
increasingly deterministic view of history.
U n d e r s t a n d i n g these changes is complicated, however, by the fact
that the most fitting language for describing t h e m came into being
3
as a result of, and i n d e e d largely in response to, these very c h a n g e s .
T h e crucial case is that of "technology" itself. To be sure, we intui-
tively account for the currency of the word in its broad m o d e r n sense
as an obvious reflex of the increasing proliferation, in the nineteenth
century, of new and m o r e powerful machinery. But, again, that
truism is not an adequate historical explanation. It reveals nothing
about the preconditions—the specific conceptual or expressive needs
unsatisfied by the previously existing vocabulary—that called forth
this new word. Such an inquiry is not trivial, nor is it "merely"
semantic. T h e genesis of this concept, as e m b o d i e d in its elusive
5. As Raymond Williams famously discovered, this dilemma invariably
affects efforts to interpret the cultural transformation bound up with the
onset of urban industrial capitalism. His own study turned on five key words
("culture," "industry," "class," "art," and "democracy") whose modern mean-
ings and whose currency derived from the very historical developments he
was interpreting. This is, of course, the historical basis for the "hermeneutical
circle," which some regard as vitiating all research in the humanities. See the
preface to Williams's book Culture and Society (Columbia University Press
1960).
242 L. Marx
6
prehistory, is a distinctive feature of the onset of modernity. ^Not
only will it illuminate the rise of "technological pessimism," but it will
help us to see that that p h e n o m e n o n , far from being a direct reflex
of recent events, is an o u t c o m e of the very developments that called
into being, a m o n g other salient features of modernity, the idea of
"technology."
The Changing Character of the "Mechanic Arts" and the Invention of
"Technology"
W h e n the Enlightenment project was b e i n g formulated, after 1750,
the idea of "technology" in today's broad sense of the word did not
yet exist. For another century, m o r e or less, the artifacts, the knowl-
e d g e , and the practices later to be embraced by "technology" would
continue to be thought of as belonging to a special branch of the arts
variously k n o w n as the "mechanic" (or "practical," or "industrial," or
"useful")—as distinct from the "fine" (or "high," or "creative," or
"imaginative")—arts. Such terms, built with various adjectival modi-
fiers of "art," then were the nearest available approximations of
today's abstract n o u n "technology"; they referred to the knowledge
and practice of the crafts. By comparison with "technology," "the
practical arts" a n d its variants constituted a m o r e limited and limiting,
even diminishing, category. If only because it was explicitly desig-
nated as o n e of several subordinate parts of something else, such a
specialized branch of art was, as compared with the tacit uniqueness
and unity of "technology," inherently belittling. Ever since antiquity,
moreover, the habit of separating the practical and the fine arts had
served to ratify a set of overlapping and invidious distinctions:
between things and ideas, the physical and the mental, the m u n d a n e
and the ideal, female and male, making and thinking, the work of
enslaved and of free m e n . T h i s derogatory legacy was in s o m e mea-
sure erased, or at least masked, by the m o r e abstract, cerebral/neutral
word "technology." T h e term "mechanic arts" calls to mind m e n with
6. To be sure, the prehistory of all words, perhaps especially all nouns, is
elusive, for the investigator must devise ways of referring to that for which
adequate names were conspicuously lacking. We need a comprehensive his-
tory of the word "technology"—a project that is, or should be, of primary
concern to practitioners of that relatively new, specialized branch of historical
studies, the history of technology.
Postmodern Pessimism 243
soiled hands tinkering with machines at workbenches, whereas "tech-
nology" conjures up images of clean, well-educated technicians gazing
at dials, instrument panels, or computer monitors.
T h e s e changes in the representation of technical practices were
m a d e in response to a marked acceleration in the rate of initiating
new mechanical or other devices and new ways of organizing work.
D u r i n g the early phase of industrialization (ca. 1 7 8 0 - 1 8 5 0 in
England, ca. 1820—1890 in the United States), the manufacturing
realm h a d , b e e n represented in popular discourse by images of the
latest mechanical inventions: water mill, cotton gin, power loom,
spinning jenney, steam engine, steamboat, locomotive, railroad "train
of cars," telegraph, factory. T h e tangible, manifestly practical char-
acter of these artifacts matched the central role as chief agent of
progress accorded to instrumental rationality and its equipment.
T h u s the locomotive (or "iron horse") often was invoked to symbolize
the capacity of commonsensical, matter-of-fact, verifiable knowledge
to harness the energies of nature. It was routinely depicted as a
driving force of history. Or, put differently, these new artifacts rep-
resented the innovative m e a n s of arriving at a socially and politically
' defined goal. For ardent e x p o n e n t s of the rational Enlightenment,
the chief goal was a m o r e just, m o r e peaceful, and less hierarchical
republican society based on the consent of the governed.
As this industrial iconography suggests, the mechanic arts were
widely viewed as a primary agent of social change. T h e s e icons often
were invoked with metonymical import to represent an entire class
of similar artifacts, such as mechanical inventions; or the replacement
of w o o d by metal construction; or the displacement of h u m a n , ani-
mal, or other natural energy sources (water or wind) by engines run
by mechanized motive power; or some specific, distinctive feature of
the era ("the annihilation of space and time," "The A g e of Steam,");
„ or, most inclusive, that feature's general uniqueness (the "Industrial
/ Revolution"). T h u s , w h e n T h o m a s Carlyle a n n o u n c e d at the outset
of his seminal 1829 essay "Signs of the Times" that, if asked to name
the o n c o m i n g age, he w o u l d call it "The A g e of Machinery," he was
not merely referring to actual, physical machines, or e v e n to the fact
7
of their proliferation. He had in mind a radically new kind of ensem-
ble typified by, but by no means restricted to, actual mechanical
7. Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Bedford, Clark & Co.,
n.d.), Ill, pp. 5-30.
244 L. Marx
artifacts. "Machinery," as invoked by Carlyle (and soon after by many
others), had both material and ideal (mental) referents; it simulta-
neously referred to (1) the "mechanical philosophy," an empirical
mentality associated with Descartes and Locke and with the new
science, notably Newtonian physics; (2) the new practical, or indus-
trial, arts (especially those using mechanized motive power); (3) the
systematic division of labor (the workers as cogs in the productive
machinery); and (4) a new kind of impersonal, hierarchical, or
bureaucratic organization, all of which could be said to exhibit the
power of "mechanism." Carlyle's essay is an early, eloquent testimo-
nial to the existence of a semantic void and to the desire to fill it with
a m o r e inclusive, scientistic, and distinctive conception of these new
h u m a n powers than was signified by the most inclusive term then
available, "the mechanic arts."
D u r i n g the nineteenth century, discrete artifacts or machines were
replaced, as typical e m b o d i m e n t s of the new power, by what later
8
would c o m e to be called "technological systems." It is evident in
retrospect that the steam-powered locomotive, probably the nine-
teenth century's leading image of progress, did not adequately rep-
resent the manifold character or the complexity of the mechanic art
of transporting persons and goods by steam-powered engines moving
wagons over a far-flung network of iron rails. To represent such
complexity, that image of a locomotive was no m o r e adequate than
the term "mechanic art." As Alfred Chandler and others have argued,
the railroad probably was the first of the large-scale, complex, full-
9
fledged technological systems. In addition to the engines and other
8. For the modern concept, see Jacques Ellul, The Technological System,
J. Neugroschel (Continuum, 1980); for a recent application of the concept
to American history, see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of
Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Viking, 1989). But some earlier social
theorists who did not use the same term nonetheless anticipated most features
of the concept. Few nineteenth-century thinkers devoted more attention to
what we call "technology" than Karl Marx; but though he described industrial
machinery as embedded in the social relations and the economic organization
of an economy dominated by the flow of capital, he still relied, as late as the
first (1867) edition of Capital, on "machinery," "factory mechanism," and
other relics of the old mechanistic lexicon: "In manufacture the workmen
are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism
independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage."
(Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (Norton, 1972), pp. 296-297)
9. Rosalind Williams ("Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of
Postmodern Pessimism 245
material e q u i p m e n t (rolling stock, stations, yards, signaling devices,
fuel supplies, the network of tracks), a railroad comprised a corporate
organization, a large capital investment, and a great many specially
trained managers, engineers, telegraphers, conductors, and mechan-
ics. Because a railroad operated over a large geographical area, 24
hours a day, every day of the year, in all kinds of weather, it became
necessary to d e v e l o p an impersonal, expert cohort of professional
managers, and to replace the traditional organization of the family-
o w n e d and -operated firm with that of the large-scale, centralized,
hierarchical, bureaucratic corporation.
B e t w e e n 1870 and 1920 such large c o m p l e x systems became a
dominant e l e m e n t in the American economy. A l t h o u g h they resem-
bled the railroad in scale, organization, and complexity, many relied
on new nonmechanical forms of power. T h e y included the telegraph
and t e l e p h o n e network; the new chemical industry; electric light and
power grids; and such linked mass-production-and-use systems as the
automobile industry (sometimes called the "American" or "Fordist"
system), which involved the ancillary production of rubber tires, steel,
and glass and which was further linked with the petroleum, highway-
construction, a n d trucking industries. In the era w h e n electrical and
chemical power were being introduced, and w h e n these h u g e systems
were replacing discrete artifacts, simple tools, or devices as the char-
Large Technological Systems," Science in Context 6 (August 1993): 75-101)
argues for a much earlier origin for these systems. She traces their genesis
to eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers like Turgot and Condor-
cet, who were committed to the "ideology of circulation." They identified
the Enlightenment with the systemic diffusion of ideas and objects in space:
ideas through global systems of communication, and objects by means of
transportation (road) grids, for the circulation of people and goods. What is
not dear, however, is the extent to which circulatory systems of this kind are
to be thought of as specifically modern, specifically technological, innovations.
After all, the Romans built similarly complex transportation and communi-
cation networks. If the point merely is that eighteenth-century theories about
circulatory systems anticipated some features—especially the systemic char-
acter—of modern technologies, the argument is persuasive. But the systems
described in these theories existed primarily in conceptual form, and since
they involved no significant material or artifactual innovations it seems mis-
leading to think of them as innovative "technological systems" such as the
railroad was. A system is "technological," in my view, only if it includes a
significant material or artifactual component. Michel Foucault, who first
called attention to these theories of circulation, may have initiated this idealist
mode of interpreting their significance.
246 L. Marx
acteristic material form of the "mechanic arts," the latter term also
10
was being replaced by a new conception: "technology."
T h e advent of this typically abstract m o d e r n concept coincided
with the increasing control of the American e c o n o m y by the great
corporations. In Western capitalist societies, indeed, most technolog-
ical systems (save for state-operated utility and military systems) were
the legal property of—were organized as—-independendy o w n e d cor-
porations for operation within the rules, and for the purposes, of
minority ownership. T h u s , most of the new technological systems
were operated with a view to maximizing economic growth as mea-
sured by corporate market share and profitability. At the same time,
each corporation presumably was e n h a n c i n g the nation's collective
wealth and power. Alan Trachtenberg has aptly called this fusion of
the nation's technological, economic, and political systems "the incor-
11
poration of America." By the late nineteenth century, Thorstein
Veblen, an e x p o n e n t of instrumental rationality, ruefully observed
that u n d e r the regime of large-scale business enterprise the ostensible
values of science-based technology (matter-of-fact rationality, effi-
ciency, productivity, precision, conceptual parsimony) were being sac-
rificed to those of the minority owners: profitability, the display of
conspicuous consumption, leisure-class status, and the building of
private fortunes. B u t the abstract, sociologically and politically neutral
(one might say neutered) w o r d "technology," with its tacit claim to
10. In explaining the origin of the modern style of corporate management,
Alfred D. Chandler describes it has having been "demanded" by the "tech-
nological" character of the railroad system. Mechanical complexity, and the
consequent need for immense capital investment, were key factors in calling
forth a new kind of organization and management. What requires emphasis
here, however, is that the effective agent of change in Chandler's widely
accepted analysis—the chief cause of the shift, as representative of the tech-
nical, from single artifact to system—is the radically new material, or artifac-
tual, character of the railroad. (See Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial
Revolution in American Business (Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 87ff. and
passim.) Historians differ in their accounts of the genesis of the new systems.
Thomas Hughes, in American Genesis (Viking, 1989) emphasizes changes in
modes of organization and management (p. 184ff.), whereas Chandler
(whose example, the railroad, belongs to the earlier mechanical phase)
emphasizes a material or artifactual change, especially from mechanical to
electrical and chemical process.
11. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (Hill and Wang,
1982).
Postmodern Pessimism 247
being a distinctive, i n d e p e n d e n t m o d e of thought and practice like
"science," is u n m a r k e d by a particular socio-economic regime.
Although the English word "technology" (derived from the Greek
I teckhne, "art" or "craft") had b e e n available since the seventeenth
1
century, d u r i n g most of the next two centuries it had referred spe-
/ cifically and almost exclusively to technical discourses or treatises. 12
In view of the way historians now routinely project the word back
into the relatively r e m o t e past, it is surprising to discover how recently
today's broad sense of "technology" achieved currency. It was seldom
\ used before 1880. I n d e e d , the founding of the Massachusetts Insti-
J tute of T e c h n o l o g y in 1861 seems to have been a landmark, a halfway
station, in its history; however, the Oxford English Dictionary cites R. F.
Burton's use of "technology" in 1859 to refer to the "practical arts
collectively" as the earliest English instance of the inclusive m o d e r n
usage. (It is important to recognize the exact nature of this change:
instead of b e i n g u s e d to refer to a written work, such as a treatise,
about the practical arts, "technology" now was used to refer directly
to the arts—including the actual practice and practitioners—
themselves.)
T h a t this broader, m o d e r n sense of "technology" was just e m e r g i n g
at the middle of the nineteenth century is further indicated by the
13
fact that Karl M a r x and Arnold Toynbee, w h o were deeply c o n -
cerned about the changes effected by the new machine power, d i d
not use the word. At points in his influential lectures on the Industrial
Revolution ( c o m p o s e d in 1 8 8 0 - 8 1 ) where "technology" would have
been apposite, T o y n b e e , an economic historian, relied on other
terms: "mechanical discoveries," "machinery," "mechanical improve-
14
ments," "mechanical inventions," "factory system." Yet within 20
12. The OED gives 1615 as the date of the word's first use in English,
meaning a discourse or treatise on the arts. See "Technology" in the 1955
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. A Harvard professor, Jacob Bigelow, has
been credited with anticipating the modern meaning of the word in his 1829
book Elements of Technology, Taken Chiefly from a Course of Lectures . . . on the
Application of the Sciences to the Useful Arts. (See Dirk J. Struik, Yankee Science
in the Making (Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 169-170.) Although the scope of the
word's meaning has expanded steadily, my impression is that its current
meaning retains its essential etymological links to the practical arts and the
material world.
13. On Marx's technological vocabulary, see note 8 above.
14. Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (Beacon, I960), esp. pp. 63—
 248 L. Marx
years Veblen would be suggesting that the "machine technology" was
15
the distinguishing feature of m o d e r n i t y . My impression is, however,
that "technology" in today's singular, inclusive sense did not gain
truly wide currency until after World War I, and perhaps not until
the Great Depression.
T h e advent of "technology" as the accepted n a m e for the realm of
the instrumental had many ramifications. Its relative abstractness, as
compared with "the mechanic arts," had a kind of refining, idealizing,
or purifying effect u p o n our increasingly elaborate contrivances for
manipulating the object world, thereby protecting them from West-
e r n culture's ancient fear of contamination by physicality and work.
An aura of impartial cerebration and rational detachment replaced
the sensory associations that formerly had bound the mechanic arts
to everyday life, artisanal skills, tools, work, and the egalitarian ethos
of the early republic. In recognizing the mastery of various technol-
ogies as a legitimate pursuit of higher learning, the universities rati-
fied that shift from the craft ethos of the mechanic arts to the
meritocratic aspirations of the engineering and m a n a g e m e n t profes-
sions. T h e lack of sensuous specificity attached to the n o u n "tech-
nology," its bloodless generality, and its c o m m o n use in the m o r e
generalized singular form make the word conducive to a range of
reference far beyond that available to the h u m d r u m particularities
of "the mechanic arts" or "the industrial arts." T h o s e concrete cate-
gories could not simultaneously represent (as either "technology" or,
say, "computer technology" can and does) a particular kind of device,
a specialized form of theoretical k n o w l e d g e or expertise, a distinctive
16
- mental style, and a unique set of skills and practices.
66. Toynhee was not timid about using new or unconventional terminology,
and indeed these lectures were extremely influential in giving currency to
the still-novel concept of an "industrial revolution." As late as the eleventh
(1911) edition, the Encyclopaedia Brilannica, which contained no separate entry
on "technology," was still offering "technological" as a possible alternative to
the preferred "technical" in the entry for "Technical Education" (volume 26,
p. 487).
15. See note 1 above. Among other obvious indications that the concept was
then in its early, avant-garde stage of development is the way unconventional
writers and artists of the period—Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and
Oswald Spengler, or the Italian Futurists and Cubists, or (in the next gen-
eration) Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin—used technological images to
characterize the distinctiveness of modernity.
16. It is instructive to notice how few of the commonplace statements made
Postmodern Pessimism 249
Perhaps the crucial difference is that the concept of "technology,"
with its wider scope of reference, is less closely identified with—or
defined by—its material or artifactual aspect than was "the mechanic
= arts." T h i s fact comports with the material reality of the large and
complex new technological systems, in which the boundary between
the intricately interlinked artifactual and other c o m p o n e n t s — c o n c e p -
tual, institutional, h u m a n — i s blurred and often invisible. W h e n we
refer to such systems, as compared with, say, carpentry, pottery, glass-
making, or machine-tool operating, the artifactual aspect is a rela-
tively small part of what c o m e s before the mind. By virtue of its
abstractness and inclusiveness, and its capacity to evoke the inextric-
able interpenetration of (for example) the powers of the c o m p u t e r
with the bureaucratic practices of large m o d e r n institutions, "tech-
nology" (with no specifying adjective) invites endless reification. T h e
concept refers to no specifiable institution, nor d o e s it evoke any
distinct associations of place or of persons belonging to any particular
( nation, ethnic g r o u p , race, class, or gender. A c o m m o n tendency of
contemporary discourse, accordingly, is to invest "technology" with a
host of metaphysical properties and potencies, thereby making it
seem to be a determinate entity, a disembodied a u t o n o m o u s causal
agent of social c h a n g e — o f history. H e n c e the illusion that technology
drives history. Of all its attributes, this hospitality to mystification—
to technological determinism—may well be the o n e that has contrib-
uted most to p o s t m o d e r n pessimism.
From the Republican to the Technocratic Idea of Progress
As the first c o m p l e x technological systems were being assembled, and
as the new c o n c e p t of technology was being constructed, a related
change was occurring within the ideology of progress. It entailed a
subtle redescription of the historical role of the practical arts. Origi-
nally, as conceived by such e x p o n e n t s of the radical Enlightenment
f as Turgot, Condorcet, Paine, Priestley, Franklin, and Jefferson, inno-
vations in science a n d in the mechanic arts were regarded as necessary
17
yet necessarily insufficient means of achieving general p r o g r e s s . To
nowadays about the import of "technology" actually are applicable to the
entire range of existing technologies—medical, military, electronic, domestic,
biogenetic, contraceptive, etc.
17. Notice the two distinct uses of "progress" here, each with a markedly
250 L. Marx
the republican revolutionaries of the Enlightenment (especially the
radical philosopkes), science and the practical arts were instruments of
political liberation—tools for arriving at the ideal goal of progress: a
m o r e just, m o r e peaceful, and less hierarchical republican society
based on the consent of the g o v e r n e d .18
T h e idea of history as a record of progress driven by the application
of science-based knowledge was not simply another idea a m o n g
many. Rather it was a figurative concept l o d g e d at the center of what
became, s o m e t i m e after 1750, the dominant secular world-picture of
Western culture. T h a t it was no mere rationale for domination by a
privileged bourgeoisie is suggested by the fact that it was as fondly
embraced by the hostile critics as by the ardent e x p o n e n t s of indus-
trial capitalism. Marx and Engels, who developed the most systematic,
influential, politically sophisticated critique of that regime, were
deeply committed to the idea that history is a record of cumulative
progress. In their view, the critical factor in h u m a n d e v e l o p m e n t —
the counterpart in h u m a n history of Darwinian natural selection in
natural history—is the m o r e or less continuous growth of humanity's
productive capacity. B u t of course they added a political stipulation,
namely that the proletariat would have to seize state power by revo-
lution if humanity was to realize the universal promise inherent in
its growing power over nature. To later followers of Marx and Engels,
the most apt n a m e of that power leading to c o m m u n i s m , the political
goal of progress—of history—is "technology." 19
But the advent of the concept of technology, and of the organiza-
tion of c o m p l e x technological systems, coincided with, and no doubt
different scope of reference: (1) the bounded, internal, verifiable, kind of
improvement achievable within a particular practice, such as progress in
mathematics, physics, medicine, overland transportation, or textile produc-
tion; the cumulative effect of such manifold kinds of progress doubtless
created the conditions for using the word with a much larger scope of
reference: (2) a general improvement in the conditions of life for all of
humanity, hence a presumed attribute of the course of events—of history
itself.
18. I have summarized this unoriginal interpretation in somewhat greater
detail in "Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?" Technology Review
(January 1987): 3 3 - 7 1 .
19. G. M. Cohen, in Karl Marx's Theory of History (Clarendon, 1978), makes
a strong case for the view that Marx's conception of history was essentially a
version of technological determinism.
Postmodern Pessimism 251
contributed to, a subtle revision of the ideology of progress. T e c h -
nology now took on a m u c h grander role in the larger historical
scheme—grander, that is, than the role that originally had b e e n
assigned to the practical arts. To leaders of the radical Enlightenment
like Jefferson and Franklin, the chief value of those arts was in
providing the material m e a n s of accomplishing what really mattered:
the building of a just, republican society. After the successful bour-
geois revolutions, however, many citizens, especially the merchants,
industrialists, and other relatively privileged people (predominantly
white and male, of course), took the new society's ability to reach that
political goal for granted. T h e y assumed, not implausibly from their
vantages, that the goal already was within relatively easy reach. What
now was important, especially from an entrepreneurial viewpoint,
was perfecting the m e a n s . But the growing scope and integration of
the new systems m a d e it increasingly difficult to distinguish between
the material (artifactual or technical) and the other organizational
(managerial or financial) c o m p o n e n t s of "technology." At this time,
accordingly, the simple republican formula for generating progress
by directing improved technical means to societal e n d s was imper-
ceptibly transformed into a quite different technocratic c o m m i t m e n t
to improving "technology" as the basis and the measure of—as all
but constituting—the progress of society. T h i s technocratic idea may
be seen as an ultimate, culminating expression of the optimistic,
universalist aspirations of Enlightenment rationalism. But it tacitly
replaced political aspirations with technical innovation as a primary
agent of change, thereby preparing the way for an increasingly pes-
simistic sense of the technological determination of history.
T h e cultural m o d e r n i s m of the West in the early twentieth century
was permeated by this technocratic spirit. (A distinctive feature of
the technocratic mentality is its seemingly boundless, unrestricted,
expansive scope—its tendency to break through the p r e s u m e d
boundaries of the instrumental and to dominate any kind of practice.)
T h e technocratic spirit was m a d e manifest in the application of the
principles of instrumental rationality, efficiency, order, and control
to the behavior of industrial workers. As set forth in the early-twen-
tieth-century theories of Taylorism and Fordism, the standards of
efficiency devised for the functioning of parts within machines were
applied to the m o v e m e n t s of workers in the new large-scale factory
system. T h e technocratic spirit also was carried into the "fine" arts
by avant-garde practitioners of various radically innovative styles
 252 L. Marx
associated with early modernism. T h e credo of the Italian Futurists;
the v o g u e of geometric abstractionism exemplified by the work of
Mondrian and the exponents of "Machine Art"; the doctrines of the
Precisionists a n d the Constructivists; the celebration of technological
functionalism in architecture by Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe,
and other e x p o n e n t s of the international style—all these tendencies
exemplified the permeation of the culture of modernity by a kind of
technocratic utopianism.
Architecture, with its disdncdve m e r g i n g of the aesthetic and the
practical, provides a particularly compelling insight into the m o d e r n
marriage of culture and technology. T h e International Style featured
the use, as building materials, of such unique products of advanced
technologies as steel, glass, and reinforced concrete; new technologies
also m a d e it possible to construct stripped-down, spare buildings
whose functioning d e p e n d e d on still other innovative devices (the
i elevator, the subway system, air conditioning). This minimalist, func-
tional style of architecture anticipated many features of what prob-
ably is the quintessential fantasy of a technocratic paradise: the
popular science-fiction vision of life in a spaceship far from Earth,
where recycling eliminates all d e p e n d e n c e on organic processes and
\ where the self-contained environment is completely under h u m a n
V control.
Postmodern Pessimism
Let us return now to our initial quesdon: how to understand the
current surge of technological pessimism. O n e way to account for
the collective despondency, I have suggested, is to chart the advent
of the abstract n o u n that names a quintessentially m o d e r n class:
"technology." T h e point is that the idea of a class called "technology,"
in its ideological inheritance from the practical arts, was suffused
from its inception by the extravagant universalist social hopes of the
Enlightenment. T h o s e hopes were g r o u n d e d in what postmodernist
skeptics like to call "foundationalism": a faith in the h u m a n capacity
to gain access to a permanent, timeless foundation for objective,
context-free, certain knowledge. T h e stunning advances of Western
science and the practical arts s e e m e d to confirm that epistemological
faith, and with it a corresponding belief that henceforth the course
of history necessarily would lead to e n h a n c e d h u m a n well-being.
Postmodern Pessimism 253
In their euphoric embrace of that faith, the Utopian thinkers of
the Enlightenment invented a historical romance called Progress. In
it they assigned a heroic role to the mechanic arts. T h a t role, like the
romance as a whole, rested on the old foundationalist faith in the
capacity of scientific rationalism to yield incontrovertible knowledge.
But the part assigned to the mechanic arts in those early years, though
heroic, actually was m o d e s t compared with what it became once it
had b e e n r e n a m e d "technology." By the 1920s "technology," no
longer confined to its limited role as a mere practical means in the
service of political e n d s , was b e c o m i n g a flamboyant, overwhelming
presence. In many modernist, technocratic interpretations of the
romance, "technology" so dominated the action as to put most other
players in the wings; in the final act, a happy e n d i n g confirmed the
vaunted power of technology to realize the dream of Progress. In
the aftermath of World War II, however, what had b e e n a dissident
minority's disenchantment with this overreaching h e r o spread to
large segments of the population. As the visible effects of technology
became m o r e d u b i o u s , m o d e r n i s m lost its verve and people f o u n d
the romance less and less appealing. After the Vietnam era, the ruling
theme of Progress c a m e to seem too fantastic, and admirers of the
old Enlightenment r o m a n c e now were drawn to a new kind of post-
m o d e r n tragicomedy.
Postmodernism is the n a m e given to a sensibility, style, or amor-
phous viewpoint—a collective m o o d — m a d e manifest in the early
1970s. As the n a m e suggests, o n e of its initial modves was a repudia-
tion of the earlier, modernist style in the arts, and a consequent effort
to define—and to become—its successor. T h e successionist aspect of
postmodernism was m a d e clear early on by a series of s u d d e n , sharp
attacks on m o d e r n architecture, probably the most widely recognized
of all styles of aesthetic modernism. As early as 1962, in his seminal
essay "The Case Against 'Modern Architecture,'" Lewis Mumford, a
leading architectural critic and an e x p o n e n t of early modernism,
anticipated many t h e m e s of that postmodernist reaction. Most sig-
nificant here was his analysis of the sources of modernism, an archi-
tectural style he traced to a set of preconceptions about the historic
role of technology. Chief a m o n g them, he wrote, was "the belief in
mechanical progress as an e n d in itself," a belief that rested on the
assumption that h u m a n improvement would occur "almost automat-
ically" if we w o u l d simply devote all o u r energies to science and
254 L. Marx
20
t e c h n o l o g y . As in most of his work, h e r e Mumford's disapproval
was not directed at technology in any narrow or intrinsic sense, not
at the m e r e technical or artifactual aspect of modernity, but rather
at the larger ideological context; put differently, he was aiming at
the imperial domination of architectural practice by the overreaching
of the technocratic mentality, whereby the technical means, u n d e r
the guise of a functionalist style, had b e c o m e indistinguishable
f r o m — a n d in fact determined—all other aspects of building practice.
His target, in s u m , was the dominating role of the instrumental in
the later, technocratic version of the progressive ideology—a version
characteristic of the era of corporate capitalism.
In making this argument, Mumford allied himself with a dissident
minority of writers, artists, and intellectuals w h o had o p p o s e d the
technocratic idea of progress for a long time. T h e y were adherents,
indeed, of a continuously critical, intermittently powerful adversary
culture that can be traced back to the "romantic reaction" against the
eighteenth-century scientific and industrial revolutions. But the cul-
tural dissidents did not a b a n d o n the Enlightenment c o m m i t m e n t to
the practical arts; what they rejected was the skewed technocratic
reinterpretation of that commitment. What they, like Mumford,
f o u n d most objectionable was the tendency to bypass moral and
political goals by treating advances in the technical means as e n d s in
themselves. N o w h e r e was this criticism m a d e with greater precision,
economy, or wit than in H e n r y David Thoreau's sardonic redescrip-
tion of the era's boasted m o d e r n improvements: "They are but
improved m e a n s to an u n i m p r o v e d end." S o , too, H e r m a n Melville
identified a d e e p psychic root of this warped outlook w h e n he allowed
A h a b , the technically c o m p e t e n t but morally incapacitated captain of
t h e Pequod, a s t u n n i n g insight into his o w n pathological behavior:
"Now, in his heart, A h a b had s o m e glimpse of this, namely: all my
21
m e a n s are sane, my motive a n d my object m a d . " As the history of
t h e twentieth century has confirmed, h i g h technical skills may serve
to mask, or to displace attention from, t h e choice of e n d s . If, as in
20. Donald L. Miller, ed., The Lewis Mumford Reader (Pantheon, 1986), p. 75.
The essay, which first appeared in Architectural Record (131, no. 4 (1962):
155-162), anticipated Robert Venturi's influential 1966 manifesto for post-
modernism, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.
21. See Walden, chapter 1; Moby-Dick, chapter 41; The Writings of Thoreau
(Modern Library, 1949), p. 49; Moby-Dick (Norton, 1967), p. 161.
Postmodern Pessimism 255
Ahab's case, t h e e n d s are d e f o r m e d , amoral, and irrational, such a
disjunction of m e a n s and e n d s becomes particularly risky.
T h i s kind of flawed technocratic mentality later became a major
target of the radical m o v e m e n t and the counterculture of the 1960s.
In retrospect, i n d e e d , that astonishing burst of political outrage looks
like a last desperate gasp of Enlightenment idealism. It was an
attempt to put technology back into the service of moral and political
ends. It is important, if we are to understand the genesis of post-
. modernism, to recognize that it appeared immediately after the
events of May 1968, j u s t as the ardent cultural radicalism of the
Vietnam era was collapsing in frustration and disillusionment. T h u s ,
postmodernism e m b o d i e d , from its birth, a strong current of tech-
82
nological p e s s i m i s m . It was a pessimism w h o s e distinctive tenor
derived from t h e adversary culture's inability, for all its astonishing
success in mobilizing t h e protest movements of the 1960s, to define
and sustain an effective anti-technocratic program of political action.
In conclusion, let me suggest two ways of looking at the technolog-
ical aspect of p o s t m o d e r n pessimism. For those w h o continue to
adhere to the promise of Enlightenment rationalism, the postmod-
ernist repudiation of that optimistic philosophy is b o u n d to seem
pessimistic. Postmodernism not only rejects the romance of Progress;
it rejects all meta-narratives that ostensibly e m b o d y sweeping inter-
pretations of history. For those w h o are drawn to the philosophic
skepticism of the postmodernists, however, the repudiation of s o m e
of the political h o p e s that ultimately rested on foundationalist meta-
physical assumptions n e e d not be taken as wholly pessimistic.
A l t h o u g h such a repudiation surely entails a diminished sense of
h u m a n possibilities, t h e replacement of the impossibly extravagant
22. American postmodernism is, in my view, most persuasively and attrac-
tively represented in the work of Richard Rorty, but he too is more compel-
ling in his skeptical critique of the philosophical mainstream than in his
murky anti-realist epistemology. See, esp., Consequences of Pragmatism (Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989). For an acute assessment of the political
weaknesses inherent in this outlook, see Christopher Norris, What's Wrong
with Postmodernism, Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990). There have been many efforts to define postmod-
ernism, but perhaps the anti-Enlightenment aspect important here is most
clearly set forth by David Harvey (The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell,
1980)) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition (University of
Minnesota Press, 1984)).
256 L. Marx
hopes that had for so l o n g been attached to the idea of "technology"
by m o r e plausible, realistic aspiradons may, in the long run, be cause
for optimism.
But the second way of looking at the role of technology in post-
modernist thinking is m u c h less encouraging. What many postmod-
ernist theorists often propose in rejecting the old illusion of historical
progress is a redescription of social reality that proves to be even
more technocratic than the distorted Enlightenment ideology they
reject. Much early postmodernist theorizing took off from a host of
speculative notions about the appearance of a wholly u n p r e c e d e n t e d
kind of society, variously called "post-Enlightenment," "post-Marx-
ist," "post-industrial," or "post-historic." A c o m m o n feature of these
theories—and of the umbrella concept, postmodernism—is the deci-
sive role accorded to the n e w electronic communications technologies.
T h e information or k n o w l e d g e they are able to generate and to
disseminate is said to constitute a distinctively postmodern and
increasingly d o m i n a n t form of capital, a "force of production," and,
in effect, a new, dematerialized kind of power. This allegedly is the
age of knowledge-based economies.
T h e r e are strikingly close affinities between the bold new concep-
tions of power favored by influential postmodern theorists—I am
thinking of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault—and the
23
functioning of large technological s y s t e m s . Power, as defined by
these theories, is dynamic and fluid. Always being m o v e d , e x c h a n g e d ,
or transferred, it flows endlessly t h r o u g h society arid culture the way
blood flows through a circulatory system or information through a
communications network. In contrast with the old notion of
entrenched power that can be attacked, removed, or replaced, post-
modernists envisage forms of power that have no central, single,
fixed, discernible, controllable locus. This kind of power is every-
where but nowhere. It typically develops from below, at the lower,
local levels, rather than by diffusion from centralized places on high.
T h e best way to understand it, then, is by an ascending analysis that
initially focuses on its micro, or capillary, manifestations. T h e most
compelling analogy is with the forthcoming m o d e of fiber-optic c o m -
munications, an electronic system that is expected to link all tele-
23. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition and Le Differends (University of Min-
nesota Press, 1984); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Pantheon, 1972).
Postmodern Pessimism 257
phonic, television, and c o m p u t e r transmission and reception, and all
major databanks, in a single national (and eventually global) network.
This outlook ratifies the idea of the domination of life by large
technological systems, by default if not by design. T h e accompanying
m o o d varies from a sense of pleasurably self-abnegating acquiescence
in the inevitable to melancholy resignation or fatalism. In any event,
it reflects a further increase in the difficulty, noted earlier, of dis-
cerning the boundary between what traditionally had been consid-
ered "technology," (the material or artifactual armature, which may
be a network of filaments) and the other socio-economic and cultural
c o m p o n e n t s of these large c o m p l e x systems. In many respects post-
modernism seems to be a perpetuation of—and an acquiescence i n —
the continuous aggrandizement of "technology" in its modern, insti-
tutionalized, systemic guises. In their hostility to ideologies and col-
lective belief systems, moreover, many postmodernist thinkers
relinquish all old-fashioned notions of putting the new systems into
24
the service of a larger political vision of h u m a n possibilities. In their
view, such visions are inherently dangerous, proto-totalitarian, and
to be avoided at all costs. T h e pessimistic tenor of postmodernism
follows from this inevitably diminished sense of h u m a n agency. If we
entertain the vision of a postmodern society dominated by immense,
overlapping, quasi-autonomous technological systems, and if the soci-
ety must s o m e h o w integrate the operation of those systems, becoming
in the process a meta-system of systems u p o n whose continuing ability
to function our lives d e p e n d , then the idea of postmodern techno-
logical pessimism makes sense. It is a fatalistic pessimism, an ambiv-
alent tribute to the determinative power of technology. But again,
the "technology" in question is so deeply e m b e d d e d in other aspects
of society that it is all but impossible to separate it from them. U n d e r
the circumstances, it might be well to acknowledge how consoling it
is to attribute our pessimism to the workings of so elusive an agent
o f change.
24. This is not true of all postmodern theorists. Rorty reaffirms a traditional
liberal perspective, though one whose capacity to provide a theoretical basis
for the control of technologically sophisticated multi-national corporations is
. extremely uncertain.
LANGDON WINNER

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

I N CONTROVERSIES A B O U T TECHNOLOGY A N D SOCIETY, there is n o idea m o r e pro-

vocative t h a n the n o t i o n that technical things have political qualities. At issue is
the claim that the m a c h i n e s , structures, and s y s t e m s of m o d e r n material culture
c a n b e a c c u r a t e l y j u d g e d n o t o n l y for t h e i r c o n t r i b u t i o n s o f e f f i c i e n c y a n d p r o -
ductivity, n o t m e r e l y for their positive a n d negative e n v i r o n m e n t a l side effects,
b u t also for t h e w a y s i n w h i c h t h e y c a n e m b o d y s p e c i f i c f o r m s o f p o w e r a n d
authority. Since ideas of this kind have a persistent and troubling presence in
1
discussions about the m e a n i n g of technology, they deserve explicit attention.
W r i t i n g i n Technology and Culture a l m o s t t w o d e c a d e s a g o , L e w i s M u m f o r d
gave classic s t a t e m e n t t o o n e v e r s i o n o f the t h e m e , a r g u i n g that "from late n e o -
lithic t i m e s i n t h e N e a r E a s t , r i g h t d o w n t o o u r o w n d a y , t w o t e c h n o l o g i e s h a v e
recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the
first system-centered, i m m e n s e l y powerful, but inherently unstable, the other
2
man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable." T h i s thesis
stands at the heart of M u m f o r d ' s studies of the city, architecture, and the his-
tory of t e c h n i c s , a n d mirrors c o n c e r n s voiced earlier in the w o r k s of Peter
Kropotkin, W i l l i a m M o r r i s , a n d other nineteenth c e n t u r y critics of industrial-
ism. M o r e recently, antinuclear and prosolar energy m o v e m e n t s in Europe and
America have a d o p t e d a similar n o t i o n as a centerpiece in their a r g u m e n t s .
Thus environmentalist Denis H a y e s concludes, "The increased deployment of
nuclear p o w e r facilities m u s t lead society t o w a r d authoritarianism. I n d e e d , safe
reliance u p o n n u c l e a r p o w e r a s t h e principal source o f e n e r g y m a y b e p o s s i b l e
only in a totalitarian state." E c h o i n g the v i e w s of m a n y proponents of appropri-
ate t e c h n o l o g y a n d t h e s o f t e n e r g y p a t h , H a y e s c o n t e n d s t h a t " d i s p e r s e d s o l a r
sources are m o r e c o m p a t i b l e t h a n centralized t e c h n o l o g i e s w i t h social e q u i t y ,
3
freedom and cultural pluralism."
An e a g e r n e s s to interpret t e c h n i c a l artifacts in political l a n g u a g e is by no
means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale h i g h - t e c h n o l o g y s y s t e m s .
A long lineage of boosters have insisted that the "biggest and best" that science
and i n d u s t r y m a d e a v a i l a b l e w e r e t h e b e s t g u a r a n t e e s o f d e m o c r a c y , f r e e d o m ,
and social justice. T h e factory s y s t e m , a u t o m o b i l e , t e l e p h o n e , radio, television,
t h e s p a c e p r o g r a m , a n d o f c o u r s e n u c l e a r p o w e r i t s e l f h a v e all a t o n e t i m e o r
another b e e n described as democratizing, liberating forces. D a v i d Lilienthal, in
T.V.A.: Democracy on the March, f o r e x a m p l e , f o u n d t h i s p r o m i s e in t h e p h o s -

121

17
122 LANGDON WINNER

p h a t e fertilizers a n d electricity that technical p r o g r e s s w a s b r i n g i n g t o rural

4
A m e r i c a n s d u r i n g t h e 1 9 4 0 s . In a r e c e n t e s s a y , The Republic of Technology,
D a n i e l B o o r s t i n e x t o l l e d t e l e v i s i o n for "its p o w e r t o d i s b a n d a r m i e s , t o cashier
presidents, to create a w h o l e n e w democratic world —democratic in w a y s never
5
before i m a g i n e d , e v e n in A m e r i c a . " S c a r c e l y a n e w i n v e n t i o n c o m e s a l o n g that
s o m e o n e d o e s not p r o c l a i m it t h e salvation of a free society.
It is no surprise to learn that t e c h n i c a l s y s t e m s of v a r i o u s k i n d s are d e e p l y
i n t e r w o v e n in the conditions of m o d e r n politics. T h e physical arrangements of
industrial p r o d u c t i o n , w a r f a r e , c o m m u n i c a t i o n s , a n d t h e like h a v e f u n d a m e n -
tally c h a n g e d the exercise of p o w e r a n d the e x p e r i e n c e of citizenship. B u t to go
b e y o n d t h i s o b v i o u s f a c t a n d t o a r g u e t h a t c e r t a i n t e c h n o l o g i e s i n themselves h a v e
p o l i t i c a l p r o p e r t i e s s e e m s , a t first g l a n c e , c o m p l e t e l y m i s t a k e n . W e all k n o w
that people have politics, not things. To discover either virtues or evils in aggre-
gates of steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, and chemicals s e e m s
just plain w r o n g , a w a y o f m y s t i f y i n g h u m a n artifice a n d o f a v o i d i n g t h e true
sources, the h u m a n sources of f r e e d o m and oppression, justice and injustice.
Blaming the hardware appears e v e n m o r e foolish than b l a m i n g the victims w h e n
i t c o m e s t o j u d g i n g c o n d i t i o n s o f p u b l i c life.
H e n c e , t h e s t e r n a d v i c e c o m m o n l y g i v e n t h o s e w h o flirt w i t h t h e n o t i o n t h a t
t e c h n i c a l a r t i f a c t s h a v e p o l i t i c a l q u a l i t i e s : W h a t m a t t e r s i s n o t t e c h n o l o g y itself,
but the social or e c o n o m i c s y s t e m in w h i c h it is e m b e d d e d . T h i s m a x i m , w h i c h
in a n u m b e r of variations is the central p r e m i s e of a t h e o r y that can be called
the social d e t e r m i n a t i o n of t e c h n o l o g y , has an o b v i o u s w i s d o m . It serves as a
needed corrective to those w h o focus uncritically on s u c h things as "the c o m p u t -
e r a n d i t s s o c i a l i m p a c t s " b u t w h o fail t o l o o k b e h i n d t e c h n i c a l t h i n g s t o n o t i c e
the social c i r c u m s t a n c e s o f their d e v e l o p m e n t , d e p l o y m e n t , a n d use. T h i s v i e w
provides an antidote to naive technological d e t e r m i n i s m — t h e idea that tech-
n o l o g y develops as the sole result of an internal d y n a m i c , a n d then, u n m e d i a t e d
b y a n y o t h e r i n f l u e n c e , m o l d s s o c i e t y t o fit its p a t t e r n s . T h o s e w h o h a v e n o t
recognized the w a y s i n w h i c h t e c h n o l o g i e s are s h a p e d b y social and e c o n o m i c
f o r c e s h a v e n o t g o t t e n v e r y far.
B u t t h e c o r r e c t i v e h a s its o w n s h o r t c o m i n g s ; t a k e n l i t e r a l l y , i t s u g g e s t s t h a t
t e c h n i c a l things d o n o t m a t t e r a t all. O n c e o n e h a s d o n e t h e d e t e c t i v e w o r k
necessary to reveal t h e social o r i g i n s — p o w e r holders b e h i n d a particular in-
stance of technological c h a n g e — o n e will have explained everything of impor-
tance. T h i s c o n c l u s i o n offers c o m f o r t to social scientists: it validates w h a t t h e y
had always suspected, namely, that there is nothing distinctive about the study
o f t e c h n o l o g y i n t h e first p l a c e . H e n c e , t h e y c a n r e t u r n t o t h e i r s t a n d a r d m o d e l s
of social p o w e r — t h o s e of interest g r o u p politics, bureaucratic politics, Marxist
m o d e l s of class struggle, and the l i k e — a n d have e v e r y t h i n g t h e y n e e d . T h e
s o c i a l d e t e r m i n a t i o n o f t e c h n o l o g y is, i n t h i s v i e w , e s s e n t i a l l y n o d i f f e r e n t f r o m
t h e s o c i a l d e t e r m i n a t i o n of, s a y , w e l f a r e p o l i c y o r t a x a t i o n .
T h e r e are, h o w e v e r , g o o d r e a s o n s t e c h n o l o g y has of late t a k e n on a special
f a s c i n a t i o n i n its o w n r i g h t f o r h i s t o r i a n s , p h i l o s o p h e r s , a n d p o l i t i c a l s c i e n -
t i s t s ; g o o d r e a s o n s t h e s t a n d a r d m o d e l s o f s o c i a l s c i e n c e o n l y g o s o far i n a c -
c o u n t i n g for w h a t i s m o s t i n t e r e s t i n g a n d t r o u b l e s o m e a b o u t t h e s u b j e c t . I n
another place I have tried to s h o w w h y so m u c h of m o d e r n social and political
thought contains recurring statements of w h a t can be called a theory of tech-

18
 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 123
nological politics, an o d d mongrel of notions often crossbred w i t h orthodox
6
liberal, conservative, and socialist p h i l o s o p h i e s . T h e t h e o r y o f technological
politics draws attention to the m o m e n t u m of large-scale sociotechnical s y s t e m s ,
to the response of m o d e r n societies to certain technological imperatives, and to
t h e all t o o c o m m o n s i g n s o f t h e a d a p t a t i o n o f h u m a n e n d s t o t e c h n i c a l m e a n s . I n
so d o i n g it offers a novel f r a m e w o r k of interpretation a n d e x p l a n a t i o n for s o m e
of the more puzzling patterns that have taken shape in and around the g r o w t h of
m o d e r n material culture. O n e s t r e n g t h of this point of v i e w is that it takes
technical artifacts seriously. R a t h e r t h a n insist that we i m m e d i a t e l y r e d u c e
everything to the interplay of social forces, it suggests that we pay attention to
the characteristics of technical objects and the m e a n i n g of those characteristics.
A n e c e s s a r y c o m p l e m e n t to, rather t h a n a r e p l a c e m e n t for, t h e o r i e s of t h e social
determination of t e c h n o l o g y , this perspective identifies certain technologies as
political p h e n o m e n a in their o w n right. It points us back, to b o r r o w E d m u n d
H u s s e r l ' s p h i l o s o p h i c a l i n j u n c t i o n , to the things themselves.
In w h a t f o l l o w s I shall offer o u t l i n e s a n d illustrations of t w o w a y s in w h i c h
artifacts c a n c o n t a i n political p r o p e r t i e s . First are instances in w h i c h the i n v e n -
tion, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or s y s t e m b e c o m e s a
w a y of settling an issue in a particular c o m m u n i t y . S e e n in the proper light,
e x a m p l e s o f this k i n d are fairly s t r a i g h t f o r w a r d a n d easily u n d e r s t o o d . S e c o n d
are cases o f w h a t c a n b e called i n h e r e n t l y political t e c h n o l o g i e s , m a n - m a d e s y s -
tems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible w i t h , particular kinds
o f p o l i t i c a l r e l a t i o n s h i p s . A r g u m e n t s a b o u t c a s e s o f t h i s k i n d are m u c h m o r e
troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By "politics," I m e a n arrange-
m e n t s of p o w e r and authority in h u m a n associations as well as the activities that
take place w i t h i n t h o s e a r r a n g e m e n t s , F o r m y p u r p o s e s , " t e c h n o l o g y " h e r e i s
7
u n d e r s t o o d t o m e a n all o f m o d e r n p r a c t i c a l a r t i f i c e , b u t t o a v o i d c o n f u s i o n I
prefer to speak of technologies, smaller or larger pieces or s y s t e m s of h a r d w a r e
of a specific kind. My i n t e n t i o n is n o t to settle a n y of t h e issues h e r e o n c e a n d for
all, b u t t o i n d i c a t e t h e i r g e n e r a l d i m e n s i o n s a n d s i g n i f i c a n c e .

