History of Technology

Andrew Meade McGee, National Air and Space Museum, “The Electronic Origins of the Neoliberal Order: Computers, Digital Technologies, and the Re-Shaping of State-Market Relations, 1968-1988." 
 
POSTPONED - TBA

Thomas Zeller, University of Maryland, College Park
"Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters"

Evan Hepler-Smith, Duke University
"Chemical ciphers: war and peace"
ABSTRACT: This chapter, drawn from my book manuscript of the above title, examines information technologies as infrastructure for chemical research in Germany, the US, and the UK during and after World War 2. Chemistry's print-based information infrastructure (handbooks, abstract journals, indexes, nomenclature schemes) enabled war-oriented chemical research projects of novel scale and scope. These projects, wartime pressures, and (in Germany) Nazi persecutions stressed that vital infrastructure to the breaking point. This ws a problem for academic and industrial chemists who saw German, American, and British reference works as a vital basis for their research. While postwar IT entrepreneurs eager to sell machine methods took a keen interest, this was not about replacing print with electronic information systems. Rather, "literature chemists" (a nascent interdisciplinary profession) put machines to work supporting the restoration and rationalization of print compilation, further entrenching print-based conventions for identifying and classifying chemical substances in terms of molecular structure. Building on Bill Rankin's insights regarding the Cold War development-economics context for the emergence of "infrastructure" as a category of economic analysis, this chapter scrutinizes decisions to expend considerable resources in rescuing some of chemistry's canonical printed information resources (and not others). This chapter traces this story through the wartime crash searches for antimalarials, herbicides, insecticies, and nerve gases, and the postwar consolidation of these projects through the articulation of a category of "biologically-active chemical substances." I would also be interested in feedback on the way I am approaching information history in this project as a whole.

Liat Spiro, College of the Holy Cross
"Patentability and Experience: Work, Class, and Risk in the Political Economy of Intellectual Property in Imperial Germany"

Claire Mayo, University of Tennessee
"Nineteenth Century Envirotechnical Regimes and the Great Flood of 1910: How Competing Ideas of Water Management Structured the Disaster"

Luis Felipe Eguiarte Souza, University of Minnesota
"Julian Huxley: 'If I were a dictator', Technocracy in his popular writing and science fiction"

Joint meeting with the Engineering Studies Working Group
Ryan Hearty, Johns Hopkins University
"Monitoring Water Quality in US Rivers in the 1950 and 1960s: information, communication, and applied sciences"
Kristoffer Whitney, Rochester Institute of Technology, Commentor

Madeline Williams, Harvard University
"Technological Ableism and Typewriters in United States History, 1843-1892"
 

Sam Schirvar, University of Pennsylvania
"The Politics of Stress: Human Factors Engineering, Occupational Health, and Air Traffic Control, 1968-1981"
Abstract
Many conditions in the 1970s United States seemed to indicate that it was an opportune time to address stress as a workplace hazard. Both the federal government and the public demanded research on workplace stress. The decade saw the closest alliances between technical experts and workers in US history as striking coal miners finally won protection from black lung disease and newly created federal agencies went on to regulate numerous workplace hazards. Why then were workers in the United States unable to win significant protections against workplace stress? To answer this question, this paper explores encounters between stress researchers and workers, focusing on human factors specialists and air traffic controllers. Human factors specialists promised to manage worker stress to reduce the risk of disastrous failures in systems like nuclear power plants and airports. They made air traffic controllers, widely seen as the most stressful occupation, their exemplar subjects. At the same time, air traffic controllers placed occupational stress at the center of their grievances leading up to and during the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike. Both efforts failed. This paper uses the professional literature of occupational health and human factors, government reports, and the PATCO archives to show how the epistemic and political struggles of stress researchers and workers were intertwined. I argue that the power to define stress remained with the workers, and making stress an occupational hazard relied on them winning political struggles in the workplace.

Zachary M. Mann, University of Southern California.
"Reading Note G: Ada Lovelace and the Secretarial Labor of Codework."