History and Technology. 1999, Vol. 16, pp. 103-110 © 1999 OPA (Overseas Publisher* Association) N.V.Reprints available directly from the Publisher Published by license underPhotocopying permitted by license only the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint,

part of The Cordon and Breach Publishing Group.Printed in Malaysia.

Book Reviews

Teny S. Reynolds and Stephen H. Cutcliffe, Eds. Technology and theWest: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture (Chicago andLondon: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 461.

Terry Reynolds and Stephen Cutcliffe have assembled eighteen art-icles from Technology and Culture, the journal of the Society for theHistory of Technology, discussing the development of technologieswithin the cultural contexts of developing Western civilization. Theyintend the collection for college undergraduates, but it will also beaccessible to the general reader. Its chronological coverage is broad:from agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the IndusValley, to space-age Europe and the American Atomic Energy Com-mission. The collection includes as an overview a nicely edited ver-sion of Melvin Kranzberg's classic 1985 presidential address to theSociety, "Technology and History: Kranzberg's Laws." It is thendivided into two sections, the first covering earliest history throughthe Industrial Revolution (ca. 1850), and the second, the expansionand diffusion of western industrial technology since then. Subjectsinclude Greek catapult technology, air pollution in pre-industrialLondon, railways and canals in nineteenth-century Britain and tech-nology transfer to nineteenth-century China and Japan, and the"Industrial Revolution" in the home. Each of the two sections openswith a fine essay by the editors, describing how the contributionsaddress general themes in the history of technology, such as the roleof political structures, the relationship between science and techno-logy, and what distinguished successful from unsuccessful attemptsto transfer technologies between cultures. Reynolds and Cutcliffeemphasize in particular the role of organized government, the state,in technological development.

This collection is one of a two-volilme set (its companion dis-cusses technology and American history) intended for use as atextbook in undergraduate history of technology courses. It is a

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sourcebook, providing for the history of technology a substitutefor the collections of primary readings that undergraduates use inother history classes. The history of technology has not lent itselfto such collections because many of its sources are not literary, andReynolds and Cutcliffe note that instructors have long assignedsecondary readings instead, including book chapters and journalarticles, these most often taken from Technology and Culture.Among the essays here, the editors' own will be the most useful forstudents, both for the organizing concepts they introduce (impos-ing order on an otherwise awkward range of subjects, contexts,and time periods), and for their footnotes, directing students toother work in the field and to the classics in particular: LewisMumford, Thomas Hughes, Lynn White, Jr., David Landes, DavidHounshell.

Despite its title, however, Technology and the West is largely anAmerican book, and a traditional one at that. Seventeen of thetwenty authors represented (including the editors) are Americans orhave made their careers largely in the United States (John Law,Adrian Randall, and Francis Evans are the exceptions). The Amer-ican perspective of the collection is illustrated in the editors' intro-ductory essay to section two, "Technology and the Industrial West,"where they locate the beginnings of ambivalence toward technolo-gical advance in the horribly destructive weapons of World War II,especially the bomb. Perhaps that is when Americans began to ques-tion the wisdom of technological progress. But European technolo-gical malaise was well-documented after the First World War, aspeople struggled to conceptualize the horrors of trench warfare andwhat Michael Adas has called "the industrial battlefield." The Amer-ican Civil War perhaps foreshadowed but did not match the shatter-ing experience of soldiers on the battlefields of continental Europe.In addition, the editors' introductory essays are organized aroundthemes that are now standard: sources of innovation, context, smalland large technologies. Despite including essays on labor and tech-nology (Adrian Randall on Luddism), gender and technology (RuthSchwartz Cowan on household technology), and trans-nationalorganizations (Walter McDougall on space-age Europe), and despitetwo excellent comparative studies (Barton Hacker on western milit-ary technology in China and Japan, and Jonathan Zeitlin on Amer-ican, British, and German aircraft manufacturing), the editorsdo not employ conceptions of labor, gender, trans-nationalism, orcomparative study among their organizing themes. An instructor

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using this book may certainly do so, however, and this is the strengthof the collection.

Jennifer K. AlexanderDepartment of History

University of WashingtonSeattle, Washington, USA

Jon Agar. Science and Spectacle: The Work ofjodrell Bank in Post-WarBritish Culture. Harwood, 1998. pp. Xx+260. IIIus., Index., Bibliog.

Except for modern cosmology, historians have paid more attentionto radio astronomy than any other branch of astronomy. This isbecause radio astronomy embodies many of the characteristics ofscience that have been interesting to historians: the rapid assim-ilation and application of new technologies, the migration of talentand expertise across intellectual and technical boundaries, nationaland institutional styles in science, the opening of a vast new portionof the electromagnetic spectrum to study, its effect upon know-ledge production, and problem choice centered around newtechnologies.

