Visions Of Technology A Century Of Vital Debate About Machines Systems And The Human World

by Rhodes, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780684863115
• ISBN10: 0684863111
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-12-07
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

Technology was the blessing and the bane of the twentieth century. Human life span nearly doubled in the West, but in no century were more human beings killed by new technologies of war. Improvements in agriculture now feed increasing billions, but pesticides and chemicals threaten to poison the earth. Does technology improve us or diminish us? Enslave us or make us free? With this first-ever collection of the essential twentieth-century writings on technology, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes explores the optimism, ambivalence, and wrongheaded judgments with which Americans have faced an ever-shifting world.Visions of Technologycollects writings on events from the Great Exposition of 1900 and the invention of the telegraph to the advent of genetic counseling and the defeat of Garry Kasparov by IBM's chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. Its gems of opinion and history include Henry Ford on the horseless carriage, Robert Caro on the transformation of New York City, J. Robert Oppenheimer on science and war, Loretta Lynn on the Pill and much more. Together, they chronicle an unprecedented century of change.

Author Biography

Richard Rhodes received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for The Making of the Atomic Bomb and the History of Science Society's Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize for Dark Sun. His other books include Deadly Feasts, Nuclear Renewal, Making Love, A Hole in the World, and Why They Kill. He lives in rural Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Sloan Technology Series	19	(2)
Introduction	21	(6)
Richard Rhodes
I. THE NEW TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1933	27	(84)
America in 1900	29	(3)
Mark Sullivan
Messages Without Wires	32	(1)
Guglielmo Marconi
A Very Loud Electromagnetic Voice	32	(1)
P.T. McGrath
Wilbur Wright's Affliction	33	(1)
Wilbur Wright
A Horseless Carriage Was a Common Idea	34	(2)
Henry Ford
Praying to the Dynamo	36	(2)
Henry Adams
The American Will Not Live Near His Work	38	(1)
Charles M. Skinner
The Profession of Engineering	39	(1)
Herbert Hoover
A Reservoir of Suffering Humanity	40	(1)
Richard Rhodes
The Charge of the Four Hundred	41	(1)
Anonymous
The Discipline of the Machine	42	(1)
Thorstein Veblen
A Good Reason for Everything That He Tries	43	(2)
Richard C. Maclaurin
Forty Doses of Chemicals and Colors	45	(2)
Mark Sullivan
The Wonderful Culebra Cut	47	(3)
David McCullough
Dignity Versus Intoxication	50	(2)
Roger Burlingame
Predictions: The Flying-Machine of the Future	52	(1)
Waldemar Kaempffert
A Rapid Succession of Improvements	53	(1)
George Eastman
Every Woman an Engineer	54	(1)
Ellen Swallow Richards
A High-Priced Man	54	(2)
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Producing Wealth But Grinding Man	56	(1)
Samuel Gompers
A Babe Still in the Cradle	57	(1)
Arthur D. Little
A City Built by Experts	58	(1)
Frederic C. Howe
Predictions: Atomic Bombs	59	(1)
H.G. Wells
Paving Propaganda	60	(1)
Morris Llewellyn Cooke
Making History	61	(1)
Henry Ford
The Line-Gang	62	(1)
Robert Frost
Gasoline Dripping from the Trees	62	(1)
Max W. Ball
Billy Mitchell Takes to the Air	63	(2)
Brigadier General William Mitchell
The Mechanization of War: I	65	(1)
William L. Sibert
The Mechanization of War: II	66	(1)
Orville Wright
Breaking Crust	66	(2)
Thomas P. Hughes
Birth Control	68	(2)
Margaret Sanger
The Radio Age: I	70	(1)
Clayton R. Koppes
The Insidious Dangers of Radio Advertising	71	(1)
Printer's Ink
In the Hands of the Technicians	72	(1)
Thorstein Veblen
Rossum's Universal Robots	73	(7)
Karel Capek
On the Line	80	(1)
Henry Ford
You Must Grind Your Bearings	81	(1)
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
The Railroads Have Reached Capacity	82	(1)
Charles Pierce burton
A Bridge Too Low	83	(2)
Robert Caro
Large Cities Have Come to Stay	85	(1)
Robert Ridgway
Unstable Ages	86	(1)
