Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past: A Social History of Technology 9789048536504

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Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past

Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past A Social History of Technology

Erik van der Vleuten, Ruth Oldenziel, Mila Davids With contributions by Harry Lintsen

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Chippers in a shipyard – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn e-isbn nur

978 94 6298 540 7 978 90 4853 650 4 (pdf) 612 | 910

© Erik van der Vleuten, Ruth Oldenziel, Mila Davids / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents Preface 9 Introduction: Engineering for a Changing World Lessons from engineering history: Society, Enterprise, Users Technology: Dream and nightmare Engineering for a changing world The structure of this book

13 14 16 17 18

1 The Age of Promise, 1815-1914 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Society Promises to Society: Peace and progress for all The national promise: The infrastructure state and civil engineers The urban promise: The Urban Machine The global promise: International machinery and the civilizing mission 1.3 Enterprise Technology’s promise to enterprise The inventor-entrepreneur Technology and the opportunity-seeking entrepreneur Strategies for business organization 1.4 Users Technology’s promises to users: “Power to you” Innovative user-consumers: The telephone and the railway The bicycle and the car User-activists User-tinkerers 1.5 Engineers Technology’s promise to engineering Engineering education Engineers and social engagement

23 23 26 26 27 29 31 34 34 36 37 40 43 43 45 47 50 51 55 56 57 59

2 The Age of Crisis, 1914-1945 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Society Peace and war Prosperity and decline Liberty and enslavement Civilization and barbarism 2.3 Enterprise Business and bankruptcy Patent wars Worker nightmares 2.4 Users Access and accidents Users and misusers 2.5 Engineers Hero and villain Engineers in totalitarian regimes A new hope

63 63 64 64 67 69 70 72 72 75 77 79 79 82 86 86 87 91

3 The Age of Technocracy, 1945-1970 93 3.1 Introduction 93 3.2 Society 95 Making technology non-political: The linear model of ­ innovation 96 Making politics technical: A systems approach to societal challenges 102 3.3 Enterprise 106 The heyday of R&D 106 The linear model in practice: organizational challenges 108 Systems approaches in business planning 110 3.4 Users 113 Consumer appliances in the age of “projected users” 113 Projected users in the built environment 115 Users and the systems approach: the car-centered city 117 3.5 Engineers 121 Growth in influence and numbers 121 Theory and science 123 Professional independence and ethical codes 126 The tide turns 127

4 The Age of Participation, 1970-2015 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Society Opening up the system Participation by protest Participation by mediation Participation by delegation 4.3 Enterprise Flipping the linear model of innovation Commercializing research and open innovation User-centered innovation Corporations under social pressure 4.4 Users Energetic user-tinkerers Mobility and “biketivists” Hacktivists and other users 4.5 Engineers Opening up institutions Opening up engineering curricula Participation: Science shops and the valorization of knowledge

131 131 133 133 134 138 140 142 142 143 146 148 149 149 152 153 156 156 158 160

Epilogue: Engineering the Future Different societal challenges Challenges to enterprise and users Beyond technocracy and participation

163 165 167 170

Notes 175 References 189 Illustration credits

207

Index 209

List of figures Internet Freedom and Cyber Security 12/154 Cheering for the Railway22/28 The Railway: A “Civilizing” Technology? 32 Founding a Fortune—in Chemicals 38 Scientific Management at Work  42 48 How Users Shaped Technology The Electric Car—Circa 1900 49 Wind Power Takes Flight 53 Technology Runs Amok 62/83 65 Technologies of War 78 Dark Side of the Assembly Line Technology: Blessing or Curse?  80 88 Engineers on Trial  Tools of Technocracy 92/101 97 Engineering the Lunar Landing 99 Trusting Experts Political Enemies—But Friends in Science 100 Users and Experts. From 1945 116 118 The Cynical Side of Traffic Separation  Power to the People 130/151 134 Protesting Nuclear Power “Opening up” Innovation 138 Rock and Reorganization 144 Reclaiming the Streets 152 Tackling the Solar Challenge  162

Preface Today, we face great challenges: climate change; the threatened breakdown of unsustainable energy, mobility, and healthcare systems; growing economic inequality; and security and privacy threats, to name a few. Until a decade ago technologists were still slow to respond to these emerging crises.1 But that has changed: today, engineering organizations, the engineering sciences, and companies are addressing these challenges. They work on everything from sustainable energy, mobility, and materials to personal medicine, encryption and inclusive innovation. Employers require engineers to understand the societal, business, and user aspects of technology. Employers also require engineers to be equipped to work in multidisciplinary teams that represent different stakeholders. Engineering education addresses these issues in the training of future engineers.2 Drawing lessons from the past, Engineering the Future contributes to the debate on the role of engineering in an age of great challenges. This book revisits two centuries of social history of technology and engineering. The history of technology as an academic discipline brings together history and engineering. As such, history of technology has always sought to bridge “two cultures”—the sciences and the humanities.3 Studying the role of technology in history reminds humanities scholars—especially historians—of the ways in which technology and engineering matter in the making of the modern world (for better or for worse). Interpreting engineering in its broader historical and social context also invites engineers to see beyond technology hypes and tech scares. Exploring the history of technology allows us to discuss where the field comes from and where it is going. This book was originally written to introduce the Eindhoven University of Technology’s engineering students to the role of social groups and issues in engineering. The existing broad-strokes social histories of technology in English have been written by American scholars; this book takes into account more of the European experience. 4 The book was made possible by many people’s committed efforts. We would like to thank Anthonie Meijers and Johan Schot for laying the foundations of the introductory history and ethics course at Eindhoven University of Technology. We are also grateful to that course’s lecturers and students for their valuable insights and comments over the past years. Particular thanks are due to Stathis Arapostathis, Karena Kalmbach, Natasja Leurs, Frank Schipper, Frank Veraart, Geert Verbong, Rosalind Williams, and Anna Åberg for their astute comments on earlier drafts. Obviously, responsibility for this book’s interpretations

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as well as any factual errors rests solely with the authors. We are indebted to Lisa Friedman for her style editing; Jan Korsten for image editing; Rixt Runia of Amsterdam University Press for her enthusiasm and support; and Lex Lemmens (Eindhoven University of Technology Bachelor College), Lilian Halsema (Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences), and Rudi Bekkers (Technology, Innovation & Society group) for their financial support in developing this book. Last but not least, we are much indebted to our historian colleagues who, in the last decades, have re-energized the study of technology’s role in European and global history. Without the insights of our colleagues, this book could not have been written. Erik van der Vleuten, Ruth Oldenziel, Mila Davids Eindhoven, January 2017



Introduction: Engineering for a Changing World

The world is changing. And so is engineering. In the past few years, the nature of engineering—as well as its research agenda—has been changing, especially in response to the many crises that haunt our present-day world. For example, several years ago, a trio of specialists interviewed approximately fifty top scientists and engineers worldwide. The specialists were Rutger van Santen, a computational catalytic chemist; Djan Khoe, an electro-optical communications professor; and Bram Vermeer, a physicist and science journalist. The interviewers inquired about the scientists’ and engineers’ research priorities for the next twenty years. The answers revealed the belief that cutting-edge technology should address society’s major challenges: climate change and energy crises; the threatened breakdown of unsustainable mobility, health, urban, and financial systems; collective and individual security threats such as terrorism and online identity theft, for example.1 The scientists argued that technology is a tremendously powerful force that is key to solving these challenges. They reasoned that many of these challenges are deeply technological in nature; modern technology in some way caused or enabled these challenges, and technology has certainly intensified the impact of these challenges. The researchers observed: “Generations of engineers have steadily woven an international web of industries, communications, and markets that has resulted in planetary interdependence … We will now survive together or quite possibly perish together.”2 Technology is implicated in our current crises; technology should therefore be part of the solution, they argued. Accordingly, the scientists and engineers interviewed asked for breakthroughs in these engineering domains: sustainable energy and materials, smart electronics, smart logistics, urban planning, personalized medicine, and cryptography, among others. “We have some serious work to do.”3 Today, this idea has become commonplace. Humanity faces great challenges, and turns to engineers to solve them. And engineers have answered. For instance, some of the most prominent engineering organizations in the world—including the US National Academy of Engineering, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering—co-organized several Global Grand Challenges Summits, such as

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those in London in 2013 and in Beijing in 2015. These summits aimed to start an “international conversation on advancing solutions to humanity’s grand challenges” and to foster “the dialog among the world’s leading engineers and other stakeholders.”4 The key themes were sustainability, urban infrastructure, energy, health, the joy of living, education, and security and resilience. Tackling these issues, it was said, requires “creativity, innovation, passion and sheer intellectual horsepower.”5 “Who better than engineers to lead this charge?” asked Dame Ann Dawling, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge and later president of the Royal Academy.6 Prominent scientists and engineers have been joined in their efforts by the likes of Microsoft’s Bill Gates and leading geneticist John Craig Venter, whose team sequenced the human genome and constructed the synthetic bacterial cell. As Venter said at the 2013 summit: “The world is in need of disruptive change and synthetic biology can provide some of the change that is needed.”7 As we will see later in this book, the Global Challenges Summits are not alone in pursuing their mission. Others participate throughout the world and across engineering disciplines: professional engineering organizations, technical universities, and technology-based companies. All are attempting to identify social challenges and gauge the future of engineering; many players have adopted similar research and education agendas. *** Emerging technologies, and the prospect of solving social problems through technology, make engineering particularly exciting and important today. Yet the prospect of using technology to address social problems also raises fundamental questions. For example, what decisions can and should engineers make? Will these decisions indeed solve problems, or introduce new ones, as has often happened in the past? In turbulent times like ours, the future is uncertain, as are the consequences of our actions. As such, it is important that engineers learn from the outcomes of similar problems and solutions in their discipline’s past.8 In this book, we look to the history of engineering to draw such lessons. Lessons from engineering history: Society, Enterprise, Users Modern engineering emerged roughly two centuries ago. Since then, many have turned to technology to solve social problems. Among those people

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have been engineers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and the public. Their experiences teach us relevant lessons. This book addresses several of those lessons. The first lesson is that engineers have never operated in a vacuum. Engineering has always addressed social challenges. In this book, we distinguish three kinds of social challenges: challenges concerning society, enterprise, and users. Overlaps between them abound. Still, it is useful to distinguish between these categories analytically, for as we will see, each group offers different questions and answers about engineering’s past, present, and future. Throughout history, many engineers have worked on challenges to society. These problems were vast indeed. Two centuries ago, structural poverty and hunger, poor health, and poor housing affected multitudes, even in the world’s wealthiest countries. With the exception of a small minority of elites, most of the world’s population lacked adequate water, food, and shelter; energy and mobility; healthcare, and personal security. Expanding cities were on the verge of breakdown. The average life expectancy was lower than 35 years of age; in cities, that estimate was even lower. As we will see in this book, the profession of modern engineering emerged to tackle such challenges: engineering has continuously interacted with society’s crises and challenges. Just as some engineers have worked on societal challenges, others have worked on challenges to enterprise. These engineers saw technology as a great business opportunity and/or as a way to improve business processes or working conditions. Many engineer-entrepreneurs transformed societal challenges into business models and new technological solutions. The business challenges of engineering became ever more important as technology-based companies—in railways, communications, energy, materials, pharmaceuticals, ICT, and so on—came to dominate our business landscape. Yet another group, users, found technology empowering, purposeful, or just plain fun. While using or playing with technology, users also promoted or changed technology. Often, users themselves became innovators. For example, user communities built their own bikes and cars in the 1880s and 1890s, do-it-yourself radios in the 1910s, and self-made personal computers and wind turbines in the 1970s—all before these technologies became successful commercial products. Today, users make weighty contributions to the development of open-source software, games, and apps. Users also contribute to housing solutions as well as many other fields. Successful innovation—including innovation that has helped solve major social challenges—has often been relevant to society, relevant to enterprise

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(as in presenting a viable business model), and relevant to users. This is why engineers from this point forward are expected to have an understanding of these social processes. In this book, we explore the many roles played by society, enterprise, and users in engineering science and practice. How have these roles affected the emergence and development of the engineering profession? Conversely, how has engineering shaped history? And how are society, enterprise, and users responding to the challenges of today? Technology: Dream and nightmare The second lesson we can draw from engineering history is that some technologies were wildly successful while others were dramatic failures. In the most discouraging cases, engineers have seen the work of well-intentioned colleagues turn into technological nightmares. When it came to solving society’s immense challenges, technology has indeed helped; but the same technologies that improved the quality of life were also used to destroy life. For example, the same scientists who developed fertilizers that helped feed people also produced poison gas. Another example of technology’s double-edged nature: information technologies like the internet promised to democratize information, but that self-same technology also enables surveillance, cybercrime, and the radical loss of privacy.9 Regarding enterprise, consider the realities of failure in a business context. For every successful technological entrepreneur, for example, many others have gone bankrupt. Most attempts to innovate have failed. Specifically, the majority of research projects have failed. When they have led to patents or products, the reality is that most patents have rarely been cited or renewed. In fact, most products never reach users’ hands.10 Historically, when innovations have reached users’ hands, those very innovations could also pose new risks to their users. For example, early refrigerators and freezers met a huge social challenge: these appliances helped to conserve food. The early refrigerators and freezers came with the liability of doors with latches, however. Children playing hide-and-seek got trapped and suffocated in abandoned refrigerators and freezers. Only after a media outcry were engineers prompted to replace the life-threatening latches with push doors. Another example: scientists developed antibiotics to save lives, but unwitting overuse of antibiotics has fostered dangerous new and resistant bacterial strains that threaten patients’ lives. Indeed, well-intended inventions and innovations have sometimes had unintended, completely unexpected, negative consequences for users.11

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Such unintended negative consequences leave us with a dilemma: the “dilemma of control.” Chemist and philosopher David Collingridge coined this phrase in 1980. Today, it is known as the “Collingridge dilemma.”12 When a given technology is young (such as the automobile in the time of Henry Ford), the direction of the technology’s development can still be influenced. In the early stages of development, however, we cannot yet know about long-term negative consequences: they have simply not yet materialized—or are not yet considered problematic. Conversely, when that technology has matured, its negative consequences have materialized. By then, however, changing the technology is extremely diff icult and expensive: standards have already been set, factories and supply lines established, workers employed and trained, and markets developed. Users may have built their daily lives around the new technology, and they may earn their living in factories that produce the technology, for example. This dilemma is historical; change—or the lack of change—over time is a crucial variable in historical outcomes. And today, this dilemma presents itself with renewed urgency. For, as described above, it is past technological solutions that have created many of our present-day social and environmental challenges. Certain past solutions have become current problems. This raises the question of whether today’s solutions will generate complex new problems ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. We cannot know the future, but we can access the past. In this book, we seek to better understand such problems. We pose the questions: How could technologies that once promised to solve human challenges intensify those challenges? By what mechanism did dreams turn into nightmares? And what did that mean for engineering? Engineering for a changing world A third major lesson that we draw from engineering history is how to engineer for an ever-changing world—and a future that we cannot know. Engineers of the past have asked themselves the same questions that we ask today: How can we solve social challenges, while avoiding new nightmares in an unknown future? How can we best cope with technology’s double edge as a cause of—and solution to—social and environmental problems? We know that society, enterprise, and user dynamics are all crucial in such processes. But how can we include these dynamics in technological decision-making and design? And who should lead that effort?

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In this book, we outline two approaches that past engineers developed to build better futures without lapsing into nightmares: the technocratic approach and the participative approach. These were contrasting ways of trying to fulfill technology’s dreams—and avoid its nightmares. Each approach was widely respected in its historical context; each holds lessons for today. According to the technocratic approach, engineers and other experts were given the mandate to identify and address social challenges on behalf of society, enterprise, and users. Citizens, politicians, company managers, and others gave engineers this mandate. According to the technocratic philosophy, multidisciplinary teams of experts use the scientific method to identify relevant social issues and develop optimal solutions. Striving to make better technological choices, these experts objectively model and weigh the pros and cons of technological options. The technocratic approach proved appealing and powerful. But as we shall see, it also received copious criticism. The participative approach emerged in response to the criticism of technocracy. According to the participative philosophy, experts alone should not identify issues—and make choices—on behalf of others. Instead, stakeholders representing society, enterprise, and users themselves should take part in the decision-making and design processes. For example, medical personnel or patient associations, car drivers, local citizens, consumers, and environmental groups might participate in technological decisionmaking, or work closely with engineers in the innovation process. Like the technocratic approach before, the participative approach prevailed—and proved to have its own set of pros and cons. This book explores how these contrasting approaches to technology came about; how they operated, and the roles engineers played in each. What were considered their strengths and weaknesses? And if neither approach was considered the perfect solution, can we identify attempts to combine aspects of both models to meet today’s challenges? The structure of this book This book is a history of the modern world observed through the lens of technology and engineering. To show that the past holds clues to the future of engineering, we have divided this book into four periods. The dates we use are approximations only. In the real world, periods overlap, and every period is complex and contradictory. Using approximate periods lets us explore specific lessons and questions, place the development of

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engineering in temporal context, and see how engineering has changed over time. Chapter 1, The Age of Promise (circa 1815-1914), introduces the social aspects of engineering. This chapter addresses the question of how challenges relevant to society, enterprise, and users came to engage engineering science and practice—and vice versa. Chapter 1 begins in 1815, when the long Napoleonic Wars ended. We see that, despite the newly-won peace, most people still lived in poverty and misery. What changed was that, inspired by the scientific and industrial revolutions, a new hope arose: that modern technology could overcome the problems that had plagued humans for millennia. In keeping with this belief, a new class of technologists set out to work on providing sufficient and high-quality water and food, shelter and clothing, energy, mobility, information, medical care, and much more. Entrepreneurs captured the opportunities provided by modern technologies to develop a new type of company—the technology-based company. Users became fascinated by the potential of novel technologies, and they, too, became innovators. These efforts ignited a wave of technological breakthroughs never before seen. This technological optimism endured throughout the Age of Promise, despite occasional setbacks and critiques of technology. The Age of Promise inspired the development of engineering as we know it today. This period provides us with a unique opportunity to examine the role of society, enterprise, and users in setting innovation agendas—and in the birth of modern engineering as a discipline and a profession. Chapter 2, The Age of Crisis (1914-1945), addresses the question of how technological promises and dreams could collapse into nightmares. The chapter examines the dynamics of technology’s negative consequences. This period in history is particularly suited to studying how once-promising technologies became complicit in major crises. In 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, the technological optimism of the prewar period evaporated, leaving behind a widely shared sense of global crisis. The time that followed was characterized by two world wars and the global economic crisis of the Great Depression. Some call this period a “thirty-year crisis.”13 Its global scale and horrors were unprecedented, and many blamed technology. It was, after all, technology that had promised to benefit humankind, but during wartime, technology was turned against humankind. For in this period, engineers and scientists repurposed technologies. Railroads, airplanes, cars, chemicals, automatic control systems, nuclear fission—all of these were implicated in the killing of tens of millions of people. During

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peacetime, technology became derailed in other ways. In the context of large-scale enterprise, for example, innovations like the conveyor belt and scientific management turned many workers’ lives into nightmares. During the Great Depression, as bankruptcies and unemployment spiked, technological pessimism became the norm. Chapter 2 analyzes the mechanics of how one person’s dream could turn into another person’s nightmare. We also outline different kinds of nightmares—dark turns for society, enterprise, and users. In Chapter 3, The Age of Technocracy (1945-1970), we address debates about how to build better futures without lapsing into nightmares, and who should lead such an endeavor. After 1945, many groups agreed that politicians and businesspeople were not necessarily equipped to direct the innovation process with sensitivity. Allegedly, politicians had used technology to wage wars. Greedy businesspeople had used technology to exploit workers and to crash the world economy. Then, as now, technical experts were called on to take charge: engineers, architects, planners, and other professionals were central in technological decision-making and implementation. Using the scientific method, these experts were expected to make better, more objective choices on behalf of society, enterprise, and users. Chapter 3 also discusses the changes in engineering ethics and education that aimed to prepare engineers for acting on behalf of others. Chapter 4, The Age of Participation (1970-2015), focuses on an alternative to technocracy: the participative approach. Here, we continue to investigate the question of how technology’s promises can be realized and its nightmares avoided. In the Age of Participation, the argument for technocracy was reversed. Many different stakeholders claimed to know their own needs better than the experts who acted on their behalf. For this reason, spokespeople for society, enterprise, and users sought to participate directly in technological decision-making and design. This was an era of participatory innovation and user-centered design. In the epilogue we explore how these legacies and lessons can inform current debates on engineering the future. The epilogue traces how scientists and engineers today define current social challenges for engineering, and how—in their view—engineering must adapt if it is to answer to these challenges.14 We apply the lessons described in this book to make sense of—and inform—this debate.

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The Age of Promise, 1815-1914

1.1 Introduction In our discoveries in science, by our applications of those discoveries to practical art, by the enormous increase of mechanical power … we have … given to Society at large, to almost the meanest member of it, the enjoyments, the luxury, the elegance, which in former times were the privilege of kings and nobles.1 Horace Greeley, Art and Industry, 1853

In 1815, when Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, a long period of war ended, and a new era began. In this new period of relative peace and optimism, a major technological dream took hold, critics be damned: after centuries of poverty, war, and misery, technology and industry would shape a period of true progress. Given the industrial revolution and new scientific breakthroughs, the expectation was clear: the great social challenges that plagued humanity would be solved. Inventions and innovations would change the world. Social challenges were wide-ranging and threatening during this period. Even in Northwestern Europe, the richest part of the world, the great majority of the population was mired in poverty. Endemic hunger and malnutrition, poor drinking water and unhealthy housing prevailed. These circumstances bred infectious diseases, and life expectancies were often lower than age thirty-five. Most people lacked access to all but local energy, mobility, food, and information. It was technology that promised great improvements in all areas. In this chapter, we will unravel several kinds of promises made during the Age of Promise—technological promises to solve social challenges faced by society, enterprise, and users. Here, we examine how these challenges came to engage the engineering sciences and profession. During this period, technology’s promise was on display at one of the greatest, most influential events of its kind: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Held in London in 1851, the event was the f irst in an ongoing series of world expositions. Its goal was to showcase groundbreaking technological achievements and design. This new concept captured the mid-nineteenth-century imagination: six million people (the equivalent of one-third of the British population at the time!) visited the exhibition to see how technology was changing the world.

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Diamonds and raw materials, extracted from newly colonized regions, dazzled visitors. They marveled, too, at the electric telegraphs and new scientif ic and surgical instruments. Particularly popular were the industrial technologies in the Machines in Motion hall, where the demonstration of the entire cotton-production process transformed cotton into f inished cloth before one’s very eyes. The expo building itself was hailed as an icon of innovative structural engineering. Made of prefabricated cast-iron-frame components and cast plate glass, the building was constructed in less than a year. The enormous glass house became known as the Crystal Palace. Though critics predicted its collapse, the Crystal Palace stood the test of time. (On display at the World Expo in Paris in 1889, the Eiffel Tower would become the next hallmark of construction engineering.)2 To organizers and visitors alike, the London exhibition exemplified the promise of technology for society: technological advance and international cooperation in the field of industry would create progress in the form of prosperity, health, liberty, and happiness for all. As newspaper editor Horace Greely noted in 1853 (see the quote above): technology would benefit “Society at large,” including even its “meanest members.” More specific promises were also made. For example, entrepreneurs recognized that technology provided new business opportunities. They created the prototypic technology-based company, which conquered the business landscape. Textile, railroad, and telegraph companies were the first such enterprises (the chemical and electrical industries followed). At the exhibition, these entrepreneurs showcased their products and processes, from the locomotive to the cotton-production line, the mass-produced “Colt” revolver to the telegraph printer. More than 14,000 British and foreign exhibitors, many from the business sector, displayed their wares. This was technology’s promise to modern enterprise, materialized. Technology’s promises to users were also on display. Special efforts were made to facilitate visits by urban working-class and rural families. These visitors saw technologies that promised to ease their workloads, at home and in the workplace. For the home, gas cookers, electric clocks, and mechanical washing machines held the promise of making life easier. For the workplace, new agricultural equipment, from mechanical reapers and threshers to steam tractors, attracted professional users (as we refer to them in this book) such as farmers. Artisans saw new methods and tools for technical drawing. Indeed, the Great Exhibition was designed to celebrate and motivate industrial workers as both users and producers of the Industrial Revolution.3

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The organizers of the London exhibit—and planners of many expos that followed—were surprised by an unexpected outcome of these technology events: they became rallying points for technology’s critics and activists, who held business and government responsible for achieving a better world through technology. Using the exhibit as their forum, activists denounced the textile industry’s dire working conditions. The activists argued for fair trade and better housing. They called for more user-friendly dresses for middle-class women. They demanded meat inspections and food safety. The Great Exhibition also put on display a promise to engineering— a profession born in the Age of Promise. The most prominent civil and mechanical engineers of the time had organized in engineering associations; these associations used the event to display the importance of their profession. In turn, the expo inspired further professionalization: foreign engineers and governments were motivated to organize and catch up with the latest technical advances on show in London. At the same time, the practice of creating and deriving knowledge via exhibitions became part of early engineering; the exhibition as an educational experience coexisted with the engineer’s formal education and practical training. 4 Technology’s promise of advancing society and industry also represented a promise to engineering itself: engineering would develop into a full-fledged and respected profession. *** The Great Exhibition of 1851 embodied technology’s promises to society, enterprise, users, and professional engineers. Many of those promises have endured—to this day. The Age of Promise also gave rise to critics, critics who lamented polluted factory towns and ravaged landscapes, the exploitation of workers and of those living in colonies. (Another form of exploitation began in Paris in 1889, at the world expo, where actual “primitive peoples” were put on display.) Crude materialism, as well as the loss of spirituality and happiness, were also among critics’ concerns. According to the criteria of today, we would add that the promises of this period were articulated mostly (though not entirely) by white male, middle-class Europeans with a Eurocentric worldview, though such arguments would not become mainstream until much later.5 It is the Age of Promise that enables us to examine technology’s original social promises in greater detail. We can learn more about how those promises came into being, how they evolved, and how they came to set the agenda for the engineering sciences—and the profession.

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1.2 Society Promises to Society: Peace and progress for all We have seen that the Great Exhibition embodied the bold promise to what Horace Greeley in 1853 called “Society” with a capital “S.” Technology and international industrial cooperation would bring peace and progress—prosperity, health, liberty, and therefore happiness—for all, including society’s “meanest member,” as Greeley phrased it. In this section, we zoom in on what the promise of technology meant in the context of the nineteenth century. This ambitious promise to society is perhaps best illustrated by an iconic civil engineer, Michel Chevalier. As a young man, Chevalier embraced an influential vision twenty years before the Great Exhibition.6 Chevalier was a recent graduate of the famous engineering schools École Polytechnique and École des Mines in Paris. In 1831, Chevalier shared with other young engineers a revolutionary idea: that technology, more than political activism and reform, would cure Europe of its plagues of poverty, class conflict, warfare, and vulnerability to the forces of nature. Chevalier’s vision centered on the Industrial Revolution’s latest technologies: railways and steamships. Only a few years earlier, in 1825, the world’s first public steam railway had been introduced. The first intercity railway, between Liverpool and Manchester, followed in 1830. Inspired by these breakthroughs, Chevalier now proposed the construction of a double-track railway network that spanned the Eurasian continent and Northern Africa. According to his plan, steamship connections would traverse the seas in all directions. These novel technologies would connect individuals across social classes, across nations, and even across continents: a vast technological collaboration would foster “the continuous exchange of sentiments, ideas, and material goods.”7 This railway and steam ship plan, Chevalier emphasized, would promote prosperity, peace, liberty, and happiness more effectively than any peace treaties or democratic constitutions. Chevalier reasoned that such modern technology would spur cooperation instead of competition. It would bring prosperity as a benefit of the collaboration in trade and industry. It would bring peace—because no one would attack those with whom they cooperated so profitably. The plan would also foster liberty, because the railway and steamship freed people from the constraints of political hierarchies, the economy, and nature; the new connections would traverse mountains and seas. As an example, Chevalier predicted that railways would liberate the Russians, who were “a paralyzed people locked in by snow.”8 For Chevalier and his contemporaries, these achievements implied “happiness.” Tellingly,

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Chevalier’s writings were translated as Railways, the most important means for peace in Europe and happiness for humanity.9 Chevalier worked all his life to realize his dream. He became a professor, an investor in infrastructure and industry projects, and a prominent politician. Then and now, his arguments echoed widely. The idea that technology would provide peace, progress, liberty, and happiness to all of society became a standard part of the discourse—whether that discourse was about electricity networks in the 1930s, TV in the 1950s, the internet in the 1990s, or social media in the 2010s. For example, the internet was promoted as harbinger of global understanding. It was also cast as a prosperous, self-propelling “new economy,” and a truly bottom-up democracy. Later, social-media marketers promised to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” as Facebook’s mission statement reads.10 Today, technology’s promises to society often fall under the sustainability category, broadly defined in terms of economic sustainability, social sustainability, and ecological sustainability. Most of the major current innovations promise benefits to society in at least one of these areas. The national promise: The infrastructure state and civil engineers In the Age of Promise, the state—national governments, parliaments, and civil servants—became a key player in delivering on the promise of technology to society. Accordingly, technology became part of a national promise. This was a new idea. Before the Age of Promise, the state did not provide technology and services to society as a whole—the state served only the political elite. And before the Age of Promise, the state supported engineering for military rather than civilian purposes. This changed during the Age of Promise. Citizens’ organizations pressured governments to work for the common good, and states came to see themselves as responsible for Society—which they usually defined as “the nation” and the citizens within its borders. This contrasted with the twentieth-century welfare state; the nineteenth-century state was a “minimal state” in which governments set policies to create only the basic conditions for development. It was technology that provided the means of development. The “minimal” approach to government meant that the state focused on building only basic infrastructure: roads, waterways, and railroads, for example. This was just as Chevalier had proposed. Later, this was followed by national telegraph networks, for example. When implementing technology’s promise to society, the state became an “infrastructure state.”11

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Cheering for the Railway. In 1882, some 600 guests from all over Europe celebrated the opening of the Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland. The Gotthard Railway symbolized a Europe connected across natural boundaries, like the Alps.

To build this basic infrastructure, governments created their own engineering departments. And this bred the need for a new profession: civil engineering. The French set the example. They had pioneered a governmental Corps des Ponts et Chaussées (Agency of Bridges and Roads). In the first half of the nineteenth century, practically all European governments copied this example, establishing state engineering departments or “Public Works” departments for their own countries—and for their colonies in the rest of the world. The infrastructure state and its new civil engineers had several policies for creating the nation’s infrastructure. First, they could plan and build the nation’s infrastructure as government projects, which could be done on their own. This was the approach common to newly established countries such as Belgium (1830), Italy (1860), and Germany (1870), in which the goal was to “build a nation” through infrastructure as soon as possible. Unwilling to wait for private companies, these countries’ early governments spent much of their national budgets on building infrastructure—and they set up their civil engineering departments to do just that.12 The case of Belgium reveals the strong influence of Chevalier’s vision for railways, the “high technology” of the time. In 1831, after discussing Chevalier’s ideas, the Belgian government charged its civil engineering department with constructing a nationwide railway network. The two

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young civil engineers in charge of the project called themselves “state engineers” to underline their commitment to societal goals. In their view, railways provided “an intimate link between future prosperity and the independence of the nation.”13 By the mid-1840s, Belgium had built the world’s first national railway grid, which connected the country’s industrial and cultural centers to their main foreign markets. The alternative to government taking control of infrastructure was the private-enterprise model. In this scenario, state engineering departments encouraged private enterprise, such as canal or railroad companies, to build infrastructure projects of national importance. Governments heavily subsidized these projects to attract interested business parties. Often these two models coexisted. For example, in Great Britain, state-run projects included the building of gravel roads to connect Britain’s “inner colonies,” including Scotland and Ireland. The British government also took control of the telegraph system in 1870. But when it came to railways, the state preferred a private-railway solution. In the Netherlands, the two models even coexisted within one sector. Politicians debated who should build a nationwide railway grid from the patchwork of private lines. The decision: the government’s Public Works Agency (Rijkswaterstaat) would build the missing links. State-owned railway lines came to exist alongside companyowned lines; railway operators were all private. This arrangement held until the Age of Crisis, when railways, also in crisis, became a state enterprise.14 The urban promise: The Urban Machine The Age of Promise was more than an era of building individual nations. It was also a time of urbanization and globalization. For example, city governments translated technology’s promise to society as a responsibility toward urban society. As such, city governments improved their residents’ lives. (Note that this was not a promise to global or national society.) Urban dwellers urgently needed better services. As farmers’ sons and daughters moved to cities in search of a better life, living conditions rapidly deteriorated. Infectious diseases spread. Urban areas became extremely unruly, unhealthy places to live. The traditional cities could not accommodate the Age of Promise’s exploding populations. For these cities had developed within the confines of defense walls. Most cities evolved from a maze of lanes, alleys, and waterways, all riddled with dead ends. Most streets were mere extensions of private spaces beyond an individual front door. To escape this trap, city administrators put modern urban technologies to work. Like national governments, city officials had been inspired by

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citizen groups. These engaged citizens problematized the city’s filth and squalor, overpopulation, and urban decay; they looked to modern technology for solutions.15 Following the example of national governments, each urban government appointed a “city engineer” or set up Public Works departments. These departments were staffed with architects, civil and construction engineers, as well as hygienists—healthcare workers who specialized in public hygiene. It was Public Works departments and the like that reorganized cities into public spaces that were more accessible, manageable, and healthy. Engineers helped to create the modern city as an “urban machine,” a metaphor that illustrates the centrality of technology in urban development.16 In the case of Paris, making the city more manageable also meant making it less attractive to “disorderly” revolutionary groups who gathered in narrow alleyways. In the words of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the official charged with the renovation of Paris, the task at hand was to “regularize the disordered city, to disclose its new order by means of a pure, schematic layout … to give unity to and transform the operative whole.”17 Haussmann demolished medieval quarters where the working-class revolutionaries dominated. In place of these areas, Haussmann built a system of large, boulevard-based streets, flanked by multi-story buildings. He specified a sewage system with underground water supply. Notably, Haussmann renovated Paris without consulting the poor, working-class residents. These citizens would have likely opposed the plan: they regarded health concerns as a form of middle-class hype. When the renovation was complete, the poor could no longer afford to live in the city center’s new buildings.18 Beyond Paris, urban governments found the Paris example fascinating, though they usually chose less radical approaches to improving cities. Social reformers, who often met at world expos, urged their local governments to reorganize cities. Local officials expanded city limits beyond defense walls, eliminated dead-end streets, drained canals, and turned private streets into public ones. The main streets were supplied with horse-drawn streetcars, gas pipes for street lighting, and waste-disposal services. An underground piped-water supply (including a firefighting infrastructure) and sewage were also added. Old, unsanitary houses were demolished, and new ones became subject to building regulations intended to improve livability. Public housing projects were to follow. Railway connections were part of the urban promise, too. City governments viewed railways as a gateway to civilization, trade, and prosperity, as well as rising real estate value. Lobbying hard to win approval for connections to emerging railway networks, railway advocates were willing to demolish

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houses to make room for tracks and railway stations. Railway opponents protested the “Locomotive Monster” with its “tail of smoke and sulfur.”19 Later, connections to telegraph and electricity networks (many cities set up their own electric utilities) emerged. By the end of the Age of Promise, the electrified cities of Berlin—then known as the “City of Light”—and New York exemplified the success of the modern metropolis as technological, commercial, and cultural centers.20 The global promise: International machinery and the civilizing mission As we have seen, Chevalier’s promise was an international one—not just a goal for an individual city or nation. Born in the Age of Promise, the new breed of civil engineers circulated the message of technology around the world. World expos and global publications represented one way to spread the message. International organizations, congresses, and expert networks were other channels. Many of the world’s oldest international organizations were infrastructure organizations, including the International Telecommunications Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1874), and the International Railway Congress Association (1884). The metaphor of “international machinery” underlines the pivotal role of technology organizations in the emerging landscape. The system of international organizations, networks, and congresses developed new structures for global governance.21 Often international organizations were created to coordinate and support national infrastructure projects. For example, railways, telegraph systems, and knowledge infrastructure (such as meteorology) connected across borders; this necessitated cross-regional or even intercontinental coordination and interfaces, rules and standards. Diplomats from member states regarded these initiatives with national foreign-policy interests in mind, but engineers were more inclined to collaborate across national borders for the common good. Through engineering, they strove to make transnational infrastructure universally accessible—by setting international standards, settling cross-border disputes, and standardizing tariffs, for example. These organizations internationalized the promise of technology. In the process, international machinery—especially interface technologies and standards—too, benefitted from innovation. The effort to globalize technology’s promise for society also took the form of creating colonial structures. Arguably, this was a more influential approach than creating international organizations. In any case, the ethics of colonialism were controversial, particularly in retrospect.