Technical Arrangements as Forms of Order

A n y o n e w h o has traveled the h i g h w a y s of America and has b e c o m e used to

the n o r m a l h e i g h t of o v e r p a s s e s m a y w e l l find s o m e t h i n g a little o d d a b o u t s o m e
of the bridges over the parkways on L o n g Island, N e w York. M a n y of the
o v e r p a s s e s are e x t r a o r d i n a r i l y l o w , h a v i n g as little as n i n e feet of clearance at t h e
curb. E v e n those w h o h a p p e n e d to notice this structural peculiarity w o u l d not
b e i n c l i n e d t o a t t a c h a n y s p e c i a l m e a n i n g t o it. I n o u r a c c u s t o m e d w a y o f l o o k -
ing at things like roads and bridges we see the details of f o r m as i n n o c u o u s , and
seldom give them a second thought.
It turns out, h o w e v e r , that the t w o hundred or so low-hanging overpasses
on L o n g Island w e r e deliberately d e s i g n e d to a c h i e v e a particular social effect.
Robert M o s e s , the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public
works from the 1920s to the 1970s in N e w York, had these overpasses built to
specifications that w o u l d discourage the presence of buses on his p a r k w a y s .
A c c o r d i n g t o e v i d e n c e p r o v i d e d b y R o b e r t A . C a r o i n his b i o g r a p h y o f M o s e s ,
the r e a s o n s reflect M o s e s ' s social-class bias a n d racial p r e j u d i c e . A u t o m o b i l e -

19
124 LANGDON WINNER

o w n i n g whites of "upper" and "comfortable middle" classes, as he called t h e m ,

w o u l d be free to use the p a r k w a y s for recreation and c o m m u t i n g . P o o r p e o p l e
a n d b l a c k s , w h o n o r m a l l y u s e d p u b l i c t r a n s i t , w e r e k e p t off t h e r o a d s b e c a u s e
t h e t w e l v e - f o o t tall b u s e s c o u l d n o t g e t t h r o u g h t h e o v e r p a s s e s . O n e c o n -
s e q u e n c e w a s t o limit access o f racial m i n o r i t i e s a n d l o w - i n c o m e g r o u p s t o J o n e s
Beachi Moses's w i d e l y acclaimed public park. M o s e s m a d e d o u b l y sure of this
result by vetoing a proposed extension of the L o n g Island Railroad to J o n e s
8
Beach.
A s a s t o r y i n r e c e n t A m e r i c a n p o l i t i c a l h i s t o r y , R o b e r t M o s e s ' s life i s f a s c i -
nating. H i s dealings w i t h m a y o r s , governors, and presidents, and his careful
manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions, the press, and public opinion
a r e all m a t t e r s t h a t p o l i t i c a l s c i e n t i s t s c o u l d s t u d y f o r y e a r s . B u t t h e m o s t i m p o r -
tant and e n d u r i n g results of his w o r k are his t e c h n o l o g i e s , the vast e n g i n e e r i n g
p r o j e c t s t h a t g i v e N e w Y o r k m u c h o f its p r e s e n t f o r m . F o r g e n e r a t i o n s a f t e r
M o s e s has g o n e and the alliances he forged have fallen apart, his public works,
especially the h i g h w a y s and bridges he built to favor the use of the automobile
over the d e v e l o p m e n t of m a s s transit, will c o n t i n u e to s h a p e that city. M a n y of
his m o n u m e n t a l structures of concrete and steel e m b o d y a s y s t e m a t i c social
inequality, a w a y of e n g i n e e r i n g relationships a m o n g p e o p l e that, after a t i m e ,
b e c o m e s just another part of the landscape. As planner L e e K o p p l e m a n told
Caro about the l o w bridges on Wantagh Parkway, " T h e old son-of-a-gun had
9
m a d e s u r e t h a t b u s e s w o u l d never b e a b l e t o u s e h i s g o d d a m n e d p a r k w a y s . "
Histories of architecture, city planning, and public works contain m a n y ex-
amples of physical arrangements that contain explicit or implicit political pur-
poses. O n e can point to Baron Haussmann's broad Parisian thoroughfares,
engineered at Louis Napoleon's direction to prevent any recurrence of street
fighting of the kind that took place during the revolution of 1848. Or one can
visit a n y n u m b e r o f g r o t e s q u e c o n c r e t e b u i l d i n g s and h u g e plazas c o n s t r u c t e d
o n A m e r i c a n u n i v e r s i t y c a m p u s e s d u r i n g the late 1 9 6 0 s and early 1 9 7 0 s t o d e -
fuse student demonstrations. Studies of industrial m a c h i n e s and instruments
also turn up interesting political stories, including s o m e that violate our normal
e x p e c t a t i o n s a b o u t w h y t e c h n o l o g i c a l i n n o v a t i o n s a r e m a d e i n t h e first p l a c e . I f
w e s u p p o s e that n e w t e c h n o l o g i e s are i n t r o d u c e d t o a c h i e v e i n c r e a s e d efficien-
cy, the history of technology s h o w s that we will s o m e t i m e s be disappointed.
T e c h n o l o g i c a l c h a n g e expresses a p a n o p l y of h u m a n m o t i v e s , not the least of
w h i c h is the desire of some to have d o m i n i o n over others, even though it m a y
require a n occasional sacrifice o f c o s t - c u t t i n g a n d s o m e v i o l e n c e t o the n o r m o f
getting m o r e f r o m less.
O n e poignant illustration can be f o u n d in the history of nineteenth century
industrial mechanization. At C y r u s M c C o r m i c k ' s reaper m a n u f a c t u r i n g plant in
Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneumatic m o l d i n g machines, a n e w and largely
untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of
$500,000. In the standard economic interpretation of s u c h things, we w o u l d
expect that this step w a s taken to modernize the plant and achieve the kind of
efficiencies that m e c h a n i z a t i o n brings. B u t historian R o b e r t O z a n n e has s h o w n
w h y the development must be seen in a broader context. At the time, Cyrus
M c C o r m i c k II w a s engaged in a battle w i t h the N a t i o n a l U n i o n of Iron M o l d -
ers. H e s a w the a d d i t i o n o f the n e w m a c h i n e s a s a w a y t o " w e e d o u t t h e bad

20
 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 125
element a m o n g the m e n , " n a m e l y , the skilled workers w h o had organized the
1 0
u n i o n local i n C h i c a g o . T h e n e w m a c h i n e s , m a n n e d b y u n s k i l l e d labor, ac-
tually p r o d u c e d inferior castings at a h i g h e r cost than the earlier process. After
three years of use the m a c h i n e s w e r e , in fact, a b a n d o n e d , b u t by that t i m e t h e y
had served their p u r p o s e — t h e destruction of the union. T h u s , the story of these
technical d e v e l o p m e n t s at the M c C o r m i c k factory cannot be understood ade-
quately outside the record of workers' attempts to organize, police repression of
the labor m o v e m e n t in Chicago during that period, and the events surrounding
the b o m b i n g at H a y m a r k e t Square. T e c h n o l o g i c a l history and A m e r i c a n politi-
cal h i s t o r y w e r e a t t h a t m o m e n t d e e p l y i n t e r t w i n e d .
In cases like those of Moses's l o w bridges and M c C o r m i c k ' s m o l d i n g m a -
c h i n e s , o n e s e e s t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f t e c h n i c a l a r r a n g e m e n t s t h a t p r e c e d e t h e use o f
the things in question. It is o b v i o u s that technologies can be u s e d in w a y s that
enhance t h e p o w e r , authority, a n d privilege of s o m e over others, for e x a m p l e ,
the u s e o f t e l e v i s i o n t o sell a c a n d i d a t e . T o o u r a c c u s t o m e d w a y o f t h i n k i n g ,
t e c h n o l o g i e s are s e e n a s neutral t o o l s t h a t c a n b e u s e d w e l l o r p o o r l y , for g o o d ,
evil, or s o m e t h i n g in b e t w e e n . B u t we usually do n o t stop to inquire w h e t h e r a
given device m i g h t have been designed and built in s u c h a w a y that it produces a
s e t o f c o n s e q u e n c e s l o g i c a l l y a n d t e m p o r a l l y prior t o a n y o f i t s p r o f e s s e d u s e s .
R o b e r t Moses's b r i d g e s , a f t e r all, w e r e u s e d t o c a r r y a u t o m o b i l e s f r o m o n e p o i n t
to another; M c C o r m i c k ' s machines w e r e used to make metal castings; both tech-
n o l o g i e s , h o w e v e r , e n c o m p a s s e d p u r p o s e s far b e y o n d t h e i r i m m e d i a t e u s e . I f
our moral a n d political l a n g u a g e for e v a l u a t i n g t e c h n o l o g y i n c l u d e s o n l y cate-
gories having to do w i t h tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the
m e a n i n g of t h e d e s i g n s and a r r a n g e m e n t s of our artifacts, t h e n we w i l l . b e
blinded to m u c h that is intellectually and practically crucial.
Because the point is m o s t easily understood in the light of particular in-
t e n t i o n s e m b o d i e d i n p h y s i c a l f o r m , I h a v e s o far o f f e r e d i l l u s t r a t i o n s t h a t s e e m
almost conspiratorial. B u t to r e c o g n i z e the political d i m e n s i o n s in the shapes of
t e c h n o l o g y d o e s n o t require that we look for conscious conspiracies or malicious
intentions. T h e organized m o v e m e n t of handicapped p e o p l e in the U n i t e d
States during the 1970s pointed out the countless w a y s in w h i c h machines,
instruments, and structures of c o m m o n u s e — b u s e s , buildings, sidewalks,
p l u m b i n g fixtures, and so f o r t h — m a d e it impossible for m a n y h a n d i c a p p e d per-
sons to m o v e about freely, a condition that systematically excluded t h e m from
p u b l i c life. It is safe to s a y that d e s i g n s u n s u i t e d for the h a n d i c a p p e d arose m o r e
from long-standing neglect than from anyone's active intention. But n o w that
the issue has b e e n raised for p u b l i c attention, it is e v i d e n t that justice r e q u i r e s a
r e m e d y , A w h o l e range of artifacts are n o w being r e d e s i g n e d and rebuilt to
a c c o m m o d a t e this minority.
Indeed, m a n y of the m o s t important examples of technologies that have
political c o n s e q u e n c e s are t h o s e that t r a n s c e n d t h e s i m p l e categories of "in-
t e n d e d " a n d " u n i n t e n d e d " a l t o g e t h e r . T h e s e are i n s t a n c e s i n w h i c h the v e r y
process of technical d e v e l o p m e n t is so t h o r o u g h l y biased in a particular direc-
tion that it regularly produces results c o u n t e d as w o n d e r f u l breakthroughs by
s o m e social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In s u c h cases it is neither
correct nor insightful to say, " S o m e o n e intended to do s o m e b o d y else harm."
Rather, one m u s t say that the technological deck has been stacked long in ad-

21
126 LANGDON WINNER

vance to favor certain social interests, a n d that s o m e p e o p l e w e r e b o u n d to

receive a better hand than others.
T h e mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by re-
searchers at the U n i v e r s i t y of California f r o m the late 1 9 4 0 s to t h e p r e s e n t ,
offers an illustrative tale. T h e m a c h i n e is able to harvest t o m a t o e s in a single
pass t h r o u g h a r o w , cutting the plants f r o m the g r o u n d , s h a k i n g the fruit loose,
and in the n e w e s t models sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic
g o n d o l a s that h o l d u p t o t w e n t y - f i v e t o n s o f p r o d u c e h e a d e d for c a n n i n g . T o
a c c o m m o d a t e the r o u g h m o t i o n of these "factories in the field," agricultural
researchers h a v e bred n e w varieties of t o m a t o e s that are hardier, sturdier, a n d
less tasty. T h e harvesters replace t h e s y s t e m o f h a n d p i c k i n g , i n w h i c h c r e w s o f
farmworkers w o u l d pass through the fields three or four times putting ripe to-
1 1
m a t o e s i n l u g b o x e s a n d s a v i n g i m m a t u r e fruit for later h a r v e s t . S t u d i e s i n
California indicate that the m a c h i n e reduces costs by approximately five to sev-
1 2
e n dollars p e r t o n a s c o m p a r e d t o h a n d - h a r v e s t i n g . B u t t h e benefits are b y n o
m e a n s equally d i v i d e d in the agricultural e c o n o m y . In fact, the m a c h i n e in the
g a r d e n has in this instance b e e n t h e o c c a s i o n for a t h o r o u g h r e s h a p i n g of social
relationships of t o m a t o p r o d u c t i o n in rural California.
By their very size and cost, more than $50,000 each to purchase, the ma-
c h i n e s are c o m p a t i b l e o n l y w i t h a h i g h l y c o n c e n t r a t e d f o r m o f t o m a t o g r o w i n g .
W i t h the introduction of this n e w m e t h o d of harvesting, the n u m b e r of t o m a t o
growers declined from approximately four thousand in the early 1960s to about
six h u n d r e d in 1973, y e t w i t h a substantial increase in t o n s of t o m a t o e s p r o -
d u c e d . B y the late 1 9 7 0 s a n e s t i m a t e d t h i r t y - t w o t h o u s a n d jobs i n t h e t o m a t o
1 3
industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of m e c h a n i z a t i o n . T h u s ,
a j u m p in productivity to the benefit of very large g r o w e r s has occurred at a
sacrifice to o t h e r rural agricultural c o m m u n i t i e s .
T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f California's research and d e v e l o p m e n t o n agricultural m a -
c h i n e s like the t o m a t o harvester is at this t i m e t h e s u b j e c t of a l a w suit filed by
attorneys for California Rural L e g a l A s s i s t a n c e , an organization r e p r e s e n t i n g
a group of farmworkers and other interested parties. T h e suit charges that
U n i v e r s i t y officials are s p e n d i n g tax m o n i e s o n p r o j e c t s t h a t b e n e f i t a h a n d -
ful o f p r i v a t e i n t e r e s t s t o t h e d e t r i m e n t o f f a r m w o r k e r s , s m a l l f a r m e r s , c o n -
s u m e r s , a n d rural California g e n e r a l l y , a n d asks for a c o u r t i n j u n c t i o n to s t o p t h e
practice. T h e U n i v e r s i t y has denied these charges, arguing that to accept
t h e m " w o u l d r e q u i r e e l i m i n a t i o n o f all r e s e a r c h w i t h a n y p o t e n t i a l p r a c t i c a l
1 4
application."
A s far a s I k n o w , n o o n e h a s a r g u e d t h a t t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f t h e t o m a t o
harvester w a s the result of a plot. T w o students of the controversy, William
Friedland and A m y Barton, specifically exonerate both the original developers
of the m a c h i n e a n d the hard t o m a t o from a n y desire to facilitate e c o n o m i c c o n -
1 5
centration in that i n d u s t r y . W h a t we see here instead is an o n g o i n g social
process in w h i c h scientific k n o w l e d g e , technological invention, and corporate
profit reinforce e a c h o t h e r i n d e e p l y e n t r e n c h e d p a t t e r n s t h a t b e a r t h e u n m i s t a k -
able stamp of political and e c o n o m i c p o w e r . O v e r m a n y decades agricultural
research and d e v e l o p m e n t in A m e r i c a n land-grant colleges a n d universities has
1 6
tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness c o n c e r n s . It is in the face of
s u c h s u b t l y i n g r a i n e d patterns that o p p o n e n t s o f i n n o v a t i o n s like t h e t o m a t o

22
 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 127
harvester are m a d e t o s e e m " a n t i t e c h n o l o g y " o r " a n t i p r o g r e s s . " F o r t h e h a r v e s -
ter is not m e r e l y the s y m b o l of a social order that r e w a r d s s o m e w h i l e p u n i s h i n g
others; it is in a true sense an e m b o d i m e n t of that order.
W i t h i n a given category of technological change there are, roughly speaking,
t w o k i n d s of c h o i c e s that can affect the relative d i s t r i b u t i o n of p o w e r , a u t h o r i t y ,
and privilege in a c o m m u n i t y . O f t e n the crucial decision is a simple "yes or n o "
choice—are we going to develop and adopt the thing or not? In recent years
m a n y local, national, and international disputes about t e c h n o l o g y have centered
on "yes or no" judgments about such things as food additives, pesticides, the
building of h i g h w a y s , nuclear reactors, and d a m projects. T h e fundamental
choice about an A B M or an S S T is w h e t h e r or not the thing is going to join
s o c i e t y as a p i e c e of its o p e r a t i n g e q u i p m e n t . R e a s o n s for a n d against are fre-
quently as important as those concerning the adoption of an important n e w law.
A s e c o n d r a n g e of choices, e q u a l l y critical in m a n y instances, has to do w i t h
specific features in the d e s i g n or a r r a n g e m e n t of a technical s y s t e m after the
decision to go a h e a d w i t h it has a l r e a d y b e e n m a d e . E v e n after a utility c o m p a n y
w i n s p e r m i s s i o n to build a large electric p o w e r line, i m p o r t a n t controversies c a n
r e m a i n w i t h r e s p e c t t o t h e p l a c e m e n t . o f its r o u t e a n d t h e d e s i g n o f its t o w e r s ;
e v e n after a n o r g a n i z a t i o n h a s d e c i d e d t o institute a s y s t e m o f c o m p u t e r s , c o n -
troversies c a n still arise w i t h regard t o t h e k i n d s o f c o m p o n e n t s , p r o g r a m s ,
modes of access, and other specific features the s y s t e m will include. O n c e the
m e c h a n i c a l t o m a t o h a r v e s t e r h a d b e e n d e v e l o p e d i n its b a s i c f o r m , d e s i g n altera-
tion of critical social s i g n i f i c a n c e — t h e addition of electronic sorters, for e x -
a m p l e — c h a n g e d t h e character of the machine's effects on t h e balance of w e a l t h
and p o w e r i n California agriculture. S o m e o f the m o s t interesting research o n
technology and politics at present focuses on the attempt to demonstrate in a
detailed, concrete fashion h o w s e e m i n g l y i n n o c u o u s design features in m a s s
transit s y s t e m s , w a t e r projects, industrial m a c h i n e r y , and o t h e r t e c h n o l o g i e s
actually m a s k social choices of profound significance. Historian D a v i d N o b l e is
n o w s t u d y i n g t w o kinds of automated m a c h i n e tool s y s t e m s that have different
implications for t h e relative p o w e r o f m a n a g e m e n t a n d labor i n t h e industries
that m i g h t e m p l o y t h e m . H e i s able t o s h o w that, a l t h o u g h t h e basic electronic
and mechanical c o m p o n e n t s of the record/playback and numerical control s y s -
t e m s are s i m i l a r , t h e c h o i c e o f o n e d e s i g n o v e r a n o t h e r h a s c r u c i a l c o n s e q u e n c e s
for s o c i a l s t r u g g l e s o n t h e s h o p f l o o r . T o s e e t h e m a t t e r s o l e l y i n t e r m s o f c o s t -
cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of e q u i p m e n t is to miss a decisive
1 7
element in the story.
F r o m s u c h e x a m p l e s I w o u l d offer t h e f o l l o w i n g g e n e r a l c o n c l u s i o n s . T h e
things w e call " t e c h n o l o g i e s " are w a y s o f b u i l d i n g order i n o u r w o r l d . M a n y
technical d e v i c e s a n d s y s t e m s i m p o r t a n t in e v e r y d a y life c o n t a i n possibilities for
m a n y different w a y s of ordering h u m a n activity. C o n s c i o u s l y or not, deliber-
ately or inadvertently, societies c h o o s e structures for technologies that influence
h o w p e o p l e are g o i n g t o w o r k , c o m m u n i c a t e , travel, c o n s u m e , a n d s o forth o v e r
a v e r y l o n g t i m e . I n t h e p r o c e s s e s b y w h i c h s t r u c t u r i n g d e c i s i o n s are m a d e ,
different p e o p l e are differently situated a n d possess u n e q u a l d e g r e e s of p o w e r as
w e l l a s u n e q u a l l e v e l s o f a w a r e n e s s . B y far t h e g r e a t e s t l a t i t u d e o f c h o i c e e x i s t s
t h e v e r y first t i m e a p a r t i c u l a r i n s t r u m e n t , s y s t e m , o r t e c h n i q u e i s i n t r o d u c e d .
Because choices tend to b e c o m e strongly fixed in material equipment, e c o n o m i c

23
 128 LANGDON WINNER

C i n v e s t m e n t , a n d s o c i a l h a b i t , t h e o r i g i n a l f l e x i b i l i t y v a n i s h e s f o r all p r a c t i c a l
i p u r p o s e s o n c e t h e initial c o m m i t m e n t s are m a d e . In that s e n s e t e c h n o l o g i c a l
i n n o v a t i o n s are similar to legislative acts or political f o u n d i n g s that establish a
f r a m e w o r k for p u b l i c o r d e r that will e n d u r e o v e r m a n y g e n e r a t i o n s . F o r t h a t
reason, the s a m e careful attention o n e w o u l d give to the rules, roles, a n d rela-
tionships of politics m u s t also be g i v e n to s u c h things as the b u i l d i n g of h i g h -
w a y s , the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly
insignificant features on n e w machines. T h e issues that divide or unite people in
s o c i e t y are settled n o t o n l y in t h e institutions and practices of politics proper,
b u t also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete,
wires and transistors, nuts and bolts.

Inherently Political Technologies

N o n e o f t h e a r g u m e n t s a n d e x a m p l e s c o n s i d e r e d t h u s far a d d r e s s a s t r o n g e r ,
more troubling claim often m a d e in writings about technology and society—-the
b e l i e f that s o m e t e c h n o l o g i e s are by their v e r y nature political in a specific w a y .
A c c o r d i n g to this v i e w , the adoption of a given technical s y s t e m u n a v o i d a b l y
brings w i t h it conditions for h u m a n relationships that have a distinctive political
cast—for e x a m p l e , centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or inegalitarian, re-.
( pressive or liberating. T h i s is u l t i m a t e l y w h a t is at stake in assertions like those
s of L e w i s M u m f o r d that t w o traditions of t e c h n o l o g y , o n e authoritarian, the
/ o t h e r d e m o c r a t i c , e x i s t s i d e b y s i d e i n W e s t e r n h i s t o r y . I n all t h e c a s e s I c i t e d
a b o v e the t e c h n o l o g i e s are relatively flexible in d e s i g n a n d a r r a n g e m e n t , a n d
variable in their effects. A l t h o u g h one c a n recognize a particular result p r o d u c e d
in a particular setting, o n e can also easily i m a g i n e h o w a r o u g h l y similar device
or s y s t e m m i g h t have b e e n built or situated w i t h v e r y m u c h different political
consequences. T h e idea we m u s t n o w e x a m i n e and evaluate is that certain kinds
of t e c h n o l o g y do not allow such flexibility, and that to choose t h e m is to choose
a particular f o r m of political life.
A remarkably forceful statement of o n e version of this a r g u m e n t appears in
Friedrich Engels's little essay " O n A u t h o r i t y " w r i t t e n i n 1 8 7 2 . A n s w e r i n g anar-
chists w h o believed that authority is an evil that o u g h t to be a b o l i s h e d altogeth-
\ er, E n g e l s l a u n c h e s into a p a n e g y r i c for a u t h o r i t a r i a n i s m , m a i n t a i n i n g , a m o n g
/ other things, that strong authority is a necessary condition in m o d e r n industry.
To a d v a n c e his case in the strongest possible w a y , he asks his readers to i m a g i n e
that the r e v o l u t i o n has already o c c u r r e d . " S u p p o s i n g a social revolution de-
throned the capitalists, w h o n o w exercise their authority over the production
and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the
anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had b e c o m e the
collective property of the workers w h o use t h e m . Will authority have dis-
1 8
a p p e a r e d o r w i l l i t h a v e o n l y c h a n g e d its f o r m ? "
\ H i s answer draws u p o n lessons from three sociotechnical s y s t e m s of his day,
I c o t t o n - s p i n n i n g m i l l s , r a i l w a y s , a n d s h i p s a t sea. H e o b s e r v e s t h a t , o n its w a y t o
b e c o m i n g finished thread, cotton m o v e s through a n u m b e r of different opera-.
tions at different locations in the factory. T h e workers perform a w i d e variety of
tasks, f r o m r u n n i n g the s t e a m e n g i n e to carrying the p r o d u c t s f r o m o n e r o o m to
another. B e c a u s e these tasks m u s t be c o o r d i n a t e d , and b e c a u s e the t i m i n g of the
w o r k is "fixed by the authority of the s t e a m , " laborers m u s t learn to a c c e p t a

24
 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 129
rigid discipline. T h e y m u s t , a c c o r d i n g t o E n g e l s , w o r k a t regular h o u r s a n d
agree to s u b o r d i n a t e their individual wills to the persons in charge of factory
o p e r a t i o n s . I f t h e y fail t o d o s o , t h e y risk t h e h o r r i f y i n g p o s s i b i l i t y that p r o d u c -
tion will c o m e to a grinding halt, E n g e l s pulls no p u n c h e s . " T h e a u t o m a t i c
m a c h i n e r y o f a b i g f a c t o r y , " h e w r i t e s , "is m u c h m o r e d e s p o t i c t h a n t h e s m a l l
1 9
capitalists w h o e m p l o y w o r k e r s ever h a v e b e e n . "
Similar lessons are a d d u c e d in Engels's analysis of the necessary operating
c o n d i t i o n s for r a i l w a y s a n d s h i p s a t sea. B o t h r e q u i r e t h e s u b o r d i n a t i o n o f
workers to an "imperious authority" that sees to it that things run according to
p l a n . E n g e l s f i n d s t h a t , far f r o m b e i n g a n i d i o s y n c r a c y o f c a p i t a l i s t s o c i a l o r g a n -
i z a t i o n , r e l a t i o n s h i p s o f a u t h o r i t y a n d s u b o r d i n a t i o n a r i s e " i n d e p e n d e n t l y o f all
social o r g a n i z a t i o n , [ a n d ] are i m p o s e d u p o n u s t o g e t h e r w i t h the material c o n d i -
tions u n d e r w h i c h w e p r o d u c e and m a k e p r o d u c t s circulate." A g a i n , h e i n t e n d s
this t o b e s t e r n a d v i c e t o t h e a n a r c h i s t s w h o , a c c o r d i n g t o E n g e l s , t h o u g h t i t
possible s i m p l y to eradicate subordination and superordination at a single
stroke. A l l s u c h s c h e m e s are n o n s e n s e . T h e roots o f u n a v o i d a b l e a u t h o r -
itarianism are, h e argues, d e e p l y i m p l a n t e d i n the h u m a n i n v o l v e m e n t w i t h
s c i e n c e a n d t e c h n o l o g y . "If m a n , b y d i n t o f h i s k n o w l e d g e a n d i n v e n t i v e g e n i u s ,
has s u b d u e d t h e forces o f nature, the latter a v e n g e t h e m s e l v e s u p o n h i m b y
subjecting h i m , insofar as he e m p l o y s t h e m , to a veritable despotism independ-
2 0
e n t o f all s o c i a l o r g a n i z a t i o n . "
A t t e m p t s to justify strong authority on the basis of s u p p o s e d l y necessary
conditions of technical practice have an ancient history. A pivotal theme in the
Republic i s P l a t o ' s q u e s t t o b o r r o w t h e a u t h o r i t y o f techne a n d e m p l o y i t b y a n a l o -
gy to buttress his a r g u m e n t in favor of authority in the state. A m o n g the illus-
trations he c h o o s e s , like E n g e l s , is that of a ship on t h e h i g h seas. B e c a u s e large
sailing vessels by their v e r y nature n e e d to be steered w i t h a firm h a n d , sailors
must yield to their captain's c o m m a n d s ; no reasonable person believes that ships
can be run democratically. Plato goes on to suggest that governing a state is
rather like b e i n g c a p t a i n of a s h i p or like practicing m e d i c i n e as a p h y s i c i a n .
M u c h the s a m e c o n d i t i o n s that require central rule and decisive action in orga-
nized technical activity also create this n e e d in g o v e r n m e n t .
I n E n g e l s ' s a r g u m e n t , a n d a r g u m e n t s l i k e it, t h e j u s t i f i c a t i o n f o r a u t h o r i t y i s
no longer m a d e by Plato's classic analogy, but rather directly w i t h reference to
t e c h n o l o g y itself. I f t h e b a s i c c a s e i s a s c o m p e l l i n g a s E n g e l s b e l i e v e d i t t o b e ,
one w o u l d expect that, as a society adopted increasingly complicated technical
s y s t e m s a s its m a t e r i a l b a s i s , t h e p r o s p e c t s f o r a u t h o r i t a r i a n w a y s o f life w o u l d
be greatly e n h a n c e d . Central control by knowledgeable people acting at the top
of a rigid social h i e r a r c h y w o u l d s e e m increasingly p r u d e n t . In this respect, his
stand in " O n A u t h o r i t y " appears to be at variance w i t h Karl Marx's position in
V o l u m e O n e o f Capital. M a r x t r i e s t o s h o w t h a t i n c r e a s i n g m e c h a n i z a t i o n w i l l
render obsolete the hierarchical, division of labor and the relationships of subor-
dination that, in his v i e w , w e r e necessary during the early stages of m o d e r n
manufacturing. T h e "Modern Industry," he writes, " . . . sweeps a w a y by
technical m e a n s the manufacturing division of labor, under w h i c h each m a n is
b o u n d h a n d a n d f o o t for life to a s i n g l e detail o p e r a t i o n . At t h e s a m e t i m e , t h e
capitalistic f o r m of that i n d u s t r y r e p r o d u c e s this s a m e division of labour in a
still m o r e m o n s t r o u s s h a p e ; i n t h e f a c t o r y p r o p e r , b y c o n v e r t i n g t h e w o r k m a n
21
i n t o a l i v i n g a p p e n d a g e o f t h e m a c h i n e , . . ." I n M a r x ' s v i e w , t h e c o n d i t i o n s

25
 130 LANGDON WINNER

that will e v e n t u a l l y dissolve the capitalist division of labor a n d facilitate prole-

t a r i a n r e v o l u t i o n a r e c o n d i t i o n s l a t e n t i n i n d u s t r i a l t e c h n o l o g y itself. T h e dif-
f e r e n c e s b e t w e e n M a r x ' s p o s i t i o n i n Capital a n d E n g e l s ' s i n h i s e s s a y r a i s e a n
i m p o r t a n t q u e s t i o n f o r s o c i a l i s m : W h a t , a f t e r all, d o e s m o d e r n t e c h n o l o g y m a k e
p o s s i b l e o r n e c e s s a r y i n political life? T h e theoretical t e n s i o n w e s e e h e r e m i r -
rors m a n y t r o u b l e s i n t h e practice o f f r e e d o m and a u t h o r i t y that h a v e m u d d i e d
the tracks of socialist revolution.
A r g u m e n t s t o t h e effect that t e c h n o l o g i e s are i n s o m e s e n s e i n h e r e n t l y politi-
cal h a v e b e e n a d v a n c e d i n a w i d e v a r i e t y o f c o n t e x t s , far t o o m a n y t o s u m m a r i z e
here. I n m y r e a d i n g o f s u c h n o t i o n s , h o w e v e r , there are t w o basic w a y s o f
stating the case. O n e version claims that the adoption of a given technical sys-
< t e r n a c t u a l l y requires t h e c r e a t i o n a n d m a i n t e n a n c e o f a p a r t i c u l a r s e t o f s o c i a l
I conditions as the operating e n v i r o n m e n t of that s y s t e m . Engels's position is of
t h i s k i n d . A s i m i l a r v i e w i s o f f e r e d b y a c o n t e m p o r a r y w r i t e r w h o h o l d s t h a t "if
y o u accept nuclear p o w e r plants, y o u also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-
military elite. W i t h o u t these p e o p l e in charge, y o u c o u l d not h a v e nuclear
2 9
p o w e r . " In this conception, s o m e kinds of t e c h n o l o g y require their social en-
vironments to be structured in a particular w a y in m u c h the same sense that
an a u t o m o b i l e requires w h e e l s in order to run. T h e t h i n g could n o t exist as an
effective operating entity unless certain social as well as material conditions
w e r e met. T h e m e a n i n g of "required" here is that of practical (rather than logi-
cal) n e c e s s i t y . T h u s , P l a t o t h o u g h t i t a p r a c t i c a l n e c e s s i t y t h a t a s h i p a t s e a h a v e
one captain and an unquestioningly obedient crew.
A second, s o m e w h a t weaker, version of the a r g u m e n t holds that a given
k i n d o f t e c h n o l o g y i s s t r o n g l y compatible with, b u t d o e s n o t s t r i c t l y r e q u i r e ,
social and political relationships of a particular stripe. M a n y a d v o c a t e s of solar
e n e r g y n o w h o l d that t e c h n o l o g i e s of that variety are m o r e c o m p a t i b l e w i t h a
d e m o c r a t i c , egalitarian society than e n e r g y s y s t e m s based on coal, oil, a n d n u -
clear p o w e r ; at t h e s a m e t i m e t h e y do not maintain that a n y t h i n g about solar
e n e r g y requires d e m o c r a c y . T h e i r case is, briefly, that solar e n e r g y is decentral-
izing in b o t h a technical and political sense: technically speaking, it is vastly
m o r e reasonable to build solar s y s t e m s in a disaggregated, w i d e l y distributed
m a n n e r than in large-scale centralized plants; politically speaking, solar e n e r g y
a c c o m m o d a t e s the a t t e m p t s of individuals and local c o m m u n i t i e s to m a n a g e
t h e i r affairs e f f e c t i v e l y b e c a u s e t h e y a r e d e a l i n g w i t h s y s t e m s t h a t a r e m o r e
accessible, comprehensible, and controllable than huge centralized sources. In
t h i s v i e w , s o l a r e n e r g y i s d e s i r a b l e n o t o n l y f o r its e c o n o m i c a n d e n v i r o n m e n t a l
benefits, b u t also for t h e salutary i n s t i t u t i o n s it is likely to p e r m i t in o t h e r areas
2 3
of public life.
Within both versions of the argument there is a further distinction to be
m a d e b e t w e e n c o n d i t i o n s t h a t a r e internal t o t h e w o r k i n g s o f a g i v e n t e c h n i c a l
s y s t e m a n d t h o s e t h a t a r e external t o it. E n g e l s ' s t h e s i s c o n c e r n s i n t e r n a l s o c i a l
relations said to be required w i t h i n c o t t o n factories a n d r a i l w a y s , for e x a m p l e ;
w h a t s u c h relationships m e a n for t h e c o n d i t i o n of s o c i e t y at large is for h i m a
separate question. In contrast, the solar advocate's belief that solar t e c h n o l o g i e s
are c o m p a t i b l e w i t h d e m o c r a c y pertains to the w a y t h e y c o m p l e m e n t aspects of
society removed from the organization of those technologies as such.
T h e r e are, t h e n , several different directions that a r g u m e n t s of this kind can
follow. A r e the social conditions predicated said to be required by, or strongly

26
 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 131

compatible with, the workings of a given technical system? Are those conditions
internal to that s y s t e m or external to it (or both)? A l t h o u g h w r i t i n g s that a d d r e s s
s u c h q u e s t i o n s are often unclear a b o u t w h a t is b e i n g asserted, a r g u m e n t s in this
general category do have an important presence in m o d e r n political discourse.
T h e y e n t e r into m a n y a t t e m p t s t o e x p l a i n h o w c h a n g e s i n social life take p l a c e
in the w a k e of technological innovation. M o r e i m p o r t a n t l y , t h e y are often u s e d
to buttress attempts to justify or criticize proposed courses of action involving
n e w t e c h n o l o g y . B y offering d i s t i n c t l y political r e a s o n s for o r against the a d o p -
; tion of a particular t e c h n o l o g y , a r g u m e n t s of this kind stand apart from m o r e
c o m m o n l y e m p l o y e d , m o r e easily quantifiable claims about e c o n o m i c costs and
benefits, e n v i r o n m e n t a l i m p a c t s , a n d p o s s i b l e risks to p u b l i c h e a l t h and safety
that technical s y s t e m s m a y involve. T h e issue here d o e s not c o n c e r n h o w m a n y
jobs will b e created, h o w m u c h i n c o m e generated, h o w m a n y pollutants a d d e d ,
or h o w m a n y cancers p r o d u c e d . Rather, the issue has to do w i t h w a y s in w h i c h
choices a b o u t t e c h n o l o g y h a v e i m p o r t a n t c o n s e q u e n c e s for t h e f o r m and quality
of h u m a n associations.
If we e x a m i n e social patterns that comprise the e n v i r o n m e n t s of technical
systems, we find certain devices and systems almost invariably linked to specific
w a y s o f o r g a n i z i n g p o w e r a n d a u t h o r i t y . T h e i m p o r t a n t q u e s t i o n is: D o e s t h i s
s t a t e o f affairs d e r i v e f r o m a n u n a v o i d a b l e s o c i a l r e s p o n s e t o i n t r a c t a b l e p r o p e r -
ties in the t h i n g s t h e m s e l v e s , or is it i n s t e a d a p a t t e r n i m p o s e d i n d e p e n d e n t l y by
a g o v e r n i n g b o d y , ruling class, or s o m e other social or cultural institution to
further its o w n p u r p o s e s ?
T a k i n g the m o s t o b v i o u s e x a m p l e , the a t o m b o m b is an inherently political
artifact. As l o n g as it e x i s t s at all, its lethal p r o p e r t i e s d e m a n d that it be c o n -
t r o l l e d b y a c e n t r a l i z e d , r i g i d l y h i e r a r c h i c a l c h a i n o f c o m m a n d c l o s e d t o all
i n f l u e n c e s t h a t m i g h t m a k e its w o r k i n g s u n p r e d i c t a b l e . T h e i n t e r n a l s o c i a l s y s -
t e m of the b o m b m u s t be authoritarian; there is no other w a y . T h e state of
affairs s t a n d s a s a p r a c t i c a l n e c e s s i t y i n d e p e n d e n t o f a n y l a r g e r p o l i t i c a l s y s t e m
in w h i c h the b o m b is e m b e d d e d , independent of the kind of regime or character
o f its r u l e r s . I n d e e d , d e m o c r a t i c s t a t e s m u s t t r y t o f i n d w a y s t o e n s u r e t h a t t h e
social structures a n d m e n t a l i t y that characterize the m a n a g e m e n t o f n u c l e a r
w e a p o n s do not "spin off' or "spill over" into the polity as a w h o l e .
T h e b o m b is, of c o u r s e , a special case. T h e reasons v e r y rigid relationships
o f a u t h o r i t y are n e c e s s a r y i n its i m m e d i a t e p r e s e n c e s h o u l d b e clear t o a n y o n e .
If, h o w e v e r , w e l o o k f o r o t h e r i n s t a n c e s i n w h i c h p a r t i c u l a r v a r i e t i e s o f t e c h -
n o l o g y a r e widely perceived t o n e e d t h e m a i n t e n a n c e o f a s p e c i a l p a t t e r n o f p o w e r

r
and authority, m o d e r n technical history contains a w e a l t h of e x a m p l e s .
A l f r e d D . C h a n d l e r i n The Visible Hand, a m o n u m e n t a l s t u d y o f m o d e r n
business enterprise, presents impressive documentation to defend the hypothe-
sis t h a t t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n a n d d a y - t o - d a y o p e r a t i o n o f m a n y s y s t e m s o f p r o d u c -
tion, transportation, and c o m m u n i c a t i o n in the n i n e t e e n t h and t w e n t i e t h
centuries require the d e v e l o p m e n t of a particular social f o r m — a large-scale c e n -
•. tralized, hierarchical organization a d m i n i s t e r e d by h i g h l y skilled m a n a g e r s .
Typical of Chandler's reasoning is his analysis of the g r o w t h of the railroads.

T e c h n o l o g y m a d e p o s s i b l e fast, a l l - w e a t h e r transportation; b u t safe, regular, re-

liable m o v e m e n t o f g o o d s and p a s s e n g e r s , a s w e l l a s t h e c o n t i n u i n g m a i n t e n a n c e
and repair of l o c o m o t i v e s , r o l l i n g stock, and track, r o a d b e d , stations,- r o u n d -

27
 132 LANGDON WINNER

h o u s e s , and o t h e r e q u i p m e n t , r e q u i r e d t h e creation of a sizable a d m i n i s t r a t i v e

organization. It m e a n t t h e e m p l o y m e n t of a set of m a n a g e r s to s u p e r v i s e t h e s e
functional activities o v e r an e x t e n s i v e g e o g r a p h i c a l area; and t h e a p p o i n t m e n t of an
a d m i n i s t r a t i v e c o m m a n d o f m i d d l e and t o p e x e c u t i v e s t o m o n i t o r , evaluate, and
c o o r d i n a t e t h e w o r k o f m a n a g e r s r e s p o n s i b l e for the d a y - t o - d a y o p e r a t i o n s .

