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
The History of Technology Working Group meets monthly to discuss a colleague’s works-in-progress or to discuss readings that are of particular interest to participants.
Past Meetings
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Madeline Williams, Harvard University
"Technological Ableism and Typewriters in United States History, 1843-1892"
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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.
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Zachary M. Mann, University of Southern California.
"Reading Note G: Ada Lovelace and the Secretarial Labor of Codework."
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Justin Castro, Arkansas State University; Linda Hall Library. Title: Introduction to "Technocratic Visions: Engineers, Technology, and Society in Mexico, 1876-1946."
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Mario Bianchini, Georgia Institute of Technology; Linda Hall Library. "The Perfect(able) German Body: Sport as Technological Utopianism in East Germany."
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Johan Gärdebo, Thematic Studies in Environmental Change, Linköping University. "Following the verbs: How 'Observing the Earth' eventually became the Earth observation satellite SPOT, 1975-1995."
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William Vogel, University of Minnesota. "Negotiating Cultures of Concealment: Scientists, the Military, and Biological Weapons"
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Eric Hintz, Lemelson Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. "Moneyball: the Computational Turn in Professional Sports"
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Barbara Hahn, Texas Tech University. Introduction to Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
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Emily Gibson, Office of Legislative and Public Affairs, National Science Foundation, "Technology and Policy: Applied research and engineering at the National Science Foundation during the 1970s"
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*Note special time*
Junaidu Danladi, Bayero University, Kan0-Nigeria, "Public Perceptions and Resistance to Piped Water in Kano City, 1924-1945"
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Paulina Hartono, Berkeley, "Do Radios Have Politics? The Politics of Radio Ownership in China in the 1920s and 1930s"
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Jaipreet Virdi, University of Delaware, "Dorothy Brett's 'Ear Machines': Disability, Technology and Representation"
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Tech Working Group will not meet on October 15, due to the upcoming international SHOT conference
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What is the history of technology and who gets to decide?
The group will discuss Eric Schatzberg's conclusion and manifesto from his Technology: Critical History of a Concept, and Jennifer Lieberman's essay "Finding a Place for Technology."
Benjamin Twagira, Emory University, paper title "'We Are What What We Know': Radio, Rumor, Identity and Politics in Militarized Kampala"
Meredith Sattler, Cal Poly San Louis Obispo, "Knowledge Space Eco-Technics: Designing Life-Forms and Life Ways at Biosphere 2, 1974-1994"
Whitney Laemmli, Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities, "The Lilt in Labour: Movement, Efficiency, and Pleasure in Mid-Century British Industry"
James Esposito, Ohio State University, "The Airplane as Breathing Machine: Aviation Medicine and Human Experimentation at the Royal Air Force Physiological Laboratory 1939-1954"
Group Conveners
Jennifer Alexander
Jennifer Alexander is an Associate Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, and Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She specializes in technology and religion; industrial culture; and engineering, ethics, and society. Her publications include The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Her current project is a book manuscript analyzing the international religious critique of technology that developed following WWII. She asks how religious and theological interpretations of technology have changed over time; how, over time, technologies and engineering have extended their reach into the human world over time through a developing technological orthodoxy; and how these changes have affected each other.
Babak Ashrafi
Executive Director, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Benjamin Gross
Benjamin Gross is the John Merritt Associate Director for Research Services at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. As a member of the senior leadership team, he oversees all aspects of research services, including reading room operations, reference and instruction, and the Center's research fellowship program. Before relocating to Texas, Gross was Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, where he established a new virtual fellowship program to support scholars unable to travel to the Midwest. He has also served as a research fellow at the Science History Institute and consulting curator of the Sarnoff Collection at the College of New Jersey. His book, The TVs of Tomorrow: How RCA’s Flat-Screen Dreams Led to the First LCDs, was published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press.
Matthew Hersch
Matthew Hersch is a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law, where he studies technological change, risk, and the ethics and professional responsibilities of engineers. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, and Harvard University, where he was Associate Professor of the History of Science. He is the author of Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), co-author of A Social History of American Technology, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2018), and co-editor of War and Peace in Outer Space: Ethical and Legal Boundaries (Oxford University Press, 2021).
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