History of Technology

Ramya Swayamprakash, Grand Valley State University

Raising Down the “Hell gate” of the Great Lakes: The Limekiln Projects in the Lower Detroit River, 1873-1900

In November 1873, the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel remarked that there was “not a more dangerous point to shipping between Chicago and Buffalo” than the Limekiln Crossing (henceforth the Crossing).  In the path of the rising shipping trade, the river’s rocky bed in this unavoidable stretch grounded many a vessel, damaging bottom lines as well. This section of the river, a chokepoint, had to be improved. These first series of iterative and incremental infrastructures set up further, more expansive interventions that created new nature in the lower river. Combatting sedimentation at this chokepoint was the basis of larger, grander hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures of control. 

Chronicling the alleviation of this chokepoint, this chapter argues that technological and infrastructural development in the Great Lakes were territorializing processes that relied on and solidified a nascent techno-infrastructural diplomacy between engineers in the Canada and the United States. Dredging—the scooping up of river bottom silt to clear up channels—was seminal in ensuring smooth trade movement. More importantly, dredging cemented unequal economic power equations between the two nations. Infrastructure creation did not just entail an engineering desire though. Disparate U.S. interests who had begun to consolidate to form the Lake Carriers Association in the 1890s—the preeminent lobby of its kind in the Great Lakes with no parallel in Canada at the time—controlled the growth of shipping. The Lake Carriers worked closely with the U.S Army Corps of Engineers and able to wield significant political power and attention to improve Great Lakes connecting channels. By charting the evolution of the shipping lobby, this chapter addresses an important historical and historiographical lacuna in Great Lakes literature.

Philip Scranton, Rutgers University

"The Auto Parts Maze in the US and the USSR, 1946-1980" 

This is a chapter of Prof. Scranton's book manuscript Spare Parts: A Global History of a Modern Problem, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins in 2026. 

Abstract:

Thousands of academic and trade books have analyzed the automobile industry, supplemented by millions of journal and magazine pages covering day-to-day production and marketing. The literature on vehicle maintenance and repair is far thinner (see Vinsel & Russell, The Innovation Delusion; Borg, Auto Mechanics), while studies of the essential technologies – spare parts – are few indeed. Our fascination with production and consumption has left what links the two – distribution – largely uninvestigated. Whereas auto assembly trended strongly toward corporate consolidation, parts provision resisted the Big Three’s sustained efforts at control, persisted as a source of technical novelty, and remained chaotic and bitterly competitive throughout the postwar decades.  Parts profusion accelerated during the 1960s, rising in eight years from 472,000 distinct components for Detroit models to 768,000. The perils of such abundance included long delays in locating the correct spare and the fragmentation of auto servicing into rival clusters of garages, dealerships, mass merchandisers (Sears), specialized chains (Midas), parts wholesalers (NAPA) and retailers (Auto Zone), supplemented by “shade tree mechanics” and DIY economizers. By contrast, the closing section highlights the perils of  planning, Soviet-style, which yielded shortages of  many components and surpluses of others (especially those that were easy-to-make, whether needed or not). Both “systems” worked, after a fashion, though neither was rational, efficient, or at all systematic.