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Gold. Copper. Iron. Metal working in Africa has been the subject of both popular lore and extensive archaeological investigation. In this volume, four leading archaeologists attempt to provide a complete synthesis of current debates and understandings: When, how and where was metal first introduced to the continent? How were iron and copper tools, implements, and objects used in everyday life, in trade, in political and cultural contexts? What role did metals play in the ideological systems of precolonial African peoples? Substantive chapters address the origins of African metal working and analyze the specific uses, technology, and ideology of both copper and iron. An ethnoarchaeological account in the words of a contemporary iron worker enriches the archaeological explanations. The volume will be of great value to scholars and students of archaeology, African history, and the history of technology.

In the early 1990s the field of American technology and culture reached a moment of synthesis, when scholars felt ready to write general texts and when publishers found the market large enough to warrant their publication. The books under review here serve both as evidence of this achievement and as a survey of approaches to the burgeoning literature of the field.' Let me say at once that all four works are high-quality textbooks, any of which I would have no hesitation in adopting, depending upon the students and the course emphasis. Each draws on a wide range of materials, and I must say that I learned from all of them. Yet my occasional ignorance may itself be an artifact of the field's previously inchoate state. The nearly simultaneous emergence of so many survey texts where none previously existed suggests the establishment of a core discourse with all its implications: agreement on periodization, canonical topics, marginal subjects, common omissions, and a (usually implicit) sense of the relationship of technology and ideology. I will come back to these underlying similarities after surveying the different ways that these authors have constructed their surveys.

Any American schoolchild can tell you that the history of technology is the history of invention.' And, as any SHOT member can attest, the focus on invention has not been confined to technology's popular history. Until quite recently, by contrast, women's inventive activity had few chroniclers. Indeed, as late as 1982, when I surveyed the literature on women and the history of American technology for Signs, although I was delighted to find an abundance of scholarship treating technology and women's work both outside the home and within it, I was surprised to learn how little had been written about women's relationship to that traditional staple of technological history: the history of invention. In one sense, of course, this is hardly surprising. Like many of the new histories that proliferated once the students of the sixties came of scholarly age in the seventies and eighties, much of women's history emerged from the "new social history" with its concern for ordinary people and everyday occurrences. It has been suspicious of and, occasionally, even hostile to work that focuses on the elite or exceptional "great person."

According to the accepted "creation story," the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) took form after Melvin Kranzberg, John B. Rae, and Carl Condit met in Ithaca, New York, in June 1957 with Henry Guerlac, president of the History of Science Society (HSS). The trio hoped to persuade Guerlac that HSS and its journal Isis should pay more attention to the work of historians of technology. They were disappointed, however, for, according to Kranzberg, the history of science was focused on "'intellectual giants.' What was important were thinkers. Technologists, so-called tinkerers, were simply

It remains to be seen whether the 1991 joint SHOT/HSS "Critical Problems" meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, will significantly influence future research and teaching in the history of technology. And it will take some perspective to understand the importance of that conference in SHOT's institutional history. But those of us directly involved in organizing the meeting were all treated to a sparkling case study (brilliant, in its own way, but with fiery particles, too) of the politics that surround such enterprises. That's what this story is about, and I tell it thinking that what I learned about the dynamics of institutional relationships might actually be useful. Not that the substance of the sessions isn't worth talking about; I would certainly be pleased if that one on Race and Technology, the first time the subject was ever explicitly broached in a SHOT meeting, led someone to imagine a dissertation topic. And it would be splendid if working together on the meeting led to an era of mutual respect and useful collaboration among the people of our two fields. But this account may help us see that there are powerful forces standing in the way of such an accommodation, not the least of which is the struggle for research funding in our subjects. So, some reflections on the events that led up to the Madison meeting might inform SHOT's history, might suggest a political context for the papers that are published here-thus accounting for the choice of subject matter, tooand might even illuminate an approach to future policy in our relations with other societies.

