Technology

Technology. Few forces have more profoundly shaped the American experience than technology. This essay examines historians' shifting understanding of the term, traces the major eras of technological change, and explores some of the factors that have influenced the pace and direction of that change.

Defining the Term.

The meaning of “technology” has undergone a revolution over the last two centuries. Although the term was familiar in German (Technologie) in the late Colonial Era, it came into limited use in English only as the American economy was beginning to industrialize. In 1829 Harvard professor Jacob Bigelow entitled his treatise “on the application of the sciences to the useful arts” Elements of Technology because he sought a “sufficiently expressive” word for his subject and “practical men” were employing it. Through 1900, however, its use was confined mainly to technical manuals or to the names of new institutes of technology. Most Americans favored the all‐encompassing phrase “the useful arts” or the narrower “mechanical arts.”

“Technology” came into currency in its modern sense in the early twentieth century. Popularized by Thorstein Veblen in the 1920s and in 1930s debates about technological unemployment, it was understood in an anthropological sense as “useful knowledge” but confined to the largely male preserves of industry and engineering. Veblen and others also stressed the machine‐like, autonomous nature of the emerging “industrial system” (which they believed engineers were uniquely suited to head). As engineers strove to enhance their status, meanwhile, they embraced the term but defined it as “applied science,” closely allied with “pure” or “basic” science. Although these conceptions continued to govern popular thought, a profoundly social understanding of technology took shape among scholars after the 1960s. Historians of technology, organized professionally in the 1950s, disputed the “applied science” definition, stressing instances where useful artifacts or processes were developed without a foundation of scientific understanding. This finding was reinforced by a federal study of weapons development (Project Hindsight, 1966). Also rejecting technological determinism and autonomy, historians explored the role of social choice and human agency in technological change, and inspired by gender and race studies, challenged the focus on white‐male‐dominated industry and engineering that had characterized earlier conceptions of “technology.”

The result was a broader view of technology as ways of “making and doing things” that, at its most expansive, encompasses all ways of shaping the real world—natural and social—to human ends. Technology so understood signifies a thoroughly social process that touches all human beings, and whose history is inevitably bound up with questions of power and authority.

Overlapping Eras of Change.

This definitional transformation reflected momentous changes in ways of shaping the real world, in the role of technology in American life, and in the nature of technological knowledge. Generalizing about these changes is risky, not least because some technologies, periods, and regions are better understood than others. Still, as a first approximation, the history of American technology may be divided into four, broadly overlapping eras.

Colonial Era through the Early 1800s.

The first era extends from the establishment of the British colonies through the early 1800s. While conditions differed over this time span and from one colony to another, colonial technology shared certain characteristics. It was small in scale, since most products, if not imported, were produced in limited quantities—in homes, on plantations or farms, or village workshops—and used or consumed locally. Most work was done manually with simple tools rather than by machine. Direct personal relationships, accordingly, marked the social relations of technology: relations among producers, between producers and their work, between producers and consumers. Furthermore, colonial technology was tied closely to nature and its rhythms. Wood, an abundant resource, provided fuel and construction material. Lighting as well as power (stationary and motive) came from natural sources (sun, wind, water, animals). The ebb and flow of daylight and the turning of the seasons shaped all technological activities. Great diversity also marked colonial technology, since goods produced manually for local markets varied widely.

The workings of colonial technology had a certain transparency, since its underlying principles, though seldom understood scientifically, were familiar. Transportation and communication still relied on age‐old technologies (turnpikes and canals), as did even technically complex production sites such as iron “plantations” or water‐powered gristmills. Skills passed from individual to individual, learned through hands‐on experience rather than from books, reinforcing social intimacy.

Yet colonial technology was not static. Certainly, the technologies that transformed eighteenth‐century British industry had little direct impact, for British mercantilism encouraged the colonists to produce raw materials or semi‐finished goods (e.g., bar iron), not finished goods such as textiles or machinery. But conquest and settlement depended on the ability to adapt European technologies to a new environment; to develop crops such as rice (first grown successfully in South Carolina by slaves who probably brought the know‐how from West Africa), and to adopt Indian techniques for cultivating maize and clearing forests. Indians, too, engaged in selective adaptation, favoring flintlock over matchlock guns, for example. Such accomplishments forged a distinctive American technology, though well within a pre‐industrial tradition.