Alfred North Whitehead
The Meaning of Power	87	(1)
Henry Ford
Immense Decrease in the Death Rate	88	(1)
Mark Sullivan
Comfort	89	(3)
Aldous Huxley
Applied Science	92	(1)
Herbert Hoover
The Automobile Boom	93	(1)
Thomas C. Cochran
The Decentralizing Power of the Automobile	94	(1)
Robert
Helen Lynd
Flying Feels Too Godlike	94	(2)
Charles Lindbergh
A Diminutive Moving Picture / The New York Times	96	(1)
The Inevitability of the Machine	97	(3)
Charles A. Beard
Engineer, Professional / Encyclopedia Britannica	100	(1)
10,000 Automobile Frames a Day	101	(1)
Sidney G. Koon
Leisure Worth Having?	102	(2)
Floyd H. Allport
Predictions: Townless Highways	104	(2)
Benton Mackaye
Lewis Mumford
Operators	106	(1)
Carter Glass
O Brave New World!	107	(2)
Aldous Huxley
A Scientific Snake Dance	109	(2)
Loring M. Black
II. DEPRESSION AND WAR: 1932-1945	111	(58)
In Defense of Machines	113	(2)
George Boas
Energy from Air-Conditioning	115	(1)
Willis R. Gregg
The First Human Hope Industrialism Has Offered	116	(2)
Archibald MacLeish
Streamlining	118	(3)
Roger Burlingame
The Machine Our Servant	121	(1)
Lewis Mumford
Consistent Optimism	122	(1)
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
Lighter Than Air	123	(1)
R. H. Harrison
The Causes of the Causes	123	(1)
S. C. Gilfillan
Predictions: Rockets Through Space	124	(1)
Richard van Riet Wooley
Overalls	124	(2)
James Agee
Invention Is a Great Disturber / National Resources Science Committee	126	(1)
The Burning of the Hindenburg	127	(1)
Herb Morrison
Predictions: Fifty Years From Now in 1988	128	(4)
Arthur Train, Jr.
One Ounce of European Gold	132	(3)
Paul B. Sears
The World of Tomorrow	135	(2)
E. B. White
Technology is Relatively Neutral / Temporary National Economic Committee	137	(2)
Air Power Will Replace Sea Power	139	(1)
John Philips Cranwell
How They Comb Their-Hair	140	(1)
Orrin Dunlap
A Radioactive Superbomb	141	(1)
Otto Frisch
Rudolf Peierls
Machinery Has Destroyed the Peace	142	(3)
Roy Helton
Beneficial Inventions and Diabolical Purposes	145	(1)
Orville Wright
Science at War: I	146	(1)
V. B. Wigglesworth
Science at War: II	146	(1)
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Plastics Go to War	147	(2)
Joseph L. Nicholson
George R. Leighton
Rations	149	(2)
Harland Manchester
The Business of the Future	151	(2)
Edwin H. Land
Progress and the Servant Problem	153	(1)
Allan G. B. Fisher
The Radio Age: II	154	(2)
Bernard B. Smith
Timber!	156	(4)
Roy A. H. Thompson
Predictions: Geosynchrony	160	(2)
Arthur C. Clarke
Manhattan Project Success	162	(1)
Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves
A Common Problem	163	(5)
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Predictions: ICBMs	168	(1)
Vannevar Bush
III. POSTWAR BOOM: 1945-1970	169	(128)
A Vision of Hypertext	171	(2)
Vannevar Bush
Weighing Up DDT	173	(2)
V. B. Wigglesworth
Atomic Morality	175	(1)
Vannevar Bush
Flying Blind	176	(2)
George A. Lundberg
Appropriations	178	(3)
George B. Dyson
Solving the Problems of War / Board of Consultants to the Secretary of State's Committee on Atomic Energy	181	(3)
Naming of Parts	184	(1)
Henry Reed
T-R-A-N-S-I-S-T-O-R	185	(1)
Ralph Bown
Bottled Sunshine	186	(1)
Suzanne White
Murphy's Law, 1949	187	(1)
Robert A.J. Matthews
A Dime a Dozen	188	(1)
Vannevar Bush
The Real Power	189	(3)
George Orwell
Varieties	192	(1)
David Riesman
Three Laws of Robotics	192	(1)
Isaac Asimov
Detroit Versus the Hot-Rod	193	(1)
Gene Balsley
Predictions: Century in the Balance	194	(3)
James Bryant Conant
Taking Thought	197	(1)
B. V. Bowden
Too Cheap to Meter	197	(1)
Lewis L. Strauss
The Pill: I	198	(1)
Bernard Asbell
Happy and Unhappy Endings	199	(2)
B. F. Skinner
Global Effects	201	(5)
John von Neumann
Fellow Traveler	206	(2)
Pravada
Space Vegetables	208	(1)
James G. Fulton
Natural Luddities	209	(2)
C. P. Snow
Reinventing Invention	211	(2)
John Jewkes
David Sawers
Richard Stillerman
Fist Fights and Females	213	(1)
Ernst Alexanderson
Blind Date: I	214	(2)
J. C. R. Licklider
Blind Date: II	216	(3)
Norbert Wiener
The First Laser	219	(3)
Theodore H. Maiman
Glitches	222	(4)
John H. Glenn, Jr.
America Is Process	226	(1)
John A. Kouwenhoven
The Most Important Passion	227	(1)
David Riesman
