Science, technology, and academia
Academia, a conservative institution, is always slow to open its doors (and minds) to new fields, and this has certainly been the case for the history of technology. In the half-century since the founding of SHOT, the history of technology in the United States has found its niche in schools of engineering including MIT, Case Western Reserve, and Georgia Tech, often as a humanities elective for engineering students, to ensure that their education is more than just preparation for a technical trade.
But it has yet to be admitted into the more prestigious research universities. Part of the reason is an intellectual bias among academics against “manual labor,” a prejudice that goes back to the ancient Greeks, if not long before. But part is also the important place taken by the history of science in the more prestigious institutions of higher learning since the First World War. A close ally of philosophy and of the natural sciences, it has enjoyed a privileged position as a purely intellectual field and, furthermore, as one that could more justifiably claim to illustrate the upward progress of humankind than did technology.The history of technology stricto sensu may appear in the curricula of only a limited number of institutions, but in a broader sense, it is part of several other disciplines. Military history is replete with references to weapons and tactics. The history of medicine, often part of medical school curricula, is also closely allied to technology, as is the history of architecture as taught in schools of art and architecture as well as in art history departments in many universities. Also very similar to the history of technology, but in different cultures and eras, are archaeology and anthropology. These disciplines, which do not have written documents to rely on as evidence, perforce pay careful attention to the artifacts and material cultures of ancient or nonliterate peoples. We may cite Leslie White (1900-75) as an example of an anthropologist whose ideas overlapped those of historians of technology.
In The Science of Culture (1949) and The Evolution of Culture (1959),[240] White equated the socio-cultural evolution of human societies with the level of their technology - “Social systems are determined by technological systems,”[241] he claimed - and the stage of cultural evolution achieved by a society correlated with the amount of energy per capita used by its inhabitants, from hunter-gatherers who used mainly human muscles, to herdsmen and farmers who used animals, to industrial societies that relied on fossil fuels, to the nuclear age. In short, White was a hard-nosed technological determinist.