But signs of a break with traditional practice gradually emerged. Adoption of the Constitution (1789) and a national patent law (1790) erected a political framework for a national market. Experimentation with steam engines and “automatic” flour milling ( Oliver Evans, 1780s), erection of the first spinning mill, based on British know‐how ( Samuel Slater, 1790), and invention of the cotton gin ( Eli Whitney, 1793) all signaled rising interest in mechanization. But the breakthrough came with the War of 1812, which stimulated the domestic market by cutting off imports and prompting tariff increases. As domestic manufacturing surged, Boston merchants built the nation's first large‐scale cotton textile factory at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813. Integrating all steps of the manufacturing process, it applied waterpower even to weaving (a departure from British practice). Seeking more waterpower, the Boston merchants opened the Lowell mills in the 1820s. Wartime experience also heightened demand for improved transportation, stimulating the construction of steamboats, roads, canals, and, by the late 1820s railroads. Under an 1815 congressional mandate, the War Department pursued “uniformity” in arms production, a project that ultimately led to the “American System” of interchangeable‐parts manufacturing technology, a key to mass production.

The Later Nineteenth Century: The Industrial Age.

As industrialization unfolded, technology took on very different qualities. Railroads and telegraphs opened regional and national markets. Labor‐saving farm machinery freed labor for factory work and spurred urban growth. The scale of technology increased dramatically. Although many products continued to be produced by craft methods, others—from cigarettes to petroleum—were manufactured in vast quantities as mechanization and capital‐intensive factory production soared after the Civil War. The social relations of technology grew correspondingly more complex. Production sites became removed from sites of consumption, as even preserved‐food production moved out of the household or off the farm. As the division of labor increased and more Americans were employed by large firms, work relations took on a bureaucratic nature; with factory production and mechanization, control of the work process shifted from workers to managers (though not without resistance and seldom completely).

Industrial technology also altered ties to nature and diminished diversity. Railroads and telegraphs, it was said, “annihilated time and space.” In both industry and agriculture, complex machines (sewing machines, machine tools, horse‐drawn reapers) lessened dependence on manual skills. While the shift to coal (for fuel) and iron or steel (for construction) proceeded slowly, by 1900 they had replaced wood as the material of choice. Meanwhile, gas illumination and, later, electrical lighting supplanted natural light, while steam slowly became the dominant source of stationary and motive power. Daily life was less closely linked to diurnal and seasonal rhythms, and new technologies altered the physical environment on an unprecedented scale. By the 1880s, coal smoke, lumber‐mill sawdust, and wastewater from hydraulic mining and urban waterworks generated air and water pollution in many parts of the nation. With the spread of railroads, telegraphs, and mass production, diversity yielded to standardization—not only of products but also of time, news, work and travel schedules, and weights and measures.

Technological knowledge underwent equally dramatic changes. The principles underlying steam power, machine tools, and mass production were less familiar, hence less transparent. Invention by individuals remained the norm—indeed, the post–Civil War years marked the highpoint of independent inventors such as Thomas Edison. But it was increasingly defined as machine‐related and patentable. (The annual number of patents rose from 600 in 1840 to some 26,000 by 1900.) Further, invention was seen as the preserve of white males, despite efforts by African Americans and white women to defend a broader conception. With the rise of capital‐intensive industry, moreover, the ability to profit from invention increasingly depended on access to capital, disadvantaging those without social connections, such as Granville T. Woods, a prolific African American inventor. Book‐learning and systematic investigation also began to supplant traditional know‐how. From a handful in the Antebellum Era (notably, Philadelphia's Franklin Institute and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point), institutions of engineering education multiplied (e.g., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1861). As practitioners of the “mechanic arts” evolved into “engineers” distinguished by specialty (e.g., civil, mining, mechanical, or electrical), professional associations proliferated.

The Early Twentieth Century: Technological Systems Take Shape.

By 1900 a new era of “technological systems” had arisen. The electrical‐power industry, for example, inaugurated by the opening of Edison's generating station in Manhattan (1882), grew from a fragmented collection of local lighting stations into an integrated system of regional power grids by the 1920s. Utility companies transmitted a standardized product (alternating current at sixty cycles per second) over a network of wires to one‐third of American households. Electricity also powered streetcars (pioneered by Frank J. Sprague, 1888) and factory motors (after 1900). By the 1930s, the “system” included those who made and sold household devices such as radios and refrigerators, credit companies to finance their purchase, advertising to promote electrical use, and sophisticated techniques to manage demand. The two dominant companies, General Electric and Westinghouse, employed many engineers, and in 1901 General Electric opened the nation's first industrial research laboratory. An array of other system‐like technologies emerged from 1880 to 1940: telephones, motor vehicles, and western irrigation projects as well as motion pictures, commercial broadcasting, and aviation.