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The Railway: A “Civilizing” Technology? Railways were key to Europe’s mission to “civilize the world.” But “civilization” often came with military subjugation. The Atjeh Tramway in Sumatra, Dutch East Indies, was a military railway—and was regularly attacked by rebels. Pictured here: Opening Day (1886) for the Atjeh River railway bridge.

Michel Chevalier and many of his peers had welcomed expansion into the world beyond Europe. They believed this would facilitate peaceful spiritual and commercial collaboration between European and non-European societies, combining the best of both worlds. For example, Chevalier and his cohorts framed the French conquest of Algeria as forging a material connection through modern technology. In their eyes, the conquest would enable a mutually beneficial collaboration: Touareg society would become a counterweight to French society.22 Specifically, Touareg society was matriarchal and spiritual, in contrast to French society, which tended to be patriarchal and materialistic. Most thinkers and practitioners, however, did not speak of a two-way collaboration, but of the one-way influence Europeans exerted on nonEuropean societies. Science and technology had become the dominant measure of human civilization. For most politicians, colonial administrators, and engineers, colonialism meant bringing Europe’s modern technological civilization to the non-European world. In the mid-nineteenth century, Carl Ritte, a founder of modern geography, referred to Europe as the “powerhouse of the world” and the “continent for educating the human race.”23 This idea came to be called Europe’s “civilizing mission”—the mission, wrongheaded or not—to bring civilization to the non-European world.24

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These colonizers largely ignored the indigenous people’s technologies. Like others swept up in the railway promise, colonizers used trains to accomplish the civilizing mission. To them, railways symbolized Europe’s superiority in technology, including steam engines, metallurgy, machine tooling, bridge building, speed, and timing. The idea, politically charged as we now see it, was to “share” that technology with the colonies. In 1890, Portuguese engineer Joaquim José Machad, a leading railway builder in Mozambique, made a remark that typified the prevailing attitude toward European technology: “A few years ago men knowledgeable of the African wilderness became aware of the fundamental help provided by railways in transforming and civilizing this immense continent, for the most part still in a barbaric stage.”25 Explorer and British colonial administrator Harry Johnston expressed the attitude more bluntly, remarking, “There is no civilizer like the railway.”26 For the Governor-General of India, James Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie, railways, telegraphy and the postal system were the “three great engines of social improvement.”27 The colonial state also became an “infrastructure state.” When it came to the pros and cons of modern technology, non-Europeans were divided. Some were admiring, others fiercely critical, but the criticism did not revise technology’s promise for global civilization—at least not in the short term. Critics of modern technology included some Europeans, as well. Among them was Sahara explorer and geographer Henry Duveyrier. As a close follower of Chevalier’s ideas, Duveyrier eagerly promoted the Trans-Sahara railway scheme to solidify France’s conquest of its African colonies—a conquest that was, according to his point of view, a collaboration. Duveyrier recommended working with, not against, indigenous peoples, and he suggested that the French in Algeria adopt the local dress and language. The project leadership disagreed with Duveyrier’s recommendations and pushed for a heavily militarized expedition. As a compromise, they opted instead for a “weakened” militarized expedition—which the Touareg rebels targeted and massacred. The media blamed Duveyrier as the expert who had misunderstood Touareg society; disillusioned and despairing, Duveyrier resorted to committing suicide. The railway project failed. The French Army as well as other colonial militaries stepped up their presence. Colonialism had always required guns; now this reality became even more visible. The civilizing mission had become indistinguishable from aggressive high imperialism, foreshadowing further escalations in violence (discussed in Chapter 2).28 ***

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In the Age or Promise, societal challenges were vast. In response, technology promised peace and progress for all—in terms of prosperity, health, and even happiness. In the previous sections, we described engineering’s promises on a national, urban, and global scale. In this era, engineering “happened” via the infrastructure state (including the colonial infrastructure state), the modern city, and international organizations. In addition to exploring where innovation took place, we explored who articulated technology’s promises—and we recognized their biases. For example, were women, who did not have voting rights, accurately represented? Did the working classes and colonized peoples always manage to voice their technology preferences? Or did others speak for them, perhaps projecting their own views of how things should be? Today, many express technology’s promise for society in terms of economic, social, and ecological sustainability. This too is a promise for all— including future generations and the natural world. But sustainability has also been accused of being a Western, urban, and middle-class hobby. Who gets to speak on behalf of sustainability? This question is often overlooked. Finally, we saw that state, municipal, and colonial governments focused on improving basic living conditions—often through infrastructure technologies. This left ample room for enterprise and users to develop more specif ic technology promises, as we will see in the two sections that follow.

1.3 Enterprise Technology’s promise to enterprise Technology’s variety of promises to society were promises made to all. Entrepreneurs shared certain technology dreams and eschewed others. Importantly, entrepreneurs refocused the promise to apply to enterprise: they vowed that new technologies would provide new business opportunities. A case in point: the 1830 Liverpool-Manchester railway that inspired Chevalier’s societal promises also held promise for business and enterprise. Corn and textile merchants had established the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, because they envisioned concrete business advantages: freight transport would be cheaper and much faster (for example, to cover 60 kilometers, a 36-hour journey would be reduced to a mere two hours) than anything the existing canal companies could offer. After the railway’s inauguration in 1830, yet another business opportunity presented itself: the

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railway company proved lucrative in its own right, providing a surprisingly good return on investment. For many investors and entrepreneurs, setting up railway companies became a goal in itself. Railways became the most popular investment opportunity, and railway companies debuted around the world.29 This business model contrasts sharply with Chevalier’s well-intended but unrealistic proposal: to divert Europe’s military spending to building public railways. Technology’s promise for enterprise took hold in sectors beyond the railway industry, from textiles to telegraphy, from electrical engineering to chemicals. As new technologies provided new business opportunities, entrepreneurs created original business models and set up new kinds of technology-based enterprises. Technology-based companies became instrumental in tech research and innovation. These companies further advanced the engineering profession by hiring large numbers of engineers—first in the field of mechanical engineering, later in chemical engineering, then electrical and industrial engineering, for example. Technology companies required a new breed of entrepreneur: people with both technological and business skills. This need was especially strong for the science-based industries that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, in the 1880s, entrepreneurs sought new technologies in electric lighting. The Scotsman Sir James Swinburne translated his enthusiasm for electrical engineering into commercial possibilities, for lightbulb manufacturers, in particular. In a series of articles published in the new engineering journal The Electrician, Swinburne tried to convince his readers that manufacturing this novel technology was a rich business opportunity. He detailed the mechanics of lightbulb manufacturing as well as the formula for business success: “The success of a lamp maker must … depend, not on secret processes, but on good business management, not only in making, but in selling his lamps.”30 He continued, “electric lighting, as a new business, needed men who had technical knowledge as well as business capacity.” Swinburne witnessed the rise of this new breed of entrepreneur: “Electricians are gradually acquiring business habits, and business men see that it is necessary to be technical also.” He advised his readers to set up small firms, because the nascent industry’s technology, as well as its business model, were still risky. Swinburne’s vision of harnessing technology for business attracted the attention of many entrepreneurs. One prominent example: Dutchman Gerard Philips cited Swinburne’s Electrician articles as his source of inspiration in forming the Philips company, which grew to be a multinational technology-based firm.

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Swinburne differentiated between two types of technologically oriented entrepreneurs who formed companies: technologists who also became businesspeople (called inventor-entrepreneurs in this book31), and businesspeople who also became technologists (referred to as opportunity-seeking entrepreneurs in this book). Both groups established innovative technology companies. The inventor-entrepreneur In the Age of Promise, many trained and self-taught engineers pursued the career of independent inventor. Inventor-entrepreneurs went a step further: they combined technical ingenuity with entrepreneurship. Typically, inventor-entrepreneurs established their business—and often their fame—on the strength of patents awarded for their own breakthrough inventions.32 These inventor-entrepreneurs account for some of the world’s most successful technology-based firms. In fact, inventor-entrepreneurs continue to create new companies—especially high-tech startups. The American Thomas Edison exemplifies the inventor-entrepreneur in the Age of Promise.33 By the age of twenty-two, Edison had decided to pursue a career as an independent inventor; he began to work on inventions for telegraph companies. With revenues from patents, among other sources of income, Edison established his own research laboratory and developed inventions in other fields as well. At thirty, Edison started to work intently on the promising technology of electric lighting. Acknowledging that arc lights—the only widely used existing form of electric lighting—were too bright, Edison came to believe in the commercial market for light bulbs. This reveals Edison’s dual talent for technology and entrepreneurship. Unlike other inventors pursuing answers to the same problem, Edison realized what electric lighting required to compete with the well-established gas-lighting industry: a total redesign. This included everything from the generators to the light bulbs, the energy-distribution system to the business model. These were brand new technologies for supplying commercial electricity to consumers. To implement this business concept, Edison set up a series of companies. The Edison Electric Light Company (1878) acted as a parent company, selling patents to secure research funding. The Edison Illuminating Company of New York (1880) built and operated commercial electric power stations, opening its first power station in Manhattan in 1882. The Edison Company for Isolated Lighting (1881) sold similar systems for individual houses and factories. Edison created separate companies to mass-produce patented light bulbs (1880), dynamos (1881), and distribution

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wires (1881). Edison’s business empire exists today in the form of General Electric. Even more companies followed when entrepreneurs around the world acquired licenses to establish subsidiaries of the Edison Company in their respective national markets. Edison remained an inventor throughout his life; when he died at the age of eighty-four, he held over a thousand patents. (This was exceptional for the time, given that the patent system was still emerging.) It was Edison’s game-changing business model that inspired Swinburne to call for the further commercialization of electric-bulb manufacturing. Many other inventor-entrepreneurs invented and marketed breakthrough technologies during the Age of Promise. Consider Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland, who invented the first synthetic plastic. Baekeland articulated technology’s commercial potential for enterprise quite plainly. When asked why he had started his work on plastics in the first place, he answered, “To make money.”34 After completing his chemical-science training in the city of Ghent, Baekeland sought ways to combine science with entrepreneurship. In 1889, he moved to the United States, the promised land of technology. Attempting to market himself as a consulting chemist, Baekeland found it difficult to earn a living. This changed when he developed a photographic paper called Velox. Baekeland created a company to produce the paper product, then sold the company to chemical giant Eastman Kodak Co. With the proceeds from the company’s sale, he established his own research laboratory. This is where Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, was invented. Baekeland filed his patent in 1907; in 1910, he founded the General Bakelite Company (later sold to Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical). Crucial to his commercial success, the patent enabled Baekeland, in the words of his son, “to build up a glass wall around himself, behind which he could work in security without being rushed.”35 Technology and the opportunity-seeking entrepreneur Inventor-entrepreneurs such as Edison and Baekeland merged major inventions with entrepreneurship. Many other founders of technologybased firms assumed a more opportunistic approach to technology. These entrepreneurs searched constantly for new business opportunities. They diligently browsed technical and engineering journals and periodicals, attended lectures, and visited companies and exhibitions (such as the Great Exhibition of 1851) in search of commercial opportunities. Some of these committed entrepreneurs formed technology-based companies; some earned patents of their own; and the majority understood the need to build “a strong patent position” to succeed in the business climate of the time.

Founding a Fortune—in Chemicals. In 1865, the “opportunity-seeking entrepreneur” Friedrich Engelhorn founded the chemical company BASF. By 1900, BASF had become the world’s largest chemical manufacturer. This 1881 painting by Friedrich Stieler shows the BASF complex in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

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Friedrich Engelhorn, the founder of chemical giant BASF (the Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik), represents the opportunity-seeking entrepreneur of the time.36 Engelhorn’s path to the chemicals industry was an indirect one: he was trained as a goldsmith. His marriage to an affluent local brewer’s daughter afforded him professional independence and a change of career. The idea for Engelhorn’s first company came from a tenant of his, a Belgian engineer who worked in coal gasification (a booming business at the time). The market opportunity was clear to Engelhorn; with his tenant and a local financier, he created a company to produce and sell bottled coal gas. This business led him to a new opportunity: supplying piped coal gas to consumers. Next, he cofounded the Baden Gas Company, which, at its peak, operated gas works in approximately nineteen towns. Engelhorn was not the inventor; he was an entrepreneurial manager. Continuously tracking the scientific and technological news, Engelhorn found himself fascinated by scientific breakthroughs in the organic chemistry of coal-tar hydrocarbons and their derivatives. In London, scientists had produced synthetic dyes from coal-tar, a seemingly worthless by-product of coal gasification. Synthetic dyes could replace expensive natural dyes in the textile industries, Engelhorn believed. He seized the opportunity. First, he added a dyestuffs production line to his gas works in Mannheim. A commercial disadvantage arose: his business depended on external suppliers of inorganic chemicals (lime, soda, sulphuric acid), which were needed to manipulate coal-tar hydrocarbons. In 1865, Engelhorn left the gas company to establish BASF—and gain control of inorganic, as well as organic, chemicals. Pioneering the first research laboratories, Engelhorn hired scientifically-trained chemists for their scientific and engineering expertise, to be used in-house. By 1900, when the World’s Fair was held in Paris, the exhibition catalog proclaimed that BASF now possessed “without question the largest chemical factory in the world”—and dominated the global market for synthetic dyes.37 Our last iconic example of enterprise in the Age of Promise—and in succeeding ages—concerns Philips, the multinational company. In 1891, Frederik Philips and his son Gerard formed the company. Soon after, Gerard’s younger brother, Anton, joined the company’s board of directors.38 By the time he formed this company, Frederik Philips was already a successful entrepreneur. He had been a tobacco and coffee trader; had purchased an American license for mechanized cigar production; had managed a banking enterprise; and had run a gas company. Philips supplied the new venture with capital as well as entrepreneurial experience. It was Gerard Philips who devised the business domain and business model. As an engineering graduate working in Glasgow, he encountered

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Swinburne’s articles in The Electrician. Pursuing electrical engineering, Gerard Philips worked in several electrical companies, including the German Edison company in Amsterdam. Here he discerned the commercial opportunity of mass-produced light bulbs: the Dutch government had temporarily suspended patent legislation. In 1891, Frederik and Gerard established the Philips lighting company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Following Swinburne’s advice, the entrepreneurs started with a small-scale factory, to learn the trade. The f irst years were diff icult; the f irm battled bankruptcy, as did most light bulb manufacturers of the time. A host of new light bulb producers crowded the market, and bulb prices plunged. The Philips strategy was to scale up the production process, but that, too, was difficult. Scaling up required a reliable production process and product, more employees, new management methods, organizational routines, and new marketing strategies. While Gerard Philips and his colleagues strove to improve the product and the production process, Anton Philips took on the marketing side of the business. Having been educated at a trade school and demonstrating a talent for sales, he struck up a contest with his brother: Anton would try to sell more lamps than his brother could produce at the factory. This sparked the company to take off as a leading light bulb manufacturer. The company hired additional scientific experts to develop original light bulb designs. In 1910, the company established its first research lab, and in 1914, Philips set up a physics laboratory, called the NatLab (after the Dutch word for physics, natuurkunde). Strategies for business organization We have now seen that technology inspired a tangible dream for entrepreneurs—the business opportunity. Inventor-entrepreneurs and businesspeople alike attained this dream by establishing technology-based companies. With these companies came new systems and strategies. In the Age of Promise, business managers, for example, employed three important strategies: upscaling the production process, professionalizing management, and systematically approaching the invention process by creating the research lab.39 Examples of scaling up the technology-based enterprise abounded in the United States, where entrepreneurs had started railway and telegraph companies. These businesses were extremely capital-intensive—they demanded investment in expensive railroads and trains before generating revenue, for example. Railway and telegraph entrepreneurs also found that their businesses involved complex operations that required roll-out over vast distances. In order to compete, companies scaled up deliberately: the costs of adding another few

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lines or transport services to a rail network and trains was comparatively small. The larger the system, the lower the unit cost of additional infrastructure. Using the principle of scaling up, some of the first large-scale technological companies emerged. With railways and telecommunications in place, demand—for raw materials, for workers, and for products—increased dramatically. Mass production of standardized products became a commercially attractive proposition. Industrial companies consolidated into ever-larger corporations to benef it from the advantages of large-scale organization. By 1914, monolithic technology-based companies dominated the American and European business landscapes. The motivation to professionalizing management went hand in hand with running larger-scale operations. For example, the newly formed US railway companies introduced professional managers to take charge of different tasks. Businesses developed management tools such as organizational structures with fixed job descriptions. Professional cost accounting allowed railway companies to calculate transportation costs and set prices more accurately. This provided more efficient and cost-saving operations, and it propelled larger firms to outcompete smaller ones. The American railway and telegraph companies’ organizational structure became the business organization model for manufacturing businesses, including the British textile industry. The development of professional management inspired the invention of industrial engineering. The argument went like this: managing complex, large-scale technology companies required an “engineering” or “scientific” approach to management and organization. Engineering schools began to train industrial engineers to optimize throughput by eliminating delays and bottlenecks in complex production processes. The American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor most famously articulated the concept of equating professional management with scientific management. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) became compulsory reading for generations of industrial engineers. Taylor claimed that a scientific approach to management would double workers’ productivity, provide pay raises for workers, and end labor disputes. Between 1900 and 1914, his approach was implemented in hundreds of American enterprises, especially those with complex production processes and high output volumes, such as textile companies and automobile plants.40 The American industrial engineer Lillian Moller Gilbreth helped to further professionalize the relationship between workers and management. Gilbreth’s pioneering book, The Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste

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Scientific Management at Work. It was 1913 when the Ford Motor Company put Taylor’s theories on scientific management into practice. Pictured here: the first moving assembly line at the Ford factories in Highland Park, Michigan.

(1914), analyzed how scientific management could approach the worker “on the basic principle of recognition of the individual, not only as an economic unit but as a personality.”41 Gilbreth is regarded a founder of industrial psychology; her studies on worker fatigue (co-conducted with her husband, Frank) are considered seminal to the field of ergonomics. A third business strategy, creating the industrial research laboratory, helped to professionalize the process of invention itself. As we have seen, new industries, such as those in the chemical and electrical sectors, were driven by scientific insights and discoveries; they were science-based industries. Around 1880, German chemical and pharmaceutical companies such as BASF pioneered the industrial research laboratory. The research laboratory’s goal: systematic production of innovation, with the purpose of gaining competitive advantage over competitors. This required in-house research facilities, academically trained personnel, and knowledge of the latest scientific insights. Following in the footsteps of chemical and

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pharmaceutical companies, electrical energy companies and telecommunications companies soon began to create research labs. In addition to in-house research labs, companies needed their own patent offices to capitalize on their inventions. These departments helped ensure that companies retained the intellectual property rights to their inventions. New patent laws were adapted to protect companies and their R&D labs—rather than individual inventors. 42 *** Technology promised societal improvement: better housing, healthcare, and transportation, for example. For enterprise, however, the promise was different: technology offered business opportunity. Regardless of how technology was used during the Age of Promise, the technology-based companies of the time promoted the engineering disciplines, including mechanical, electrical, chemical, and industrial engineering. (Later, engineering physics, mathematics, industrial design, and biomedical engineering, among other disciplines, would follow.) The technology-based company became instrumental in engineering and innovation, just like the infrastructure state and the modern city. The early technology-based companies remade the business landscape. They replaced trading companies and artisan shops as the most visible and prominent form of enterprise. Today, technology-based companies dominate the business landscape. According to The Financial Times, most of the 500 largest firms worldwide (ranked according to market value) are such companies. Computers and software, mining and energy, aerospace and automotive, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, healthcare and biotechnology, communications, construction, industrial engineering—the list continues. 43 Beyond society and enterprise, to a third category of stakeholder, technology represented yet a different promise. It was neither about improving life for all nor providing business opportunities. Instead, it was about empowering particular groups of technology users.

1.4 Users Technology’s promises to users: “Power to you” When it came to serving society and enterprise, technology was in the foreground—and users languished in the background. Another thinker

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of the Age of Promise, Edward Bellamy, was critical of the ways in which technology was put to use. In practice, Bellamy argued, technology did not reach large user groups such as working-class families. Bellamy was not a scientist but a writer. In 1888, he wrote a sciencefiction book that became an international bestseller. It was called Looking Backward 2000-1887. In his book, Bellamy described a utopian world—an ideal world. The story goes like this: a young, upper-class man, Julian West, falls into a deep sleep in the year 1887—and wakes up 113 years later, in the year 2000. While he slept, the United States transformed into a utopia. The current-day Doctor Leete and his daughter show Julian around, explaining the progress that has been made. In the year 2000, modern technology, from pneumatic tubes for goods delivery to the “musical telephone” (radio was still unknown to Bellamy), makes life more simple and enjoyable, for workers and for citizens. Technology and capital are no longer concentrated in the hands of companies, but serve—and are controlled by—the user community. Workers work fewer hours, and everyone retires with full benef its at the age of forty-f ive. Julian is surprised, because back in 1887, workers and poorer citizens had often felt bypassed by progress. It led to economic inequality, strikes, and social unrest. Gradually, the well-to-do Julian—and in his footsteps, the reader—is convinced of the superiority of community-based technology and social organization. 44 Bellamy’s dream of bringing modern technology to user groups such as working-class families, had a great appeal. Looking Backward became one of the best-selling American books of its time. Moreover, the book inspired a social movement of men and women who sought to realize Bellamy’s dream through so-called Bellamy clubs. Making technology available to people in the household is a good example. 45 The state provided only the basic infrastructural conditions for progress; enterprises often had businesspeople in mind for their products (households, and especially working-class households, were not yet a marketing category). As a result, poorer households did not have access to modern technology. Often inspired by Bellamy’s ideas, men and women activists, labor unionists, feminists, doctors, nutritionists, and so on promoted communal household facilities, like shared kitchens. The idea was: if households pooled their money as a community, they could jointly buy the newest technologies of the day—washing machines, gas or electric stoves, and refrigerators, for example. At the time, these were expensive machines designed exclusively for selected professional markets: hospitals, restaurants, and army bases, for example. In the United States

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and Europe, activists established communal or cooperative (that is, owned by the users themselves) housing, kitchens, bakeries, and laundries with modern machinery. These user communities accumulated technical knowledge and experimented with new building designs. From New York to Moscow, user communities designed apartment blocks with kitchen-less apartments and common kitchen, laundry, library, and kindergarten areas. It was the user community that invented the apartment hotel, a communal form of housing that rationalized domestic labor, intended to radically change the hierarchical relations between men and women, as well as masters and servants. User communities had become an agent of innovation—in this case, innovation in the fields of household technology and construction engineering. Today, it is widely acknowledged that users seek empowerment through technology. 46 The promise is well captured by the marketing slogan “Power to you”—Vodafone’s corporate version of the promise to users. 47 Users are also accepted as a major source of innovation—like the infrastructure state, the urban machine, and the technology-based company. The best-known form of user innovation is when users themselves invent novel technology. In some technology domains this is the dominant form of innovation. In this book, we distinguish more than one form of user innovation. In fact, various forms of user innovation often coexisted—and reinforced one another. Innovative user-consumers: The telephone and the railway In the Age of Promise, users, as consumers, bought technology products, but the design process did not stop here. Users often employed the technologies in ways that diverged from the original designers’ intentions. Users developed preferences for how to use products—and even invented new uses altogether, suggesting new innovation pathways for manufacturers and others to follow. The early development of the telephone is a good example. 48 Originally, telegraph companies developed and marketed the telephone with a business-to-business strategy in mind, as we would say today. Telephony’s target groups were government, the military, and enterprise. So, when telegraph companies introduced telephony, they targeted “business” users, positioning the telephone as a business tool. The telephone was actually designed for short, efficient, business-related conversations. The visionaries behind the telephone did not anticipate that other user groups would use

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telephony for social conversations—as a form of social media, as we would say today. Indeed, large numbers of women began to use telephony for managing family relations; their long conversations overloaded telephone systems. The telephony industry’s first response was to try to eliminate this household use of the telephone: advertising campaigns mocked women’s conversations as “gossip,” branding it a wasteful, inappropriate use for the ingenious telephone. Similarly, telephone companies also dismissed the innovative ways in which immigrants and farmers used telephony. The accusation was that immigrants and farmers did not “comprehend telephony” and used telephones improperly. It took decades for some telephone companies to gradually understand these users’ concerns and habits. It also took decades to change their business model, marketing strategy, and the design of telephony systems. Eventually, companies targeted women users, who talked on the phone to maintain social relationships for themselves and for their families. To capitalize on the telephone as a social networking technology, the companies redesigned their telephone systems for this kind of traffic, and they charged for the duration of the call rather than charging for the connection made. The companies that pursued this strategy grew fast; others followed suit. The companies that trudged on with the old systems and markets were sidelined. Consumer behavior had changed the uses of the telephone, and design changes followed. The telephone became the technology to support social relations—a function it still has today, in the age of smartphones and social media. Another example, and one we follow throughout this chapter, is the railways. We have already seen the railway’s promises to society and enterprise; now we will examine the interaction between users and railway engineering. For enthusiastic middle-class travelers, railways became a symbol of speed and progress, a new way of leisure travel. With the advent of the railway, the middle class could reach places previously accessible to the upper classes only. Given trains’ relatively high speed, travelers could see the landscape change before their very eyes—for the first time in their lives.49 Another reality of train travel was that leisure travelers did not wish to mingle with poorer passengers, who almost always traveled not for leisure, but to migrate in search of work. In the Age of Promise, approximately thirty million people in Europe (as well as a smaller number of people in China) used railways and steamships to emigrate to the Americas. Middle-class

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railway users’ concerns about “mingling” motivated the development of first-, second-, third-, and even fourth-class wagon designs.50 For example, in Europe, Slavic and Jewish immigrants especially were considered “filthy.” They were widely believed to carry diseases, and these immigrants were separated from other passengers and locked in fourthclass wagons. This prevented passengers from getting off trains in transit countries. In fact, a separate physical infrastructure of railway stations and prison-like camps existed to prevent certain immigrants from interacting freely with others. In Ruhlebel station outside Berlin, for example, migrants and their families—as well as their baggage—were subjected to being steamed, disinfected, and deloused in chemical showers. These migrants were also subjected to a selection process: those believed unfit to enter the US (because of illness or “deviant” morals) were filtered out and returned to their place of origin, regardless of whether this meant breaking up families. The astounding number of migrant travelers gave rise to this separate infrastructure. Wealthy railway travelers experienced other problems. On European trains, wealthy passengers traveled in wagons in which each compartment had a separate door to the station’s platform. These compartments were not interconnected. Criminals found ways of using these wagons in ways that the train designers had not anticipated. For example, a criminal could board the train, commit robbery and murder, and even dispose of the victim’s body without anybody noticing. “Everyone knows beforehand that a sleeping man may be butchered in a railway carriage,” wrote one journalist of the time.51 Fear spread among wealthy passengers—and among the media. Railway companies responded to the security threat by innovating. First, railways introduced various kinds of alarm systems and communication systems. Later, railways changed the entire design of the wagon, in line with its American counterpart: an interior aisle ran along all compartments. This way, railway personnel could check on passengers, and, in the event of a crime, victims could more easily escape. The bicycle and the car New technologies for individual mobility, like bicycles and cars, emphasize the importance of a specific category of consumer preference: using technology for pleasure. In their early years, the bicycle and the car were not seen as useful technologies, but as fun technologies.

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How Users Shaped Technology. User preferences shaped the bicycle’s overall design. As an alternative to the “high-wheelers,” new user groups favored the so-called safety bicycle, which boomed in the 1890s. In this photo of around 1895, women in the American state of Montana look on as their cohort repairs a safety bicycle.

The bicycle followed several development trajectories. The classic high wheelers—a high front wheel with pedals, small back wheel—acquired ever-larger front wheels to increase speed. Upper-class young men in their twenties used these daredevil machines, as they were called, for racing. Another user group—men and adventurous young women—was interested in the bicycle for touring the countryside, but they lamented the instability of high-wheelers. This group grew fast: in 1905, for example, German bicycle clubs comprised the largest sports association, with more than 40,000 members. This was much larger than either soccer or athletics clubs. Bicycle design kept pace with the developments: bicycles became more stable, their front wheels much lower. The resulting loss of speed was offset by chain drive on the back wheel—precisely the technology we know today. When pneumatic air tires transformed touring bicycles into the fastest of its kind, the bicycle stabilized into the design configuration that endures today.52 Consumer preferences had shaped the modern bicycle. In the case of the car, user preferences decided the competition between steam, electric, and petrol engines around 1900. At that time, electric

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The Electric Car—Circa 1900. Lest we forget, electric cars were also a thing of the past. Witness this 1900 photo of the London Electrical Cab Company’s fleet. In urban areas, where the electric car’s limited range was less problematic, taxi companies were a key user group. Later, most users preferred cars with internal combustion engines, which allowed for a much greater range.

cars—with their limited range due to battery restrictions—were used by taxi companies and upper-class urban women for city trips. The largest user category, upper-class urban men, mostly preferred touring the countryside and racing in cars powered by petrol rather than by electricity or steam. Interestingly, cars powered by petrol were unreliable, but users saw this as an attraction, not a disadvantage. In early car culture, part of the adventure was to troubleshoot problems, listen to the engine, and make repairs. The dominant culture of male car users pushed innovation in the direction of cars that ran on petrol rather than electricity.53 Users play a pivotal role in innovation. Given this, it is important to distinguish real users from the hypothetical users that companies and governments had in mind and projected, unasked, onto others; we call these the projected users.54 Many innovations failed because companies’ projected users did not correspond to real ones. As we saw with telephones, railways, bicycles, and cars, there was an effort to understand users’ preferences. Eventually, entrepreneurs, inventors, and designers adapted their designs to suit users.

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When enterprise neglected to read real user preferences, the risk of commercial failure followed. For instance, in the 1890s, Thomas Edison failed to commercialize his newly invented kinetoscope, an early motion-picture camera that strung together images to create the illusion of a moving image. Unknown to Edison, film would become affordable, mass-scale entertainment. So, in this case, Edison positioned his invention as a tool for business, not for leisure. The audience for the kinetoscope could well have been immigrants and the working classes, who, it turned out, craved entertainment. Other inventor-entrepreneurs of Edison’s generation also had problems imagining users. When it came to marketing vinyl records, for example, the innovation was positioned as a way of creating spoken letters, a form of documentation to be used in offices. Only later did vinyl records become the main medium for music—until that, too, was replaced in the digital age.55 User-activists Activism evolved as another way of shaping innovation and bringing technology’s benefits to users. The example of Bellamy and the Bellamy club movement illustrates this context in which we speak of the user-activist. User-activists played an important role in several of the technologies discussed above. We have seen that activists worked with user communities to introduce cooperative kitchens, bakeries, and laundries, as well as housing for working-class families. In the case of bicycles and cars, as well, cyclists and drivers set up their own user organizations—with support from manufacturers—to lobby politicians. The bicycle movement, particularly the touring club, was a worldwide, middle-class force. Cycling clubs concentrated on safety; they established scenic bicycle routes and placed first-aid boxes along these routes. Cycling clubs also lobbied for better roads and services, higher hotel standards, and other tourist infrastructure. Of all user-activists, cyclists were perhaps the most well-organized.56 In the spirit of Bellamy, user-activists also worked on behalf of other marginalized groups—not only in their own self-interest. The White Label movement is a good example of this form of activism. The nineteenthcentury textile industry in the US and Europe was a major development for workers and consumers. Men’s clothing had become inexpensive for consumers: immigrant women and men mass-produced men’s clothing using industrial sewing machines. These factory workers suffered terribly, braving dangerous conditions to earn mere pennies. Many workers died in factory fires. One example: Manhattan’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory blaze of 1911 killed an estimated 146 workers, mostly women.