T h r o u g h o u t his book Chandler points to w a y s in w h i c h technologies used in the

production and distribution of electricity, chemicals, and a w i d e range of indus-
trial g o o d s " d e m a n d e d " o r " r e q u i r e d " t h i s f o r m o f h u m a n a s s o c i a t i o n . " H e n c e ,
t h e o p e r a t i o n a l r e q u i r e m e n t s o f r a i l r o a d s d e m a n d e d t h e c r e a t i o n o f t h e first
2 5
administrative hierarchies in A m e r i c a n business."
Were there other conceivable w a y s of organizing these aggregates of people
and apparatus? C h a n d l e r s h o w s that a previously d o m i n a n t social f o r m , t h e
small traditional f a m i l y firm, s i m p l y c o u l d not h a n d l e t h e task in m o s t cases.
A l t h o u g h he d o e s n o t speculate further, it is clear that he believes there is, to be
realistic, v e r y little latitude in t h e f o r m s of p o w e r and a u t h o r i t y appropriate
within modern sociotechnical systems. T h e properties of m a n y modern tech-
n o l o g i e s — o i l p i p e l i n e s a n d refineries, for e x a m p l e — a r e s u c h that o v e r -
w h e l m i n g l y i m p r e s s i v e e c o n o m i e s o f scale a n d s p e e d are p o s s i b l e . I f s u c h
s y s t e m s are t o w o r k e f f e c t i v e l y , efficiently, q u i c k l y , a n d s a f e l y , c e r t a i n r e q u i r e -
m e n t s of internal social o r g a n i z a t i o n h a v e to be fulfilled; the material p o s s i -
bilities that m o d e r n t e c h n o l o g i e s m a k e available c o u l d not be e x p l o i t e d
otherwise. Chandler acknowledges that as one compares sociotechnical institu-
tions of different nations, one sees " w a y s in w h i c h cultural attitudes, values,
2 6
ideologies, political s y s t e m s , a n d social structure affect these i m p e r a t i v e s . "
B u t t h e w e i g h t o f a r g u m e n t a n d e m p i r i c a l e v i d e n c e i n The Visible Hand s u g g e s t s
that any significant departure f r o m the basic pattern w o u l d be, at best, highly
unlikely.
It m a y be that o t h e r c o n c e i v a b l e arrangements of p o w e r and authority, for
example, those of decentralized, democratic worker self-management, could
p r o v e capable of a d m i n i s t e r i n g factories, refineries, c o m m u n i c a t i o n s s y s t e m s ,
and railroads as well as or better t h a n the organizations C h a n d l e r describes.
Evidence from automobile assembly teams in Sweden and worker-managed
plants in Yugoslavia and other countries is often presented to salvage these pos-
sibilities. I shall n o t be able to settle controversies o v e r this matter here, b u t
r
merely point to w h a t I consider to be their bone of contention. T h e available
e v i d e n c e t e n d s t o s h o w that m a n y large, sophisticated t e c h n o l o g i c a l s y s t e m s are
i n fact h i g h l y c o m p a t i b l e w i t h c e n t r a l i z e d , hierarchical m a n a g e r i a l control. T h e
interesting question, h o w e v e r , has to do with w h e t h e r or not this pattern is in
any sense a r e q u i r e m e n t of s u c h s y s t e m s , a question that is not solely an empiri-
cal o n e . T h e m a t t e r u l t i m a t e l y r e s t s o n o u r j u d g m e n t s a b o u t w h a t s t e p s , i f a n y ,
are practically n e c e s s a r y i n t h e w o r k i n g s o f particular k i n d s o f t e c h n o l o g y a n d
what, if anything, such measures require of the structure of h u m a n associations.
W a s Plato right in s a y i n g that a ship at sea needs steering by a decisive hand and
that this c o u l d o n l y be a c c o m p l i s h e d by a single captain and an o b e d i e n t c r e w ?
Is Chandler correct in saying that the properties of large-scale systems require
centralized, hierarchical managerial control?
T o a n s w e r s u c h questions, w e w o u l d have t o e x a m i n e i n s o m e detail the
moral claims of practical necessity (including those advocated in the doctrines of

28
 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 133
e c o n o m i c s ) and w e i g h t h e m against moral claims of o t h e r sorts, for e x a m p l e , t h e
n o t i o n t h a t it is g o o d for sailors to participate in t h e c o m m a n d of a s h i p or that
workers have a right to be involved in m a k i n g and administering decisions in a
factory. It is characteristic of societies based on large, c o m p l e x technological
s y s t e m s , h o w e v e r , that moral reasons other than those of practical necessity
appear increasingly obsolete, "idealistic," and irrelevant. W h a t e v e r claims o n e
m a y w i s h to make on behalf of liberty, justice, or equality can be i m m e d i a t e l y
n e u t r a l i z e d w h e n c o n f r o n t e d w i t h a r g u m e n t s t o the effect: " F i n e , b u t that's n o
w a y to r u n a railroad" (or steel mill, or airline, or c o m m u n i c a t i o n s s y s t e m , a n d
so on). H e r e we e n c o u n t e r an important quality in m o d e r n political discourse
a n d i n t h e w a y p e o p l e c o m m o n l y t h i n k a b o u t w h a t m e a s u r e s are justified i n
response to the possibilities technologies m a k e available. In m a n y instances, to
s a y that s o m e t e c h n o l o g i e s are i n h e r e n t l y political is to say that certain w i d e l y
accepted reasons of practical necessity—especially the need to maintain crucial
technological systems as smoothly working entities—have tended to eclipse
other sorts of moral and political reasoning.
O n e attempt to salvage the a u t o n o m y of politics f r o m the bind of practical
necessity involves the notion that conditions of h u m a n association found in the
internal w o r k i n g s of technological s y s t e m s can easily be kept separate from the
polity as a w h o l e . A m e r i c a n s have long rested content in the belief that arrange-
m e n t s of p o w e r and authority inside industrial corporations, public utilities,
a n d t h e like h a v e little b e a r i n g o n p u b l i c i n s t i t u t i o n s , p r a c t i c e s , a n d i d e a s a t
large. T h a t " d e m o c r a c y stops at t h e factory gates" w a s taken as a fact of life t h a t
had nothing to do w i t h the practice of political freedom. B u t can the internal
politics of t e c h n o l o g y and the politics of the w h o l e c o m m u n i t y be so easily
separated? A recent study of A m e r i c a n business leaders, contemporary ex-
emplars of Chandler's "visible hand of m a n a g e m e n t , " found t h e m remarkably
impatient w i t h s u c h democratic scruples as "one m a n , one vote." If d e m o c r a c y
d o e s n ' t w o r k f o r t h e f i r m , t h e m o s t c r i t i c a l i n s t i t u t i o n i n all o f s o c i e t y , A m e r i c a n
executives ask, h o w w e l l c a n it be e x p e c t e d to w o r k for the g o v e r n m e n t of a
nation—particularly w h e n that g o v e r n m e n t attempts to interfere with the
a c h i e v e m e n t s of t h e firm? T h e authors of the report observe that patterns of
a u t h o r i t y t h a t w o r k e f f e c t i v e l y i n t h e c o r p o r a t i o n b e c o m e for b u s i n e s s m e n " t h e
desirable m o d e l against w h i c h to c o m p a r e political and e c o n o m i c re'ationships
2 7
i n t h e rest o f s o c i e t y . " W h i l e s u c h f i n d i n g s are far f r o m c o n c l u s i v e , t h e y d o
reflect a s e n t i m e n t i n c r e a s i n g l y c o m m o n in t h e land: w h a t d i l e m m a s like t h e
e n e r g y crisis require is not a redistribution of w e a l t h or broader public partici-
pation but, rather, stronger, centralized p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t — P r e s i d e n t Carter's
p r o p o s a l for an E n e r g y M o b i l i z a t i o n B o a r d a n d t h e like.
An especially vivid case in w h i c h the operational requirements of a technical
s y s t e m m i g h t i n f l u e n c e t h e q u a l i t y o f p u b l i c life i s n o w a t issue i n d e b a t e s a b o u t
the risks o f n u c l e a r p o w e r . A s t h e s u p p l y o f u r a n i u m for nuclear reactors r u n s
out, a p r o p o s e d alternative fuel is t h e p l u t o n i u m generated as a b y - p r o d u c t in
r e a c t o r c o r e s . W e l l - k n o w n o b j e c t i o n s t o p l u t o n i u m r e c y c l i n g f o c u s o n its u n a c -
c e p t a b l e e c o n o m i c c o s t s , its risks o f e n v i r o n m e n t a l c o n t a m i n a t i o n , a n d its d a n -
gers in regard to the international proliferation of nuclear w e a p o n s . B e y o n d
these concerns, h o w e v e r , stands another less w i d e l y appreciated set of haz-
a r d s — t h o s e that i n v o l v e the sacrifice o f civil liberties. T h e w i d e s p r e a d use o f

29
 134 LANGDON WINNER

p l u t o n i u m as a fuel increases t h e c h a n c e that this toxic s u b s t a n c e m i g h t be sto-

len by terrorists, organized crime, or other persons. T h i s raises the prospect,
a n d n o t a trivial o n e , that e x t r a o r d i n a r y m e a s u r e s w o u l d h a v e to be t a k e n to
safeguard p l u t o n i u m from theft and to recover it if ever the substance w e r e
stolen. Workers in the nuclear industry as well as ordinary citizens outside
could well become subject to background security checks, covert surveillance,
wiretapping, informers, and e v e n e m e r g e n c y measures u n d e r martial law—all
justified by the n e e d to safeguard p l u t o n i u m .
Russell W. Ayres's study of the legal ramifications of p l u t o n i u m recycling
concludes: "With the passage of time and the increase in the quantity of pluto-
n i u m in existence will c o m e pressure to eliminate the traditional checks the
courts and legislatures place on the activities of the executive and to develop a
powerful central authority better able to enforce strict safeguards." He avers
that " o n c e a q u a n t i t y of p l u t o n i u m h a d b e e n stolen, t h e c a s e for literally t u r n i n g
3 1
the country upside d o w n to get it back w o u l d be o v e r w h e l m i n g . " Ayres antic-
ipates and worries about the kinds of thinking that, I have argued, characterize
i n h e r e n t l y p o l i t i c a l t e c h n o l o g i e s . I t i s still t r u e t h a t , i n a w o r l d i n w h i c h h u m a n
b e i n g s m a k e a n d m a i n t a i n artificial s y s t e m s , n o t h i n g i s " r e q u i r e d " i n a n a b s o l u t e
sense. N e v e r t h e l e s s , o n c e a c o u r s e of action is u n d e r w a y , o n c e artifacts like
nuclear p o w e r plants have b e e n built and put in operation, the kinds of reason-
i n g that justify t h e a d a p t a t i o n of social life to technical r e q u i r e m e n t s p o p up as
[ spontaneously as flowers in the spring. In Ayres's w o r d s , " O n c e recycling be-
) g i n s a n d the risks of p l u t o n i u m theft b e c o m e real rather t h a n h y p o t h e t i c a l , t h e
Y c a s e for g o v e r n m e n t a l i n f r i n g e m e n t of p r o t e c t e d rights w i l l s e e m c o m p e l l i n g . " 2 8

After a certain point, those w h o cannot accept the hard requirements and i m -
peratives will be dismissed as dreamers and fools.

* * *

T h e t w o varieties of interpretation I h a v e outlined indicate h o w artifacts can

h a v e p o l i t i c a l q u a l i t i e s . I n t h e first i n s t a n c e w e n o t i c e d w a y s i n w h i c h s p e c i f i c
/ features in the d e s i g n or a r r a n g e m e n t of a device or s y s t e m c o u l d p r o v i d e a
convenient means of establishing patterns of p o w e r and authority in a given
) setting. T e c h n o l o g i e s of this kind have a range of flexibility in the d i m e n s i o n s of
- their material form. It is precisely b e c a u s e t h e y are flexible that their c o n -
s e q u e n c e s for s o c i e t y m u s t be u n d e r s t o o d w i t h reference to the social actors able
t o i n f l u e n c e w h i c h d e s i g n s a n d a r r a n g e m e n t s are c h o s e n . I n t h e s e c o n d i n s t a n c e
we examined w a y s in w h i c h the intractable properties of certain kinds of tech-
n o l o g y are s t r o n g l y , p e r h a p s u n a v o i d a b l y , linked to particular institutionalized
patterns o f p o w e r a n d a u t h o r i t y . H e r e , t h e initial c h o i c e a b o u t w h e t h e r o r n o t
t o a d o p t s o m e t h i n g i s d e c i s i v e i n r e g a r d t o its c o n s e q u e n c e s . T h e r e a r e n o a l t e r -
n a t i v e p h y s i c a l d e s i g n s o r a r r a n g e m e n t s t h a t w o u l d m a k e a s i g n i f i c a n t dif-
ference; there are, f u r t h e r m o r e , no g e n u i n e possibilities for creative i n t e r v e n t i o n
by different social s y s t e m s — c a p i t a l i s t or socialist—-that c o u l d c h a n g e the intrac-
tability o f t h e e n t i t y o r s i g n i f i c a n t l y alter t h e q u a l i t y o f its political effects.
To k n o w w h i c h variety of interpretation is applicable in a given case is often
w h a t is at stake in disputes, s o m e of t h e m passionate ones, a b o u t the m e a n i n g of
t e c h n o l o g y for h o w we live. I h a v e a r g u e d a " b o t h / a n d " p o s i t i o n here, for it

30
 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 135

s e e m s t o m e that b o t h k i n d s o f u n d e r s t a n d i n g are applicable i n different c i r c u m -

stances. I n d e e d , it can h a p p e n that w i t h i n a particular c o m p l e x of t e c h n o l o g y —
a s y s t e m o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n o r t r a n s p o r t a t i o n , for e x a m p l e — s o m e a s p e c t s m a y
b e flexible i n their possibilities for s o c i e t y , w h i l e o t h e r a s p e c t s m a y b e (for
better or worse) c o m p l e t e l y intractable. T h e t w o varieties of interpretation I
have e x a m i n e d here can overlap and intersect at m a n y points.
T h e s e are, of course, issues on w h i c h people can disagree. T h u s , s o m e
p r o p o n e n t s o f e n e r g y f r o m r e n e w a b l e r e s o u r c e s n o w b e l i e v e t h e y h a v e a t last
d i s c o v e r e d a set of intrinsically democratic, egalitarian, c o m m u n i t a r i a n tech-
nologies. In my best estimation, h o w e v e r , the social c o n s e q u e n c e s of build-
ing renewable e n e r g y s y s t e m s will surely d e p e n d on the specific configurations
of b o t h h a r d w a r e a n d t h e social institutions created to bring that e n e r g y to us. It
m a y b e t h a t w e w i l l find w a y s t o t u r n t h i s silk p u r s e i n t o a s o w ' s ear. B y c o m -
parison, advocates of the further d e v e l o p m e n t of nuclear p o w e r s e e m to believe
t h a t t h e y a r e w o r k i n g o n a r a t h e r f l e x i b l e t e c h n o l o g y w h o s e a d v e r s e s o c i a l ef-
fects can be fixed by changing the design parameters of reactors and nuclear
waste disposal systems. For reasons indicated above, I believe t h e m to be dead
w r o n g in that faith. Y e s , we m a y be able to m a n a g e s o m e of the "risks" to public
health and safety that nuclear p o w e r brings. But as society adapts to the more
dangerous and apparently indelible features of nuclear p o w e r , w h a t will be the
long-range toll i n h u m a n f r e e d o m ?
My belief that we ought to attend m o r e closely to technical objects t h e m -
s e l v e s i s n o t t o s a y t h a t . w e c a n i g n o r e t h e c o n t e x t s i n w h i c h t h o s e o b j e c t s are
situated. A ship at sea m a y w e l l require, as Plato and Engels insisted, a single
captain and o b e d i e n t crew. B u t a ship out of service, parked at the dock, needs
o n l y a caretaker. To u n d e r s t a n d w h i c h technologies and w h i c h c o n t e x t s are
important to us, and w h y , is an enterprise that m u s t involve both the s t u d y of
specific technical s y s t e m s and their history as well as a thorough grasp of the
c o n c e p t s a n d c o n t r o v e r s i e s o f p o l i t i c a l t h e o r y . I n o u r t i m e s p e o p l e are o f t e n
w i l l i n g t o m a k e drastic c h a n g e s i n the w a y t h e y live t o accord w i t h technological
i n n o v a t i o n at t h e s a m e t i m e t h e y w o u l d resist similar kinds of c h a n g e s justified
on political g r o u n d s . If for no o t h e r r e a s o n t h a n that, it is i m p o r t a n t for us to
a c h i e v e a c l e a r e r v i e w o f t h e s e m a t t e r s t h a n h a s b e e n o u r h a b i t s o far.

REFERENCES
'I would like to thank Merritt Roe Smith, Leo Marx, James Miller, David Noble, Charles
Weiner, Sherry Turkle, Loren Graham, Gail Stuart, Dick Sclove, and Stephen Graubard for their
comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this essay. My thanks also to Doris Morrison of the
Agriculture Library of the University of California, Berkeley, for her bibliographical help.
2
Lewis Mumford, "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics," Technology and Culture, 5 (1964):
1-8.
3
Denis Hayes, Rays of Hops: The Transition to a Post-Petrokum World (New York: W. W. Norton,
1977), pp. 71, 159.
4
David Lilienthal, T. V.A.: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), pp.
72-83.
5
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 7.
6
Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Tecbnics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: M . I . T . Press, 1977).
7
T h e meaning of "technology" I employ in this essay does not encompass some of the broader
definitions of that concept found in contemporary literature, for example, the notion of "technique"

31
136 LANGDON WINNER

in the writings of Jacques Ellul. My purposes here are more limited. For a discussion of the diffi-
culties that arise in attempts to define "technology," see Ref. 6, pp. 8-12.
8
Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Random
House, 1974), pp. 318, 481, 514, 546, 951-958.
Vbtd., p. 952.
1
"Robert Ozanne, A Century of Labor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvest-
er (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 20.
" T h e early history of the tomato harvester is told in Wayne D. Rasmussen, "Advances in
American Agriculture: T h e Mechanical Tomato Harvester as a Case Study," Technology and Culture,
9 (1968): 531-543.
12
A n d r e w Schmitz and David Seckler, "Mechanized Agriculture and Social Welfare; T h e Case
of the Tomato Harvester," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 52 (1970): 569-577.
n
W i l l i a m H. Friedland and Amy Barton, "Tomato Technology," Society, 13:6 (September/Oc-
tober 1976). See also William H. Friedland, Social Sleepwalkers: Scientific and Technological Research in
California Agriculture, University of California, Davis, Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences,
Research Monograph N o . 13, 1974.
"University of California Clip Sheet, 54:36, May 1, 1979.
ls
Friedland and Barton, "Tomato Technology."
l 6
A history and critical analysis of agricultural research in the land-grant colleges is given in
James Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978).
"David Noble, "Social Choice in Machine Design: T h e Case of Automatically Controlled Ma-
chine Tools," in Case Studies in the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming).
I8
Friedrich Engels, "On Authority" in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., Robert Tucker (ed.)
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 731.
"Ibid.
20
Ibid., pp. 732, 731.
21
K a r l Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 3rd ed., Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (trans.) (New York:
T h e Modern Library, 1906), p. 530.
22
J e r r y Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow,
1978), p. 44.
23
S e e , for example, Robert Argue, Barbara Emanuel, and Stephen Graham, The Sun Builders: A
People's Guide to Solar, Wind and Wood Energy in Canada (Toronto: Renewable Energy in Canada,
1978). "We think decentralization is an implicit component of renewable energy; this implies the
decentralization of energy systems, communities and of power. Renewable energy doesn't require
mammoth generation sources of disruptive transmission corridors. Our cities and towns, which
have been dependent on centralized energy supplies, may be able to achieve some degree of auton-
omy, thereby controlling and administering their own energy needs" (p. 16).
24
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 244.
2i
Ibid.
2
Hbid., p. 500.
"Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), p. 191.
28
Russel W. Ayres, "Policing Plutonium: T h e Civil Liberties Fallout," Harvard CivilRigbts-Civil
Liberties Law Review, 10 (1975):443, 413-4, 374.

32
 I
' I I I

Ecological Imperialism:
The Overseas Migration of
Western Europeans as a
Biological Phenomenon
Alfred W. Crosby

Industrial man may in many respects be considere4 an aggres-

sive and successful weed strangling other species and even the
weaker members of its own.
Stafford Lightman, "The Responsibilities of Intervention in
Isolated Societies," Health and Disease in Tribal Societies

CO
EUROPEANS IN NORTH AMERICA, especially those with an interest in
CO gardening and botany, are often stricken with fits of homesickness at the
sight of certain plants which, like themselves, have somehow strayed
thousands of miles eastward across the Atlantic. Vladimir Nabokov, the
Russian exile, had such an experience on the mountain slopes of Oregon:

Do you recognize that clover?

Dandelions, I'or du pauvre?
(Europe, nonetheless, is over.)

A century earlier the success of European weeds in America inspired Charles

Darwin to goad the American botanist Asa Gray: "Does it not hurt your
Yankee pride that we thrash you so confoundly? I am sure Mrs. Gray will
sack up for your own weeds. Ask her whether they are not more honest,
1
downright good sort of weeds."
The common dandelion, I'or du pauvre, despite its ubiquity and its bright
yellow flower, is not at all the most visible of the Old World immigrants in
North America. Vladimir Nabokov was a prime example of the most visible
kind: the Homo sapiens of European origin. Europeans and their descen-
i Page Stegner, ed., The Portable Nabokov (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 5 1 7 ; Francis
Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London: Murray, 1887), vol. 2., p. 3 9 1 .

103
 Alfred W. Crosby
dants, who comprise the majority of human beings in North America and in
a number of other lands outside of Europe, are the most spectacularly
successful overseas migrants of all time. How strange it is to fjnd English-
men, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards comfortably ensconced
in places with names like Wollongong (Australia), Rotoriia (New Zealand),
and Saskatoon (Canada), where obviously other peoples should dominate,
as they must have at one time.
None of the major genetic groupings of humankind is as oddly distributed
about the world as European, especially western European, whites. Almost
all the peoples we call Mongoloids live in the single contiguous land mass of
Asia. Black Africans are divided between three continents - their homeland
and North and South America - but most of them are concentrated in their
original latitudes, the tropics, facing each other across one ocean. European
whites were all recently concentrated in Europe, but in the last few centuries
have burst out, as energetically as if from a burning building, and have
created vast settlements of their kind in the South Temperate Zone and
North Temperate Zone (excepting Asia, a continent already thoroughly and
irreversibly tenanted). In Canada and the United States together they
amount to nearly 90 percent of the population; in Argentina and Uruguay
together to over 95 percent; in Australia to 98 percent; and in New Zealand
to 90 percent. The only nations in the Temperate Zones outside of Asia
which do not have enormous majorities of European whites are Chile, with
a population of two-thirds mixed Spanish and Indian stock, and South
Africa,-where blacks outnumber whites six to one. How odd that these two,
so many thousands of miles from Europe, should be exceptions in not being
predominantly pure European.*
Europeans have conquered Canada, the United States, Argentina, Uru-
guay, Australia, and New Zealand not just militarily and economically and
technologically - as they did India, Nigeria, Mexico, Peru, and other
tropical lands, whose native people have long since expelled or interbred
with and even absorbed the invaders. In the Temperate Zone lands listed
above Europeans conquered and triumphed demographically. These, for the
sake of convenience, we will call the Lands of the Demographic Takeover.
There is a long tradition of emphasizing the contrasts between Europeans
and Americans - a tradition honored by such names as Henry James and
Frederick Jackson Turner - but the vital question is really why-Americans
are so European. And why the Argentinians, the Uruguayans, the Austra-
lians, and the New Zealanders are so European in the obvious genetic sense.
The reasons for the relative failure of the European demographic takeover
in the tropics are clear. In tropical Africa, until recently, Europeans died in
2 The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1978 (New York: Newspaper Enterprise Associa-
tion, 1978), passim.
104
1
.1 I ! (
Ecological Imperialism
droves of the fevers; in tropical America they died almost as fast of the same
diseases, plus a few native American additions. Furthermore, in neither
region did European agricultural techniques, crops, and animals prosper.
Europeans did try to found colonies for settlement, rather than merely
exploitation, but they failed or achieved only partial success in the hot lands.
The Scots left their bones as monument to their short-lived colony at Darien
at the turn of the eighteenth century. The English Puritans who skipped
Massachusetts Bay Colony to go to Providence Island in the Caribbean Sea
did not even achieve a permanent settlement, much less a Commonwealth of
God. The Portuguese who went to northeastern Brazil created viable set-
tlements, but only by perching themselves on top of first a population of
native Indian laborers and then, when these faded away, a population of
laborers imported from Africa. They did achieve a demographic takeover,
but only by interbreeding with their servants. The Portuguese in Angola, who
^helped supply those servants, never had a breath of a chance to achieve a
;
demographic takeover.' There was much to repel and little to attract the mass
,- of Europeans to the tropics, and so they stayed home or went to the lands
where life was healthier, labor more rewarding, and where white immigrants,
by their very number, encouraged more immigration.
\ In the cooler lands, the colonies of the Demographic Takeover, Europeans
) achieved very rapid population growth by means of immigration, by
( increased life span, and by maintaining very high birthrates. Rarely has
population expanded more rapidly than it did in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in these lands. It is these lands, especially the United
States, that enabled Europeans and their overseas offspring to expand from
something like 18 percent of the human species in 1 6 5 0 to well over 30
percent in 1 9 0 0 . Today 670 million Europeans live in Europe, and 2 5 0
million or so other Europeans - genetically as European as any left behind
in the Old World - live in the Lands of the Demographic Takeover, an ocean
or so from home.i What the Europeans have done with unprecedented
3 Philip D. Curtin, "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade," Political Science Quarterly 83 (June
1968), 1 9 0 - 1 1 6 passim; John Prebble, The Darien Disaster (New York: Holt, Rinehart 8c
Winston, 1968), pp. 296, 300; Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American
History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934), vol. 1, n. 497; Gilberto Freyre,
The Masters and the Slaves, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1946), passim;
Donald L. Wiedner, A History of Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Vintage Books,
1964), 49-5'J Stuart B. Schwartz, "Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European
Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil," American Historical Review 83
(February 1978): 4 3 - 7 9 passim.
4 Marcel R. Reinhard, Histoire de la population modiale de 1700 a 1948 (n.p.: Editions
Domat-Montchrestien, n.d.), pp. 3 3 9 - 4 1 1 , 4 2 8 - 3 1 ; G. F. McCleary, Peopling the British
Commonwealth (London: Farber and Farber, n.d.), pp. 83, 94, 1 0 9 - 1 0 ; R. R. Palmer and
Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 560; World
Almanac i 8, pp. 34, 439, 497, 5 1 3 , 590.
97
105
 Alfred W. Crosby
success in the past few centuries can accurately be described by a term from
apiculture: They have swarmed.
They swarmed to lands which were populated at the time of European
arrival by peoples as physically capable of rapid increase as the Europeans,
and yet who are now small minorities in their homelands and sometimes no
more than relict populations. These population explosions among colonial
Europeans of the past few centuries coincided with population crashes
among the aborigines. If overseas Europeans have historically been less
fatalistic and grim than their relatives in Europe, it is because they have
viewed the histories of their nations very selectively. When he returned from
his world voyage on the Beagle in the 1 8 3 0 s , Charles Darwin, as a biologist
rather than a historian, wrote, "Wherever the European has trod, death
seems to pursue the aboriginal."'
Any respectable theory which attempts to explain the Europeans' demo-
graphic triumphs has to provide explanations for at least two phenomena.
The first is the decimation and demoralization of the aboriginal populations
of Canada, the United States, Argentina, and others. The obliterating defeat
of these populations was not simply due to European technological
superiority. The Europeans who settled in temperate South Africa seemingly
had the same advantages as those who settled in Virginia and New South
Wales, and yet how different was their fate. The Bantu-speaking peoples,
who now overwhelmingly outnumber the whites in South Africa, were
superior to their American, Australian, and New Zealand counterparts in
that they possessed iron weapons, but how much more inferior to a musket
or a rifle is a stone-pointed spear than an iron-pointed spear? The Bantu
have prospered demographically not because of their numbers at the time of
first contact with whites, which were probably not greater per square mile
than those of the Indians east of the Mississippi River. Rather, the Bantu
have prospered because they survived military conquest, avoided the
conquerors, or became their indispensable servants — and in the long run
because they reproduced faster than the whites. In contrast, why did so few
of the natives of the Lands of the Demographic Takeover survive?
Second, we must explain the stunning, even awesome success of European
agriculture, that is, the European way of manipulating the environment in
the Lands of the Demographic Takeover. The difficult progress of the
European frontier in the Siberian taiga or the Brazilian sertao or the South
African veldt contrasts sharply with its easy, almost fluid advance in North
America. Of course, the pioneers of North America would never have
characterized their progress as easy: Their lives were filled with danger,
deprivation, and unremitting labor; but as a group they always succeeded in
5 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1961), pp. 4 3 3 - 4 .
106
Ecological Imperialism
taming whatever portion of North America they wanted within a few
decades and usually a good deal less time. Many individuals among them
failed — they were driven mad by blizzards and dust storms, lost their crops
to locusts and their flocks to cougars and wolves, or lost their scalps to
understandably inhospitable Indians — but as a group they always suc-
ceeded - and in terms of human generations, very quickly.
In attempting to explain these two phenomena, let us examine four
categories of organisms deeply involved in European expansion: ( 1 ) human
beings; (2.) animals closely associated with human beings — both the
desirable animals like horses and cattle and undesirable varmints like rats
and mice; (3) pathogens or microorganisms that cause disease in humans;
and (4) weeds. Is there a pattern in the histories of these groups which
suggests an overall explanation for the phenomenon of the Demographic
Takeover or which at least suggests fresh paths of inquiry?
Europe has exported something in excess of sixty million people in the
past few hundred years. Great Britain alone exported over twenty million.
The great mass of these white emigrants went to the United States,
Argentina, Canada, Australia, Uruguay, and New Zealand. (Other areas to
absorb comparable quantities of Europeans were Brazil and Russia east of
the Urals. These would qualify as Lands of the Demographic Takeover
except that large fractions of their populations are non-European.)*
In stark contrast, very few aborigines of the Americas, Australia, or New
Zealand ever went to Europe. Those who did often died not long after
arrival.'' The fact that the flow of human migration was almost entirely
from Europe to her colonies and not vice versa is not startling — or very
enlightening. Europeans controlled overseas migration, and Europe needed
to export, not import, labor. But this pattern of one-way migration is
significant in that it reappears in other connections.
The vast expanses of forests, savannas, and steppes in the Lands
of the Demographic Takeover were inundated by animals from the Old
World, chiefly from Europe. Horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs have for
hundreds of years been among the most numerous of the quadrupeds of
these lands, which were completely lacking in these species at the time of
first contact with the Europeans. By 1 6 0 0 enormous feral herds of horses
and cattle surged over the pampas of the Rio de la Plata (today's Argentina
and Uruguay) and over the plains of northern Mexico. By the beginning of
the seventeenth century packs of Old World dogs gone wild were among the
8
predators of these herds.
6 William Woodruff, Impact of Western Man (New York: St. Martin's, 1967), 106-8.
7 Carolyn T. Foreman, Indians Abroad (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943),
passim.
8 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), pp.
107
 Alfred W. Crosby
In the forested country of British North America population explosions
among imported animals were also spectacular, but only by European
standards, not by those of Spanish America. In 1 7 0 0 in Virginia feral hogs,
said one witness, "swarm like vermaine upon the Earth," and young
gentlemen were entertaining themselves by hunting wild horses of the inland
counties. In Carolina the herds of cattle were "incredible, being from one to
two thousand head in one Man's Possession." In the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries die advancing European frontier from New England to
the Gulf of Mexico was preceded into Indian territory by an avant-garde of
semiwild herds of hogs and cattle tended, now and again, by semiwild
herdsmen, white and black.'
The first English settlers landed in Botany Bay, Australia, in January .of
1 7 8 8 with livestock, most of it from the Cape of Good Hope. The pigs and
poultry thrived; the cattle did well enough; the sheep, the future source of
the colony's good fortune, died fast. Within a few months two bulls and four
cows strayed away. By 1 8 0 4 the wild herds they founded numbered from
three to five thousand head and were in possession of much of the best land
between the settlements and the Blue Mountains. If they had ever found their
way through the mountains to the grasslands beyond, the history of Australia
in the first decades of the nineteenth century might have been one dominated
by cattle rather than sheep. As it is, the colonial government wanted the land
the wild bulls so ferociously defended, and considered the growing practice
of convicts running away to live off the herds as a threat to the whole colony;
so the adult cattle were shot and salted down and the calves captured and
tamed. The English settlers imported woolly sheep from Europe and sought
out the interior pastures for them. The animals multiplied rapidly, and when
Darwin made his visit to New South Wales in 1 8 3 6 , there were about a
10
million sheep there for him to see.
The arrival of Old World livestock probably affected New Zealand more
radically than any other of the Lands of the Demographic Takeover. Cattle,
horses, goats, pigs and — in this land of few or no large predators — even the
Footnote 8 (continued)
82-88; Alexander Gillespie, Gleanings and Remarks Collected during Many Months of
Residence at Buenos Aires (Leeds: B. DeWhirst, 1 8 1 8 ) , p. 1 3 6 ; Oscar Schmieder,
"Alteration- of the Argentine Pampa in the Colonial Period," University of California
Publications in Geography 2 (27 September 1927): n. 3 1 1 .
9 Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1947), pp. 1 5 3 , 3 1 2 , 3 1 8 ; John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina
(n. p.: Readex Microprint Corp., 1966), p. 4; Frank L. Owsley, "The Pattern of Migration
and Settlement of the Southern Frontier," Journal of Southern History n (May 1945):
147-75-
10 Commonwealth of Australia, Historical Records of Australia (Sydney: Library Committee
of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1914), ser. 1, vol: 1, p. 550; vol. 7, pp. 379-80; vol. 8,
pp. 150—1; vol. 9, pp. 349, 7 1 4 , 831; vol. 10, pp. 92, 280, 682; vol. 20, p. 839.
108
Ecological Imperialism
usually timid sheep went wild. In New Zealand herds of feral farm animals
were practicing the ways of their remote ancestors as late as the 1 9 4 0 s and
no doubt still run free. Most of the sheep, though, stayed under human
control, and within a decade of Great Britain's annexation of New Zealand
in 1 8 4 0 , her new acquisition was home to a quarter million sheep. In 1 9 7 4
New Zealand had over fiftyfive million sheep, about twenty times more
sheep than people. 11
In the Lands of the Demographic Takeover the European pioneers were
accompanied and often preceded by their domesticated animals, walking
sources of food, leather, fiber, power, and wealth, and these animals often
adapted more rapidly to the new surroundings and reproduced much more
rapidly than their masters. To a certain extent, the success of Europeans as
colonists was automatic as soon as they put their tough, fast, fertile, and
intelligent animals ashore. The latter were sources of capital that sought out
their own sustenance, improvised their own protection against the weather,
fought their own battles against predators and, if their masters were smart
enough to allow calves, colts, and lambs to accumulate, could and often did
show the world the amazing possibilities of compound interest.
The honey bee is the one insect of worldwide importance which human
beings have domesticated, if we may use the word in a broad sense. Many
species of bees and other insects produce honey, but the one which does so
in greatest quantity and which is easiest to control is a native of the
Mediterranean area and the Middle East, the honey bee {Apis mellifera).
The European has probably taken this sweet and short-tempered servant to
every colony he ever established, from Arctic to Antarctic Circle, and the
honey bee has always been one of the first immigrants to set off on its own.
Sometimes the advance of the bee frontier could be very rapid: The first hive
in Tasmania swarmed sixteen times in the summer of 1 8 3 2 . . 11
Thomas Jefferson tells us that the Indians of North America called the
honey bees "English flies," and St. John de Crevecoeur, his contemporary,
wrote that "The Indians look upon them with an evil eye, and consider their
progress into die interior of the continent as an omen of the white man's
approach: thus, as they discover the bees, the news of the event, passing
1
from mouth to mouth, spreads sadness and consternation on all sides." '
n Andrew H. Clark, The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants, and Animals (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949), p. 190; David Wallechinsky, Irving
Wallace, and A. Wallace, The Book of Lists (New York: Bantam, 1978), pp. 1 2 9 - 3 0 .
12 Remy Chauvin, Traite de biologie de I'abeille (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1968), vol. 1, pp.
38-9; James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London:
Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1834), p. 23.
13 Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 1 1 1 ;
Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the
State of New York, trans. Clarissa S. Bostelmann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1964), p. 166.
109
I
 Alfred W. Crosby
Domesticated creatures that traveled from the Lands of the Demographic
Takeover to Europe are few. Australian aborigines and New Zealand
Maoris had a few tame dogs, unimpressive by Old World standards and
unwanted by the whites. Europe happily accepted the American Indians'
turkeys and guinea pigs, but had no need for their dogs, llamas, and alpacas.
Again the explanation is simple: Europeans, who controlled the passage of
large animals across the oceans, had no need to reverse the process.
It is interesting and perhaps significant, though, that the exchange was
just as one-sided for varmints, the small mammals whose migrations
C Europeans often tried to stop. None of the American or Australian or New
/ Zealand equivalents of rats have become established in Europe, but Old
World varmints, especially rats, have colonized right alongside the Europe-
ans in the Temperate Zones. Rats of assorted sizes, some of them almost
surely European immigrants, were tormenting Spanish Americans by at
least the end of the sixteenth century. European rats established a beach-
head in Jamestown, Virginia, as early as 1 6 0 9 , when they almost starved out
the colonists by eating their food stores. In Buenos Aires the increase in rats
kept pace with that of cattle, according to an early nineteenth-century
witness. European rats proved as aggressive as the Europeans in New
Zealand, where they completely replaced the local rats in the North Islands
as early as the 1 8 4 0 s . Those poor creatures are probably completely extinct
today or exist only in tiny relict populations. -* 1
C The European rabbits are not usually thought of as varmints, but where
I there are neither diseases nor predators to hold down their numbers they
" can become the worst of pests. In 1 8 5 9 a few members of the species
Orytolagus cuniculus (the scientific name for the protagonists of all the
Peter Rabbits of literature) were released in southeast Australia. Despite
massive efforts to stop them, they reproduced - true to their reputation -
and spread rapidly all the way across Australia's southern half to the Indian
Ocean. In 1 9 5 0 the rabbit population of Australia was estimated at 5 0 0
million, and they were outcompeting the nation's most important domes-
ticated animals, sheep, for the grasses and herbs. They have been brought
under control, but only by means of artificially fomenting an epidemic of
V_ myxomatosis, a lethal American rabbit disease. The story of rabbits and
1
myxomatosis in New Zealand is similar. s
\ Europe, in return for her varmints, has received muskrats and gray
14 Bernabe Cobo, Obras (Madrid: Atlas Ediciones, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 3 5 0 - 1 ; Edward Arber,
ed., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith (New York: Burt Franklin, n. d.), vol. 2,
p. xcv; K. A. Wodzicki, Introduced Mammals of New Zealand (Wellington: Department of
Scientific and Industrial Research, 1950), pp. 89-91.
15 Frank Fenner and F. N. Ratcliffe, Myxomatosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1965), pp. 9 , 1 1 , 1 7 , 2 2 - 2 . 3 ; Frank Fenner, "The Rabbit Plague," Scientific American 190
(February 1954): 30-5; Wodzicki, Introduced Mammals, pp. 1 0 7 - 1 4 1 .
no
Ecological Imperialism
]_ squirrels and little else from America, and nothing at all of significance from
Australia or New Zealand, and we might well wonder if muskrats and
1
squirrels really qualify as varmints. * As with other classes of organisms, the
exchange has been a one-way street.
) None of Europe's emigrants were as immediately and colossally success-
I ful as its pathogens, the microorganisms that make human beings ill, cripple
I them, and kill them. Whenever and wherever Europeans crossed the oceans
and settled, the pathogens they carried created prodigious epidemics of
smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, and a number of other diseases.
It was this factor, more than any other, that Darwin had in mind as he wrote
of the Europeans' deadly tread.
The pathogens transmitted by the Europeans, unlike the Europeans
themselves or most of their domesticated animals, did at least as well in the
tropics as in the temperate Lands of the Demographic Takeover. Epidemics
devastated Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Hawaii, and Tahiti soon after the Euro-
peans made the first contact with aboriginal populations. Some of these
populations were able to escape demographic defeat because their initial
numbers were so large that a small fraction was still sufficient to maintain
\ occupation of, if not title to, the land, and also because the mass of
Europeans were never attracted to the tropical lands, not even if they were
partially vacated. In the Lands of the Demographic Takeover the aboriginal
populations were too sparse to rebound from the onslaught of disease or
were inundated by European immigrants before they could recover.
The First Strike Force of the white immigrants to the Lands of the
Demographic Takeover were epidemics. A few examples from scores of
possible examples follow. Smallpox first arrived in the Rio de la Plata region
in 1 5 5 8 or 1 5 6 0 and killed, according to one chronicler possibly more
interested in effect than accuracy, "more than a hundred thousand Indians"
of the heavy riverine population there. An epidemic of plague or typhus
decimated the Indians of the New England coast immediately before the
founding of Plymouth. Smallpox or something similar struck the aborigines
of Australia's Botany Bay in 1 7 8 9 , killed half, and rolled on into the
interior. Some unidentified disease or diseases spread through the Maori
tribes of the North Island of New Zealand in the 1 7 9 0 s , killing so many in
a number of villages that the survivors were not able to bury the dead. 7 J
16 Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions (Trowbridge and London: English Language
Book Society, 1 9 7 1 ) , pp. £4-5, z8, 73, 1 1 3 .
17 Juan Lopez de Velasco, Geografia y descripcidn universal de las Indias (Madrid:
Establecimiento Topografico de Fortanet, 1894), P- 55*> Oscar Schmieder, "The Pampa
A Natural and Culturally Induced Grassland?" University of California, Publications in
Geography (27 September 1 9 1 7 ) : 266; Sherburne F. Cook, "The Significance of Disease in
the Extinction of the New England Indians," Human Biology 14 (September 1975):
486-91; J. H. L Cumpston, The History of Smallpox in Australia, 1788-1908 (Mel-
III
 Alfred W. Crosby
After a series of such lethal and rapidly moving epidemics, then came the
slow, unspectacular but thorough cripplers and killers like venereal disease
and tuberculosis. In conjunction with the large numbers of white settlers
these diseases were enough to smother aboriginal chances of recovery. First
the blitzkrieg, then the mopping up.
The greatest of the killers in these lands was probably smallpox. The
exception is New Zealand, the last of these lands to attract permanent
European settlers. They came to New Zealand after the spread of vaccina-
tion in Europe, and so were poor carriers. As of the 1 8 5 0 s smallpox still had
not come ashore, and by that time two-thirds of the Maori had been
18
vaccinated. The tardy arrival of smallpox in these islands may have much
to do with the fact that the Maori today comprise a larger percentage. (9
( percent) of their country's population than that of any other aboriginal
people in any European colony or former European colony in either
' Temperate Zone, save only South Africa.
American Indians bore the full brunt of smallpox, and its mark is on their
history and folklore. The Kiowa of the southern plains of the United States
have a legend in which a Kiowa man meets Smallpox on the plain, riding a
horse. The man asks, "Where do you come from and what do you do and
why are you here?" Smallpox answers, "I am one with the white men - they
are my people as the Kiowas are yours. Sometimes I travel ahead of them
and sometimes behind. But I am always their companion and you will find
me in their camps and their houses." "What can you do," the Kiowa asks.
"I bring death," Smallpox replies. "My breath causes children to wither like
young plants in spring snow. I bring destruction. No matter how beautiful
a woman is, once she has looked at me she becomes as ugly as death. And
to men I bring not death alone, but the destruction of their children and the
blighting of their wives. The strongest of warriors go down before me. No
1
people who have looked on me will ever be the same." ?
In return for the barrage of diseases that Europeans directed overseas,
they received little in return. Australia and New Zealand provided no new
^ strains of pathogens to Europe - or none that attracted attention. And of
\ America's native diseases none had any real influence on the Old World —
( with the likely exception of venereal syphilis, which almost certainly existed
Footnote 17 (continued)
bourne: Albert J. Mullet, Government Printer, 1 9 1 4 ) , pp. 1 4 7 - 9 ; Harrison M. Wright,
New Zealand, 1769-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 62. For
further discussion of this topic, see Crosby, Columbia Exchange, chaps. 1 and 2, and
Henry F. Dobyns, Native American Historical Demography: A Critical Bibliography
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Newberry Library, 1976).
18 Arthur C. Thomson, The Story of New Zealand (London: Murray, 1859), vol. 1, p. 2 1 2 .
19 Alice Marriott and Carol K. Rachlin, American Indian Mythology (New York: New
American Library, 1968), pp. 1 7 4 - 5 .
112.
Ecological Imperialism
in the New World before 1 4 9 2 and probably did not occur in its present
form in the Old World. 20
Weeds are rarely history makers, for they are not as spectacular in their
effects as pathogens. But they, too, influence our lives and migrate over the
world despite human wishes. As such, like varmints and germs, they are
better indicators of certain realities than human beings or domesticated
animals.
The term "weed" in modern botanical usage refers to any type of plant
which - because of especially large numbers of seeds produced per plant, or
especially effective means of distributing those seeds, or especially tough
roots and rhizomes from which new plants can grow, or especially tough
seeds that survive the alimentary canals of animals to be planted with their
droppings - spreads rapidly and outcompetes others on disturbed, bare soil.
Weeds are plants that tempt the botanist to use such anthropomorphic
words as "aggressive" and "opportunistic."
Many of the most successful weeds in the well-watered regions of the
Lands of the Demographic Takeover are of European or Eurasian origin.
French and Dutch and English farmers brought with them to North
America their worst enemies, weeds, "to exhaust the land, hinder and
damnify the Crop." By the last third of the seventeenth century at least
twenty different types were widespread enough in New England to attract
the attention of the English visitor, John Josselyn, who identified couch
grass, dandelion, nettles, mallbwes, knot grass, shepherd's purse, sow
thistle, and clot burr and others. One of the most aggressive was plantain,
which the Indians called "English-Man's Foot." 22
European weeds rolled west with the pioneers, in some cases spreading
almost explosively. As of 1 8 2 3 corn chamomile and maywood had spread
up to but not across the Muskingum River in Ohio. Eight years later they
2
were over the river. 3 The most prodigiously imperialistic of the weeds in
the eastern half of the United States and Canada were probably Kentucky
bluegrass and white clover. They spread so fast after the entrance of
Europeans into a given area that there is some suspicion that they may have
been present in pre-Colombian America, although the earliest European
20 Crosby, Columbian Exchange, pp. 1 2 2 - 6 4 , passim.
21 Jared Eliot, "The Tilling of the Land, 1760," in Agriculture in the United States: A
Documentary History, ed. Wayne D. Rasmussen (New York: Random House, 1975), vol.
1 , p. 1 9 2 .
22 John Josselyn, New Englands Rarities Discovered (London: G. Widdowes at the Green
Dragon in St. Paul's Church-yard, 1672), pp. 85, 86; Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy S.
Berkeley, eds., The Reverend John Clayton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
1965), p. 24.
23 Lewis D. de Schweinitz, "Remarks on the Plants of Europe Which Have Become
Naturalized in a More or Less Degree, in the United States," Annals Lyceum of Natural
History of New York, vol. 3 (i8}z) i8z8-x8}6, 1 5 5 .
113
1
 Alfred W. Crosby
accounts do not mention them. Probably brought to the Appalachian area
by the French, these two kinds of weeds preceded the English settlers there
and kept up with the movement westward until reaching the plains across
the Mississippi. * 2
Old World plants set up business on their own on the Pacific coast of
North America just as soon as the Spaniards and Russians did. The climate
of coastal southern California is much the same as that of the Mediterra-
nean, and the Spaniards who came to California in the eighteenth century
brought their own Mediterranean weeds with them via Mexico: wild oats,
fennel, wild radishes. These plants, plus those brought in later by the
Forty-niners, muscled their way to dominance in the coastal grasslands.
These immigrant weeds followed Old World horses, cattle, and sheep into
1 willful flora.
California's interior prairies and took over there as well. *
The region of Argentina and Uruguay was almost as radically altered in
its flora as in its fauna by the coming of the Europeans. The ancient Indian
practice, taken up immediately by the whites, of burning off the old grass of
the p a m p a every year, as well as the trampling and cropping to the ground
of indigenous grasses and forbs by the thousands of imported quadrupeds
who also changed the nature of the soil with their droppings, opened the
whole countryside to European plants. In the 1 7 8 0 s Felix de Azara observed
that the pampa, already radically altered, was changing as he watched.
European weeds sprang up around every cabin, grew up along roads, and
pressed into the open steppe. Today only a quarter of the plants growing
wild in the pampa are native, and in the well-watered eastern portions, the
"natural" ground cover consists almost entirely of Old World grasses and
1
clovers. *
The invaders were not, of course, always desirable. When Darwin visited
Uruguay in 1 8 3 z, he found large'expanses, perhaps as much as hundreds of
24 Lyman Carrier and Katherine S. Bort, "The History of Kentucky Bluegrass and White
Clover in the United States," Journal of the American Society of Agronomy 8 (1916):
256-66; Robert W. Schery, "The Migration of a Plant: Kentucky Bluegrass Followed
Settlers to die New World," Natural History 74 (December 1965): 4 3 - 4 ; G. W. Dunbar,
ed., "Henry Clay on Kentucky Bluegrass," Agricultural History 51 (July 1977): 522.
25 Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
na
California Press, 1967), pp. 1 2 - 1 5 ; E ' S. Bakker, An Island Called California (Berk-
eley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 1 5 0 - 2 ; R. W. Allard,
"Generic Systems Associated with Colonizing Ability in Predominantly Self-Pollinated
Species," in The Genetics of Colonizing Species, ed. H. G. Baker and G. Ledyard Stebbins
(New York: Academic Press, 1965), p. 50; M. W. Talbot, H. M. Biswell, and A. L.
Hormay, "Fluctuations in the Annual Vegetation of California," Ecology 20 (July 1939):
396-7.
26 Felix de Azara, Descripcidn 6 historia del Paraguay y del Rt'o de la Plata (Madrid: Imprenta
de Sanchez, 1847), vol. I, 5 7 - 8 ; Schmieder, "Alteration of the Argentine Pampa," pp.
310-11.
114
Ecological Imperialism
square miles, monopolized by the immigrant wild artichoke and trans-
1
formed into a prickly wilderness fit neither for man nor his animals. ?
The onslaught of foreign and specifically European plants on Australia
began abrupdy in 1 7 7 8 because the first expedition that sailed from Britain
to Botany Bay carried some livestock and considerable quantities of seed. By
May of 1 8 0 3 over two hundred foreign plants, most of them European, had
been purposely introduced and planted in New South Wales, undoubtedly
2 8
along with a number of weeds. - Even today so-called clean seed charac-
teristically contains some weed seeds, and this was much more so two
hundred years ago. By and large, Australia's north has been too tropical and
her interior too hot and dry for European weeds and grasses, but much of
her southern coasts and Tasmania have been hospitable indeed to Europe's
Thus, many — often a majority — of the most aggressive plants in the
temperate humid regions of North America, South America, Australia, and
New Zealand are of European origin. It may be true that in every broad
expanse of the world today where there are dense populations, with whites
in the majority, there are also dense populations of European weeds.
Thirty-five of eighty-nine weeds listed in 1 9 5 3 as common in the state of
New York are European. Approximately 60 percent of Canada's worst
weeds are introductions from Europe. Most of New Zealand's weeds are
from the same source, as are many, perhaps most, of the weeds of southern
Australia's well-watered coasts. Most of the European plants that Josselyn
listed as naturalized in New England in the seventeenth century are growing
wild today in Argentina and Uruguay, and are among the most widespread
and troublesome of all weeds in those countries. ' 2
In return for this largesse of pestiferous plants, the Lands of the Demo-
graphic Takeover have provided Europe with only a few equivalents. The
Canadian water weed jammed Britain's nineteenth-century waterways, and
North America's horseweed and burnweed have spread in Europe's empty
lots, and South America's flowered galinsoga has thrived in her gardens. But
the migratory flow of a whole group of organisms between Europe and the
Lands of the Demographic Takeover has been almost entirely in one
0
direction.' Englishman's foot still marches in seven league jackboots across
every European colony of settlement, but very few American or Australian
17 Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, pp. 119—20.
28 Historical Records of Australia, set. 1, vol. 4, pp. 2 3 4 - 4 1 .
29 Edward Salisbury, Weeds and Aliens (London: Collins, 1961), p. 87; Angel Julio Cabrera,
Manual de la flora de los alrededores de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Editorial Acme S. A.,
1953), passim.
30 Elton, Ecology of Invasions, p. 1 1 5 ; Hugo Ilitis, "The Story of Wild Garlic," Scientific
Monthly 68 (February 1949): 1 2 2 - 4 .
us
 Alfred W. Crosby Ecological Imperialism