A Scientific-Technological Elite	227	(2)
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A Vast Wasteland	229	(1)
Newton N. Minow
Weightlessness	230	(1)
John H. Glenn, Jr.
Silent Spring	231	(1)
Rachel Carson
How Like Sailors They Were	232	(3)
John Steinbeck
Doomsday in the War Room	235	(2)
Stanley Kubrick
Terry Southern
Science and Technology	237	(2)
Jacques Ellul
Downloading (Prehistory of)	239	(1)
Norbert Wiener
King Lud	240	(1)
Mario Savio
A Story to Tell	240	(3)
Loudon Wainwright
Moore's Law	243	(3)
Gordon E. Moore
Culture to the Nth Power	246	(4)
Herbert A. Simon
A New Duty	250	(2)
Barry Commoner
Pax Atomica	252	(2)
William G. Carleton
Conservatives	254	(1)
F. H. Clauser
Regicide	254	(2)
Melvin Maddocks
For a Coming Extinction	256	(1)
W. S. Merwin
Booby-Trap Technology	257	(2)
Paul Goodman
More Injury to More People	259	(2)
Harold P. Green
Predictions: Zero Population Growth	261	(2)
Donald J. Bogue
Blue Jeans and Coca-Cola	263	(1)
Alva Myrdal
The Whole Earth	264	(1)
John Allen
Continuity	265	(1)
Bruce Mazlish
Tyrannies	265	(4)
Emmanuel G. Mesthene
Contra Industrial Tourism	269	(2)
Edward Abbey
``Plastics''	271	(1)
Jeffrey L. Meikle
Square Rooting	272	(1)
Gene Shalit
The Richness of Technology	272	(2)
T.J. Gordon
A. L. Shef
The Internet Primeval	274	(4)
J. C. R. Licklider
So It Goes	278	(1)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Curve of Technological Competence	279	(3)
T.J. Gordon
A. L. Shef
Predicting the Unpredictable	282	(3)
Robert A. Nisbet
Benefit Versus Risk	285	(2)
Chauncey Starr
Emergent Japan	287	(2)
Nigel Calder
Primary Instincts	289	(1)
Vannevar Bush
Setting Standards: Two Lists	289	(2)
Nigel Calder
True Devotion	291	(1)
Vannevar Bush
Mugs and Zealots	292	(2)
Nigel Calder
The Technological Imperative	294	(3)
Lewis Mumford
IV. YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW: 1970-	297	(84)
At the Dam	299	(2)
Joan Didion
Following Orders	301	(1)
Daniel C. Drucker
Daily Deliberate Protection	302	(1)
Gil Elliot
Revolutionary Toolmaking	303	(1)
Gerard Piel
How to Solve America	304	(3)
L. Rust Hills
Predictions: Super-Super SSTs	307	(1)
Spiro Agnew
White Bread and Technological Appendages: I	308	(2)
Theodore Roszak
White Bread and Technological Appendages: II	310	(2)
Gerard Piel
Small Is Beautiful	312	(2)
E. F. Schumacher
Solving Social Problems	314	(1)
Amitai Etzioni
The Pill: II	315	(1)
Loretta Lynn
Five-Dimensional Technology	316	(2)
Daniel Bell
Practical Virtue	318	(1)
Isaiah Berlin
Solving Unsuspected Problems	319	(3)
Elting E. Morison
Closing the Distance	322	(1)
Joseph Weizenbaum
Power	322	(1)
Langdon Winner
Murphy's Law: Corollaries	323	(1)
Arthur Bloch
Going Solar	323	(5)
Jerome Martin Weingart
Sharing the Blame	328	(2)
Harvey Brooks
Catch-22	330	(1)
David Collingridge
The Growth of Anything Whatever	331	(5)
Cyrill Stanley Smith
Girls Just Want to Have Computers	336	(1)
Nancy Kreinberg
Elizabeth K. Stage
Taking a Meeting	337	(2)
Michael H. Jordan
Objectified Human Compassion	339	(2)
Elaine Scarry
Smoke and Mirrors	341	(2)
Edwin T. Layton, Jr.
Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold	343	(4)
Roger M. Boisjoly
Bad Charts	347	(1)
Edward Tufte
Simple and Complex Technologies	348	(2)
John Manley
Facts and Plain-Speaking	350	(1)
Samuel C. Florman
Four Generalizations	351	(1)
Eugene B. Skolnikoff
Surroundsound	352	(1)
Graham Nash
A Modern Baby	352	(1)
Nancy Smithers
Biospherics	353	(2)
Joel E. Cohen
David Tilman
Multiples	355	(1)
Howard Reingold
Getting the Lead Out	355	(2)
Norman Balabanian
Digging Deep	357	(1)
David E. Nye
Downloading	358	(1)
Gregg Easterbrook
Influence	359	(1)
Hans Bethe
137 Million Lives	360	(2)
Kevin M. White
Samuel H. Preston
Deep Blues	362	(1)
Frank Rich
Beyond Social Construction	363	(2)
Fredrico Capasso
Autism on the Net	365	(1)
Harvey Blume
Beauty and Truth	366	(1)
Louis Brown
Omega Point	367	(1)
Jaron Lanier
The End of the Beginning	368	(1)
Freeman Dyson
R.U.R. Revisited	369	(1)
Marvin Minsky
Stuff	369	(1)
Ivan Amato
Society Evolving	370	(1)
Bran Ferren
Predictions: Robotic Sex	371	(1)
Joel Snell
The Future as a Story	372	(3)
David Remnick
Surefire Predictions	375	(4)
Julian L. Simon
Envoy: Quo Vadis?	379	(2)
Edward O. Wilson
Bibliography	381	(8)
Index	389