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User-activists mobilized against such technological disasters. Millions of middle-class women created a massive reform movement. Around 1900, the American Florence Kelley led one initiative. She and her counterparts in many industrializing countries fought the textile industry’s unfair labor practices and conditions. Calling themselves the White Label League, these user-activists succeeded in persuading enterprise to sew a white label into every piece of clothing that had their “approval”—every item made under fair (rather than slave-like) working conditions. Using this system, activists demanded better lives for the immigrant men and women. The activists created a network of grassroots organizations. The League lobbied governments and enterprise, demanding products that were made under fair working conditions.57 Such product certifications, too, are still with us today. In the built environment, users worked with municipalities to develop public infrastructure. This was called the civic improvements movement.58 Operating in cities, these citizens called themselves “municipal housekeepers.” Women reformers conducted surveys and drew up plans for urban infrastructure. These reformers lobbied for better housing, streetlights, sewer systems—and helped finance public facilities. The activists collaborated with progressive politicians, engineers, architects, and civic leaders. The activists also formed alliances with professional women in science, including MIT chemical engineer Ellen Swallow Richards and Harvard toxicologist Alice Hamilton, for example. These user-activists transformed millions of users into modern urban planners.59 User-tinkerers In addition to inventing new applications for technology and new forms of activism, users also “tinkered” to create new technologies. Referencing the best-known form of user innovation, we speak of “user-tinkerers.” We have already examined several examples. First-generation bicycle and car owners did not only affect innovation as user-consumers or activists, for example; they also liked to tinker with their vehicles. Getting your hands dirty and making improvements yourself was part of the experience of owning a bicycle or an automobile. And as we saw, people in household communities were not only activists pressing others to innovate; household communities also reengineered housing designs. This is the most direct form of user innovation. The early days of radio provide another example. One of the leading radio pioneers and eventual Nobel Prize winner, Guglielmo Marconi, started out tinkering with electricity as a kid. Marconi routinely discussed his

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experiments with his mother. When he was a twenty-year-old student, his mother set up a lab for him in the attic of the family house. It was in this attic laboratory that Marconi first managed to transmit radio signals. Securing a patent and moving from Italy to England were two of the steps the amateur scientist took in becoming an inventor-entrepreneur. Eventually, the Marconi Company sought government and company contracts (for radio stations throughout the British Empire, in 1912, for example). Marconi chose to ignore hobbyists, as he himself had been.60 Hobbyists continually influenced radio development, however. At the time, radio meant point-to-point communication, or “wireless telegraphy.” Inspired by Marconi and other pioneers, an army of amateurs began to build radio sets at home. Magazines such as Amateur Weekly Illustrated, first published in 1901, offered simple radio setups. Amateurs built thousands of transmitters, which disturbed military and commercial traffic. Authorities banned the self-built transmitters, which made the hobby even more exciting. Experimenting with both existing and novel radio components, amateurs pioneered the very concept of broadcasting to an audience. Consider the contrast between amateur and professional operators. Professional wireless telegraphy operators regretted the fact that radio signals were public—that anyone with a receiver could intercept a radio transmission; but radio amateurs found this exciting. One example: in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1909, Charles David “Doc” Herrold used an arc transmitter to tap into 500 volts of power… from a streetcar. Herrold used this power to broadcast voice and music (his wife Sybil has been called the first disk jockey). Many other amateur radio operators followed, blazing the way for the radio boom that began in the early 1920s. Companies, user groups, and governmental organization had begun to broadcast everything from news and political propaganda to music and religious sermons. So far, we have described mostly end users as initiating innovation. Another category of user, however, participated as well: professional users. Consider these scenarios: artisans and industry workers using machine tools; surgeons using medical instruments; farmers using agricultural technologies, and so on. All of these people use innovation in a professional context. The invention of the electric wind turbine stems from one such professional user community: Danish farmers. This community had been evolving for decades. In the 1870s and 1880s, Danish farmers led a groundbreaking cooperative movement that harnessed the promise of modern technology. Family farmers, who functioned like a communal housing movement, felt bypassed by modern technology and progress. The farmers noticed that urban users—rather than rural ones—were profiting from new technologies. Steam engines, electricity

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Wind Power Takes Flight. It was in Denmark, 1891, that Poul La Cour developed his breakthrough wind-electric turbine. In the following decades, many rural communities created user-owned windelectric systems.

supply systems, telephony—all were designed for the group farmers called “town people.” To counter this, the farmer movement formed cooperative institutions—everything from user-owned banks to user-owned schools and dairy factories. These were organizations that serviced farmers and were owned by farmers—not by urbanites.

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Poul la Cour was a farmer’s son who studied physics and meteorology in Copenhagen before returning to the countryside, where he worked at an adult school for farmers. Schools such as these had been set up by the farmers’ movement to educate and emancipate the peasantry.61 La Cour observed how new energy technologies, especially large steam engines and the large-scale factories they powered, motivated people to move from the countryside to the city. He believed that rural Denmark urgently needed a small-scale energy technology if it was to compete. So, in the 1890s, la Cour experimented with windmill designs at the cooperative school. He developed a device that channeled irregular wind power into a steady rotation—a precondition for connecting a dynamo. La Cour allowed farmers to use the device free of charge. Inspired by urban power stations, la Cour began to develop electric power systems for farming communities. In 1903, he inaugurated the first known wind-electric power system. The system, which he installed at his school, consisted of a small windmill, a dynamo, a battery, 450 light bulbs, and several electromotors. La Cour and his collaborators founded the Danish Wind Electricity Society, which aimed to assist farming communities in setting up windelectric power systems, and to educate system managers and electricians. La Cour was unwilling to wait for rural electrification programs of urban utility companies to provide the necessary power. Besides, he preferred to function independently of these organizations. The outcome: hundreds of local farming communities set up their own electricity cooperatives—wind-electric systems in smaller villages, and diesel-electric systems in larger villages.62 As we have seen, the phenomenon of users tinkering is widely acknowledged as a form of user innovation. Specifically, users in search of exactly the right product are faced with an “innovate or buy” decision; if the exact product they seek is not available, users tend to invent one themselves.63 In fact, the majority of scientific instruments were not invented by instrument manufacturers. Most instruments were invented by the professionals who used those instruments: scientists. Similarly, surgeons often developed surgical instruments before medical-equipment companies began actively developing a tool. We can observe many examples of end users tinkering during the early phases of such technologies as the car, the bike, and the radio. This is hardly surprising in a modern context; after all, user communities play a key role in our present-day computer culture. It would be a long time, however, before it became commonplace for companies to systematically incorporate user innovation in their innovation policies.64 We discuss this in Chapter 4. ***

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We have now seen how technology’s promises to users differed from its promises to society and enterprise. When it came to users, technology addressed the needs and desires of specific user groups, such as middleclass bicyclists, upper-class male automobile drivers, and female telephone users. Other groups insisted that modern technological change would benefit them—not hurt or bypass them—as was the case with Bellamy’s working-class families, the While Label League’s textile mill workers, and la Cour’s rural village communities. Making modern technology available to these user groups was intended to make their lives easier, enabling socio-economic equality and political emancipation—or just providing plain fun. We have also seen that users were not passive consumers—unlike how corporate inventors and marketers imagined them to be. Contrary to these “projected users,” who existed only in the minds of corporate marketers, real users actively contributed to innovation: user-consumers invented new applications for technologies. User-activists lobbied for change. User-tinkerers invented new technologies. Often, these different forms of user-inspired innovation came together in the design trajectory of one specific technology. Users became a primary source of innovation, equal to the infrastructure state and the technology company. Finally, we saw how trained engineers and scientists, such as la Cour, worked with, and on behalf of, users.

1.5 Engineers In the Age of Promise, technology offered something different to society, to enterprise, and to users. At the core of these offerings were engineers and other technologists (the distinction between the two was not yet clear in the Age of Promise). Consider the different kinds of engineers who delivered on these various promises. Michel Chevalier, who had voiced technology’s promise to society so influentially in the 1830s, was a newly educated civil engineer. Those who used technology for enterprise were self-made or formally educated engineers; this includes Thomas Edison, Leo Baekeland, Friedrich Engelhorn, Gerard Philips, and Frederick Winslow Taylor. A third category, the trained scientist turned professional inventor, included Poul la Cour, who developed the wind turbine. Engineers of different kinds worked for and alongside governments, enterprises, and user communities to implement technology’s promises. It is through these processes that the profession of engineering itself emerged.

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Technology’s promise to engineering We have one more promise yet to explore. In the Age of Promise, technology contained a specific offering to engineers: they were designated to deliver technology’s benefits to society, enterprise, and users. This meant that engineering itself needed to become a full-fledged profession and scientific discipline. To fulfill this vision, engineers established an array of engineering institutions, from professional associations to engineering schools. Many of our present-day engineering institutions stem from this era. The Institution of Civil Engineers, established in London in 1818, became an influential model for the professional engineering association.65 Eight young engineers undertook the initiative, with 23-year-old Henry Robinson Palmer in the lead. The original eight members won the support of older engineers, who brought in expertise and contacts in the form of politicians and industrialists. The Institution gained widespread recognition when it acquired a Royal Charter in 1828. This charter stated explicitly the expectations of technology: The general advancement of mechanical science, and more particularly for promoting the acquisition of that species of knowledge which constitutes the profession of a civil engineer; being the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man, as the means of production and of traffic in states, both for external and internal trade, as applied in the construction of roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, river navigation, and docks, for internal intercourse and exchange; and in the construction of ports, harbours, moles, breakwaters, and lighthouses, and in the art of navigation by artificial power, for the purposes of commerce; and in the construction and adaptation of machinery, and in the drainage of cities and towns.66

This captures it: technology’s promise to society (both the state and the city), enterprise (production, trade, and commerce), and users required that the field of engineering itself advance. Accordingly, the association would build a non-military engineering community to further the engineering sciences and the engineering profession. This promise inspired engineers to establish additional engineering associations, in Britain and elsewhere. These included general engineering organizations, such as the Société des ingénieurs civils de France (1848)67, the American Society of Civil Engineers (1852), and the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (German Engineering Society, 1856). These became leading

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organizations with international memberships. Engineers worldwide consulted their journals, which informed readers about the state-of-the-art in the engineering sciences. Such organizations were formed in smaller countries, as well. For example, the Dutch Koninklijk Instituut van ­Ingenieurs (1847) was modeled directly after its British forerunner.68 Other engineering societies focused on the development of specific disciplines. For instance, the Royal Institute of British Architects (1834) aimed at the general advancement of Civil Architecture, and promoting and facilitating the acquirement of the knowledge of the various Arts and Sciences connected therewith; it being an art esteemed and encouraged in all enlightened nations, as tending greatly to promote the domestic convenience of citizens, and the public improvement and embellishment of towns and cities.69

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1847), founded by the prominent railway engineer George Stephenson, pledged “to enable Mechanics and Engineers engaged in the different Manufactories, Railways and other Establishments … to increase their knowledge and give an impulse to inventions likely to be useful to the World.”70 Next came electrical engineering associations, chemical engineering associations, industrial engineering associations, and so on.71 All cited technology’s future benefits to society, enterprise, or users as a reason for their existence, and all vowed to advance their own discipline and profession. Engineering education We have now seen that the emergence of engineering as a profession and discipline is closely tied to interactions with society, enterprise, and users. The same holds for engineering education. In the Age of Promise, leading engineers realized that they needed new schools—engineering schools—to educate the required technological experts. These schools were alternatives to military academies and the master-apprentice system on the shop floor. It is these schools that became the models for our current technical universities and other educational institutions in the field of engineering.72 An important model for science-based engineering education was the French École Polytechnique (1794). It was here that Michel Chevalier had been trained in the 1820s. It was also at the École Polytechnique that Chevalier first became acquainted with technology’s pledge to society. In

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the school’s curriculum, a great deal of attention was paid to mathematics, physics, chemistry, and the like. An iconic example: under the guidance of the famous mathematician and mathematical physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace, a mathematical approach to science and engineering became the backbone of the education program. After this scientific training, engineers could further specialize in specific application domains. Still, the school’s “scientific” approach to engineering shows in its renowned graduates such as Ampère, co-discoverer of electromagnetics; Gay Lussac, known for his laws on gases; Carnot, considered to be the father of thermodynamics; the mathematician Siméon Denis Poisson, who spearheaded work on differential equations; Henri Becquerel, co-discoverer of radioactivity, and many more.73 While these science-oriented engineering schools focused on training engineers for the state, the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (1829) was established to train engineers in the “industrial sciences” for the benefit of enterprise. The school’s curriculum combined science with practicebased education. Later, other schools followed, and the model inspired many others beyond France.74 French engineering schools enjoyed university status and became widely known for some version of their scientific approach. In contrast, an engineering education in Britain and many other countries consisted of adult training for the working classes. In Britain per se, this education could be found at the so-called mechanics institutes. These taught new engineering knowledge and skills, such as basic mathematics and technical drawing. These institutes favored practice over scientific theory. Some of these mechanics institutes would evolve into Britain’s technical universities.75 In the short term, however, they provided non-academic training to engineers who typically worked in small-scale machine shops. During the Age of Promise, the debate raged over science versus practice in engineering; the mathematics content of engineering education varied according to what was in vogue. Curricula also varied from one region to another.76 National engineering societies worked hard to make engineering a science-based discipline. The national engineering societies sought the academic respect that the profession so deserved, in their eyes. In Austria, engineering schools gained full university status in the 1830s, but in other countries, such as Germany and the Netherlands, engineers had to fight hard for academic status. Engineering societies tirelessly repeated the promise of technology to justify engineering as a scientific discipline. In 1899, several German engineering colleges finally gained the right to award university degrees. This, in turn, granted some engineering institutions

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full university status. In the Netherlands, the polytechnic school in Delft received university status only in 1905; in Greece, that happened in 1914.77 Representatives of industry repeatedly argued against scientific training. These representatives claimed that enterprise needed engineers with practical know-how—not scientists with academic knowledge. While the science-versus-practice debate continued, as it does today, some stereotypes endured. For instance, the well-known nineteenthcentury French engineer Gustave Eiffel—graduate of the École Centrale and builder of the Eiffel Tower in Paris—loathed the British preference for practical, empirical, trial-and-error methods: “We have had the honor in France to surpass them by far in the theory and to create methods which open up a sure path to progress,” he wrote.78 Conversely, one of the most famous British engineers, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, warned young British engineers against the French approach: “I must caution you strongly against studying practical mechanics among French authors … never even read any of their works on mechanics any more than you would search their modern authors for religious principles … A few hours spent in a blacksmiths and wheelwrights’ shop will teach you more.”79 It was not only the theoretical content of the engineering curriculum that varied according to the science-versus-practice debate. Practice-oriented schools trained engineers for industry, in which relationships were less hierarchical. Many engineering enterprises were family businesses; daughters, sisters, and wives could work as engineers alongside men. One example was the academically trained Kate Gleason at the Gleason Machine Tool Works in New York, an important gear manufacturer to this day. Another engineer of the time was Emily Roebling, who, working in her family’s business, helped design New York’s Brooklyn Bridge. By contrast, the science-minded technical universities trained engineers for the state. Universities that worked with this model copied the state’s hierarchical modes of organization. Often they barred admission to women. This started to change only after 1900, when women were gradually admitted to prestigious engineering schools in Austria, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, for example. The city of St. Petersburg added a Women’s Polytechnic Institute after 1905. In Paris, by contrast, women would only graduate from the École Polytechnique starting in the 1970s.80 Engineers and social engagement Few people would challenge the idea that engineering, as a discipline, stems from a range of social concerns. Engineers in the Age of Promise disagreed

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about how involved to be with such concerns, however. We can distinguish three categories of engineers in this respect.81 The first category is the classical-liberal engineer—the first generation of civil engineer on record. Like Chevalier, these engineers argued that technology and infrastructure would deliver the promise of technology. This alone justified engineering as a profession and as a discipline. When focusing on social issues, classical-liberal engineers referred to creating the technological conditions for progress. The engineers in this category rarely turned to direct political and social action to improve the lives of workers, or the poor, for example. Toward the end of the Age of Promise, younger generations of engineers took up the cause, and a second group, the progressive-liberal engineers, emerged. To solve social problems such as urban housing and unhygienic housing, progressive-liberal engineers called for technical solutions like sewage works, sanitation facilities, household waste incineration, and safe production processes. When they confronted social and political resistance, these engineers pushed for political intervention. Knowing that legislation shapes technology and society, leading members of the engineering movements chose to participate in local politics. They believed that the engineer’s role was to bridge the gap between capital and labor. As one engineer expressed this thinking: “Although he [the engineer] belongs by birth and education to the employers’ class, he is constantly in touch with the poor, and knows their needs and wants. He is the one who can reconcile the different classes of our society.”82 In this vision, an engineer helped to solve the social challenges of the day. A third, smaller group of engineers consisted of socialist visionaries. Most of the time, engineers were not attracted to the revolutionary, socialist movements of their time, but socialist engineers saw political and social action as key to their profession. For example, around 1900, a younger generation of engineers promoted socialism. Socialist engineers demanded changes in the engineering curriculum: students should learn to distinguish between capital and labor—and take sides—engineers argued. To solve the inequalities of their time, engineers should study public health and hygiene, labor legislation, and urban planning. Another strategy was to send pamphlets to parliament. These addressed all the major problems, as well as the solutions, that called for action. These engineers believed in the gradual improvement of workers’ lives: increasing wages, reducing working hours, and improving working conditions. These engineers also promoted democratic reforms, like the right to vote. Little by little, they believed, these steps would lead to a better, socialist society; and, they reasoned, it

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was engineers’ task to make this happen. Some socialist engineers worked as labor inspectors, in public housing, or on health commissions. In every case, when it came to the struggle between capital and labor, socialist engineers sided with labor, not with enterprise. *** “The engineer is the king of our epoch,” noted a writer in the 1873 edition of the prominent Larousse encyclopedia. Others called the engineer the “hero of our age.”83 Engineers were celebrated for delivering on technology’s promise. The engineering profession, born in the Age of Promise, had come a long way. A certain arrogance also set in, however. One observer stated that “a single English engineer possessed more practical knowledge than all the savants of China”84—and engineers disagreed about how far to take their social involvement. Still, they worked arduously on the societal, enterprise and user promises of technology. In this chapter, we have distinguished between technology’s promises to society, enterprise, and users, because each introduces specific insights and questions concerning engineering and its role in addressing challenges. In specific innovation domains, society, enterprise, and user dynamics all played their roles. In the domain of the railway, for example, technology’s promises to all of the stakeholders merged. The infrastructure state and colonial authorities, among others, were responsible for planning, financing, and sometimes building railways. Companies constructed their own railway systems, business models, and management strategies. Users, too, were part of the mix, developing expected and unexpected user preferences and concerns that influenced innovation. In the next chapter, we discuss how some of these technological solutions to social challenges backfired. We examine how certain technological dreams turned into nightmares. This provides the basis for later chapters, in which we outline engineers’ strategies for realizing dreams and avoiding nightmares.

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The Age of Crisis, 1914-1945

2.1 Introduction When sometimes dark clouds appeared in the political sky, we consoled ourselves with the reflection that we lived in an enlightened age, an age of unexampled mastery over matter, physical progress, and striking developments in every sphere of the intellect. A large European war seemed impossible. Ever expanding and multiplying commercial, cultural and intellectual communication among the nations had intertwined their interests as never before. It was unthinkable that the attainments of all these unifying forces would be destroyed, and the world put back many years in its development towards a higher level of human existence … Alas, the year has taught us that these theories were unrealistic.1 Netherlands Chamber of Commerce, London Annual Report, 1914

In the previous chapter, we saw how engineers like Chevalier shared a dream of peace and progress through technology. These engineers worked on technological promises with governments, businesses, and user communities, and they developed the engineering profession itself. This produced a wealth of technological innovations, which addressed many of humanity’s greatest challenges: more food, clothing, and shelter; greater, more sustainable supplies of energy; more—and more efficient—forms of mobility, at least for the majority in Western countries. Technology managed to invigorate business dynamics and to alter users’ lives; technology lent credibility to the booming profession of engineering. Many Europeans and Americans felt that they lived in extraordinary times of rapid progress. The Age of Promise also saw a great number of small but significant wars; severe class conflicts; and deep concern over foreign competition. The Age of Promise also presented serious colonial exploitation and miserable technological failures. In 1912, the supposedly “unsinkable” ocean liner, Titanic, struck an iceberg and sank, killing more than 1,500 people. In this era, technology met its critics, too. And yet, as the quote demonstrates, the general optimism about technology’s promises and societal progress had endured. This changed during the Age of Crisis.

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Fought with modern technology, the First World War was—and was seen as—“an engineer’s war.”2 Worse, it showed that the same technologies that had promised peace and prosperity could be implicated in mass killings on an unprecedented scale. Technology had also promised great business opportunities, but in the years of economic hardship that followed the war—culminating in the Great Depression—many technological enterprises went bankrupt. Technologies that had been the backbone of the technology-based company, such as the conveyor belt and industrial engineering methods, turned into a worker’s nightmare. Critics claimed workers became enslaved to machines, and users enslaved to the technologies of mass consumption; technology “dehumanized” people, they said. The era culminated in an even more devastating Second World War, characterized by further escalation of killings and brutalities. Again, modern technology was at the core—from the technologies of the Holocaust to automatic gunfire to the atomic bomb. Some historians call this period the “thirty-year war” or “thirty-year crisis.”3 Others criticize these terms, warning that one must not attribute these global catastrophes to a common, underlying dynamic (reducing the issue to blaming the Germans, for example) that distorts historical reality. Still, the most visible global crises of this period—two world wars and the worst global economic depression ever recorded—were unprecedented. Specifically, the magnitude of civilian deaths and human suffering was unprecedented, and many blamed technology. The optimism about technology seen in the prewar period was challenged by an overwhelming sense of humanity’s—as well as technology’s—dark side. This compels us to study how technology became so tarnished in this Age of Crisis.

2.2 Society In the Age of Crisis, many still dreamt of peace and progress, commercial opportunity, and user empowerment. Exciting technological promises emerged in this era: for radio and electric power grids; motorways and aviation; medical technologies; and nuclear physics. 4 Dreams of peace and progress aside, many now imagined technological nightmares, too. Peace and war One major source of nightmares was war. Chevalier had seen railroads as a tool critical to achieving peace: building railroads meant cooperating

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Technologies of War. During the First World War, technological advances were turned into means of destruction. In this photo, taken in July 1916, British soldiers in the Battle of the Somme wear gas masks and operate a Vickers machine gun. To this day, the battle of the Somme counts as one of the deadliest in human history.

internationally for mutual benefit. Others had voiced a similar vision for technologies beyond the railroad. When Europe’s militaries used the very same railroads for the purposes of war, the scenario changed drastically. Governments built so-called war trains that delivered great advantages on the battlefield. More importantly, railroads and telegraphy were used for military logistics.5 In the first two weeks of the First World War, Europe’s warring armies used railways to transport roughly ten million troops and two million horses. Preparing for these huge operations over a long period, nations had devised elaborate so-called Military Travel Plans. Now these plans were executed—with unexpected, devastating results. Military strategists based their offensive and defensive plans on railroads; however, the strategists had not foreseen soldiers getting stuck in a deadlocked front zone. This is exactly what happened during the First World War. Planners responded by constructing light, narrow-gauge railways that linked the main rail lines to the front line. This practically ensured a continuous flow of soldiers, ammunition, and food to the front lines. Millions were massacred in the trenches of the First World War. Day after day, railway systems worked like conveyor belts, feeding young soldiers into the trenches on both sides of the front lines. With opposing sides armed with modern technologies—from artillery batteries and

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machine guns to poison gas and fighter planes—the war appeared to be hopelessly deadlocked. Sixty-five million men were mobilized for war. Between eight and ten million soldiers died; approximately twenty million were wounded. It felt as if a generation of young men had been destroyed, and a generation of children would grow up fatherless.6 After the Great War, as it was called, railways were implicated in many smaller wars: civil wars, colonial wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions—all of which came to haunt the world. Science-based technology, too, morphed from a promise to humankind and business to a weapon of war. During the First World War, for example, the American military recruited top electrical engineers, including Thomas Edison, to work on weaponry. The German army used electricity networks to power their war efforts. It also built 300 kilometers of lethal electric fence along the forested border of occupied Belgium and the neutral Netherlands. The intention was to electrocute deserters, spies, and saboteurs. In many countries, including Britain, Russia, Germany, and Japan, militaries redirected chemical production facilities from synthetic dyes and fertilizers to ammunition and explosives.7 The invention of chemical warfare may well be the most notorious development of the First World War. The effort involved many top chemists and physicists, including several Nobel Prize winners. For example, on the French-German front, the 1913 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, Victor Grignard, led scientific experiments with poison gas shells on the French side. The chemist Fritz Haber led the army’s development of poisonous gases for trench warfare on the German side. The case of Fritz Haber is telling, as he was an important figure in the Age of Promise as well as the Age of Crisis. Haber became widely known and celebrated for delivering the promise of technology to society. His “Haber process,” developed roughly between 1894 and 1911, is a catalytic reaction that binds nitrogen in the atmosphere to hydrocarbons—which is used in artificial fertilizers that would solve world food shortages. The German firm BASF began using the process on an industrial scale, and Haber won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for improving “the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind.”8 Haber, it was said, had made “bread from air.” Today, the Haber process is central to food production for about half the world’s population (though environmentalists see it as a contributing factor to the ecological crisis). When the German military asked Haber to aid his country, the scientist used his chemical expertise to make weapons, however. The maker of “bread from air” became “Dr. Death”—the “father of chemical warfare.”9 Haber’s

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team developed chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas on a mass scale. They tested and deployed these weapons on-site, in the war trenches. Haber’s choices were not exceptional. Many scientists and engineers worked on military technologies during and between the World Wars. Haber’s gas team alone included three other future Nobel Laureates: physicists James Franck and Gustav Hertz, as well as chemist Otto Hahn, who would later discover nuclear fission. Moreover, Haber disagreed with those who found his wartime choices immoral. He argued that scientists “serve mankind in peace, and the fatherland in war.”10 Besides, high-tech weaponry would not only protect his fellow citizens; Haber and his colleagues asserted that this weaponry would foreshorten wars and relieve suffering. Delivering a quick death instead of a slow and painful demise from an infected bullet wound was a “more humane” way of killing, they argued. There was widespread disagreement among scientists and engineers about this treacherous ethical issue. Many agreed with Haber. For instance, the American Chemical Society pledged the active aid of its 15,000 members to the US Chemical Warfare Service, arguing that “the ability to wage gas warfare is a blessing—not a curse—and will make for the future security, peace, and happiness of the world.”11 In contrast, one colleague of Haber’s, Otto Hahn, later reported that he had felt “very ashamed and deeply agitated” when witnessing gas-attack experiments in the trenches of the First World War. Hahn was also devastated when his nuclear-fission discovery enabled the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. At the same time, his former gas squad colleagues Franck and Hertz worked on atomic bomb projects for the Allies (the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively), as did prominent physicists such as Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and Werner Heisenberg. Other scientists and engineers worked on military technologies like radar, automatic gunfire, encryption machines, rockets, and synthetic fuels.12 The historical and ethical question was—and still is: were scientists helping to protect society, or were they contributing to society’s nightmare? Prosperity and decline In the civil domain, the promise of technology to society had been clear: economic progress and prosperity for all through international industrial collaboration. Modern technologies and industries had, indeed, integrated the world economy. But in the Age of Crisis, that economy was caught in an economic crisis of an unprecedented scale: the Great Depression of the

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1930s.13 How could technology’s economic promise turn into an economic nightmare? First, the crisis emerged as an outcome of the First World War: the need to develop military technologies had exhausted national treasuries and bank reserves, destroying financial markets. As governments printed extra money, many countries suffered from sharp inflation. Companies struggled and workers lost jobs. The general feeling was that the modern, technologybased economy was collapsing. Economic pessimism ruled. Second, the crisis endured when state governments reacted defensively and nationalistically: they tightened their control of the economy, especially resources and technology. This happened in liberal democracies as well as the new communist and fascist states. All increased trade barriers and supported domestic industries. All nationalized energy resources such as coal and hydropower, and tried to initiate the construction of national electricity grids to distribute scarce energy efficiently through the country. The British and the Soviet governments had built impressive national grids by the mid-1930s. Most governments had also increased their control of national communications and mobility: railways, roads, and aviation. And most had also interfered with manufacturing and agriculture, forcing chemical industries to cooperate in national syndicates, for example. Governments introduced central planning to produce optimal technological efficiency at the level of the national economy.14 These national solutions mitigated the immediate domestic effects of the crisis. But they also created new problems. National solutions frustrated old dreams of peaceful international industrial collaboration and joint progress. These solutions also made the economic crisis a structural one. Worse, techno-economic nationalism and competition became another factor in the outbreak of the Second World War. This contributed to the European Communities’ (forerunners to the European Union) insistence on international economic and technological cooperation after the Second World War. Finally, some large-scale technological systems failed, creating tremendous suffering in their wake. The great Soviet famines of 1932-1933 are perhaps the most terrifying example. In the 1920s, the Soviets had replaced their peasant economy with a modern food system based on large-scale food production and railway distribution. The Soviets also used new refrigeration science to build Europe’s largest fleet of cooling wagons for perishable foods, such as meat, vegetables, and butter. The grand promise of centralizing resources and technologies had apparently materialized. Food outputs spiked, the distribution system worked, and

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the model appeared to be successful. However, when adverse weather conditions devastated harvests in 1932 and 1933, Stalin’s officials continued to demand that farmers meet grain quotas; off icials believed—incorrectly—that farmers had hidden the food. An estimated five to ten million people starved to death in the Ukraine and Russia’s Caucasus and Volga regions.15 Liberty and enslavement A third promise of technology for society was liberty—freedom from social and economic constraints, as well as the constraints of nature. In the Age of Crisis, this promise of liberty also backfired. New political ideologies were partly responsible. For example, fascism and communism had emerged as popular alternatives to liberal democracy. Modern technology itself also played a part in the loss of freedom: prominent philosophers, social critics, and engineers argued that technology threatened human individuality and freedom. One of Germany’s most prominent engineers, Walter Rathenau, argued this point. Rathenau had been trained in physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, and philosophy; he had written a dissertation on the absorption of light by metals. Rathenau headed one of Germany’s leading electrical engineering firms, and his talents did not stop here. After the First World War, when the German Empire collapsed, he became Minister of Reconstruction and Foreign Minister of the new nation of Federal Germany. On the one hand, Rathenau endorsed the wonders of modern technology—after all, technology had transformed the world into a global production system. On the other hand, he observed that, increasingly, modern men and women were losing their individuality—they were starting to think and behave as if they were cogs in modern technological systems. In league with the philosophers of his day, Rathenau spoke of a “mechanization of the world” that produced a “mechanization of the spirit.”16 Mechanization shrank the human spirit and the soul; it produced a moral void. The fear that humans had become slaves to modern technology emerged as a major theme in the Age of Crisis. Philosophers such as José Ortega y Gasset and Oswald Spengler wrote about technology’s threat of enslaving the human spirit. In the technologically advanced United States and Germany, thinkers theorized that people slavishly followed the rhythm of the conveyor belt, the thrum of the automobile, or listened passively to recorded music and radio. Critics believed that the technologies of the

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day destroyed the act of creation that was key to human civilization. The influential American technology analyst Lewis Mumford observed the rise of an “objective personality,” which induced “the relative passiveness of machine-trained populations”; this personality “transferred subjective spontaneity to the machinery which he serves,” added Herbert Marcuse, who later would publish the bestseller One-Dimensional Man.17 The task at hand, many believed, was to subordinate technology to human will and culture. This presented the engineering community with a new and urgent task. It is no coincidence that the Age of Crisis produced science-fiction titles such as David H. Keller’s The Threat of the Robot (1929), and Edmund Hamilton’s The Reign of the Robots (1931). In the latter, machines threaten to enslave humans but are defeated by a hero with human capacities, including love, friendship, resistance, and courage. This form of science fiction endured long beyond the Age of Crisis. From the Terminator (1984-2016) to The Matrix (1999-2003) movie franchises, it is still with us today.18 Civilization and barbarism Finally, the theme of the decline from freedom to slavery could be detected in debates about civilization and barbarism. Modern technology had also promised civilization. Many people, from Europe’s urban government officials to colonial administrators, had called railways the “great civilizer,” for example. The progress of civilization was measured in terms of scientific and technological advance. And through science and technology, the West would civilize the rest of the world, as the saying went. Many non-Europeans were skeptical of the “civilizing mission.” In the Age of Crisis, this skepticism escalated, partly because of the supposed impoverishment of the human spirit (see above), and partly because colonial violence against civilians compromised the civilizing mission. On the eve of the Age of Crisis, the civilizing mission’s dark side was exposed in the international media. The case of Congo Free State was a turning point: transnational human rights activists and media campaigns blasted the story to the public. In domestic media coverage, King Leopold II of Belgium had been portrayed as an altruistic benefactor of humanity and civilizer of his personal colony. (Between 1885 and 1908, Congo had been the King’s private property, not state property.) Now, however, missionaries and journalists revealed that the king had been driven by personal greed, and that his Colonial Army used natives as

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slaves to produce goods such as rubber for the emergent car industry. The Colonial Army used mutilation, torture, rape, and mass killing to control the slaves. In the three decades of Leopold’s rule, more than half of the indigenous population had died.19 In the Age of Crisis, all colonial powers met with rebellion and responded with brutal force. The media reacted, and the civilizing mission was further compromised. One example: in 1919, the British committed a machine gun massacre of 400 unarmed men, women, and children in Amritsar, India. When exposed, this became a source of disgust around the world; nevertheless, other excesses followed. New forms of indiscriminate violence against civilians surfaced. Aviation, an exciting new technology to some, posed the destruction of civilization to others.20 In colonial territory, the British launched bomber-plane attacks on villages in Africa and British Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) in the 1920s. In another example, the French bombed a peaceful demonstration in Vinh, in colonial Vietnam, in 1930. Wing commander John Adrian Chamier had framed Royal Air Force policy in 1921: The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle … This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt.21

Acting “brutal” was intentional policy. In 1936, the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie witnessed before the League of Nations, forerunner to the United Nations, how Mussolini’s Italy had used extermination in its conquest of Ethiopia in 1935.22 Airplanes used tear gas and mustard gas to bomb areas indiscriminately; civilian men, women, and children were killed or driven out. Selassie warned that such practice would end in catastrophe for Europe, as well. And that catastrophe materialized: the German air raids on the Spanish cities of Jaén and Guernica in 1937 and the subsequent Italian bombings of Alicante and Barcelona foreshadowed the carpet-bombing massacres of the Second World War. The Germans carried out carpet bombings (in Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, and Belgrade, for example). The Allied Forces also conducted carpet bombings (in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Kassel, Darmstadt, Dresden, and Tokyo, for example). And the Japanese carpet-bombed Nanking, Guangzhou, and Rangoon, for example. These bombings killed hundreds of thousands of people.