or New Zealand invaders stride the waste lands and unkempt backyards of clover killed off the fern, and the European dog the Maori dog — as the
Europe. Maori rat was destroyed by the Pakeha (European) rat — so our people, also,
1
will be gradually supplanted and exterminated by the Europeans.' The
European and Old World human beings, domesticated animals, future was not quite so grim as he prophesied, but we must admire his grasp
varmints, pathogens, and weeds all accomplished demographic takeovers of of the complexity and magnitude of the threat looming over his people and
their own in the temperate, well-watered regions of North and South Amer- over the ecosystem of winch they were part.
ica, Australia, and New Zealand. They crossed oceans and Europeanized vast 32 James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians (New York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1970),
territories, often in informal cooperation with each other — the farmer and p. 380.
his animals destroying native plant cover, making way for imported grasses
and forbs, many of which proved more nourishing to domesticated animals
than die native equivalents; Old World pathogens, sometimes carried by Old
World varmints, wiping out vast numbers of aborigines, opening the way for
the advance of the European frontier, exposing more and more native peoples
to more and more pathogens. The classic example of symbiosis between
European colonists, their animals, and plants comes from New Zealand. Red
clover, a good forage for sheep, could not seed itself and did not spread
without being annually sown until the Europeans imported the bumblebee.
Then the plant and insect spread widely, the first providing the second with
food, the second carrying pollen from blossom to blossom for the first, and
the sheep eating the clover and compensating the human beings for their
1
effort with mutton and wool.'
There have been few such stories of the success in Europe of organisms
from the Lands of the Demographic Takeover, despite the obvious fact that
for every ship that went from Europe to those lands, another traveled in the
opposite direction.
The demographic triumph of Europeans in the temperate colonies is one
part of a biological and ecological takeover which could not have been
accomplished by human beings alone, gunpowder notwithstanding. We
must at least try to analyze the impact and success of all the immigrant
organisms together - the European portmanteau of often mutually support-
ive plants, animals, and microlife which in its entirety can be accurately
described as aggressive and opportunistic, an ecosystem simplified by ocean
crossings and honed by thousands of years of competition in the unique
environment created by the Old World Neolithic Revolution.
The human invaders and their descendants have consulted their egos,
rather than ecologists, for explanations of their triumphs. But the human
victims, the aborigines of the Lands of the Demographic Takeover, knew
better, knew they were only one of many species being displaced and
replaced; knew they were victims of something more irresistible and
awesome than the spread of capitalism or Christianity. One Maori, at the
nadir of the history of his race, knew these things when he said, "As the

31 Otto E. Plath, Bumblebees and Their Ways (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 1 1 5 .

Il6 117
CHAPTER II

Edison the Hedgehog:

Invention a n d
Development

Q UOTING the Greek poet Archilochus, Isaiah Berlin wrote in The

Hedgehog and the Fox: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing." Hedgehogs, according to Berlin, are those "who
relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent
or articulate." Foxes, in contrast, pursue many ends, ends that are "often
unrelated and even contradictory." Berlin counted Dante, Plato, Lucretius,
Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust among the
1 2
hedgehogs. Thomas Edison's name should be added to the list.
Edison invented systems, including an electric light system that took form
as the Pearl Street generating station and distribution network of the Edison
Electric Illuminating Company of New York, now known as the Consoli-
dated Edison Company. Edison focused on one level of the process of
technological change—invention—but in order to relate everything to a
single, central vision, he had to reach out beyond his special competence
to research, develop, finance, and manage his inventions. Because of this
organizational, system-building drive, he is known as an inventor-entre-
3
preneur.
Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the prob-
lems associated with the growth of systems. The history of Edison system
building, therefore, is also a history of ideas and a study of problem solving.
Edison's concepts grew out of his need to find organizing principles that
were powerful enough to integrate and give purposeful direction to diverse
factors and components. The problems emerged as he strove to fulfill his
ultimate vision.
As an inventor-entrepreneur, Edison presided over the process of tech-
nological change from problem identification to innovation and technology
transfer. Creative fulfillment, however, came to him mosdy from the in-

' Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1953), p. 1.
'' Parts of this chapter are drawn from Thomas P. Hughes, "The Electrification of America:
The System Builders," Technology and Culture 20 (1979): 124-61.
3
For a discussion of the concept of an entrepreneur as one who presides over invention,
development, and innovation, see Thomas P. Hughes, Elmer Sperry, Inventor and Engineer
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 63-70, 241, 290-95.

41
1 9 INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
ventive act, not from the other phases of technological development. He
counted his patents more than his money, at least until his later years, when
he began to look to industrialists like Henry Ford as status models. Edison
flourished as an inventor-entrepreneur in the late 1870s and early eighties,
the period when he was presiding over the invention and introduction of
Jhis .system of electric lighting. His historical peers were other inventor-
entrepreneurs, such men as Robert Fultom_Samuel Morse, and Cyrus Hall
McCormick, who, like himself, did not rest until companies (usually those
they established) were manufacturing their inventions. Edison formed.a
number of companies to organize his invention and the introduction of
the lighting system: a company for research and development, others for
. manufacturing components, and another to preside over the operation of
the system. In each case, he allied himself with men whose interests and
capabilities complemented his own. Persons with legal and financial ex-
perience, for instance, compensated for his lack of experience and special
aptitude for the complexities of organization and financing. Despite their
presence, however, it was Edison, as inventor-entrepreneur, who pulled
most of the strings of the complex system. Later in the history of electric
lighting and power systems, other entrepreneurs—manager-entrepreneurs
and financier-entrepreneurs—took center stage because the most difficult
problems blocking the growth of the system became managerial and fi-
nancial. Inventors and engineers still had roles to play in the history of the
evolving light and power systems, but the inventor-entrepreneurs moved
on to other newly emerging fields of technology.
Ellison's genius lay in his ability to direct a process involving problem
identification, solution as idea, research and development, and introduction
into use. These phases of change need to be defined, but because the
process was, and is, so complex, and because there are so many variations
on the central theme, an encompassing, general definition will suffice here.
In problem identification, an inventor perceives a situation that can be
defined as a problem. The ability to define the situation as a problem implies
that a solution is likely to be found. Experienced inventors recognize that
many situations cannot be defined as problems, because the state of the
technology, availability of funding, or some other factor is not favorable.
Idea response is the inventor's effort—active and passive (subconscious
perhaps)—to formulate concepts that will solve in his imagination his def-
inition of the problem. An imaginary device is functioning in an imaginary
environment. Usually the inventor gathers information as he pursues—or
even awaits—ideas. T h e idea response will become an invention after the
idea has been given form. The inventive concepts of Edison and other
inventors are often, perhaps usually, visual rather than verbal or mathe-
matical. For this reason, the first expression of an idea often appears as a
drawing in a notebook or on a scrap of paper. Subsequently the idea is
given form as a mechanical and electrical device or as a chemical process.
This invention is then brought by research and development to the stage
at which it can be introduced to the market. Research is an information-
gathering exercise and can be done by literature search or by scientific
experimentation. Development, an important part of the innovation proc-
ess, often involves the redefinition of the problem, new ideas, and research
as the invention is tried in environments that are increasingly like the real-

42
 a
20 NETWORKS OF POWER
use environment within which the innovation must function. The invention
is no longer an imaginary device functioning in the inventor's mind. It is
important to add that the innovation process is not straightforward; it
involves backtracking to identify new subproblems, elicit additional ideas,
4
and make new subinventions.
T h e identification of a problem by experienced inventor-entrepreneurs
like Edison usually involved bridging the gap between resources and de-
mand. T h e professional identified a demand, either exisdng or potendal,
and the available resources that might fill it. T h e resources included avail-
able endowments such as existing technology, capital, labor, and land (nat-
ural resources). Having identified the problem of using the resources to
meet the demand, the inventor then created the technology, or the idea
for the technology, that would make the resources usable in filling the
demand. An excellent invention used the available resources efficiently and
economically to respond to the demand precisely. T h e Iess-than-excellent
invention needed to be refined to meet the demand. Not every invendon
was a response to a demand, actual or anticipated, however; many that
were not demand oriented were ingenious utilizadons of available re-
sources, including existing technology. The response to available endow-
ments, especially technological ones, is somedmes identified as "technolog-
ical push" in contrast to "market pull." Edison, like so many professional
5
inventors, acted in response to a combination of the two.
Edison preferred to invent systems rather than components of other
persons' systems. During his long career as a professional inventor-entre-
preneur, he turned to the invendon of systems to such an extent that
preference for systems can be idendfied as a salient characteristic of his
approach. T h e history of several of his major inventions—the quadruplex
telegraph, the telephone, the incandescent electric lighting system, mag-
netic-ore separation, Portland cement, and the storage battery—illustrates
6
the spectrum of his methods. Some of these ventures were successful,

4
These definitions are developed further with illustrative examples in Thomas P. Hughes,
"Inventors: T h e Problems They Choose, the Ideas They Have, and the Inventions They
Make," in Technological Innovation: A Critical Review of Current Knowledge, ed. P. Kelly and M.
Kxanzberg (San Francisco, Calif.: San Francisco Press, 1978), pp. 168-82.
' T h e literature, on the nature of invention is voluminous, and much of it is written by
economic historians, sociologists, and historians of technology. Among the most useful books
are Jacob Schmookler, Invention and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1966); S. C. Gilfillan, The Sociology of Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970);
and the revised edition of Abbott P. Usher, A History of Meclianical Invention (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954). An annotated listing of many articles and books on
innovation (and invention) can be found in S. H. Cutcliffe, J. A. Mistichelli, and C. M. Roysden,
Technology and Values in American Civilization (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 1980).
8
Edison's inventive activities are described in detail in many biographies, the quality of
which varies greatly. T h e most recent are Robert Conot, A Streak of Luck (New York: Seaview
Books, 1979); Ronald W. Clark, Edison: The Man Who Made the Future (New York: Putnam,
1977); and Matthew Josephson, Edison (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). T h e most thorough
on technical matters and adulatory in tone are Frank L. Dyer and Thomas C. Martin, Edison:
His Life and Inventions, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1910); and the 1929 edition of
that work, which was written in collaboration with William H. Meadowcroft and also published
by Harper & Bros. T h e most intimate study of the inventor is the account by Francis Jehl,
Menlo Park Reminiscences, 3 vols. (Dearborn, Mich.: Edison Institute, 1937—41). Wyn Wach-

43
INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
some were not. Edison's method was not always the same; it varied with
time and according to the problem, as one would expect from a profes-
sional. T h e history of his electric lighting system, however, reveals the
7
essential characteristics of his systems approach.
Edison is most widely known for his invention of the incandescent lamp,
but it was only one component in his electric lighting system and was no
more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison J u m b o generator,
the Edison main and feeder, or the parallel-distribution system. Other
inventors with generators and incandescent lamps and comparable inge-
nuity have been forgotten because they did not carry the process further
8
and introduce a system of lighting.
Why did Edison so often choose to work on systems? If the inventor
created only a component, he remained dependent on others to invent or
supply other components. T h e inventor of components could not have the
control over innovation that Edison wanted. An apt example of an inventor
of components, but not systems, is Joseph Swan (1828-1914), the British
inventor of the incandescent lamp. Swan's lamps were incorporated with
components invented by others into a system, but in private conversation
9
Swan acknowledged the superiority of Edison's system. Swan cannot cora-

horst's Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1981) relates
Edison the cultural hero to American values. See also the exhibit catalogue by Bernard Finn
and Robert Friedel, Edison: Lighting a Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution,
1979). For a brief study of Edison, see Thomas P. Hughes, Thomas Edison, Professional Inventor
(London: HMSO, 1976).
'Biographies of Edison usually include discourses on the Edison method. T h e chapter
"Edison's Method in Inventing" in Dyer and Martin's Edison (2: 596-628) is informed and
considered, if not critical. G. P. Lathrop ("Talks with Edison," Harper's New Monthly Magazine
80 [1889-90]: 425-35) rehearses the familiar, but adds occasional helpful items as he tries to
perceive how an inventor invents. M. A. Rosanoff ("Edison in His Laboratory," Harper's
Magazine 165 [1932]: 401—17) provides a scientist's appraisal which is not sentimental. Richard
H. Schallenberg ("The Alkaline Storage Battery: A Case History of the Edison Method,"
Synthesis 1 [1972]: 1-13) generalizes about the Edison method from the case of the alkaline
battery. H. M. Paynter of M.I.T. kindly provided me with a copy of his Thurston Lecture
"Edison in Retrospect: Experimental Physicist and Systems Engineer," which he delivered at
the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' annual meeting in Detroit, Mich, on 13 No-
vember 1973. I have also found helpful a paper on Edison's method which was presented by
his son Theodore to the M.I.T. Club of Northern New Jersey on 24 January 1969. See also
Conot, Streak of Luck, pp. 455-72; and Thomas P. Hughes, "Edison's Method," in Technology
at the Turning Point, ed. William B. Pickett (San Francisco, Calif.: San Francisco Press, 1977),
pp. 5-22.
8
This analysis of Edison's method of inventing systems is taken in part from Hughes,
"Edison's Method," pp. 5—22.
s
S e e G. P. Lowrey to Edison, 23 October 1881, and C. Batchelor to Edison, 4 October
1881, Edison Archives, Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, N.J. (hereafter cited as
EA). T h e question of priority in the invention of the incandescent lamp has troubled many
historians. Among the leading contenders for that priority were Thomas A. Edison and Joseph
Swan (of Newcastle upon Tyne). Unfortunately, some of the controversy has swirled around
a nebulous concept of what actually was invented. In a recent essay, "Swan's Way: Inventive
Style and the Emergence of the Incandescent Lamp," George Wise sensibly focuses on the
invention of the carbon filament and discusses the importance of Edison's systems approach
to the invention. Wise points out that Edison's estimates of the cost of his system were grossly
in error, but contributed conceptually to his invention. I am indebted to Wise for allowing
me to see his pre-publication manuscript, scheduled to appear in IEEE Spectrum in April
1982.

44
NETWORKS OF POWER

p a r e with E d i s o n as an i n v e n t o r - e n t r e p r e n e u r , but his claim to h a v e in-

v e n t e d the practical carbon-filament l a m p is c o m p a r a b l e to Edison's.
A n o t h e r reason for Edison's inclination to invent systems was m o r e sub-
tle: h e s o u g h t t h e s t i m u l a t i o n f o r i n v e n t i v e ideas w h i c h c o m e s f r o m s e e i n g
inadequacies in s o m e c o m p o n e n t s revealed by improvements m a d e in others.
Imbalances a m o n g interacting c o m p o n e n t s pointed u p the n e e d for ad-
ditional invention. By the time each system was ready for use, therefore,
it i n v o l v e d m a n y p a t e n t s . E d i s o n , w h o rarely articulated his m e t h o d , said
of his i n v e n t i o n of an electric lighting system:
It was not only necessary that the lamps should give light and the d y n a m o s g e n -
erate current, but t h e lamps must be adapted to the current of the dynamos, and
the d y n a m o s must be constructed to give the character of current required by
the lamps, and likewise all parts of the system must be constructed with refer-
ence to all other parts, since, in o n e sense, all the parts form o n e machine, and
the connections between the parts being electrical instead of mechanical. Like
any o t h e r machine the failure of o n e part to cooperate properly with the other
part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperadve for the p u r p o s e i n t e n d e d .
T h e problem then that I undertook to solve was stated generally, the
production of the multifarious apparatus, methods and devices, each adapted for
use with every other, and all forming a comprehensive system.'"

T h e interactions p r o v i d e d structure, o r g u i d e l i n e s , for i n v e n t i v e activity.

O t h e r i n v e n t o r s also u s e d t h e systems a p p r o a c h , h a v i n g , like E d i s o n , e x -
1 1
p e r i e n c e d its s t i m u l a t i n g e f f e c t .
Reflection on Edison's m e t h o d suggests that he u s e d the systems a p -
proach in o r d e r to e m p l o y the reverse salient-critical p r o b l e m s m e t h o d ,
but s i n c e E d i s o n d i d n o t a n a l y z e a n d articulate his a p p r o a c h a n d m e t h o d ,
the historian m u s t interpret t h e r e c o r d carefully. In fact, the r e c o r d s h o w s
that o t h e r inventors a n d e n g i n e e r s used the reverse salient-critical prob-
l e m s m e t h o d d u r i n g the half-century c o v e r e d by this study; thus, attributing
that m e t h o d to E d i s o n as well d o e s not s e e m a far-fetched conclusion (see
p p . 3 3 - 3 7 below). As n o t e d earlier, reverse salients are o b v i o u s w e a k points,
or weak c o m p o n e n t s , in a technology which are in n e e d of further devel-
o p m e n t . A reverse salient is obvious, a n d creative imagination is not n e e d e d
t o d e f i n e it. A s will b e s h o w n , t h e n o n d u r a b i l i t y o f e x p e r i m e n t a l l a m p
filaments before 1 8 7 8 was a reverse salient in incandescent-lamp systems.
E d i s o n a n d m a n y o t h e r s w e r e a w a r e o f the n e e d for inventive activities i n
this area. In c o n t r a s t to a r e v e r s e salient, t h e n , the d e f i n i t i o n of critical
p r o b l e m s b y a n i n v e n t o r d o e s require creative i m a g i n a t i o n . Critical p r o b -
lems result f r o m the inventor's defining the reverse salient as a problem,
o r set o f p r o b l e m s , that, w h e n solved, will correct t h e r e v e r s e salient. (As
will b e s e e n , i n E d i s o n ' s w o r k t h e r e v e r s e salients w e r e o f t e n e c o n o m i c i n
n a t u r e ; t h e critical p r o b l e m s , technical.) A s y s t e m s a p p r o a c h facilitates t h e
use of the reverse salient-critical problems m e t h o d b e c a u s e reverse salients

' " T h e quotation is taken from a photoreproduction of Edison's public testimony. T h e

reproduced pages are numbered 3128-34. T h e item is on file at the Edison Archives in a
folder labeled "Electric Light Histories Written by Thomas A. Edison for Henry Ford, 1926."
Edison archivist A. R. Abel is unable to identify the original source of this item.
" Elmer Sperry, also a professional, independent inventor, introduced guidance and con-
trol systems for ships and airplanes prior to World I. His approach is similar to Edison's. See
Hughes, Sperry, esp. pp. 51-53, 63-70, 159-61, 290-95.

45
 23
Figure II.1. Associates in the Edison
system: Francis Upton, John Kreusi, and
Charles Batchelor. Courtesy of the Edison
Archives, Edison National Historic Site,
West Orange, N.J.
INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
are observably weak in relationship to other system components, and be-
cause, as Edison himself wrote, the improvement of one component in a
system will reverberate throughout the system and cause the need for
improvements in other components, thereby enabling the entire system to
fulfill its goal more efficiendy or economically. In other words, the systems
approach facilitated the conceptual formuladon of Gestalt patterns and the
visualization of the incomplete parts of those patterns.
T h e availability of assistants with a variety of knowledge and skills also
stimulated Edison to choose problems that involved a system of compo-
nents. T h e r e were superb mechanics, electricians, chemists, glass blowers,
and other skilled persons in the Menlo Park communi^'Jrffter^cqxuring
funding for his electric lightingjproject in the fall of 1878, Edison employed
additional men whose talents were particularly well suited for the project.
Of special importance among them was Francis Upton, the mathematician
and physicist. Others, however, had been at Edison's side for years. Charles
Batchelor, for instance, was an ingenious master craftsman, dexterous and
sharp-eyed, and his wide-ranging experimental techniques and mechanical
aptitude kept him at Edison's right hand. Batchelor was so closely involved
with Edison in all of his work "that his absence from the laboratory is
12
invariably a signal for Mr. Edison to suspend labor." John Kreusi, who
was in charge of the Menlo Park machine shop, also played a major role
in building the Edison system. Trained in Switzerland as a fine mechanic,
he could deftly construct Edison's various designs from nothing more than
rough sketches and cryptic instructions. He, like Batchelor, had been with
Edison in Newark, New Jersey, before the establishment of the Menlo Park
1 3
laboratory (see Fig. 11.1 ) i
When the electric lighting project entered the development phase, others
at Menlo Park worked on various components of the system. Dr. Hermann
Claudius, a former officer in the Austrian Telegraph Corps, built simu-
lations of the system with batteries for generators, fine wires for the dis-
tribution system, and resistors for the load. Francis Jehl reported that
14
Claudius had at his fingertips Kirchhoffs laws of conductor networks.
T h e names of some of the other pioneers who made it possible for Edison
to invent and develop an entire system include John "Basic" Lawson, J. F.
Ott, D. A. "Doc" Haid, William J. Hammer, Edward H.Johnson, Stockton
Griffin, George and William Carman, Martin Force, and Ludwig Boehm
(see Fig. II.2).
These varied talents were supported by a broad array of expensive ma-
chine tools, chemical apparatus, library resources, scientific instruments,
15
and electrical equipment. A major reason for the establishment of the
Edison Electric Light Company, the patent-holding enterprise, in October
1878 was to acquire funds for additional laboratory equipment. T h e story
,2
New York Herald, 21 December 1879, quoted in Jehl, Reminiscences, 1: 393.
" J e h l , Reminiscences, 1: 54.
14
Ibid., 2: 545.
'"'For Jehl's description of the scientific instruments, see ibid., esp. 1: 257-70. Robert
Friedel, director of the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers, has found no evidence in the Edison record of Edison's having
borrowed the Sprengel pump. T h e surviving record suggests that the pump was developed
at Menlo Park. Robert Friedel, personal communication, 1 March 1982.
46
 24 NETWORKS OF POWER
Figure II.2. Creators of the Edison
system, Menlo Park, 1879. Back row,
right to left: A. "Doc" Haid (chemist);
Francis Upton (mathematician); Francis
Jehl; and Charles Batchelor (master
mechanic). Third row, third from right:
Thomas Edison. Courtesy of the Edison
Archives, Edison National Historic Site,
West Orange, N.J.

(perhaps apocryphal) of Edison's borrowing a Sprengel pump from Prince-

ton University to achieve the vacuum needed in his incandescent-bulb ex-
periments is well known. It may have led to the erroneous conclusion,
however, that Edison and Upton did not sufficiently appreciate the im-
portance of scientific instruments in experimentation, at least not enough
to invest heavily in them. It may also have led to the equally false conclusion
that Edison's laboratory was not as well equipped as the laboratories of
major universities. In fact, the Menlo Park laboratory probably built a
vacuum p u m p of the latest design. Furthermore, Menlo Park had galva-
nometers, static generators, Leyden jars, induction coils (including a
Ruhmkorff coil capable of a 20-cm. spark), batteries, and condensers.
Wooden-boxed condensers "were strewn everywhere," for they, along with
variable-resistance boxes, were essential apparatus for telegraphy experi-
16
ments. In addition, the laboratory was equipped with a standard ohm, a
Wheatstone bridge, Thomson high- and low-resistance reflecting galva-
nometers, an astatic galvanometer, and a Helmholtz-Gaugain tangent gal-
vanometer. Edison's experimentation also led to the purchase of other
inventors' and manufacturers' apparatus, such as generators, for testing
purposes. T h e Edison laboratory at Menlo Park was probably one of the
best electrical laboratories in the world. Moreover, Edison also equipped
it, at great expense, as a chemical research laboratory. The expenses and
wages for equipment and personnel were substantial. Edison reported in
January 1879, about six months after commencing the electric lighting
project, that he had expended $35,000 on the project and that operating

16
Jehl, Reminiscences, 1: 228-29, 257-70.

47
 INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
expenses continued at the rate of about $800 each week. By November
17
1879 more than $50,000 had been spent on the project.
> T h e r e was a feedback relationship in all this. Edison assembled a com-
munity of craftsmen and appliers of science and the tools and scientific
instruments they needed in order to work on problems of a systemic nature,
and the presence of these men and their apparatus further stimulated him,
even constrained him, to choose to invent and develop systems. T h e ex-
istence of a community at Menlo Park and later at Edison's larger laboratory
at West Orange, New Jersey, did, however, lead to controversy about the
significance of Edison's role and about his dependence on his staff. Francis
Jehl insisted in his Memoirs (published years later) that Edison was the
18
Napoleon with the master plan. Other historians have interpreted Edi-
son's contribution and method in light of Jehl's memoirs. As a result, Edison
emerges as the profoundly imaginative formulator of a grand design that
was fulfilled in detail by knowledgeable and skilled assistants. Edison even
used insights drawn from scientific law—for example, Ohm's law—to his
own advantage. On the other hand, Jehl, in a confidential memorandum,
assigned the role of master conceptualizer to Francis Upton, the user of
19
science who invented ingenious solutions to technical problems.
Upton, a young "scholar and gentleman" who was nicknamed "Culture"
by Edison, joined Edison's staff at Menlo Park in December 1878 on the
recommendation of Grosvenor P. Lowrey, Edison's counsel and business
and financial adviser. He became Edison's mathematician and physicist.
He had been educated at Phillips Andover Academy, Bowdoin College,
Princeton University, and Berlin University, where he attended lectures by
the eminent scientist Hermann von Helmholtz. Notes on Helmholtz's lec-
tures on physics during the winter semester of 1877 survive among Upton's
papers at the Edison Archives in West Orange, New Jersey.
The Edison who emerges in Jehl's memorandum is remarkably different
20
from the Edison depicted in Jehl's Reminiscences. In private, Jehl described
Edison as a "pusher" who gave his financial backers confidence that he
would find a way to solve the problems. Jehl reluctantly acknowledged that
Edison was a genius, but he regarded Upton as the thinker and the con-
ceptualizer of systems. As he put it:
When an abnormal man can find such abnormal ways and.means to make his
name known all over the world with such rocket-like swiftness, and accumulate
such wealth with such little real knowledge, a man that cannot solve a simple
equation, I say, such a man is a genius—or let us use the more popular word—a
wizard. So was Barnum! Edison is and always was a shrewd, witty business man

" E d i s o n to Theodore Puskas, 28 January 1879, in Letter Book E-3407, EA; Lowrey to
Edison, 13 November 1879, in folder labeled "Electric Light—General," EA.
18
J e h l , Reminiscences, 1: 216, 362-63; 2: 852-54.
, s
T h e memorandum is in the William Hammer Collection, Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. It was enclosed in a tetter from Francis Jehl to F.
R. Upton, 22 April 1913. In a note on the memorandum, Hammer wrote that years earlier
Jehl had written a similar letter to him from Budapest. I am indebted to Robert Friedel of
the History Institute of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers for calling my
attention to this item.
20
jehl wrote his Reminiscences years after these events while employed at the Menlo Park
laboratory at Dearborn, Michigan, which had been restored by Henry Ford, a friend and
admirer of Edison's.

48
NETWORKS OF POWER
without a soul, an electrical and mechanical j o b b e r , w h o well understood how to
"whoop things up," whose only ambition was to make m o n e y and pose as a sort
of fetich for great masses of people that possess only a popular notion of an art,
and w h o are always ready to yap in astonishment at s o m e fire-work display that
is blown off for the benefit of mankind. Yellow journals and hedge-writers claim
h i m for their o w n , while the work of U p t o n is hidden in the lore of progressive
21
science and r e s e a r c h .

Jehl insisted in private, as he did in his memoirs, that the work at Menlo
Park was not haphazard experimentation, but in confidence he declared
that the group's theoredcal insights came from the "proficient and eruditive
mind" of Upton. It was Upton who coached Edison about science and its
uses in solving technical problems; it was Upton who taught Edison to
comprehend the ohm, volt, and weber (ampere) and their relation to one
22
another. Upton, for instance, laid down the principles that governed the
project's commercial and economic distribution system and solved the equa-
tions that rationalized it. His tables, his use of scientific units and instru-
ments, made possible the design of the system.
Upton's interpretation of his relationship with Edison was far more ap-
preciative of Edison's role. In a memorandum on the Edison method,
Upton portrayed Edison as the director of a research and development
23
laboratory. He stressed Edison's power of concentration and single-minded
pursuit of an objective. Whatever lay at hand was seized upon and molded
to his purpose; occasionally, quite expensive apparatus was ruined because
it was available and could be made to serve an immediate purpose. T h e
expense mattered little to Edison during the heat of the quest. His power
of concentration also showed itself in his ability to follow a single line of
thought as he read through pages of densely packed information. Edison
also impressed Upton with his talent for asking original questions. "I can
answer questions very easily after they are asked," Upton lamented, "but
find great trouble in framing any to answer." Edison posed questions that
could be translated into hypotheses, which in turn established the strategy
and tactics of experimentation. His questions were often drawn from his
doubts about accepted explanations and procedures. According to Upton,
Edison never took anything for granted; he always doubted what others
thought possible. Sometimes the result was that he found a new way. T h e
questions sometimes flowed from Edison as if he had no control over his
thoughts but was intuitively penetrating to the essence of a complex and
confusing situation. While waiting for the leading questions to form in his
mind or the right experiment to present itself, Edison often passed the
time, Upton observed, by idly doing experiments in the general area of his
concern, which kept his attention focused on the general problem. If such
efforts proved fruitless, he would shift to another subject area and work
on another project for a time.
Upton was well versed in calculus, and Edison was notorious for his
weakness in mathematics, but the way in which Edison grasped the essence
of quantifiable relationships impressed Upton. Upton's task was to reduce

21
Memorandum in Jehl to Upton, 22 April 1913, pp. 10—11, Hammer Collection.
"Ibid., p. 4.
23
Folder labeled "Biographical—Upton,.Francis," item E-6285-11, EA.

49
INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Edison's notions to equations. Edison's ability to find metaphors that al-
lowed him to draw on what he knew and impose order on what he did not
know also was a gift. Upton admired the way in which Edison formulated
general objectives, or solutions, and then worked ingeniously toward the
end in view.
Further research will not ultimately resolve the complexity and contra-
dictions in the surviving testimony of active, ambitious men like Edison and
his Iieutenants.The relationships were as multifaceted and involuted as
Jehl's analogy of Napoleon-and-staff suggests. Pioneers like Upton en-
hanced the Edison legend; a few others, like Jehl, in private, cast doubts.
Among those who raised questions openly were Nikola Tesla, the inventor
of a polyphase power system; W. K. L. Dickson, the inventor of motion
24
picture apparatus; and Frank J. Sprague, a pioneer in electric traction.
Their, or their advocates', criticisms generally focus on the alleged failure
of Edison, or history, to ascribe credit due them for work done, or inven-
tions made, while they were employed by Edison. Laboratory notebooks
and other records do suggest that he was often stimulated by the ideas and
achievements of others, inside the laboratory and out. He drew on the ideas
of others by means of literature and patent searches. It is also true that
Edison seldom singled out assistants to attribute to them particular inventive
ideas, but he often acknowledged their general assistance in newspaper
interviews and he gave them responsible positions in his manufacturing
enterprises.
T h e tangled connections and contradictory evidence can be clarified
somewhat, however, if we view the Edison group as an organic community
whose members were functionally, or systematically, related. Edison's role
had to be played, as did Kreusi's, Batchelor's, and Upton's. Jehl might have
been covertly jealous of the publicity given Edison, even of his stature as
a hero, but the myth helped attract financiers who would never have sup-
ported Jehl or even Jehl's hero Upton. No doubt Edison's immense prestige
also influenced those who were involved in patent litigation. And it is
doubtful that the others could have provided the verve and intellectual
style that gave Edison the power to inspire most of the Menlo Park com-
munity to work long hours at fever pitch. It is understandable, however,
that persons functioning effectively in a community would at times reject
the ego-constraining role the community asked them to play.
The controversy over Edison's role is clarified somewhat when attention
is directed to the systems approach informally used in his laboratory. As
entrepreneur and manager of research and development, Edison was re-
sponsible for the output of his research-and-development community. Eval-
uating him simply as an independent inventor is inappropriate. T h e ques-
tion should not be Did Edison invent? but rather How did he preside over
inventive activity? Biographers have been led astray by focusing on Edison's
patents and their priority, In truth, assigning patents to Edison was prob-
ably in many instances partially a tactical device used to take advantage of
his fame and prestige to impress potential financial backers and evenjudges

21
Gordon Hendricks, The Edison Motion Picture Myth (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1961); Harriet Sprague, Frank J. Sprague and the Edison Myth (New York: William
Frederick Press, 1947).

50
in patent litigation. Because many of his inventions were undoubtedly the
result of collective endeavors, it would have been fair to assign the patents
to several persons in the laboratory including Edison. This, however, is an
issue separate from the question of the role he played as a manager and
entrepreneur of invention and development. It is interesting to note in this
regard that the American inventor Eli Whitney has recently been described
25
as a manager and entrepreneur.
T h e systems Edison chose were not simply technical ones; they involved
economics as well. For example, from the start of his sustained concentra-
tion on the electric lighdng project in the fall of 1878, Edison and his
laboratory assistants analyzed the costs of generating and distributing elec-
tricity. Various notebook entries, though they do not provide a chronology
and complete record of Edison's inventive ideas and development activities,
show the focus of his thoughts on, for instance, the cost of operating the
Gramme and Wallace arc-light generators that were acquired for test pur-
26
poses. From the available literature, Edison and his assistants also ascer-
tained the cost of operating a Jablochkoff arc-lighting system, the invention
that had created so much excitement during its display in Paris and other
European cities. Other items in the notebooks for the early months of the
project also reveal Edison's concern about the cost of copper needed for

25
See Merritt R. Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1977); and, especially, idem, "Eli Whitney and the American System of
Manufacturing," in Technology in America, ed. Carroll W. Pursell.Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: M.l.T.
Press, 1981), pp. 4 5 - 6 1 .
25
Menlo Park Notebook no. 6 (4 December 1878-30 January 1879), pp. 22-30. Edison's
laboratory notebooks are part of the Edison Archives on file at the Edison National Historic
Site, West Orange, N.J. Hereafter, if only one date is given for a notebook, it is for the first
dated entry in the notebook; if two dates are given, the second is for the last dated entry.

51
INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
27
distribution and generator wiring. On 8 September 1878 Edison visited
the Ansonia, Connecticut, plant of William Wallace, the brass manufac-
turer, to see his arc-light dynamo. While there, Edison made rough cal-
28
culations, including fuel costs and transmission losses. He also decided
in the early days that a successfuljighting_system.. would be.one that pro-
29
duced light at a price lower than the cost of gas. Spurred by his vision
of an electric lighting system that would be analogous to existing gaslight
systems, he began—in 1878, according to his own recollections—collecting

every kind of data about gas; bought all the transactions of the gas engineer-
ing societies, etc., all the back volumes of gas journals. Having obtained all the
data and investigated gas-jet distribution in New York by actual observations, I
made up my mind that the problem of the subdivision of the electric current
30
could be solved and made commercial.
Edison could not reduce general statements about the comparative costs
of gas lighting and electric lighting to quantitadvely more precise ones until
he had developed some of his inventions and made a detailed analysis of
the cost of gas lighting as supplied in a particular locality. From the start,
he clearly realized, however, that his system would have to be economically
competitive, and thus he conceived of the problem to be solved by invention
as inseparably technical and economic. He did not set out to invent a lighting
system the cost of which would not be considered until it was built. As an
economic historian later observed, "From the economist's viewpoint, the
most significant aspect of Edison's activities in electric lighting was his
31
concern at every step with economic factors." It would perhaps be more
correct to say that he defined problems as econotechnical.
Because technological change involved economic, legal, and legislative
factors as well as technical and scientific ones, Edison needed a Grosvenor
Lowrey to help him fulfill his objectives as an inventor-entrepreneur. Low-
rey guided Edison in matters involving Wall Street, New York City poli-
ticians, and patent applications. Edison, however, did not step back, im-
merse himself in technological and scientific problems, and leave the "politics"
to Lowrey; the surviving correspondence shows that Edison played a prom-
inent role in the financial and political scenarios concerning his inventions.
Born in Massachusetts, Lowrey took up the practice of law in New York

" S e e Menlo Park Notebook no. 1 (28 November 1878-24 July 1879), section on wire
calculations; and Notebook no. 12 (20 December 1878), pp. 174-75, 232-33. On the cost of
operating Jablochkoff candles, see Notebook no. 6, p. 57.
28
Christopher S. Derganc, "Thomas Edison and His Electric Lighting System," IEEE Spec-
trum, February 1979, p. 50.
29
Harold C. Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 1875-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1953), p. 83.
50
Testimony of Edison quoted in Thomas C. Martin, Forty Years of Edison Service, 1882-
1922 (New York: New York Edison Co., 1922), p. 9. Contrary to Edison's claim that he
undertook investigadon of the gaslight industry in 1878, notebook records and other original
sources show that no systematic research about the industry was done until the end of 1879
and during 1880, when Edison was planning his first central station in New York City. I am
indebted to Paul Israel of the Thomas Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University for this
information. Israel is investigating Edison's method in the Menlo Park period. Paul B. Israel,
personal communication, 16 February 1982.
31
Passer, Electrical Manufacturers, p. 83.