A Pigment Handbook is designed to reach a wide audience as the ultimate authority on artists' colorants. With the support of the National Gallery of Art, Professor Robert Feller has edited a collection of essays on ten of the most important pigments for conservators, restorers, and art historians. Many of the monographs first appeared in the quarterly of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Work. The first two sections describe the character and nomenclature of the pigment and the history of its use. The third section deals with such matters as colour, permanence and compatibility. The fourth section enumerates the varieties of the pigment available, differences that may arise owing to different methods of preparation, and, in the case of colorants that could be of natural origin, the potential variations of character dependent on the source. Section Five describes the methods and procedures that can be employed to identify the pigments. Finally, the sixth section of each essay lists the principal citations in which the particular pigment has been identified in various objects of artistic and historic significance.

Elihu Thomson was an amazing man. During his five decades as an electrical engineer and businessman, he won some 696 patents, thus making him the third most prolific inventor in American history Nor was this all. As W. Bernard Carlson reminds us, Thomson was more than a prolific inventor of electrical technology. He was an effective businessman as well. In tandem with his partner, Edwin J. Houston, Thomson founded an electrical company, and, eventually, the General Electric Company. In that corporate and collective context, and with working with others, Thomson established processes of product improvement and scientific research that yielded, in 1900, the General Electric Research Laboratory. Of course it is Thomas Alva Edison who has the more fame and name recognition to scholar and the public alike, but Spencer Tracy never starred in a motion picture of Thomson (nor, apparently, was there ever a biopic of Thomson). Carlson's is an informative book that deserves a respectful reading among American business historians as well as historians of American technology. Carlson has written, not a full-fledged biography, but instead a book using Thomson's career to tell two tales-the one technological history, the other business history-both from what some historians of technology now dub the social constructionist point of view. That perspective assumes that social forces create knowledge, including technical knowledge.1 The history of technology story concerns Thomson's contributions to the development of electrical technology-in particular, electric lights, generators, and motorsfrom exotica in the lecture hall when the story begins in the late 1860s to routine machinery when Carlson ends it in 1900. Carlson insists that his discussion of Thomson as inventor, businessman, and participant in the social construction of technical knowledge, stressing innovation, manufacturing, and marketing strategies, provides us with a picture of the electrical industry

Aluminum is one of the ubiquitous metals of the late twentieth century. Designers have used aluminum for everything from aircraft design to cookware; objects as diverse as skyscrapers and lunch sandwiches have been wrapped in aluminum. This pervasive presence of aluminum in the designed environment is not, of course, the result of chance or coincidence. Starting in the late 1940s, the American aluminum industry embarked on a remarkably successful campaign to promote the use of aluminum. Even a brief review of this campaign, such as this essay offers, can be rewarding for design historians and practitioners. A case study of the design activity sponsored by the American aluminum industry affords historians the opportunity to explicate the complex relationship between design and industry in the modern era. A review of the place and role of design in the American aluminum industry also challenges historians to distinguish between the emerging field of design history and other scholarly disciplines such as the history of technology or business studies. In order to understand the dynamic role played by industrial designers within the American aluminum industry after World War II, several questions need to be answered

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1991 meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in Vancouver, B.C., and at the Society for the History of Technology meeting in Sacramento, Calif., in 1989. It is part of a larger study on the relationship between design, society, and technological change in industrializing France on which I am currently working. I want to thank Michael Smith, Robert Frost, David Pinkney, and Leo Marx for their comments and suggestions.

