History and Technology

ISSN: 0734-1512 (Print) 1477-2620 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghat20

History and Technology: Research on the

borderline

Pietro Redondi Executive Editor

To cite this article: Pietro Redondi Executive Editor (1983) History and Technology: Research
on the borderline, History and Technology, 1:1, 1-6, DOI: 10.1080/07341518308581610

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341518308581610

Published online: 30 Jun 2008.

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 History and Technology, 1983, Vol. 1, pp. 1-6
0734-1512/83/0101-0001 $12.00/0
© 1983 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH
Printed in the United Kingdom

Editorial
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HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH ON THE BORDERLINE

The phrase, "critical history of technology" first appeared in the writings

of Karl Marx. It occurs in a celebrated footnote in the first volume of Das
Kapital: "A critical history of technology would demonstrate how
small a role one individual, alone, could have played in any particular
invention."
The notion of social history of science and technology, on the other
hand, was put forward in 1931 at the Second International Congress of
History of Science and Technology in London. The idea was taken up in
France when, independently of Marxist perspectives, Lucien Febvre in
1935 formulated the ideal of a history of technology in which historical
knowledge was to be the first requirement.
This ideal retains all of its significance today. It seems to call for a new
debate, new research, and new inquiries into the relations between
history and technology. Should the subject be technology? Or should it
be techniques? In using the former term 'technology', we do not wish to
blunt the semantic difference that exists, in several languages, between
technology, designating the scientific study (the institution of which is
relatively recent) of the procedures and instruments of the various
branches of industry, and techniques, the aggregate of methods and
procedures used in an art, a trade or an industry.
Even if the relations between history, technology, and techniques are
constant, they cannot be linear or identical, because they change in
response to the definition of unprecedented problems and new
methods.
History and Technology is intended to accommodate discussions of
the relations between the various poles of contemporary research in the
field of the history of technology. But the journal has a more specific
goal: to situate, and develop, the history of technology.
In other words, we wish to see technology through its relationship to
l
 2 PIETRO REDONDI

history by placing it at the center of historical perspective as a variable

that is autonomous without being independent of the state of society.
We see it as consonant with forces of production and intellectual forms.
On this condition alone, we may understand why history of technology
cannot be reduced to a list of discoveries and advances: it experiences
resistances, impasses, revivals of former trends, and most notably,
transferrals, affiliations and interdependences: phenomena that cannot
be represented without inserting technology into general history.
Isolated from general history, subordinated to the concerns of purely
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economical history, or the history of material culture, readily placed

under the heading of ethnology or anthropology, the history of tech-
nology is still in search of an identity. There is a sort of reduction here.
And yet, there can be no material history without the history of tools,
equipment and means of production. There can be no cultural history
without a history of the place of technology in the value system and in the
world view of various social groups.
The difficulty in formulating problems and historical research
programs is traceable to the present marginal state of the discipline. By
investigating this difficulty, and reacting to it, an international journal
can serve as the essential instrument.
Indeed, History and Technology wishes to be completely open to
international interdisciplinary collaboration. It proposes to be a meeting
place for historians of technology, on the one hand, and historians from
all academic fields, on the other: historians of ideas, historians of the
sciences, historians and archaeologists of industry, economic historians,
institutional historians and geographers. Historians with different
backgrounds have questions to ask, and knowledge to gain from one
another, in spite of their differences.
Our goal is to place the history of technology at the crossroads of
multiple historical perspectives. In so doing, History and Technology
hopes to serve as a forum for critical experimentation and research on
the relation between history and technology.
History and Technology, in giving precedence to technology
confronted with time, space and social and intellectual development,
proposes to analyze the very complex relations that have involved
technological processes with political and intellectual history, social and
economic history.
We know very well that for a long time it has become impossible to
portray these relations in other terms than those of a single, complex,
 EDITORIAL 3

dynamic whole whose processes have as yet been insufficiently invest-

igated. Nationalities and revolutions, military necessities, forms of
economic development and geographical conditions, cultural traditions
and technological effects of knowledge and scientific methodologies: to
what extent does technology take part in history, and vice versa?
What is at stake, to paraphrase Kuhn, is the following problem: why
and how to study the essential tension that exists between history and
technology?
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If it is, in itself, legitimate, our project cannot dissemble the difficulties in