52
NETWORKS OF POWER
City and rose to prominence there. He acted as counsel to the U.S. Express
Company, Wells Fargo & Company, and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
He was also legal adviser to the financial entrepreneur Henry Villard, who
became closely associated with Edison. In 1866 Lowrey became general
counsel for the Western Union Telegraph Company, a posidon which
brought Edison and Lowrey together in connection with telegraph patent
litigation. Lowrey was one of those who persuaded Edison to turn to electric
32
lighting. Having observed the sensational publicity given to the intro-
duction of the Jablochkoff arc light in Paris in 1878, Lowrey urged Edison
to enter the field and offered to raise the money Edison needed to expand
Menlo Park. Not only did he advise Edison, he often encouraged the in-
ventor. Lowrey promised in 1878 that the income from electric-lighting
patents would be enough to fulfill one of Edison's dreams: it would "set
[him] up forever . . . [and] enable [him] . . . to build and formally endow
33
a working laboratory such as the world needs and has never seen." (At
that time, the only buildings in the Menlo Park complex were the laboratory
building, the carpentry shop, and the carbon shed; still to come were a
machine shop, library, and office buildings.) Shortly afterward, Edison gave
Lowrey a free hand in negotiating the sale of forthcoming electric-lighting
patents and establishing business associations and enterprises at home and
abroad: "Go ahead, I shall agree to nothing, promise nothing and say
nothing to any person leaving the whole matter to you. All I want at present
34
is to be provided with funds to push the light rapidly."
Lowrey had close contacts with the New York financial and political
world. His law offices were on the third floor of the Drexel Building—
Drexel, Morgan and Company occupied the first floor. Working closely
35
with his long-time friend Egisto P. Fabbri, "an Italian financial genius"
and partner of J. Pierpont Morgan's, he obtained the funds for Edison
from the Vanderbilts and Drexel, Morgan and Company. His skiTLand
effectiveness in dealing with poTiEFians and political problems is conveyed
by the following episode. In December 1880 Lowrey arranged a lobbying
extravaganza. T h e objective was to obtain a franchise allowing the Edison
Illuminating Company to lay the distribution system for the first commer-
cial Edison lighting system in New York City. Behind the opposition of
some New York City aldermen lay gaslight interests and lamplighters who
might be thrown out of work by the new incandescent light. A special train
brought the mayor and aldermen to Menlo Park. Arriving at dusk, they
saw the tiny lamps glowing inside and outside the laboratory buildings.
After a tour and demonstration by Edison and his staff, someone pointedly
complained of being thirsty, which was a signal for the group to be led up
to a darkened second floor of the laboratory. Lights suddenly went on to
disclose a lavish "spread" from the famous Delmonico's. After dinner, Low-
rey presented Edison and Edison's case, and in due time the franchise was

" P a y s o n Jones, A Power History of the Consolidated Edison System, 1878—1900 (New York:
Consolidated Edison Co., 1940), p. 27; on Lowrey, see p. 161.
" L o w r e y to Edison, 10 October, 1878, EA.
M
Edison to Lowrey, 2 October, 1878, EA.
" Lewis Corey, Tlie Ho-ise of Morgan (New York: G. H. Watt, 1930), p. 23, quoted in Jones,
History of the Consolidated Edison System, p. 162.

53
 31 INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
1 StotW->(bi 36
T. k. LDISOX. g r a n t e d . T h e franchise was as necessary for commercial success as a well-
No. 27-5.2J3. F i t c a l e s Mar. 20.1SD3. working dynamo.
T u r n i n g to the simple chronological history of the invention and devel-
opment of Edison's electric lighting system will serve as a reminder that
.. ^ . .
-
even though Edison's concepts were holistic and his approach was essen-
tially systematic, his day-to-day activities were analogous to the hunting and
.o
•o backtracking of a goal-seeking organism that does not know precisely how
0 'ifp# to proceed. Edison had taken time off from some of his other projects to
experiment with incandescent lamps before the fall of 1878, but it was not
until 1878 that he envisaged his goal and organized the electric-lighting
project. To suggest that Edison's approach to the invention of electric
lighting was systematic does not imply, however, that from the start of the
project he conceived of the system in all of its precise technical and economic
relationships and quantitative characteristics. What is clear is that he in-
tended from the start of the project to invent not only an incandescent
lamp but also related components, such as a distribution network.
T h e components of the system about which Edison first had inventive
ideas in 1878 may have been the distribution network and the incandescent
lamp. These ideas, as is usually the case with inventions, were improvements
and new combinations. Until Edison's numerous notebooks with their often
Figure 11.4. System diagrams: Generators 37

in series, lamps in parallel, and three-wire
distribution. Patent no. 274, 290 (20
March 1882). Three-wire distribution was
not introduced until 1883.
incomprehensible and scrambled entries are more thoroughly analyzed,
the answer to the question of what exactly he discovered or invented in
the early fall of 1878 will remain in doubt, but circumstances suggest that
the inventions may have been a parallel system of distribution and a fila-
ment lamp with a circuit-interrupting device (see Fig. II.4). T h e design of
a circuit-interrupting device in each lamp may have been suggested to him
by the design of a tasimeter that he had recently invented to measure the
38
heat of the sun's corona during eclipse. He believed that these ideas could
be developed into practical devices. As he wrote to an associate, "Have
39
struck a bonanza in electric light—indefinite subdivision of light."
Edison's early problem identification and inventive ideas were not, how-
ever, remarkably original. T h e subdivisionoOight.had.been_CQnsidered^a
critical problem ever since it became obviousthat arc lamps were too intense
for small-space lighting. Subdivision refers to the divjsjqn of light.or elec-
trical energy, into smaller units. T h e use of Jow-intensity, incandescent-
filament lamps was seen as a likely answer to this problem because a number
of inventors before Edison had designed incandescent lamps of varied
characteristics. These lamps, however, were not durable. One historian of
the incandescent electric light cites the invention of twenty types of incan-

36
J e h l , Reminiscences, 2: 778-85.
37
At the time of this writing the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, headed by Professors
Reese Jenkins and Leonard Reich, is engaged in the editing and analysis of the Edison
collection at West Orange. In cooperation with this project, Dr. Bernard Finn of the Smith-
sonian Institution and Dr. Robert Friedel of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engi-
neers' history center are making an in-depth study using the Edison papers on the invention
of the incandescent lamp. Both studies should provide fresh information, understanding, and
insight into Edison's method and activities.
33
C o n o t , Streak of Luck, pp. 116, 120.
39
Telegram from Edison to Puskas, 22 September 1878, EA. (Edison had written William
Wallace to this effect on 13 September.)

54
NETWORKS OF POWER
descent lamps from 1809 to 1878 (what has been called the precommercial
period). One of the inventors, Moses G. Farmer, was the former partner
40
of Wallace, whom Edison visited in September 1878. Farmer had used a
platinum-strip incandescent lamp as early as July 1859 and returned to
experimentation in 1877; in 1878 he proposed connecting the incandescent
lamps in parallel. He also used a circuit-breaking device to cool the fila-
41
m e n t . Edison may have learned of this on his Ansonia visit; in any event,
he had had the opportunity to consider parallel circuits, as contrasted to
series connecdons, in the telegTaph and in arc-light and electrochemical
42
battery systems.
His notebooks for the last three months of 1878 and his early electric-
light patents support the conclusion that his bonanzas were the durable
filament and parallel circuitry. He had decided even earlier to use a plat-
43
inum filament. Early in October he was experimenting with a platinum
filament and a thermostatic device to cool the platinum before it fused. At
44
the same time, he had in mind a parallel circuit. He applied for a patent
on a platinum filament with a thermostatic regulator on 5 October 1878
45
and was granted the patent (no. 214,636) on 22 April 1879. Edison's
notebooks and patents suggest that the invention of a thermostatic regulator
and the parallel circuit were inextricably linked because the regulator briefly
interrupted the flow of current to cool the filament and because, if the
lamps had been wired in series, all the lamps would have been extinguished
when the regulator of any one of them operated. Thus the interaction of
46
components served as the stimulus for invention.
With their inventive ideas, Edison and his associates embarked on the
long and tedious research and experimentation that was needed to develop
their general notions into practical devices. Not all of Edison's experiments
involved physical apparatus. Many were simply calculations; by using data
available in the technical literature and elementary science, such as Ohm's
law, Edison and his staff could anticipate phenomena. Because the simple
circuit equations and economic calculations used were quantitative, the
experiments, both physical and symbolic, were econotechnical (though Edi-
son and his assistants would never have employed such jargon).
Edison announced his brainchild prematurely, with fanfare, in the New
York Sun on 20 October 1878. He told reporters of his plans for under-
ground distribution in mains from centrally located generators in the great
cities; predicted that his electric light would be brought into private houses
and substituted for gas burners at a lower cost; and confidently asserted
that his central station "[would furnish] light to all houses within a circle
40
Arthur A. Bright, Jr., The Electric-Lamp Industry: Technological Change and Economic De-
velopment from 1800 to 1947 (New York: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 39-40.
41
Conot, Streak of Luck, p. 120; Bright, Electric-Lamp Industry, p. 46; George F. Barker to
Edison, 22 November 1878, EA.
12
Frank L. Pope, Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph (New York: Van Nostrand, 1877),
p. 153; Edwin Houston, A Dictionary of Electrical Words, Terms, and Phrases (New York: Johnston,
1888), p. I 3 l ; Memorandum in Jehl to Upton, 22 April 1913, p. 8, Hammer Collection.
"Charles Stowell to Edison, 31 May 1878, EA.
"Drawing labeled "Caveat no. 4" and dated 8 October 1878, EA.
43
Bright, Electric-Lamp Industry, pp. 61-64; and Jehl, Reminiscences, 1: 235-36.
46
Edison also saw the possibility of using a shunt circuit for each lamp to make the lamps
independent. Robert Friedel, personal communication, 1 March 1982.

55
INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
of half a mile." He spoke not only of his incandescent lamp but of other
envisaged components of his system, such as meters, dynamos, and distri-
bution mains. In fact, he had no generator, no practical incandescent lamp,
much less a developed system of distribution—these were at least a year
away. He did however, have the concept. As he wrote in private to an
associate,
I have the right principle and am on the right track, but time, hard work and
s o m e g o o d luck are necessary too. It has been just so in all of my inventions.
T h e first step is an intuition, a n d comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this
thing gives out and [it is] then that 'Bugs'—as such little faults and difficulties
are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor
47
are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly r e a c h e d .

Others also reported in 1878 that Edison had ideas for a lamp and for
a parallel wiring system as well as a general outline for his project. Francis
Jehl, who joined Edison as a laboratory assistant early in 1879 and who
later published reminiscences of the Menlo Park days, believed that in
October 1878—twelve months before the construction of a practical incan-
descent lamp and the announcement of his basic generator design—"Edi-
son had his plans figured out, as a great general figures out his battle
48
strategy before the first cannon is fired." T h e key to Edison's success,
49
according to Jehl, "lay in his early vision, far in advance of realization."
Assuming that Edison was thinking systematically helps explain why he
soon directed his attention away from the durability of the filament to a
combination of durability and high resistance. Analysis of system costs led
him to identify the need for a high-resistance filament. Ultimately this
became the critical problem and the essence of his lamp as a patentable
invention. It is not clear when the search for high resistance began, but in
a 1926 essay that has been attributed to him, Edison stated that in the fall
of 1878 he experimented with carbon filaments, the major problem of
which was their low resistance. As he explained it, "In a lighting system
the current required to light them in great numbers would necessitate such
large copper conductors for mains, etc., that the investment would be
prohibitive and absolutely uncommercial. In other words, an apparently
remote consideration (the amount of copper used for conductors), was
50
really the commercial crux of the problem." Further evidence for the
dating of his high-resistance concept is his statement that "about December
1878 I engaged as my mathematician a young man named Francis R.
Upton. . . . O u r figures proved that an electric lamp must have at least 100

" E d i s o n to Puskas, 13 November 1878, EA.

48
J e h l , Reminiscences, 1: 216.
49
Ibid., p. 217.
50
T h o m a s A. Edison, "Beginnings of the Incandescent Lamp and Lighting System"
(typescript), p. 4, EA. T h e typescript is dated 1926 and identified as an item sent to Henry
Ford at his request; it should be used cautiously, however, because by 1926 Edison and his
patent lawyers had organized history with their own priorities in mind. Also, it follows in
many ways the account of the incandescent lamp given in the authorized biography of Edison;
see Dyer and Martin, Edison, 1: 234—66. T h e 1926 typescript was written with the help of W.
H. Meadowcroft, who later collaborated with Dyer and Martin in the publication of the 1929
edition of the Edison biography. I am indebted to Robert G. Koolakian for this information.

56
NETWORKS OF POWER
51
ohms resistance to compete commercially with gas." Edison said that he
then tried various metals, including platinum, in order to obtain a filament
of high resistance, and that he continued along these lines until about April
1879, when he developed a platinum filament of great promise because
the occluded gases had been driven out of it, thereby increasing its infu-
sibility. In his Reminiscences, Jehl maintains that Edison wanted a high-
resistance lamp as early as October 1878, and that he had reached this
52
conclusion by thinking through his envisaged system of electric lighting.
Jehl also states that by applying Joule's and Ohm's laws, Edison arrived at
the essentials of his system.
Edison seems to have been refining his inventive ideas for components
and his more general ideas for a system throughout the fall of 1878 (see
Fig. II.5). His early emphasis on the durable filament and parallel wiring
was specific, but his notion of a system involving generators, lamps, and
distribution from a central station was vague. He probably first conceived
of it as an analogue of central-station, illuminating gas supply. Experi-
menting with filaments and calculating costs from available data about
existing generator and arc-light systems allowed him, and then Upton, to
introduce the costs into the system. This perspective revealed that a durable
filament and parallel wiring might yield a technically workable system, but
not an economically feasible one. As a result of a systematic analysis of
technical and economic factors, the high-resistance filament then emerged
as the critical problem. Joule's and Ohm's laws, equations that are consid-
ered simple today, were of great value to the inventors, for they allowed
the characteristics of the components to be introduced as variables and
related systematically. T h e effect of an intended change in one variable
(component) on other variables (components) could be anticipated, and
actual experiments would test the assumptions and predictions.
Jehl's stress on the importance of Ohm's law, and items in the laboratory
notebooks and secondary literature, suggest more about the nature of Edi-
53
son's reasoning and that of his assistants, especially Francis U p t o n . As

51
Edison, "Beginnings," p. 5. Upton stated that Edison had high resistance in mind when
Upton joined Edison's staff; see Francis R. Upton's 1918 speech to Edison Pioneers, item X-
EG285-13, folder labeled "Biographical—Upton, Francis," EA.
32
Contrary to his recollection, however, Jehl did not come to Menlo Park until the end of
February 1879, "at the earliest." Paul B. Israel, 16 February 1982, personal communication
(see note 30 above). Therefore, Jehl's statement should be taken as secondhand evidence.
" J e h l {Reminiscences, 1: 362-63 and 2: 852-54) stresses Edison's reliance upon Ohm's law.
The stress suggested a clue to Edison's reasoning. In a reference often used at Menlo Park
(the essay "Electricity" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. [1878], p. 41), Ohm's law is
stated as R = E/C (resistance equals electromotive force divided by current). In a misleadingly
titled article, Harold C. Passer argues cogently that Edison's reasoning was as Jehl suggested
("Electrical Science and the Early Development of the Electrical Manufacturing Industry in
the United States," Annals of Science 7 [1951): 382-92). Passer offers no evidence, however,
from the notebooks or other original Edison sources. Passer similarly discusses Edison's rea-
soning and concepts in Electrical Manufacturers (pp. 82, 84, and 89). Dyer and Martin's Edison
(1: 244—60), parallels the memorandum attributed to Edison in 1926. Josephson's Edison (pp.
193-204, 211-220) stresses Edison's use of Ohm's law but does not note the importance of
Edison's having used Ohm's law in conjunction with Joule's law in order to conceptualize his
system. Josephson also dates Edison's first high-resistance lamp as January 1879 (a platinum
filament), but gives no source for the statement (ibid., p. 199); nor does he provide a source
for the statement that Edison came to the idea for high resistance in a "flash of inspiration"

57
 35 INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT

URNKILUi VIEW HI' S t J W TAUli XSU KDLSOX'K IMIOHXYVIIY.

i>xiaiK'ii w tub r.A£0!t.iTcmr.

M W N ' S 1'KRFKCTEN KI.KCTRR! I.KIHT.

l<:Ilnll.*lr .11!!,- tinit. vjtwllrif m. flir. ar.-: rp'ju .lit -rLi\:;.[
Tlur ' A. K,II« Hint lb.-
iTC'illiM.,:; • .-r'^.Tt^r^^TL* G >
• ' t J M
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1IxMi:c filiate ni> fil- iIi!r-1 I.i ^'ii'lu-I ;;(- <->(h*-1ih.'
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itrv.-I> '-f ir.'-;ijTi>--^imllii-r i'.nti I!:?! •! 'In-
, : , :
ThUt' J-.-f rr-.il Hi-' hit iiifcflilii-rv. :h-.-n- .-h-htt-H 3
. . • -v '' n.i- r.-m.-trit.-.i,:,. ii'rl.Tlly.-Ji.->iic.n[ :V )\'.<|nt,,, mi.t i s t v a -:r:.5r (
rerti".-i i-lrvtii'; Un.j-. V i l l u s i , i d : | ii. Ln isWr.a.-r;
I-;- ..i;:;.- :] „ L :i „ ,,,. l : n u k Ut «

r
".:\ i-.-.'. '^i^riViy
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"'V ' '"' : J' " " '" "f I-t .1UU.-.-1 nm.-.-iy r::.T:;
r^'-,.V':!V';'^' '-"'r .'"
' - -l ; ,! l! v
(..•::•,:.;•;•,,:,
:: : l r t M
V '• . v' " • "• :.}• *-;,!.••• M, ' i ' - m i , , ^
I f / i i a Ditto
|'f •I'ln-.l. WiiJ (ilitv.i-L fi-::;nil ;n;iT,-»t t.H-ii u[ r>a ,.r 1
r
~o III)/ tfiflp
• -'ijiii, in^TiiiiiiUj
tm, - - im -
i: -iWv-'MMwV,

f-ib'iC iliaii
v.::: nil Om •!<>-
•rfc. TV.p lrUUT
irirt -i.T~3 cii.l.ti
iMiiici-i-uJ Will]
lnq ttjHer f l o ^
lf&rkr-|4iMllK-

J'XTLU'snNti All; v i s i m •

Figure IIS. Creation of the Edison system, Menlo Park. From Leslie's Weekly (1880), as reproduced in Forty Years of
Edison Service, 1882-1922 (New York: Press of the New York Edison Co., 1922), facing p. 21.

58
NETWORKS OF POWER
noted, Edison and Upton saw that the cost of copper, especially that which
depended on the cross-sectional area and the length of the conductors, was
a major variable in the overall cost equation. Large and long conductors
would raise the price of electric light above that of gas. To keep conductor
length down, Edison sought a densely populated consumer area; to keep
the cross-sectional area small, he had to reason further, using the laws of
Ohm and Joule. T h e notebooks show that Edison and Upton used Joule's
2
law (heat or energy = current x resistance = voltage x current) to
calculate the amount of energy that would be expended by the incandescent
54
filaments. They also used an adaptation of that law to show energy loss
2
in the conductors. Energy loss was taken to be proportional to the current
times the length of the conductor times a constant dependent upon the
quality of the copper used, all divided by the cross-secdonal area of the
2 55
conductor (energy loss proportional to C La/S). T h e formula posed an
enigma, for if Edison increased the cross section of the copper conductors
to reduce loss in distribution, he would increase copper costs, which was
to be avoided. Obviously, a trade-off, to use the jargon of the engineering
profession, was in order.There was, however, another variable—the cur-
rent—to consider. If current could be reduced, then the cross-secdonal
area of the conductors need not be so large. But current was needed to
light the incandescents, so how was one to reduce it?
To solve the dilemma, Edison and Upton could have reasoned as follows.
Wandng to reduce the current in order to lower conductor losses, they
realized that they could compensate and maintain the level of energy trans-
fer to the lamps by raising the voltage proportionately (H = C X V). T h e n
they brought Ohm's law into play (resistance equals voltage divided by
current). It was a eureka moment, for they realized that by increasing the
resistance of the incandescent-lamp filament They would raise the voltage
ih~relationship to the current. (Resistance was the value of the ratio.) T h u s
began the time-consuming search for material suitable for a high-resistance
filament. T h e notable invention was this logical deduction; the filament
was a hunt-and-try affair.
Edison's reasoning can be illustrated with a simple example using ap-
proximate, rounded-off values. In 1879 he obtained a carbonized-paper
filament whose resistance ranged from 130 ohms cold to about 70-80 ohms
56
heated. In order to arrive at a lamp whose candlepower was equivalent
to that of gas, he found, this filament would require—in present-day units—

after 8 September 1878 (ibid., p. 194). Bright's Electric-Lamp Industry does not offer any
additional information on the way in which Edison conceived of his system. Jehl's Reminiscences
remains the most suggestive published source, despite the book's lack of organization; see 1;
214-15, 2 4 3 - i 5 , 255-56, and 2; 8 2 0 - 2 1 , 852-54.
34
Menlo Park Notebook no. 3 (21 November 1878), p. 107, and Notebook no. 9 (15
December 1878-10 March 1879), p. 4 1 , contain some of the many early entries involving
Ohm's law. In Notebook no. 6, pp. 11 ff., Joule's law is mentioned; the dates in this notebook
(4 December 1878-30 January 1879, indicate that Edison was using Joule's law early in his
electric lighting project. In Notebook no. 10 (December 1878-January 1879), the word "Joule"
2
is jotted down where the equation H = C R is used.
33
Menlo Park Notebook no. 12, pp. 174-76.
36
M e n l o Park Notebook no. 52 (31 July 1879), p. 229; the entry is dated 15 December
1879.

59
INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
the equivalent of about 100 watts. This meant that the product of the voltage
across the lamp and the current must equal 100 watts. Since the resistance
was 100 ohms, the current had to be 1 amp, for according to Joule's law
2
the heat energy was equal to the product of C and the resistance (100 =
2
C x 100; C = 1). It then followed that the voltage must be 100 in order
to fulfill the energy need (H = C x V; V = 100/1 = 100). Therefore,
the approximate specifications of the lamps in Edison's system in today's
57
terminology were 100 watts, 100 volts, 1 amp, and 100 o h m s .
Another possible explanation for the decision to seek high resistance,
and a complementary one, was the search for a platinum filament with a
small surface of radiation. T h e objective was to maintain the incandescent
material of the filament at a high temperature with a low expenditure of
energy. To do this Edison shaped the filament into a spiral, thereby re-
58
ducing the radiating surface as well as the size of the filament. T h e
experimentation with small surfaces of radiation resulted in higher-resist-
ance filaments. With Francis Upton's help, Edison could then have ascer-
tained the effect of higher resistance on the entire circuit. They could have
serendipitously discovered the advantages of high resistance.
T h e funds raised in part by Lowrey for personnel and equipment allowed
the simultaneous invention and development of other components of the
system besides the incandescent lamp. Upton, for instance, was especially
active in the design and construction of an appropriate generator. T h e
generators on the market—for instance, the Siemens, Wallace, and Gramme—
were designed for arc lights wired in series. A network of feeder wires and
distribution mains for the distribution network also received considerable
attention. T h e inventive ideas embodied in the various versions of the
components of the system resulted in a large family of patents covering
the Edison system.
In the fall of 1879, about the same time that Edison and his assistants
obtained a filament with the high resistance and durability desired, Menlo
Park announced impressive progress in the design of an incandescent-lamp
generator. On 18 October 1879 Scientific American carried an article—un-
signed, but written by Upton—describing the generator. In contrast to the
earlier, high-resistance generators of other inventors, the Edison generator
had low internal resistance. T h e article claimed that it would obtain nearly
double the foot-pounds of energy from the same input that earlier gen-
erators had achieved, or an efficiency of 90 percent. Although original in
terms of the specifics that were designed for the incandescent system, the
generator was based on experiments done at Menlo Park with the gener-

r 7
' In January 1881 Edison conducted an economy test of the electric lighting system installed
at Menlo Park to demonstrate its practicability. This was a prelude to his installation of a full-
size system at the Pearl Street station in New York City in 1882. In the test he used two lamp
sizes, 16 c.p.and 8 c.p. T h e 16-c.p. lamp depended on an electromotive force of 104.25 volts
and a resistance of 114 ohms; therefore, the current in the 16-c.p. lamp was .9 amps. See C.
L. Clarke, "An Economy Test of the Edison Electric Light at Menlo Park, 1881," dated 7
February 1881, and published for the first time in Committee on St. Louis Exposition of
Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, Edwonia: A brief History of tile Early Edison
Electric Lighting System (New York: Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, 1904), pp.
166-78.
M
Derganc, "Edison and His Electric Lighting System," pp. 55-56.

60
NETWORKS OF POWER
ators of Gramme, Wallace, and others. In fact, the publicity for the Edison
generator exaggerated its excellence compared with other inventors' gen-
erators. T h e Edison generator was designed for a system of incandescent
lamps connected in parallel and, therefore, a system with low resistance.
It correctly had a low internal resistance to match the low external resist-
ance. To compare it with a high-resistance arc-light generator designed for
a system of arc-lights connected in series, however, was not appropriate.
T h e Edison generator was not designed for arc lights in series. Still, the
claims made about the generator excited much professional and public
reaction, as was usually the case with the well-publicized Edison inventions,
and Edison should be given credit for seeing the need to design components
systematically in relationship to others in the system—a truth other inven-
59
tors failed to g r a s p .
Believing late in 1879 that the essential design of the incandescent lamp
and generator would prove practical, Edison and his associates shifted their
emphasis to development of the components and the system. This meant
increased stress on economic factors. As early as 1880 they were calculating
the cost of a central station of 10,000 lamps, possibly in anticipation of the
planned central station for New York City's Pearl Street. They had exper-
imented enough to estimate that 1 h.p. from a steam engine and generator
could supply eight 16-c.p. lamps. Therefore they needed about 1,200 h.p.
for their system. T h e calculations that followed this assumption involved
fixed capital, operating expenses, and other costs (see Fig. II.6). Finally,
assuming that the 10,000 lamps would be used five hours out of every
twenty-four, and knowing what gas companies charged for five hours of
equivalent light, they calculated the surplus income of an electric utility
charging the same price for light. Edison and the parent Edison company
holding the patents would receive payment from a surplus income of
60
$90,886.
As development proceeded, Edison advanced the level of experimen-
tation from components to laboratory-scale models of the system and then
to a small, pilot-scale system for lighting Menlo Park in December 1879.
Because the components were new and because Edison wanted to control
their manufacture, Lowrey assisted in the formation of several companies.
Edison had to draw heavily on his own resources to fund these manufac-
turing companies. Edison and Lowrey also founded an operating company
to build a central-station system that would both function commercially
and serve as a demonstration for potential franchise purchasers.
T h e organization and management of the companies formed by Lowrey
and Edison in connection with the electric lighting system have been de-

59
For the reaction of the scientific community to Edison, Edison's inventions, and especially
the claims made for the generator, see David Hounshell, "Edison and the Pure Science Ideal
in Nineteenth-Century America," Scientific American, February 1980, p. 614. More general
reactions are analyzed in Jean-Jacques Salomon, "Public Reactions to Science and Technology:
T h e Wizard Faces Social Judgment," in Science, Technology and the Human Prospect, ed. C. Starr
and P. Ritterbush (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), pp. 77-93.1 am indebted to Dr. Thomas
Simpson of St. J o h n ' s College, Sante Fe, New Mexico, for his views in comparing arc-light
and incandescent-lamp generators.
60
For a discussion of this cost analysis, see Hughes, "Electrification of America," pp. 1 3 3 -
35.

61
 39 INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Figure 11.6. Edison's estimate for a
10,000-lamp central station. From Menlo Capital Investment: Depreciation
'ark Notebook no. 120 (1880). Courtesy of
the Edison Archives, Edison National Power plan: building $ 8,500 ' 27c $ 170
Historic Site, West Orange, N.J. Boilers and auxiliary equipment 30.180 10% 3,018
Steam engines and dynamos 48,000 3% 1.440
Auxiliary electrical equipment 2,000. 2% 40
Conductors 57,000 2% 1,140
Meters 5,000 5% 250

Total 5150,680 $6,058

Operating and O t h e r Expenses:
Labor (Daily):
Chief engineer $ 5.00
Assistant engineer 3.00
Wiper 1,50
Principal.fireman 2.25
Assistant fireman 1.75
Chief'voltage regulator 2.25
Assistant voltage regulator 1.75
. Two laborers 3,00
Total $20.50
Labor (Annual) . $ 7,482:
Other;
Executive w-ages (annual) . $ 4.000
Rent, insurance and taxes 7,000
Depreciation. . . . . 6.058
. Coal (annual) 8.212
(S2.80/ton;: 3 # / h . p . hour;.
5 hours daily: l,200 h,.p.)
Oil, waste, and water 2.737
Lamps (30.000 at 35c each) 10,500

Total . $45,989 •
Estimated Minimum Income from 10,000 Installed Lamps $136,875
• •. -Expenses - 45,939

$ 90.836

6 1
scribed well e l s e w h e r e . H e r e it is i m p o r t a n t to stress that t h e pristine
character of the c o m p a n i e s manifested Edison's determination to create a
c o h e r e n t s y s t e m . T h e first c o m p a n y — t h e E d i s o n Electric L i g h t C o m p a n y
( E E L C ) — w a s f o r m e d on 15 O c t o b e r 1878 essentially to f u n d Edison's in-
v e n t i o n , r e s e a r c h , a n d d e v e l o p m e n t projects a n d to b r i n g a r e t u r n on his
i n v e s t m e n t t h r o u g h the sale or licensing of patents on the system t h r o u g h -
o u t the world. T h e E d i s o n Electric Illuminating C o m p a n y of N e w York, a
utility, or o p e r a t i n g , c o m p a n y , was i n c o r p o r a t e d in D e c e m b e r 1 8 8 0 as a
licensee of the p a r e n t E d i s o n Electric Light C o m p a n y . U n d e r Edison's
personal supervision, the E E I C would build the central generating station
o n Pearl Street i n N e w Y o r k City w h i c h b e g a n c o m m e r c i a l o p e r a t i o n i n
S e p t e m b e r 1 8 8 2 . I n 1 8 8 1 E d i s o n also established i n N e w Y o r k City t h e
E d i s o n M a c h i n e W o r k s to build d y n a m o s and the Edison Electric T u b e
C o m p a n y to manufacture underground conductors. T h e Edison Lamp
Works, o r g a n i z e d in 1880, t u r n e d out incandescent lamps in quantity (see
Fig. II.7). E d i s o n also e n t e r e d into a p a r t n e r s h i p with S i g m u n d B e r g m a n n ,
a f o r m e r E d i s o n e m p l o y e e , to set up a c o m p a n y to p r o d u c e various acces-

Passer, Electrical Manufacturers.

62
 40 NETWORKS OF POWER

Figure U.7. The incandescent-lamp factory, Menlo Park, 1880, part of the Edison manufacturing system. Executive staff (front row, left to
right): Philip Dyer, William Hammer, Francis Upton, and James Bradley. Courtesy of tlie Edison Archives, Edison National Historic site, West
Orange, N.J.

sories. As engineer and manager, Edison was the pivotal figure in all of
these companies during the early years, but for him the focus and the
commitment remained invention (see Fig. I I . 8 ) .
T h e history of the design and construction of the Pearl Street Station of
62
the Edison Electric Illuminating Company has been told by m a n y . One
especially serious engineering problem encountered in the construction of
the station was the laying down of the distribution system underground.
As noted earlier, the cost of the distribution system was a critical problem

62
Of the secondary works, Matthew Josephson's Edison tells the story with unusual clarity
and interest and includes an extensive bibliography of articles about the historic station. The
Edison Pioneers have recounted their experiences and other authors have celebrated the
achievement on various anniversaries of the station's opening. Essays by Edison's contem-
poraries can be found, for example, in the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies'
Edisonia. Especially valuable because of its extensive reprinting of early source material and
information on the Pearl Street station and the Edison Electric Illuminating Co. is Payson
Jones's History of the Consolidated Edison System. T h e Consolidated Edison Co. of New York is
a successor company to the EEIC.

63
 41 INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
TrW EDISON i l ^ C T R I C LTCrfT COiCPANY
P a r e n t o f a l l g d i s o n e l e c t r i c l i g h t e n t e r p r i s e s , o r g a n i z e d b y C r o s v e n o r P . Lowrey a s a m e a n 8 o f f i n a n c i n g Thomas A . S d l s o n * s I n v e n t i o n o f a c o m p l e t e
i n c a n d e s c e n t e l e c t r i c l i g h t eyatsm and o f p r o m o t i n g i t s a d o p t i o n t h r o u g h o u t t h e w o r l d . I n c o r p o r a t e d O c t o b e r 1 5 , 1 8 7 8 : merged w i t h i t a own s u b s i d i a r y
The S d i a o n Company ?or I s o l a t e d L i g h t i n g December J l . 1336 t o form "Sdiaon E l e c t r i c L i g h t Coo pan y , " w h i c h wae e u c c e e d e d a s t h e p a r e n t S d l s o n e n t e r -
p r i s e by t h e 3DIS0N GJ?NSRAL 3L3CTRIC COMPANY i n 1 8 8 ^ and t h e G 2 N 3 R A L SLSCTRIC COMPANY i n 1 8 9 2 . C o n t r o l o f s u b o r d i n a t e c o m p a n i e s m a i n t a i n e d by l i c e n s e
o o n t r s c t a or sgreemanta. .

THt UDISON SL3CTRIC ILLUMINATING COMPANY OP NSW T H i SDISON U A C K X Y 3 WOSXS, an I m m e d i a t e o u t g r o w t h

YORK, l i c e n s e e o f t h e p a r e n t S d i a o n S l e c t r i c o f Thomas A . S d i a o n ' s Menlo Park Machine Shop,
L i g h t Company and b u i l d e r of New York C i t y * e I n 1881 e s t a b l i s h e d a t 10U Goerck S t r e e t , New
pioneer Pearl Street S t a t i o n . Founded b y York C i t y and M a n u f a c t u r e r o f P e a r l S t r e e t ' s
T h o a a s A . S d i s o n , C r o s v e n o r P . Lowrey and o t h e r s . w o r l d famous S d i e o n "Jumbo" dynamos - A p r e d e c e s -
I n c o r p o r a t e d December I7i 1 8 8 0 ; c e n t r a l s t a t i o n s o r o f t h e G e n e r a l S l e c t r i c Company.
s e r v i c e s t a r t e d Septenber 1882. Predecessor
of t h e ( o l d ) Mew York S d i s o n Company and t h e THS (SDISON) SLSCTRIC TUBS COMPANY, 65 Wash-
p r e s e n t C o n s o l i d a t e d S d i s o n Coopany o f New Y o r k . i n g t o n S t r e e t , New York C i t y , e s t a b l i s h e d b y
Inc. Thomas A . S d i s o n I n 1 8 8 1 . Builder of the Pearl
S t r e e t S y s t e m ' s underground c o n d u c t o r s . Merged
THS SDISON SLSCTRIC ILLUMINATING COMPANY 0? by The 3 d l a o n Machine Works In l B S p .
BROOKLYN, a l i c e n s e e o f t h e p a r e n t S d l s o n S l e o t r i c
L i g h t Company. Founded by Jdvard H* J o h n s o n • THS SDISON LAMP SORKS, e s t a b l i s h e d at Menlo Park
Slgmund Bergmann and o t h e r S d l s o n p i o n e e r s . i n 1880 b y Thomae A . S d i s o n . F r a n c i s R . U p t o n ,
I n c o r p o r a t e d Maroh 10» 1 8 8 7 ; c e n t r a l s t a t i o n s e r - C h a r l e s B a t e h e l o r and Edward H . J o h n a o n , a l l o f
v i c e s t a r t e d September 2 , l B B ^ . Predeceeeor of whom w e r e P e a r l S t r e e t p e r i o d d i r e c t o r s o f t h e
t h e p r e s e n t B r o o k l y n S d i a o n Company, I n c . , a f i r s t New York S d i e o n Company I n t h e f o l l o w i n g
s u b s i d i a r y o f t h e C o n s o l i d a t e d S d i a o n Company o f decade* Operator o f t h e w o r l d ' s f i r s t i n c a n d e s -
New Y o r k , I n o , c e n t e l e c t r i c lamp f a c t o r y a t Menlo P a r k , I n
w h i c h w e r e p r o d u c e d t h e bamboo f i l a m e n t c a r b o n
0TH3R SDISOW SLSCTRIC ILLUMINATIHC COMPANIES. lamps l i g h t e d b y t h e P e a r l S t r e e t S t a t i o n i n 1882,
I n many American c i t i o o S d i s o n e l e c t r i c i l l u - I n c o r p o r a t e d a s t h e S d l s o n Lamp Company i n 1 8 8 U .
minating oompanles were organized aa l i c e n e e e s A p r e d e c e s s o r o f t h e G e n e r a l S l e c t r i c Company*
o f t h e p a r e n t S d l s o n S l e c t r i c L i g h t Company,
w h i c h owned t h e p a t e n t r i g h t s t o S d i s o n ' a e l s e • BSRCMAVN a COMPANY, f o u n d e r s of t h e e l e c t r i c
trio light inventions. I a t h i s way t h e S d l s o n l i g h t a c c e s s o r i s e manufacturing i n d u s t r y . - S s t a c -
e l e c t r i c l i g h t system spread throughout the l i s . n s d a t 1 0 8 - 1 1 * W o o s t e r S t r e e t , New York C i t y »
United S t a t e e . * - early in 1881. O r i g i n a l p a r t n e r s * e r o Sljmund
&*rjj'aann and Edward K. J o h n s o n , a f t e r w a r d J o i n e d
SDrSGH COMPANY FOB ISOLATE LIGHTING, a s t o c k b y Thomas A . i d i e o n . Manufactured equipment f o r
c o n t r o l l e d subsidiary of the o r i g i n a l Sdleon pioneor Pearl Street Syatea. A predecessor of the
S l e e t r i o L i g h t Company, o r g a n i z e d i n 1 6 8 1 * and C s n w a l tSlectrJ.C Company*
merged w i t h t h e p a r e n t company t o form "Edison
S l e o t r i c L i g h t Company" I n 1 8 8 6 .

?HS THOMAS A, SDISON CONSTRUCTION D3PAHTMSNT, UNITED SDISQM MANUFACTURING COMPANY, o r g a n i z e d In

o r g a n i z e d by Thomas A. S d l s o n and merged by the l a t e 1880'a aa a subsidiary of the three
The S d i s o n Coopany For I s o l a t e d L i g h t i n g p r i o r S d l s o n m a n u f a c t u r i n g c o m p a n i e s ) S d i a o n Machine
t o October 2 8 , 1 8 8 * . Works, S d l s o n Lamp Company and Bergmann a Company.

Figure 11.8. Edison's manufacturing system. From Jones, History of the Consolidated Edison System, p. 13. Courtesy of the Consolidated
Edison Co, of New York.

that Edison recognized early in the development of the system, and thus,
inventive talent and developmental skills were heavily invested in the prob-
lem. Subsequently, other utilities also found that distribution and trans-
mission were problems of the first order, the popular attention given to
lamps and generators notwithstanding. The electrical network is, after all,
the essence of the system.
Edison's ultimate objective was to introduce central-station supply. A
central station would distribute electric light to the public, in contrast to
generating plants, or isolated stations, which would be used only by theiif
owners. The steam boilers, steam engines, generators, and auxiliary equip-
ment would be housed in the station building itself; from the central station
the distribution system would, in the case of New York City, fan overman
area of one square mile. Edison chose 257 Pearl Street, in the financial
district, as the location of the New York CSty"s"ta5on. So located, the central
station would supply restaurants and shops that could afford the new light
as a way of attracting customers and would illuminate workplaces and
offices that coulcf afford it as an unusually effective light without hazardous

64
 42
*xa*r'_ftrr'#(i 47?'..
Figure 11.9. Thomas Edison, 1882.
Courtesy of t)ie Edison Archives, Edison
National Historic Site, West Orange, N.J.
NETWORKS OF POWER
and noxious fumes. In the Wall Street district, the station would also catch
the attention of financiers and the investing public, persons who were
needed to fund Edison stations elsewhere.
In 1882 Edison was in New York supervising construction of the Pearl
Street system. As chief engineer, he spent long hours, week after week,
not in an office, but out with the workers sweating in the hot summer sun
as they wrestled with the new and difficult task of laying the underground
cables for the Pearl Street station. Edison did not stop at supervision; he
worked in the dug-out trenches with the laborers, responding to the most
minute problems, many of which arose from the difficulties of maintaining
adequate insulation. Often after a frantic day unregulated by the clock, he
would sleep for only a few hours on piles of tubes stacked in the stadon
building, his bed place softened only by his overcoat. Invention continued
as problems arose during the development and engineering phases of con-
struction. Edison applied for 60 patents in 1880, 89 patents in 1881, and
107 in 1882. Most covered inventions pertaining to the electric lighting
system. Only once again in his lifedme, in 1883, a year in which he applied
for 64 patents, would the total n u m b e r of his patents reach the level applied
63
during the three years he dedicated to electric lighting.
On 4 September 1882 J o h n W. I.ieb, an Edison electrician, threw the
switch that fed current from a J u m b o generator in the Pearl Street station
to the first of the lamps installed in the district. T h e generators bore the
name of the great elephant brought to America by P. T. Barnum. Edison
switched on the lamps in 23 Wall Street, the offices of Drexel, Morgan and
Company. T h e single generator was driven by a directly connected Porter-
Allen engine supplied with steam from Babcock & Wilcox boilers (the two
components of the system which were unusual in that they had not been
built by Edison). Initially, only about one-third of the one-square-mile dis-
trict to be supplied from the station had current and only four hundred
lamps were lit. In place, but not operating the first day, were five other
Jumbos, steam engines, and boilers. The noncondensing Porter-Allen steam
engines were rated at 125 nominal h.p., weighed about 6,500 pounds, took
steam at 120 pounds per square inch of pressure, and ran at 350 revolutions
per minute. They were designed to light twelve hundred 16-c.p. lamps.
When cooled with an air blast, the machines could supply 850 amps at
115—120 volts. T h e generators weighed about seven times more than the
steam engines driving them.
Control and regulation, vital functions in this and subsequent supply
systems, have been overlooked by many historians, but they were not over-
looked by Edison and his associates (see Fig. 11.10). Voltage regulation was
obtained by inserting and removing resistance from the field circuit of the
generators. An automadc indicator utilizing an electromagnet connected
across the main circuit indicated the voltage level. If the voltage was within
one or two volts of the desired amount, the indicator arm, the armature
of the electromagnet, remained in a neutral position in balance between
the pull of the electromagnet and the pull of a delicately adjusted spring.
If the line voltage rose, the armature would swing under the influence of
" A r t h u r E. Kennelly, "Thomas Edison," in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical
Memoirs (Washington, D.C., 1943), p. 301.
65
43 INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
the stronger magnetic field toward the electromagnet and close a contact,
thereby lighting a red lamp; if the line voltage dropped, the attraction of
the electromagnet weakened and the spring exerted the greater pull, caus-
ing the armature to reverse its swing and to close the low-side contacts and
light a blue lamp. The attendant accordingly turned a handwheel to control
the amount of field resistance. To devise such a control to match output
and load was simple for Edison, for electromagnetic devices, like relays,
64
were the essence of the telegraph he knew so well.
Edison's station was noted for its handling of material and for its eco-
nomical engineering. An uninterrupted flow of material and energy would
later characterize power plant engineering. A 20-h.p. engine drove a screw
conveyor for lifting coal from the vault under the building to a position
above the boilers where the coal dropped by gravity into the stoke hole of
the boiler. Another screw conveyor took ashes from beneath the grates and
discharged them into a container under the sidewalk. The exhaust from
the steam engines passed through feed-water heaters and then into the
atmosphere; a fan forced combustion air into the furnace and cooling air
onto the generator commutator. Under full headway, the four boilers, rated
at 240 h.p. each, would consume about five tons of coal and 11,500 gallons
of water per day (see Fig. II. 11).
v
Initially, the most serious problem arose when two generator sets were
connected in parallel. The governors of the two steam engines began to
hunt, first cutting off and then providing steam for full power. Edison •
found an ingenious means of temporarily correcting the anomaly by me-
chanically connecting the governors of the steam engines. In November
1882, however, two Armington & Sims engines were substituted for the
Porter-Allen engines, and when these operated successfully with generators
connected in parallel, all of the Porter-Allen engines were replaced. It is
interesting to note that this difficulty involved a component that was not
designed and built by Edison for the system.
Countless other problems plagued the station during the breaking-in
period. Current leaked from conductors and junction boxes under the
streets. In addition, there were fires from faulty wiring. Slowly, however,
service increased. On 1 October 1882, a few weeks after service began,
wiring was in place for 1,626 lamps in the district and 1,284 were in use;
on 1 October the following year there was wiring for 11,555 lamps and
8,573 were in use. The Pearl Street station remained in service until 2
January 1890, when a disastrous fire shut down the original sysTemTTh^n,
on 12 January of that year, a reconstructed station began supplying current
from Pearl Street. On 1 April 1894 the station was retired and the building
was sold. Then only a plaque marked the historic site where Edison dem-
onstrated so effectively his system for generating, controlling, distributing,
measuring, and utilizing electricity for lighting.
If the Pearl Street station had not been part of a business as well as a
technological system, however, it might not have survived until the fire of
1890. A similar station in London was abandoned several years after its
founding, for financial and political reasons (see pp. 55—62 below). The
64
This account of the station and its equipment is based in part on Hughes, Thomas Edison,
pp. 29-36. *

66
 44 NETWORKS OF POWER

Figure n.U. Pearl Street station, 1882: Engineering drawings. From Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, Edisonia, p. 64.