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Targeted attacks on civilians culminated in the Holocaust that killed six million Jewish, gay, disabled, and other minority citizens. Many scientists and engineers participated—by developing the Holocaust’s logistics and killing technologies.23 Some analysts interpreted the Holocaust as the collapse of civilization and a reversion to barbarism. Others argued that the Holocaust was a perverse culmination of modern technological civilization. These thinkers identified the Holocaust as a planned, scheduled, efficient, industrial, and high-tech form of mass killing. It was an event executed by modern bureaucratic and technological organizations, they argued.24 *** The examples above suggest several ways in which technology’s promises to society could go awry. One historical mechanism is that some of the technologies originally developed by some for peaceful purposes, were deliberately repurposed by others for destructive purposes. This happened in warfare and during the Holocaust, for example. Another mechanism: technologies indeed realized their promise, and people came to depend on them; when these technologies failed, people became suddenly vulnerable. This happened when large-scale food systems broke down, for example. This implicated the food systems in mass starvations. A third mechanism was neither deliberate nor sudden: well-intended technologies might slowly, unintentionally, and invisibly produce unwanted developments. This happened when mass production and consumption technologies gradually reduced humans to mere “consumers,” as social critics argued. A fourth mechanism: technological choices motivated by fear during times of crisis could exacerbate problem. This happened, for example, when governments chose technological and economic nationalism as a way out of crisis: domestic problems may have been solved in the short run, but they created new tensions in the long run.

2.3 Enterprise Business and bankruptcy In the Age of Promise, technology’s promise to entrepreneurs had entailed new business opportunities and competitive advantages. Entrepreneurs

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had created technology-based companies. They had improved productivity by increasing the scale of operations, by making the production process more efficient, and by professionalizing the process of invention in the industrial research lab. In the Age of Crisis, however, entrepreneurs found that their dream of the technological enterprise could collapse completely: what started as a promising business opportunity and competitive advantage could slide into business failure, and, in extreme cases, bankruptcy. Again, railways provide a useful example. In the Age of Promise, railway companies had pioneered the large-scale technology-based company. Railways had proven a lucrative business, and entrepreneurs had managed to attract investors to finance the huge initial investments—in trains, rails, tunnels, bridges and the like. In fact, railways were so successful that historians speak of a “railway boom” or “railway mania.” Railways became a target of financial speculation, given their promise of high returns on investment to speculators. In the Age of Crisis, however, expenses rose and incomes fell, and railway companies’ earlier successes—including their large-scale technology— turned against them. 25 Railway revenues declined for several reasons. The railway boom had created too many railway companies, which now competed for the same market. Moreover, this market stagnated, given the collapse of international trade and increasing competition from cars, buses, and trucks. In many countries, railway entrepreneurs and engineers spoke of a “coordination crisis”—how to manage the survival of railways and the growth of automobility? Meanwhile, expenses remained high; in some contexts, expenses even climbed. As noted, the large-scale, technological nature of railway companies had required large investments by external investors. Railway companies were forced to pay interest and dividends—despite decreasing incomes. New companies faced even higher expenses, for they built railways through less densely populated and more difficult terrain: the most lucrative routes had already been taken. State governments often required railway companies to build such economically unattractive routes. Given the collapse of the international capital market, entrepreneurs no longer had access to inexpensive sources of funding, which could have provided a buffer in hard times. The outcome was a long list of railway companies, all forced to declare bankruptcy. In other cases, poor financial performance forced railway entrepreneurs into takeovers and mergers. And in many countries, railway companies in acute financial trouble had to accept a takeover by the state,

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which tried to prevent a total breakdown of this strategic sector. This happened to the financially troubled railways in Canada (1919), Germany (1919), France (1937), the Netherlands (1937), Sweden (1939), Spain (1944), and, several years later, Britain (1947). A takeover by the state was often a gradual process. In the Netherlands, for instance, private railway companies responded to financial troubles by setting up an economic collaboration, a syndicate called Nederlandse Spoorwegen. When problems persisted, the state repeatedly came to the rescue, buying shares and injecting funds. Company performance did not improve, however, and by 1937, the state maintained ownership of all shares. (This state of affairs persisted until the neoliberal turn of the 1990s.) In other sectors, too, the entrepreneurial dream of the technology-based company turned into an entrepreneurial ordeal. Sectors that depended on exports or the international capital market were hit hard. This included the textile industry, food processing, shipbuilding, steel, and car manufacturing. Farmers in many countries went bankrupt. The effects were clearly visible in the world’s most technologically advanced countries. In the US, for example, leading car manufacturer General Motors was forced to fire 100,000 of its 260,000 employees; US Steel terminated fulltime contracts, and net farm income dropped by 70 percent. In Germany, industrial output dropped by 46 percent. In the Netherlands, employment in the metal sector decreased by 33 percent (1930), and in shipbuilding even by 50 percent (1931).26 The beer industry illustrates the staggering number of companies that ceased to exist. The sector had developed rapidly in the Age of Promise, thanks to the introduction of the steam engine, breakthroughs in refrigeration, and the science of micro-organisms (including the invention of the pH concept in the Carlsberg laboratories). But in the Age of Crisis, the number of breweries fell rapidly. Between 1900 and 1940, for example, brewery counts in Britain fell from 6,447 to 946. In Germany, where consumers used to purchase beer from the local Brauhaus, numbers plunged from 19,000 to 4,300. In the Netherlands, total breweries sank from 500 to 99. In the latter case, most local breweries were absorbed by a few large players, such as Heineken, Bavaria, and Amstel. In 1930, 90 percent of the workforce in the sector found themselves employed by one of the six largest Dutch breweries.27 Even the promising organic-chemical industry suffered. Initially, entrepreneurs appeared to have turned the First World War to their advantage. Royal Dutch Shell, BASF, and others received large state subsidies to expand their facilities and manufacture explosives. After the war, the vast expansion of production facilities continued in almost all industrialized countries.

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This bred surpluses. The chairman of the new British chemical giant ICI noted, “Today the dye making capacity of the world is nearly four times in excess of the world’s present requirements.”28 As in the case of other industries, many in the chemical sector were forced to give up. In response to such crises, the chemical and other industries devised a solution of their own: as an alternative to state regulation, these industries established international cartels to regulate markets. In organic chemistry, for instance, German, French, British, and Swiss synthetic dye manufacturers organized a so-called four-party cartel. This collaboration pooled research, profits, and production, dividing markets among the collaborating companies. Each party had priority access to its home market. In foreign markets, companies collaborated to dominate—if not squeeze out—competitors. Powerful technological cartels also emerged in the areas of steel, zinc, tin, copper, and aluminum. Cartels also affected the market for nitrogen, coal mining, timber, paper, electric light bulbs (with partners in twelve countries worldwide, including Philips and Siemens), as well as many other sectors. Cartels came to control 30 to 40 percent of the remaining world trade.29 In this way, the big players held onto their entrepreneurial dreams, though they created adversity for their less fortunate competitors. Patent wars The professionalization of invention, an important strategy of the technology company in the Age of Promise, also became an ordeal in the Age of Crisis—at least for those inventors and enterprises who could not stay competitive. The largest and most successful technology-based companies ran the largest and best equipped research labs. These increasingly dominated the innovation scene—at the expense of independent inventors and inventorentrepreneurs. Tellingly, 40 percent of the members of the American Physical Society, the leading professional organization for physical scientists and engineers, now worked for two dominant companies, General Electric and telecom giant AT&T. In conjunction with well-equipped research labs, these and other firms set up patent departments, turning lab ideas into patents for commercial exploitation.30 Inventors, who usually owned small firms, could no longer cope with the business strategies of larger firms. These big players had begun to formulate patents as broadly and generically as legally possible. The dominant companies also tried to acquire a range of patents covering a single given

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commercial application. Once the patent was secured, the next step was often to sue competitors for patent infringement, pushing industrial competition from the laboratory and the marketplace into the court room. This strategy worked, because legal cases were expensive, and large companies could hire a bevy of patent lawyers to challenge independent inventors’ patents to the point of bankruptcy.31 This is how, in the Age of Crisis, independent inventors and inventor-entrepreneurs gradually disappeared from the innovation scene. Even in everyday language, the word “invention” was replaced with “Research and Development” or “R&D.”32 The field of radio technology, one of the most dynamic and exciting technology sectors of the time, illustrates the unequal relationship between big business and independent inventors. For instance, in 1907, American electrical engineer Lee de Forest had invented the triode vacuum tube—the crucial technology for electronics until the invention of the transistor. De Forest’s small company had trouble paying the bills, however, so he demonstrated his tube amplifier to telecom giant AT&T, hoping to sell the patent. After AT&T notified de Forest that they were not interested, the inventor sold his patent cheaply to a lawyer representing an anonymous party. (This was preferable to declaring bankruptcy.) The lawyer turned out to be a “front man”—a covert representative—for AT&T, which had thus acquired the patent.33 AT&T had outsmarted the inventor. Another example relates to Edwin Armstrong, an American inventor who, as a student, discovered and patented electric signal amplification by feedback, relaying the output of de Forest’s triode into the input. With a small lab and a team of loyal assistants, Armstrong was determined to make a living as an independent inventor. It was going to be tough: Armstrong’s biographer notes that, in the 1920s, his energies no longer went to invention, but to “courts and tribunals, piling up thousands of pages of testimony, wearing out nearly three sets of lawyers, costing well over a million dollars.”34 Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Armstrong’s invention of frequency modulation clashed with the business interests of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). This patent battle also continued for decades, until a clinically depressed Armstrong, financially and physically depleted, jumped from the thirteenth floor of his New York City apartment. A friend of his alleged that, in his later years, Armstrong had spent an overwhelming 90 percent of his time on court cases. This was not what he had “signed up for” as a young engineer. Fortunately, Armstrong’s wife eventually won the persistent lawsuits, though RCA managed to stall them for another decade.35 Patent battles erupted in other fields, too. In Chapter 1, we discussed how Leo Baekeland had founded the General Bakelite Company to produce

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and sell synthetic plastics. Shrewdly, Baekeland developed a patent position that made it almost impossible for others to enter the plastics market “without infringing on at least three or four patents at the same time.”36 For instance, when the Redmanol Chemical Products Company started to market Formica plastics, Baekeland accused the newcomer of infringing on the Bakelite patents, and a legal procedure followed. The judge sided with the General Bakelite Company. Entrepreneurs associated with the new company then agreed to merge their company with Baekeland’s, in return for high-level positions in the new company. Worker nightmares Another technological dream dissolved into despair during the Age of Crisis: the dream of industrial engineering. This scientific approach to management was expected to increase productivity, raise worker wages, and prevent worker conflicts. In the Age of Crisis, technology companies found themselves under financial pressure; factory managers used scientific management approaches to cut labor costs—without improving worker conditions. For companies in the business of mass production, the cost-cutting tactic was to redesign the factory floor around an assembly line in which unskilled workers performed routinized tasks. Workers were also required to use punch cards that monitored their work hours, and to submit to time-and-motion studies, which measured optimal performance down to the tiniest movement. Whenever possible, managers responded to cost-cutting pressures by eliminating workers from the production process and prodding the remaining laborers to work faster. They simply sped up the conveyor belts. Increasingly, workers grew unhappy. As they went on strike and founded more radical labor unions, the conflict between employers and employees only widened. In the US, where scientific management had originated, the Taylor Society (a forerunner to the Institute of Industrial Engineers) and the American labor movement had briefly tried to work together in the 1920s. In the 1930s, however, the collaboration fell apart. In the US and in Europe, scientific management came under heavy fire: factory mechanization and the process of rationalization were blamed for creating mass unemployment. Workers, unions, and the public also feared that mechanization would lead to loss of skills, as workers were said to be reduced to cogs in the machinery of production. Many felt that workers, not entrepreneurs, should own the means of production; they called for a political revolution, inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917.37

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Dark Side of the Assembly Line. In his classic satiric film Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin plays a worker driven insane by the monotony and speed of assembly-line work.

It is no coincidence that some of the most famous silent movies of the time focused on the conflict between managers and workers, who, in these films, are portrayed as the proverbial cogs in the machine. In Germany, Fritz Lang’s science-fiction movie “Metropolis” (1927) featured a tyrannical industrialist and oppressed workers in the city’s underground energy factory. In its most famous scene, the machinery turns into a false god, the Moloch, to which workers are sacrificed—they are fed into the Moloch’s maw and swallowed whole. Charlie Chaplin’s comedy “Modern Times” (1936) is a condemnation of scientific management and the assembly line. Chaplin goes insane as an assembly-line worker, criticizing the frantic work pace and the modern corporation’s dehumanizing need for control.38 To understand how such nightmares played out in companies, we turn again to the case of Royal Dutch Philips. Thanks to its central physics laboratory, the NatLab, Philips had succeeded in developing a successful diversification strategy. The company’s product portfolio then expanded from light bulbs to electronic vacuum tubes, x-ray tubes (the roots of the firm’s present-day position in medical imaging), as well as radio components and radio sets. Both profits and employee numbers rose during the 1920s, but between 1929 and 1932, the incandescent lamps market collapsed

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(production decreased by 75 percent), and the firm laid off more than half of its workers in the city of Eindhoven.39 Later, Philips managed to expand its market share of radio sets: the company slashed the factory’s work force by 66 percent, introduced the conveyor belt, and optimized the remaining work force. Radio output increased by 10 percent. 40 Just as in Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” Philips had integrated the assembly line and scientific management’s time-and-motion techniques into the radio-production process. Industrial engineers were enthusiastic: “One day after another, the conveyor belts move on, and many industrious hands, in cheerful solidarity, achieve speed and quality beyond compare.”41 For radio factory workers, however, this system was less pleasurable: “… some have gone insane … one threatened to throw a radio chassis, screaming … another tried to jump out of a window … a third just sat down next to the belt and started praying,” one employee recalled. 42 Starting in the early 1930s, Dutch labor inspectors investigated Philips’ assembly-line practices as well as those of companies in many different sectors. Initially, few problems were found. As one of the labor inspection organization’s medical advisors reported the situation, crying was common among certain groups of women factory workers, especially immigrants, but—the surprising conclusion read—“that is no indication of assembly-line problems.”43 This attitude changed only when social democratic politicians began to criticize the assembly line, but even then, the status quo endured. With the appropriate speed and the right workforce, assembly-line practices were not a problem, politicians and business managers reasoned.

2.4 Users Access and accidents Users’ high hopes for technology could also be dashed. The user promise, as we saw in Chapter 1, was to attain access to modern technology, but this access brought with it new kinds of accidents. The evolution of electricity provides a useful example. From household organizations to cooperative village power stations, user groups wanted access to electricity and its applications. The downside was a surge in the number of mishaps, especially fires, heat burns, and accidental electrocutions. It was an age in which safety standards for electrical installations and equipment were just being invented; accident reports often blamed users for their supposed lack of familiarity with electricity. These reports found,

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Technology: Blessing or Curse? In the interwar years, Philips produced X-ray tubes for various user groups. Top: The portable Philips Metalix in a patient’s home in 1928. The tube was used for e.g. diagnosing bone fractures and tuberculosis. Bottom: A Philips X-ray shoe fitter or “pedoscope” at Wouters shoe store in Eindhoven, 1935. Acknowledgment of radiation hazards for users came later, and many portable X-ray applications disappeared.

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for instance, that to help guard their livestock, farmers sometimes connected their electric fences directly to the village power system’s 220 volt distribution line. This meant that adults and children who touched the fence could be electrocuted. In households and shops, government inspectors found that users tried to repair blown fuses by using a nail or a hairpin to turn the electric lights back on—often with fatal consequences. Faulty electrical wiring also caused many fires, as did electric flat irons. There were even reports of suicides committed by electrocution. 44 This raised the question of who was liable for such accidents: consumers or producers? Consumer organizations struggled to persuade government to sponsor consumer protection laws. Public advertising campaigns also blamed users for accidents. These campaigns sought to educate users about the risks of new consumer technologies by vividly illustrating what could go wrong. “Beware—monsters live in electric wires,” warned a poster from one such campaign. The message: contact with just one exposed electrical wire could be fatal. Advertising addressed other consumer technologies, as well: “Do not use a flame to find a gas leak,” warned a gas-industry advertising poster, recommending that consumers use soapy water instead! “Exhaust fumes kill,” proclaimed a third poster; it portrayed exhaust fumes from a car in a garage, which turned into a monster and choked the driver. The poster reminded car owners “to open doors and windows” before starting their car engines while inside their garages.45 Of all the modern technologies that promised users better lives, the new mobility technologies generated the accidental-death statistics in the Age of Crisis—and continue to cause the greatest number of casualties. We saw how, in the Age of Promise, railways fascinated users, and passenger traffic rose sharply. On the brink of the Age of Crisis, however, railways proved overwhelmingly to be the most frequent cause of accidental death in the US. In 1913, for example, more than 10,000 people were killed and more than 86,000 injured in railway accidents. Typically, these deaths occurred when trains collided, or when trains hit pedestrians on or near the tracks in stations or at railway crossings. 46 The railway’s death toll was high, despite various safety measures, from drilling railway staff and passengers on safety precautions to the introduction of numerous safety technologies. One such technology was better breaking systems, such as the air brake. Not all so-called safety measures were used for safety alone, however. For example, managers used the air brake, which had promised greater safety, to enable trains to run closer together on the rails. This increased railway revenues—not necessarily railway safety. Later, the railway’s death toll declined in some regions.

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In 1996, for example, roughly 1,000 people lost their lives in the US as a consequence of train accidents. But on a global level, the death toll remains considerable. In 2014, more than 27,000 people in India died as a result of railway accidents, for example. 47 It was in the 1920s that the automobile started to eclipse the role of the train as the main killer. The US became the first “automobile nation.” By 1920, cars were the culprit in more than 12,000 deaths in America; by 1930, that number had reached 31,000. Immediately after the Second World War, British commentators observed that more people were killed in traffic than on the battlefield. Roads, they said, were places of “mass murder.”48 Today, more than 1.2 million men, women, and children die on the roads around the world each year; fifty million become injured. 49 Users and misusers In the Age of Promise, users had modified new technologies to empower their specific user groups. Recall the wealthy railway travelers who secured safer train wagons; the working-class residents who sought affordable housing; and the rural farmers who generated wind power to create profitable agricultural industries. The question arose, however: Who, exactly, had become empowered? This is the context for our closer look at car-related accidents in the Age of Crisis. The non-motorist majority—pedestrians and cyclists—ruled the streets in this period. In cities, non-motorists accounted for about 95 percent of all traffic and for roughly two-thirds of all traffic deaths. Everyone from journalists to judges, lawyers, policemen, parents, and pedestrians agreed: motorists were to blame for their irresponsible behavior on the road. Motorists were seen as joy riders, speed maniacs, and killers—as misusers of technology and the streets. Why were motorists considered to be misusers? Traditionally, streets were places where anyone could walk, talk, play, shop—but not speed. Children and teenagers played games in the streets all day long. Most people believed that, as new users, drivers of cars did not belong on the street. In Germany, protesters resorted to threats against drivers. Cyclists, pedestrians, teenagers, farmers—all manner of people used their fists and their knives; they threw buckets of water, built barricades, and strung wires across dark roads—all in an effort to keep drivers out.50 Protesters also wrote petitions. In the American city of Cincinnati, protesters gathered 42,000 signatures on a petition to limit cars to twenty-five miles per hour. In Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Britain, pedestrians

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Technology Runs Amok. This cartoon by the Dutchman Leo Jordaan (1885-1980) depicts Amsterdam street life in 1920. The cartoon’s caption says it all: “Hell.”

established organizations to ensure mandatory driver’s tests for motorists. The idea was to impose a speed limit and have drivers’ licenses suspended for driving dangerously. The pedestrian-based organizations also lobbied parliament to make motorists liable in case of accidents—no matter what the cause (no-fault liability, as lawyers call it). All over the industrializing world, then, the non-motoring majority resented high-class motoring minorities as intruders on the streets.51

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Starting approximately in the 1930s, the automotive lobby, in collaboration with state authorities, organized a counter-attack. The lobby consisted of powerful upper-class motorists and enterprising businesspeople. The new car lobby promoted a different vision of mobility for the road—and for users. Car promoters argued that the future belonged to motorists. The pro-car lobby also considered pedestrians and cyclists to be an obstacle to the car’s innovation that was so dear to them: speed. The car lobby wanted speed, adventure, and risk to rule the road. Accordingly, car promoters cast pedestrians and cyclists as the road’s misusers, people who were poor and uneducated, irresponsible and stupid, anti-progress and old-fashioned. The road was no longer to be a shared space accessible to all; it should belong to cars.52 How did the automotive lobby try to achieve its goal? Pro-car campaigners forged a vision of mobility through education campaigns, engineering interventions, and new traffic laws. First, education campaigns sponsored by the car industry warned children not to run on the streets, not to cross streets, and not to play in the streets. The message was that children and their parents—rather than motorists—needed to be careful at all times. Second, the car coalition made engineering interventions, lobbying for building fast lanes accessible only to motorists. So, the freeway (or motorway) was born. Third, policymakers and experts passed new traffic laws. The new rules favored cars and pushed pedestrians and cyclists out of the way. For example, pedestrians were fined for something they had always done: crossing the street diagonally as the shortest distance between two points. Cyclists were punished for riding side by side or too close to cars. And motorists were given the right to speed straight to their destinations. The lobby was successful. If the commentators and the media had once blamed motorists as misusers of the road, liability laws now reduced car owners’ responsibility for accidents.53 General Motors (GM) was part of the coalition between enterprise and high-class users. At its Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, GM showed motorists of the future moving along an automated highway— in 1960. The key concept was fast-moving traffic; slow traffic was forbidden. In GM’s mobility dream, users of the future were middle-class consumers: they lived in suburbs, not cities, and they drove only cars. The mobility case also illustrates how users organized as activists. The powerful new car industry made a strategic alliance with their upper-class and potential middle-class consumers. As users and as citizens, the high-class motorists became activists. High-class car users created powerful touring and automotive clubs. Through these organizations, they lobbied for new road infrastructures. The non-motoring road-user majorities also had their

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own user organizations (for pedestrians and cyclists) that lobbied the state to step in and protect them. This faction, while representing the majority, was far less powerful, however. Thus, a conflict emerged between two kinds of users, each with a different vision for the future: working-class cyclists and pedestrians on the one hand, and wealthy motorists on the other. They clashed over how the streets should be used—and who had the right of way.54 In the Age of Crisis, the conflict was not only about motorists and nonmotorists. The contest was also about individual transportation versus public transit. High-class car advocates wanted to create for urban motorists the freedom to move at a high speed. Accordingly, they wanted to either abolish public transit systems (like trams) or redirect them underground. This was not a socialist utopia of equal distribution, nor was the company’s goal to provide accessibility to all. It was instead a business opportunity that required support from the state to build a highway system financed with public funds—substantial public funds, in fact. So, the argument was not only about who could afford cars. The fight was about how public funds were to be distributed—and with whom the state would side, cyclists and pedestrians or motorists. In the communist Soviet Union, the state sided with lower-class users; leaders invested heavily in public transit (trams and buses) with full subsidies. They discouraged individual transportation (cars). Social democratic politicians were caught between the higher-class motorists’ powerful lobby and their own commitment to a better society for workers. They—along with entrepreneurs invested in trams—wanted workers to use the partially subsidized public transit system. Both communist and social democratic politicians, in other words, imagined users as working-class men and women who needed quick transportation to their jobs in the factories and at harbors. Their vision of the future was based on a new model of socially sustainable mobility. Affordable transit should be accessible to everyone, they reasoned. In the context of this vision, mobility technology was not a commercial good, but a public asset. And the state needed to act on behalf of users to make that asset available. Despite the state’s good intentions, many poorly-paid workers found public transit too expensive; they chose to either walk or cycle to work. *** For users, new technologies like electricity and cars could turn into a nightmare at times. When it came to technology’s failures and fatal accidents, the question was, who was responsible for their design and their use: consumers

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or producers? The law did not always side with users. Consumer-protection laws were in their infancy, but user organizations tried to get laws passed. The issue was not simply a matter of users encountering conflict with enterprise when seeking protection from the government. During the Age of Crisis, the issue was also about who was considered the real user and who was seen as misusing the innovation at hand. In the case of mobility, the conflict was also between different kinds of road users. During the Age of Crisis, policymakers increasingly sided with the mighty car lobby, which included the car industry and traffic engineers. This group proved more powerful than other road users, like pedestrians and cyclists.

2.5 Engineers Hero and villain During the Age of Promise, engineering associations had worked hard to give the new engineering profession credibility and respectability. Successfully so, for the engineer counted as the “king” or “hero” of that era. But in the Age of Crisis, technological nightmares left many unsure of engineers’ status. Electrical engineer William E. Wickenden, President of the Case School of Applied Science (now Case School of Engineering) in Cleveland, Ohio, was an important spokesperson for the engineering profession in the US In 1932, he summarized the current reputation of engineers: In the drama of civilisation, the engineer suddenly finds himself called from manipulating the properties in the back-scene and the wings to play a leading role in the center of the stage, and the public is not yet sure whether he is the hero or the villain of the piece.55

Given that engineers had moved from the backstage to center stage, they were now more visible to those in power. This made engineers a suitable scapegoat in times of crisis. Wickenden noted that the older elites (who felt bypassed by the rise of the engineering profession) were especially likely to place blame for the crisis on the engineer, who, in the words of one critic of the time: reduces everything he touches to hard and fast quantities, as if the problems of life could be solved on a slide-rule and an adding machine;

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he cares nothing for beauty and serenity; he fills our cities with noise and ugliness and the countryside with grime and waste; he standardizes all that he touches; he makes robots out of men by day, and fondly imagines that he can turn them back into men after working hours by giving them bathtubs, radios, and cheap automobiles. This fellow is a philistine, with no love for the human spirit.56

Wickenden and other engineers rejected this negative stereotype. They insisted on the positive reputation of engineers, which engineering societies and schools had worked so hard to build. Wickenden urged his fellow engineers to keep going: The first duty of the engineer in a changing society is to keep civilization running. As in the theater, the show must go on. If, as some critics urge, science and machinery were abandoned and a few hundred thousand engineers were to quit for good, the whole structure of society would come down.57

Apparently, the broader public no longer knew whom to believe. In the popular imagination, the reputation of scientists and engineers was becoming ambiguous. On the one hand, some science fiction in the Age of Crisis depicted the scientist (and engineer) as the story’s hero. In fact, the heroes of these science-fiction plots were more often scientists and engineers than any other profession. On the other hand, the scientist was also frequently depicted as a villain, and this was new. After scientists, the most popular professions for villains were: businessman, politician, and criminal. This held true, with the exception of wartime, when the scientist-villain came in second, after the businessman.58 The reputation of engineers had taken a beating, but it had not been destroyed. In times of trouble, engineers are typically blamed for problems, but they are, in turn, relied upon to solve those problems. Engineers in totalitarian regimes To some degree, engineers could ignore attacks on their reputation and “carry on with the show,” as Wickenden recommended. The repositioning of engineers from the backstage to center stage also entailed powerful politicians demanding engineers’ services as well as their loyalty. In totalitarian regimes, especially, scientists and engineers were caught in an undeniable nightmare.

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Engineers on Trial. After the Second World War, Nazi engineers were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But in 1948, Konrad Meyer (third from left in the dock) managed to convince the Nuremberg judges that his Generalplan Ost—the German plan for colonization of Eastern Europe, expulsing Slavic inhabitants—was based on science, not politics. The judges largely acquitted Meyer, punishing him only for his membership in the German SS.

Certain political regimes saw scientists and engineers as an important strategic asset and a potential threat. Among regimes in this category were Nazi Germany; the communist Soviet Union; Fascist Italy, Spain, and Portugal; and the new communist states in Central Eastern Europe.59 These regimes forced scientists and engineers to support and carry out their policies. Engineers could no longer do their jobs in a non-political way. Any ideological clash with the regime could result in persecution—even execution. Scientists and engineers in these countries were forced to make choices. And the consequences of many of these choices could be harsh indeed. Relatively few engineers sided with the totalitarian regimes; some of the totalitarian sympathizers voluntarily initiated key totalitarian projects. For example, after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, the career of spatial planner Konrad Meyer took off: Meyer worked his way up to become vice-president of the German Research Foundation. He became infamous for designing the Generalplan Ost—the scheme that removed Slavic peoples from occupied Eastern Europe to create Lebensraum (living space)

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for German settlers. In the Netherlands, Anton Mussert was a cum laude graduate in civil engineering from the Delft University of Technology; he had become a chief inspector in the Public Works Agency (Rijkswaterstaat). In 1931, Mussert cofounded the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), a fascist organization; between 1942 and 1945 he assumed the appointed role of leader of the Netherlands. In other cases, engineers became the targets of totalitarian regimes. Soviet engineer Peter Palchinsky is a representative example. Palchinsky had worked closely with the communist authorities in the Soviet Union, but as a spokesman for the engineering profession, he resisted Communist Party attempts to control the engineering organizations. He also criticized some of the Soviet Union’s great engineering works—the world’s largest hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River; the world’s biggest steel plant, Magnitogorski; and the digging of the White Sea Canal by forced labor. Palchinsky deemed such projects “bad engineering” because they were poorly planned, wastefully executed, and ignored worker safety and local conditions. One night, members of the secret police showed up at Palchinsky’s home and arrested him. A year later, his wife read in the newspapers that Palchinsky had been convicted of treason—without a trial. The sentence: execution by firing squad, which had been carried out immediately.60 Throughout the Soviet Union, Stalinist policies fostered the state’s ability to benefit from the services of loyal technical experts, while annihilating rebellious ones. Another example: In Soviet Ukraine, the authorities had founded the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute to assist the development of science-based industries. It became an international center for nuclear physics as well as low-temperature and theoretical physics. But in 1937 and 1938, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, Institute personnel that did not stand fully behind Stalin’s ideas were arrested. Future Physics Nobel Prize winner Lew Landau (who came to be known for his mathematical theory of superfluidity) was imprisoned for a year; leading cryogenics researcher Lev Shubnikov and several other colleagues were secretly executed. What had started as a promising research endeavor had ended in persecution. The victims’ reputations were later restored, but only posthumously.61 During wartime, it was even more dangerous to be an engineer, especially in occupied territories. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, techno-scientific experts and other members of the intelligentsia were seen as potentially powerful rebels. Almost immediately, the occupying forces closed the Warsaw University of Technology and restricted access to higher education. (The same happened elsewhere: when students protested, the Nazi regime that occupied the Netherlands closed the Delft Technical

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University, for example.) In the university town of Krakow, the occupiers invited all academic staff to a public lecture. It was a trap—researchers were imprisoned and deported to concentration camps. Invading Lviv several years later, the Wehrmacht executed more than forty professors and their families only a few days into the occupation. When the fortunes of war changed, however, German engineers refused to work in the Eastern occupied territories; only then did the German authorities reopen engineering schools, to groom engineers who could do the job.62 Most scientists, engineers, and their professional associations did not take extreme positions with totalitarian regimes. To survive, many engineers struck compromises. They agreed to work for totalitarian regimes, in return for personal safety and the opportunity to do science and engineering. Indeed, if the new leaders supported an expert’s projects, that expert was likely to receive more funding. This was the compromise. When the Nazis came to power, party leaders demanded loyalty from the strategically important science and engineering institutions. “Engineers,” said Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, “will decide whether the main demands of National Socialism will find their practical application.”63 Next came a policy of Gleichschaltung of science and engineering: organizations were either submitted to Nazi control or they were eliminated. The Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (German Engineering Society) complied. In return for its continued existence, the society accepted Nazi representatives on their boards, and they announced their support of the Nazi leadership. The society pledged to rebuild Germany, fight unemployment, end raw material shortages, and increase Germany’s military capabilities. The society also pledged to conform to the national civil service code, which included the expulsion of non-Aryan members, especially Jews. Other German engineering organizations made similar decisions, as did professional societies in the fields of chemistry and physics. The society for mathematics followed later, after a few years of refusal. Ultimately, to secure their existence, all organizations were required to align with the new regime. This allegiance to totalitarian rule did not mean that Germany’s scientists and engineers necessarily supported Nazi ideologies. For example, only a small minority of Germany’s 220,000 engineers joined the Nazi Party. But pledging allegiance did help to convince party officials like construction engineer Fritz Todt, head of Nazi technology policy, “to preserve the technical-scientific associations and … to find another way of proceeding than that of doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc., whose earlier associations were all dissolved and replaced by purely National Socialist associations.”64

Pledging allegiance also meant that the members of the professional organizations could work on cutting-edge science and engineering projects, from nuclear physics to the construction of the German motorway system. A new hope Society, enterprise, users, and engineering were in deep crisis. In response, a group of engineers and other experts proposed a solution that would prove highly consequential later on: rely on experts. While all other social groups put their own interests first, they argued, scientists and engineers could provide an objective and neutral analysis of—and solutions to—the many challenges of the Age of Crisis. Scientists, engineers, and other experts could mediate conflict between factions, between politicians, businesspeople, and users, as well as disputes between managers and workers. This approach was called technocracy, and it was carried by an emerging movement. As technocracy proponents in the United States famously phrased it in 1937: Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population of this continent. For the first time in human history it will be done as a scientific, technical, engineering problem. There will be no place for Politics or Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers.65

In the Age of Crisis, this approach to fulfilling technology’s promise was but one of many. It was only after the Second World War that technocracy—as experts defined it—became a powerful, widespread approach to building technological futures.

