Review: Shock of the Old (Part II)

This post constitutes part two of a review of David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old. I shall attempt to make this post stand alone by itself but read Part I if you want the review of the actual book rather than my mad musings.

In Part I, I ended by facetiously summarising my objection to the ideas in the book by saying: Yes. And?

I agree with David Edgerton's ideas. I don't see much problem with them: of course we should take a complete look at the history of technology, rather than one that--as this 2006 Guardian interview with Edgerton says--describes 1940s technology history as one of supersonic flight and atomic power.

Supersonic 1940s: The Bell X-1

When I read this interview (before having read the book) my response was dramatic. Who thinks that the 1940s was a decade of supersonic flight? Is this a popular conception that I've somehow missed out on or an absurd academic one? In the Guardian interview and in the book, Edgerton insists on using the term "we" to describe the position he is attempting to counter. "We think that..." "We believe..." Who is this we and why do they have a rather bizarre view of the 1940s? I absolute agreed, before reading the book, that the 1940s were more of a time of "tanks, aeroplanes, cars, coal and wheat and pig farming."

You could ascribe my objection to pure high and mightyness: I don't think that because I am superior and magically have more knowledge (or the right kind of knowledge) than most. 

Let me defend myself by trying to explain why I think I didn't come into this book with the expectation that technology history, either popularly or academically, never seemed to be quite as extreme as Edgerton makes out (perhaps we should allow that he may have been hyperbolising to make a point).

Finally I will actually disagree with Edgerton. Hold on to your hats, things will get crazy.

Still reading? Something of what Edgerton is worried about, this focus on the absurd magic of the cutting edge, seems to come from the futurist ideas of the 50s-70s, when people were landing on the Moon and everyone fully expected we would have at least a Moon colony and flying cars by now. The science fiction of this period--think Thunderbirds, 2001 and even Back to the Future--are I think symptoms of the possibly more sensible expectation of the everyday person. The future was going to be awesome and it was barely fifty years away, if that.

Alternate future: the Firefly crew on their crowded, jury-rigged bridge.

But I was born in the mid 1980s and my teenage TV science fiction was quite a different story. Dark Angel (2000) was set in a post-apocalyptic future populated almost exclusively by the kind of technologies Edgerton wants to draw attention to: bicycles instead of cars, jury-rigged ways of keeping up with the vanguard of technology. Firefly (2002), the beloved space western, was similar-- the heroes didn't have the cutting edge technology. Unable to access the most cutting edge technology, they too made us of elderly technology (although it looked futuristic to us). Even Stargate which gives us an alternate 'now', has humans in general scrambling to keep up with other technologies and doing many of the things Edgerton wants to highlight: borrowing, reverse-engineering, imitating, jury-rigging. The Dial Home Device for the Earth Stargate was missing and Earth scientists have managed to hack one together out of what, compared to the original technology, amounts to some bits of string and duct tape.

 A generation after Edgerton, I think, the myth of the future has changed from one of the gleaming inventiveness of humanity to one of borrowing and jury-rigging. It's changed enough for me to be genuinely surprised that anyone would look at the 1940s and think "supersonic flight" above "Spitfire" or would feel it necessary to be quite so bombastic about making this point about old technology being important as if it was completely groundbreaking. 

 That's the "Yes" of my fascetious argument. The 'And' therefore expects more from this line of argument. If we have in fact established that there is more to technology that what was invented yesterday, how can we begin to investigate this or make sense of it? This is what I would have liked to read in the book-- some clear suggestion not only that we should look at old, borrowed, regressive and maintained technology as equally important but how we should approach it. The book contains plenty of examples, but I don't think I ever got the sense that Edgerton really knows what the next step is. Perhaps he's got there now, as the book is now a good six years old!

*

And now I must disagree with Edgerton. Or rather, I must query how he appears to conceive of technology (or perhaps how he appears to conceive of how "we" conceive of technology). There is a sense that technologies invented are intended to eclipse their predecessors. For example, I see no reason why the machete as a killing tool should necessarily be outmoded by the gun, bomb, rocket or atomic warhead-- which the book appears to suggest is what is intended by the rocket's invention. If I live in London and want to get people in Paris, I don't have to be in Paris to kill them if I have a rocket. I can simply line up my rocket and fire it. It may not be the cheapest, most efficient or effective method, but it plays quite a different role.

In fact, technology rarely eclipses a previous technology complete because-- like Darwin's semi-apocryphal finches--it occupies quite a different evolutionary niche. A "better" bird doesn't necessarily entirely displace the previous bird because the ways in which it is different may outweigh the ways in which it fills the same task as the earlier bird.

In the killing technology example, the bomb will never replace the machete entirely because the bomb will always play a different role: it is more difficult to acquire, especially in quantity (even with the internet), more indiscriminate and less personal. It destroys people in quite a different way, which must have sociological and psychological implications.

1869 Ladies' Pedal Bicycle

We walk for different reasons and on different journeys than we bike, take a train, drive  or fly. While these are successive transport technologies I just don't see that anyone really dismisses biking because planes exist. This is the level on which Edgerton makes his stand: Bicycles fly in the face of the innovation myth. But do they really?