Excerpts

Introduction

Richard Rhodes

The Western world has argued passionately about technology -- what it is, where it's going, whether it's good or bad for us -- throughout the twentieth century, even while inventing it at a ferocious and accelerating rate. This anthology samples that vital debate, drawing primarily on American sources. It's an impressionistic sampling. It had to be, given the sheer volume of statements, articles, books and documents generated across a hundred years. I sorted for variety, for felicity and succinctness of expression, for range not only of subject but also of mood. I looked for humor to balance solemnity, prediction to balance explication, recollection to balance abstraction. I included a share of the canonical texts all of us have heard (or, sometimes, misheard) -- H. G. Wells's prediction of atomic bombs, Arthur C. Clarke's vision of geosynchrony, Murphy's Law, Moore's Law, the silent spring of Rachel Carson. I left out most commentary on medicine, which is regularly attended because of its mortal impact on our lives. Something you think should be here is probably missing; but I hope you will also be surprised by what you find. If my witching methods work, drinking from this particular Pierian spring may at least leave you thirsty to explore the original texts, a mighty river of discourse. Those texts are referenced in the bibliography that begins on page 381.

I could pretend innocence of America's environmental and cultural wars and say that technology is human making. At first inspection, it is that -- from lemon pie to computer chips, from plowshares to gene sequencers. Along with language, it's what distinguishes us from the other species with which we share the planet. People used to speak of craft or "practical arts"; in that guise, technology has been around for a good two million years. The Pleistocene spearpoint flaked from pink flint that I display on my coffee table was the high technology of its day, as sophisticated and effective as a samurai sword or a fighter jet.