I would like to set the record straight in regard to the book I edited with John Lienhard entitled History of Heat Transfer: Essays in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the ASME Heat Transfer Division. The review that appeared in Technology and Culture 32 (January 1991): 144-45 was by a respected figure in heat transfer, William M. Kays. The review was not only unfair but inaccurate. Kays incorrectly states that "most of the essays were written not for this particular volume but in some other context." This is simply false: nine of the twelve essays were written specifically for this volume. Kays cannot imagine history as anything but the old-fashioned "heroic" internalist history, since he assumes that the goal of any historical endeavor in this field should be a "comprehensive study of the developments of this science," a point he repeats on the next page where he specifies what is defective about our work: we do not cover all the great men. He can find no sense in the papers selected and falsely assumes (without checking) that these essays were just what happened to be available in the printed literature. Far from being random, the papers present a coherent, focused picture of the growth, context, and social significance of heat transfer research; indeed, we, the editors, were more aggressive than is usual in anthologies in spelling out what we wanted and attempting to get authors to write the sort of history we wanted. The anthology does what I hoped it would do; this puzzles Professor Kays because he does not understand history and makes naive assumptions about what it should be. A comprehensive internalist history was never my goal. Speaking only for myself, I got involved in this project as a means to introduce the contextual history of technology to engineers. The volume examines a variety of the contexts of heat transfer research in essays ranging from the Darwinian debates over the age of the earth (by Paul Nahin) to the role of heat transfer in the "product-driven" innovations cycle at General Electric (by George Wise). We were concerned with the institutional contexts of engineering research and were lucky in that Max Jakob, a distinguished Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany who played a major role in the diffusion of heat transfer to America, had kept a diary since college days (1906-55). His daughter Elizabeth, who retains the diary, sifted through this priceless document to write a marvelous study of an honorable and able research engineer working at a leading German

For the last four years I have been collecting material about a major British aircraft project, the TSR.2 tactical strike and reconnaissance aircraft. This project, which was first conceived in about 1956 and was canceled amid much acrimony in 1965, employed at least 20,000 people at its height. As a part of my study I have read all the secondary material I can find, I have seen a great deal of primary source material of one kind or another, and I have interviewed more than thirty of the major participants. During the last eighteen months I have been writing this material up. This has, I confess, been a particularly difficult exercise. One of the reasons for this has been that it is possible to write it up in different ways. Let me simplify and say that I could write it up as critical narrative history. Alternatively, I could use parts of that narrative to explore more theoretically oriented questions that have to do with technology and the way in which it interacts with social relations.

Herbert H. Dow, founder of the Dow Chemical Company, opined in 1930 that industrial development rested on three basic technical advances: "firstly the steam engine inaugurating power production," then interchangeable parts "making possible mass production," and third, an "advance still in its infancy, automatic operation by automatic control of continuous processes." He thought the latter occupied a position in the process industries akin to that of interchangeable parts in the assembly industries.' From the 1890s onward, Dow sought to reduce the number of people employed in the production process. His strategy was to increase plant size, use automatic analysis and automatic operation of the equipment governed by automatic analysis, and develop automatically controlled and operated continuous processes. By automatic control Dow meant closed-loop feedback control, and the Dow Chemical Company developed its own electrically operated controllers during the 1920s.2 During this same period, specialist

Since beginning to teach the history of technology more than a decade ago I have repeatedly taken classes to nearby museums and historic sites. I have done so not because of any prior expertise in material culture but because of a simple desire to complement and enhance class readings, lectures, and discussions. Even at the outset of my career it seemed to me obvious that seeing tools and machines firsthand and, if possible, in operation made more sense than merely reading about them or seeing pictures or slides. Despite the financial and organizational problems of such ventures and, in the case of the University of Michigan, the surprising contempt on the part of other historians for these field trips as allegedly devoid of intellectual merit, I have never regretted these class outings. Indeed, many of my students at Michigan, at Harvard, and more recently at Maine have rated them among the highlights of my courses. By requiring my students not only to visit the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village or Lowell National Park or Slater Mill or Boston's Computer Museum or the Maine State Museum (MSM) but also to write papers about their experiences, I have, I believe, raised their visual literacy along with their understanding of technology's past. As one student wrote of her experience at the Maine State Museum, "I honestly believe that I gained more from this museum visit than any others [here or elsewhere] simply because I approached the visit with a purpose other than entertainment."