Science and Spectacle goes a considerable distance in rationalizingthe emergence of radio astronomy in Britain as a large-scale enter-prise fuelled by government-backed efforts to promote science as asource of national prestige in the Post-War world. The Jodrell Bankfacility has become a most provocative and fruitful case study inpower politics, coalition building and the acquisition of authorityover intellectual, social, physical and electromagnetic territory. Agarexamines how, in the late 1940s and 50s, radio astronomy at the Uni-versity of Manchester became dominated by instrument building,resulting in the creation of a huge steerable dish 250 feet in dia-meter, the largest astronomical instrument in the world at its open-ing in the late 1950s. Much of the story centers around the coalitionbuilding required to create and manage such a monster, first withinastronomical ranks, then in the larger scientific community, thenin government circles, and finally in the world at large. The storycontinues by showing how this coalition building was parlayed intosupport from the government by arguing for its timeliness, its valuein establishing links between government and universities, and byits perceived prestige value for the nation. Considerable attention

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is given over here to gaining a better understanding of the loose-ly defined boundary concept of "prestige" and how different play-ers perceive it.

This is a well-crafted structural history that documents the con-ceptualization, selling, building and defense of a very expensiveenterprise. The author has taken admirable care in laying out struc-tural elements that can account for the nature of the beast: howadvocates gained allies and attracted patrons, how they staked outterritory, met social and technical challenges, established authority,defended identity. Throughout all of this, Agar shows how each ofthese elements played a role in shaping, or defining the scientificmission of the instrument, and how the instrument that was finallybuilt reflected many different interests. He explores its "inter-pretive malleability:" how it symbolized different things to differ-ent stakeholders, or was constructed as such, by each of theseinterests, including astronomer, government bureaucrat, engineer,and patron.

Agar explores in some depth how the creation of a public spec-tacle became a means to create a new domain through "managedexclusion," or the process through which various and sundrysources of "interference" were detected, dealt with and removed inthe development and management of the new space demanded by,and eventually occupied by the telescope and its creators. Most fas-cinating and revealing is Agar's portrayal of the telescope's chiefprotagonist, Bernard Lovell, and how he made sure that his namebecame synonymous with the telescope. Lovell has on several occa-sions told his own story {The Story ofjodrell Bank, 1968; Out of theZenith, 1973; TheJodrell Bank Telescopes, 1985) and has been the sub-ject of at least one biography by an associate (D. Saward, BernardLovell, A Biography, 1984). He also figured prominently in Edge andMulkay's seminal Astronomy Transformed, and has not been silent onthe matter of governance of science in Britain or his role in thatrealm. What is new in Agar's treatment of Lovell is how he is cast asone architect, rather than the architect, of the instrument, but stillmanaged to place himself at the very center of the spectacle sur-rounding the object. Lovell deftly met opportunistic challenges bythe project's head engineer as well as perceived intrusions by thepublic, the electrical and rail utilities, and the frequency allocationboards of the government and military. He managed to isolate allthese sources, treating them as "interference," to make sure thatthe facility retained its scientific demeanor, and, from long quota-

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tions liberally applied by Agar, clearly perceived all these sources ofdifficulty as interference qua interference, a term deriving from hisroots in radio technology. In so doing, Agar suggests, the telescopeas scientific instrument was shaped by social forces. Although Iwould agree that more than scientific and technical considerationsdefined the ultimate nature of the device, I am not wholly con-vinced that Lovell's rhetoric reveals this fact, or is sufficient evid-ence for it. Clearly neither does Agar, but he seems a bit tooenthusiastic over his analysis. From both his own writings and fromthe attention historians have given to him, Lovell is far too complexto be taken at face value. Still, Agar has made a bold stab, and thesum total of the arguments presented in this book has come as closeas any to convincing this inveterate skeptic.

Although Agar draws admirably from secondary works dealingwith large-scale spectacle in science in the contemporary world,I would have appreciated hearing more from him about how he feelshis case study confirms or contrasts with those like Robert Smith'sanalysis of the selling of the Space Telescope or Michael L. Smith's1983 essay on Apollo, "Selling the Moon," (in Fox and Lears, TheCulture of Consumption) which explores the concept of the "displayvalue of science," another way of describing spectacle. Generally,I would have liked to see more comparative analysis to gain a fullerview of the relative roles of the individual, university, fundingagency, or even of public expectation, in the shaping of science.I also found very helpful Agar's depiction of the controversy over thesiting of large-scale projects: should they be the province of univer-sities or research centers, i.e. national facilities? This is a recurringtheme in many disciplines today, and in many nations, such asJapan, India, the United States, as well as all over Europe. There is agrowing literature on the subject, which would have been useful totap, to raise this case study to a broader landscape. Finally, the per-ennial question of who (or what) controls government funding of sci-ence is also addressed, and again, more comparative analysis wouldhave been welcome.

On the other hand, one mark of a good book is the hungerfor more it instills in the reader. Agar has done a very good job onthis score. For example, although he provides a balanced view ofLovell, it is by evident design a distant view. This might have beenof conscious necessity, but still I was surprised to find myself want-ing to hear more of what Agar thinks of Lovell and his manip-ulations. This reader suspects that the glimpses Agar provides faH

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considerably short of what must be in his mind. Ah, the perils of con-temporary history!

David De VorkinNational Air and Space Museum

Washington D.C.