Consider the bicycle made today. Not the bicycle grandfathered--that's a different story--but the bicycle constructed today. It has a certain shape--penny farthings and choppers being unusual--an airfilled rubber tire, air brakes, a unisex (usually) diamond frame.

There has been innovation. Something has happened to the bicycle to refine it: each component has been initially invented and used and nowadays there is a general consensus on how to make an affordable general-use bicycle that is modern at least to the last 30 years. Even where poverty abounds and jury-rigging is rife, people tend to take what is best and use it. This bicycle is not old at all! The concept of 'a bicycle' may be over a hundred and fifty years old, but since then it has undergone near-continous innovation taking in advances/changes in design, materials, construction methods, methods of maintenance, social norms and changes in use-- all the things Edgerton wants to talk about.

A different kettle of fish: The modern diamond-frame bike.

For me, that is the history of technology and it is absolutely one of innovation. The main invention of technology is important but not nearly so important as the inventions that will improve it-- and they are inventions and I can't really get behind the idea that they aren't new.

I saw a thing once about a lighting technology used in some towns in the Philippines which consisted of a plastic bottle full of water wedged in a hole in the roof. You can try this at home! The water acts as a lens to 'capture' and redirect the light more effectively than a simply using a piece of plastic as a window.

Edgerton would love this as a piece of Old Technology. But is it old? It makes use of simple materials and a basic understanding of light (or even an observation of it), it's cheap and near-universally available. But it wasn't being done ten years ago and now it's being done. It's not advanced, certainly, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about.

The Shock of the Old has something to say, but it doesn't seem to have enough to say. We need to know: what is a distinct technology? When is a technology newly invented and when merely updated? If an old thing like a bicycle is made out of radically innovated parts and materials, is it still an old technology (I'm looking at you, Bugatti Veyron)? Is the Concorde a new thing entirely or just an updated plane? Shouldn't we be looking at technologies more closely (e.g. the tires of a bicycle rather than the bicycle as a whole) to make more sense out of the progress of technology? Are innovations in maintenance of old things innovations? What role does the niche of technology play in how it is eclipsed, or not? Without these questions being at least addressed-- at least asked-- the whole book boils down to the rather unshocking observation of: "not everyone uses the newest stuff".

Yes. And?

Review: Shock of the Old (Part I)

I finished David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old earlier this week, but I've been letting it sit and stew for a while. I'm going to do this review in two halves because I think it's important for me to separate my response to the book from my response to the ideas, because I simultaneously agree and disagree with the thesis of the book. In order to articulate my argument, I think I need two halves. This is part one, in which I mostly enjoyed the book and agree with Edgerton.

If a book's goal is to challenge what you think, the Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 is very successful. Edgerton's aim is to shake up the field of technology history, leading some reviewers to describe him (not unhappily) as revisionist. The book is full of Edgerton-coined terms such as 'creole technology' and a sense of indignation and righteousness.

The main thesis of the book is that the history of technology focuses far too much on the history of invention and innovation. In fact, more than that--Edgerton argues that the history of technology and our very understanding of technology itself almost is that of invention and innovation and that is is wrong. We should instead look at the use of a given technology. This would mean, for examine, that we examine the use of a tool like a metal blade as a killing tool not as an outdated bronze-age technology but as a technology that continues to be crucial and effective to this day, even with the proliferation of other killing technologies such as guns and bombs. Edgerton illustrates this particular example (which I have phrased somewhat differently from him) with the devastatingly brutal use of the machete in Rwanda, in which millions were efficiently murdered.

In the conclusion of this article published in the Journal of History of Science and Technology (which slightly more academically reinterates in a compressed fashion many of the points, and a lot of the language, made in the more popularist book, if you're looking for a quick fix), Edgerton writes,   

If [this paper] calls for anything it is for the history of technology to ask and answer historical questions, to engage in historical and other debates. It argues that to do this we need to attend very carefully to nature of the standard narratives that are at work in today's academic  histories, which, for example, privilege the ‘question of technology'; conflate invention/innovation/technology and equate technology with the rich world, or the internal study of technology with invention, and much more besides.

 I wish this paragraph had been in the book, because I think it articulates what Edgerton was trying to do more clearly than his book does. I am not familiar with the academic histories of world technology, but I am happy to accept that there may in fact be a problem in academia like that described above. In that light, I do agree with Edgerton: technology is clearly about use as well as its invention. Technologies do not necessarily displace their predecessors, nor does the poorer world precisely trail after the richer technologically or lack a distinct technological history. There is value to examining the roles of resurgence, maintenance and the sharing/transition/imitation of technologies both temporally and geographically. The examples Edgerton provides are interesting and illustrative. In short: I agree.

What else is there left to say? I hear you cry. What's not to love? Why aren't you, like prominent reviewers, glowingly ending this review on a positive note?
  