the path to be followed — difficulties that stem not only from the
enormity of the unknown territory, a no-man's-land at the border of
several disciplines. It is advisable to mention them briefly here.
The outlooks of history and technology have rarely intersected. We
recognize at once that while history has the capacity to bring the past
back to life, technology has the power to make us quickly forget it, by
condemning, irrevocably and with increasing rapidity, techniques and
methods to obsolescence. But there are grounds for questioning this first
impression. "Science and art", this definition attributed to history could
just as well describe technology. This analogy, that seems to us fertile for
debate and analysis, has not been subjected to the examination it
deserves.
The equally widespread idea that historical knowledge and techno-
logical knowledge are divided by the difference of their objectives, goals
and methods, conflicts with the daily practice of historians and archaeo-
logists faced with the instruments and processes that modern technology
places at their disposal. A new and intimate rapport between history and
technology has thus been instituted by the introduction in history of the
means of elaboration and cognitives belonging to technology.
For its part, technology finds itself, on a worldwide scale, faced with
political and economic decisions that cannot be considered outside a
historical approach. There is neither a valid program, nor a conscious
decision without critical confrontation with the past. Technology is the
most powerful instrument of the will to power. Up to now, it has served
this will in the pursuit of the mastery of nature. Today, it is the mastery of
the technological instruments by technology itself that constitutes the
crucial problem. Whence the paradox: the technologies of the past,
which disposed of simple instruments relative to ours, had to resolve
 4 PIETRO REDONDI

extremely complex problems. Present-day technology, with very

sophisticated instrumentation at its disposal, is, on the other hand, faced
with a series of apparently obvious questions, such as the mastery of
technological instruments. This paradox prompts us to examine these
problems in a more critically advised manner. For technology, the
necessity to understand its own past is no longer just the requirement of
an erudite curiosity. This comprehension is becoming a condition for
putting its present in perspective, for envisioning a responsible co-
ordination between the natural sciences, the humanities and social
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sciences, and the applied sciences of today.

In advocating a reflection on the relation between history and techno-

logy, History and Technology does not wish to evade the essential
importance of an internal, or "technical", history of technology. Be-
cause this perspective alone can allow for the study of the cognitive
value and practice of technology — cognitive value that has given
priority to answering questions of eminently social, anthropological and
economic nature. These problems are now more decisive than ever:
what are the constitutive moments in a technological situation: dis-
covery, invention, experimentation, innovation, application? How can
the channels of technological thought and practice, or again the
historical relation, often indirect or hidden, between sciences and
technology be identified? In History and Technology, these problems
will find their audience: that of historians of ideas, of industry, of
societies, whose inquiries and hypotheses can be confronted with the
analysis of technological phenomena themselves.
History and Technologyv/ishes to assume the pursuit of a confronta-
tion and collaboration between external or social history, and the
internal history of technology. And this goes beyond any desire for
eclecticism at all costs. If it is true that an often radical demarcation
between external and internal history has up to now made a lasting
impression on research, History and Technology is sensitive to the fact
that this demarcation constitutes an existing situation that cannot be
thought of as standing to reason.
It is in the name of this methodological concern that History and
Technology takes its place among the other journals — not numerous —
dedicated to the history and archaeology of technology. As such,
History and Technology takes up the appeal for synthesis of the history
 EDITORIAL 5

of technology and intellectual and social history that Lucien Febvre put
forth in Annales almost fifty years ago. Here we are not discussing the
reasons this appeal has remained unheeded. It is true, the history of
technology has remained marginal in relation to institutional history. It
is still a borderline discipline. Lucien Febvre's appeal is still a vital
message that poses a problem and imposes critical reflection. In pub-
lishing this text at the opening of History and Technology, we recognize
a debt, and wish to state clearly our concerns and our choices.
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History and Technology would also like to put this methodological

impetus to the test, even in its organization, by advocating a wide
spectrum of research. And keeping in mind the real complexity of its
objective, the multiple levels of historical approximation, History and
Technology wishes to find expression under four headings:
(a) "Foundations and Methods" — which will bring together articles
bearing on the historiography of technology, on the philosophical
reflection present in or engendered by technological development, on
the cross-fertilization between technology, on the one hand, and
historical methodology on the other; on the development of repre-
sentations of the technological objective, and, finally, on general
problems of the history of technology.
(b) "Studies" — to which are destined analyses of the internal history
of technology, on the relation between science and technology, on the
research of industrial archaeology, and on the history of teaching
institutions and technological research. Under this heading, we also seek
studies devoted to the history and the geography of technological
language, allowing access to the essential and up to now neglected field
of the history of technological vocabulary and its relation to other
vocabularies. But this heading also exists to provide for profiles of
technological communities, family traditions in industry and techno-
logy, and biography, free from any hagiographical temptations.
(c) "Sources" — The third heading plays an essential role in allowing
the communication of documentary sources (written and iconographic
sources, instruments, machines, projects) with the philological and
critical equipment indispensable for putting them in historical pers-
pective.
To these three headings, a fourth entitled "Notes" may be added to
 6 PIETRO REDONDI

accomodate critical notes on representative works, to bring attention to

initiatives and programs liable to advance the discussion of the relation
between history and technology.

PIETRO REDONDI
Executive Editor
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