David Nye. Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. xii + 331.

Although explicitly a "social history of American energies," thepower in the title of David Nye's most recent book also refers to thepower of personal choice in addition to the power generated by largescale energy systems. Despite the double meaning intended by Nye'suse of the word, it would be a mistake to assume that the two types ofpower are equivalent. In fact, Nye himself fares better in detailinghow energy consumption changes consumers' habits than in dem-onstrating how consumers' choices may change systems of energyproduction.

This book is at its best when Nye's topic is the power generated bylarge scale energy systems. Beginning with the muscle power ofAmerican aboriginal societies, and ending with the electrical powerthat sustains America's current information economy, Nye elegantlycharges the social manifestations of American energy use. Despitethe broad treatment of the material - a necessity demanded by theambition of the project and modest size of the volume - Nye suc-cessfully documents how the parameters of "cultural choices" wereset "by energy sources, technologies, and markets" "at any giventime"(10). By deftly weaving themes from the history of technology,economic history, and American studies, Nye once again proveshimself a master of synthesis. There is no other history of Americanenergy consumption that uses this variety of sources and is as enga-gingly written.

Since Nye chose to write a history broad in scope, a sympatheticreader will expect the occasional lack of nuance that a more detailedtreatment can provide. At moments, however, a lack of nuancelapsed into a conflation of historically important episodes. Nye'sanalysis of the Great Depression as a demand for a structural shift ineconomic systems of production from "older muscle-power-basedagricultural system[s]" and "steam based heavy industries" to "high

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technology, to the mass-culture industry, and to the service sector"overlooks too many interesting debates on the causes and effects ofthe New Deal (184). Even more importantly for historians of techno-logy, this overly broad view conflates the crisis of the depression withthe stimulus to high technology supplied by World War II. Nyewrites that "[w]hen Roosevelt looked at agriculture or heavy industry,he saw excess capacity, mass unemployment, and personal hardship;when he looked at the airplane industry, mass communications, orthe electrical utilities, he saw expansion and the development of newtechnologies" (184). Roosevelt may have seen this, but a deeper ana-lysis of recent literature in the history of electronics might explainhow these developments actually came about (Stuart Leslie's TheCold War and American Science, for example, or Rebecca Lowood'sCreating the Cold War University).

Of even greater consequence is Nye's call for personal choice inenergy consumption - the other type of power referred to in thetitle. According to Nye it is time for Americans to "decide whetherthey think energy choices matter now, or whether they expectingenious technologies to solve emerging problems later." AlthoughNye's call for action is well placed, I wonder whether he too easilypostulates technological determinism as the culprit for our seeminginability to make rational choices about energy use. The scholarlybasis for this call to action is the recent reevaluation of the role ofconsumption in society. Scholars from the social sciences, such asArjun Appadurai, Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, and DanielMiller, have recently argued that we should begin viewing consump-tion as a fundamentally creative act. Specifically, we should no longeruncritically accept Marxist depictions of consumption as a form offalse consciousness or Thorstein Veblen's depiction of consumptionas a form of conspicuous display, but we should investigate how con-sumers use goods to construct intelligible belief systems. Nye's use ofthese studies demonstrates that he understands their import. Hiscall for personal choice, however, demonstrates that he forgot muchof their nuance.

According to Isherwood and Douglas, goods "are coded for com-munication" and consumers use these codes in complex "rituals ofconsumption" {The World of Goods, 1979, xxi and 264). The sector ofthe economy that one predominantly participates in, manual, clerical,or professional, shapes the "periodicity" and the information con-tent of these rituals. Thus a rational choice regarding one's ownpersonal consumption habits is often predicated upon the choices

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available through the "linkages" of a good and its consumer tosocial, industrial, and technological circumstances. For instance,many of the high periodicity consumption habits required by man-ual workers' lifestyles actually serve to keep them from gainingaccess to goods that contain the high information content char-acteristic of professional households, such as easy access to profes-sional services. And this is where the slippery concept of power getsNye into trouble. Actually how much choice do we have when weare "enmeshed" in "large scale technological systems" where theirsubstantial momentum resists most types of change? Nye's way outof this dilemma, pointing out that old systems are often enmeshedin the new and that all we have to do is choose older forms ofenergy, fails to acknowledge how deeply our choices, tastes, andoptions are circumscribed by our positions in a highly differentiatedeconomy.

This brings me back to what is right about Nye's book. The onlyway out of this trap is not a call for choice - for choice is only the mostimmediate manifestation of a consumer's search for "informationcodes" - rather it is a call for more types of highly differentiatedinformation. And this is where Nye's book excels. Since his writing islively, his examples engaging, and his documentation extensive, thisbook will introduce many new students to the interesting literatureon the social history of American technology. Despite his unevensuccess in his treatment of forms of power, Nye has crafted a vision ofAmerica's past that can sit comfortably on historians' bookshelvesnext to other large-scope synthetic monographs. I suggest you exer-cise what little power you have and purchase it.

Phillip Stevens ThurtleProgram in the History of Science and Technology

Stanford UniversityStanford, California, USA