But for many of us, "technology" means something more specific (and problematic) than craft or practical art; hearing the word applied to cooking or gardening might surprise us, at least initially. In this more recent sense, the term came into use only about 150 years ago, adapted from a classical Greek noun meaning a systematic treatment, as of grammar or philosophy. Ask a friend today to define technology and you might hear words like "machines," "engineering," "science." Most of us aren't even sure where science leaves off and technology begins. Neither are the experts. We also usually think of technology as hardware rather than software, although many organized systems serve technological ends no less than machines; your computer isn't complete without its programs. Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; as two demographers report late in this book, fully half of us are alive today because of its improvements.

This barely acknowledged distinction between old, low technology and new, high technology probably reflects our ambivalence toward machines and machinelike systems, especially when they're recent and unfamiliar, and particularly when they're large and not in our control. We swim in technology as fish swim in the sea, depend on it from birth to final hours, but many of us trust it only in its older and more familiar guises. Recent technology is more often seen as a threat -- to our jobs, our health, our values -- than a blessing. Even public health takes its lumps; I've had otherwise decent people, people who donate a share of their worldly goods to feed the poor, tell me that saving all those lives just crowds the planet. Your life too, I argue, and they nod guiltily, embarrassed but unwilling to concede the point.

Technological wariness is an enduring disturbance, with roots in religion. Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans carries the sense of it; so does the serpent persuading Eve to taste the knowledgeable apple, and the Jewish myth of the Golem, a Frankenstein's monster animated by incorporations of holy words. (Stanislaw Ulam, the Polish mathematician who conceived the design breakthrough that led to the development of the U.S. hydrogen bomb, once told MIT polymath Norbert Wiener that the Golem had been in his family, since he was a descendant of the rabbi supposed to have constructed it; Wiener, thinking of the Bomb, responded, "It still is.") Technology competes with the gods at miracle-working and the gods take revenge: no wonder we're nervous about it. At its most fundamental, our distress probably reflects angst at automata, at organized systems without souls, like nature itself in its destructive and predatory forms -- isn't that why we argue whether computers can think?

C. P. Snow, the English physicist and novelist, identified more specific hostility toward technology among intellectuals, particularly literary intellectuals, in his well-known 1959 lectures on "The Two Cultures." Such hostility becomes obvious when you survey the literature; it's obvious in this book, and not because I biased the sample. To the contrary, appreciation of technology among intellectuals not technologically trained was hard to find. Since many intellectuals are concerned with social justice and not devoid of ordinary compassion, it's surprising that they don't value technology; by any fair assessment, it has reduced suffering and improved welfare across the past hundred years. Why doesn't this net balance of benevolence inspire at least grudging enthusiasm for technology among intellectuals?

Snow traced the conflict to class differences that widened with the progress of the industrial revolution. I've included an excerpt from that discussion at its appropriate place in this book. The landed classes resisted the revolution, Snow notes, since it threatened their predominately agricultural interests. The new industrialists and engineers emerged from the craft and working classes. The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford University had not yet been wired for electricity. Intellectuals neglect technical education to this day. Since most intellectuals aren't from upper-class backgrounds, Snow seems to be implying that their hostility to technology results from aping their betters -- not a very generous assessment.

Given the pervasiveness of the intellectual bias against technology, technologists are probably justified in concluding that it derives in some measure from technical and scientific illiteracy as well as jealousy and competition for influence. But such conclusions risk trivializing the debate -- much as do intellectuals' tiresome accusations that greed is the technologist's primary motivation for enterprise. If the record of technological innovation in this century is, on balance, clearly positive, it's also true that technologists have been prodigal at excusing themselves from moral responsibility for weapons of mass destruction, pollution and other well-known horrors.

They do so in part by refusing to acknowledge the extent to which belief systems intrude into their operations. Claims that a "technical imperative" drives technological change, for example, much as an invisible hand is supposed to drive the capitalist marketplace, fall into this category. The recent literary-intellectual assault on science as an arbitrary construction no more anchored in the real world than any other religious or social institution is an extreme but predictable consequence of such denial. The assault has found support precisely because the scientific and technological community has chosen to deny knowledge of its own complicity in installing and maintaining structural violence. Structural violence -- violence such as racial discrimination that is built into the structure of societies -- remains the largest-scale and most intractable form of violence left in a world where knowledge of how to release nuclear energy has foreclosed world war. As methodologies, science and technology are demonstrably objective and effective; but they're unquestionably bound up with power relations as social systems.