The qualities that characterized industrial technology marked American life deeply in the early twentieth century: scale and standardization increased, the lines of mediation between production and (now largely female) consumption became more intricate, and nature grew more remote (though in a sense accessible by automobile). But the era of systems also introduced a new level of social interdependence. Technological systems comprise many interlocking parts—including people—that must function properly and predictably; disruption or change at any one point affects the whole. To be sure, personal interdependence had marked the colonial era, while railroads, telegraph companies, and mass producers had all grappled with organizational complexity in the industrial era, giving rise to managerial hierarchies and Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management methods in the 1880s. But technological systems brought new, industry‐wide hierarchies of social interdependence that linked producers with distant consumers, in some cases shifting the production of services onto the consumer. By 1930 the housewife who drove an automobile and thus provided transportation for the household was embedded in a system that encompassed not only auto manufacturers such as Henry Ford and his assembly line but also steel, glass, rubber, and upholstery manufacturers, finance companies, gasoline producers and filling stations, garages and mechanics, roads, traffic lights, and self‐service “supermarkets.” Even farm households, once reliant on nature and neighbors, became dependent on complex systems for everything from gasoline‐powered tractors and seed corn (from the 1930s) to entertainment.

Technological knowledge was systematized as well. In a transformation first perceptible in the electrical and chemical industries (in what some call the “second industrial revolution”), practical and scientific knowledge became interdependent. Technological knowledge became enmeshed in the corporations that spawned systems, as independent inventors yielded to corporate engineers and industrial scientists. The workings of technology thus grew more opaque, more remote from everyday experience. Technological knowledge, concentrated in engineering schools and professional associations, also became further masculinized. As the percentage of doctoral degrees in science and engineering awarded to women declined from 1920 through the 1960s, and as professional associations excluded women from full membership, the expertise and systems of male engineers came to symbolize “progress.”

The 1930s to the Late Twentieth Century: Technology as “Second Nature.”

In viewing the fourth era in the history of American technology, whose beginnings stretched back to the 1930s, two trends stand out: the extension of ever larger technological systems into virtually every corner of American life, and the reconstitution of nature itself through new technologies. From the 1930s on, technological systems expanded and multiplied, merging into an interlocking national, then global, infrastructure. New Deal Era programs promoted regional hydroelectric power systems and encouraged rural electrification, and the Rural Telephone Act (1949) brought telephone lines to American farms. Post‐war agriculture became “agribusiness”: capital‐, energy‐, and chemical‐intensive. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government built a nationwide interstate highway system. Airline passengers carried by a nascent civil aviation industry increased to nearly thirteen million by 1947, then multiplied as jets were introduced in the 1950s. The first radio network (National Broadcasting Company, 1926) linked two systems to create a third; partly owned by General Electric and Westinghouse, it distributed radio programs over leased telephone lines. Commercial television broadcasting, launched in 1939–1940, burgeoned after World War II. By 1959 Americans owned fifty million TV sets. The major networks dominated programming until the arrival of cable TV (also color television and videotape recorders) in the 1960s. The first commercial communication satellite (Intelstat I) was launched in 1965; by the early 1970s virtually global satellite coverage had been achieved. By the 1990s, satellite transmissions, cable television, digital facsimiles, fiber optics, and the Internet put the vast majority of Americans within reach of a global network of technological systems.

World War II and the Cold War yielded other giant technological systems as well, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, the space program, and the Internet, developed in the late 1950s chiefly through the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). At the heart of most systems in this era lay electronic devices. Electronic digital (i.e., binary) computers, developed for military purposes during World War II, became feasible for civilian use after transistors replaced vacuum tubes in the 1950s. Small electronic signal devices made of semiconductors (mainly silicon), transistors were soon integrated with other components into a single silicon chip—the integrated circuit (1960s)—then in large‐scale circuits (microprocessors, 1971), and finally in very‐large‐scale integrated (VLSI) circuits (mid‐1980s). These and related advances, most funded by the Pentagon, increased the power of computers dramatically and reduced their size from room‐sized mainframes to desktop (1980s) and palm‐held (1990s) computers. Thanks to microprocessors, a host of consumer products as well as manufacturing and other business processes were computerized from the 1970s on. Linked in local‐area networks (LAN) or through the Internet, microelectronic devices unleashed an “information revolution” that had touched the lives of virtually all Americans by the 1990s. (Actual access remained uneven, however.)