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The Age of Technocracy, 1945-1970

3.1 Introduction Progress in the war against disease depends upon a flow of new scientific knowledge. New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature, and the application of that knowledge to practical purposes. Similarly, our defense against aggression demands new knowledge so that we can develop new and improved weapons. This essential, new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research.1 Vannevar Bush, Science—The Endless Frontier, 1945

The Age of Crisis had left behind shocking devastations and atrocities. Nations, cities, businesses, and families were in ruins. Society, enterprise, and users faced tremendous challenges; again, many saw technology as the key to solutions. And many asked the questions that we ask today: This time, how do we realize technology’s promises without incurring disaster? The question was especially urgent in the years and decades after the Second World War. With the resurfacing of nationalism and the emergence of the Cold War, people feared a Third World War, and they believed it would be a nuclear one. Before the Second World War, in the 1930s, early advocates of technocracy had suggested that experts take charge. Politicians and commercial managers had steered technology towards war, worker exploitation, and the crash of the world economy, they argued. Engineers, architects, scientists, planners, and other professionals would do better. Neither ideology, nor power struggles, nor profit-making would take the lead; objective scientific methods would steer the process of defining problems, analyzing those problems, and innovating. Experts would set the innovation agenda. And experts would address social problems as engineering challenges. Using the available resources, experts would make optimal choices for society, enterprise, and users. This would steer technology towards a better future. After the war, governments, businesses, and citizens gave experts that mandate to take responsibility. Now, experts addressed major social challenges as engineering problems, and experts became more influential than ever in setting the innovation agenda. We distinguish two main features of this technocratic approach.

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First, experts gained more control over the innovation agenda by asserting the primacy of “basic” research—research that was untainted by either political or commercial priorities. The report quoted at the beginning of this chapter exemplif ies that approach to innovation. Science—The Endless Frontier (1945) was written by electrical engineer and government science advisor Vannevar Bush at the request of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The report was to be a seminal reference for experts, governments, and companies in the US—and beyond—for decades.2 To underscore that the science and technology agenda should be set by experts, Bush distinguished expert-driven “basic research” that should be “performed without thought of practical ends,” from politically or commercially driven “applied research.” Painstaking basic research, he argued, had produced penicillin that had saved countless lives; radar that had decided the war; plant breeding, insecticides and fertilizers that had transformed food production; and the new radio, plastics, and other industries that provided much-needed employment for citizens. This was just the beginning: in the hands of experts, basic research would boost national health and well-being. Other leaders expanded this idea into what innovation analysts came to refer to as “the linear model of innovation.” In 1952, the US National Science Foundation, which was established in response to the Bush report, defined the innovation process this way: “the technological sequence consists of basic research, applied research, and development,” where “each of the successive stages depends upon the preceding.”3 So, innovation began with basic science, then passed through phases of applied research, development, production, and distribution. Ultimately, society, enterprise, and users would profit. Technology-based companies referred to this model when setting up research laboratories and when strengthening basic research functions in existing labs. Statistics bureaus began to label research investment in the categories of “basic/fundamental research,” “applied research,” and “development research.” The investments made in these categories were linked to economic growth. A second feature of the technocratic method was a systems approach to understanding challenges and f inding solutions. Experts addressed complex problems from an integrated, systemic perspective, speaking of “complexes” or “systems.” Experts referenced technical and social components that could be modeled, analyzed, and manipulated. Inspired by electro-technical and mathematical control theory (cybernetics) and its feedback loops, some experts began to develop a generic “systems science” that could be applied to complex technological, urban, and

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biological systems. Like the linear model of innovation, the systems approach, too, proliferated in government as well as corporate planning around the globe. 4 This approach helped experts to treat social challenges “as a scientif ic, technical, engineering problem,” just as the prewar technocracy movement had hoped to do. The approach is still with us today.5 *** In the Age of Technocracy, politicians, managers, and citizens gave experts an unprecedented mandate to make choices on behalf of society, enterprise, and users; but that mandate never amounted to giving technocrats carte blanche. Experts were still obliged to negotiate with technology’s many stakeholders, and the power of the mandate in practice remains a matter of historiographical dispute.6 There were critics of technocracy, too, critics who blamed experts for ignoring environmental issues and bypassing democratic control of technology, for example. Around 1970, these critiques would inspire the new Age of Participation. Before the Age of Participation took root, however, technocracy remained a broadly respected approach to engineering the future (and avoiding new nightmares). In the industrialized world, technocracy was associated with a rise in scientific and technological creativity never before seen. This embraced the successful reconstruction of postwar society, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 60s, almost zero employment, and the distribution of wealth to more social groups than ever before. In the Global South, the technocratic approach promised similar hopes for developing national economies, especially for the many new countries created in the process of decolonization.

3.2 Society Both main features of technocracy marked the technocratic approach to societal challenges. First, experts argued that they, not politicians, should take the lead in setting public research and innovation agenda. Establishing expert-driven “basic research” as the first stage in a “linear model of innovation” was an important step in “making technology non-political.” Second, experts worked on “making politics technical”—translating sensitive political conflicts into engineering challenges. These were to be solved neither by fighting, lobbying, nor voting. Instead, technocrats would use

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systems approaches to develop optimal solutions on behalf of all others—so the argument went. Making technology non-political: The linear model of innovation In his report, Science—The Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush did not invent the categories of “basic” and “applied” research. Those came from industry. But the report—and similar reports in other countries—managed to win politicians’ support for expert-driven basic research. In many industrialized countries, governments gave experts a mandate to establish, organize, and direct publicly funded basic research. Basic research would drive applied research and lead to economic growth, health, and social welfare. This has been called the “macro version” of the linear model of innovation, as opposed to the “micro version,” which differentiates research and development activities within technology-based companies.7 In an effort to meet national policy objectives, politicians gave experts this mandate. In Science—The Endless Frontier, Bush had argued that basic research would fuel American industries and economic competitiveness, as well as boost national defense. Accordingly, the US government established the National Science Foundation, which would pour hundreds of millions of dollars annually into science and engineering at American colleges and universities. In addition, the National Institutes of Health would support biomedical research, and the Atomic Energy Commission would fund nuclear and particle physics. After Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the US government became concerned about losing its technological leadership; the American government established NASA for peaceful atmospheric science and space exploration. Like many others, the US government funded basic-research facilities, enabling scientists and engineers to steer innovation agendas. One of the most iconic examples of an international institution conducting basic research is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN (1954). A consortium of governments, including those of France, Germany, and the UK, founded the organization. The idea was that CERN would be “transparent as a glasshouse” and avoid classified research.8 The focus was on building the world’s largest particle accelerator; the organization refrained from conducting research on nuclear reactors, which had industrial and military implications. The founding governments gave CERN researchers the freedom to do basic research as part of a plan to meet political goals. For example, during this same era, the 1950s, the American government (which had developed and

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Engineering the Lunar Landing. Computer engineer Margaret Hamilton, Director of the MIT Software Engineering Division, standing next to the source code that enabled the moon landing in 1969.

promoted the idea of CERN) strengthened basic research in Europe to foster economic prosperity and transnational community as antidotes to communism; other political goals were to gain access to European knowledge, as well as preoccupy European physicists with non-military research.9 Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg expressed the official German policy: CERN would foster a “spirit of cooperation and mutual understanding,” in the realm of physics and beyond.10 For Heisenberg, and for German science and technology in general, decoupling research and politics also signaled

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a process of rehabilitation after the Second World War: Heisenberg went from being a Nazi scientist compromised by the Nazi uranium project to being a respected CERN expert. Demonstrating another political goal, CERN director Wolfgang Gentner argued that techno-scientific collaboration would promote European integration across the Iron Curtain. For these reasons, among others, European governments gave CERN considerable autonomy and budget. In 1957, CERN’s first synchrocyclotron became operational, and CERN experts have worked on the “next big machine” ever since, including their efforts on today’s Large Hadron Collider. The organization’s basic research produced countless spin-offs, most famously, perhaps, the World Wide Web, which CERN made freely available in 1993. To this day, CERN stands for expert-led decision-making, where rational argument and a shared scientific attitude lead decision-making and conflict-resolution. Politicians and the public still trust that CERN scientists act in the interests of the common good.11 Governments funded many such opportunities for international, expert-led research. For example, academic researchers organized the European Space Research Organisation (1962) according to the CERN model: dedicated to peaceful basic research, autonomous in deciding the organizational structure and scientif ic program, and strict in limiting government and industrial involvement. The European Space Research Organisation was kept separate from rocket development, which was sensitive from a militarily and commercial standpoint. (Only in 1975 did a merger create the European Space Agency, which united basic research and rocket development.) NASA, America’s counterpart to the European Space Agency, also became an international research program involving many European and even Soviet researchers; socialist countries also collaborated through Interkosmos, a former Soviet space program. 12 Later, CERN also served as a model for the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Another example of international basic research can be found in the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was a global collaboration of thousands of nuclear energy experts. Governments founded and funded the organization seeking to maintain or secure a leadership position in “peaceful” nuclear energy technology. Another goal was to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. If a government wanted to acquire a nuclear power plant in, say, Finland, dictatorial Spain, or socialist Bulgaria, that government could draw on international and bilateral nuclear energy relations to build domestic scientific expertise—without gaining access to nuclear weapons capabilities.13

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Trusting Experts. Visitors admiring the blue glow of a small nuclear reactor at the exhibition “Het Atoom” (The Atom), Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, 1957.

So far, we have focused on international research, but this was only a fraction of the basic research that took place at the time. Through national research councils and organizations, many governments mandated domestic experts to do basic research and set national innovation agendas. In Sweden, an emerging leader in research, the government hoped that its domestic technological capabilities would make it self-sufficient—and allow it to be neutral in the Cold War. In the Netherlands, the government sought to compensate for the loss of its former colony, Indonesia. The Dutch government stimulated a knowledge economy—including basic research—in the hope of replacing its product economy, based, in part, on Indonesia’s raw materials. In Germany, one investment in basic research was made through the country’s Max Planck societies; in France, the operative organization was the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS);

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Political Enemies—But Friends in Science. On April 25, 1956, British and Soviet experts openly discussed thermonuclear fusion in Britain’s nuclear research center in Harwell. Scientific collaboration and declassification of fusion research followed. In the photo, Harwell director Sir John Cockcroft (gesturing) discusses with the father of the Soviet atomic bomb Igor V. Kurchatov (middle, with beard) and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (middle, bald), amongst others.

and both the Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships set up basic-research institutes outside the university system. Switzerland appeared to be the exception: it invested in applied—rather than basic—research.14 Starting in the early 1960s, the Organization for European Cooperation and Development (OECD)—the international organization for economic development in the Western world—preached the idea that sequential basic research, applied research, and development led to national economic growth. Accordingly, the OECD championed the linear model of innovation and the pivotal role of experts.15 Expert-led basic research and the linear model of innovation characterize the Age of Technocracy. Some historians and historiographers dispute that, in practice, “basic research” can be distinguished from “applied research” in this era. Another challenging question is: How “basic” and how “autonomous” was basic research—especially in the military realm?16 On the one hand, many embraced the linear model of innovation; even the US military hewed to this model. American leaders in the field of military research spoke explicitly of “basic research.”17 A famous Department

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Tools of Technocracy. Computer engineer and systems scientist Jay Forrester (2nd from right), pictured with the Whirlwind computer at the MIT Digital Computer Lab in 1957. With his MIT team, Forrester used basic research to achieved spectacular breakthroughs in computer science. Later Forrester used computer modeling to analyze complex social challenges—regarding military, urban, industrial, and global resource systems.

of Defense study considered 25 percent of all its research in the 1960s to be “basic or undirected”—even if concentrated in areas “generally relevant to [Department of Defense] missions.”18 The US military’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA, today famous for ARPANET, forerunner of the internet) was seen as an effort “to emphasize pure research,” even if it could not show “that [pure research] might lead to a valid military application.”19 Even if research had a clear application, military and academic researchers might have different perspectives. For example, US military engineers saw the Whirlwind—a vacuum-tube digital computer celebrated as the f irst major real-time control computer—as a component of a new air defense system. For academic engineers at Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it was about funding their research agenda in electronics and computer science. Eventually they collaborated with IBM to produce the Whirlwind at MIT. Its breakthroughs (real-time control, parallel processing, and magnetic core memory, for example) inspired the widespread adoption of business computers in the 1960s.20

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On the other hand, promoting expert-led basic research did not always prevent militaries from developing new nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Many countries that sought nuclear weapons capabilities did not achieve their goal; still, the world’s nuclear arsenal grew rapidly, especially in the US and the USSR. De-politicizing technology remained a painfully limited phenomenon. In sharp contrast to later activist movements, experts in the Age of Technocracy reacted by influencing politicians behind the scenes. For example, in 1955, mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Albert Einstein issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. This political document demanded that world leaders find peaceful solutions to international conflicts. The Manifesto also called on the scientific community to mediate. A series of expert conferences—later named the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs—followed, in which experts and policymakers from the socialist East and capitalist West jointly monitored the nuclear arms race and discussed non-proliferation and ban treaties for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. The conference members shunned media exposure, and participating experts worked behind the scenes. As such, Pugwash, as an organization, was largely unknown to the broader public—until it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, for its contributions to nuclear disarmament.21 This leads us to the question of how scientists dealt with urgent political questions. Making politics technical: A systems approach to societal challenges By pursuing basic research, and by their interventions in the nuclear arms race, experts had shown how their methodology could transcend national, ideological, and political divides. The technocracy movement had suggested that experts could also tackle politically sensitive problems “as an engineering problem.” This was a “technification of politics”—a process of converting political issues to technical issues. The technification of politics was intended to prevent political conflicts from escalating. Crucial to this endeavor was an integrated, systematic approach to societal challenges. These challenges were complex because many technical, social, and environmental issues interacted. Experts began to approach these challenges in terms of systems that contained many interacting components. By cleverly manipulating selected components, one could manage and adjust how the system functioned overall, and optimize system performance.

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We see a concrete example of the systems approach in Dutch hydraulic engineering: the remarkable construction of a national water-supply system between 1940 and 1971.22 In this case, the scarce resource was fresh water from the Rhine River that entered the country on its eastern border, and flowed westward and northward towards the sea. The political conflict: different stakeholders wanted the river’s water for different purposes, from securing Amsterdam’s drinking water and enabling farmers in the northeast to flushing out salty groundwater (the northward flow), to securing intensive agriculture in the West (the westward flow). A political deadlock loomed. Ultimately, it was not politicians but civil engineers who set out to solve the problem. Specifically, engineers from the Public Works Agency, or Rijkswaterstaat. They identified and researched twenty key water uses or “functions” of a hypothetical national fresh water system. They developed a series of possible solutions, and evaluated these in their models of the Dutch river system—mathematical models, electrical models, and hydrological scale models. This led to their optimal solution: through strategically placed weirs, dams, and sluices, engineers were able to manipulate water flows on a national scale to satisfy all stakeholders—as opposed to making a political choice prioritizing some stakeholder needs over others. The national fresh water system became operational in 1971. Referencing this technocratic approach, Rijkswaterstaat became known as “a state within a state”: after all, the organization managed to bypass politicians and solve political conflicts through engineering. In fact, many of the organization’s projects were not approved by politicians, and some projects were “approved” only after key decisions had already been made.23 In tackling the key societal challenges of their time, experts applied systemic thinking that was at times qualitative. Increasingly, however, experts used quantitative modeling and simulation—on a local, national, and international scale. Locally, urban planning had come of age. In the capitalist West as well as the socialist East, urban planners restructured cities according to modernist, functionalist ideals. In 1930, a now-famous modernist architect, designer, and urban planner came on the scene with his model of the “radiant city.” The modernist in question was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier. Using systemic thinking, Le Corbusier divided the city into functional sections, including residential areas (suburbs), commercial districts, factory districts, and leisure districts—all interconnected by express motorways. In the 1950s and 60s, this functional approach became commonplace in the East and in the West. The systemic urban approach

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was supported by new fields, such as traffic engineering; the city was now built for speed and flow.24 Nationally, a key challenge in the Global North was to reconstruct economies and societies devastated by the Second World War. For recently decolonized states in the Global South, the challenge was to construct a national economy. In both cases, national governments gave considerable leeway to experts—economists, engineers, and planners, for example. These experts were to plan society’s course using the various systemic approaches. Planning experiments from the prewar period provided inspiration. In the US, the regional plan for the Tennessee Valley had been developed using a systemic, “multi-purpose plan” that combined river navigation, hydroelectricity production, irrigation and agricultural programs, forestation, and social development programs. In the Soviet Union, the centrally planned electrification scheme and later five-year economic plans linked scarce water, mineral, energy, and food resources to industrial, urban, and social development. After the War, this concept of systemic, multi-purpose planning circulated around the globe. Governments gave experts considerable freedom to plan economic development. In socialist states around the world, engineers and other experts often comprised the majority of the executive branch of government, the politburo, for example. Governments throughout the capitalist West were equally committed to integrated national planning; they mandated experts to set up central planning bureaus or committees. Their goal: develop regional (or national), multi-purpose plans for postwar reconstruction. In the Global South, old and new states set up similar institutions, as evidenced by India and Pakistan, immediately after they gained independence.25 In many places around the world, international security proved to be a key societal challenge. Lacking faith in purely diplomatic solutions, politicians gave experts a mandate to engineer solutions for political problems. Experts from the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank applied their systemic planning approaches to these challenges. The focus was on border regions that were prone to conflict over access to international rivers: the Indus River system in Pakistan and India, the Jordan River in the Middle East, and the Mekong River system in Southeast Asia, for example. In the case of India and Pakistan, both new governments tried to claim the Indus River system’s water. The threat of war loomed. World Bank experts could not induce a joint development plan, but they did broker the Indus Waters Treaty (1960), which divided the available water. Each country

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dew up its own development plan, but a joint committee of experts from India and Pakistan oversaw projects on both sides. In case of conflicts, the treaty stated, a neutral, highly qualified engineer would mediate. This technocratic solution has been credited with preventing a water war; the Indus Waters Treaty has even survived several subsequent wars between India and Pakistan.26 Even more ambitious was the United Nations’ systemic planning approach. One example, from one regional commission: Swedish technocrat Gunnar Myrdal directed the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE, 1947). For his part, Myrdal persuaded the UN General Assembly that the trend in nationalism and escalating East-West tensions could trigger a Third World War. Europe, especially, was at risk, he argued. Myrdal proposed that all countries in Europe—East and West—participate in a joint economic system. Myrdal, too, was a systems thinker: his concept of “circular cumulative causation” posited technology, economy, and society as constantly interacting—sometimes dangerously. On the strength of Myrdal’s direction, the UN Economic Commission for Europe created many technical committees. Thousands of experts from numerous countries hammered out joint solutions—for everything from agriculture to food standards, housing, and energy. This was intended to prevent governments from warring over scarce resources. Experts developed solutions together— and implemented these solutions in their home countries.27 *** We have seen that in the Age of Technocracy, technical experts received a mandate to determine public-innovation agendas. Experts set about solving societal challenges that were politically charged. Basic research and systems thinking were two of their most important tools. Technocrats would later be criticized for evading political and public democratic control. Such critique points to an important aspect of the technocratic approach (which technocrats considered a strength of technocracy): experts argued that decision-making should be content-driven. Experts therefore believed that decision-making should be shielded from political ideologies, national interests, and public opinion. Incidentally, when the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, emerged in the 1950s, it too was organized around experts talking content, shielded from national or public opinion. That legacy is still visible today, in critiques of the European Union’s “technocratic character” and “democratic def icit.”28

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While technocratic approaches came under fire in the West from the late 1960s, these same approaches would spread rapidly in newly-industrializing countries such as the so-called Asian Tigers (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and so on) and China. In China, which emerged as a technological giant in the last decades, still in 2009 eight out of nine members of the politburo were trained engineers.29

3.3 Enterprise The heyday of R&D In enterprise, too, technocracy gained traction. Just as in the public sector, the private sector came to value “basic research” and the “linear model of innovation.” In fact, the Age of Technocracy can also be called the Golden Age of corporate R&D. Many American high-tech companies rose to global prominence in the postwar era. During and after the Second World War, these companies profited immensely from federal government funding of what became known as the military-industrial-university complex.30 Military funders, research universities, and industry pooled research resources, and hightech industries in electronics, computers, aviation, telecommunications, and many others simply boomed. In this context, US corporations such as DuPont (chemicals), General Electric (power engineering, computing), AT&T (communications) and others multiplied their research expenditure and hired fleets of academically-trained researchers. Engineering departments and factory laboratories grew as well. Corporations even started to fund academic disciplines that contributed to their R&D: two of the biggest recipients were the chemistry and physics departments of universities.31 Within these rapidly expanding research and development labs, research leaders implemented a micro-level version of the linear model of innovation. In the early 1940s, US industry maintained 70,000 researchers in 2,200 labs. In the most advanced labs, a prominent industrial consultant noted, stages through which innovation travels included “fundamental research” without any regard for application, “pioneering applied research,” “test-tube research,” and “pilot plants.” After the technology was taken into production, research continued with “product improvement,” “trouble shooting,” and “technical control of process and quality.”32 Universities also occupied a place in this scheme, working on the frontiers of science, from where a “stream of youth carries its results continuously into industry.”33 In the 1950s

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and 60s, different versions of this model spread throughout industry; all started with basic or fundamental research, and, increasingly, all required more steps. In Europe, the thinking was not much different. In the case of Philips, our example of the previous chapters, prominent theoretical physicist Hendrik Casimir led the Philips R&D lab, nicknamed the NatLab, from 1946 to 1972. Casimir also headed a national commission on public basic research. For public research, he had followed the macro version of the linear model; at Philips, he implemented a micro version with six essential research steps. Casimir argued that the innovation process started with “Fundamental Research”—with a capital F and a capital R. This research was the domain of the universities. Academic research, in his view, strove to understand natural phenomena and to discover universal laws, thereby producing fundamental concepts. Without academic Fundamental Research—Faraday’s and Maxwell’s investigations of electromagnetism, for example—electrical and communication technologies would be unthinkable. There would be no transistors without quantum mechanics. Academic theoretical knowledge, however, needed to be “translated” before it could be used for industrial purposes. This was the task of industrial researchers in the central company laboratory, the NatLab. Here, Casimir prioritized “fundamental research”—in lower-case letters. Here, he believed, researchers should maintain complete freedom to set research agendas. This applied only to fields that could yield technical applications: solid-state physics, or molecular spectra, for example. To translate fundamental knowledge into products, the central lab was also expected to do “target research” (finding a substance with certain properties, for example) and “project research” (working on a prototype, for instance). Two more forms of research took place outside the lab, in the factory. These were funded by the product divisions: “Factory engineering” researched the upscaling of the prototype to production processes, and “application research” adapted products to user demands.34 To ensure that experts established a fundamental research agenda independently of commercial managers in the product divisions, the central lab was expected to have its own funding. Philips allocated one percent of the company turnover to the NatLab. This enabled funding to increase by a factor of 26 between 1947 and 1965. Casimir explicitly opposed projectspecific budgeting, fearing that it would hinder research freedom. By the end of Casimir’s term, in 1972, the NatLab employed almost 2,000 research engineers, and it was referred to as a “super-university.” For Philips, just as

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for other large science-based companies, the linear model of innovation was both a strategy and an ideal.35 The linear model in practice: organizational challenges According to the linear model of innovation, user-oriented application research came at the end of the sequence, rather than at the beginning. The advantage was that research agendas set by experts could lead to fundamental new insights never before imagined. This inspired wholly new product classes, even new industries. The danger was a split between the research department on the one hand, and the production, marketing, and sales departments on the other hand. To prevent a disconnect of research and application, cooperation was key; that meant teamwork between people in research, development, production, and marketing.36 The transistor provides an important example of science-driven innovation. The first phase of Philips’ transistor research, which focused on the point-contact transistor, was successful. Philips took inspiration from solid-state physics breakthroughs in US companies, where military research on radar had spurred semiconductor research. AT&T’s Bell Laboratories announced its discovery of the transistor effect in Physical Review in 1948.37 Recognizing that transistors could make Philips’ vacuum-tubes obsolete, the NatLab started fundamental research on solid-state materials. In 1952, they succeeded in developing their own point-contact transistors. Following the linear model, the innovation now moved from the central lab to the product division for vacuum tubes, which set up a semiconductors lab and production facility. In 1953, Philips started commercial production of transistors. The linear model had worked smoothly.38 In contrast, the path from R&D to market for Philips’ second generation of transistors (the layer or junction transistor) was far more difficult. In the layer transistor, a sandwich of emitter, base, and collector was integrated into one crystal. Again, pioneering work had taken place in the US, at Bell labs and RCA.39 And once again, Philips tried to develop the in-house knowledge to produce its own layer transistor. This time, NatLab researchers could not develop a prototype. Dutch universities were of no help—semiconductor technology was not yet on the research and education agenda. So, Philips bought a transistor license from Bell. Now the NatLab could proceed, and soon, the lab presented transistor samples that appeared ready for transfer to the product division. 40 A difference of opinion erupted between NatLab researchers who had worked on the Bell transistor and the product division’s factory-engineering

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lab researchers, who argued that the RCA transistor was more suitable for mass production. To settle the disagreement, researchers were transferred, new equipment bought, and a collaboration committee proposed—to no avail. Only after RCA transistor knowledge became publicly available did the product division manage to develop its own layer transistor. 41 Aligning fundamental research and factory engineering was difficult. More difficult, still, was connecting with markets and users. In the linear model of innovation, the attempt to do this happened last. Companies did invest in what Casimir called application research (how the product could be adapted to users); experts in social science—sociologists, psychologists, marketing researchers—staffed in-house marketing and advertising departments. Mass-production and mass-marketing were said to go hand in hand.42 Given the limitations of the linear model of innovation, however, connecting science-driven innovation to the appropriate markets remained a major challenge. Health research conducted at Unilever, the multinational giant, provides an intriguing example of the linear model in practice. The company acknowledged that, in the postwar era, cardiovascular disease had become the major health challenge in wealthy societies; it was the primary cause of death, in fact. The company also defined a relevant commercial opportunity: Unilever’s margarine contained much less saturated fat—blamed for cardiovascular disease—than the alternative, butter. Establishing a new biomedical lab, Unilever began to conduct fundamental research on fats and health; the company produced cutting-edge scientific contributions. When medical professionals (professional users, in our terminology) requested that Unilever create a cholesterol-lowering fat in edible form, the company hesitated. Unilever researchers went to work, but they dis­ agreed about whether the new margarine should be classified and sold as a scientific product or a consumer product. It became chiefly a scientific one, sold to a small professional market—Blood Cholesterol Lowering fat (BCL, hence the later brand name Becel) was available to the public only from hospitals and pharmacies—and by prescription. Unilever had missed the consumer market opportunity. Only when its competitors had pioneered the market did Unilever further develop and sell the product worldwide as a healthy margarine, under brand names such as Becel, Flora, and Promise (in the US). 43 Unilever’s Becel had been a challenge to launch; but ultimately, it became a global success. The linear model of innovation could have proved far more of an obstacle. Consider the central lab at DSM, a Unilever competitor. Many successes had helped DSM to diversify. Tellingly, the company did,

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however, fail to market synthetic lysine, a vital amino acid that Japanese and American firms were also developing. In this case, DSM’s Central Lab and Commercial Affairs department worked well together, agreeing that synthetic lysine should be added to many foods. Central Lab research began in 1957; a pilot plant followed in 1960. In 1964, the company started factory engineering of a full-scale plant. A new Biological Experimental Station, soon placed under Commercial Affairs, conducted applied research, but the company hit an obstacle when the plant became operational in 1968: marketing and sales had neglected to secure approval for adding synthetic lysine to foods. Among the target foods for lysine were bread, baby food, and peanut butter. The companies producing those foods had not granted approval; nor had the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization or other development programs. After merely six months of production, the plant closed. The science-driven innovation trajectory had become an expensive—and, for researchers, a traumatic—failure. 44 Systems approaches in business planning Coordinating the linear model of innovation during its many stages of development was a major business-planning challenge. Another management challenge was negotiating the technology company’s accelerating size and complexity. Failures aside, in this period of corporate growth, central research labs were helping to create many more product families within the same company. Research-based companies were diversifying their product portfolios and growing fast. The trend in diversification was amplified by the process of conglomeration—companies merging. Starting in the 1960s, companies were increasingly active in acquisitions and mergers. A company that was not part of a conglomerate tended to diversify into product lines that fit with its original core activity. In contrast, a conglomerate was likely to maintain unrelated product lines under the umbrella of one parent company. Examples of conglomerates include the British construction-materials firm Hanson, which expanded from bricks into energy. German giant Krupp expanded from the steel industry into electronics, aerospace, and nuclear technology. American telecom giant IT&T even entered the hotel market (the Sheraton hotel chain) and the rental-car business (Avis). 45 Large, diversified technology companies were organized into parallel product divisions. But this structure was difficult to manage. To tackle this business challenge, experts used systems approaches, as they had done in addressing complex societal challenges. In the early 1950s, British,

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American, and Swedish experts argued that systems approaches would help to stabilize companies with multiple parallel divisions; a systems approach would help align conflicting goals within the organization. 46 A vice president of the US conglomerate Litton Industries (an electronics firm that diversified into shipbuilding, foods, and construction) said in 1969: “The systems approach enables a firm to enter across a wide variety of industries. From a systems standpoint, there are no industries, only problems to be solved and a methodology for solving them.”47 This particular systems approach stemmed from military innovation and operations, which entailed particularly complex logistics. A new discipline, Operations Research, emerged to optimize existing military operating systems, using mathematical modeling, simulation, and optimization. In wartime Britain, physicists, mathematicians, and engineers had optimized the early-warning radar system. Experts had to address a range of interacting elements that included radar equipment, communication networks, gunfire control, and personnel behavior (perceived as the weak link). The radar system’s heroic role in the Battle of Britain lent the method credibility. In the US, the RAND Corporation advanced the idea of Operations Research for choosing the optimal future system, calling the method “Systems Analysis.” To deal with the uncertainties of future scenarios, RAND Corporation experts worked with decision theory (game theory), organizational theory, statistics, econometrics, and linear as well as dynamic programming. With Systems Analysis, expert teams could analyze complex offensive and defensive warfare simulations. Experts contended with huge numbers of variables in many interconnected equations; they made informed decisions about alternative military systems that would minimize costs or maximize damage.48 These approaches were soon applied to industrial challenges. “Military OR [Operations Research] in time of peace will be followed by industrial OR, where the efficiency of different industrial processes will be studied in the same way, with mathematical/statistical methodology,” explained Swedish mathematical statistics professor Harald Cramér in 1947.49 His research group proceeded to conduct commissioned operations research, such as optimizing newspaper distribution and steel-industry transportation. In the late 1950s, leading operations-research groups established the International Federation of Operations Research Societies for “the development of operational research as a unified science and its advancement in all nations of the world.”50 The approach spread. On a tactical level, Operations Research helped make the production process more efficient. On a strategic level, Systems Analysis helped experts to make informed choices about companies’ future alternatives: how to organize, where to locate, and which markets to enter.

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In the 1960s, “System Dynamics” would address even more difficult and abstract business challenges. Jay Forrester—the MIT computer engineer who had directed the Whirlwind computer project as part of the US air defense system—studied the conglomerate General Electric “not as a collection of separate functions, but as a system in which the flows of information, materials, manpower, capital equipment, and money [determine] growth, fluctuation, and decline.”51 Modeling and simulating industries as dynamic systems helped analyze “overshoot and undershoot” in these flows. For example, overproduction often led to a management decision to close facilities, a move that led to underproduction; overemployment and underemployment alternated; and so on. Forrester and others argued that managers who lacked a systemic view often mistook the symptom for the cause; their actions tended to worsen the problem, rather than to solve it. Dynamic modeling and simulation would suggest better strategies, despite the possibility of those strategies feeling counter-intuitive to managers. *** Just as politicians had given experts a mandate to tackle societal challenges, industry managers gave experts a mandate to address business challenges. Experts had set public innovation agendas and addressed societal problems using a macro version of the linear model of innovation, and a “macro version” of the systems approach. To set corporate innovation agendas and solve the challenges of enterprise, they developed a more specific “micro version” of the linear model of innovation. Experts also used highly specific systems approaches. These developments were characteristic of large, multi-divisional firms that increasingly dominated the business landscape. We must remember, however, that a huge number of small and medium-sized enterprises existed. To some degree, these smaller organizations tapped into research through joint-research institutes—applied-research institutes such as the German Fraunhofer Society, the Dutch TNO, and the Australian CSIRO, for example—as well as trade associations.52 Critics would later argue that the experts who addressed societal problems bypassed politicians. In the case of enterprise, especially large companies, critics would lament that computer models biased—rather than informed—the decisions made by top management. Critics would also attack the marginal role of product divisions, marketing, and user research in setting the agenda for innovation. What, then, did technocratic approaches imply for users?

