MADISON, WIS. : The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) journeyed to America’s Dairyland last fall to hold its annual convention. This year’s event was a particularly special occasion, not just because of the scenic location but because of the additional presence of the History of Science Society (HSS). The two groups held a “joint annual meeting and conference on critical problems and research frontiers”—and with session titles like “Are There Good Reasons for the Existence of Separate Disciplines of History of Science and History of Technology?” the gathering had to last a day longer than usual just to allow time to read the program.

The two fields might seem natural partners, but in fact there was animosity between them for many years. SHOT was founded in 1957 after a group of technology enthusiasts got the cold shoulder from the HSS establishment. In those days many science historians believed that they themselves studied the growth of ideas, while technology was mere “tinkering” unworthy of serious scholarship. Many technology historians, in turn, felt that the science people had their heads in the clouds, churning out endless monographs on how Copernicus influenced Newton while ignoring the engines and smelters and generators that really changed the world.

Bad blood continued for more than a decade. By the end of the 1960s one scholar from the technology side could accuse his science brethren of that decade’s worst possible sin: not being “relevant.” Then in 1971 Edwin T. Layton, Jr., published a landmark paper portraying science and technology as “mirror-image twins,” activities that were closely connected and intertwined, differing sometimes in focus or methods but not fundamentally separate. Within a few years the idea that scientists make discoveries and technologists apply them was thoroughly routed from the history-of-technology camp. As the 1970s wore on, the science historians, too, came increasingly to accept that things were more complicated than that. Rapprochement has continued, to the point where many in Madison questioned whether there should be any distinction at all between the two historical disciplines (though most of them ended up saying that there should).

Differences persist. The history of science still has more scholarly veneer, a tweedier image. HSS was founded much earlier (in 1924), and its practitioners can spend much of their time amidst antique manuscripts in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Chinese. Their technology counterparts are more likely to be found poking around the ruins of an abandoned textile mill. HSS’s main journal has the elegant name of Isis, after the ancient Egyptian goddess of nature and magic; SHOT’s journal is more prosaically called Technology and Culture .

One speaker at the convention, Svante Lindqvist of Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, found differences of substance as well as style. He noted that science historians continue to investigate all eras of the past and every part of the world; meanwhile, over the last few years, virtually all their technological colleagues seem to have developed an interest in American corporate research laboratories of the 1920s. He dryly added that if relevance is still a criterion, SHOT’S members should turn their attention further into the past, since most of the world lives with technology closer to that of medieval times than to that of modern America.

That was one of the few discordant notes at the Madison affair. Historians from both sides of the fence heaped praise on one another’s efforts, calling for closer ties and pointing out how much the two groups can learn from each other. When Loren Graham of MIT delivered the keynote address about Peter Pal’chinskii, a Russian engineer who came to grief under Stalin, it was easy to forget which of the two tribes the speaker came from in the excitement of hearing such a good and important story unfold.

Graham described how Pal’chinskii ran afoul of the Soviets when he resisted Stalin’s plans for collectivization, drawing on his engineering experience to protest that they would never work. He was eventually executed. In the aftermath of his case and others like it, Soviet technical education was revamped to emphasize ideological conformity and subservience to the plan. The results of this policy are tragically evident today—not only in technology but in all phases of Russian life, for such narrowly trained, blinkered engineers became the ruling class of the Soviet Union.

Conference participants spoke constantly of the need to reach a broader audience than the few academics who share a given specialty. Graham’s address provided a model: a fascinating tale of engineering with the broadest of social and political ramifications.

ON THE SHELF : Through four days of scholarly speechifying in Madison, the names of certain books and articles kept cropping up. Most were at least a decade old, but one, Virginia Scharff’s Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Free Press/Macmillan, $22.95), had been out for only a few months at the time of the conference. Despite its youth, this work was mentioned at least half a dozen times, often simply as “Scharff’s book.” Clearly, it has already had a considerable effect on historians.

The book examines America’s auto industry from its beginnings through the 1920s. Scharff finds that women played a major role in shaping the automobile’s design and demonstrates how the eternal struggle between the sexes was played out in the fight for control of the new machine. Women used automobiles to challenge gender stereotypes; as these challenges succeeded, men revised their stereotypes, or came up with new ones, to explain women’s changing behavior.

Initially the idea of the fair sex driving at all seemed outlandish to most men. But after women made it clear that they would not be excluded, men made virtue of necessity: clean private autos, they said, were much more suitable for delicate ladies than crowded, unruly streetcars. Similarly, when the female market became too big to ignore, manufacturers began including women in their advertisements—but only in ones stressing safety, comfort, and reliability. Those that concentrated on power and excitement were illustrated with men.

Scharff believes that this male fetish for ruggedness and adventure retarded automotive development. Such advances as the enclosed body and the electric self-starter, she asserts, could have become standard much sooner. They didn’t because the old ways appealed to masculine ideals—cruising through the woods with the wind in one’s hair, wrestling the mechanical beast into submission. When men discovered that getting rained on and struggling to crank up a balky engine weren’t such fun after all, they attributed the changes to feminine weakness: we don’t need these frills, they said, but if the dear ones will insist on driving, we’ll have to make things easy for them. Self-starters and other features were advertised as being “so simple a girl can use it” to avoid the suggestion that men needed pampering.

Further examples abound. The Styling Section at General Motors was called the “beauty parlor,” even though the shape of its products clearly reflected male preoccupations. When women refused to be confined to wimpy electric vehicles, manufacturers trumpeted the easy operation of their gasoline models as an indulgence of feminine whims. In fact, Scharff sees most of early automotive history as a series of female-initiated changes that men first resisted and then co-opted. Automobiles have long been associated with sex. Scharff’s book gives new ways to look at that connection.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. : What do Jane Austen, Jimi Hendrix, and Louis C. Hunter have in common? They all did some of their best work after they were dead. Posthumous collaborators turned Austen’s and Hendrix’s leftovers into finished products, and now Lynwood Bryant has done the same for Hunter’s technological history.

Upon completing his classic Steamboats on the Western Rivers in 1947, Hunter turned his attention to the history of power generation. After twenty years he produced what Bryant calls “a large and diffuse manuscript that presented many editorial problems.” It was divided into three parts, and the first two, dealing with water and steam power, were published in 1979 and 1985 by the Hagley Foundation. Following Hunter’s death in 1984, the planned third volume was abandoned.

Then a group of Hunter enthusiasts, including Bryant (a retired MIT historian) and Hunter’s two daughters, found new sponsors and revived the project. The result is A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1930, Volume 3: The Transmission of Power (MIT Press, $50). For historians and buffs alike, it is well worth the wait.

The book begins with a discussion of how power has been generated in small quantities for workshops, factories, and farms. Animal power (horse, ox, mule, and occasionally even dog), windmills, and hot-air engines, as well as internal combustion, were all used. The book then describes the trend toward transmitting power generated in bulk at a central source. Early methods included wire rope, hydraulic transmission (London had 184 miles of hydraulic mains by 1927), and compressed air. Finally, of course, electric transmission won out, and Hunter details that industry’s rise from both a technical and business point of view.

Hunter’s book is the direct opposite of Scharff’s. It concentrates on machines, and people appear only as necessary to invent and operate them. From this technocentric point of view, however, and within the limits the author set for himself, it is exhaustive. The series is an invaluable reference work, and everyone with an interest in history can be glad that the complete set is now available.