67
INVENTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Pearl Street station and the Edison Electric Illuminating Company (EEIC)
were sustained not only because of the capital invested in the plant and
the company but also because the other companies of the Edison system'
depended on them as showpieces and inducements for others to purchase
Edison franchises and Edison equipment. This part of the early Edison
history is rarely mentioned in the Edison lore; Edison and his associates
65
were reluctant to release any detailed operating figures at the time. The
annual reports of the parent Edison Electric Light Company and corre-
spondence now available, however, provide evidence of the EEIC's near
collapse.
The EEIC did not charge customers for electricity in 1882 and showed
a loss of over $12,000 for the first two quarters of 1883, followed by a net
66
loss for the year. In 1885 the company reported a net income of 6 percent
on its capital investment of $828,800 and declared a 4 percent dividend.
The latter may have been intended to encourage investors, who were needed
for the construction of a new central station uptown. The company pre-
dicted that the new station would be more profitable because the newer
Edison three-wire distribution system would lower costs substantially and
because the load in the new district would be more evenly distributed to
accommodate use at all hours of the day or night. The relationship between
regularity of load and per-unit cost (load factor) had been recognized as a
critical problem.
Nevertheless, Edison encountered difficulties in funding the expansion.
The Edison Electric Light Company, the owner of one-quarter of the EEIC's
operating stock, appropriated $171,200 of this stock as a trust fund to assist
in raising funds. Despite this, the promise of larger profits from the new
station, and the further inducement of a 20 percent bonus on the new
expansion stock to EEIC stockholders, the company still experienced dif-
ficulties. A private canvassing of stockholders revealed that not one-tenth
of the million and a half dollars authorized could be raised from this source.
The prominent financier Henry Villard, an investor in Edison stock who
was then residing in his native Germany after a reverse of his American
fortunes, heard from'his American correspondent that informed opinion
was disgusted with the entire Edison business and believed that Edison
officials were getting rich at the expense of EEIC stockholders. Villard's
correspondent advised him to ignore the rosy, vague promises of the com-
pany's officials and not to purchase the expansion stock. Faced by the
apathy of such stockholders, the company then formed a guarantee syn-
dicate with the promise of profit for syndicate participants in the form of
a large bonus of EEIC stock. News of this venture was passed on to Villard
in February 1886 with the advice that he not "touch it with a ten-foot
67
pole." Finally, a "Drexel Morgan Syndicate" with heavy investments in
68
the Edison system "[squeezed] out some money somewhere."

63
See p. 71 below.
86
Edison Electric Light Co., Annual Report, 1883 (New York: EEIC, 1884); and Edison
Electric Illuminating Co., Annual Report, 1885 (New York: EEIC, 1886).
67
C. A. Spofford to Henry Villard, 12 January, 18 January, 25 January, and 26 February
1886, Box 124, Villard Papers, Harvard University Library, Cambridge, Mass.
68
Spofford to Viliard, 26 February 1886, Villard Papers.

68
NETWORKS OF POWER
Not only surviving but expanding, the EEIC, a critical component of
Edison's system, seems to have stimulated the sale of Edison franchises by
the parent company and of equipment by the manufacturing companies.
The sale of franchises in major cities proceeded briskly at the same time
that, behind the scenes, Edison's backers were having difficulty financing
their showpiece. By 1888, large Edison companies or utilities were located
in Detroit, Michigan; New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Paul, Minnesota; Chi-
cago, Illinois; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Brooklyn, New York. Abroad,
central lighting stadons had been established in Milan and Berlin. In 1890
the New York udlity reported dramatic growth since 1888: the number of
its customers had risen from 710 to 1,698; the number of lamps (16 c.p.)
used had increased from 16,377 to 64,174; and the company's net earnings
69
had nearly doubled, jumping from $116,235 to $229,078. Indicative of
the approach of a new era of electric power, in 1889 the company reported
the first "motorload" (470 h.p.).

EdisoA Electric Illuminating Co., Annual Report, 1890. (New York: EEIC, 1891).

69
George Eastman's Modern Stone-Age
Family
Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

MARC OLIVIER

Before the snapshot, photography was largely a gentleman's hobby, a pastime

that required technical skill and costly equipment. George Eastman, founder
of the Eastman Kodak Company, transformed the practice of photography—
first in 1888 by replacing the complexities of wet-plate processing with a
twenty-five-dollar handheld camera (preloaded with film for a hundred ex-
posures and advertised with the slogan, "You press the button, we do the
rest"), and then, in 1900, by democratizing the snapshot with the simple and
affordable one-dollar "Brownie" camera. By 1905, an estimated ten million
Americans had become amateur photographers, most of whom were previ-
ously excluded from photographic expression because of gender, age, or eco-
nomic status.' That women and children were particularly targeted is evi-
denced in the decision to name the dollar camera after the Brownies, who
were invisible sprites of Scottish folklore that writer and illustrator Palmer
Cox (1840-1924) had commercialized through a series of illustrated poems
and an unprecedented number of product endorsements that had appeared
in popular women's and children's magazines from the 1880s onward.
Although hardly innovative in itself, Eastman's appropriation of Cox's
Brownies takes on particular importance when considered in the larger
context of an emerging generation of snapshot photographers. The aggres-
sive marketing of the Brownie camera redefined not only who could take

Marc Olivier is associate professor of French at Brigham Young University. His publica-
tions focus on literature, science, and technology and include studies of microscopy and
literature, Rousseau and botany, and the popular dissemination of natural history. He
was guest curator at Brigham Young University's Museum of Ait for "Nostalgia and
Technology" an exhibition on the socialization of domestic technology from the seven-
teenth century to the present.
©2007 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
OO40-165Xy07/4801-0001$8.00

1. Graham King, Say "Cheese"! The Snapshot as Art and Social History (London,
1986), 9.

70
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
photographs, but for what purpose. As I argue here, Eastman's conflation
of the product with its commercialized mythic namesake was a campaign
to portray snapshot photography as a p h e n o m e n o n both modern and
magic, one that fulfilled the primitive urge toward visual communication.
Superficially, this may seem no more than a ploy to reach a broad, new con-
sumer base. The Kodak trade circulars, advertising ephemera, and corre-
J A N U A R Y spondence archived at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York,

2007 and the materials related to Palmer Cox at the Strong Museum, also in
V O L 48 Rochester, tell another story, however. At a deeper level, Eastman's exploita-
tion of a figure steeped in folklore actually offered a magical alternative to
2
textual narrative.
This study focuses on the marketing of the Brownie camera from its
introduction in 1900 to 1914 and the discontinuation of the "Brownie
Book," also known as "The Book of the Brownies" (Brownie-specific adver-
tising brochures aimed at children). It revisits the importance of the
Brownie in Kodak history and explores the social impact of an emerging
technology. The complex history of the Brownie combines the study of
folklore, the history of advertising, and the history of snapshot photogra-
phy. If Eastman's biographers and the historians of Kodak have often trivi-
alized the toy-like box camera, they have followed a tradition that grants
3
artistic merit to photography largely on the basis of technical skill. Paul
Sternberger's study of amateur photography and art demonstrates that
contempt for the "press-the-button-we-do-the-rest-amateur" during the
earliest years of snapshot photography extended beyond the professional
community and into amateur photographic societies longing to establish

2.1 would like to thank Kathy Connor, George Eastman House archivist, who facil-
itated my access to Eastman's correspondence and a collection of materials related to the
Brownie camera, as well as Todd Gustavson, technology curator, who helped me with the
collection of cameras, packaging, and select trade brochures. The Richard and Ronay
Menschel Library at the Eastman House (with more than 43,000 volumes about photog-
raphy and film) was also useful for its large collection of trade journals. The Strong
Museum, also in Rochester, New York, has an excellent collection of advertising ephem-
era related to Palmer Cox's Brownies as well as first-edition copies of his series of
Brownie books. I also thank David Hughes, secretary and magazine editor for the Kodak
Brownie Collectors Group in England, for supplementing my materials with a copy of
the 1902 "The Book of the Brownies," which is not available at the Eastman House.
3. Elizabeth Brayer devotes less than two pages (of 529) to the Brownie, making it a
footnote to the development of Kodak in George Eastman: A Biography (Baltimore,
1996). Carl W. Ackerman's otherwise superior biography mentions the Brownie on only
one page {George Eastman [Boston, 1930]). Douglas Collins devotes approximately one
paragraph to that camera in The Story of Kodak (New York, 1990). In The Snapshot
Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography (London, 1977), Brian Coe and Paul Gates
include a brief chapter on the Brownie. Outside of specialized collectors' groups, the
most thorough treatment of the Brownie camera has been that of Nancy Martha West in
Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), who nevertheless fails to
mention "The Brownie's Story of the Brownie."

71
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie
4
their legitimacy. Further removing the Brownie from serious discussion,
the Eastman Kodak Company warned in 1900 that "The Brownie is not a
Kodak" and urged retailers to shun such brand-demeaning slogans as "A
5
genuine Eastman Kodak for 99 cents." Consequentiy, the camera that
brought snapshot photography to the masses is usually credited as doing
just that and nothing more. Relatively little scholarly attention has been
paid to the meaning of the campaign that offered a new form of expression
to millions of consumers. The Brownie tends to lose its historical specificity
in works treating snapshot photography, and is often overshadowed by its
6
more expensive predecessor, the Kodak Number 1 of 1888. Moreover, de-
spite its evocative name, the Brownie has received no attention from schol-
ars of folklore, who must contend with a disciplinary bias against technol-
7
ogy. It is easy to imagine that a folkloric approach to Eastman's Brownie
yields a cautionary tale of how "products of the imagination are in danger
8
of becoming instrumentalized and commercialized."

4. B. F. McManus, quoted in Paul Spencer Sternberger, Between Amateur and

Aesthete: The Legitimization of Photography as Art in America, 1880-1900 (Albuquerque,
N.M., 2001), 112 and chap. 4.
5. Kodak trade circular, no. 4 (March 1900), 1 (all "trade circulars" were published
in Rochester by the Eastman Kodak Company). The Brownie was meant to be an entry-
level camera for children who would grow into life-long consumers of the more expen-
sive Kodak line. The reality of consumer response is addressed later in this article.
6. Effectively bypassing the Brownie in her fascinating study, Marianne Hirsch ref-
erences the 1888 Kodak and then concludes: "Thus photography quickly became the
family's primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation" {Family Frames:
Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory [Cambridge, Mass., 1997], 6). Mary Warner
Marieo's Photography: A Cultural History (New York, 2002), 169, indudes a passing ref-
erence. Douglas R. Nickel's introductory essay to the catalog Snapshots: The Photography
of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present (San Francisco, 1998) contains a balanced, if brief,
view of the culture generated by Eastman's Brownie and Kodak cameras (pp. 9-15).
Geoffrey Batchen employs categories from material culture to study "vernacular photo
objects" in Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 59.
His work, as well as Patrick Maynard's The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through
Photography (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames, and Julia Hirsch's
Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect (Oxford, 1981) exemplify the histori-
cal and philosophical scholarship on photography that does not deal specifically with the
Brownie.
7. Folklorists continue to struggle with the terms "folklore" and "technology" as op-
posing binaries. Often romanticized as the antithesis of civilization, the purity of the
"folk" mythos is jeopardized by technology. See Barbara Kiishenblatt-Gimblett, "Folk-
lore's Crisis," Journal of American Folklore (1998): 281-327, which points out the irony of
using modern recording devices to preserve oral histories and tales while shunning those
same devices as a legitimate part of a folk community. A pioneering attempt to contend
with the romantic ideal of preindustrial peasant culture is Herman Bausinger's Folk Cul-
ture in a World of Technology, trans. Elke Dettmer (Bloomington, Ind., 1990). See also Re-
gina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison, Wise,
1997).
8. Jack David Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales
(Lexington, Ky., 2002), 3. Zipes revolutionized the study of folklore and fairy tales by

72
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D CULTURE

And yet, Eastman's "instrumentalization" of folklore begins with an al-

ready-exploited sprite, first commercialized nearly two decades earlier by
Palmer Cox. Thus, in order to better reveal the significance of the Brownie
camera, I will first explore the mutadons of its eponymous folkloric figure.
After demonstrating how Cox transformed the sprite from solitary recluse
to advocate of technology and "spokescreature," I will look at what makes
JANUARY Eastman's use of the character unique, and how the connections between it,
the product, and the consumer helped define snapshot photography.
2007 Finally, I will consider how the Brownie character declined and was gradu-
VOL. 48 ally replaced with "Brownie" boys and girls.

Cox's Transformation

The original Brownie is a reclusive character, an invisible sprite of Scot-

tish folktales. As a youth of Scotch-Irish descent, Cox is said to have "heard
and absorbed the folklore of the Grampian Mountains of Scodand" at the
9
firesides around his country home of Granby, Quebec. The typical Brownie
of those tales would have been both a mischievous and helpful domestic
creature, an unseen resident attached to a particular house. Properly re-
warded with a well-placed bowl of cream or a bit of cake, the capricious ser-
vant was said to perform useful tasks while its adoptive human family slept.
When offended, however, the Brownie could become a source of annoyance,
10
plaguing the household with tricks. When Cox adapted the tales of his
childhood for publication in American children's magazines and a series of
illustrated books, the creatures were no longer solitary nor attached to a par-
ticular domestic space; they had become a self-governing, independent, and
11
venturesome band (fig. I ) . As noted by Roger Cummings, w h o is the
author of the only book-length study of Cox's Brownies: "The Brownie band
is thoroughly democratic. Except in Palmer Cox's Brownies (the play), The
Brownies and Prince Florimel, and The Brownie Clown ofBrownietown, none
12
of the group is singled out as a permanent commander, leader, or guide."
Moreover, the group became increasingly cosmopolitan as Cox introduced
characters of various nationalities and occupations, the most popular of

examining their social function with the tools of modern literary theory. He is one of the
relatively few folklorists to address the relation between technology and the folk—usu-
ally in a manner that emphasizes the negative impact of technology.
9. Roger W. Cummings, Humorous but Wholesome: A History of Palmer Cox and the
Brownies (Watkins Glen, N.Y., 1973), 16.
10. Marc Alexander, A Companion to the Folklore, Myths, and Customs of Britain
(Stroud, U.K., 2002), 36. See also Alison Jones, Larousse Dictionary of World Folklore
(Edinburgh, 1995), 82.
11. Cox began publishing illustrated poems about the Brownies in children's maga-
zines in 1883. The first of the sixteen Brownie books was published in 1887.
12. Cummings, 113.

73
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

FIG. 1 Illustrations of Brownies. (From Palmer Cox, Another Brownie Book [New
York, 1890], 110. Courtesy of the L Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee
Library, Brigham Young University.)

which included Dude, Rough Rider (modeled after Theodore Roosevelt),

13
Chinaman, Irishman, Policeman, and Soldier.
The combination of individualism, curiosity, industry, and harmonious
social interaction suggests an Americanization of the Brownie. In the words
of Cummings:

Though the Brownies are apolitical and emerge nightly from a region
which is never geographically defined, to anyone who reads even a
few of the Brownie books it is obvious that the world of the Brownies
not only is Utopian, but embodies characteristics commonly associ-
14
ated with the American dream.

As evidence of Cummings's assertion, the skeptic need only consult the third
in the series of Brownie books, The Brownies at Home (1893), in which out-
ings include a trip to the White House, an excursion to the Pennsylvania
State House (Independence Hall), and a preview of the 1893 Columbian Ex-
position in Chicago that culminates in the patriotic scene of the Brownies
hoisting a giant American flag as their contribution to the World's Fair.
Cox's Brownies, Americanized and Utopian, also loved to explore the
wide world, both geographical and technological. Books such as The Brown-
ies around the World (1894), The Brownies through the Union (1895), and The
Brownies in the Philippines (1904) demonstrate a penchant for travel. But of
greater import for this study is the interest in technology they manifest in
their many adventures. In Another Brownie Book (1890), delighted Brownies
take themselves for a wild ride on a new steam locomotive, investigate the
workings of a tugboat in a canal, and study entomological specimens pro-
jected through a stereopticon machine. In that same collection of adven-
tures, the Brownies experiment with the telephone—a device that less than
15
10 percent of readers across America would then find in their own homes.
Cox's band of Brownies immediately adapts to life in the modern world:

13. See Lynda McCurdy, "Palmer Cox: Patriarch of Pint-Sized Pleasure," 1974, type-
script, Strong Museum, 22-23.
14. Cummings (n. 9 above), 113-14.
15. See Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940
(Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 22.

74
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

A telephone gave great delight

To those who tried it half the night,
Some asking after fresh supplies;
Or if their stocks were on the rise;
What ship was safe; what bank was firm;
Or who desired a second term.
JANUARY Thus messages rant to and fro
2007 With "Who are you?" "Hallo!" "Hallo!"
V 0 L 4g And all the repetitions known
16
To those who use the telephone.

Twenty years later, in The Brownies' Latest Adventures (1910), they once
again champion the now more c o m m o n telephone by repairing broken
lines and downed poles after a severe storm. Their work symbolizes a new
role in linking domesticity to industry. Far from being the solitary noctur-
nal creatures of folklore, Cox's Brownies enjoy all the latest trappings of
modernity and seem to prefer human technical achievement over their own
magical powers. They effectively enchant the machines they use, thereby
responding to the need for wonder in the modern age—a need articulated
1
by Andre Kedros as "a modern marvel, capable of exorcising the menacing
technological environment and showing the ways leading to the mastery no
17
longer of nature, but of technology itself." The Brownies help anchor the
shock of new technologies to traditions of unseen forces and magical
18
helpers. Unlike their earlier folk counterparts, Cox's Brownies venture
boldly beyond the home.
In reinventing the reclusive Brownies as advocates of technological
progress and democratic values, Palmer Cox quickly realized their potential
for commercial endorsements. After first appearing in the p o e m "The
Brownies' Ride," in the February 1883 issue of. St Nicholas magazine, by
November of that year they were advertising Ivory Soap on the cover of
Harpers Young People magazine, a debut that marked not only their emer-
gence as spokescreatures but the beginning of modern commercial charac-

16. Palmer Cox, Another Brownie Book (New York, 1890), 141.
17. Andre Kedros, "Le Merveilleux dans la litterature pour la jeunesse a Tere tech-
nologique," 15th Congress of International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) 28
(1977): 23-31 (my translation). For a study of large-scale technological enchantment, see
David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). The effect gen-
erated by the spectacular projects examined in Nye's book differs from that produced by
lesser technologies (such as the Brownie camera) that come to reside in the home. As Nye
apdy demonstrates, the massive scale of the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, or the
Statue of Liberty rivals natural wonders and creates awe through physical grandeur—an
impossible feat for a small box camera. Instead, the Brownie's enchantment comes from
its control over temporality, a theme I address below.
18. For a discussion of photography's relation to the supernatural, see Nancy Martha
West, "Camera Fiends: Early Photography, Death, and the Supernatural," Centennial Re-
view 40 (1996): 170-206.

75
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie
19
ter licensing. For his own profit, Cox consented to the use of his Brownies
20
in advertisements for at least forty products. Beyond that already large
number of authorized endorsements, Brownie look-alikes proliferated in
the mass media without Cox's copyright though with no negative legal
repercussions, given that Cox could not lay claim to the folk Brownie but
only to his own characters. Although the licensed and unlicensed use of the
Brownies in advertising has not been tallied, the number would likely invite
comparisons between Palmer Cox and Walt Disney.
By 1900, Cox had published seven Brownie books, and the Brownies
had endorsed products for nearly seventeen years. Given that degree of
media saturation, Eastman's (unauthorized) use of the Brownies to intro-
21
duce the first one-dollar camera hardly suggests innovative marketing.
Nevertheless, Eastman exploited the characters to a degree unrivaled by his
contemporaries; while Proctor and Gamble can claim the earliest commer-
cial use of the Brownies, no company employed the sprites with as much
impact and meaning as did Eastman Kodak Unlike Ivory Soap and dozens
of other Brownie-endorsed products, Eastman's "Brownie" camera adopted
not only the Brownies' image, but also their name and characteristics. From
his first use of the Brownie in 1900, Eastman increasingly took control of
Palmer Cox's characters. The camera and the Brownie soon became so
inextricably linked that Cox himself adopted photography as part of the
Brownies' world.

The Kodak Brownie

The first announcement of the Brownie camera in a Kodak trade circu-

lar describes the newcomer as "a good, honest little camera that will delight
22
the heart of any boy or girl." Nothing in the appearance of the camera,
which was made of jute board reinforced with wood and covered in imita-
tion black leather, inspires awe or a sense of mystery. The Brownie's cloth-
ing, so to speak, is in the camera's cardboard packaging and printed adver-
tisements, both of which make liberal use of Palmer Cox-style drawings.
The socialization of the Brownie occurs with the help of a hard-hitting
advertising campaign, for which the plan of attack is given to retailers in an
article titled "Ammunition": "The campaign is about to open. The season

19. See Wayne Morgan, "Cox on the Box: Palmer Cox and the Brownies: The First
Licensed Characters, the First Licensed Games," Game Researchers' Notes 2 (1996): 5533-
37. Morgan focuses on the many Brownie games (both licensed and unlicensed), includ-
ing blocks, puzzles, ninepins, marble games, toy artillery, rubber stamps, and ring toss.
20. Cummings (n. 9 above), 101.
21. Like the Eastman House librarians and curators, 1 have been unable to document
the initial decision to use Cox's Brownie in Kodak advertising from Eastman's personal
records and correspondence.
22. Kodak trade circular, no. 3 (February 1900), 1.

76
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D CULTURE

L & s t m a n K o d a K Co.'s

BROWNIE,
CAMERAS
JANUARY

2007

VOL. 4 8

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with our six exposure film cartridges and are so
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At* your dialer or mite us for a Brmmie Camera Club
OmitMuttm. fsoOM in Kodak frins to tht memters.

EASTMAN KODAK CO..

Rochester. N. Y.
FIG. 2 ADVERTISEMENT FOR BROWNIE CAMERAS. (FROM The Youth's Companion,
26 July 1900, 371.)

23
for aggressive work is at hand." Long-range "magazine guns" will assault
consumers with full-page ads, and catalogs will be used for "effective close-
24
range work." A separate article on the Brownie proposes that "[e]very
school boy and girl in the land ought to have a Brownie before the vacation
25
season begins." Finally, in June, full-page Brownie advertisements appear
in the most popular ten-cent magazines, including Sr. Nicholas, the first
h o m e of Palmer Cox's Brownies. A typical ad depicts tiny Brownies crawl-
ing on the camera, walking around the camera, and peering into the lens
(fig. 2). The sprites help give life and movement to the otherwise dull black

23. Kodak trade circular, no. 5 (April 1900). 2.

24. Ibid., 3.
25. Ibid., 6.

77
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

FIG. 3 Brownie Number 1 camera and box, 1901. (Courtesy of t h e George East-
man House, Rochester, N.Y.)

box; they create a kinship, as if t h e device were a n e w i n d u c t e e to t h e

Brownie b a n d .
T h e packaging of the camera, with its colorful images of a cheerful
Brownie using a Brownie camera, envisions t h e snapshot photographer as a
would-be folkloric character (fig. 3). As such, the Brownie-toting Brownie
signals a move from verbal to visual preservation of memory. Inseparable
from its technological double, the sprite personifies t h e transfer of oral tra-
dition to what Scott McQuire, in his work on t h e social effects of the cam-
26
era, calls the " m e m o r y machines" of industrial culture. McQuire notes that
although the traditions of oral culture did n o t die during the nineteenth
century, social and cultural practices shifted t h e b u r d e n of m e m o r y to
mechanized forms: "Increasingly, the story's function as a memory-text was
27
transferred to the newspaper, t h e novel and the film.'' Although a product
of industry, the Brownie camera maintains an anachronistic allegiance to
folk culture, as if the i m p e t u s to create t h e device h a d c o m e from the
Brownies themselves. But as a " m e m o r y machine," t h e Brownie was allied
m u c h m o r e with oral history t h a n with the printed word. The new Brownie
figure asserts an equivalence between snapshot culture a n d preindustrial
traditions of storytelling.
To cultivate t h e camera's identity, Kodak b e g a n s h i p p i n g "Brownie
Books" as early as 1901. The Kodak trade circular called the books "the best
28
Brownie advertisement that has yet been p u t o u t . " The first booklet con-
tained w i n n i n g pictures from a nationwide p h o t o competition. The second,

26. Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time, and Space in
the Age of the Camera (London, 1998), 121.
27. Ibid., 120.
28. Kodak trade circular (February 1901), 3.

78
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
with the slightly altered tide "The Book of the Brownies," begins with "The
Brownie's Story of the Brownie." The tale places the camera's origins in the
world of the Brownies and reads:

Once upon a time the Queen of the Fairies summoned the Chief of
all the Brownies to her presence. "Good Brownie," said she, "for many
January years you have served me faithfully and well, and I now grant you one
2 o q 7 request—your heart's desire." Bowing low the Brownie pondered but
a moment and then replied: "Give to me that which will bring back
vol. 48 pleasures past and double pleasures present—that I may bestow it
upon my earthly friends, the children." Waving once her magic wand,
the Fairy Queen placed in the waiting Brownie's hands a box.
"Speed you back to earth again, and in a city near the great inland
seas, you will find a man having power over light and darkness. Give
to him this box, that he may reproduce it for the benefit of your chil-
dren friends—all you ask for, and more, the box contains."
With box secure in his tiny arms the Brownie vanished and by
means known to Brownies soon placed the box in the hands of the
man by the inland seas.
As all good children know, mortals must heed the behest of the
Fairy Queen, and so the magical box was reproduced again and again
and scattered over the wide world wherever Brownie bands were
found, to whisper in waiting ears the secret of the pleasures in the
litde black box.
This is the Brownie's Story of the Brownie—the litde camera
that has afforded pleasure and education to thousands of children
29
and grown-ups the world over.

Rather than masking the corporate side of production, the tale estab-
lishes a magical provenance for the camera, helping to link Eastman Kodak
to a fairytale world. The tale transforms Eastman ("the man by the inland
seas") into a demiurgic master of light and darkness, a man with power to
reproduce the "magical box" for all the children of the world. The camera's
origin is shown to be the result of a special collaboration: engineering cour-
tesy of the Fairy Queen, and mass reproduction courtesy of George East-
man. Thanks to that collaboration, the mechanisms of mass fabrication
and distribution gain an aura of enchantment. At "the behest of the Fairy
Queen," Eastman's business is the proliferation of otherworldly technology.
Among the attributes of the Brownie camera, the one most central to
"The Brownie's Story of the Brownie" is its power over time. Thanks to the
Brownie's thoughtful wish, human beings receive a means of controlling
the past and adding joy to the present. The temporality of the Brownie
camera is that of the fairies—an eternal present. As poet and cultural critic

29. Eastman Kodak Company, "The Book of the Brownies" (1902), 1-2.

10

79
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

Susan Stewart remarks in her well-known study, On Longing, "[w]hile the

gigantic takes up time and space in history, the fairy lives in a continual
present Fairy rulers are often described as simultaneously ancient and age-
30
less." Similarly, the Brownie camera renders its object as both eternally
present and suddenly ancient, generating nostalgia for the present. Photo-
graphs become what Nancy Martha West calls "instant antiques, objects that
condense to nothingness the increasingly small amount of time required to
31
make something old into something cherished." The "instant antique"
phenomenon fulfills the Brownie's proposed doubling of "pleasures pres-
ent," as it transforms everyday experiences into valuable relics. Through
photography, the past reenters the present, and the present becomes a trea-
sured past—human time commingles with that of the fairies.
Corollary to the commingling of human and fairy time is the introduc-
tion of modern society's amnesia into the realm of fantasy (read also, child-
hood). Palmer Cox's imitative response to Eastman's campaign exemplifies
the problem. Not long after the appearance of Eastman Kodak's Brownie,
Cox added his own Brownie with a box camera to the Brownie band. In
books appearing prior to the popularization of the dollar camera, the
Brownies travel the world without ever taking a photo. Suddenly, in The
Brownies in the Philippines (1904), nearly every page includes a snap-happy
Brownie (fig. 4). The appearance of this new figure in Cox's work both indi-
cates and spreads a growing anxiety about the undocumented life. Sprites
once content with a quiet and invisible domesticity learn to seek photo-
graphic proof of their expeditions. Similarly, potential consumers, espe-
cially women and children, learn that their own previously invisible lives
need mediatized expression. Eastman's "intended consumers were not pro-
fessional photographers," remarks Marianne Hirsch, "but people w h o had
seen photographs but had not thought of actually taking them any more
than they might have considered painting pictures, writing novels, or com-
32
posing music." Hirsch's comparison reminds us that cultural practices
and attitudes could have led many people to self-exclude from photo-
graphic expression—no matter how affordable—were it not for Eastman's
aggressive Brownie campaign.

Snapshot Print Culture

As a technology that democratizes the author's voice, photography

promises to transcend the achievements of print culture. In both subtle and
direct ways, Eastman makes snapshot photography a higher form of self-

30. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic the Souve-
nir, the Collection (Baltimore, 1984), 113.
31. West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (n. 3 above), 16 (emphasis in original).
32. M. Hirsch (n. 6 above), 6.

11

80
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

JANUARY
2007
VOL.48

FIG. 4 Brownie with camera. (From Palmer Cox, The Brownies in the Philippines
[New York, 1904], 13.)

expression than the written word. In the images of a girl photographing a

Brownie (fig. 5), for example, the use of books as a prop for the camera
serves a dual purpose: the first, merely functional; the second, symbolic.
The box sits on a pedestal of books ostensibly to reach a height suitable for
taking the Brownies portrait, yet the resulting image also confirms sym-
bolically the cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words. The camera's
placement asserts the Brownie's authority and status as equal, if not supe-
rior, to books. This reordering of hierarchies is echoed by Eastman in a
humorous letter to a friend. Adopting a prophetic tone, Eastman foretells
the day when Kodak representatives

will carry the good word into the utmost regions of the earth;
yea, into even the Sunday Schools and Kindergartens, until it shall
finally come to pass that children will be taught to develop before
they learn to walk, and grown-up people—instead of trying word
painting—will merely hand out a photograph and language will
33
become obsolete.

33. Collins (n. 3 above), 99.

12

81
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

fig. 5 Girl with Brownie camera and Brownie figure. (From Eastman Kodak
Company, Kodak trade circular [April 1902], 2. Courtesy of the George
Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.)

While exaggerated in the letter for the sake of a laugh, Eastman's Utopian
replacement of written narrative (or "word painting") with photographs
appears in only slightly more subtie forms in his official publications.
An article in a 1900 circular gives photography a context within the his-
tory of communication that reduces the printing press to yet another step
toward photographic expression: "Away back yonder, in the dawn of civi-
lization, our ancestors had no way of recording thoughts and events, but
34
after a time a system of writing was formulated..." begins the story. Next,
the sweeping narrative advances to the advent of the printing press before
continuing in a manner that places photography on a higher point of the
evolutionary scale: "Now photography is a means of recording thoughts,
actions and events, as well as an a r t " This new timeline of progress alters
33

the relationship between picture and printed word from the more standard
account that would make the printing press the fulfillment of cave painting.
In Kodak's history, photography—and not writing—becomes the ultimate
end of our primitive instincts. As an article in a 1915 Kodak trade circular
stated, "[t]he impulse to Kodak goes back to the stone age [sic]—the means

34. Kodak trade circular (n. 23 above), 6.

35.Ibid.

13

82
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
36
is less than thirty years old." Kodak makes the production of images a
purer form of narrative, akin to the spoken tales and records of lost cul-
tures. The act of picture-making offers both a connection to primeval de-
sires and a return to childhood innocence. In that regard, the nostalgia of
photography stems not only from the preservation of childhood and the
antiquing of the quotidian, but from ties to prehistory—primitivism
JANUARY through technology.
2007 Eastman's narrative simultaneously validates photography as an evolved
V O L 4g art form and a rediscovery of primitive desires. In an era of flux and trans-
formation, Eastman grafts ancient roots onto the turn-of-the-century fam-
ily. The perceived continuity between ancient desire and modern technology
counteracts the destabilizing force of innovation and invites potential con-
sumers to discover their inherent longing to photograph. Rather than a
hobby handed down to the masses by the leisure class, photography be-
comes a universal language, one that recalls the cave paintings of Lascaux
more than the oil paintings of the Louvre. In a testament to the appeal of
Stone Age imagery, Edward Steichen described "The Family of Man," his
1955 blockbuster exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City, in terms similar to those employed in the Kodak trade circular forty
years before: "Long before the birth of a word language the caveman com-
municated by visual images. The invention of photography gave visual com-
37
munication its most simple, direct, universal language"
In Steichen's declaration as in Eastman's, the representation of photog-
raphy as a universal language trumps (but does not exclude) artistic expres-
sion. Steichen's exhibition, which toured the world for eight years and fea-
tured more than five hundred photographs of families around the world
grouped by such universal themes as children and love, also promoted pho-
tography as a tool for neutralizing cultural differences. In that, we witness
the link between the caveman (universal symbol of shared primitive roots)
and the Brownies (spokescreatures for democracy and globalized fraternity
through technological consumption and self-representation). Steichen's
"The Family of Man" is commonly interpreted as a postwar search for com-
monalities among disparate cultures, but the Brownie's impact on the
formative years of snapshot photography suggests a public already condi-
tioned to equate photography with bands of united folk from all walks of
38
life (modern and primitive). The Brownie boys and girls of the 1900s had

36. Kodak trade circular, vol. 16, no. 12 (November 1915), 14. Kodak ads were still
using the same language as late as 1989: "150 years ago a language was invented that
everyone understood," quoted in M. Hirsch, 48.
37. Quoted in M. Hirsch (n. 6 above), 49. For a discussion of both photography and
motion pictures as hieroglyphics, see Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the
Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford, 2005), 35-60.
38. The Museum of Modern Art's own web site calls the exhibition "an expression of
humanism in the decade following World War II": http://www.moma.org/research/
archives/highlights/06_1955.html (accessed 5 July 2005).

14

83
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

become the adult public willing to embrace photographs as the medium

best-suited to express that message.
Of all the products to use Brownies in advertising, only the Brownie
camera conflated Brownie, product, and consumer. Eastman not only
essentially added a new member to the Brownie band with his snapshot
photographer, he added hundreds of thousands of boys and girls to the
throng. Just as the public was meant to identify the camera with the char-
acter in a happy confluence of values, powers, and traits, so also was the
user of the camera meant to become a Brownie boy or girl. With that goal
in mind, Eastman Kodak created the "Brownie Camera Club of America,"
complete with its own constitution. The essential prerequisites for m e m -
bership, as stated in Article III of the club's constitution, were that the child
be a resident of the United States or Canada under 16 years of age, and that
he or she own a Brownie camera. The lineage of the humble club can be
traced to the many serious amateur photographic societies that flourished
in the 1880s and 1890s—societies often modeled on the European tradition
39
of art academies. As a "Brownie" club, however, the organization also
identified with the mystique of preliterate oral traditions and nomadic
bands of sprites. The charter member of the club, a 13-year-old boy, joined
40
on 22 April 1900. Like many who would follow, the boy gained a new
identity, one with ties to both industry and folk culture. The Brownie
Camera Club made children members of the Brownies through ownership
of what was fundamentally marketed as a corporate product born of folk
technology. Club literature, photo competitions and exhibitions, and ad-
vertisements in children's magazines helped create a sense of community
among America's first generation of snapshot photographers. While all
clearly in the interest of the company's profits, photos published by East-
man Kodak of or by real-life Brownie boys and girls are nonetheless impor-
tant for their role in helping children express themselves as members of a
community.
Advertisements urged, "Let the kiddies tell their story with a BROWNIE,"
and "Even in their kindergarten days, the youngsters can make good pic-
41
tures with a BROWNIE." The texts convey a pleading tone, as if exclusion
from the fellowship of the Brownies constitutes a deprivation of basic
childhood rights. Another slogan, used for years, rings like an emancipa-
tory rallying cry, beseeching adults everywhere to "Let the Children Ko-
dak!" At a time when children were to be seen and not heard, the Brownie
introduced them to a potent, if mute, form of self-expression. In a parallel
campaign, w o m e n were encouraged to tell their stories from their own

39. See Sternberger (n. 4 above) for a discussion of late-nineteenth-century photo-

graphic societies and clubs.
40. Kodak trade circular, no. 6 (May 1900), 4.
41. Kodak trade circular (n. 36 above), 5 (emphasis in original); Kodak trade circu-
lar, vol. 20, no. 7 (June 1916), 5.

15

84
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

point of view with a Kodak. In both campaigns, groups typically excluded

from the production of i d e o l o g y — w o m e n and children—are given an
alternate form of expression in which to order and express their own
worldview. Although lacking in traditional power, users ostensibly gain
visual control over their surroundings and are able to make their outiook
concrete and valuable through photographs. According to Jack Zipes, the
JANUARY content of their photos, while influenced to some degree by advertisements,
2007 does not emanate solely from a corporation disguised as its audience, as is
e m
VOL 48 ^ racu 42
o, television, and motion pictures. This is not to say that
corporate interests do not invade the life of the camera's user (which, East-
man hopes, will be revisited as a series of "Kodak moments"), but certain
narrative decisions rest in the hands that press the buttons. In other words,
the Brownie enthusiast is promised authorial status, however mediated the
production of his or her story.
"We have yet to explore sufficientiy the ways in which the technologies
of the mass media were able to foster and not just weaken or destroy a sense
43
of community," writes Lawrence Levine. In the case of the Brownie, as in
any study of mass-marketed technology, the reading that underscores the
insidious forces of corporate culture comes easily. Either because we have
grown accustomed to hearing about it, or because it is always there, the de-
structive side of technological innovation attracts attention. But in each
case, as Zipes observes, both positive and negative purposes accompany the
44
advancement of mass media. On the negative side, the Brownie club aims
to create a nation of prepubescent consumers-—junkies hooked on a brand
before they learn to tie their shoes. "Plant the Brownie acorn and the Kodak
45
oak will grow," boasts the Kodak trade circular. Further, one can argue
that the Brownie's most sinister accomplishment is to commodity child-
hood. By creating and feeding a perception that an always-receding child-
hood can be preserved only through film, does Kodak double pleasure
or anxiety? Pause and draw a line connecting the promotion of snapshot
photography to this familiar scene: parents at a school pageant, nearly all
viewing the spectacle through the lens of a camcorder or camera, sacrific-
ing their firsthand enjoyment for the sake of the archive. Is this the en-
chanted legacy of the Brownie? Add pornography and invasion of privacy
to its offenses, and the black box now seems more like Pandora's than the

42. Zipes (n. 8 above), 20-21. He adds (p. 20) that "It was the radio, then movies,
and ultimately TV which were able to draw together large groups of people as the origi-
nal folk-tale narrators did and to relate tales as though they were derived from the point
of view of the people themselves" and pronounces the result of mass-mediated fairy tales
"a happy reaffirmation of the system which produces them" (p. 21).
43. Lawrence W. Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its
Audiences," American Historical Review 97 (1992): 1393.
44. Zipes, 19.
45. Kodak trade circular (n. 40 above), 1.

16

85
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

gift of a Fairy Queen. Nevertheless, to vilify Eastman Kodak as a "soulless

46
corporation" oversimplifies the problem, as does the glorification of
Eastman as a great emancipator of oppressed w o m e n and children. The
complex nature of Eastman's project is perhaps best manifested in Kodak's
fairy tale of the Brownie. Like the "You press the button, we do the rest"
campaign that preceded it, the Brownie tale teaches that photographic self-
expression, however magical, must pass through the industrial complexes
47
headed by a technologically skilled "man by the inland seas." Consumer-
based narrative decisions notwithstanding, the owner of a Brownie mimics
the collaborative process seen in "The Brownie's Story of the Brownie."
As advertisements began to label children as "Brownie" boys and girls,
the Brownie characters appeared less frequently. In the images of children
photographing Brownies, the camera is used as a transition between the
child and the folkloric figure, suggesting an affinity between childhood and
enchantment, both of which are made accessible to adults through the
camera. A 1 9 0 9 circular identifies the product line and a lineup of children
48
as "The Brownie Family" (fig. 6 ) . Another popular series of advertise-
ments that began as early as 1903 uses images of a (human) "Brownie boy"
49
carrying a fishing pole and a camera. The Palmer Cox Brownies were suf-
ficiently well-known that the reference to Brownies was clear, with or with-
out images of the creatures. The characterization of children as Brownies
reveals the camera's power to seize the ephemeral, fleeting nature of child-
hood in action—a feat no less marvelous to the adult consumer than the
idea of capturing an invisible sprite on film.

Conclusion

In May 1914, Eastman Kodak announced the discontinuation of the

50
"Brownie Book." Brownie advertising did not stop, but the cameras were
marketed more directly to adults. A 1 9 0 9 circular acknowledged that it took
some time for the Eastman Kodak Company to realize "that grown-up peo-
51
ple were making pictures with the No. 1 Brownie." In response to that
realization, the advertising began to change. The expanded line of Brownie
cameras enjoyed more direct association with the parent brand in trade lit-
52
erature that began to refer to them as "Little Cousins of the Kodaks." The
consolidation of catalogs into one "Kodak Summer Book" in 1914 led to

46. John Bull Jr., quoted in Sternberger (n. 4 above), 116.

47. Eastman Kodak Company, "The Book of the Brownies" (n. 29 above), 1.
48. Kodak trade circular (1909), 7.
49. An example can be seen in the June 1903 Kodak trade circular.
50. Kodak trade circular (1914), 3.
51. Kodak trade circular (1909), 1.
52. Ibid.

17
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

KODAK FRADE CIRCULAR.

T H E BROWNIE FAMILY.
Baby is the subject, and finds the posing fun.
Harry is the expert with Brownie No. I.
Susie is the artist ot Brownie No. 2 ;
She says "there's really nothing, the little box can't do"!
Jane is at the shutter of Brownie No. 3 :
Johnnie chose a Folding one, as all of you may see.
Mary likes her pictures in the "postal" size,
Thomas loves the "stereo"—note its eager eyes.
With our "Special Artists" always on the spot,
We're sure of knowing who is who, as well as what is what.
The prints we put in albums, each one neatly dated—
The Brownie Family History is "fully illustrated."
— Titdor /cuts.