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3.4 Users Consumer appliances in the age of “projected users” In the Age of Technocracy, experts increasingly projected their ideas onto users. Experts did not ask users what they wished or desired; rather, experts claimed they knew best what users wanted. Experts’ projections of what users wanted easily found their way onto innovation agendas—agendas produced by linear models of innovation as well as by systems approaches. What role did these projections play in innovation? We see examples in cases of tension between projected users and real users. In the previous section, we examined the case of Unilever and margarine, which showed how corporations working with a linear model of innovation could lose touch with user-consumers. In this example, even experts in special divisions that studied users had initially missed the emerging mass market of household consumers who were open to buying margarine. Our next example, the case of the microwave oven at Philips, allows us to more closely scrutinize the mismatch between projected users and real users. As a leading radio vacuum-tube producer, Philips had great expertise in magnetron technology—vacuum tubes that generate microwaves. Expertise or no expertise, Philips largely missed the consumer market of microwave ovens—one of the largest remaining applications for vacuum tubes after the advent of the transistor.53 Why was that? During the Second World War, magnetron technology had been used in British radar systems. In 1946, American companies had already extended the technology’s range use and begun marketing it for the purposes of heating food. Philips, too, worked on commercializing magnetron technology, but the company’s NatLab research engineers focused solely on high-tech military users throughout the 1940s. In the process, engineers ignored the fact that mass-market magazines for the home had begun to advertise the microwave oven as a kitchen appliance. By the mid-1950s, European competitors were also selling microwave ovens for large kitchens—on passenger ships, as well as in hospitals and military canteens—and Philips became interested in microwave ovens. Marketing research showed that, in addition to these professional markets, competitors worked on ovens for home cooking. Philips’ household technology division decided to enter the arena, acknowledging that microwave ovens might revolutionize domestic food preparation. After all, microwaves could not only cook food: these simple, user-friendly ovens could also reheat

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pre-cooked food. Philips approached Unilever to develop frozen processed meals that could be reheated at home—using a microwave oven. In the years that followed, however, Philips researchers chose to focus on professional microwave cooking rather than reheating. Radiation experts experimented with cooking meat to the desired level of doneness and texture on the “microwave stove,” for example. Bypassing ordinary housewives, the marketing division focused on professional cooks; these users matched Philips’ self-image as a “high-tech” company. Betting that household consumers would only later adopt the new technology, Philips ended its collaboration with Unilever. In 1960, its first oven for the professional food market was ready. The projected market of professional cooks in commercial kitchens proved diff icult to develop, and Philips eventually dismantled its microwave-oven production line altogether. In the short run, however, this projection of the professional cook’s needs proved hard to relinquish. For, as dieticians in Philips’ in-house home economics lab observed in retrospect, in the culture of male experts it was diff icult, especially by women, to argue for a more realistic understanding of the microwave market.54 The home-economics lab had been created to bridge the product-development division and the commercial divisions; engineer Frouke Bosma led the home economics lab. In the 1960s, Bosma’s team discouraged marketing the microwave as a miraculous, high-tech cooking appliance that would replace existing stoves. Instead, the home economics lab recommended the microwave be positioned as low-tech, inexpensive, and user-friendly, an additional household appliance strictly for reheating meals. Experts in Philips’ marketing division failed to follow Bosma’s professional advice. Marketing experts insisted that the microwave oven was destined to revolutionize—not to become a mere add-on in home kitchens. This is how Philips, despite its technological expertise, missed out on a household-appliance market that soon took off in the UK, Germany, Japan, and many other countries. Competitors developed the market for affordable, comparatively low-tech, user-friendly technology. Philips’ focus on high-tech research and professional users had failed to identify the huge market of end users. Philips would again try to enter that market in 1974, but even eleven years later, in 1985, the company was targeting only a modest 10 percent market share. Philips’ domestic market, the Netherlands, was a late adopter of the microwave. Only in the 1980s did home healthcare programs like Meals on Wheels kick-start the popularity of domestic microwave ovens.55

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Projected users in the built environment Social housing provides another example of how technocrats projected users rather than consulting actual users. Immediately after the Second World War, housing was in severe crisis. In many European countries, technocratic government committees studied the housing question. Seeking solutions to the massive lack of dwellings of sufficient quality, committees convinced the state to initiate large-scale affordable housing projects. For instance, influenced by British and American developments, Swedish technocrats persuaded the state to initiate its “one million houses in ten years” program.56 In the Netherlands, the goal was to partner with the construction industry to build 100,000 housing units per year. In 1962, the one-million mark was reached in the city of Zwolle; the two-million mark was reached in Apeldoorn in 1972. In these projects, standardization and large-scale production were favored over customizing the housing. In their designs for large-scale social housing, architects, architectural engineers, and urban planners barely considered real users—the very people who were to live in their dwellings. Instead, these experts thought of users as idealized residents. In trying to “do the right thing” for these projected users, modernist architects insisted on designs that separated spaces according to their functions. For example, the kitchen was for preparing food, the dining room for eating, and the bedroom for sleeping. But modernist architects also had an aesthetic reason for separating rooms: the modernists hated clutter of any kind. In fact, they considered the people who would live in these buildings old-fashioned. According to these modernists empowered to build social housing, future residents needed to be taught how to be modern. Users should adapt to modern technologies, rather than the other way around.57 Pushing back against these modernists, residents of public housing often responded in subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, ways. Many residents of public housing came from working-class and rural backgrounds. These residents were accustomed to living in one large room where they ate, slept, and worked. They resisted single-purpose rooms. Many turned kitchens into multi-purpose living rooms. And, breaking the rules, residents tore down kitchen walls. They moved tables—and even beds—into the kitchen. This was not how it was “supposed” to be. But it happened in the social democratic and capitalist West. It also happened in the Socialist East. In this political context, Hungarian citizens took their resistance even further. Many ignored the state’s housing plan entirely. And, working with family and friends, many people built their own houses. We call these users subversive or rebellious, because they acted contrary to the way that

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Users and Experts. From 1945, Women’s Advisory Committees took on the role of representing users in designing Dutch social housing. In this 1970 photo, an advisory committee member participates in a meeting in Utrecht. These committees were a rare example of institutionalized user influence on technology choices in the Age of Technocracy.

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engineers, designers, and planners wanted them to. These acts of rebellion may have been minor, but they were significant. Note that in the Age of Technocracy, these were mostly individual acts—not the result of users organized in movements. Observing these conflicts, home economists tried to mediate between the state, architects, and residents. By listening to residents’ opinions, the home economists tried to offer practical solutions and relieve tensions between designers and users. For example, home economists advised using dish racks and installing easy-to-clean surfaces in social housing. Home economists thought little of expensive, high-tech household solutions, and they rejected the idea of architects deciding how people should live. Home economists also believed they offered unique expertise, claiming their knowledge was different from that of architects and politicians. They also saw themselves as unique spokespeople for residents—the one-and-only group that voiced the needs and wishes of housing-technology users. So, as was typical for the Age of Technocracy, home economists, too, cast their arguments in the language of expertise. Overall, citizens had only a narrow communications channel for expressing their needs and wants. In the Netherlands, for example, a multitude of local volunteer Women’s Advisory Committees—supported by local governments—offered some feedback on behalf of residents. Once plans were drawn, committee members gave architects practical advice. In this way, volunteers tried to prevent architects from using impractical materials; from having electrical outlets installed incorrectly, and from hanging doors the wrong way, for example. Again, these were small but significant interventions.58 Listening mainly to engineers and architects, decision-makers devised standardized solutions. Family-sized housing was the standard. Neither residents nor their spokespeople had the power to fundamentally change the blueprint of these large-scale housing projects. No housing for single people, students, or the elderly was built during this period. In short, as citizens and as consumers, users had little say in social housing. Users and the systems approach: the car-centered city In the domain of mobility, we have already seen how modernist urban planners and traffic engineers used systems approaches to revamp cities. These technocrats separated cities into districts according to their different functions. Modernists connected city districts via mobility systems, then optimizing these systems for speed and flow.

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The Cynical Side of Traffic Separation. This 1934 cartoon from the British national cycling association parodies early attempts at traffic separation. In the Age of Technocracy, separating fast from slow traffic became the norm. Traffic separation contributed to the rise of the car-centered city—by pushing slow road users to the side.

Experts imagined that the projected users of these systems would travel by car or high-tech public transit systems like subways—despite the fact that few people owned cars, with the exception of the US. Experts persisted in imagining that citizens would have cars in the near future. Shell Oil’s City of Tomorrow campaign of 1937 and General Motors’ Futurama exhibit

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at the World’s Fair of 1939 supposedly portrayed everyone’s future. After the Second World War, experts prompted governments and the automotive industry to team up, and a massive amount of money was invested to make car-owning a reality. All over the world, massive investments were made in large-scale national highway-building projects—for military purposes, as a way of creating jobs, and as a way of growing national economies. In projecting and designing the car-based society and the car-based city, experts largely ignored most existing road users—pedestrians and bicyclists. These parties were forced to make way for the future of mobility: cars and high-tech public transport. (Today, city planners see bicycles as a sustainable technology that may save polluted and congested cities; in the 1950s and 60s, it was cars and public transport that represented progress.59) In the US, General Dwight Eisenhower strongly supported car mobility. He had been inspired by autobahns, having seen the German highway system when he helped liberate Europe. Through the Highway Trust, the US Federal Government subsidized interstate highways for 55 billion dollars between 1956 and 1973. The US government also subsidized state and urban highways, paying 50 percent of the total cost. Almost no federal money was invested in either public transportation or in walking and cycling infrastructures. In New York, the famous urban planner Robert Moses demolished neighborhoods for the purpose of giving cars easy access to the city.60 Meanwhile, mobility statistics in Europe looked very different. In the late 1930s, some in Europe speculated that, in the US, there was one bicycle for every seventeen cars—while in Europe, there was one car for every seven bicycles.61 Bikes were still the favored means of transport for the working class, the middle class, and, sometimes, the upper class. Despite the popularity of the bicycle, planners throughout Europe began to optimize urban systems and flows for motorized traffic and high-tech public transport. The planners’ priority reflected clearly in their main solution: traffic separation. By separating slow and fast traffic, motorists would be able to both bypass the city and enter the inner city via motorway. The construction of dense networks of highways, ring roads, and radial access roads followed. In contrast to cars, bicycles had a negative effect on traffic capacity, experts decided: bicycle traffic had to be curbed. And so their solutions either did not include biking, or included bicycle lanes as an add-on to purge slow traffic from the main road, enabling fast traffic to proceed. The process varied from city to city. In some US and Italian cities, cyclists were called “pests” or “mosquitos,” and they had to be stamped out. In Antwerp, Belgium, cyclists complained that they were treated as the “pariahs of the road.” In Amsterdam, planners were more tolerant:

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cyclists were considered “problem children” who needed to be disciplined into becoming proper street users.62 Traffic engineers generally thought of cyclists as reckless, unpredictable, undisciplined, and working-class—and some bicyclists began to cultivate this image of independence and freedom. They parked their bikes wherever they liked, ignored traffic signs and traffic police, and passed cars on the left and right. So, in the Age of Technocracy, cycling’s share of the total number of city trips fell steeply—from over 70 percent (and sometimes over 90 percent) in the early 1940s to under 40 percent in the most bicycle-friendly cities (such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen). By 1970, cycling often dipped below 10 percent (as in Stockholm and Basel).63 In some places, like Stockholm, planners were extremely successful. In other places, planners overplayed their hand. In Amsterdam, for example, city plans to turn historic canals into parking lots triggered massive resistance, and the plans were shelved. In Eastern Europe, socialist authorities discouraged private-car ownership and promoted public transport. For example, in early-1940s Budapest, biking was still a dominant mode of transit, but in the 1950s, development plans banished the city’s cyclists. This was said to be “for their own good”— to prevent accidents. An inexpensive and elaborate subway network became Budapest’s transport backbone. In time, residents started to see biking as a decidedly unmodern “peasant technology.”64 *** In a time in which “people wanted goods, not gods,” as one prominent historian put it, the consumer society arrived in the developed world.65 Many people got what they had dreamt of—a modern house, a car, fashionable clothing, appliances, gadgets. But in terms of access to the innovation process and technological decision-making, real users’ influence decreased dramatically. Experts debated—mostly among themselves—what users wanted; their high-tech projections of users dominated innovation choices. Experts also tended to assume that users would sooner or later adapt to their research-based choices. Some criticized this limited role assigned to real users; critics recognized how the real users’ limited role played out in car culture, for example. During the Age of Technocracy, individual critics did protest cars. In their writings, these individuals denounced the mass-scale highway projects. And critics argued against prioritizing automobility over other forms of personal transport. In France, the artist Guy Debord, who began his protests in 1959, condemned city planners for misidentifying cars as a means of

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transportation. Debord claimed that cars were not a mode of transport but a status symbol. In the Netherlands, artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys voiced the idea that traffic invaded social space; he also claimed that cars violated human rights. In her famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), US writer Jane Jacobs led the protest against cars. She wrote that urban planners and “highwaymen with fabulous sums of money and enormous powers at their disposal … do not know what to do with automobiles in cities.”66 The American architecture critic Lewis Mumford also objected to cars, writing in 1963: “The motorcar shapes and forms. Mutilates and deforms might be better words…. The heart of the city should be served chiefly by rapid transit, buses, taxis, and above all the human foot. The choice is clear and urgent: Does the city exist for people, or for motorcars?”67 At the time, these critics operated as independent individuals. They were intellectuals who lived in cities and spoke out for public transportation, for cyclists, and for pedestrians. As critics, they did not yet represent a broadbased social movement. That would come later, in the Age of Participation.

3.5 Engineers Growth in influence and numbers Nations were undergoing great changes: they were struggling to rebuild after the ravages of war—or after hard-won fights for independence from colonial powers. Governments across the world called in a huge corps of scientists, engineers, and other professionals. These experts staffed large new research institutes that worked on nuclear physics, computers, space exploration, and national plans. They also developed social housing, national energy networks, mobility systems, telephone and TV networks, and military infrastructure. Industry had reorganized along the lines of the linear model of innovation; it needed even greater numbers of scientists and engineers—for research, production, development, organization, and management. In these government and industry departments, engineers and scientists increasingly directed the course of innovation. The goal was to develop solutions to societal, enterprise, and user challenges. Engineers and scientists could address these challenges because, in part, they had the expertise: they knew how to frame research agendas and develop solutions before handing them over to politicians and managers. Engineers and scientists also came

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to have direct power. In technology companies, CTOs and many CEOs held advanced technical or university degrees—especially in the booming sectors of construction, energy, chemicals, and electronics. In national and local government, leading civil servants were often engineers, especially in public works, transport, agriculture, urban planning, environment, and construction departments and agencies.68 As we have seen, in socialist countries, engineers even made up a substantial share of the national government’s executive function, the politburo. In these positions, high-ranking scientists and engineers could influence decision-makers—or make decisions themselves—to increase the number of educated engineers. Throughout the world, governments, militaries, industry, and engineering associations teamed up and invested massively in technical universities and schools. For their part, young men and women eagerly enrolled in technical and science education. Once again, engineering had become one of the most prestigious professions. This made engineering extremely attractive to ambitious young men. Challenging stereotypes, young women also entered the engineering profession—in growing numbers. This held especially in socialist countries. In East Germany, for example, the percentage of women among engineering students jumped from 4 percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 1971; most of these new women engineering students studied mechanical or electrical engineering.69 Accordingly, the number of engineering schools and universities multiplied. In the US, the number of educated engineers more than tripled, from approximately 260,000 in 1940 to 800,000 in 1960. In the Soviet Union, their numbers grew from 250,000 in 1940 to more than 600,000 by 1953. Both countries trained even larger numbers of technicians in lower- and mid-level technical schools. China rapidly followed the Soviet example and soon turned out huge numbers of engineers. In England, it was observed that “the nation was concerned, as never before, with the education and training of scientists and technologists for research, production and management.”70 In smaller countries like the Netherlands, the number of technical schools and universities also multiplied. In the Global South, where science and technology stood center stage in development programs, new universities and technical schools boomed. This held for countries from Colombia to newly independent India. Often, international organizations (such as ­U NESCO) or foreign governments co-funded technical schools and universities. Tellingly, the Scientific Manpower Committee set up in India immediately upon independence reported that the county needed engineers. They cited the need for 60,000 engineers, 25,000 scientists, and 20,000 doctors over the next decade. In response, the Indian government

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set up technical schools and universities. The government also sponsored students to go abroad and earn degrees in engineering or agriculture from the US and UK.71 Government and industry funders often viewed these educated experts as national assets. Funders saw the relevance of scientists and engineers to domestic industrial, economic, social, and military development. But this sponsorship of foreign study also engendered the “brain drain” controversy that emerged as of the 1960s. Developed countries employed not only their own nationals, but foreign nationals with engineering degrees. These educated professionals chose to work in countries in which their professional prospects were brighter, their skills in high demand. The term brain-drain was coined for British experts leaving for attractive positions in the US. The term spread rapidly when newly educated engineers in developing countries emigrated to a small number of advanced countries. At the time, countries in which the brain drain took place included Argentina, Colombia, Greece, India, Iran, Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, and Turkey. Engineers and scientists were emigrating to developed regions like the US, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. For example, each year from 1961 to 1965, Greece lost 35 percent of its fresh engineering graduates to Northwestern Europe and the US; another 10 percent lived outside their home country temporarily.72 Theory and science The engineering profession was also changing qualitatively. One of the most pervasive changes took place along the lines of the linear model of innovation: given that basic or fundamental research was seen as key to innovation, theory and science were increasingly emphasized and valued. Usually, this took place at the expense of practical skills and experience, which were associated with later stages in the linear model. By the mid-1950s, the Conference of Commonwealth Engineering Societies and the Conference of Engineering Societies of Western Europe and the United States discussed the profile of the modern engineer: “A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems,” as opposed to engineering technicians who applied proven techniques.73 Back home, national engineering societies worked to institutionalize academic engineering as a science. For example, in the US, engineering became a division of the National Science Foundation in 1964. During that

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same year, a national academy of engineering was established under the auspices of the American Academy of Sciences. Socialist countries had already followed the Soviet model, in which a national academy of sciences presided over the most prestigious technical research institutes: metallurgy, power engineering, and nuclear engineering, for example. In the East and West, engineers had become scientists, and it became commonplace to speak of engineering knowledge in terms of the “engineering sciences.” In engineering education, accordingly, the mathematical and scientific content of the curriculum increased greatly. Even in the UK and US, the rich tradition of shop-floor engineering education all but disappeared. As elsewhere, field training and practical skills such as drafting and surveying were replaced by courses in fundamental sciences, mathematics, and engineering science. There had been precursors, including courses in radio engineering, for example; but only after 1945 did Engineering Science become the dominant model at leading US technical universities.74 At lower-level and intermediate technical schools, too, theory and science increased. European Community countries worked on a higher status for non-academic engineering programs. For instance, following Germany, France, Belgium, and the US, mid-level Dutch technical schools were elevated to the status of higher-level technical schools. This empowered them to grant graduates the title of engineer (although this was considered a lower-level degree than the one granted to university-level engineers).75 This push for theory and science—at the expense of practice—followed what has been called the “scientific revolution in technology” that produced a “quantum jump in engineering knowledge” in the 1950s and 60s.76 Three arguments accompanied the push for more theory and science. The first was that this revolution would lead to increased market demand for scientifically trained engineers. As a manager of the chemical firm DSM argued: “the standards with respect to knowledge of applied materials, safety and lay-out have substantially increased, and a machinist or someone with intermediate technical training does not meet them anymore.”77 A second argument concerning engineering as a career prevailed in technical universities. Simply put, prewar engineers had built machines and kept them running; their meager early theoretical education was enough to serve them throughout their professional lives. To engineers in the postwar era, this no longer applied. As electrical engineer and MIT dean Gordon S. Brown framed it in 1962: “It took only about ten years for engineers to mass produce jet engines after the basic concepts of jet propulsion were understood. Almost overnight the skills of many engineers in designing piston engines became worthless. Now rocket propulsion and

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nuclear propulsion threaten to compete with the jet engine.”78 The same happened in the cryogenics and semiconductor sectors. To keep up with such accelerating knowledge developments during their careers, academic engineers needed the mindset and the training of fundamental science. A third argument for increased theory and science content in engineering education stressed the goal of cultivating innovation leadership. Engineers needed to be leaders, not followers, in innovation. Brown summarized: There is a great need these days for the engineer whose main efforts are in the opening up of new vistas, who is very much at home in physics, mathematics, and chemistry, who has close relations with scientists, who is strong in scientific concepts and the ability to synthesize them, and who is motivated to exploit them. Sometimes this person is called the engineer-scientist.79

Ironically, turning engineering into a science also created new challenges to the engineering profession. More and more, engineers were working side by side with trained scientists. In the scientific pecking order, however, the highest prestige and public esteem was awarded to the most theoretical and abstract fields. For example, theoretical physicists—rather than engineerscientists—were credited for advances in nuclear energy, aerospace, and electronics. Scientists also competed with engineers for the same jobs.80 To counter this, engineering associations made it a priority to distinguish the engineering sciences from the natural sciences. Now, a form of systems thinking entered the argument. The engineer-scientist could do more than natural science: “the creative aspect rests in the engineer’s ability to relate seemingly unrelated events of nature, whether abstract or tangible, in quantitative ways, to make new and useful theories, materials, devices, complex systems, and especially systems in which men interact with machines,” Brown noted in 1962.81 Engineering associations maintained that curricula, such as Brown’s at MIT, should teach basic science and the scientific method as well as quantitative modeling. The goal of modeling was to integrate the multitude of seemingly unrelated variables contained in a single project. In this scenario, students needed to develop an “interdisciplinary capacity” if they were to solve the complex problems of their times.82 This systemic approach also included studying the social sciences, life sciences, and the humanities. Brown and others considered these disciplines especially important, given the expectation that engineers assume leading positions in society and business. Engineering majors at the leading US technical universities (which

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were also considered leading globally) allocated roughly twenty percent of their studies to courses in the humanities and the social sciences.83 Professional independence and ethical codes In the Age of Technocracy, a related institutional change in engineering concerned professional independence versus loyalty to employers. An important technocratic sentiment was that engineers and other experts— rather than politicians or businesspeople—should steer technological innovation and social change. In this scenario, engineers would no longer be obedient servants of their patrons: government and business. Given that most engineers worked in business or government, a dilemma loomed: whether to choose professional independence or bureaucratic loyalty.84 In 1939, Vannevar Bush—then still dean at MIT—had warned engineers: without a professional spirit “we may as well resign ourselves to general absorption as controlled employees … with no higher ideals than to serve as directed.”85 Arthur E. Morgan, who pioneered systemic technocratic planning and directed the Tennessee Valley Authority, subscribed to the same idea as Bush. Morgan, too, feared that the engineer who worked in bureaucracies tended “not to be a free agent, but a technical implement of other men’s purposes.” Morgan also expressed concern that engineering organizations “might just degenerate into a tool to discipline members along lines of policy which their employers happen to be following.”86 The Second World War appeared to prove both men right. After the War, engineering societies increasingly developed strategies to strengthen the professional independence of individual members. A prime example of increased independence from business comes from one of the world’s largest engineering societies, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), created in 1963 from merging the Institute of Radio Engineers and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. In 1967, the Engineers Joint Council—an umbrella organization for American engineering societies—announced that corporations could become members. In response, the IEEE immediately withdrew from the Council to preserve their professional independence. That sent a strong message to the organization’s members.87 The will to protect professional independence from business and government also motivated advocates to rewrite engineering societies’ professional codes of conduct—guidelines that outlined responsible professional behavior for members.88 Early professional codes had prioritized the value of the engineers’ trustworthiness for clients and employers: “the

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engineer should consider the protection of a client’s or employer’s interests his first professional obligation,” read the professional code of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers of 1912.89 Many engineers simply assumed that employer loyalty was also in the public interest. Many felt that the atrocities of the Second World War made that assumption obsolete. This sentiment was especially strong in Germany, where engineers collaborating with Nazi officials had been put on trial. The German Engineering Association tried to make a fresh start. In 1950, it organized the first of a series of congresses with philosophers to address engineers’ social responsibility and the consequences of technology for humanity. Engineer responsibility, a participant report stated, had previously referred to tasks like building a reliable machine or guaranteeing a precise tool. Responsibility for how that machine or tool would be used rested with the employer, not with the individual engineer. That was about to change. The Association now introduced an oath: new members were to pledge not to work for employers who failed to respect human rights, for example. Instead, the German engineer would “work with respect for the dignity of human life so as to fulfil his service to his fellow men without regard for distinctions of origin, social rank, and worldview.”90 In the US too, engineering societies adapted their professional codes to prioritize allegiance to the public rather than the employer: engineers should take an interest in public welfare and “have due regard for the safety of life and health of the public.”91 Similarly, scientists and engineers from the UK, US, Japan, and India set up the Society for Social Responsibility in Science (1949), for which they later wrote a manifesto (1953) that argued for the linear model (“the spirit of free inquiry is essential to scientific research”) as well as social responsibility: “Each person has the individual and moral responsibility to consider the end results of his work as far as he can see them,” the manifesto stated.92 These examples became key references in later debates on engineering ethics throughout the world. The tide turns In the Age of Technocracy, the engineering profession reached another high point in reputation. Later generations of engineers often looked back with melancholy to this golden age. After all, engineering enjoyed respect from the public and from corporations. Engineers also led innovation, maintained research autonomy, and received ample funding. Perhaps to share in the reputational wealth, non-engineering experts often viewed themselves as a kind of engineer. Mathematical economist

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Jan Tinbergen was one such expert. Tinbergen applied dynamic models to economic processes, for which he won the first Nobel Prize in economics. Tinbergen was a cofounder of the Dutch Central Planning Bureau. And he saw his field of econometrics as an “engineering science.”93 Also telling is the more positive role of engineers and technology in science fiction. Prewar villains frequently took the form of insane scientists or engineers. Prewar robot stories featured machines and robots conquering the world and enslaving humans. Postwar narratives diverged, however. Villains that appeared in postwar fiction typically took the form evil forces such as totalitarian regimes or mega-companies. These dark forces used known technologies—from drugs to the media—to control populations. And postwar robot stories could take a constructive direction, as in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (nine short stories published between 1940 and 1950). These stories explore the interrelationships between humans, robots, and morality. Reminiscent of the ethical codes described above, the stories introduced the three laws of robotics: (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) A robot must obey the orders issued by human beings, except where such orders conflicted with the First Law; (3) A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.94

During the same period, criticism of technical experts was also brewing. Technocrats were accused of wrongly bypassing democratic controls, company business divisions, and end-user demands. Critics suggested that the roles should be reversed: experts should not make key technology decisions; policymakers, commercial managers, and users should make the important technology choices that concerned them. Starting in the mid-1960s, a small but increasingly vocal group of professional engineers expressed their critique. They spoke of a “science worship syndrome” that had gone too far, citing the social and environmental downsides of expert-led technology choices.95 In socialist Europe, such critique remained merely an undercurrent for the time being; technocratic approaches remained in place until the cascading collapse of socialist states after 1989. In other countries, technocratic methods prevailed even longer; in China, technocracy endures today. In the Western world, however, the critique of technocracy gained power: by the late 1960s, the Age of Technocracy was ending. It is the following era, the Age of Participation, that we turn to next.

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4.1 Introduction As engineers and scientists we are all painfully aware that … the word “technology” has become synonymous with pollution and war. Our young people are no longer impressed with the man-on-the moon accomplishment. The fact that our problems require more and better technology has failed to penetrate the din of rock and roll or whatever piper is predominant at the moment.1 Stanley W. Burriss, President Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, 1971

Burriss spoke these words in 1971, at a symposium of the Society of Women Engineers and the Engineering Foundation in the US. By then, a sea change in the public’s perception of modern technology was underway. In the course of a few years, experts and technocratic approaches had lost much of their authority—at least for “our young people,” as Burriss phrased it. Technocracy’s expert-driven, high-tech, and large-scale innovation choices were strongly criticized. The critique also targeted technocracy’s systems approaches to making future-proof technology choices. The linear model of innovation, which set innovation agendas, also came under fire. New social movements, including protest movements, led the attack on technocracy’s systems thinking. These social movements intersected with a “youth culture” or “counterculture” of a generation that rejected the social norms of their parents. Despite their diversity, protesters united in their repudiation of what they saw as a “dominant Western technological worldview.” New activist organizations such as Friends of the Earth (1969) and Greenpeace (1971) denounced postwar technological systems for having been designed and optimized to efficiently exploit nature—and destroy the environment. Civil rights activists lamented that technocrats made social decisions that ignored minority viewpoints—and reached beyond the democratic control of citizens and their elected representatives. In the context of the nuclear arms race and chemical warfare in Vietnam, antiwar protesters concluded that technocracy’s military-industrial-university innovation system had produced perverse weaponry. Counterculture authors believed that technocrats had used systems of rationality and order—only

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to stifle emotions, self-expression, and communality. Many felt that radical change was needed: humans, not “the system,” should come first.2 Interestingly, some systems researchers joined the critics. These researchers were not critical of their systems analyses, but of the future that technocracy’s choices had produced. One of the most consistent critiques came from Jay Forester’s system dynamics group at MIT, which, starting in 1970, created world-dynamic models for the international think tank Club of Rome and its bestselling report, Limits to Growth (1972). Here, computersimulated scenarios suggested catastrophic global collapse—by 2050 at the latest. Contributing factors included the exponential growth in population, resource use, consumption, and pollution on a finite planet. Having sold tens of million copies in over thirty languages, Limits to Growth became a key reference for the argument that technocratic decision-making had to change.3 The critique of technocracy’s linear model of innovation came from researchers who evaluated the model itself and questioned whether basic research indeed produced the desired applications. Particularly influential was a US Department of Defense study called “Project Hindsight,” published in the late 1960s. The study examined the role of basic research in military innovation. Of the 710 “events” that had led to twenty crucial weapon systems between 1946 and 1962, the study identified only 3 percent as undirected, basic-research events. The rest of the events were a result of applied research. So, funders ought to focus on applied research instead of basic research. The National Science Foundation sponsored a study of civilian technology, which countered the results. But the damage had already been done: the linear model of innovation had become contested. 4 It would never fully recover; policymakers and enterprise would radically revise their ways of setting innovation agendas. The Age of Participation emerged in response to these criticisms of technocracy’s methods and solutions. Expert-dominated “closed systems” needed to be “opened up” to other people, other values. And the linear model of innovation needed to be turned upside down: users and applications, rather than basic research, should drive innovation. To get there, critics stressed the need to dismantle technocracy’s monopoly on making key technological decisions on behalf of social stakeholders; instead, they argued, social stakeholders should themselves participate directly in making technological choices and setting innovation agendas. After all, the reasoning went, social stakeholders best understood their own present and future needs. Given that they would be living with the consequences of technological change, these social

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stakeholders were thought to have a democratic right to participate—and to shape that change. So emerged a participative ideal for the making of technology.5 *** Some have argued that culture wars between humanists and technologists triggered the Age of Participation. Historical research suggests otherwise. Many engineers, especially older ones, initially resented what they experienced as an ambush on technology and engineering. But a small, outspoken group of engineers were also early critics of technocracy. These engineers spearheaded the new social movements, notably the anti-nuclear movement. These men and women set up action groups such as Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action. They organized conference sessions such as “Redirecting Electro-Technology for a Better World.” They introduced grassroots engineering, which developed so-called alternative or appropriate technology. They made renewable-energy experiments and waste-recycling technologies key components of the environmental and anti-nuclear movements. And they trained research focus on domestic “technologies of everyday life.”6 Participative approaches to science and technology prevailed—even after the confrontational nature of many social movements wore off. In time, the engineering community came to see participative approaches as a primary strategy: participation could produce future-proof innovation in an age of ever more complex social and technological challenges.7

4.2 Society Opening up the system At least three strategies were used to “open up” closed technological systems to participation.8 Often, protesters took the initiative: citizens or civil society groups demanded influence on technological systems and decisionmaking “from the outside.” In many countries, governments responded to this strategy of participation-by-protest by following public opinion. For example, many countries ramped down their nuclear energy programs in response to public opinion. Governments even went so far as to facilitate protester influence by passing laws to allow the public to co-decide on technology issues.

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Protesting Nuclear Power. Building nuclear power plants did not ensure the technology would be used. For example, the reactor plant in Kalkar, Germany, was subject to lawsuits and protests—like the one pictured here (June 3, 1979). Increased safety demands rendered the Kalkar plant financially unfeasible. It never became operational and was eventually repurposed as an amusement park.

Another strategy was to mandate professional mediators to unlock closed technology systems. These professional mediators tried to bring together different groups—engineering agencies, politicians, citizens, businesses, and the like. Such participation-by-mediation aimed for a deliberative procedure that was intended to produce better, more legitimate, and more democratic technological choices. The third strategy stemmed from governments’ turn toward neoliberalism. Government bureaucracies took less responsibility for social issues; they increasingly delegated that responsibility to the market of supply and demand, asking social stakeholders (particularly companies) to participate actively in societal problem-solving. We call this strategy participation-by-delegation. Here are examples of each of these participation forms. Participation by protest Action groups protested many engineering initiatives, from railways and highways to housing projects. Activists also challenged engineering research, from food irradiation to genetic modification. The protest against nuclear power is among the most iconic examples.

