Postwar enthusiasm and the Society for the History of Technology
Not until after the Second World War did the history of technology become a well-established branch of scholarship. Paralleling the explosion of scholarship was a continued popular interest in technology.
Many of the world's fairs, museum exhibitions, and magazines mentioned earlier continued and expanded in the postwar era. In addition to the popular interest in machines of all sorts came a surge of excitement about postwar technologies. The media extolled every new development in computers and telecommunications, and many individuals personally experienced the ongoing evolution (or “progress”) of PCs, laptops, cell phones, PDAs, smart phones, GPS devices, not to mention such innovations in software as word processing, spreadsheets, email, the World Wide Web, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Every innovation elicited a flurry of media and advertising hype, some of which compared the newest thing with its now-obsolete antecedents, a form of day- by-day history of technology. In addition to these personal technologies, there were the national or global technologies spawned by the Cold War, especially rockets and satellites. Interest reached a climax in July 1969 with the landing of men on the Moon, and resulted in numerous exhibitions and publications about rocketry and space.It is in this atmosphere of techno-enthusiasm that scholarship in the history of technology emerged. The emergence of the field was marked by the founding of a new scholarly society. In 1957, four American academics with an interest in technology, Melvin Kranzberg of Case Western Reserve University, Thomas P. Hughes of the University of Pennsylvania, Carl Condit of Northwestern University, and John B. Rae ofMIT, approached the History of Science Society to discuss widening that society's focus to include technology. Rebuffed, they founded a new organization, the Society for the History of Technology, or SHOT, in 1958.
The next year, the society began publishing a journal called Technology and Culture under the editorship of Melvin Kranzberg until 1981, then of Robert Post (1982-95), John Staudenmaier (1995-2010), and Suzanne Moon (since 2010). It has also collaborated with the American Historical Association in the publication of a series of booklets entitled Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society, and Culture. From the beginning, the driving force behind these new initiatives was Melvin Kranzberg. Originally a scholar of European political and social history, he became interested in the history of technology as a result of teaching at Case Western Reserve, an engineering school. Besides founding SHOT and Technology and Culture, he wrote many articles (some under pseudonyms) and edited and co-authored several important books in the field.[234]Since their inception, SHOT and Technology and Culture have adopted a broad focus, seeking to understand technology in its social and cultural contexts. As the home page of its website explains:
An interdisciplinary organization, SHOT is concerned not only with the history of technological devices and processes but also with technology in history - that is, the relationship of technology to politics, economics, science, the arts, and the organization of production, and with the role it plays in the differentiation of individuals in society. Not least, it is concerned with interpretive flexibility, the conception that beliefs about whether a technology “works” are contingent on the expectations, needs, and ideologies of those who interact with it.[235]
In carrying out the mission of SHOT, Technology and Culture has featured articles on three kinds of themes: the context of technology, meaning how society and culture shaped the emergence and success of various technologies; the impact of technologies on societies and cultures; and the relations between technology and science.
By including articles about failures as well as successes, it helped undermine the popular perception of technology as an autonomous force and its history as the story of progress toward the future, in other words the Whiggish interpretation of technological history.[236] Its contributors have included not only historians and other social scientists with an interest in technology, but also engineers, scientists, and other technologists with an interest in history. In its early years, the journal stressed the economic history of technology, the mutual influences of science and technology, and the history of engineering. More recently, it has broadened its scope to include gender issues and the role of women in technology; the impact of industrialization on the environment; and the business and labor aspects of technological change. While Technology and Culture has gone far toward distancing the field from its Whiggish origins, many of its articles are still slanted toward the best-known - hence most successful - technologies. In short, the purpose of the journal has been partially fulfilled.SHOT has been more successful in divorcing the history of technology from its national-chauvinist origins. In an effort to reach out beyond the confines of the United States, Melvin Kranzberg collaborated with three European historians of technology - Maurice Daumas of France, Eugeniusz Olszewski of Poland, and S. J. Schuchardine of the USSR - to found the International Committee for the History of Technology, or ICOHTEC in 1968. This organization was founded not only to give European scholars an opportunity to meet closer to home and give papers in their own languages (though English still predominates), but also to form links across the Iron Curtain, thereby demonstrating that technology was not a capitalist or communist phenomenon, but a human endeavor. ICOHTEC publishes in its journal ICON many of the papers given at its annual conferences.
In addition to collaborating with ICOHTEC, the Society for the History of Technology has also subsidized the travel expenses of foreign scholars to its annual meetings through its International Scholars Program. In recent years it has held one annual meeting overseas every four years, in London, Munich, Uppsala, Amsterdam, and Lisbon.