THE FIRST RECORDED MEETING OF THE Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) took place at the 1957 annual convention of the American Society of Engineering Education at Cornell University. Four members (John Rae, Carl Condit, Thomas Hughes, and Melvin Kranzberg) used the occasion to ask Cornell historian of science Henry Guerlac whether the History of Science Society's journal, Isis, might make room for articles on the history of technology. According to Kranzberg, the meeting with Guerlac "proved to be a disaster" and led to the formal foundation of SHOT in 1958 and the creation of a separate journal, Technology and Culture. Several decades later, SHOT-now numbering three to four hundred active members-and its journal are still the primary institutional outlets for historians of technology in the United States and Western Europe. SHOT is a tightly knit organization, and, among its members, the distinction between outsiders and insiders remains highly salient.' In part, SHOT's self-perception of marginality goes back to its origins as an unappreciated rump group within the History of Science Society. Nor is it surprising that a field whose ideological and intellectual limits are difficult to identify and establish should be so concerned about its sociological boundaries. Because of the peculiar nature of the Western world's love affair with progress and its identification of progress with science and technology, the question of who is best suited to tell the story of technological change has been and continues to be hotly contested by an ideologically diverse array of individuals and institutions.2 That debate is particularly intense within the United States, where interpreters of the history of technology include museum curators, corporations, and the mass media, as well as academic scholars. Companies such as General Motors and Exxon

More than fifty years have passed since Robert Merton formulated, in his doctoral dissertation on Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, what he later, in his "Shandean Postscript," came to call the "kindle cole" principle: the "sociological discovery of the distorting effects of public (as distinct from private) polemics among men of science."' According to the kindle cole (or "Hooke-Newton-Merton") principle of scientific polemics, scientists ought to avoid engaging in public controversies and try to insulate themselves from the responses of the "excitable crowd," both scientific and other.

In the past decade industrial research has been a focus of activity in the history of technology. This new generation of scholarship distinguishes itself from earlier work in a number of ways.' First, it is based on documentation that provides an inside view of the evolution of industrial research. Second, it has benefited from numerous detailed case studies that demonstrate that innovation is not synonymous with invention.2 Finally, the organizational approach to understanding big business developed by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has given historians a framework within which to place the research laboratory.3 Companies develop strategies and create organizational structures to carry them out. Research laboratories, however, once in place, develop their own organizational identities and research agendas, seeking direction from science as much as from business.

In 1972, at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, three historians of technology raised questions about the past, present, and future of the field.' Eugene Ferguson, in his essay "Toward a Discipline of the History of Technology," declared that the field had not yet established its intellectual identity. Edwin Layton considered "Technology as Knowledge," a theme he has explored further on several occasions. Robert Multhauf made "Some Observa

In the context of joint meetings of the Societies for the History of Technology and the History of Science it is proper, perhaps inescapable, to see our topic in the light of a revolutionary change in the historiography of science. Over the last decade our work in the history of science has been refounded and set in a new context by writers such as Thomas Kuhn' and Joseph Agassi,2 who have tackled explicitly the problems of conceptual bases of our craft. There have, year by year, been changes less explicit which deserve note at this point. We have seen sessions devoted to the laying of the specter of "precursoritis," which at one time afflicted many and led to frequent chimerical quests for "firsts" until we resolved silently though perhaps not unanimously that the task of the historian of science should be wider than the staking of property claims on a personal or national basis. Then we have seen what has become a perennial discussion point in the identification of two species of historian, the externalist and the internalist, and the gradual acceptance of a position that the conflict now has relatively little to offer except for a feeling that if one is to be strongly inclined one way or the other, it is better to do so out of strength than out of a one-sided incompetence or insensitivity. A gradual organizational change of some consequence for the nature of our work has been a continuing shift in the alignment of many historians of science toward neighboring fields. A decade ago the unity implied by the label "History and Philosophy of Science" and similar departmental descriptions was so hallowed that it was

This collection of essays brings together six distinguished scholars to examine the progress, problems, and potential of material culture studies in America. From the perspective of their respective disciplines--cultural geography, vernacular architecture, American studies, the history of technology, the decorative arts, and folklife studies--these widely respected authorities survey the major material culture research of the past two decades and assess the most creative and innovative work-in-progress. Thomas J. Schlereth's introductory chapter provides a critical analysis of material culture evidence, articulating the distinctive quality of such data and focusing on the problematic nature of doing research with objects rather than with written records. The chapters that follow, five of which originally appeared in 1983 in a special issue of American Quarterly, represent a succinct summary of those fields and subfields of material culture scholarship that are at the cutting edge of current research. The volume includes an expanded, up-to-date bibliography that will be of use to a wide range of scholars. Today American material culture studies remains a field where the most innovative work is occurring at the local or regional level. The essays in this volume suggest, however, that such work will be part of the wider evidential base and broader interpretive strategy out of which a new synthesis may develop.