Well, there are two things I object to, the first of which I shall articulate here, the second in my second post. My first objection is that I found this book poorly written. If (lol) this had been submitted to me as a paper, I would have sent it back because I found it quite badly constructed and in some cases, poorly explained. The text was bookended by the thesis, but did not make a cohesive argument throughout. In fact, I frequently found myself wishing each individual chapter had been a standalone article and that within each article, there was rather more discussion and rather fewer examples. In places, the reader was presented with a pile of data and examples presented without explicit links to the argument.

I think this all comes down to the book being more of an argument about the problems in academic histories without ever referencing the academic histories--or indeed, historians--it is apparently attempting to counter. At the same time, it's being a popularist, technological storyteller that sells in bookshops-- more like the lovely book The Battery that I recently read. The result was frustratingly neither a cutting examination of a failed historical narrative nor an interesting and innovative delve into the history of 20th century technology.

And so that is my first objection. My second is much more of an objection of ideas, and it can be partly touched upon with the terribly facetious comment: Yes. And?

You will have to read Part II for more. 

Book Review: The Battery

The full title of this book by Henry Schlesinger is The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution. It simply tells the story of the invention and use of the battery throughout history.

‘Simply’ is the right term, but it’s not at all a bad thing. Aside from the title, this book has no pretentions to grandeur. It takes a small thing that we all rely on and tells its story through the much more well-known, more beloved, more written about story of the objects it powers. A single battery itself takes pride of place on the cover, humbly noble.  

Voltaic Pile: the first battery

Until reading this book, my knowledge of the history of electricity was focused on current. The bulky, very basic battery only starts in the spotlight early on before being shunted out in the Edison and Tesla years by current. The otherwise lovely BBC Story of Electricity (which I have mentioned before) does just this, leaving the battery in the dust after the first episode.

The book captures this in a quote from Edison, when he was investigating the use of the battery for powering the new electric lighting:

“The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catch penny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies.” (pg 144)

But the battery didn’t die out and disappear, even for Edison himself. A relatively simple technology that hasn’t changed dramatically over the years, the battery’s been a necessary little (semi-)portable powerhouse in continuous and heavy use since it was invented. Schlesinger describes batteries powering theatre and party lights, early and later telegraphs, ticker tape machines, telephones, farmhouse and army radios, doorbells, flashlights, even the famous green light on the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby… they made these early electric objects possible for a majority of people before current was common and widespread. Of course, they remain crucial to our lives—and in some ways their uses remain almost unchanged.

The much-less messy dry cell batteries "for telephone service".

Some of the most fascinating things that captured my interest were the importance of “unwieldy” maintenance of early wet home batteries, the use of small amounts of electricity in favour of large amounts and the myriad of tiny devices built around, not the existence of electricity itself, but the battery specifically—not to mention the scientific advances made possible by the battery. The book itself makes a good case (although not explicitly) for the powerful technological determinism of the battery—the battery guiding the creation of a certain world, rather than being pressed into service by the march of progress.

The way Schlesinger’s clear, well-written and constructed book presents it, the battery is the Frodo of the electric world. Small and frequently low-powered compared to others, but highly determined and usually portable, it can accomplish a lot for little input.

Noble battery, we salute you.   

Ps. The book is available for your electronic book, so you can read it using your own battery!

Book Review: What is This Thing Called Science?

Scrubs' J.D. wonders "What is This Thing Called Science?"

So my excuse for the long break, or most of it, is moving house and having a broken computer fan. I am now moved (for now) and my computer is back, so here's something to be going along with.

I'm always reading something on the History of Science, often more than one something. A few weeks ago I finished a book charmingly named What is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers. I feel the title should always been said with a finger on the chin and a quizzical look. 

It was quite a charming read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Essentially, it's a play-by-play of (some?) of the important various philosophies of science over the 20th century. I had encountered Thomas Kuhn and the interestingly anarchic Paul Feyerabend before, but not people like Imre Lakatos. Chalmers details the ideas, decides how they are useful, helpful and flawed before moving on to the next thing. He finally settles, albeit slightly uncomfortably, on Deborah Mayo and the idea of New Experimentalism.

I'm afraid I will need to come back to New Experimentalism and Mayo, although the major key to the philosophy is there in the name-- science is something heavily connected to experiment... and that's the best I've got at the moment. One thing that Chalmers does do is try to battle his way out of the idea that Feyerabend put forth-- that science is not progressive or produces results any more accurate than reading the entrails of unfortunate goats. Throughout the book Chalmers is determined to find something about science that is, if not based on a single unified metholodogy, at least productive and progressive.

Think of the goats, Feyerabend!

I liked that about the book. Feyerabend's somewhat cheeky and anarchic ideas are fascinating and hold a kind of perverse sense (I'd better come back to him as well) but are counter-intuitive and I can understand that somebody would want to start with a bit of a proposition that science is useful, is progressive and while it might be slightly less easy to package up than we are sometimes led to believe it is, does actually have value over those poor goats.

I recommend this book. The internet informs me it's an excellent introduction to the Philsophy of Science and, for once, I agree with someone on the internet.