Over the same years, other technologies offered sweeping powers to manipulate nature itself. One line of development centered on molecular manipulation in the manufacture of synthetic materials. An early, widely used plastic, Bakelite (ca. 1909), was the first in a series of synthetic materials constructed of complex molecules or “polymers.” Technical advances during World War II included nylon (a linear polymer), alloys, and composites. The new postwar discipline of “materials science,” emerging from chemistry, physics, and metallurgy, was funded after 1960 by the Pentagon's advanced research agency, which was interested in developing high‐temperature, high‐strength‐to‐weight materials for military purposes. This culminated in the 1990s in “nanotechnology,” the precise positioning of atoms and molecules in what physicist Richard Feynman envisioned in 1959 as “bottom up” manufacturing of materials and microscopic devices.

Another line of research, on the manipulation of reproduction, led from hybrid corn in the 1920s through discovery of the double helical structure of DNA (1952) to recombinant DNA techniques (gene cloning) in the 1970s. The 1980s and 1990s saw the development of genetically altered microorganisms (declared patentable in 1980), plants (1977), and animals (1996) as well as gene therapies for human diseases (e.g., cystic fibrosis, 1993). Meanwhile, the birth‐control pill was approved for sale in 1960, and the first American in vitro fertilization achieved in 1981. Amidst debates about the ethics of human cloning, the federally funded Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 and virtually complete a decade later, as part of a global effort to identify the location and structure of every human gene. By the end of the twentieth century, in short, new technologies offered the possibility of constructing all kinds of matter from the “bottom up.”

These two trends combined to give American technology the qualities of “second nature” in the post–World War II years. For a time in the 1970s and 1980s, “quality management” techniques, computerization, flexible methods of production, and niche markets seemed to herald a reversal of the centralization and standardization that marked earlier technological systems. “Lean” production methods such as just‐in‐time inventory control and subcontracting eased the rigidities inherent in Fordist methods of mass production. The Internet, moreover, retained the decentralization designed into its military progenitor, ARPANET, to withstand a nuclear attack. But, in practice, the hierarchies of interdependence expanded, as interlocking technological systems encompassed not merely those who produced and consumed its products but virtually all Americans. Standardization became pervasive, evident in the rapid spread of commodities (or computer viruses) around the world. Working in concert, systems such as electricity, automobiles, television, and the Internet ordered social life as nature once did. The “24/7 economy” of the 1990s—operating twenty‐four hours a day, seven days a week—decoupled daily life from nature. Even environmental problems generated by twentieth‐century technologies were addressed largely with new technologies (e.g., air pollution control devices, genetically engineered microorganisms to combat oil spills). Technology had become so deeply woven into American life as to be taken for granted. Nano‐ and biotechnologies, moreover, permitted nature itself to be constructed anew at the atomic and genetic level.

Technological knowledge became even more opaque and further removed from everyday life. Technology's shift from the mechanical toward the scientific accelerated in these years, with the growing importance of solid‐state physics and molecular biology. The locus of technological knowledge moved from corporate research labs to a larger nexus composed of industry, the military, and universities—the “military‐industrial complex” whose emergence President Dwight D. Eisenhower had discerned in 1961. During the Cold War—particularly in response to the Soviet atomic bomb (1949), the Korean War, and the Soviets' launching of Sputnik I (1957)—federal funds poured into education (National Defense Education Act, 1958) and into industrial research and development (R&D), on the model that had proved so productive during World War II. By 1965, fully two‐thirds of American R&D was funded by the federal government. As total R&D spending more than tripled thereafter, the government's share declined, but it still accounted for about one‐third in the 1990s. In short, technological knowledge in the era of technology‐as‐second‐nature became increasingly scientific, highly institutionalized, and inflected by government priorities.

Understanding Technological Change.

Tracing the evolution of machines once seemed sufficient to explain technological change, but scholars now view it as a multi‐layered social process that has not followed a predetermined course. Sorting out the relevant historical forces involves distinguishing between the pace and the particular direction of technological change.

