Carroll Pursell

Government and Technology in the Great Depression

Even before the onslaught of the Great Depression of 1929, misgivings about the role of technology in Western culture were gaining wide currency. Aggressive insistence upon the inevitability and superiority of machine civilization were countered by denunciations of a new Dark Age of dehumanized enslavement for the soul. With the coming of the depression and its signal characteristic of unemployment in the midst of seeming overproduction, this philosophical and literary debate took on new significance for the shaping of public policy. Throughout the New Deal years, the question of the machine was constantly before the government. Officials in Washington, however, were torn by that same ambivalence which had marked much of the concern of the 1920s: on the

Domesticating modernity: the Electrical Association for Women, 1924–86

For over half a century, from 1924 to 1986, the Electrical Association for Women (EAW) worked to modernize the British home by bringing the blessings of labour-saving appliances to the aid of British women. Adopting a strategy of facilitation, the EAW sought, on the one hand, to educate women about electricity and its advantages in the home, encourage them to demand greater access to that electricity and keep them abreast of new developments in appliances and the infrastructure (from a national grid to sufficient outlets) necessary for enjoying them. On the other hand, the organization sought to discover the real needs and desires of the women themselves, and to bring this forcibly to the attention of the electrical industry in Great Britain ; to make the ‘womens point of view’, as it was called, a factor in the production, distribution and application of electricity in the home.Although the very masculine electrical industry was a decisive part of both the EAWs context, and of its financial and advisory structure, the group proudly insisted that it was a womens organization in which women addressed other women about womens concerns and well-being. In its early years, the excitement of women coming together in a modern cause was palpable, but as the leadership aged and electricity turned from modern vision to commonplace reality, the almost religious zeal and pace of activities began to falter. A late-hour attempt to highlight nuclear power plants as evidence of a renewed and equally exciting modern moment fell short, and in 1986 the EAW quietly dissolved itself, the casualty of large social changes, some of which it had proudly helped to bring about.

Early Stationary Steam Engines in America: A Study in the Migration of a Technology

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Engineering Organization and the Scientist in World War I: The Search for National Service and Recognition

Abstract When the United States entered World War I in 1917, there was no elaborate framework for providing scientific advice to the government. Engineers and scientists struggled to find an appropriate mechanism, but the former found themselves subordinated to a scientific community which sought to dominate emerging structures. At stake was not merely the credit for helping win the war, but also an advantage in the coming postwar definition and expansion of industrial research. Scientific leaders sought advantage by making a distinction between ‘engineering research’ and engineering practice, and claiming jurisdiction over the former.

Herbert Hoover and the Transnational Lives of Engineers

Engineering was the largest of the new, modern professions unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, and during the hundred years between 1850 and 1950 many of those practitioners, especially in the areas of mining and civil works, were true cosmopolitans. The rage for exploration and exploitation during these years of High Imperialism created the context for and dictated the mobility of these transnational lives. The profession itself, and the men who followed it, sought out, embraced and were shaped by that experience.

A Trade Catalog on the Transmission of Power by Wire Rope

Trade catalogs are a still largely ignored-but often extremely rich-source of information for the historian of technology. The cover picture of an intermediate station for a wire-rope driving system, for example, appeared on the front of a promotional pamphlet written by W. A. Roebling for the firm of John A. Roeblings Sons of Trenton, New Jersey. The pamphlet, entitled Description of A New Method of Transmitting Power by Means of Wire Ropes, was copyrighted in 1869, and a fourth edition appeared in 1874. Within its thirty-seven pages, Roebling described the overall process of his new method and the construction of its several parts, provided four plates showing the device in operation, gave detailed instructions on how to splice wire rope, reprinted tables of characteristics of rope available from the firm, reproduced twenty-five testimonials from satisfied customers, and printed a list of eighty additional establishments using the process, three of them in Canada and one in Bolivia. The copy of the pamphlet belonging to the library of the University of California, Santa Barbara, also contains a loose, four-page, undated price list for wire rope, featuring a striking engraving of the Roebling factory at Trenton.

The safe and rational children's playground: Strategies and technologies since the nineteenth century

Between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries the evolution of playgrounds in the United States was shaped by both ideology and technology. Advocates agreed that playgrounds should control and instruct children, but disagreed on the way to accomplish those goals: the extreme positions marked by a commitment to the principles of ‘Efficiency’ or the ideal of recreation. The technology of playgrounds, both the sites and the equipment, changed only slowly, but both steel and wooden devices of traditional design and newer forms of sculptural modernism became central to a developing discourse over dangers to users. Ironically, playgrounds had initially been touted as safe alternatives to play on city streets. After World War II they too were overtaken by the larger risk-aversion that came to mark American culture. This article has been peer-reviewed