SOME ADVERTISERS LIKE RHYMES. IF YOU DO. HERE'S A GOOD ONE. THE
CUT IS NO. 290, AND IS YOURS FOR THE ASKING.

FIG. 6 Advertisement and poem, "The Brownie Family." (From Eastman Kodak
Company, Kodak trade circular [1909]. Courtesy of the George Eastman House,
Rochester, N.Y.)

18

87
 OLIVIER I Snapshot Photography and the Brownie

the adoption of a tone aimed at adult consumers. During World War I, the
Brownie was sometimes cast in the role of Nanny ("You don't have to pro-
vide amusement for the children—Just leave it to the BROWNIE"), but the
idea of capturing childhood ("Pictures of the children by the children have
53
the charm of childhood itself") remained central to most campaigns.
More than a century after the introduction of the Brownie, the magical
tale of its origins has nearly disappeared. The story of a Brownie's goodwill
toward children, of a Fairy Queen's engineering, and of Eastman's magical
mass production no longer inform the concept of photography in the
minds of adults or children. The idea of "Brownie boys and girls" n o w
54
evokes cookie sales rather than snapshots and camera clubs. The sprites
have returned to invisibility, replaced by efficient Kodak technicians. Ver-
sions of "Brownie" cameras continued to be manufactured into the 1950s,
but as Palmer Cox's Brownies lost their popularity and faded from public
memory, so too did the association of the camera with its namesake. Never-
theless, the Brownie ghost in the machine merits attention for its impact on
a foundational period in the conception of snapshot photography By the
time the folkloric Brownies had faded from memory, millions of con-
sumers had learned to identify themselves and photography with the traits
of the Brownie band. By popularizing snapshot photography as a valuable
language in its own right, as a voice of the people in an increasingly medi-
atized society, Eastman broke the oral/print binary. The snapshot possesses
not only the immediacy, transparency, and purity of enunciation associated
with oral expression, but also the tangible and archival qualities of the
printed document—an enchanted middle ground where the primitive and
the modern coexist

53. Kodak trade circular (April 1915), 16 (emphasis in original); Kodak trade circu-
lar (June 1916), 5.
54. Beginning Girl Guides (Girl Scouts in the United States) were called "Brownies"
until 1985, when Daisy Scouts became the beginner scouting organization for kinder-
garten girls. The organization was founded in 1909 in England, and in 1912 in the United
States. References to the world of fairies abound in the early Brownie organization, in-
cluding elf and gnome emblems, membership pins representing a sprite figure, and
"pixie" caps. A sampling of uniforms is available online at http://www.vintagegirl-
scout.com/unibr.htm (accessed 10 November 2005).

19

88
7. Needless H a v o c

As m a n p r o c e e d s toward his announced goal of the conquest

of nature,, he has written a depressing record of destruction,
directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the
life that shares it with him. The history of the recent centuries
has its black passages — the slaughter of the buffalo on the
western plains, the massacre of the shorebirds by the market
gunners, the near-extermination of the egrets for their plumage.
Now, to these and others like them, we are adding a new chapter
and a new kind of havoc — the direct killing of birds, mammals,
fishes, and indeed practically every form of wildlife by chemical
insecticides indiscriminately sprayed on the land.
Under the philosophy that now seems to guide our destinies,
nothing must get in the way of the man with the spray gun.
The incidental victims of his crusade against insects count as
nothing; if robins, pheasants, raccoons, cats, or even livestock
happen to inhabit the same bit of earth as the target insects and
86 SILENT SPRING
to be hit by the rain of insect-killing poisons no one must protest.
The citizen who wishes to make a fair judgment of the ques-
tion of wildlife loss is today confronted with a dilemma. On
the one hand conservationists and many wildlife biologists assert
that the losses have been severe and in some cases even catas-
trophic. On the other hand the control agencies tend to deny
flatly and categorically that such losses have occurred, or that
they are of any importance if they have. Which view are we
to accept?
The credibility of the witness is of first importance. The pro-
fessional wildlife biologist on the scene is certainly best qualified
to discover and interpret wildlife loss. The entomologist, whose
specialty is insects, is not so qualified by training, and is not
psychologically disposed to look for undesirable side effects of
his control program. Yet it is the control men in state and fed-
eral governments — and of course the chemical manufacturers
— who steadfastly deny the facts reported by the biologists and
declare they see little evidence of harm to wildlife. Like the
priest and the Levite in the biblical story, they choose to pass
by on the other side and to see nothing. Even if we charitably
explain their denials as due to the shortsightedness of the special-
ist and the man with an interest this does not mean we must
accept them as qualified witnesses.
The best way to form our own judgment is to look at some
of the major control programs and learn, from observers familiar
with the ways of wildlife, and unbiased in favor of chemicals,
just what has happened in the wake of a rain of poison falling
from the skies into the world of wildlife.
To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from
birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of
wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for
even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has
a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view. Even if, as has
sometimes happened, some of the birds and mammals and fishes
N E E D L E S S H A V O C 8 7
: are able to re-establish themselves after a single spraying, a great
and real harm has been done.
? But such re-establishment is unlikely to happen. Spraying
(tends to be repetitive, and a single exposure from which the
wildlife populations might have a chance to recover is a rarity.
What usually results is a poisoned environment, a lethal trap in
; which not only the resident populations succumb but those who
I come in as migrants as well. The larger the area sprayed the
I more serious the harm, because no oases of safety remain. Now,
in a decade marked by insect-control programs in which many
thousands or even millions of acres are sprayed as a unit, a
decade in which private and community spraying has also
surged steadily upward, a record of destruction and death of
American wildlife has accumulated. Let us look at some of these
: programs and see what has happened.
; During the fall of 1959 some 27,000 acres in southeastern
Michigan, including numerous suburbs of Detroit, were heavily
: dusted from the air with pellets of aldrin, one of the most dan-
gerous of all the chlorinated hydrocarbons. T h e program was
conducted by the Michigan Department of Agriculture with
the cooperation of the United States Department of Agriculture;
its announced purpose was control of the Japanese beetle.
Little need was shown for this drastic and dangerous action.
On the contrary, Walter P. Nickell, one of the best-known and
best-informed naturalists in the state, who spends much of his
time in the field with long periods in southern Michigan every
: summer, declared: "For more than thirty years, to my direct
/knowledge, the Japanese beetle has been present in the city of
Detroit in small numbers. The numbers have not shown any
appreciable increase in all this lapse of years. I have yet to see
a single Japanese beetle [in 1959] other than the few caught in
Government catch traps in D e t r o i t . . . Everything is being kept
; so secret that I have not yet been able to obtain any information
whatsoever to the effect that they have increased in numbers."
88 SILENT SPRING
An official release by the state agency merely declared that
the beetle had "put in its appearance" in the areas designated for
the aerial attack upon it. Despite the lack of justification the
program was launched, with the state providing the manpower
and supervising the operation, the federal government providing
equipment and additional men, and the communities paying for
the insecticide.
The Japanese beetle, an insect accidentally imported into the
United States, was discovered in N e w Jersey in 1916, when a
few shiny beetles of a metallic green color were seen in a
nursery near Riverton. The beetles, at first unrecognized, were
finally identified as a common inhabitant of the main islands of
Japan. Apparently they had entered the United States on
nursery stock imported before restrictions were established in
1912.
From its original point of entrance the Japanese beetle has
spread rather widely throughout many of the states east of the
Mississippi, where conditions of temperature and rainfall are
suitable for it. Each year some outward movement beyond the
existing boundaries of its distribution usually takes place. In the
eastern areas where the beetles have been longest established, at-
tempts have been made to set up natural controls. Where this
has been done, the beetle populations have been kept at rela-
tively low levels, as many records attest.
Despite the record of reasonable control in eastern areas, the
midwestern states now on the fringe of the beetle's range have
launched an attack worthy of the most deadly enemy instead
of only a moderately destructive insect, employing the most
dangerous chemicals distributed in a manner that exposes large
numbers of people, their domestic animals, and all wildlife to
the poison intended for the beetle. As a result these Japanese
beetle programs have caused shocking destruction of animal life?
and have exposed human beings to undeniable hazard. Sections
of Michigan, Kentucky, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri ;
NEEDLESS HAVOC 89
are all experiencing a rain of chemicals in the name of beetle
control.
T h e Michigan spraying was one of the first large-scale attacks
on the Japanese beetle from the air. The choice of aldrin, one
of the deadliest of all chemicals, was not determined by any
peculiar suitability for Japanese beetle control, but simply by
the wish to save money — aldrin was the cheapest of the com-
pounds available. While the state in its official release to the
press acknowledged that aldrin is a "poison," it implied that no
harm could come to human beings in the heavily populated areas
to which the chemical was applied. (The official answer to the
query "What precautions should I take?" was "For you, none.")
An official of the Federal Aviation Agency was later quoted in
the local press to the effect that "this is a safe operation"
and a representative of the Detroit Department of Parks and
Recreation added his assurance that "the dust is harmless to
humans and will not hurt plants or pets." One must assume that
none of these officials had consulted the published and readily
available reports of the United States Public Health Service,
the Fish and Wildlife Service, and other evidence of the ex-
tremely poisonous nature of aldrin.
Acting under the Michigan pest control law which allows
the state to spray indiscriminately without notifying or gaining
permission of individual landowners, the low-lying planes began
to fly over the Detroit area. T h e city authorities and the Fed-
eral Aviation Agency were immediately besieged by calls from
worried citizens. After receiving nearly 800 calls in a single
hour, the police begged radio and television stations and news-
papers to "tell the watchers what they were seeing and advise
them it was safe," according to the Detroit News. The Federal
Aviation Agency's safety officer assured the public that "the
planes are carefully supervised" and "are authorized to fly low."
In a somewhat mistaken attempt to allay fears, he added that the
planes had emergency valves that would allow them to dump

OO SILENT SPRING
their entire load instantaneously. This, fortunately, was not
done, but as the planes went about their work the pellets of
insecticide fell on beetles and humans alike, showers of "harm-
less" poison descending on people shopping or going to work
and on children out from school for the lunch hour. House-
wives swept the granules from porches and sidewalks, where
they are said to have "looked like snow." As pointed out later
by the Michigan Audubon Society, "In the spaces between
shingles on roofs, in eaves-troughs, in the cracks in bark and
twigs, the little white pellets of aldrin-and-clay, no bigger than a
pin head, were lodged by the millions . . . When the snow and
rain came, every puddle became a possible death potion."
Within a few days after the dusting operation, the Detroit
Audubon Society began receiving calls about the birds. Accord-
ing to the Society's secretary, Mrs. Ann Boyes, "The first
indication that the people were concerned about the spray was
a call I received on Sunday morning from a woman who re-
ported that coming home from church she saw an alarming
number of dead and dying birds. The spraying there had been
10
done on Thursday. She said there were no birds at all flying
in the area, that she had found at least a dozen [dead] in her
backyard and that the neighbors had found dead squirrels." All
other calls received by Mrs. Boyes that day reported "a great
many dead birds and no live ones . . . People who had maintained
bird feeders said there were no birds at all at their feeders."
Birds picked up in a dying condition showed the typical symp-
toms of insecticide poisoning — tremoring, loss of ability to
fly, paralysis, convulsions.
N o r were birds the only forms of life immediately affected.
A local veterinarian reported that his office was full of clients
with dogs and cats that had suddenly sickened. Cats, who so
meticulously groom their coats and lick their paws, seemed to
be most affected. Their illness took the form of severe diarrhea,
vomiting, and convulsions. The only advice the veterinarian
NEEDLESS HAVOC QI
could give his clients was not to let the animals out unneces-
sarily, or to wash the paws promptly if they did so. (But the
chlorinated hydrocarbons cannot be washed even from fruits
or vegetables, so little protection could be expected from this
measure.)
Despite the insistence of the City-County Health Commis-
sioner that the birds must have been killed by "some other kind
of spraying" and that the outbreak of throat and chest irrita-
tions that followed the exposure to aldrin must have been due to
"something else," the local Health Department received a con-
stant stream of complaints. A prominent Detroit internist was
called upon to treat four of his patients within an hour after
they had been exposed while watching the planes at work. All
had similar symptoms: nausea, vomiting, chills, fever, extreme
fatigue, and coughing.
The Detroit experience has been repeated in many other com-
munities as pressure has mounted to combat the Japanese beetle
with chemicals. At Blue Island, Illinois, hundreds of dead and
dying birds were picked up. Data collected by birdbanders here
suggest that 80 per cent of the songbirds were sacrificed. In
Joliet, Illinois, some 3000 acres were treated with heptachlor in
1959. According to reports from a local sportsmen's club, the
bird population within the treated area was "virtually wiped
out." Dead rabbits, muskrats, opossums, and fish were also
found in numbers, and one of the local schools made the collec-
tion of insecticide-poisoned birds a science project.
Perhaps no community has suffered more for the sake of a
beetleless world than Sheldon, in eastern Illinois, and adjacent
areas in Iroquois County. In 1954 the United States Department
of Agriculture and the Illinois Agriculture Department began a
program to eradicate the Japanese beetle along the line of its
advance into Illinois, holding out the hope, and indeed the as-
surance, that intensive spraying would destroy the populations

92 SILENT SPRING
of the invading insect. The first "eradication" took place that
year, when dieldrin was applied to 1400 acres by air. Another
2600 acres were treated similarly in 1955, and the task was
presumably considered complete. But more and more chemical
treatments were called for, and by the end of 1961 some 131,000
acres had been covered. Even in the first years of the program
it was apparent that heavy losses were occurring among wildlife
and domestic animals. T h e chemical treatments were continued,
nevertheless, without consultation with either the United States
Fish and Wildlife Service or the Illinois Game Management
Division. (In the spring of i960, however, officials of the fed-
eral Department of Agriculture appeared before a congressional
committee in opposition to a bill that would require just such
prior consultation. They declared blandly that the bill was un-
necessary because cooperation and consultation were "usual."
These officials were quite unable to recall situations where co-
operation had not taken place "at the Washington level." In the
same hearings they stated clearly their unwillingness to consult
with state fish and game departments.)
Although funds for chemical control came in never-ending
streams, the biologists of the Illinois Natural History Survey
who attempted to measure the damage to wildlife had to operate
on a financial shoestring. A mere $1100 was available for the
employment of a field assistant in 1954 and no special funds
were provided in 1955. Despite these crippling difficulties, the
biologists assembled facts that collectively paint a picture of
almost unparalleled wildlife destruction — destruction that be-
came obvious as soon as the program got under way.
Conditions were made to order for poisoning insect-eating
birds, both in the poisons used and in the events set in motion
by their application. In the early programs at Sheldon, dieldrin
was applied at the rate of 3 pounds to the acre. To understand
its effect on birds one need only remember that in laboratory
experiments on quail dieldrin has proved to be about 50 times
I I I I I I I I
NEEDLESS HAVOC 93
as poisonous as D D T . T h e poison spread over the landscape at
Sheldon was therefore roughly equivalent to 150 pounds of
D D T per acre! And this was a minimum, because there seems
to have been some overlapping of treatments along field borders
and in corners.
As the chemical penetrated the soil the poisoned beetle grubs
crawled out on the surface of the ground, where they remained
for some time before they died, attractive to insect-eating birds.
Dead and dying insects of various species were conspicuous for
about two weeks after the treatment. The effect on the bird
populations could easily have been foretold. Brown thrashers,
starlings, meadowlarks, grackles, and pheasants were virtually
wiped out. Robins were "almost annihilated," according to the
biologists' report. Dead earthworms had been seen in numbers
after a gentle rain; probably the robins had fed on the poisoned
worms. For other birds, too, the once beneficial rain had been
changed, through the evil power of the poison introduced into
their world, into an agent of destruction. Birds seen drinking
and bathing in puddles left by rain a few days after the spraying
were inevitably doomed.
The birds that survived may have been rendered sterile. Al-
though a few nests were found in the treated area, a few with
eggs, none contained young birds.
Among the mammals ground squirrels were virtually anni-
hilated; their bodies were found in attitudes characteristic of
violent death by poisoning. Dead muskrats were found in the
treated areas, dead rabbits in the fields. The fox squirrel had
been a relatively common animal in the town; after the spraying
it was gone.
It was a rare farm in the Sheldon area that was blessed by the
presence of a cat after the war on beetles was begun. Ninety
per cent of all the farm cats fell victims to the dieldrin during
the first season of spraying. This might have been predicted
because of the black record of these poisons in other places. Cats
94 SILENT SPRING
are extremely sensitive to all insecticides and especially so, it
seems, to dieldrin. In western Java in the course of the anti-
malarial program carried out by the World Health Organiza-
tion, many cats are reported to have died. In central Java so
many were killed that the price of a cat more than doubled.
Similarly, the World Health Organization, spraying in Vene-
zuela, is reported to have reduced cats to the status of a rare
animal.
In Sheldon it was not only the wild creatures and the domes-
tic companions that were sacrificed in the campaign against an
insect. Observations on several flocks of sheep and a herd of beef
cattle are indicative of the poisoning and death that threatened
livestock as well. The Natural History Survey report describes
one of these episodes as follows:
The sheep . . . were driven into a small, untreated blue-
grass pasture across a gravel road from a field which had been
treated with dieldrin spray on May 6. Evidently some spray
had drifted across the road into the pasture, for the sheep began
to show symptoms of intoxication almost at once . . . They
lost interest in food and displayed extreme restlessness, follow-
ing the pasture fence around and around apparently searching
for a way out . . . [They] refused to be driven, bleated almost
continuously, and stood with their heads lowered; they were
finally carried from the pasture . . . They displayed great desire
for water. Two of the sheep were found dead in the stream
passing through the pasture, and the remaining sheep were re-
peatedly driven out of the stream, several having to be dragged
forcibly from the water. Three of the sheep eventually died;
those remaining recovered to all outward appearances.
This, then, was the picture at the end of 1955. Although the
chemical war went on in succeeding years, the trickle of research
funds dried up completely. Requests for money for wildlife-
insecticide research were included in annual budgets submitted
to the Illinois legislature by the Natural History Survey, but
NEEDLESS HAVOC 95
were invariably among the first items to be eliminated. It was
not until i960 that money was somehow found to pay the ex-
penses of one field assistant — to do work that could easily have
occupied the time of four men.
The desolate picture of wildlife loss had changed little when
the biologists resumed the studies broken off in 1955. In the
meantime, the chemical had been changed to the even more
toxic aldrin, 100 to 300 times as toxic as D D T in tests on quail.
By i960, every species of wild mammal known to inhabit the
area had suffered losses. It was even worse with the birds. In
the small town of Donovan the robins had been wiped out, as
had the grackles, starlings, and brown thrashers. These and
many other birds were sharply redueed elsewhere. Pheasant
hunters felt the effects of the beetle campaign sharply. The
number of broods produced on treated lands fell off by some
50 per cent, and the number of young in a brood declined.
Pheasant hunting, which had been good in these areas in former
years, was virtually abandoned as unrewarding.
In spite of the enormous havoc that had been wrought in the
name of eradicating the Japanese beetle, the treatment of more
than 100,000 acres in Iroquois County over an eight-year period
seems to have resulted in only temporary suppression of the
insect, which continues its westward movement. The full ex-
tent of the toll that has been taken by this largely ineffective
program may never be known, for the results measured by the
Illinois biologists are a minimum figure. If the research program
had been adequately financed to permit full coverage, the de-
struction revealed would have been even more appalling. But
in the eight years of the program, only about $6000 was pro-
vided for biological field studies. Meanwhile the federal govern-
ment had spent about 1 3 7 5 , 0 0 0 for control work and additional
thousands had been provided by the state. T h e amount spent
for research was therefore a small fraction of 1 per cent of the
outlay for the chemical program.

96 SILENT SPRING
These midwestern programs have been conducted in a spirit
of crisis, as though the advance of the beetle presented an ex-
treme peril justifying any means to combat it. This of course
is a distortion of the facts, and if the communities that have
endured these chemical drenchings had been familiar with the
earlier history of the Japanese beetle in the United States they
would surely have been less acquiescent.
The eastern states, which had the good fortune to sustain their
beetle invasion in the days before the synthetic insecticides had
been invented, have not only survived the invasion but have
brought the insect under control by means that represented no
threat whatever to other forms of life. There has been nothing
comparable to the Detroit or Sheldon sprayings in the East. The
effective methods there involved the bringing into play of nat-
ural forces of control which have the multiple advantages of
permanence and environmental safety.
During the first dozen years after its entry into the United
States, the beetle increased rapidly, free of the restraints that
in its native land hold it in check. But by 1945 it had become
a pest of only minor importance throughout much of the ter-
ritory over which it had spread. Its decline was largely a con-
sequence of the importation of parasitic insects from the Far
East and of the establishment of disease organisms fatal to it.
Between 1920 and 1933, as a result of diligent searching
throughout the native range of the beetle, some 34 species of
predatory or parasitic insects had been imported from the Orient
in an effort to establish natural control. Of these, five became
well established in the eastern United States. The most effective
and widely distributed is a parasitic wasp from Korea and
China, Tiphia vernalis. The female Tiphia, finding a beetle
grub in the soil, injects a paralyzing fluid and attaches a single
egg to the undersurface of the grub. The young wasp, hatching
as a larva, feeds on the paralyzed grub and destroys it. In some
25 years, colonies of Tiphia were introduced into 14 eastern
I I I . I I I I I
NEEDLESS HAVOC 97
states in a cooperative program of state and federal agencies.
The wasp became widely established in this area and is generally
credited by entomologists with an important role in bringing
the beetle under control.
An even more important role has been played by a bacterial
disease that affects beetles of the family to which the Japanese
beetle belongs — the scarabaeids. It is a highly specific organism,
attacking no other type of insects, harmless to earthworms,
warm-blooded animals, and plants. The spores of the disease
occur in soil. W h e n ingested by a foraging beetle grub they
multiply prodigiously in its blood, causing it to turn an ab-
normally white color, hence the popular name, "milky disease."
Milky disease was discovered in N e w Jersey in 1933. By 1938
it was rather widely prevalent in the older areas of Japanese
beetle infestation. In 1939 a control program was launched, di-
rected at speeding up the spread of the disease. No method had
been developed for growing the disease organism in an artificial
medium, but a satisfactory substitute was evolved; infected grubs
are ground up, dried, and combined with chalk. In the standard
mixture a gram of dust contains 100 million spores. Between 1939
and 1953 some 94,000 acres in 14 eastern states were treated in a
cooperative federal-state program; other areas on federal lands
were treated; and an unknown but extensive area was treated by
private organizations or individuals. By 1945, milky spore disease
was raging among the beetle populations of Connecticut, N e w
York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. In some test areas
infection of grubs had reached as high as 94 per cent. The dis-
tribution program was discontinued as a governmental enterprise
in 1953 and production was taken over by a private laboratory,
which continues to supply individuals, garden clubs, citizens' as-
sociations, and all others interested in beetle control.
The eastern areas where this program was carried out now
enjoy a high degree of natural protection from the beetle. T h e
organism remains viable in the soil for years and therefore be-
98 SILENT SPRING
comes to all intents and purposes permanently established, in-
creasing in effectiveness, and being continuously spread by nat-
ural agencies.
Why, then, with this impressive record in the East, were the
same procedures not tried in Illinois and the other midwestern
states where the chemical battle of the beetles is now being
waged with such fury?
We are told that inoculation with milky spore disease is
"too expensive" — although no one found it so in the 14 eastern
states in the 1940's. And by what sort of accounting was the
"too expensive" judgment reached? Certainly not by any that
assessed the true costs of the total destruction wrought by such
programs as the Sheldon spraying. This judgment also ignores
the fact that inoculation with the spores need be done only
once; the first cost is the only cost.
We are told also that milky spore disease cannot be used on
the periphery of the beetle's range because it can be established
only where a large grub population is already present in the
soil. Like many other statements in support of spraying, this
one needs to be questioned. The bacterium that causes milky
spore disease has been found to infect at least 40 other species of
beetles which collectively have quite a wide distribution and
would in all probability serve to establish the disease even where
the Japanese beetle population is very small or nonexistent.
Furthermore, because of the long viability of the spores in soil
they can be introduced even in the complete absence of grubs,
as on the fringe of the present beetle infestation, there to await
the advancing population.
Those who want immediate results, at whatever cost, will
doubtless continue to use chemicals against the beetle. So will
those who favor the modern trend to built-in obsolescence, for
chemical control is self-perpetuating, needing frequent and costly
repetition.
On the other hand, those who are willing to wait an extra
NEEDLESS HAVOC 99
season or two for full results will turn to milky disease; they will
be rewarded with lasting control that becomes more, rather than
less effective with the passage of time.
An extensive program of research is under way in the United
States Department of Agriculture laboratory at Peoria, Illinois,
to find a way to culture the organism of milky disease on an
artificial medium. This will greatly reduce its cost and should
encourage its more extensive use. After years of work, some
success has now been reported. When this "breakthrough" is
thoroughly established perhaps some sanity and perspective will
be restored to our dealings with the Japanese beetle, which at
the peak of its depredations never justified the nightmare ex-
cesses of some of these midwestern programs.
Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying raise a question that
is not only scientific but moral. The question is whether any
civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying
itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
These insecticides are not selective poisons; they do not
single out the one species of which we desire to be rid. Each
of them is used for the simple reason that it is a deadly poison. It
therefore poisons all life with which it comes in contact: the cat
beloved of some family, the farmer's cattle, the rabbit in the
field, and the horned lark out of the sky. These creatures are
innocent of any harm to man. Indeed, by their very existence
they and their fellows make his life more pleasant. Yet he re-
wards them with a death that is not only sudden but horrible.
Scientific observers at Sheldon described the symptoms of a
meadowlark found near death: "Although it lacked muscular
coordination and could not fly or stand, it continued to beat its
wings and clutch with its toes while lying on its side. Its beak
was held open and breathing was labored." Even more pitiful
was the mute testimony of the dead ground squirrels, which
"exhibited a characteristic attitude in death. The back was
 IOO SILENT SPRING

bowed, and the forelegs with the toes of the feet tightly clenched
were drawn close to the thorax . . . The head and neck were
outstretched and the mouth often contained dirt, suggesting that
the dying animal had been biting at the ground."
By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a
living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human
being?

CD
 13

Biotechnology

FEW TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS worry people quite as much as the

ones that we cat or die ones that we use as medications or the ones that wc
employ in our sexual and reproductive lives. At die same time, few of us
ever think of foodstuffs and drugs and medical devices—such things as
seedless grapes, antibiotics, and birth control pills—as technologies at all.
We need to think again, for if we define technology as something created
by human artifice in order to alter the environment so as to achieve human
goals, then, of course, these artifacts qualify. They don't exist in nature;
they certainly alter the environment, both biological and social. Just as cer-
tainly, they were created by some human beings to satisfy their own and
other people's needs.
Indeed, one of the reasons why so many people worry about these kinds
of technologies is that they seem to be altering our biological and social
environments in disconcerting ways. N e w agricultural products—such as
seedless grapes, hybrid corn, genetically engineered tomatoes—tend to
drive old ones off the market and out of production. This means that ge-
netic diversity is reduced and at the same time the uniform crops that re-
main are ever more susceptible to ever more devastating infestations. Our
social environments change as well, sometimes dramatically. Antibiotics
lower death rates, and this means that they increase the size of populations,
leading, some say, to serious overcrowding and other ills of overpopula-
tion. The various reproductive technologies, especially contraceptives and
abornfacients, satisfy needs of some people that other people think ought
to be left unsatisfied.

301
 The history of the various twentieth-century biotechnologies thus rais-
es all kinds of very knotty questions about the social and ethical impact of
technology. It also raises fundamental questions, as we shall see, about
whether we would be able to resolve such social and ethical paraodxes if
we understood that history better.
Science, Technology, and Technoscience
The history of biotechnology also raises questions about the differences be-
tween science and technology. If such things as seedless grapes, antibiotics,
and birth control pills are technologies, dien surely the activities that cre-
ated them—agricultural and medical research—must also be technologi-
cal. Yet most of us, if asked, would say that the people who do agricultur-
al and medical research are scientists. Scientists, we think, are the people
who discover new truths by using the experimental method, while some-
what different people—what shall we call them? engineers? technolo-
gists?—using very different methods eventually apply those truths in order
to create new products. We like to think of scientific research as the pur-
suit of somediing we call pure knowledge, and the pursuit of applications
as somehow different, certainly a "less pure" activity. But do such distinc-
tions really make any sense in the domain of agricultural and medical re-
search, where the ultimate goal has always been some new product that will
taste better, cure better, nourish better, flourish better, or work better?
Early in the nineteenth century, science and technology were pursued by
markedly different groups of people, and diis meant that the differences be-
tween the two pursuits were fairly obvious. Science was taught and prac-
ticed by educated people who had jobs in colleges, universities, and muse-
ums; technologies were used and produced by artisans who had received
their training and practised their crafts in workshops and factories. Before
1 8 5 0 , if you had wanted a better mousetrap (or cast-iron stove or survey-
or's sextant), you probably wouldn't have thought to ask a college teacher
(or even a person educated at a college) for help. In this period of time, the
distinction between science and technology was essentially a social distinc-
tion: one group of people,.widi one set of traditions, did technical work;
another group of people, with a somewhat different culture, were scientists.
As the nineteenth century wore o n , however, increasingly large numbers
of people began to believe that if artisans learned science, technological
progress would be accelerated, that if physicians and farmers learned the
rudiments of biology, more diseases could be cured and more food would
be produced. Many of the engineering colleges created in die nineteenth
century (see Chapter 6) were founded on this set of new assumptions; the
same assumptions guided the creation of agricultural colleges and new
medical schools. The faculty had to be trained in the sciences; education
was to be grounded in die sciences. No longer would a civil engineer get
his training on a canal sift) or a railroad line, or a farmer at his father's knee,
or a physician by apprenticeship. Instead, he (or occasionally she) had to
i l l :
begin with the fundamentals of dynamics and mechanics, physiology and
botany, anatomy and chemistry.
A social and intellectual hierarchy was created by this new set of as-
sumptions: science is "better" or "more fundamental" than technology; re-
search scientists, dierefore, are "better" or "smarter" than engineers, or
practicing physicians or working farmers. The person who works with his
head is better than the person w h o works with his hands; die library and
the laboratory are more honorable places of employment than the shop
floor, the barnyard or die examining room. By the turn of the twentieth
century, this distinction between science and technology—science discov-
ers; technology applies; discovering is better than applying—had become
a commonplace, which is why so many of us still believe it today.
Yet it is a problematic commonplace. N o t surprisingly, engineers, farm-
ers, and practicing physicians tend to resent die subsidiary position to
which they arc relegated in this hierarchical model, feeling—widi some
heat at times—that there is something especially challenging about the
practical and clinical arts that the rather colorless word "applied" simply
cannot convey. In addition, when scientists are applying for money to sup-
port their research, they tend to ignore die flattering distinctions at the
heart of the model since philanthropists, industrialists, and governments
usually want to know what technological payoff—not what truth—diey are
going to get in return for their investment.
Thus, after 1 9 4 5 , as scientific research became increasingly expensive
and the scientists on the faculties of colleges and universities became in-
creasingly dependent on outside funding for dieir research, die clear line
that had once been drawn between science and technology began to look,
to some people at least, a litde fuzzy. In addition, as research began in-
creasingly to depend on complex pieces of machinery (for example, linear
accelerators and electrorTrhTcroscopes) and machine-based processes (for j
example, gel electrophoresis and computer modeling), the old distinction
between diose w h o work with their hands and those who work with their . «"~
heads began to seem more than a litde dubious. Accordingly, some schol- ~\ ^ .A
ars have coined a new term, technoscience, to describe such enterprises as
agricultural, medical, and military research, enterprises in which science
and technology, investigation and application, resemble two sides of the
same coin.
The case studies in the history of biotechnology that are related in this
chapter were thus chosen pardy to illustrate die character of die enterprise
of technoscience and partly to illuminate some of the social and ethical
quandaries diat the biologically based technosciences have created in our
time.
Hybrid Corn
Human beings have been practicing genetics for several millennia; all do-
mesticated animals and plants—dogs, horses, grains, fruits—were devel-
Jo3
 oped over the course of many centuries by selective breeding, deliberate
attempts to take advantage of the natural variability of organisms: mating
this ram with that ewe in the hope of getting lambs with thicker coats of
wool; choosing seed from that row of wheat or diis patch of rye in the hope
of getting a higher yield next season. Some of this selective breeding was
done informally; a farmer tried to choose seed carefully for one or two sea-
sons; a herder managed to isolate a few pairs out of the flock every spring.
Corn is an easy crop on which to practice selective breeding. The tassel
on the top of the stalk carries the pollen; the silks on the branches receive
the pollen; the seeds, which develop after the pollen lands on the silk, arc
the kernels attached to the ears. Many nineteenth-century American farm-
ers were selective breeders. They let die corn in their fields pollinate freely,
the wind scattering the pollen among the silks of many plants; after the har-
vest, they retained some ears to use as seed, deliberately choosing those ears
that had very regular rows or exceptionally sweet kernels or that had come
from stalks with a large number of ears.
In the waning decades of the nineteenth century, some faculty members
in the agricultural colleges began experiments in which they artificially
pollinated corn to achieve selective breeding; they would detassel a row of
corn or put paper bags over the silks and tassels; dien researchers armed
with litde paintbrushes would control the transfer of pollen. Also by the
end of the nineteenth century, a few seed companies had come into exis-
tence, often started by farmers w h o had found it more profitable to raise
produce for seed than to sell it as food. Corn did not dien account for a
large part of seed company business since most farmers used their o w n ,
homegrown corn for seed. As a result, the seed companies—witii one ex-
ception—had virtually no financial incentive to invest in experiments with
artificial pollination.
In any event, none of the corn-breeding experiments was particularly
successful. Experimental seeds could not be guaranteed to produce a new
generation widi the improvements the experimenters were aiming for; the
corn that resulted was of variable quality, as variable as corn grown from
openly pollinated plants.
But the experimenters kept trying, and in the first decade of the twenti-
eth century, their efforts were galvanized by new discoveries and new the-
ories in the study of heredity. In 1 8 8 9 , an Englishman, Francis Galton, had
concluded, on the basis of his studies of the heights of parents and chil-
dren, diat the offspring of abnormal parents have a tendency to "regress
toward the population mean." A decade or so later, a Dutch biologist,
H u g o DcVries, discovered "mutations," major variations in a trait, which
could arise spontaneously and be inherited. Both discoveries—that some
unusual plants could breed true and that others would, after a generation
or two of breeding, revert right back to their parental types—had impor-
tant implications for breeders.
So did the workoTa Czech priest, Gregor Mendel, w h o had published
some papers about experiments that he had done on die artificial pollina-
tion of ornamental sweet peas. Mendel had concluded that some of the
characteristics of a plant could be thought of as units, that some units (for
example, the green color for seeds) dominated over others (for example,
the yellow color for seeds), and that in inheritance these units operated in-
dependently and according to the mathematical laws of probability. In
1 9 0 5 , an American, W. S. Sutton, demonstrated that the probabilistic be-
havior of Mendel's units would make physiological sense if those units were
located on the chromosomes in the nucleus of cells. A few years later, in
1 9 1 0 , another American, Thomas H u n t Morgan, was able to demonstrate
diis phenomenon experimentally w h e n he determined that a particular unit
character, eye color, was carried on the same chromosome that determined
the sex o f the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. T h e Mendel-
Morgan hypothesis (later to be called the gene theory) also had important
implications for breeders because it suggested that stable new species, or
at least stable new types, could be created by artificially and carefully cross-
ing one type with another over the course of several generations.
In addition, early in the twentieth century, two Scandinavian biologists,
Hjalmar Nilsson and Wilhelm Johannsen, had isolated "pure lines" (Jo-
hannsen later called them genotypes) by inbreeding, or self-fertilizing,
plants for several generations. Nilsson and Johannsen had been studying
plants like wheat and oats, which normally self-fertilize, and they had dis-
covered that, by carefully selecting the plants for several seasons, they could
create seed stocks that would consistently breed true to type. Their stocks
would not, to put the matter another way, vary with regard to one or two
crucial characteristics. It remained to be seen whether careful crossing and
subsequent inbreeding would have the same results in corn, which nor-
mally cross-fertilizes.
T w o Americans, E. M. East and George Shull, created the techniques
that would eventually solve the problem. They belonged to die first gen-
eration of American scientists w h o acquired a doctorate as part of their pro-
fessional training. East had a doctorate in plant physiology from the Uni-
versity of Illinois. He became the director of the Connecticut Agricultural
Experiment Station in 1 9 0 5 and began experiments intended to create
(and cross) inbred (or pure) lines of corn—varieties of corn created, as Jo-
hannsen had done, by self-pollinating plants for two or three seasons.
George Shull had received a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He
began studying the inheritance of row patterns in corn (the number of rows
of kernels per ear, a significant factor in yield calculations) in 1 9 0 6 , when
he became an employee of the Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold
Spring Harbor, N e w York.
Looked at in one way, both East and Shull were scientists, and dieir ex-
periments were purely scientific. East wanted to find out which corn char-
acteristics were dominant and which recessive; Shull was trying to find out
what were the unit characters in corn that would correspond to the unit
characters (such as seed color and seed shape) that Mendel had identified
in sweet peas. Both researchers were using corn in much the same way that
3oS
 Morgan had used fruit flies: as suitable medium through which to do ex-
periments. Looked at another way, however, both East and Shull were
technologists, pursuing very practical goals. Both were trying to ascertain
how the rules of Mendclism could be applied to a plant that had enormous
economic importance; they wanted to find out about the patterns of hered-
ity in corn in order to breed better corn plants. This is one of the charac-
teristics of technoscience: die pursuit of abstract knowledge and practical
goals can be carried out simultaneously.
Unfortunately, East found, season after season, as Galton had predicted,
that his hybrid plants lost vigor after the first year; the seed produced by
plants grown from hybrid seed did not have very high yields. When East
left the agricultural station in 1 9 0 9 to accept a professorial position at Har-
vard, his inbreeding experiments were continued by several of his students.
One of these men, Donald F. Jones, made a crucial guess about the reason
why hybrids between two inbred lines lost vigor. If, as Morgan's experi-
ments widi Drosophila had suggested, several different unit characters were
linked on each chromosome, then the hybrids of two pure lines might not
be vigorous because they were too pure—contained too few variations of
each genetic unit. Why not try creating a hybrid of four lines, a cross be-
tween two hybrids, a double cross?
Jones tested his double crosses in the growing seasons of 1916 and 1 9 1 7
and was delighted to discover that diey did not lose dieir vigor. He want-
ed to try crossing different pure lines and to test his hybrid seed under nor-
mal growing conditions in odier parts of the country. One of the farmers
who volunteered to do this for him was Henry Wallace. Wallace was the
scion of an eminent Iowa farming family who had shown considerable aca-
demic promise (and interest in scientific breeding) when a student at Iowa
State University. In the early 1920s, he was managing his o w n farm and
writing for an agricultural magazine, Wallaces'Farmer, which his grandfa-
ther had founded. Wallaces' Farmer encouraged what it called progressive
farming—experimentation with new products and processes—and Henry
Wallace practiced what he preached. Wallace planted some test plots of
Jones's seed, but he also crossed the Connecticut seed with some of his
own inbred lines until he had developed a strain of corn that was well adapt-
ed to the particular growing conditions in Iowa.
In 1 9 2 6 , the Hi-Bred Company, founded by Wallace, began advertising
and marketing the seed for this new strain, making it die first company to
commercialize hybrid corn. The Hi-Bred Company was immensely suc-
cessful. Wallace went on to be Secretary of Agriculture for two of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's terms and eventually a presidential candidate himself.
Although Wallace was the first to commercialize hybrid seed, other com-
panies soon followed; at least one of those companies, Funk Brothers, had
actually begun experimenting with double-crossed seed before either Jones
had published about it or Wallace had tried planting it. The Funk Brorh-
ers Company had been founded in 1901 by Eugene Duncan Funk, who
had attended the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and had, even in die
1880s, developed an enthusiasm for scientific agriculture. In 1 8 9 3 , he had
developed a new strain of corn (by crossing two varieties that had been de-
veloped by selection, not by inbreeding), and it was the commercial po-
tential of this strain (called Funk's 90-day, to signify the length of time from
planting to harvest) that led him and the members of his family to com-
bine their resources so as to be able to sponsor more research.
By 1 9 1 0 , Funk Brothers had a reputation as a research-oriented organi-
zation; it had as many people employed in, and as much land devoted to,
research work as most agricultural experiment stations funded by the
U S D A , and it had endowed a chemical laboratory at Weslcyan University,
where the chemical analyses of its new strains was carried out. In 1 9 1 5 , the
company hired J. R. Holbert as its chief agronomist. Holbert had just grad-
uated from Purdue with a bachelor of science degree in plant pathology;
he was immediately put in charge of the corn-breeding experiments. Be-
tween 1 9 1 6 and 1 9 1 8 , Holbert developed several pure lines based on
Funk's seeds; between 1 9 1 8 and 1 9 2 0 he developed several single crosses
of these lines—and a year later, a double cross. Small quantities of Pure
Line Double Cross N o . 2 5 0 were being sold by Funk Brothers by 1 9 2 2 ,
but they did not actually advertise it in their catalogue until 1928, after
Wallace had already demonstrated that there were a significant number of
farmers who could be induced to try—and retry—this new type of seed.
The path from Mendel's sweet peas to Wallace and Holbert's hybrid
corn is pretty much a straight line, but determining where on diat straight
line science stopped and technology began is not easy. Some people would
say that Mendel and Galton and Johannsen were scientists because they
discovered general principles, but that Jones and Holbert and Wallace were
agricultural inventors because they were trying to create something that
hadn't been there before: a hybrid, something unnatural, the result of hu-
man interference with the natural process of pollination.
Unfortunately, Mendel was "doing technology" also. Mendel's hobby
was gardening; like many serious gardeners of his day, he had been trying
to create new varieties of garden plants by artificial crossing, that is, by hy-
bridizing. So his goal was, at least in part, precisely the same as Wallace's
and Holbert's—that is, technological. So was his procedure, for when he
crossed the plants that resulted from planting yellow seeds with those that
resulted from planting green seeds, he was creating an entity that had nev-
er existed before: a sweet pea hybrid.
Thus one could say, widiout stretching the truth at all, diat Mendel dis-
covered the scientific laws of dominance and independent segregation
while in pursuit of a technological development program. The same kind
of statement could be made about Francis Galton, w h o discovered the law
of regression to die population mean while trying to figure out how to im-
prove the human race, and about E. M. East, who discovered that corn has
unit characters while trying to figure out how to help farmers increase their
yields. In which case, we end up arguing diat scientific discoveries were
made by people w h o were, despite their advanced training in die sciences,
3©n
 fundamentally technologists. And if we end up saying that, then what we THE PRAIRIE FARMER October 24, 1936
have ended up saying is that from its inception genedcs has been not so
much a science as a technoscience. The story o f hybrid corn thus teaches us
that technosciences are enterprises in which people seek the truth about D e K a l b Q u a l i t y Hybrids
nature in order to transform it; conversely technosciences are also enter-
prises in which some truths about nature have been uncovered in die prac-
tice of trying to transform it.
Virtually all of the corn grown in the United States today is hybrid corn,
Let
the product of artificial pollination of inbred strains. There are hundreds
of varieties: some bred for high productivity; some for early, or late, mat-
DE KALB
uration; some that are appealing because diey are sweeter and their rows QUALITY
of kernels more uniform. American farmers started making the transition
to hybrid corn during the Depression, and completed the transition dur- Hybrids be your
ing World War II when the loss of so much farm manpower to the military
made consistendy high yields imperative for individual farmers. By the ear-
M o r t g a g e L i f t e r
ly 1930s, the great commercial potential of hybrid corn had become very
clear, and several seed companies began developing and marketing their EXTRA PBOHTS IHTHIS DE KAIB QUA^TJRN•||H.p
own inbred strains from which double-cross seed could be derived.
Both commercial experimenters and experimenters employed at univer- / Superb Quality
sities and agricultural research stations had been in the habit of exchang- / H i g h Yield
ing the seed of their inbred lines, but in the 1930s, as the profits from the /Stiff Stalked
use of that seed began to mount, die exchanges stopped. Some growers— / Drouth Resistant
bodi commercial and noncommercial—tried to patent specific crosses, and / Normal Maturity
Jones tried to patent the idea of double crossing, but such claims were re-
/ Feeds Further
peatedly rejected by thcTpatent office and by the courts. As a result, all die
commercial parties have had to protect their financial stake in their lines by W B a r e i n p r o d u c t i o n o f twelve tUHetent hybrid
•(raini which h a v e a v^ry w i d e r«n c of adt.put.IHty
B