Two factors quickened the pace of change over the course of American history. Competition, both capitalist and nationalist, encouraged the search for improved technologies. The pursuit of profits and economic efficiency generated enormous increases in productivity. Farm productivity more than doubled between 1960 and 1996, for example, while nonfarm labor productivity nearly doubled. Likewise, international competition—economic as well as political—prompted government funding for specific technological advances. The pattern of support established after the War of 1812—the armories' work on interchangeable parts, the state governments' promotion of canals and railroads—grew more pronounced in the twentieth century, particularly during World War II and the Cold War, when technological innovation appeared critical to national security. Federal funding supported virtually all post‐1945 technological breakthroughs.

Technological “borrowing” also hastened the pace of change. Through the 1850s, the United States was a net borrower, adapting European textile and railroad technology to local circumstances, for example. By the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, however, American innovations enjoyed wide recognition in Europe. By 1900, American inventors were drawing from and contributing to an international pool of technical knowledge in the electrical, chemical, and other industries. Twentieth century America became, on balance, a net technology exporter—for example, of mass‐production techniques to Europe and the Soviet Union after World War I. Borrowing went on among industries as well. Innovations spread rapidly, for example, within the nineteenth‐century machine‐tool industry and the twentieth‐century electronics industries. The “spinoff” of technologies from the military to the private sector further accelerated the process of technological change.

But the factors that help account for the pace of technological change do not necessarily explain its direction. At critical moments in American history, competing technologies seemed equally viable: canals, railroads, and steam carriages on common roads in the early 1830s; alternating and direct electric current or large‐scale mass production and more flexible forms of production in the 1880s; numerical control and record‐playback control in computerized manufacturing in the 1950s. While Americans have been portrayed as naturally inventive, enthusiastic about mechanization, and prone to define “progress” in technological terms, throughout the nation's history critics have questioned the direction of technological change. Debates about the social utility of factory labor marked the 1830s and 1840s; intellectuals from Henry David Thoreau to Lewis Mumford questioned the movement toward technological systems; the Depression of the 1930s sparked debates about mass production's role in “technological unemployment”; and social protesters in the 1960s challenged technology's social and environmental consequences and launched an “alternative technology” movement. Why some voices or technologies, but not others, achieved dominance requires deeper analysis.

Among the factors that have influenced the direction of technological change, two stand out. The availability of resources created distinctive incentives expressed in relative prices. In the nineteenth century, natural resources such as wood and water were abundant, while capital and labor were comparatively scarce. Thus Americans relied longer on wood and waterpower than did the British. The relative costliness of labor encouraged labor‐saving mechanization; the scarcity of capital made it worthwhile to build machines cheaply and use them intensively. But if relative costs biased the direction of technological change, they seldom determined specific technological choices, since costs themselves change during the process of invention, development, and diffusion. Prior technological choices also generated inertia that constrained the direction of change. Existing technologies tended to absorb capital and inventive energy that would otherwise have been directed elsewhere, and, once a set of supporting institutions and behaviors grew up around specific technologies such as the QWERTY keyboard layout or the internal‐combustion automobile, fundamental change became more costly.

Within the parameters established by relative prices and existing technologies, other factors tipped the balance toward specific technological solutions. Sometimes, the actions of individuals proved decisive (e.g., Thomas Edison's in the battle between alternating and direct current). Government funding was often critical, especially when it targeted specific technological solutions (e.g., machine tools and transistors better suited to military than to commercial needs). Although the effects of ideologies are difficult to gauge, they have also shaped the direction of technological change. Examples include the “command and control” ideology expressed in military support of computer research, gender or racial ideologies that influenced product design or use, and “progress” ideologies that privileged the use of iron or electricity. Consumers have also had their say, putting technologies to unanticipated uses. The creators of both the telephone and the Internet's predecessor, ARPANET, intended them for business use; it was telephone callers and researchers who turned them into devices for social interaction. The answer to the question of which technology or whose voice prevails often lies immersed in the messy details of history.
See also Atomic Energy Commission; Automation and Computerization; Automotive Industry; Biotechnology Industry; Business; Capitalism; Cotton Industry; Education: The Rise of the University; Education: Education in Contemporary America; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Defense; Iron and Steel Industry; Lumbering; Manhattan Project; Mass Marketing; Petroleum Industry; National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Physical Sciences; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; Tennessee Valley Authority; Textile Industry; Tobacco Industry.

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Colleen A. Dunlavy