All this is to anticipate the vital and continuing debate I've sampled in this book. I'm reluctant to generalize from my sample. It's designed to be an animated performance of itself, its four parts anchored in the major events that set its terms. Enthusiasm for technology grew among technologists in the first quarter of the century as the expanding mass production of consumer goods, particularly automobiles, created great wealth. But critics attacked the application of technology to industrial production even before the First World War showed how technology could mass-produce slaughter (one theorist described the machine gun, the basic killing tool of the war, as "concentrated essence of infantry"). The Great Depression shifted the debate from industrial to social transformation, borrowing metaphors and solutions from technology even as technology was challenged. By the end of the Second World War the shift from an agricultural to a technological society was essentially complete. The second half of the century filled in the spaces while a new transformation to an electronically based information technology began -- to reach its maturity, presumably, in the twenty-first century now opening.

These tidal highs and lows hardly obscure the persistent, continuing enlargement of the influence of science and technology on human affairs. By whatever measure you choose, science and technology came to dominate the human project in the twentieth century. Public health more than doubled the average lifespan. The discovery of how to release nuclear energy made world-scale war suicidal. Birth control subdued the Malthusian multiplication of human population. Agriculture fed the multitudes. Electronics wired the world and put human communication beyond the reach of tyranny. Manned vessels of discovery cast off beyond the earth; automated voyagers -- notes in high-tech bottles -- even escaped the solar system. At the same time, human activities drove a catastrophic decline in species diversity and began global warming; from a wild place the earth became a garden, well tended in some districts, ruthlessly exploited in others. The evolutionary neural enlargement that spun out technology (which imitates evolution culturally, propagating in memes rather than in genes) is not only open ended; it's also myopic, which makes invention and application acts of faith. The deep truth about the debate that fills this book is that it's a debate among the orthodox, a debate about speed limits and barricades rather than the necessity of the quest. No one, not even the Unabomber, has proposed a return to the Hobbesian garden of the primates.

Visions of Technologyoriginated in discussions among the members of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Technology Book Series advisory committee. In the midst of commissioning histories of major twentieth-century technologies, we realized that there must also be a thick vein of debateabouttechnology to be mined into a book, and that such a book might serve as a meta-history of the effect of technological change on the twentieth-century human world. Fools walk in where angels fear to tread: I volunteered to assemble an anthology provided a professional historian could be found to join me in the work. Elting E. Morison agreed to undertake that partnership. Unfortunately, his final illness intervened before he could contribute beyond reading and approving the initial proposal I drafted. His participation would have broadened the range of selections and enriched the running commentary. It wasn't to be. I wish it had been.

I planned at the outset to arrange selections by theme within their roughly quarter-century periods. That plan foundered on the breadth of issues many contributors explore. Finally, chronology alone seemed adequate and appropriate; I try to sketch themes and connections in my introductory comments. Chronology -- usually of publication, occasionally of subject matter -- reveals characteristic preoccupations and repetitions with minimal anachronism. It exposes, for example, the crisis of confidence in technology that arose with the Great Depression, the challenge to technology the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s launched, the recurring testing of links between innovation and job loss.The result is a species of textual archeology, levels exposed from the earliest to the most recent in turn. The index cross-references them; the bibliography points to the original source.

Thanks to Paul Kennedy, who recommended my editorial associate Stephen Kim. Stephen spent two summers sorting through the first half of the century in the stacks and archives of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Jeff Wheelwright then contributed from his own extensive experience and archives as a science writer and from library investigations into the second half of the century. I consulted the distinguished members of the advisory committee and queried Technology Book Series contributors, but minimized overlap with their books. I've been reading about technology since early childhood and reporting and writing about it for more than thirty years, and obviously drew on that knowledge and experience as well.

Here then is a chronological and topical range of twentieth-century assessments of what technology is, who does it, how it works and what values it sustains.

GLADE

May 1993-June 1998

Copyright © 1999 by Richard Rhodes

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Excerpted from Visions of Technology by Richard Rhodes
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