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In the 1960s, many citizens, scientists, and engineers worried that nuclear weapons threatened humankind’s safety and survival. In this period, commercial nuclear-power plants had only recently been introduced. At first, the resistance to nuclear-power plants was only marginal. Fast-forward to the early 1970s, when concerns had accumulated, forming a large anti-nuclear movement. Local protesters teamed up with environmental and human-rights organizations. Together, they challenged the safety, environmental impact, and social implications of nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy. This was a grassroots movement involving ordinary citizens. Scientists, engineers, and engineering students also took part. In fact, engineers played a leading role on both sides: they developed the nuclear industry and protested along with the anti-nuclear movement. The means of protest varied greatly.9 Protesters spread their message via posters, newspapers, stickers, and badges. Some participated in “dieins,” in which activists lay down in the streets and pretended to be dead. Others held peace camps. 30,000 women held hands to form a human chain that encircled the Royal Air Force near Berkshire, England, in 1981. Activists organized petitions and hearings. And there were dozens and dozens of mass demonstrations. Among the largest: 150,000 people in Bilbao, Spain, denouncing the Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant in 1977; 120,000 nuclear-power protesters in Bonn, seat of the West German government, in 1979; 100,000 demonstrators clashing with 10,000 police at the Brokdorf nuclear plant near Hamburg in 1981; and 200,000 people marching in Rome in 1986. Radical splinter groups also embraced violent means of protest. This included sabotaging of energy-company equipment, committing violence against targeted scientists, and throwing stones at police at demonstrations. A more constructive form of protest was to promote and develop alternative energy sources, notably renewables such as wind and solar power. Activists traveled throughout the world, from Canada to Japan and from New Zealand to Ireland. The anti-nuclear movement used protest to demand influence on technological decision-making. And it achieved numerous successes. For example, in 1975, construction started on a nuclear power plant in Wyhl, in southern Germany. Acting spontaneously, town residents occupied the building site. German TV showed police dragging away—through the mud—local farmers who participated in the protest. This won widespread sympathy for the protesters. Later that year, a court postponed the project. The “success of Wyhl” inspired anti-nuclear protesters around the world. In the early

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1980s, nuclear construction resumed, but 30,000 people occupied the site, and the government cancelled the project for good—turning the site into a nature reserve.10 There were many other notable successes. For example, following largescale public protest, the Austrian Parliament in 1978 decided on a national referendum. The anti-nuclear faction in Parliament barely achieved a majority: 50.5 percent voted for a total ban on nuclear fission. At the time of the vote, Austria’s first nuclear power plant had been completed, but it was never made operational. In Spain, after widespread protests (see above), the Spanish government cancelled the Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant—and several other plants—in 1984. The Danish Parliament ordered its government to ban nuclear power in 1985. And in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, protests triggered the Italian government to organize a national referendum. The popular vote here, too, rejected nuclear power; existing nuclear power stations were closed.11 In cases of failing to persuade politicians and judges to cancel nuclear projects, protesters sometimes won higher safety regulations, which undermined the financial viability of some nuclear plants. This was the case of the German-Dutch-Belgian fast-breeder plant in Kalkar, Germany: the plant was fully constructed but never made operational: it was eventually turned into an amusement park.12 The size and effectiveness of anti-nuclear protests varied from country to country. Many nuclear plants remained operational, and many new ones were built. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident triggered a new round of protests and plant closures, though again, protests and political responses differed from country to country.13 The example of nuclear power shows how social movements used protest to influence billion-euro innovation decisions. It was often a Yes/ No decision to nuclear power plants—and, in some cases, a Yes/No on mandatory safety systems. In other technology domains, resolution did not involve a Yes/No decision. Participation-by-protest could lead to adapting technological solutions—without having to give up the technology altogether. The Oosterschelde storm surge barrier in the Netherlands is one iconic example of a social movement that succeeded in communicating its values—and opening up the existing design system to innovative solutions. By 1970, all but one dam in the southwestern Netherlands’ flood-defense system had been completed.14 That system was a response to a 1953 flood that had killed more than 1,800 people. In the 1950s and 1960s, the system had been a triumph of technocratic decision-making and design. In 1970,

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the largest projected dam, the Oosterschelde-estuary dam, was half-way finished. That year, rebellious young people in one seaside village organized a protest group they called Oosterschelde Open. They accused the dam builders of “murdering” the sea-life in the Oosterschelde’s salt-water environment. Protesters painted anti-dam slogans on houses and on streets; they distributed pamphlets. When they encountered mighty local opposition, the group teamed up with like-minded locals such as fishermen. Oosterschelde Open also formed alliances with environmental groups from all over the Netherlands. Together, these activists bombarded the media and politicians with the argument that keeping the waterway open would not compromise safety. To the surprise of many, the protesters won the sympathy of progressive politicians, who adopted the dam issue part of their 1972 election campaign. Prompted by the protesters, these candidates stood for democratization and the environment—and they won the election. The new government appointed a commission to reconsider the options. In stark contrast to earlier technocratic practice, not a single Rijkswaterstaat engineer sat on the commission. The outcome was a semi-permeable dam that was open by default and closed in the case of storm surges, thus preserving the saltwater environment. Only after the decision was made did Rijks­waterstaat engineers enter the process. They designed the requested—and very expensive—dam. Between 1976 and 1986, engineers built sixty-six huge caissons, forty-five meters apart, to support monolithic gates. As needed, the gates could be lowered into the sea to protect against rising storm tides. The action group Oosterschelde Open had succeeded in making systems engineers receptive to their values. And while they had not controlled the decision-making, engineers ultimately received much praise. For example, the dam led the American Society of Civil Engineers to name the Dutch coastal-engineering works as one of seven modern wonders of the world. Rijkswaterstaat engineers made participative approaches part of their engineering toolbox. We can cite many similar participative mega-projects. One example only: Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel project (1982-2007). This is considered the largest urban highway project in the US. In an enormous operation known as the Big Dig, the existing highway that cut through the city center was transformed into a tunnel. In this case, engineers continuously responded to concerns voiced by environmental groups, community groups, and other stakeholders. These protesters were a powerful force: they had blocked highway projects in downtown Boston before. Now, they could directly influence the urban-design process.15

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“Opening up” Innovation. Pictured here is the Oosterschelde storm surge barrier during a storm on February 27, 1990. Originally, engineers envisioned it as a closed dam. But once protesters’ concerns were heard, the plan changed. This semi-permeable dam—closed only in extreme weather, and thus preserving the salt water environment—is now a model of participative engineering.

Participation by mediation In the 1980s, government and protesting citizens often found themselves deadlocked. Participation by mediation emerged as a solution to that deadlock. Consider the dynamic of the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example. More and more, protest movements revealed their capacity to polarize society into proponents and opponents of nuclear power. This polarizing dynamic applied to other large projects, as well. Out of frustration, protesters as well as authorities increasingly used violence as a problem-solving strategy. Protest, it appeared, intensified rather than solved social conflict.

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The idea of participation by mediation held that professional mediators invite representatives of each stakeholder group to debate important new technologies. Through deliberation, both sides would try to build consensus. Together, they would co-design technology. In the Netherlands, for example, the nuclear issue was divisive. In 1980, the church, labor unions, and local-government representatives suggested a “citizen consultation” on nuclear power. Anti-nuclear groups participated, hoping to obstruct nuclear plans. The center-right government also agreed to take part in the “citizen consultation”—but for a very different reason: the government hoped to appease protesters. Professional mediators were called in to negotiate the highly charged conflict. The mediators then invited “any citizen who has something to say” to submit opinions. After compiling these opinions, mediators organized another 1,900 public hearings, nationwide. The conclusion: Dutch citizens did not want nuclear expansion. The government tried to ignore the public’s ruling, but the Chernobyl disaster forced their hand, and nuclear expansion plans were shelved.16 Meanwhile, organizations of professional mediators emerged in other countries. Examples include the Danish Technology Board (1986), the Netherlands Organization of Technology Assessment (1986, later the Rathenau Institute), and the Austrian Institute of Technology Assessment (1987). These groups would advance participation-by-mediation approaches.17 For example, the Danish Technology Board made strides in bringing citizens’ voices into policy-making. They used the terms “consensus conference” (which also became known as the “citizen conference” in other contexts) to refer to their meetings. Mediators organized debates on controversial technologies, from biotechnology to carbon capture and storage. They hosted readings and in-depth discussions among citizen groups. These activities helped to inform citizens, qualifying them to make well-argued judgments on controversial technologies. In the final step of the mediation process, citizens discussed their recommendations with policymakers. Sometimes these citizens’ voices affected policy-making. Some of the outcomes: the parliament limited genetic screening in job hiring and insurance; it excluded genetically modif ied animals from biotechnology research programs; and it prohibited food irradiation. The consensus-conference approach has been used from Argentina to Australia and from France to Norway. Among the most ambitious projects of this kind was the World Wide Views on Global Warming citizen conference in 2009.18 Organizers invited

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roughly 4,000 citizens in 38 countries to participate; they were to help form a “citizen’s view” on climate-change policies. The organizers’ belief: citizens must live with the consequences of climate policies, so they should have a say in climate-policy decisions. In each country, mediators conducted citizen panels with about 100 citizens. The mediators provided balanced information on the subject of climate change, and they facilitated roundtable debates. Then participants were asked to vote. The mediators collected the results and presented them to policymakers at the UN Summit on Global Warming in Copenhagen. This time, many participants were disappointed: the citizen voice did not persuade politicians to commit to climate goals. A World Wide Views on Biodiversity citizen conference followed despite the disappointment. The event brought citizens’ opinions to the policy table at the 2012 UN Biological Diversity Summit in India. In 2015 followed a World Wide Views project on Climate and Energy, which involved 10,000 citizens in 76 countries. This time these citizens felt heard, as politicians took action at the UN Climate Summit in Paris. Other participatory methods were designed with the main purpose of mediating between stakeholders—rather than engaging citizens. Scenario workshops brought together stakeholders like energy companies, Greenpeace, policymakers, and local residents. For example, the European Commission as well as national energy authorities invited stakeholders to plot renewable energy roadmaps. The projected outcome: working together at the same table should turn potential opponents into collaborators with viable working relationships. Still other methods targeted technology’s design process. Strategic Niche Management invited people to participate in real-life sustainability experiments. One of its first large projects tested electric vehicles in several European cities in the early 2000s. In contrast to traditional technical testing, these experiments were open laboratories. Researchers investigated emerging new user practices and perceptions, consumer expectations, and regulatory issues, among other matters. The goal: to channel those insights back to the drawing table.19 Participation by delegation Neoliberal politicians fostered the idea of participation by delegation. The neoliberal definition of participation holds that government is best when delegating responsibilities to society, which includes private enterprise, citizens, and civil-society organizations.

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We can trace this form of participation for the case of the Netherlands. For example, in 1981, the Dutch Liberal party platform called for “participatory democratization pairing participation in decision-making and autonomous responsibility.”20 This neoliberal version of participation was formulated as an alternative to the progressive, “Leftist” ideal of participation as a political right of the 1970s. In the welfare state, it was argued, state experts had taken responsibility for social decisions on behalf of citizens and stakeholders. In doing so, the state had come to treat citizens and stakeholders as weak, “helpless” members of society in need of being taken care of. Citizens had become passive onlookers, waiting for the state to solve their problems. In a “participation society,” by contrast, the state delegated responsibility for initiating problem-solving to citizens, NGOs, and companies. Stakeholders, it was said, would manage much better than government. This would lead to lower prices for products and services, more consumer choice, higher-quality services, and corporate responsiveness to clients.21 In theory, this neoliberal version of a participation society would motivate stakeholders, from patient organizations to consumer groups, to raise issues and solve problems—in short, to co-decide on innovation. In practice, however, this neoliberal process often amounted to reducing government expenses as an end in itself.22 So, neoliberal politicians delegated state tasks to private companies; state functions were privatized. In the Netherlands, for example, the national telecommunications company, Dutch PTT, the Dutch State Mines, KLM Airlines, and provincial electricity companies were all privatized. The same kinds of privatization happened in many other European countries, as well. Participation by delegation has prevailed in many countries, strengthening private enterprise along the way. Critics of privatization have said that governments have put the needs of business over the citizen’s right to democratic participation. Even in Denmark, a stronghold of participation by mediation, the neoliberal approach to participation became dominant starting in the late 1990s. For example, once participation by delegation took root, the Danish government simply decided that agricultural biotechnologies were largely a matter of consumer choice. In some cases, Danish consumers have managed to assert their choices through their buying behavior. For example, they have largely rejected genetically modified foods.23 More and more, participation by delegation has come under attack. In the Netherlands, around 2005, for example, even mainstream political parties began questioning whether “privatization had gone too far.” A

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Parliamentary Inquiry (2011-2012) concluded that previous governments had reduced “society” to the interests of “citizens as taxpayers.” These governments had turned privatization into an exercise in opportunistic budget-cutting, the inquiry stated. It was time to restore the bonds that hold society together.24 *** In the Age of Participation, certain participative approaches to societal challenges were widely used. Often, various participative approaches coexisted. And, as we have seen, some approaches have been perceived as more successful than others: mediation and delegation have been presented as alternatives to protest. More recently, delegation has replaced mediation in many countries. Technocratic approaches have also persisted, research tells us. A study of eight European countries in the mid-2000s showed that, in all of the countries studied, participative approaches existed to address controversial technologies: nuclear energy, biotechnology, and information technology, for example. Various participative approaches were found to exist alongside traditional modes of expert-centered governance. This was the case even in the most participatory countries, such as Denmark and the Netherlands. Non-participatory approaches were found to be more dominant in Portugal and Greece, for example.25

4.3 Enterprise Flipping the linear model of innovation In the Age of Participation, corporate innovation strategies to meet business challenges also changed in important ways. The postwar decades had given rise to large, diversified companies as well as the linear model of innovation. Again, the linear model specified a relatively autonomous basic-research lab that set the innovation agenda; the company tweaked products to users only during later stages of the innovation process. That model came under pressure, however. The previous period of unlimited commercial growth seemed to have halted. During the 1970s and 80s, economic stagnation set in. Speaking of this time as crisis years, managers worked toward leaner companies that focused on core activities and yielded short-term profits. They modified their innovation

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processes, and the linear model of innovation was flipped: in this period, it was the search for commercially viable products and services that increasingly guided central-research-lab activities—instead of the other way around. In addition, users became an important starting point for user-centered innovation. And social protests demanded that corporate business and innovation models become receptive to social and environmental values. Commercializing research and open innovation After 1970, changes in corporate priorities and business strategies changed the role of central research laboratories, dismantling an important part of the linear model of innovation in the process. In a context of economic stagnation, management increasingly criticized past managerial decisions. For one, the creation of large, diversified companies had made these companies difficult to streamline. Profitable divisions existed alongside unprof itable ones, which might produce profits in the long run. Internal supply chains had lost efficiency. And companies experienced growing competition from specialized companies that offered the same products—sometimes at lower price points. At the same time, small companies came into vogue: in Silicon Valley, California, small but innovative high-tech startups in the IT and biotechnology sectors blossomed in the backyards of large research universities and giant corporations.26 Boards of large, diversified companies thus came to see downsizing as a way forward. To survive and excel, they decided to focus on their core businesses. So they divested their organizations of unwanted business units and outsourced much of their manufacturing and many other business functions. The consequences for their central research labs were profound. These labs lost much of their previous role: producing basic research breakthroughs that led to innovation in a variety of unrelated product divisions. Accordingly, central research labs lost prestige and funding. Management also tended to criticize the central research lab’s autonomous position at the top of the research hierarchy. The linear model of innovation lost its appeal: corporate boards no longer had time to wait for basic research to produce profitable products. Rather than autonomous labs doing undirected research, these labs switched to conducting applied research for the company’s market-oriented product divisions. Funding mechanisms changed to adapt to the practices: starting in the 1970s, direct investment in corporate basic research dropped sharply. Central labs grew

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Rock and Reorganization. Rolling Stone Mick Jagger watches as Jan Timmer, CEO of Philips subsidiary PolyGram, demonstrates a CD player. The compact disc stemmed from a Philips product division, not its central research lab. Equally characteristic of the age, under Timmer as Philips CEO in the 1990s, the Philips conglomerate refocused on core activities and efficiency—outsourcing activities and laying off 15% of the company work force.

dependent on doing projects for product divisions, which were funded by market-oriented product divisions. Once again, Philips provides a representative example of the trends toward downsizing via divestment and commercializing research. As for the Philips NatLab’s shifting position in the innovation hierarchy, the lab’s new director, Eduard Pannenborg, led the change. Faced with the deepening economic crisis, Pannenborg reasoned that research required coordination with commercial markets. All R&D investments should result in products—and profits. An isolated basic-research function was no longer acceptable. Management decided on NatLab budget cuts and reorganizations of the 1970s and 80s. Decentralized funding replaced

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direct funding: by 1989, two-thirds of NatLab research was applied research funded by product divisions. It is no coincidence that one of the company’s main successes during this period, the development of the compact disc, was initiated by the Philips audio product division, which established a CD laboratory to tap NatLab researchers’ knowledge and expertise.27 Outsourcing and divestiture, too, had a tremendous effect on NatLab research. Philips outsourced much of its product manufacturing and divested several product lines, including photolithographic machines for manufacturing integrated circuits (now ASML), semiconductors (currently NXP), and electron microscopy (now FEI)—all of which became global players in their own right.28 With so much innovation and manufacturing outsourced, the NatLab lost much of its research base. Rounds of staff transfers and lay-offs followed: the number of NatLab researchers dropped from 2,000 in 1970 to 600 in 2006. A few years later, the NatLab was reconfigured as Philips Research. Team members involved in applied research and were transferred from product divisions to the new organization. This increased the size of Philips Research, but the change sealed its fate as an applied-research entity. Finally, a related key development in corporate research became “open innovation.” In a context of corporate divestiture and research commercialization, managers often saw open innovation as a way to gain access to relevant knowledge—without necessarily paying for expensive in-house research labs. The traditional research setup in traditional large companies was now referred to as “closed innovation”—in-house research that was carefully protected against outsiders. In open innovation, by contrast, companies moved in the direction of sourcing knowledge from outside the company. For example, in the 1990s, the US based conglomerate AT&T had divested Bell Labs, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent research organizations, into Lucent Technologies (later taken over by Nokia). Lucent followed the traditional research-based approach to the telecom equipment market, conducting a great deal of basic research in-house. In the race to bring new products to market, new players continually beat Lucent, however. One such new player was Cisco Systems, which sourced expertise externally, often by partnering with high-tech startups. This practice enabled Cisco to keep up with one of the world’s most prominent research labs—without having to invest heavily in inhouse research. Similarly, computer hardware and software giant IBM was forced to confront newcomers like Intel and Microsoft. Since then,

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open innovation was embraced by many industries—computing, pharmaceuticals, biotech, telecommunications, for example. Some industries, like nuclear reactor manufacturers, did not buy into the new model of open innovation.29 Starting in 2012, Philips Research embarked on an open innovation strategy. The campus became an “innovation ecosystem.” As of 2017, it houses some 140 companies and 10,000 researchers. In this environment, engineers and scientists can easily interact and share knowledge. Special facilities help companies to share resources, including test labs and clean rooms.30 User-centered innovation Another example of the linear model’s repeal is user-centered innovation. Companies began to consider users as a starting point for—rather than an end-point of—innovation. The innovation models of the 1950s and 1960s had assumed that manufacturers were the main innovators. Companies had set up market-research departments to tweak innovations to user needs in the target market; product-development divisions and applied-research groups addressed those needs. But in the Age of Participation, these departments were criticized for missing out on newly emerging markets developed by innovative users. Market-research departments had usually dismissed innovative users as outliers with little commercial value. On the contrary, innovation studies showed that many new product markets originated with user innovation, and f irms started to develop methods to systematically capture those opportunities. Like open innovation, corporate user-based innovation, too, had its success stories. For example, the American firm 3M (popularly known for its “Post-it” product) systematically developed this approach in the mid-1990s. Within a few years, most of its new product sales came from user-centered innovation. By the early 2000s, the custom semiconductor industry also exemplified this trend.31 Various forms of user-centered design also found their way into corporate applied-research and design departments—at Philips and elsewhere. Starting in the late 1960s, critics challenged previous systems-management and design approaches. Trade unions, managers, and specialists led the challenge. Consider the case of automation in offices and factories. Critics accused approaches such as Operations Research, System Analysis,

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and System Ergonomics of optimizing systems instead of worker experience. Designers of computer mainframes and software programmers reduced workers to “system elements,” it was said. As such, it was workers who were expected to adapt to the overall system logic. In machine-tools manufacturing, for example, programmers had gained the authority to decide on tool sequences manufacturing speeds; workers shifted from the role of doer to the role of process monitor. That pattern had to change: “The need for the future is not so much computer oriented people as for people oriented computers,” said Raymond S. Nickerson, division director at BBN Technologies (later pioneers of IP routers and voice-over IP) in 1969.32 In the 1970s, user-centered design approaches emerged for off iceinformation systems, industrial-process-control systems, transportation systems and others. These approaches interpreted user experience as both the starting point and the goal of design, replacing linear design processes with flexible, iterative design methodologies. Some user-centered design methods relied on experts—notably psychologists and anthropologists—to research user experience. Other design methods developed into “participative design,” which relied on users themselves. In the field of computers, for example, one advocate of the method described participative design as an “approach towards computer systems design in which the people destined to use the system play a critical role in designing it.”33 This design ideology “turns the traditional designer-user relationship on its head, viewing the users as the experts—the ones with the most knowledge about what they do and what they need—and the designers as technical consultants.”34 Such participative design approaches derived partly from Scandinavia, where it had been called “cooperative design.” Here it had been pushed since the early 1970s by trade unions, such as the Norwegian Metal Workers’ Union and the Swedish trade union federation. The user in this case was the worker—the professional user, as we say in this book. The trade unions were committed to ideals of industrial democracy: emancipating the worker in relation to management. For example, in the mid-1970s, the Swedish trade union federation collaborated with workers on a number of automation projects at different enterprises. In the case of a locomotive repair shop, management had announced a new computer-based planning system for repairs. That system segmented the workflow into fragmented employee actions, and prescribed how employees should behave to get the system to work. In response to that plan, the union teamed up with local workers, after agreement with management, to design a planning tool that would work for

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the employees. That tool would be user-centered: it focused on flexibility and worker-centered planning, and was ultimately implemented. This case was often cited and imitated.35 In the 1980s, participatory design (as it was called in the US) spread rapidly.36 Company managers at that time struggled with the implementation of personal computers in the workplace. With PCs on their desk, employees’ productivity skyrocketed. Previously, workers had depended on the central mainframe computers—with which they had to request time slots, log in, feed in tasks, and wait passively for results. Participatory design boomed: worker ideas and experiences provided a basis for new corporate computer services. Subsequently, user-centered design and participatory design rapidly proliferated in many fields—from hospital automation to urban planning and landscape architecture. Corporations under social pressure Finally, corporate business and innovation strategies also became more receptive to social issues. Pressure from protest groups provided some of the momentum; later, policies supporting corporate social responsibility also contributed to the change. In the previous age, corporations were held accountable only for activities within their organizations, such as the welfare of their employees. By contrast, from the 1970s onwards, protest groups criticized corporations for exploiting workers worldwide. Anti-war activists protested the tight relationship between corporations and the “war machine.” Environmentalists protested the enormous waste and pollution created in the making of products. International activists protested corporate power. These activists spoke on behalf of citizens who lacked the voice—and the power—to influence business decisions. One example: in 2008, the activist organization Greenpeace ran a campaign called “Poisoning the Poor.” In this confrontation, Greenpeace accused Philips of dumping its electronic waste (e-waste) in Ghana, Africa. The waste contained toxic materials. Children roaming garbage belts earned much-needed money by retrieving rare metals, which entailed burning the waste. This process exposed the children to poisonous gases. Philips had not dumped these products directly, but through an intermediary. The company was still held responsible. Philips also faced accusations of adding to the growing stream of consumer products that consumers quickly deemed obsolete or old-fashioned—and casually dumped. Philips’ innovations had contributed to this growing pile of waste created by the

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consuming West. Greenpeace insisted that Philips take responsibility for its products “from cradle to grave.” Not only should the company recycle, Greenpeace claimed, but it should bear the financial cost of recycling. Users and the media bombarded Philips with letters and emails. Bowing to the pressure of the Greenpeace campaign, Philips stepped up its recycling efforts—which also implied designing products for future recycling of components. This example illustrates the new realities that corporations like Philips faced in the Age of Participation. Clearly, they were not only in the business of making products. Business was forced to answer to stakeholders in the world at large, whether those stakeholders were in the Netherlands, in Ghana, or beyond. Philips and other companies introduced Corporate Social Responsibility programs, in which the business and innovation models were adapted to ethical standards and norms. It should be noted that critics of Corporate Social Responsibility programs sometimes refer to “CSR” as “window-dressing,” “greenwashing,” and an “unreliable” form of industry self-regulation.

4.4 Users In many ways the Age of Participation belonged to users. Increasingly, end users rejected the products made by manufacturers. Users themselves wanted to design products. Indeed, they created alternative, user-friendly, and sustainable technologies. By designing their own technologies, citizens, consumers, and users empowered themselves. They often called it “Appropriate Technology”: technology designed for, and tailored to, local use. The new user movements also challenged the knowledge of experts. Instead of relying on professional expertise, users turned themselves into experts—and offered their own version of expertise. Often this was informal knowledge, based on experience, not codified theory. Sharing knowledge was another key component of user movements. Here, we turn to three examples of user movements from the energy, mobility, and IT sectors. Energetic user-tinkerers In 1968, writer and activist Stewart Brand published Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. This book functioned as a kind of shopping guide for

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members of the environmental movement. Whole Earth Catalog listed self-building tools available on the market. The book gave ordinary people access to tools for building a sustainable society.37 When the anti-nuclear energy movement gained momentum, some citizen activists did not merely protest—they developed energy alternatives as a response. One group of Danish citizens became active in exactly the way Stuart Brand had envisioned: they built their own windmills. These activists shared technical information as part of creating a more equal, sustainable community. They promoted a do-it-yourself approach for ordinary users. In 1974, a Danish school designed the world’s biggest wind turbine. The idea was to produce non-nuclear energy for the school. The vision behind the project also included showing the power of self-reliance and sharing. The Danish “Tvind” school built this gigantic wind turbine with the help of more than 300 volunteers: anti-nuclear teachers and eco ­activists, international exchange students and professors—plus engineering students. The volunteers based the turbine on the high-tech design of German aeronautical-engineering professor Ulrich Hütter. The result was a 53-meter-high concrete tower with three 27-meterlong wing blades. In general, the turbine symbolized the anti-nuclear, alternative-energy movement. In particular, the turbine symbolized a truly high-tech, scalable windmill solution. The Tvind turbine was designed as a collective, large-scale project—not as an energy alternative for users to try at home.38 The do-it-yourself movement was meant for individual users, and it lasted longer than the large-scale movement. In 1975, the technical-minded and very practical activists of the Danish anti-nuclear movement produced the Organization for Sustainable Energy. This group brought together amateur windmill builders and environmentalists—both individuals and cooperatives. The organization held meetings and published do-it-yourself manuals. The do-it-your-self movement was inspired by Poul la Cour, the Danish scientist, inventor, and educator. (In the Age of Promise, we met la Cour as the man who developed the first wind turbine and helped farmers with local power stations.) The Organization for Sustainable Energy instructed user-tinkerers, craftspeople, and cooperatives on how to build their own backyard windmills, often with second-hand parts. Amateur builders, tech-savvy users, and small firms belonged to the group. Together, they created the Danish standards—technical and political—for wind turbines. The design was

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Power to the People. Volunteers carry a rotor blade of a self-made wind turbine at the Tvind school, Denmark, in 1976. Tvind was a counterculture hotspot. Its work inspired other user communities to further develop back-garden wind turbines, preparing Denmark’s global leadership in wind turbine development and export.

flexible, reliable, safe, and small-scale. And it became the foundation for a new wind-power industry. It was these activists who succeeded in pushing the wind-power industry in a new direction. The Danes, technically sophisticated and politically active as they were, developed small-scale wind turbines across the country. In the Netherlands, the situation differed radically. The Dutch, even with their centuries-old tradition of windmills, missed the chance to develop a wind-power industry based on users. Instead of growing a broad user base, the Dutch wind-power industry developed under centralized control. It was driven by research and policy rather than by well-organized, small-scale users. In the end, the Danish models created a better product than did the Dutch plans.39 Why did the Danish model for wind power succeed in ways that the Dutch plan did not? It was in part because Danish users and producers had collaborated closely. Users were technically skilled and well informed. Together with small manufacturers, they earned the support of the government. Their custom-made designs emphasized safety and reliability. Ultimately, their close collaboration led the Danes—not the Dutch—to be world’s leading exporter of wind-power technology.

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Reclaiming the Streets. Since the 1970s, bicycle activists (also known as biketivists) have been campaigning to “reclaim the streets” from cars. And starting in 1992, many biketivists became part of the Critical Mass movement, which was new at the time. Fast forward to the 21st century: Critical Mass events like the one pictured here (Budapest, April 19, 2009) are continuing to change the public perception of biking.

Mobility and “biketivists” The second example of a powerful user movement is based on the carmeets-bicycle battle. Cities had turned into car-centered places. Amsterdam became the example to the world when Dutch artists and activists devised alternative solutions to the car. As early as 1965, the so-called Provos released a manifesto against cars. Cars choked cities, they said. Cars polluted the air and made people admire them as status symbols. Industrial designer and Provo member Luud Schimmelpennink introduced the world’s first freely accessible bike-share plan as an alternative. He proposed a free bicycle program called The White Bicycle Plan (Witte Fietsenplan) to replace the “terrorism of the motorized minority.”40 The pioneering White Bicycle Plan was replicated in European cities like Copenhagen, Milan, Helsinki, and Rennes. The US cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota; Olympia, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Princeton, New Jersey—among others—also followed Amsterdam’s example. This movement of pro-bicycle activists was named biketivists. Truly international,

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the bike­tivists had comrades in Montreal (the group Le Monde à Bicyclette) and New York City (the Transportation Alternatives).41 All over the world, a movement now called Critical Mass organized massive bike rides for fun and protest. These events showed the world that cycling was a workable mobility alternative. The biketivists imposed a new way of thinking about urban planning and traffic engineering. For example, in the Netherlands, members of one social movement achieved enormous impact when they protested unsafe car traffic because it killed many children. This was called the Stop Child Murder organization [Stop de kindermoord]. The Bicycle Union (De Enige Echte Nederlandse Fietsersbond) was also effective; it lobbied successfully to build separate bicycle lanes and other dedicated infrastructures. This became a model for the world. What, exactly, was the biketivist user movement’s achievement? It inspired alternative planning models. Instead of the model of dividing traffic into “slow” and “fast” lanes, activists and selected planners introduced “traff ic calming.” Drachten and Delft became the international model cities for these new traffic models. One example: in 1970, Delft engineer and activist Joost Vahl introduced the traffic bump as a speed-reduction method. How did the state respond to activists’ demands? In 1976, the Ministry of Transport and Public Works created a planning standard. All Dutch suburbs, they said, would have a traffic zone called a woonerf in which pedestrians had priority over cars. Cooperating with the Bicycle Union, the government also developed design standards for bicycle infrastructures. Many countries and cities outside the Netherlands followed these best practices and design standards. Other countries developed their own exemplary movements. Swiss activists became the role models for the pedestrian-rights movement, for example. They helped to develop the idea of streets as multifunctional—for motorists and others. In short, activists and organizations challenged and changed the trend of car-centered mobility. In the case of urban mobility, activists helped create alternatives. 42 Hacktivists and other users The third example of a broad-based user movement comes from the world of computing. During the 1960s, the American company IBM set the “official” standard in computing. But this was not just a case of enterprise taking the lead. In fact, IBM was sponsored by US federal dollars and

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Internet Freedom and Cyber Security. Hacker activists (“hacktivists”) use their technical skills to fight corporate and government censorship of the internet, for example. Pictured here: a hacktivist wearing the characteristic “Anonymous” mask at the CeBIT international computer expo in Hannover, 2016.

the military. The company focused on two user groups: the military and business. In 1965, for example, the company launched the IBM System 360: a mainframe targeted for business users. The state focused on another group of computer users: high-school students. In the 1980s, many governments around the world sponsored personal computers as an educational tool. Specifically, governments paid for standard school computers. And these computers were meant as machines on which to learn and not to play. 43

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Yet these “off icial” computer companies and national governments did not push computers in new directions. It was hackers and hobbyists who did that. 44 In fact, the future belonged to hackers and hobbyists. They playfully hijacked the computer for their own purposes. In doing do, they created the foundation for the personal-computer revolution. The prime example is the Apple computer. Computing amateurs developed the Apple as the alternative to the professional IBM. In 1976, computer hobbyists Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak designed their f irst Apple computer. In addition to Steve Jobs and his co-developer, many other users were important to developing personal computers. In many countries, computer amateurs organized meetings and published newsletters and magazines. Young hackers and self-described geeks held regular events. Teenagers traded hardware and software. They also taught each other the latest hacking techniques. Computer users like Jobs, Wozniak, and thousands of anonymous hobbyists turned into co-producers of a new technology: the personal computer. From this we conclude that users were crucial to transforming the computer from the limited-use mainframe into the versatile machine of today. Users were also essential to developing the internet. The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency pioneered the internet. Next, university research centers connected their systems to the internet. Then hackers got involved. These hackers were often engineering and science students at research-based institutions like MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Stanford. Hackers began to employ the “nets” for their own use—communication. Next in line were physicists, computer amateurs, artists, and activists. Physicists at CERN in Geneva devised a user-friendly protocol that became the World Wide Web (www) for better communication. Computer amateurs repurposed the internet for hacking and gaming; artists and activists around the world created platforms and graphic interfaces. They began to use the internet to make art, make political statements, and build political movements. Together, these users made the internet accessible to all—not just the military and research engineers. Indeed, during the 1990s, neither the state nor enterprise controlled the internet. Rebellious engineers and users had a huge influence on the internet’s early development. In the beginning, users were dismissed as merely “creative”; but once they understood the internet’s potential, governments and corporations tried to take power away from users. Increasingly, governments and the computer industry saw hackers as dangerous, subversive, and even illegal users.