The first Institute on Industrial Archaeology was held last summer in Troy, New York. Other Institutes are planned for the future that will demonstrate the role of archaeology in understanding industrial processes and the history of technology.

The industrial revolution in America did not begin with billows of smoke and steam from city factories but in bucolic settings scattered about the rural landscape where textile manufacturing first took root. As Zachariah Allen writes in 1829, these textile operations were "carried on in little hamlets, which often appear to spring up in the bosom of some forest, around the water fall which serves to turn the mill wheel." When he wrote there were already thousands of company-owned mill villages in the northeast and by 1840 there were nearly 700 cotton mills alone in New England, most of them still in such villages close to rivers and streams.This book documents the growth of industrial technology in these "little hamlets," covering the social, labor, economic, and technical aspects of this fascinating chapter in the development of American enterprise.The sources brought together here include company records; general histories of early cotton manufactures; accounts of particular companies; memoirs, autobiographies, letters, and diary entries of mill founders, managers, and workers; contemporary descriptions of factory villages; data found in ledgers, manufacturing censuses, and employee lists; company regulations; weaving instructions; help-wanted advertisements and recruiting letters for mill workers; workers' contracts; newspaper accounts of labor protests; and maps.Gary Kulik is curator of textile machinery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Roger Parks is editor of the New England Bibliography, Boston University. And Theodore Penn is researcher in the history of technology at Old Sturbridge Village.

This article represents an attempt to assess the relationships between research in labor history and issues of moment in studies of the history of technology. To make this topic manageable, the discussion will be confined to matters concerning American industrial labor, excluding work in agriculture, extractive sectors, and service trades,' in order to keep the focus on what might be termed the core of labor history studies, the articulation of the manufacturing base in the United States. The plan of exposition is tripartite, a customary craft practice among mental laborers. Initially, the thematic development of American labor history will be summarized, followed by an assessment of elements that have divided and may link labor and technology research, concluding with a bundle of suggestions for future inquiry, based on the state of our collective arts.

Since Dr. Staudenmaier has introduced his thoughtful and provocative paper by posing a question, I have felt it permissible to do likewise. I want to go back to the founding of our society and ask, What did we expect SHOT to wrought? I can speak only for myself; I think I have a pretty good idea of what was in the minds of all of those who were present twenty-five years ago, but I cannot presume to speak for them. Let me take the society first, because SHOT is more than what appears in Technology and Culture. What I believe most of us wanted first was to see the history of technology recognized as a distinctive area of historical scholarship in its own right, and not just as an adjunct to the history of science or, to a lesser extent, to economic history. We wanted to establish a community so that we would know that there were others out there who shared our interests. That, I feel, has been achieved, as this meeting amply attests, and I think it fair to say that the achievement has exceeded our expectations even if it has fallen short of our hopes in some respects.' We also hoped to encourage teaching and research in the field. Certainly there has been progress (if John Staudenmaier will permit me to use the word) in this direction, but we have further to go. I still have humanistic colleagues who obviously regard the history of technology as something that might conceivably belong in a second-rate trade school but has no place in a respectable academic institution. They know nothing about the subject and have no interest in finding out. We have come a long way, but there are still barriers to be broken down. Nevertheless, there are many more people teaching and doing research in the history of technology and related areas than there were twenty-five years ago. Staudenmaier is perfectly right in pointing to the significance of

Industrie du cigare aux Etats-Unis a la fin du 19eme siecle et au debut du 20eme siecle. Nouvelles technologies et main d'oeuvre