Whiggish and nationalist history of technology
It may seem odd to list exhibitions, museums, and magazines in a chapter on the historiography of technology, but popular perceptions and enthusiasms for various technologies form a presence around which historians of technology carry out their scholarly pursuits, for popular ideas on technology and its history are imbued with a philosophy historians call Whiggism.
There are two aspects to the Whiggish interpretation of history. The first is a belief in progress. Exhibitions, museum displays, and popular magazines stress the instrumental progress of technology, that is, the improvements in speed, power, convenience, safety, and so on brought about by the latest inventions. Associated with the idea of progress are two other ideas enshrined in the popular discourse on technology. One is that it is autonomous and beyond the control of ordinary people, therefore inevitable. The other is that its ultimate cause is science, which is by definition beyond the comprehension of ordinary citizens; hence the use of the word “science” in periodicals like Scientific American and Popular Science and in institutions like the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Epitomizing the ideas of scientific supremacy and technological determinism or inevitability is the motto of the Hall of Science at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933 and 1934: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”
Historic displays and articles are featured in museums and magazines partly out of nostalgia (like steam trains for tourists), but also to showcase the evolution of a technology from primitive to contemporary to futuristic. What the public likes and wants to hear about the history of technology is the good news. Who, upon seeing a replica of the Zuse Z3 (1941) in the Deutsches Museum or parts of an ENIAC (1946) in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, is not awed by the size and complexity of these machines, but even more so by learning that even the smart phones in visitors' pockets are much faster and more powerful than these room-size behemoths? Who, upon seeing the Wright brothers' Flyer or Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of Saint Louis, does not compare them to the big jets that bring tourists to Washington to visit the Air and Space Museum where they hang on display? And when there have been attempts to show the dark side of technology, such as explaining the role of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay in dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, there was an immediate outcry from patriotic politicians (see Figure 7.2).
Which brings us to the second side of the popular history of technology: patriotism.
Most of the displays in the larger museums of science and technology feature national inventions and artifacts. In the United States that means privileging the achievements of Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and other notable Americans; in Great Britain, James Watt, William Henry Fox Talbot (one of the inventors of photography), and Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke (the inventors of the telegraph); in France, Louis Daguerre (one of the inventors of photography), the Montgolfier brothers (inventors of lighter- than-air balloons), Louis Pasteur, and Clement Ader (inventor of the first heavier-than-air flying machine); in Germany, Rudolf Diesel and Ferdinand von Zeppelin. As is evident, there were sometimes several inventors for each advance, such as Wheatstone and Cooke and Morse for the telegraph, Talbot and Daguerre for photography, and Ader and the Wright brothers for flight. Thus, several nations can vie for the title of first. And occasionally, an inventor can be claimed by several nations - such is the case of Guglielmo Marconi, son of an Irish mother and an Italian father who did most of his work on wireless radio transmissions in Britain. Where professional historians of
Figure 7.2 The Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Super Fortress bomber, which dropped the first atomic bomb over Japan in the Second World War (© Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis).
technology might see multiple inventors and complex social forces at work, popularizers stress the national element. In museum exhibitions, popular magazines, and textbooks for children, the history of technology serves a purpose similar to that of political, military, and literary history: inculcating national pride in children, reinforcing patriotism in a nation's citizens, and associating national pride with belief in progress (see Figure 7.3).
In addition to periodicals and museum exhibits, we might add another kind of popular - and generally Whiggish and nationalistic - history of technology: lavishly illustrated “coffee-table” books about airplanes, locomotives, guns, ships, and other technologies that fill the shelves in the history sections of bookstores. Some of these, despite their biases and narrow focus on hardware, contain information of value for the broader history of technology.