preventing die sale or theft of the seed from their inbred varieties. tot Che ejMlrc wm belt. Our f o u r U r g e drycil,
ipread ovcrilHnota » n d Iowa, allow ill to nrowaur
iiockl in u w i d e area. We hitve furnbhed hybrid
Hybrid corn looks and tastes much different from traditional varieties, •ecd to tVmcni ovcc i h c entire corn belt, who mat-
vel M I" ability to withstand the trying condltloni
but it is also very different socially and economically. Because it results from o f t h * drouth. ThU y « r d r y c o n d i t i o n s p r e v e n t e d
brnceroou f o r m i n g , yet the t o o t •yuem f r o m the
artificial, controlled pollination, farmers cannot produce die seed for hy- itronR « a l k . a n d hi*vy ColLfle of DeKalb Quality
Hybrid* carried t h e m t h r o u g h the heavy wlndf,In-
brid corn themselves. Production of hybrid seed requires access to the seed i l' . f s s ^ ^ j ^
•KtHtmckatftnd dry w « ( her with remarkable y l c l d i
M o w . i M eOHIO
r ^ wI t. I;. .Tm
;M WRITE FORMORIi SPECIFIC INFORMATION
of four different lines of inbred corn. That seed has to be planted on spe- I111NOIS INDIANA
IOWA WISCONSIN „.,.NtoRASlCA'<Mi)
cial plots and the silks have to be artificially pollinated. This has to be done
afresh every growing season in order to produce hybrid seed for the next
growing season. The seed from hybrid plants, openly pollinated, is degen-
DEKALB AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION
DEKALB ILLINOIS
erate seed; the next crop cannot be guaranteed to have anything like the
same characteristics as the crop from which the seed had been drawn.
Hybrid corn is dius implicated in the process by which small-scale farms, Hybrid corn probably did improve yields and profits for many farmers as this
owned and managed by farming families, have given way to very large advertisement suggests, but it also increased their costs since they became
farms, owned by large corporations, managed by corporate employees. To dependent on seed companies such as this one. (Courtesy DeKalb Genetics
grow hybrid corn, a farmer must be dependent on commercial seed com- Corporation.)
panies—and must go to the added expense of purchasing seed. Thus, like
petroleum-based fertilizers, petroleum-fueled tractors, electrically heated
incubators, and on-line meteorological databases, hybrid corn is a techno-
logical system thatibas increased the capital expenses required for success-
ful farm operations. The more capital that is required, the larger the plot
309
 . ^ ^ . i ui\i mv^tiNULUGIES
of land that needs to be farmed to make a profit—and the fewer people
there arc who can afford to continue farming independendy.
The end of family farming is an outcome drat the people who experi-
mented with hybrid corn never intended; indeed, at least one of those peo-
ple, Henry Wallace, would have abhorred it if he had lived to see it. Even
something as apparendy natural as a succulent ear of corn-on-the-cob can
be a technology, and like all technologies, it can have unexpected and un-
intended social and economic consequences. These unexpected and unin-
tended outcomes are common features of virtually all technological
changes, ones that we all must learn to appreciate. Because our social and
economic system is complex—some would say infinitely complex—even
the most sophisticated, best informed, thoroughly objective experts can-
not predict all the consequences of a significant technological change.
Penicillin
By the beginning of the twendedi century, most physicians in the United
States and Europe had come to accept the germ theory of disease, the no-
tion that some diseases are caused by microscopically small organisms. By
the turn of the century, in fact, a new science had been born: bacteriolo-
gy—the effort to classify these tiny organisms and to understand both their
metabolism and their modes of reproduction.
Alexander Fleming was a British bacteriologist; he was trained as a physi-
cian, but in the 1920s, he was employed as a medical researcher and
teacher. Fleming was interested in developing therapies for bacterial infec-
tions by studying the ways in which white blood cells, leukocytes, destroy
bacteria. Fleming's experiments were done on colonies of bacteria grown
in laboratory dishes; the antiseptic effectiveness of the materials he was
studying was gauged by the speed widi which bacteria died. One day, Flem-
ing noticed diat one of the plates in his laboratory, which must have been
accidentally exposed to the air, had some mold growing on it and—diis is
the significant part—that in the area near the mold the bacterial colony was
dying. Fleming was not particularly interested in the mold—he was exper-
imenting with leukocytes—but he was interested enough to send a sample
off to a mycologist (someone w h o specializes in the study of molds) for
identification. Fleming also grew some of the mold in test tubes and in-
jected some of the broth that developed in those test tubes into some an-
imals in his laboratory to see whether it was toxic. When the animals ap-
peared unaffected by the injections, he tried dropping a very weak solution
of the broth into the eyes of an animal that had an eye infection—and the
infection was gone in a few days. Satisfied that the fluid produced by the
mold, Penicillium notatum, was both nontoxic and powerfully antibacte-
rial, he published a short paper o n his researches in the British Journal of
Experimental Pathology'in 1929.
Neither Fleming rior anyone else seems to have paid much attention to
the antibacterial capacity o f Penicillium for the next decade. One or two
Biotechnology 311
biochemists tried to isolate the active chemical in the broth by distilling the
broth or by evaporating it or by mixing it with various kinds of solvents,
but all such efforts failed, and most knowledgeable people assumed that if
the active chemical couldn't be isolated, then the antibiotic couldn't be
manufactured in quantities large enough to do anyone any good as a med-
ication.
A decade later, however, two men renewed interest in the Penicillium
moId.^Ernest Chain, a German-Jewish biochemist had fled his homeland
and found a job in the medical research laboratory headed byHoward Flo-
reyf an Australian-born professor of pathology at Oxford University. Flo-
rey and Chain, aware that Europe was headed toward war, feared that ex-
isting antibiotics would be inadequate. Florey's lab was also running a
deficit; research on a promising new antibiotic was, he thought, a sure road
to new government funding. On August 2 7 , 1939—as Hider's army was
attacking Poland—Florey applied to the Medical Research Council (a
British government agency that supported medical research) for a small
grant to study Penicillium. Three days later, Britain and France declared
war on Germany.
The Medical Research Council was, however, also strapped for funds;
most of the money that Florey and Chain needed to start their research
eventually came from the'Rockefeller Foundation in N e w York} which was
then one of the major nongovernmental underwriters of medical research.
Penicillin (as the active ingredient in die broth produced by the mold
was eventually called) turned out to be an exceptionally fickle substance.
The mold had to be grown under absolutely sterile conditions since, iron-
ically, it was susceptible to being killed by airborne bacteria. Extracting die
active ingredient in die broth proved to be a major stumbling block as well
since heat, acids, and alkalis—the usual extraction media—all seemed to
destroy die bacteriolytic action of the chemical. By March 1 9 4 0 , after
months of work and the cooperation of many people in the laboratory—
biochemists, physicians, and technicians—Chain had only been able to pro-
duce one tenth of a gram of a brown powder from the fluid that had ac-
cumulated in hundreds of incubated dishes. Nonetheless, when this impure
powder was tested in petri dishes, it proved to be immensely powerful at
killing a wide spectrum of bacteria; a litde might go a very long way. When
injected at various dilutions into laboratory mice, it proved to be, as ex-
pected, nontoxic. Then mice were deliberately infected with staphylococ-
cus. Those mice that also received injections of penicillin survived; un-
treated mice were dead within a day. The entire laboratory staff was
encouraged by the results.
But the war in Europe was going very badly. In die first days of April
1940, in rapid succession, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium were
attacked and overrun; over the course of the next month, British and
French troops were pushed back to the sea, then forced to flee across the
English Channel, leaving much of western Europe occupied by the Ger-
mans. As the mouse experiments were being finished and the results writ-
I
 TWJbm im •H-CENTURT TECHNOLOGIES
ten up for a paper in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, men, women,
and children were being killed and wounded by German bombs which were
falling on London, just an hour's train ride from the Oxford laboratory.
Penicillium continued, however, to be recalcitrant. The researchers cal-
culated that they would need thirty grams of penicillin powder to treat a
human being, but using all the dishes and staff and extraction apparatus at
its command, the Oxford laboratory could only produce three grams a
week. Florey tried to enlist the aid of British pharmaceutical companies,
but they were all operating at full capacity to meet the demands of the by
now very stressed British population."By turning virtually his entire labo-
ratory into a penicillin manufactory, Florey was finally able, by February
1 9 4 1 , to accumulate enough of the powder to treat six patients—five of
whom were cured of massive, life-threatening infections. Florey under-
stood that penicillin had the potential to be a powerful weapon not only
in the fight against disease but also in the fight against the Nazis; he also
understood that there was no possibility of having it produced in sufficient
quantities under wartime conditions in Britain.
In June 1 9 4 1 , Florey and a chemist, Norman G. Headey, departed for
the United States, taking samples of the mold with them. Headey had suc-
ceeded in developing an effective system for extracting penicillin from the
culture broth—a crucial step in the process of turning a mold into a med-
icine. Headey's method was called back separation; it required the use of
two solvents, die first to get the penicillin separated from die broth and the
second to separate the penicillin from the first. Headey had also devised a
system for measuring the potency of any batch of penicillin powder, a unit
measurement (later called the Oxford Unit), which created a standard of
measurement and a way of determining safe doses for individual patients.
Florey hoped that he could convince some American organization—either
the government or a pharmaceutical company—to begin growing large
quantities of Penicillium notatum and to build a fairly large extraction ap-
paratus.
The question of who, if anyone, would be the first to patent penicillin
or some part of the system for obtaining it from its natural condition had
already been raised by Chain before Florey departed—and would be raised
again, numerous times in subsequent years. Chain's father had been a
chemical manufacturer in Germany; it seemed natural to him that the drug
should be protected by patents, so as to raise money for the Oxford labo-
ratory. Florey was dubious, and die physicians in charge of the Medical Re-
search Council were adamandy opposed, believing that it was unethical for
medical researchers to benefit in anyway from the commercial exploitation
of their discoveries. And there the matter rested, temporarily, as Florey and
Headey prepared to depart.
Florey, Headey, and Penicillium received a very friendly reception in the
United States; in short order, they had met with two people whose coop-
eration would turn out to be crucial. The first was Dr. Robert Coghill, an
agricultural chemist, who was die director of die Fermentation Division of
Biotechnology 313
the Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois. Located in
the middle of die farm belt, this laboratory, which was part of the United
States Department of Agriculture, was devoted to the task of finding in-
dustrial applications for American farm products, particularly corn. Heat-
ley and Florey had been told to see Coghill because the process by which
Penicillium produces penicillin out o f the chemicals in its growing medi-
um is a fermentative process, like the processes involved in making beer
and wine, a living organism changing one substance into another. Coghill's
staff was expert both at growing a variety of fermentative organisms and at
devising means for extracting the chemicals they produced. That summer,
Coghill and his staff were working with an abundant industrial by-product
for which they were trying to find some use. Corn steep liquor was a sticky
substance, a bit like molasses—the residue that remains when starch is ex-
tracted from corn. Within a month, the laboratory staff had discovered that
if corn steep liquor was used as a growing medium, penicillin production
could be increased tenfold.
The other crucial person whom Florey and Headey met that summer
was A. N. Richards. Like Florey, Richards had been trained as a physician,
and also like Florey, he had made his reputation at die laboratory bench
rather than the bedside. In 1 9 4 1 , he was a professor of pharmaceutical sci-
ences at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and one of the
country's leading experts on the development and testing of new medica-
tions; he was also a scientific advisor to a number of pharmaceutical com-
panies. That summer, Richards had just accepted a new appointment, as
head of the medical branch of the Office of Scientific Research and Devel-
opment ( O S R D ; see Chapter 11), a federal agency diat was to mobilize
technical and scientific talent in the event of war.
Richards was immediately convinced that penicillin would be crucial to
the war effort, but there was little he could do to assist Florey and Heat-
ley because the United States was not then at war and O S R D had no pow-
er to overrule, or even to influence, the decisions made by pharmaceutical
companies. Several American pharmaceutical companies were already in-
vestigating Penicillium broth. Research scientists working for these firms
had read Florey's report about his success with mice. As a result, there were
several small research projects in the works in which efforts were being
made to isolate and characterize the active ingredient in the broth, precisely
what Chain was working on at Oxford. Florey and Headey had called on
some of these industrial research laboratories, but, wishing to protect their
investments, several of the companies had been reluctant to talk with them
or to reveal very much about their research programs.
Florey returned to Britain in October; Headey remained in Peoria. On
December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, Congress
declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy. Five days later, Richards called
a meeting in Washington to initiate a crash program for the production of
penicillin.
Coghill was present; he told the committee about the benefits of using
 314 TWENTIETH-CENTURY TECHNOLOGIES

corn steep liquor as a growing medium. Several representatives of phar-

maceutical companies were present. Richards told them that under new
wartime regulations they would not be prosecuted for violation of the an-
titrust laws if diey agreed voluntarily to pool all the information that they
were acquiring about penicillin. He also assured them that no one would
be allowed to take out a patent on the production process, or any part of
it, for the duration of the war. Under new tax regulations, the companies
were going to be allowed to plow back 85 percent of their profits into war-
related research. A scientific advisory board was going to be formed to sug-
gest ways to increase penicillin production. The companies and the De-
partment of Agriculture agreed tentatively to cooperate. The American war
to conquer die secrets of the penicillin molecule had begun; the British re-
searchers would join the effort, but the initiative, and most of the funding,
was now American.
The penicillin war proceeded on several fronts. The chemical engineers
working for pharmaceutical companies designed systems for scaling up the
incubation of the mold and the extraction of the powder. Within a year,
several companies had opened massive "botdc plants," capable of handling
100,000 one-liter bottles at a time, each containing 2 0 0 cubic centimeters
of corn steep liquor. Eighteen months earlier Florey's group at Oxford was
obtaining one to two units of penicillin for every cubic centimeter of Peni-
cillium it cultured; because o f the improved medium being used in the
United States and because of the improved extraction systems that chemists
and chemical engineers had developed, the bottle plants were obtaining
1,500 units for every cubic centimeter of culture.
In March 1942, a woman in N e w Haven, Connecticut who was close to
death from a staphylococcus infection became the first American to receive
and be cured by commercially produced penicillin. A year later, the annual
rate of American production was 2 billion units, and 100 patients had been
treated. In the summer of 1 9 4 3 , the commanders of the Allied forces be-
gan making plans for a massive invasion of Europe, an invasion that was
going to be both difficult and bloody. A m o n g other things that would be
needed were vasdy increased supplies of penicillin. In the late summer of
1 9 4 3 , O S R D , the War Production Board, and the Medical Research Coun-
cil decided to appoint a penicillin "czar" who would be given unusual pow-
ers to command materials and unusual resources with which to contract for
research. Production soared: 6 8 4 billion units in the first half of 1 9 4 4 ,
2 . 4 8 9 trillion units in the second, 7.5 trillion units by the time peace was
declared in August 1945. The price also fell, from $ 2 0 0 to $35 per million
units. (A few years after the war, with continued improvements in the pro-
duction process, the price fell as low as $.50 per million units.) The OSRD
had succeeded, bodi according to plan and beyond its wildest dreams; Pharmaceutical companies had to build entirely new facilities for manufacturing
penicillin had saved more lives than any medication previously devised. penicillin very quickly in the closing years of World War II. (Courtesy Library of
Congress.)
All of the penicillin produced during die war was derived from a natur-
al organism, but in the summer of 1 9 4 3 , OSRD had also begun an effort
to synthesize the antibiotic ingredient. As a first step, biochemists had to
315
 316
TWENTIETH-CENTURT TECHNOLOGIES
crystallize a pure sample of the active ingredient in the Penicillium broth
so that they could determine what elements the penicillin molecule con-
tained and h o w they were arranged. In the summer of 1 9 4 3 , a group of
chemists working under Oskar Wintersteiner at the G. Squibb Company
succeeded in crystallizing pure penicillin. Shortly thereafter, Roger Adams,
a biochemist w h o was head of a very large research group at the Universi-
ty of Illinois and editor of a very prestigious biochemistry journal (some of
his colleagues called him the pope of biochemistry), was put in charge of
the synthesis program. Ten companies, with the largest and best organized
research laboratories, were given government contracts to pursue research,
and four academic chemists, w h o had previously had appointments at uni-
versities and medical schools, were recruited as consultants.
Once again, the penicillin molecule proved recalcitrant; the synthesis of
penicillin was not accomplished for another fourteen years. During die war
years, the constituent elements of the molecule were identified and its
structure was determined, but before anything more could be done, the
war ended and the penicillin crash program drew to a close. Academic
chemists left government service and returned to their laboratories and to
the problems they had dropped when the war broke out. Most of the phar-
maceutical companies lost interest in penicillin synthesis, pardy because
their fermentation plants were in place and functioning well and pardy be-
cause it was clear diat no developments made during the war under OSRD
contracts were going to receive patent protection.
During the war, John ^heehan had worked on penicillin synthesis as an
employee in the research laboratories of the Merck company. After die war,
he returned to an academic position at MIT but continued to struggle with
the synthesis of penicillin because he believed that, once synthesized, the
penicillin molecule could be modified so as to be targeted against specific
bacteria. Sheehan's research was funded pardy by MIT and partly by small
grants from a pharmaceutical company. He discovered that it was relative-
ly easy to create a linear molecule out of the constituent elements of peni-
cillin, but that it was exceedingly difficult to get that molecule to form into
a ring. He didn't solve the problem until 1 9 5 7 and die solution, by his ac-
count, depended on happening across an article in a professional journal
that suggested to him that one group of chemicals—the carbodiimides—
had just the characteristics that were needed to get the reaction to proceed.
Sheehan's syndiesis opened a whole new era in penicillin research and man-
ufacturing because, as he had suspected, the synthesis of die basic com-
pound was just the first step in the creation of variations that would adapt
an all-purpose medication to several specific situations.
The history of penicillin reveals, just as the history of hybrid corn did,
that there is a continuum—not a neat distinction—between science and
technology. Florey, Chain, Fleming, Coghill, Headey, and Shcehan all suc-
ceeded in discoveritig.something, and each discovery had a specific practi-
cal meaning for human health. They were able to make these discoveries
pardy because they were skilled at experimental procedure and pardy be-
317
Motechnology
cause, due to their training in the sciences, they managed to make con-
nections between various phenomena. Yet at each step of the way, each of
those scientists was also exploring applications. Fleming injected some of
the mold broth into mice to see if it would kill them; Florey injected it into
humans to make sure that it was safe; Chain searched the literature to dis-
cover what other substances could be used in the same way Florey hoped
to use penicillin; Headey knew he had to find a technique for purifying
penicillin that could, potentially, be scaled up; Shechan took out a patent
because he knew that more than one company was going to be interested
in scaling up his syndiesis. The ultimate goal (indeed, in the case of Florey,
Chain and Headey, the immediate goal) was to alleviate the pain and suf-
fering that some bacteria can inflict on human beings.
In addition, the history of penicillin reveals that, more often than not,
successful technoscicnce requires a great deal of money, plus the coopera-
tion of many different kinds of people and many different social institu-
tions; technoscience, to put die matter another way, is very often "big sci-
ence." Commercial production of penicillin and its artificial variants
involved research physicians, biochemists, chemical engineers, and agri-
cultural scientists. It also involved government agencies, private compa-
nies, philanthropic foundations, and universities. In addition, it was an in-
ternational effort, which may have culminated in the United States but
depended nonetheless on discoveries made by people trained in Britain,
Australia, and Germany. Finally, technoscicnce depends on skillful man-
agers—the people w h o make connections between all these individuals and
institutions—as much as, or perhaps more than it depends on the individ-
ual genius of researchers.
Some people object to big science precisely because of that latter feature,
because it is a team effort rather than a solitary pursuit. Others people ob-
ject to it because frequendy that team effort has been directed toward mil-
itary or destructive goals; the atomic and hydrogen bombs, for example,
and the intercontinental ballistic missile were all products of big science.
The history of penicillin reminds us, however, that while there were many
lives destroyed and put in peril by big science, dicre were also many that
were saved and cased by the same kind of enterprise.
Like hybrid corn, some of the impact of penicillin, and the hundreds of
other antibiotics based on it, has been unexpected and ironic. Everyone
w h o labored so mightily to create penicillin hoped that it would lower
death rates, but none of the researchers anticipated that inexpensive an-
tibiotics, distributed all over the globe, would so profoundly lower death
rates that, in many places, severe overpopulation, overcrowding, and envi-
ronmental degradation would result. Similarly, few of the researchers could
have guessed that their work would profoundly affect familial relationships.
Yet when physicians were able to use antibiotics to reduce the severity of
such common and widespread diseases as pneumonia and tuberculosis,
mothers and wives began to realize that their home-nursing duties were no
longer as onerous as they had once been. The end result was that married
 318 TWENTIETH-CENTURT TECHNOLOGIES
women began to take full-time jobs outside dieir homes without fearing
that they were direatening the lives of their children and husbands. An-
tibiotics were not the only causes of such complex social phenomena as
overpopulation and married women joining the workforce, but they
weren't insignificant causes either, and they were certainly unexpected.
Finally, no one working in antibiotic research in the 1940s and 1950s
envisioned what we now know grievously to be die case. Bacteria mutate.
An antibiotic, by killing off old forms of a bacterium, makes it easier for
newer, antibiotic-resistant forms to survive. Each new generation of bac-
teria can dierefore require a new generation of antibiotics—and in the lag
time between the natural creation of the one and the artificial creation of
the other, people can become dangerously, even fatally, ill. The bacterial
environment, to put the matter another way, is profoundly altered by an-
tibiotics, altered in ways that threaten human life. This means that in the
antibiotic wars there are only temporary victories: hard-won to be sure, and
probably worthwhile, but never permanent.
The Birth Control Pill
Because it affected the most intimate and personal aspects of people's lives,
the birth control pill (often referred to simply as the Pill) was, unquestion-
ably one of the most controversial technologies of its day. Indeed, one in-
dicator of its revolutionary impact is the fact diat people who were born
after the controversy had died down have a hard time imagining what all
the fuss was about.
Like hybrid corn, the birth control pill was the product of what might
be called litdc technoscience. No governmental agencies of any kind were |
committed to its development, which meant that die number of people in- I
volved was smaller and the amount of money spent was smaller. Aside from ,
that, however, the development of the Pill was as much a complex, man-
aged technoscientific enterprise as the development of penicillin.
In the latter years of the nineteenth century, several European medical
researchers had become interested in certain chemicals that circulated in
the blood. Apparendy, these chemicals, released by some of the body's in-
ternal organs, were able to affect the behavior of other organs; by 1 9 0 5 ,
the whole class of such chemicals had been given die name "hormone,"
from a Greek word meaning "to incite to activity."
A series of experiments performed on laboratory and domestic animals
in the early decades of the twenticteh century convinced medical re-
searchers that some of these hormones affected both the development of
secondary sex characteristics and sexual behavior: these substances came to
be called sex hormones. By 1928,. two American physicians, George Cor-
ner and Willard M. Allen, having carefully studied all the changes that oc-
cur in mammalian ovaries during ovulation, discovered that there was such
a substance in the corpus luteum (the vessel formed out of the follicle af-
ter an egg has been released). This substance seemed to prevent the ripen-
Biotechnolqgy 319
ing of additional eggs; it also seemed to increase and alter the lining of the
uterus to prepare for implantation of eggs and die commencement of preg-
nancy. They named this substance "progesterone," from the Greek words
meaning "in favor of and "bearing offspring."
Subsequently, researchers began to understand that the complex feed-
back relations between progesterone and three other hormones (estrogen;
follicle-stimulating hormone, or FSH; and luteinizing hormone, or LH)
governed the human menstrual cycle. They also reasoned that proges-
terone, because it prepared the uterus for pregnancy, might be used as a
therapy for women whose pregnancies regularly miscarried or for women
who struggled with other menstrual disorders. N o t surprisingly, some
medical scientists also realized that, since progesterone prevented ovula-
tion, it had potential as a contraceptive. Since women do not generally ovu-
late when they are pregnant and since maintenance of a pregnancy seemed
to depend on maintenance of a certain level of progesterone, artificially es-
tablishing diat same level would actually prevent a pregnancy by prevent-
ing ovulation, by "fooling" the body into "thinking" it was already preg-
nant. Fuller Albright, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School,
referred to this in 1945 as "birth control by hormone therapy." 1
Betwixt cup and lip there were, however, two enormous problems, one
technical, the other social. Supplies of either human or animal progesterone
were extremely limited. There was no known way either to extract large
quantities of it from living tissue or to synthesize it, which meant, among
other things, that the limited amount available was being used only to treat
those patients who could afford the very high price. Furthermore, all pub-
lished discussions of birth control—including professional research reports
about contraceptives—had to be very carefully circumscribed because in
many states dissemination of information about birth control was illegal. Al-
bright hid his suggestion about birth control by hormone therapy in a tech-
nical article about treating menstrual disorders. If someone unfriendly to
birth control had noticed what he had written and had brought the matter
to die attention of the authorities, Albright could have been fined and jailed.
Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how one feels about the
Pill), there were two women in the United States who had already done
batde with the authorities over birth control and w h o had no reservations
about continuing to do so. One was Margaret Sanger, a trained nurse who
was devoted to the cause of birth control. Sanger and her sister had opened
the country's first birdi control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916; both women
had spent time in jail as punishment. By the late 1940s, Margaret Sanger
was internationally famous for her efforts to spare American women from
unwanted pregnancies. The Birth Control League, which she and several
others had founded in 1 9 1 5 , had been transformed into the Planned Par-
enthood Federation of America, which coordinated the activities of more
than two hundred local clinics. And the Supreme Court case that she had
initiated (by having someone mail her a diaphragm from overseas) had
been w o n in her favor, thereby voiding the federal laws that had made it il-
 320 TWENTIETH-CENTURT TECHNOLOGIES
legal to use federal facilities such as the postal service to disseminate birth
control devices or information. Sanger regarded herself as a rebel with a
cause; she could afford to continue to be rebellious because she had been
left a considerable fortune by her second husband.
As wealthy as she was, Sanger did not have enough money to sponsor a
research and development project; however, by 1951 there was someone
else w h o did. Katiierine Dexter McCormick was the heir to one large for-
tune (her father's) and one enormous one (her late husband's). As a young
woman, she had earned a bachelor of science degree in biology from MIT
(at a time when this was a very unusual diing for a young woman to do)
and had become an ardent suffragette. During the 1920s and 1930s, she
cooperated with Margaret Sanger by arranging to smuggle European birth
control devices into this country so that they could be dispensed in clinics.
As a young married woman, she had struggled tragically with her husband's
collapse into schizophrenia—and had vowed not to have children by him.
While he was still alive, she had gained control of his financial affairs and
donated large sums of money to neuropsychiatric research. After he died
in 1947, she sold several of their large estates and decided to spend her
money on her own political causes. Birth control was one of them.
In 1 9 5 1 , McCormick asked Sanger what, at that point in time, the birdi
control movement most needed. Sanger responded that it needed a safe,
inexpensive contraceptive drat would combat over-population and that
women, rather dian men, could control. Sanger then introduced Mc-
Cormick to Gregory Piacus, a physiologist, w h o was one of the world's
leading experts on the mammalian egg. Pincus was the head of a private,
not-for-profit scientific research institute, the Worcester Foundation for
Experimental Biology, which he had founded with a colleague in 1 9 4 4
when he was denied tenure at Harvard. The Worcester Foundation had
struggled along, doing biomedical research under contract to a variety of
organizations (including Planned Parenthood), but in 1 9 5 1 , it was close
to bankruptcy. McCormick made Pincus an offer: she would foot the bill
if he would turn his foundation to the task of developing birth control by
hormonal therapy. Between 1951 and 1 9 5 9 , Pincus acted, in fact if not in
tide, as the manager of the Pill project.
Unbeknownst to Pincus, in the early 1940s, a maverick American
chemist, Russell Marker, had developed a process for converting a steroid
found abundandy in some plants, sapogenin, into progesterone. Marker
was a professor at Penn State at the time, and his research costs were be-
ing underwritten by a pharmaceutical company. When he discovered that
one of the world's richest sources of sapogenin was a plant that grew only
in the deserts of Mexico, Marker proposed to executives of the pharma-
ceutical company that they create a laboratory for extracting sapogenin and
making progesterone in. Mexico. When they turned him down, Marker,
aware of the great therapeutic demand for progesterone, prompdy quit his
job and went into business with a Mexican entrepreneur.
Eventually Marker was forced out of that company—and another tha*
/
Biotechnology 321
he helped found—but his process (which he had refused to patent, mak-
ing it available to anyone) created the foundation for what soon became a
flourishing Mexican industry: the synthesis of various steroids, including
progesterone, from desert plants. In 1 9 4 9 , needing an expert chemist, one
of those companies, Syntex, hired Carl Djerassi, a young American who
had recendy completed his doctoral dissertation. Within a few months,
Djerassi had figured out a way to make cortisone, which was being used
extensively as a treatment for arthritis, from the chemicals in one of those
plants. A few months later, he took on another interesting project: making
a version of progesterone that would work better than progesterone.
The problem with synthetic progesterone was that it had to be admin-
istered by injection and in very large doses because it was degtaded and
rendered ineffective when it passed through a patient's liver. Djerassi
thought up several different ways to try modifying progesterone, and after
several months, he found a molecule that proved to be highly active when
fed to laboratory animals. After a physician tested the compound success-
fully on three women volunteers who were suffering from excessive men-
strual bleeding, Djerassi applied for a patent on November 2 2 , 1 9 5 1 , on
norethindone, an orally active variant of progesterone. In those very same
months, Frank B. Colton, chief research chemist for the G. D. Searle Com-
pany, was also trying to alter the proge'sterone molecule so that it could be
taken orally; Colton's successful version, to which Searle gave the trade
name Enovid was not patented for another year and a half.
In April 1 9 5 1 , when Pincus turned his laboratory to contraceptive re-
search, he knew nothing about these developments; the first task he set his
research associates, Min-Chueh Chang and Anne Merrill, was to find out
whedier regular injections of progesterone would actually prevent female
laboratory animals from becoming pregnant. N o t long after starting these
trials, Pincus met a Boston gynecologist, John Rock, who was testing out
a new therapy for infertility. Rock had been regulating his patients' men-
strual cycles by administering doses of estrogen and progesterone every day
for several months—deliberately fooling their bodies into thinking they
were pregnant—and then taking his patients off the medication and letting
their natural menstrual cycles return. In effect, Rock was already tcsdng a
chemical contraceptive on human beings and had discovered—in pursuit
of a cure for infertility—that it worked.
Rock's work meant that Pincus could stop fussing with laboratory ani-
mals, but he couldn't know whether a chemical contraceptive would be safe
for long-term use until he conducted a clinical trial. He also knew that he
couldn't proceed to a clinical trial (and also satisfy McCormick and
Sanger's requirement that the new contraceptive be cheap) until he locat-
ed, or developed, a form of the hormone that didn't have to be given by
daily injection. A series of inquiries to pharmaceutical companies yielded
the information that two of them—Searle and Syntex—would be happy to
sell him samples of die orally administered progestins that Djerassi and
Colton had just recendy developed.
322 TWENTIETH-CENTURY TECHNOLOGIES
Clinical trials of progestin could now proceed. Rock agreed that he
would very quietly test oral progesdn on fifty women volunteers—Massa-
chusetts state law still made it illegal to discuss birdi control publicly.
Pincus announced the successful results (not one of the fifty women had
ovulated) at a meeting of the International Planned Parenthood League in
October 1955. A few months earlier, he had begun to try to locate a place
where an even larger, longer-term clinical trial could be organized involv-
ing poor women (who were, after all, McCormick and Sanger's target pop-
ulation). Pincus and Rock also wanted women volunteers who could be
counted on both to want a contraceptive and eventually to want to go off
it since the two needed to be assured that the effect would be reversible
and that subsequent babies would not be harmed by their mothers' chem-
ical regimen. N o t surprisingly, they also wanted a place in which diere was
no law banning discussion of birdi control.
The places diey chose were Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Mexico City. The
clinical trials were paid for by McCormick, but organized with the help of
local physicians, nurses, and social workers who were already birth control
advocates. Before the trials began, Pincus and Rock decided to use Scarle's
progesdn, Enovid, because it appeared to have fewer side effects. While the
Puerto Rican trials were in progress, they discovered that the reason for
this was that several Enovid batches were contaminated with small amounts
of estrogen; thereafter, all formulations of die Pill contained trace amounts
of estrogen. By 1957, die team had carefully monitored 2 5 , 4 2 1 monthly
cycles of pill administration and had calculated a contraceptive failure rate
of 1.7 percent (by comparison, the failure rates for diaphragms in those
years were 33.6 percent and for condoms, 28.3 percent). McCormick and
Sanger were, of course, delighted.
But the pharmaceutical companies, even Searle and Syntex, were hesi-
tant. In 1957, Searle and applied for and received FDA approval to mar-
ket Enovid as therapy for menstrual disorders and repeated miscarriages.
T w o years later, 500,000 American women were taking die Pill every day,
far more than the number that were thought to suffer from such disorders.
Clearly some physicians knew, and had told their patients, that Enovid
could be used as a contraceptive. Despite this unexpected phenomenon,
the companies perceived that the political risks involved in marketing oral
progestins as contraceptives were very great. The Catholic Church had
clearly indicated that it would use the laws that were dien on the books, as
well as its considerable political clout, against any effort to popularize birth
control.
Eventually Searle capitulated, both to Pincus's remonstrations and to its
own potential profits. In 1 9 5 9 , it applied to the FDA for permissioji-to ad-
vertise Enovid as a contraceptive. The FDA took a long time examining
the reports of all the clinical trials; this would be, after all, the first med-
ication intended tq„be taken by healdiy people, who would be taking it for
very long periods of time, possibly for decades. Finally, on May 1 1 , 1960,
Biotechnology
the Pill was formally declared safe for prolonged and regular use as a con-
traceptive.
American married women were enthusiastic; so were many of their physi-
cians. By 1 9 6 6 , researchers estimated that 56 percent of all married Amer-
ican w o m e n under the age of twenty and 25 percent of those under the age
of forty-five were using the Pill, a total of at least 5 million women. The
number of users continued to rise until the middle 1970s when some fem-
inist groups became concerned about the relationship between the Pill and
the incidence of other diseases, and an alternative contraceptive, the I U D ,
became widely available.
By that time, however, as far as the opponents of birth control were con-
cerned, the Pill had already done far too much social damage. In the decade
between 1965 and 1 9 7 5 , a mulrifaceted revolution in American sexual be-
havior occurred. Scholars today debate the extent to which that revolution
can be attributed to the oral contraceptive, but even those who doubt that
it was the sole causative factor admit diat its role was far from insignificant.
Ironically, the revolution turned out not to be quite the one McCormick
and Sanger had anticipated. The most likely users of oral contraceptives
turned out not to be poor women in undeveloped countries but fairly well-
educated, middle-class women in relatively wealthy countries. The prob-
lems of overpopulation were not solved by the Pill. Even where govern-
ments were eager to try contraception, the difficulty of distributing the
requisite daily doses and educating illiterate women about how to take
them proved insurmountable.
For reasons no one can quite explain, the oral contraceptive made it pos-
sible for Americans to discuss birth control, which had previously been a
taboo subject in public and in polite conversation. Married women learned
about it from dieir friends and began demanding it from their doctors. As
more and more w o m e n discovered that there was a simple and reasonably
safe way to control their fertility themselves, more were encouraged, and
found the time, to assert diemselves in other fields of endeavor as well. And
as they discovered that they could control their fertility without constrain-
ing their sexual desires, more and more women began admitting diat they
had such desires and that they wanted to satisfy them.
In short order, the rumor spread to unmarried women as well. Some
traveled to distant cities and pretended to be married in order to get a
physician to write a prescription; others soon learned which nearby physi-
cians were willing to look the other way, ignoring the absence of a wed-
ding ring. At one college after another, infirmary physicians began distrib-
uting the Pill to students who asked for it; at one Planned Parenthood clinic
after another, physicians and nurses stopped insisting that patients demon-
strate dieir marital status before being examined. In 1961, two leaders of
Planned Parenthood in Connecticut informed the state police that they
were going to publicly open a birth control clinic. When they were duly
arrested and fined, they went to court to challenge Connecticut's restric-
324 TWENTIETH-CENTURT TECHNOLOGIES Biotechnology 325

five law. Four years later, when the Supreme Court decided (in Griswold v.
Connecticut) that the law was unconstitutional, it thereby invalidated all
the restrictive state laws about dispensing birth control devices and infor-
mation to married women. In 1 9 7 2 , when it resolved a related case (Eisen-
stadtv. Baird) the Supreme Court finally extended the right to obtain birth
control to unmarried women as well.
The rebellious generation that came of age in the late 1960s therefore
reached sexual maturity at a time when birth control could be publicly dis-
cussed. In addition, all kinds of contraceptives were fairly easy to obtain,
including one—the oral contraceptive—that did not interfere with sexual
pleasure and did not require a man's cooperation to be effective. The two
strongest disincentives to premarital sexual behavior, the fear of being dis-
graced and the fear of getting pregnant, had evaporated. Millions of young
people, not surprisingly, took advantage of the opportunities duis pre-
sented. In the process, they totally transformed the nation's tolerance for
explicit sexual discussion and for premarital sexual activity. This was an out-
come that only a very few birth control advocates had ever expected, as
completely unintended as some of die consequences of penicillin and hy-
brid corn.
By 1970, both birth control and abortion had become discussable—and
Even as venerable an institution as the Roman Catholic Church was
protestablc—subjects. These demonstrators are gathered across the street from
rocked to its foundations by the oral contraceptive. When the 1960s St. Patrick's Cathedral (Roman Catholic) in Manhattan in 1970. (Courtesy
dawned, the only birth control technique that die Church approved—-and Tcmma Kaplan.)
only lukewarmly—was the rhythm method. American Catholics were not,
however, unanimous in their adherence to this teaching and the advent of
the Pill made them even more disgruntied. By 1 9 6 4 , some 60 percent of Such was the power of sexual desire and of the little pill that finally made
the Catholics surveyed in a national poll said that they were dissatisfied with it safe for large numbers of women to consider succumbing. Like the re-
their Church's position; and two-thirds of the women were willing to ad- search and development project that produced hybrid corn, it had been a
mit that they were using some contraceptive mediod other than rhydim; a relatively small undertaking, engaging the efforts of two wealthy and deter-
third of those were using die Pill. mined women, plus a handful of university scientists, a few pharmaceutical
All over the country, parishioners were putting pressure on priests to de- companies, a not-for-profit research institute, a few thousand volunteer pa-
viate from the Church's rules and in fairly short order the American bish- tients, and one federal regulatory agency. Like the project diat produced
ops began putting pressure on the Roman hierarchy to pay attention to commercial penicillin, it was managed by a few clever and persistent indi-
what was happening among their congregants. In the spring of 1965, Pope viduals w h o were able to manipulate several social institutions so as to
Paul VI convened an extraordinary meeting in Rome; twenty-one clergy- achieve their objectives in a relatively short period of time—eight years
men and thirty-four lay people (including three married couples) were from start to finish. And whatever its faults and its unintended conse-
asked to give the pope advice on whether die Church ought to change its quences may be, most people whose lives were altered by the product of
position on birth control. After weighty deliberations, a majority of the that technoscientific undertaking continued to approve of it.
commission concluded that it should. The pope took several years to con-
sider those recommendations, but in 1968, in the encyc!icaLH»wffw«e Vi-
tae, he announced that he was rejecting it completely/The pope's decision Conclusion
was a shattering blow from which, many Catholics argue, the American
In recent decades, the power of biomedical technoscicnce has increased,
Church has still not recovered. The number of Catholics (both married and
partly because so many people believe that its past achievements were pos-
unmarried) using birth control continued to rise and the number attend-
itive and pardy because new frontiers were opened by die technoscience
ing mass began tt\plummet; 1967 was die last year in which the majority
that developed after James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the dou-
of American Catholics said that they believed diat the pope's authority was
ble helical structure of D N A in 1952. The same techniques of selective
paramount.
breeding that produced hybrid corn have since yielded new forms of many
326 TWENTIETH-CENTURY TECHNOLOGIES
traditional grains and vegetables and garden flowers. N e w breeding tech-
niques involving the micromanipulation and splicing together of chromo-
somes (called recombinant D N A techniques) have given us such new life-
forms as bacteria that can digest oil spills and fully ripe tomatoes that can
be harvested mechanically. Manipulation of the same hormones that arc in
the oral contraceptive now make it possible for physicians to harvest eggs
from women's ovaries, die fundamental starting point for in vitro fertil-
ization. And the accumulated knowledge about how to manage techno-
scientific projects has made it possible for molecular geneticists to create
the Human Genome Project—an international effort, coordinating the ac-
tivities of universities, medical schools, government agencies, and busi-
nesses—to identify the location and chemical structure of every active gene
in the nuclei of human cells. Some people hope that when the genome proj-
ect is finished it will be possible to cure every disease diat afflicts human
beings; other people fear that when the project is finished technoscientists
will be able to manipulate odier people as easily as they can now manipu-
late bacteria and grasses.
The history of hybrid corn, commercial penicillin, and the birth control
pill has several tilings to teach us as we contemplate the future that bio-
medical technoscience may or may not create. First, no new technology has
ever been the unalloyed blessing diat its advocates say it is—or the unal-
loyed curse that its opponents insist it is. All technological changes have
unintended and unexpected social and ethical outcomes, few ofwhich have
been predicted by even tjjc best of experts. Second, since at least 1945 (and
possibly earlier) even die best of these experts have not been disinterested.
Because of the nature of technoscience, virtually all researchers cam their
livings, in one way or anodier, on some goal-directed project, which means
that they all have some vested interest in the polidcs and policies that will
affect those projects. Finally, some people will be affected positively and
others negatively by the outcome of any technological change; indeed, the
same person can be affected negatively or positively depending on which
of several possible social roles that person happens to be playing. Thus the
most important, lessons that the history of technology can teach us are
these: technology is complicated; so is life; so is the history that we create
as we live our lives together. Those us w h o care about die future need to
pay very close attention to these complexities. Every technological change
has profound social and ethical consequences, and we cannot rely on ex-
perts to make wise decisions about diose consequences for us.
Note
1. Fuller Albright, "Disorders of the Female Gonads," in JohnH. Musser, ed.,
Internal Medicinerlts Theory and Practice (Philadelphia, 1945), p. 966, as quoted
in Bernard Asbell, The Pill: A Biography of the Drug that Changed the World (New
York: Random House, 1995), p. 18.
Biotechnology 327
Suggestions for Further Reading
Bernard Asbell, The Pill: A Biography of the Drug that Changed the World (New
York, 1995).
Stuart S. Blume, Insight and Industry: On the Dynamics of Technological Change in
Medicine (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (Cambridge, 1993).
Lawrence Busch, William B. Lacey, Jeffrey Burckhardt, and Laura R. Lacy, Plants,
Power and Profit: Social, Economic and Ethical Consequences of the New Biotech-
nologies (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
Albert L. Elder, cd., The History of Penicillin Production (New York, 1970).
Deborah Fitzgerald, The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890-1940
(Ithaca, NY, 1990).
Stephen S. Hall, Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene (New
York, 1987).
Jim Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Timer (Cambridge, MA, 1978).
David Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du
Pont R&D, 1902-1980 (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
loel Howell, Technology in the Hospital: Transforming Patient Care in the Early
Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 1995).
Sheldon Krimsky, Genetic Alchemy: The Social History of the Recombinant DNA
Controversy (Cambridge, MA, 1982).
Jonathon Licbenau, Medical Science and Medical Industry: The Formation of the
American Pharmaceutical Industry (Baltimore, 1987).
Alan Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy (Ames, IA, 1985).
lean L. Marx, A Revolution in Biotechnology (New York, 1989).
James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and
American Society since 1830 (New York, 1978).
John C. Sheehan, The Enchanted Ring: The Untold Story of Penicillin (Cambridge,
MA, 1982).
John Swann, Academic Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Cooperative Re-
search in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1988).
Arnold Thackray, Ed., Private Science: The Biotechnology Industry and the Rise of
Contemporary Molecular Biology (Philadelphia, 1994).
Trevor I. Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After (Oxford, 1984).
Edward Yoxen, The Gene Business: Who Should Control Biotechnology} (New York,
1983).