Terry S. Reynolds

Scientific Influences on Technology: The Case of the Overshot Waterwheel, 1752-1754

Between 1752 and 1754 John Smeaton, an English engineer; Antoine de Parcieux, a practically oriented French mathematician; and Johann Albrecht Euler, a Swiss-German physicist and astronomer, independently established that the overshot-gravity waterwheel was significantly more efficient than the traditional undershot-impulse wheel. Since their work is sometimes cited as an early example of the successful application of science to technology, and since the waterwheel was then the workhorse of European industry, this case of simultaneous discovery provides an ideal vehicle for investigating how science influenced technology in the 18th century.

On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passe

The focus of my remarks tonight will be on the need for respect and toler ation of seemingly obsolete approaches to scholarship in the history of technology, because these approaches may offer better bridges to certain of our external audiences than our most avant-garde scholarship. My awareness of this phenomenon stems from my participation in the graduate program in industrial archaeology at Michigan Technological Uni versity in Houghton, a program that blends historical archaeology with the history of technology. The industrial archaeology program at Michigan Tech admits students from a variety of backgrounds: from history to engineering to anthropology and archaeology. For roughly a decade I have taught or cotaught a course designed to introduce industrial archaeology students to the history of technology. In that course students get at least a brief exposure to a range of literature from our field, from the old multivolume reference works edited by Maurice Daumas and Charles Singer, to single-volume syn theses like David Landess Unbound Prometheus and Carroll Pursells social history of American technology, to specialized monographs and scholarly articles from Technology and Culture and other journals.1 In the process, the course introduces students to various approaches to the history of technol ogy, from internalism to contextualism to social construction. At the end of the course, I have often asked these students what mate rials they enjoyed reading the most and what materials, apart from enjoy

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape (review)

633 rians of the country’s colonial past. From a history-of-technology perspective, the most intriguing essays deal with automobiles and drivers from Imperial to Nazi Germany (Rudy Koshar) and hydraulic engineers in nineteenth-century Prussia, which Rita Gudermann sees as contradicting Wittfogel’s famous argument about the despotic potential of control over water resources. In a treatise on the Germans as “a sylvan people,” Michael Imort gives an overview on the cultural meaning of forests in Germany. Friedemann Schmoll traces the history of bird protection through the nineteenth century; Sandra Chaney compares nature protection in the two German states after 1945. It was perhaps inevitable that a volume of this kind would include an article on the Nazi era, though John Alexander Williams’s discussion of the ideology of bourgeois conservation is somewhat disappointing, especially for an author who has produced landmark publications on the topic. The notion of a smooth merger between conservation and Nazi ideology is one of those myths of German historiography that will probably never die. It would be too much to call this a concise introduction to German environmental history; after all, cultural landscapes have always been but one topic of German environmental historians, though a prominent one. The focus on landscapes makes for a remarkably coherent volume, though, something that cannot be said of many collections of a similar sort. If nothing else, this one gives an impression of the merits of transnational perspectives, underscoring how crucial it is to challenge the silent “nationalization of nature” (Richard White) that has been going on in environmental circles. It is somewhat irritating, however, that the volume starts off with complaints about the state of environmental history in Germany. If German environmental history is still out in the woods, how did it produce such a nice volume?