CAMBRIDGE, MASS.: Inspired by the success of Ph.D. programs in the history of technology at institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware, the historian of technology Merritt Roe Smith has lobbied long and hard for a similar program on his home turf, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His labors reached fruition last fall, when MIT admitted the first four students into its doctoral program in the history of technology. Smith, who is the president of the Society for the History of Technology, launched the program with his colleagues Loren Graham and Peter Buck. Smith believes that the program’s location at one of the nation’s elite engineering schools will be a definite advantage. “MIT has been the center of my universe for many years. I work with the people I’m studying. It’s an exciting place to be a historian of technology.”

The program, says Smith, will give graduate students ‘Very long leashes” with which to pursue their academic interests. “We’re looking for self-directed students with z. great deal of intellectual independence and maturity. We also want to keep the program small to facilitate access between students and faculty.” The high-powered faculty includes Leo Marx (see “Paradise Limited: An Interview with Leo Marx,” Invention & Technology , Fall 1988); Sherry Turkic, author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit ; and Thomas K’fchn, who wrote the pathbreaking The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . MIT, long esteemed for looking boldly into the future, will now also look boldly into the past.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Jeffrey K. Stine, curator of engineering at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, believes that historians of technology will have to play an increasingly important role in helping government set environmental policy. “It’s a big research field,” he says. “There’s going to be a need for historians of technology to apply their craft.” Stine contends that by looking at past matters of environmental politics, technology, and public policy, historians can provide valuable lessons for technologists and politicians.

Stine cites his own study of the controversial Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway as a case in point, an early example of large-scale technology confronted with major environmental concerns. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Tennessee-Tombigbee to provide a more direct water route from the Ohio, Tennessee, and upper Mississippi rivers to ports on the Gulf Coast. The 234mile-long waterway runs through Mississippi and Alabama, connecting the north-flowing Tennessee River and the south-flowing Tombigbee. Congress first authorized its construction in 1946, but concern about the waterway’s high cost and questionable benefits stalled funding for almost twentyfive years, until 1970. “In the intervening years,” says Stine, “significant changes had occurred in public attitudes toward the environment.”

By 1970 the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) had gone into effect, requiring federal agencies to submit environmental impact statements for projects that might pose a threat to the natural environment. Critics charged that the Tennessee-Tombigbee would irreparably damage the region’s ecology, turning 150 miles of a thriving, free-flowing river into a “slackwater system of impounded lakes,” destroying more than 70,000 acres of fish and wildlife habitat, and gouging an unsightly 44-mile-long canal alongside an unnavigable stretch of the Tombigbee River.

“Many people regarded the Corps of Engineers as a symbol of governmental and engineering insensitivity to environmental concerns,” Stine says, but after environmental groups had launched a series of NEPA-inspired lawsuits to pressure the corps to develop new plans for the waterway, “the corps met with an interdisciplinary group of experts—ecologists, engineers, landscape architects—and looked at alternatives.” The meetings resulted in a new plan that satisfied newly enacted environmental guidelines and answered some of the objections of the project’s opponents. The corps devised a cleaner means of disposing of excavated material and substituted a carefully landscaped chain of reservoirs for the offensive canal. Construction went ahead, and the TennesseeTombigbee Waterway was completed in 1985.

Stine thinks that the case of the Tennessee-Tombigbee is instructive because it demonstrates how an organization like the Corps of Engineers, long accustomed to large-scale, earth-mauling projects, could adapt to new concerns about the environment. It also shows how “the policy of requiring environmental impact statements can be a very useful tool, not just as a way of blocking projects but as a means for engineers to develop plans that are as little destructive to the environment as possible. In that sense the TennesseeTombigbee Waterway was quite a successful step.”

The story ends with a twist, though. Traffic on the waterway turned out to be far lower than expected—too low to justify its hefty two-billion-dollar cost and the sacrifice of the Tombigbee River. Ultimately the complicated calculation of environmental, social, and budgetary costs and benefits added up wrong, and historians and legislators alike must continue their constant réévaluation of large-scale technological practice.

Stine finds this process fascinating to watch. For example, “people are taking a new look at solar power,” he points out, “which was popular for a time in the seventies but then considered impractical and inappropriate as a major source of energy. Now it’s benefiting from a sort of retrospective technology assessment.” Similarly, nuclear power, so feared and loathed by environmentalists, is beginning to look like a relatively benign alternative to the burning of fossil fuels.

“There are other historians doing interesting work in this area,” Stine notes. “Martin Melosi, at the University of Houston, wrote an excellent book called Garbage in the Cities . Also there’s Joel Tarr at Carnegie Mellon, who’s interested in waste-water treatment in urban environments.” Stine hopes that more historians will turn their attention toward this vital field and that technologists and policy makers will listen to what they have to say.

ALBANY, N.Y: The spirit of Henry Mercer lives on not only in the Mercer Museum (see page 26) but also in the people who make up the Early American Industries Association. The EAIA, says Alan Bates, its president, “is dedicated to promoting interest in the history of early industry and in the tools used to create the material objects of the last couple of centuries.”

The EAIA was formed in 1933, Bates says, “when a group of New Englanders gathered in a tavern and got to talking about their common enthusiasm for collecting old and obsolete tools. They decided to form a little organization.” Since then the organization has grown to include more than twentyfive hundred members in the United States and abroad. It maintains an extensive library of books and catalogues, housed at the Mercer Museum, and its members meet annually for two or three days of seminars, handson demonstrations, and tool auctions. Last year they gathered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and examined the tools and products of Harmonist craftsmen at the magnificently preserved Old Economy Village nearby.

The group publishes a quarterly journal, The Chronicle , plus a bimonthly newsletter called Shavings . Both contain news about tool collectors, historical articles, and photographs of such unusual implements as shipwright bevels, nineteenth-century carpenter’s braces, and nail-pulling hatchets. An article in a recent issue of The Chronicle looked at some of the tools Henry David Thoreau probably used when he built his cabin on Waiden Pond.

Last fall twenty-eight EAIA members ventured to Britain to meet with members of England’s Tools and Trades History Society. Bates describes the high point of the two-week expedition: “In Portsmouth we got a look at the inner secrets of the Mary Rose , one of Henry VIII’s warships. It was buried in the mud for four hundred and fifty years but was recently recovered, and it’s now on display. They recovered a carpenter’s kit—the only known surviving set of sixteenth-century woodworking tools.”

The group’s next tour, in October, will take members to explore the early industrial legacy of Wales and France. “We’ll be looking at industrial museums, maritime museums, folk museums, a slate mine, and the usual assortment of castles and tourist-type attractions. There’s also going to be time for members just to poke around and see what they can find.” The climax of the tour will undoubtedly be the House of Tools Museum in the French city of Troyes. “It’s the mecca for tool collectors,” Bates explains. “It’s probably the finest single display of tools of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the world.”

Bates hopes that 1989 will be a pivotal year for the EAIA. “We’re casting about for a paid executive director. We’ve also launched a big membership drive, with the goal of doubling membership in the next five years. We’re looking to spread our wings.”

Readers interested in the Early American Industries Association may write to the group’s treasurer, John S. Watson, at P.O. Box 2128, Empire State Plaza Station, Albany, NY 12220.