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4.5 Engineers Many critics of technocracy linked the very idea of technocracy with technology and engineering. Ironically, many early critics were engineers themselves; despite this, the critique hit the engineering profession hard. In some countries, especially in the Western world, engineers lost prestige. They also lost their leadership role in the debate about the future of society. Instead of engineers, it was economists, sociologists, and philosophers who led the discussion. In an editorial in the journal Chemical Engineering Education in 1969, one engineer complained: “We have let the humanists suggest that they are the salvation of mankind and that the ‘technologists’ are the destroyers, the polluters, and the dehumanizing materialists.”45 Many in the engineering community felt that the profession should “open up” and be more receptive to other values and other kinds of people in order to become more “humane.” Some argued that engineering had always been deeply humane; others said that technology and engineering needed to be reoriented—towards human and community needs. Adopting counterculture lifestyles, many young engineers joined protest movements and started bottom-up engineering. Even leaders in the industrial and military sectors talked about making technology more humane. One example relates to Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, who for decades had directed the development of US nuclear submarines. In 1969, Rickover lectured on the need for “humanistic technology” produced by a “humanistic” engineering profession. Thus emerged the humane-technology debate. In the next decades, the engineering profession became more open in several ways. Opening up institutions Change-minded engineers and engineering students began to create new organizations—and to transform existing institutions. For example, after debating whether the American Physical Society should take a stance against the Vietnam War, professors and students founded Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (1968) and the more militant Science for the People (1969). Teachers and students at MIT set up the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969) to “devise means for turning research applications away from the present emphasis on military technology toward the solution of pressing environmental and social problems.”46 By this time, Volunteers for International Technical Assistance had already existed for several years. This was an expert group that worked on development in the world’s poorest countries through local technologies,

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such as solar cookers. As of the late 1960s, the organization experienced a boom: more than 5,000 volunteers from 55 countries helped turn it into a flagship organization for appropriate, humane technology. A related example is Engineers Without Borders, which was started in 1982 at the elite French engineering school École des Ponts et Chaussées. Engineers Without Borders expanded to several local groups in France. Taking root in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere, it grew to an organization of 12,000 members working on local development projects in 45 countries. 47 Traditional engineering organizations, too, made themselves available to the idea of counterculture values. Progressive reformers emphasized the political role and the “fundamental moral mission” of engineering associations. They set up Technology & Society departments within their associations, and they rewrote ethical codes. For example, Victor Paschkis and other members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) resolved that their organization should take personal responsibility seriously: no one—including engineers—could ever claim to be “only a cog in the wheel.” The Society founded an ASME Technology & Society sub-group, which stipulated that engineers will be responsible at all times for being alert to and informed about undesirable consequences, which could be brought about by the scientific or technological business activities or plans in which they are directly or indirectly involved. These consequences may be of a safety, social, cultural, environmental or economic nature, and of long or short range. 48

At universities throughout the Western world, change-minded faculty and students formed Science, Technology and Society groups. Group members conducted socially-relevant research and developed technology-and-society courses and programs for engineering curricula. These issues were also discussed in socialist Europe, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, for example. 49 Universities and colleges also opened up the engineering profession in a more profound way: they began to more actively recruit underrepresented groups, particularly women and minorities. Meeting the demand for more engineers, women and minorities had entered engineering in greater numbers during and after the Second World War. For example, in the late 1950s, when US policymakers studied the Soviet engineering education, they found massive enrolment of women and minorities—and copied that model. In the Age of Participation, this push to produce more engineers entailed other motives. For example, human-rights activists considered their promotion of women and

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minorities to be a goal in and of itself: engineering represented access to new career possibilities. Activists also believed that increased participation would inject new values into engineering. As Norwegian reformers wrote in the 1980s: Science and technology are seen as important factors in the shaping of a new future. Access to science and technology means good career opportunities for the individual as well as access to political and economic power for women as a group …. The aim is to …. use these positions to change decisions and priorities.50

And so, women began to enroll in engineering studies in great numbers. By 1992, women’s participation in engineering studies in Latin America and Western Europe had reached levels that Eastern Europe had already hit in 1972.51 From country to country and from discipline to discipline, differences remained, however. For example, in 2012, Portugal topped the OECD list with women comprising roughly 50 percent of all those enrolled in engineering studies. Other regions followed suit, including Spain, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, and the former socialist countries; but the EU and US averages were between 20 and 30 percent for women studying engineering and construction, and 40 percent for women studying science, computing and mathematics. (These were the categories used in the study.) Another challenge: as the level of university hierarchy increases, the representation of women decreases rapidly.52 Opening up engineering curricula Engineering curricula also changed. For example, they introduced courses on “humane technology” topics. In North America and Western Europe especially, Science, Technology and Society (STS) groups at universities and colleges created science-technology-society courses. In the US alone, 200 engineering colleges had developed such courses by the mid-1970s. In the Netherlands, practically all universities with science and engineering programs offered similar courses at that time. These first generation of science, technology, and society courses usually taught engineering students about the societal implications of technology. The courses also covered the engineer’s social responsibility, as well as professional codes of ethics. Later, this approach became less activist-oriented and more scholarly: students studied interrelationships between values, stakeholders, and technology. The subject appealed to humanities students as well as social-science students and faculty: STS was evolving into an interdisciplinary field that complemented discipline-oriented engineering programs.53

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During the mid-1970s, the approach to ethics in engineering education also changed. No longer would engineering organizations’ ethical codes suffice. Some complained (and continue to complain) that most engineers hadn’t heard of such codes, anyway.54 The idea was that individual engineers should be able to make ethical choices in their work. So, using hypothetical ethical dilemmas, engineering students were asked to practice making choices as part of their studies. In real life, the ethical implications of design choices are not necessarily known at the outset, of course. Some consequences may emerge after many years. (In this book, we called this the problem of unintended consequences or the Collingridge dilemma.) Students were therefore to learn to recognize the ethical issues relating to future professional practice. They were to engage in solution-oriented debate about ethical issues. Students were also asked to use ethical theory to inform this debate. Later, as practicing engineers, they would be able to monitor the implications of their projects as they unfolded, just as scientists monitor their experiments. Other goals for the practicing engineer: the ability to provide a safe exit (ensuring a fail-safe design, for example) in case things went wrong; the consistent practice of seeking informed consent from users and consumers—communicating technology’s possible risks; and developing participative approaches to making ethical choices.55 Another key development in engineering education concerns the reform of the linear model: instead of starting with science and theory, engineering would start with practice. In the Age of Participation, educational reformers criticized an “overemphasis on science for its own sake.”56 For example, students could do the math, but they couldn’t necessarily design the products. In Europe and North America especially, the sentiment was that engineering students too often left college or university without the skills needed to be professional engineers. Problem-solving ability and design experience topped the list of skills that were missing. Even leading educational reformers from the previous Age of Technocracy, such as Penn State University President Eric Walker, now believed that the process of making engineering more scientific had gone too far: “The danger for engineers … is that they can become too enamored of research for its own sake. A good engineer … must strike a balance between knowing and doing,” he argued in the 1970s.57 By the mid-1970s, educators at MIT were planning how to bring design and “the art of engineering” (rather than the “science of engineering”) back to the classroom. In Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere, new engineering universities and colleges introduced problem-centered learning. At traditional engineering universities and colleges, educational reforms brought multidisciplinary approaches. Curricula integrated theory and practice in project-oriented and design-oriented programs. Design courses made a spectacular comeback.58

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Participation: Science shops and the valorization of knowledge Academic science and engineering departments were also warming to citizen participation. One sign was the development of science shops. These were local, small-scale “shops” where university faculty and students worked to solve real-life problems for, and with, citizens, workers, and civil society organizations. Science shops combined the counterculture ideal of “humane technology” with the opportunity to practice design and project-based course work. Non-academics set the agenda. Science shops started as local, uncoordinated projects but became an EU research policy objective and an international phenomenon called the “Living Knowledge” network.59 The first initiatives were taken by Science, Technology and Society groups at universities in the Netherlands in the 1970s. The universities that helped start the movement were striving to democratize science and technology. The movement started at Utrecht University’s chemistry department (1973) and Eindhoven University of Technology’s applied physics department (1976). In both cases, small teams of socially engaged professors and students worked on questions posed by financially disadvantaged citizens, workers, and civil-society groups. These pioneering professors and students made the decision to start the engineering process with real-life, practical problems rather than with ethics. By the late 1990s, Dutch science shops existed at all universities, and they completed thousands of projects per year. Topics ranged from analyzing industrial pollutants to evaluating worker safety in new production processes, and from finding appropriate technology for developing nations to conducting market research for a proposed women-run radio station. Such research was usually free of charge; students were “paid” in study credits and sometimes used their experience in science shops as material for their thesis projects.60 In the 1980s and 90s, the “science shop” model spread. Without much organizing, more universities were interacting “real problems of real people.” In Belgium, Denmark, France, and Germany, social movements like the German Bürgerinitiativen and the environmental movement played an important role in popularizing the science shop. Like the Dutch model, some of the science shops were university-based. In the UK, science shops were supported by the government and the Nuffield Foundation. In Spain, independent local initiatives emerged. Starting in 1995, science shops cropped up from Norway to Greece, and from Ireland to Israel. Eight science shops proved successful in Romania, for example.61 By the early 2000s, the European Commission observed that universities were caught between producing cutting-edge engineering knowledge and

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becoming involved in the interdisciplinary arena of social and environmental problems. The roughly 60 science shops in operation at the time appeared to be a promising model for the interdisciplinary component of the engineer’s education. So, the European Commission’s Science & Society Action Plan (2001) made creating science shops a key policy objective. The Commission co-funded what became the international “Living Knowledge” network, with science shops in 24 countries, from Denmark to Austria, and from Romania to Australia. Science shops were also established in non-Western countries such as China, South Korea, and Malaysia.62 The science-shop model of being receptive to financially weak stakeholders outside the university resonated mostly with participation initiated by social movements and by professional mediators, as we described above. Interestingly, the science-shop movement also confronted and conformed to a neoliberal version of participation. Starting in the 1980s, European and American universities increasingly turned their attention to economic competitiveness.63 The new priorities included securing research funding, research commercialization and entrepreneurship, increasing student uptakes, and retaining students (which meant streamlining programs and striving to increase graduation rates). In the Netherlands, where they had originated, many science shops were shut down in the 1990s. The rationale was that students needed stricter curricula, and faculty needed to focus on their academic publications. The more idealistic science shops disappeared. Others were turned into “knowledge centers” that served not only financially disadvantaged civil-society groups, but also big business. Replacing talk of the “democratization of research,” universities now spoke of “knowledge valorization”: using knowledge to “create value” for commercial and social purposes.64 Today, commercial and social objectives exist side by side in science shops, university knowledge centers, and similar settings. *** The balance between experts and outside stakeholders had been recalibrated. Today technocratic movements are still part of the engineering world, but these movements no longer monopolize the debate. Participativeinnovation approaches have become a standard feature of engineering. In the current debate about how to practice engineering for a sustainable future, both approaches are in play. Often participative and non-participative approaches are seen as opposites, but the current challenge may well be to invent new ways for experts and all others to interact around technology.



Epilogue: Engineering the Future Since the dawn of civilization, advances in the fields of engineering, science, and technology have played an indispensable role in shaping humans’ social and economic development. Now people face a host of global challenges that must be addressed through long-term and innovative education, research, and engineering solutions. The Grand Challenges [for Engineering] are a call to action, and they have created a growing, global, grass-roots movement that is changing how people think about the future and about the responsibility of engineering in creating that future.1 C. Daniel Mote Jr., President, US National Academy of Engineering Dame Ann Dowling, President, Royal Academy of Engineering Ji Zhou, President, Chinese Academy of Engineering 2016

In 2016, the presidents of the leading American, British, and Chinese engineering academies issued a joint statement in which they argued that the world had changed—and engineering needed to change with it. They identified several developments driving this change. These included economic globalization, cultural diversification, and global communications. The “global challenges” stood out: these were “significant challenges to the survival and continued development of the world as we know it.”2 For example, they argued, our production and consumption systems cannot continue to deplete the Earth’s resources “if humanity is to survive.”3 These systems also produce waste and emissions that cause environmental degradation and climate change. Health systems crack under the burden of global epidemics; overburdened healthcare networks; and the challenge of feeding the rapidly expanding world population. Cities suffer from aging infrastructure, overcrowding, pollution, housing shortages, and unemployment. Making matters even more complex are the systemic, global hazards posed by everything from terrorism to financial instability to cybersecurity threats. Engineering has solved problems of a similar magnitude in the past, the argument continued. Engineering has managed to help feed and improve the health of more than seven billion people, for example. Now, engineering should tackle our present-day problems and help build a sustainable future:

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The goal is to work toward a world where humanity and nature live in harmony, with green technology, low-carbon emissions, biological diversity, and ecological balance …. Advances and ref inements in medicine will create a global model of integrated healthcare, preventive medical solutions, and individualized medicine …. Highly efficient and environment-friendly infrastructures will disseminate resources as well as innovative improvements. …. Enhanced systemic technical solutions will counter globalized security threats. 4

To redirect the engineering sciences to these tasks, the three large engineering academies promoted a novel research agenda: the Grand Challenges for Engineering. In 2008, a group of experts had identified fourteen specific challenges, from making solar energy economical to managing the nitrogen cycle, and from reverse-engineering the brain to securing cyberspace. Starting in 2013, the three academies have hosted a series of Global Grand Challenges Summits, in which they discuss the key threats. Those invited to participate include entrepreneurs, political leaders, and engineering students. The topics discussed were grouped under the categories of sustainability, urban infrastructure, health, education, energy, security and resilience, and the joy of living. These priorities overlap with the research agendas formulated by others.5 Consistent with today’s news headlines and political debates, this vision for engineering implies that our world is haunted by a series of interrelated crises.6 The vision outlined above is one approach to solving these crises. In fact, this approach is increasingly attractive to policymakers, technology-based companies, and research funders. For example, some research councils have now formed “global challenges” funding programs. The vision has also inspired changes in engineering education. *** In this book, we have examined similar past visions. Ours is a first effort to rethink the history of engineering from a “grand challenges” perspective. Such research is still in its infancy; much more needs to be done. The current state of the world poses new challenges to the history of technology and engineering, as well.7 Given the insights currently available, we were able to make several historical observations that speak to present-day debates about the future of engineering. For example, we saw that the three engineering academy presidents were right: engineers have indeed faced tremendous challenges

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in the past. In fact, a grand challenges perspective on engineering history reveals that, over the last two hundred years, modern engineering evolved in perpetual interaction with societal, enterprise, and user challenges. We also observed that defining and solving such challenges was never straightforward. Efforts to problem-solve sometimes backfired. In this epilogue, we mobilize historical insights to inform present-day debates on the future of engineering. Different societal challenges Engineers never operated in a vacuum; they always developed promises and solutions in collaboration with many others. In the crowded arena of problem-solving major challenges, engineers could not control the design and social implications of their interventions. For example, in Chapter 1 we discussed Chevalier’s influential thinking about the railways in the 1830s. Chevalier saw railways as a way out of Europe’s millennia-old crisis of poverty and war. In the century that followed, the railway promise was copied, and even hijacked, by many different players—national, urban, and colonial governments; investors and technology-based companies; users; and militaries. All contributed to developing railway technology and its social outcomes, for better and for worse. Similarly, a host of historical actors co-developed the meanings and implications of such notions as crisis (Chapter 2), technocracy (Chapter 3), and participation (Chapter 4). Today, too, the notion of grand challenges has become something of a meme. Some find it an annoying buzzword. Others, like the three academy leaders quoted above, have translated the term grand challenges into a research agenda to save the planet. Still others see it as a strategy used by engineers and scientists to attract funding and raise public support for science and technology. 8 So who, exactly, articulates these grand challenges—and why? How do the motives behind the grand challenges affect innovation agendas? Grand challenges for society have been framed in various ways. Consider an early example: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges for Global Health program (2003). This influential program furthered the health targets of the UN Millennium Development Goals (the precursor to the UN’s present-day Sustainable Development Goals). Aimed at saving and improving lives in the developing world, the program channeled major funding into interdisciplinary research in fourteen specific categories of medical innovation, including developing vaccines that do not require refrigeration and preventing severe diseases transmitted by insects.9

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In contrast, the European Union’s Societal Challenges program framed societal challenges as generic policy objectives: health and wellbeing; food security and the bio-economy; energy; smart and green transport; climate, the environment and resources; inclusive, innovative, and reflective societies; and security. The program had been under development for several years before it was presented, in 2009, at the “New Worlds–New Solutions” conference in Lund, Sweden. At that conference researchers, policymakers, industrialists, and research funders adopted the Lund Declaration, which linked European Union research policy to grand challenges: “European research must focus on the Grand Challenges of our time moving beyond current rigid thematic approaches.”10 The European Commission then developed its “largest research framework ever”: Horizon 2020. From 2014 to 2020, this project would allocate nearly 80 billion euros for research on societal challenges.11 Now let’s examine how the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 has positioned itself to address societal challenges. Since roughly 2001, the European Union has been developing a new identity as a cross-border crisis manager. Consider some of the circumstances surrounding the need for this new role: the “9/11” terrorist attacks (2001); the Madrid bombing (2004); the London bombings (2005); and cross-border health threats, including mad cow disease and bird flu. In 2005, French and Dutch voters rejected the European Constitution. This further challenged the legitimacy of the European Union. As such, the idea that “common problems require common solutions” became even more important.12 So, taking the lead with problem-solving societal challenges apparently harmonizes with the European Union’s new identity. Programs addressing grand challenges also exist on the national level. In this context, national interests dominate. Indeed, physics Nobel Laureate Kenneth G. Wilson introduced the notion of grand challenges as a national initiative. In the 1980s, Wilson advocated a US supercomputing program to rival the “Japanese supercomputing challenge.” Grand challenges in US policy documents continued to follow national science-and-industry priorities.13 Another more recent example: Irish policymakers have repurposed the societal challenges def ined by the European Union as the “grand challenges for Ireland.” In the course of this process, Irish policymakers and stakeholders agreed that particular challenges, like security threats, were less relevant for Ireland. Other issues, such as energy and healthcare, were indeed considered socially relevant—and they presented business opportunities. The case for targeting energy was framed this way:

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The challenge for Ireland is to achieve greater energy security whilst meeting its international commitments to carbon emission reduction and without damaging its international competitiveness. How can Ireland achieve this delicate balance taking advantage of its natural resources (wave and wind) to deliver environmental and economic dividends?14

Like governments, individual research institutes as well as universities tend to focus on a few strategic areas in which they can compete for innovation breakthroughs, funding, and prestige.15 In analyzing approaches to societal challenges, some scholars see a paradox: on the national level—and in the case of research institutes—the research tends to be specialized, focusing on areas in which promising solutions are in sight. On the global level, however, societal challenges are broader, even more complex, and interrelated. For example, attaining “sustainability” requires a far-reaching, systemic approach that cuts across specific challenges. So, developing research and innovation systems to tackle societal challenges is seen as a grand challenge in its own right.16 Challenges to enterprise and users Having summarized diverse approaches to societal challenges, we can now revisit the challenges confronted by enterprise and users. This brings up an even broader set of dynamics. Consider how technology-based companies have embraced the notion of grand challenges. In corporate communications, such as mission statements and advertising, we can see how companies translate societal challenges into business challenges. For example, IBM used this very term to identify problems in water and sanitation, energy management, financial services, transportation, public safety, healthcare, and agriculture. Specifically, IBM claimed to address these challenges through improved data analytics.17 Another tech company, National Instruments, also reframed its activities in the context of grand challenges: “In each of the broad categories defined by the National Academy of Engineering—sustainability, health, security, and joy of living—many of our most important grand challenges await engineering solutions. National Instruments empowers its customers to create systems that improve the world and address these challenges of today, as well as those yet to come.”18 A third example comes from technology giant Lockheed Martin, which states: “Lockheed Martin’s innovators and creative thinkers define our capabilities. They bring unparalleled experience and accomplishments to the skies and to the battlefields, as they answer

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twenty-first century challenges in cyber security, energy and climate change, healthcare, and transportation. Driving innovation that provides global security solutions—that’s how we define mission success.”19 The subject of our main case-study, the technology-based company Philips, also used the concept of the grand challenges to redef ine its mission. Through “meaningful innovation,” Philips pledged to contribute to three “grand challenges”: securing livable, smart, safe, and sustainable cities; building an affordable and patient-centered healthcare system; and encompassing the huge pressures on energy, food, and water. 20 Philips’ executives claimed that its leadership in healthcare, lighting, and consumer appliances positioned the company to profit commercially from these challenges: “The world needs innovations that will make it healthier and more sustainable. With our portfolio, I see tremendous opportunities in both mature and growth markets,” noted CEO Frans van Houten in 2014.21 For example, the company’s strong market position in LED lighting would be applied to making safer, energy-efficient public lighting systems for the Paris metro, Buenos Aires streetlights, and Dutch highways. Another Philips example: in the context of urban farming, LED lights would imitate sunlight for growing fruits and vegetables in so-called food skyscrapers.22 On closer inspection, however, we see that the challenges to enterprise only partially overlap with the challenges to society. In the case of Philips, the very reason to revamp the company’s mission was a looming business nightmare: the steady loss of market share, declining financial results, and even the threat of bankruptcy. In 2014, referring to the company’s origins as a light bulb manufacturer, CEO Van Houten noted: “the business model ‘LAMP,’ our bread and butter for 125 years, will cease to exist … we are a 125-year-old company. We have to reinvent ourselves. Otherwise we’ll reach the end of our life cycle, lose our relevance, and disappear.”23 Philips’ top management feared their company’s Asian competitors, in particular. What stoked their fear? The knowledge that these competitors used profitable innovation and business models. In response, Philips’ management opted for “meaningful innovation” (rather than cheaper production of proven products). This was one of their answers to the ultimate business challenge—survival. “The challenge for many companies is in knowing what to innovate and how to go about doing so … innovation must be driven by a desire to deliver real meaning to the customer,”24 wrote the company’s chief technology officer. Clearly, the company’s business challenges take priority over their societal challenges. For example, citing financial reasons, Philips’ management has been trying (unsuccessfully, as of 2016) to sell off

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its lighting division—regardless of having referred to LED applications as crucial to meeting two out of the three Philips “grand challenges.” Now let’s bring users into the equation. In the previous chapters, we have seen that user expectations of technology were different, still, from the expectations of society and enterprise. So, what did users expect of technology’s answers to grand challenges? We have seen how businesspeople and innovators came up with their own ideas on “projected users.” But how would real, flesh-and-blood users respond to the technological solutions that claimed to solve grand challenges? Consider a recent, nationwide US survey, which asked potential “userconsumers” whether they expected future technologies to make their lives better or worse.25 Most of those who responded said that they would not ride in a driverless car; undergo a brain implant to improve their memory or mental capacity; or eat meat grown in a laboratory. Indeed, thirty percent believed that future technology will negatively impact their lives. The 59 percent who viewed technology as a net positive force related mostly to adventurous new travel technologies, from flying cars to jet packs and hoverboards. Those surveyed were also enthusiastic about medical technologies for increasing lifespan. But even the technology enthusiasts said they feared certain future developments, including designer babies, care robots, commercial drones, and Google Glass-type wearable information systems. For these technologies, a ready-made mass consumer market does not yet exist; it remains to be seen how user preferences will develop and co-shape these technologies. User-activists and user-tinkerers typically take tech matters into their own hands. Time and again, their main challenge was to claim influence, assert autonomy, and develop tailor-made solutions. For example, some citizens felt that the energy sector had failed to serve their needs. To become more independent of large energy corporations, these citizens created their own power plants as a widespread solution. The cooperatively owned power plants were small in scale; they were solar, wind, or biomass powered. In Germany alone, some 150,000 citizens had established 750 such user-owned, non-commercial systems by 2014. In turn, these user-cooperatives have founded organizations to provide technical and political support.26 Another example: in the field of computing, user communities continue to make contributions to open-source software. Citing user-friendliness and broad compatibility, these users argue that open-source software outperforms software companies’ proprietary products. Indeed, the user-generated open-source model is changing the commercial software industry and inspiring practitioners in other technological domains. Meanwhile, internet

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users regularly clash with the government as well as with business policies and commercial agendas. It is users, after all, who posed one of the most vital technology-inspired questions of today: “Who controls the internet?” In the arena of urban mobility, biketivists demonstrated how their interests converge with municipal attempts to fight overcrowding and pollution. In doing so, biketivists earned the support of municipal governments in a growing number of cities.27 For society, enterprise, and users, we have seen how the dynamics related to grand challenges overlaps and diverges. This raises several issues. For example, solving societal challenges requires engaging the business sector and new business models; but at the same time, mission statements about “grand challenges” have led to accusations of “greenwashing”—making money in the guise of new sustainability and social responsibility initiatives, for example. How should tensions like these be addressed? How do society, enterprise, and user dynamics relate? Should this interactive process be governed? If so, how—and by whom? These are some of the challenges that the current scholarship on sustainable, responsible innovation addresses.28 Beyond technocracy and participation Finally, we looked at technocratic and participative approaches to guiding innovation agendas towards better futures. We recognized that both of these approaches promised better technology choices. But both approaches also became contested. Technocracy was criticized for its linear model of innovation; and its closed-systems approach was found “undemocratic” and insufficiently open to human and environmental values. Some participative approaches were accused of keeping people polarized rather than making society more democratic. Other participative approaches were criticized for being time-consuming and expensive, as well as for serving budget-cutting political agendas, for example. This raises one more question: Can we find new approaches to steering innovation agendas toward better futures? Interestingly, it has been argued that the concept of grand challenges transcends both technocratic and participative approaches. The grand challenges approach takes as a starting point neither basic research (as in technocratic approaches) nor applied research and user-centered innovation (as in participative approaches). The grand challenges approach, the argument goes, seems to sidestep altogether the hierarchies of the innovation-process.29 The general idea is that experts and social stakeholders are in this together; somehow, they must jointly develop an entirely novel concept.

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Currently, it is unclear what that new concept would entail. In this epilogue, we have already revisited several conflicts and pitfalls (such as the tension between funding-driven specialization and integrated approaches required by societal challenges, as well as the pitfall of “greenwashing”). Perhaps current grand challenges programs can best be interpreted as open experiments that build on past experience to create something new. In part, the visions of the future of engineering discussed above seem to have evolved from the Age of Technocracy. Like their predecessors, today’s engineering visionaries call for experts—engineers, in particular—to take charge of solving societal challenges; to work in multidisciplinary teams of experts; and to use systems approaches in addressing the complexity of today’s societal challenges. As mechanical engineer Dame Ann Dawling, currently President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, phrased it at the First Global Challenges Summit in London in 2013: The global nature of our economies, supply chains, research endeavours and communities—as well as the environmental impacts of our activities—mean that our futures are inextricably linked. Political dialogue often falters in the face of complex problems with many interdependencies, and it is time to explore what could be accomplished with a globally integrated systems approach. Who better than engineers to lead this charge?30

Dawling here implies that, in facing the staggering complexity of societal challenges, engineers equipped with a systems approach may succeed where politicians have failed. On the question of organizing experts into multidisciplinary teams, the three academy presidents view collaboration as mandatory: Solving the Grand Challenges will require contributions from many professions in addition to engineering because the Grand Challenges are engineering system problems. … [B]ringing together practitioners in engineering, the social sciences, and the arts to build excellent teams, make breakthroughs, and tackle global issues, such as sustainable energy and climate change, is a mandatory step, not merely a gesture towards inclusivity.31

Other visions of the future of engineering, too, have echoed the need for multidisciplinary teams and systems approaches.32 In addition, the European-future-of-engineering project that we cited at the beginning of

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this book also sounds the call for technocracy’s linear model of innovation. It argues that solving our societal challenges starts with a “detour via pure knowledge,” followed by the problem of societal acceptance of scientific insights, because “it is our task as scientists to encourage governments to base their decisions on more rational arguments.”33 At the same time, however, we can see participative legacies in current visions of “engineering the future.” Notice that the three Academy presidents quoted above include practitioners in their reference to multidisciplinary teams. These academic leaders also call for changes in engineering education that will enable engineers to better address the grand challenges. The suggested changes are not about increasing the science and theory content of the curriculum, as was suggested during the Age of Technocracy; instead, the idea is to give students “hands-on research or design projects,” “realworld, interdisciplinary experiential learning with clients and mentors,” “entrepreneurship and innovation experiences,” “global and cross-cultural perspectives,” and “social consciousness through service learning.” In addition, the leaders are looking to engage still-underrepresented groups in engineering, notably women and minorities. These priorities reference education agendas from the Age of Participation; the academy presidents even go so far as to use the counterculture term grassroots movement: “The Grand Challenges are a call to action, and they have created a growing, global, grass-roots movement that is changing how people think about the future and about the responsibility of engineering in creating that future.”34 In their approach, building sustainable futures requires a collective, socially-inclusive effort, in which engineers play a key role. Similar observations can be made about other societal-challenges programs. As for the EU program, the Lund declaration stated that “identifying and responding to Grand Challenges should involve stakeholders from both public and private sectors in transparent processes taking into account the global dimension.”35 Indeed, many university researchers today are struggling with the question of how to include stakeholders in their research applications. Another example is the above-mentioned Grand Challenges for Ireland program: this began as an expert group, but its stakeholderconsultation round changed the dynamics. The program became known for its “participatory, bottom-up process” for defining grand challenges (though on closer examination, most of those represented were policy stakeholders).36 In the domain of enterprise, companies are experimenting with new approaches to setting innovation agendas. On the one hand, central-research labs have once again been empowered, reversing the Age of Participation’s

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trend toward increasing the influence of business units. “Companies that a few years ago claimed that the days of fundamental research were over, are now retracing their steps,” noted the chief technology officer of chemical company DSM. The same executive observed that Shell and Philips, among other companies, were making similar moves.37 On the other hand, the very same central-research labs are collaborating more and more with the world beyond the lab. The central lab may well be empowered within the company, but they are not confined there: increasingly, researchers work in entrepreneurial and user-centered ways. Here, too, new approaches are emerging. In the case of Philips, for example, management criticized business units for being too focused on short-term results; fast cycles of incremental innovation; and research that would pay off within a few years. Management argued that today, competition demands out-of-the-box, radical innovation for entirely new markets, which can produce results when mature markets are saturated. This suggested a strengthened central-research organization focused more on fundamental research. According to managers, researchers should look ahead ten years (instead of five), and they should explore a broader range of application domains.38 At the same time, central-lab researchers should work in more participative ways. In particular, researchers should develop a mindset of entrepreneurship and “customer centricity”— teaming up with customers to generate more creative ideas and to speed up the innovation process. For example, Philips researchers currently develop new medical technologies in collaboration with other companies, hospitals and surgeons, universities, startups, government bodies, and others.39 In summary, innovators are experimenting with new approaches to “engineering the future.” Clearly, experts as well as social stakeholders are playing key roles. Some commentators speak of “tentative governance” or of an “iterative approach,” which alternates between research and stakeholder feedback.40 How these ideas will develop in practice, only the future will tell.



Notes

Preface 1. 2. 3. 4.

Misa, Leonardo, xviii. For references see Meijers and Van den Brok. Engineers for the Future. Snow, The two cultures. Schwartz Cowan, Social history of American technology; Pursell, The machine in America; Misa, Leonardo.

Introduction: Engineering for a Changing World 1.

13. 14.

Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer, 2030; Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer. The thinking pill. Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer, 2030, 3. Ibid, 259. As quoted from http://ggcs2015.cae.cn/ (consulted February 8, 2016). Sir John Parker as quoted in: Global Grand Challenges, 2. Dame Ann Dawling as quoted in: Ibid, 3-4. John Craig Venter as quoted in: Ibid, 5. Toussaint, “Using the Usable Past”; Lundin, “Making history matter”; Van de Poel and Royakkers, Ethics, technology, and engineering. Högselius, Kaijser, Van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition. Bessant and Tidd, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 12, 483; Van Zeebroeck, “The puzzle of patent value indicators.” Tenner, Why things bite back; Mohun, Risk. Collingridge, The social control of technology. Ever since, the dilemma has informed scholarship, e.g. in technology assessment and responsible innovation. E.g. Koops et al., Responsible Innovation, 10, 25, 90, 158. Doumanis, “Europe’s Age of Catastrophe.” Mote, Dowling, Zhou, “The Power of an Idea.”

1

The Age of Promise, 1815-1914

1. 2.

Greeley, Art and Industry, 52. Bosbach and Davis, The Great Exhibition; Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition. Leapman, The World for a Shilling. Walker, “The impact of the Great Exhibition; Syrjämaa”, “At intersections of technology and a modern mass medium.” Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 137-9 and 345 ff. Perry, “Exhibitions, colonial.”

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

3. 4. 5.

176 

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past

Högselius, Kaijser, van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, introduction. Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications.” Chevalier, Politique Européenne, 7. Chevalier, Système de la Méditerranée, 48. In Dutch: Chevalier, De ijzerbanen beschouwd. Reagan, “The Evolution of Facebook’s Mission Statement”; Mattelart, Networking the World. Term taken from: Guldi, Roads to Power. Milward, Private and Public Enterprise in Europe. As quoted in: De Block, “Engineering the territory,” 89 and note 13. On the Dutch infrastructure state: Van der Vleuten, “Networked Nation.” Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, 68. Hård and Misa, The Urban Machine; Hård and Misa, Urban machinery: Inside modern European cities. As quoted in: Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. Also: Buiter, “Constructing Dutch streets.” Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, 69-70. As quoted in: Nilsen, Railways and the Western European Capitals, 8. Hughes, Human-built world, 49-50. Schot and Kaijser, Writing the Rules for Europe, 7. Also: Balbi, Network Neutrality; Iriye, Global community. Heffernan, “The Limits of Utopia.” As quoted in: Diogo and Van Laak, Europeans Globalizing, 36. Adas, Machines as Measures, 224. Adas, Dominance by design. As quoted in: Diogo and Van Laak, Europeans Globalizing, 5. As quoted in: Adas, Machines as Measures, 229. Ibid, 225. Heffernan, “The Limits of Utopia”; Heffernan, “Shifting Sands: The transSaharan railway.” More on Railways and imperialism: Misa, Leonardo, 112-27. Nielsen and Fogh, Frygt og fascination, 10. Around 1900 railways made up almost half of the trade at the London and Paris bourses, and the majority at the New York Stock Exchange. Michie, The global securities market, 88. As quoted in: Heerding, The history of N.V. Philips, 64-5. Hughes, “Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” 58-59 and 62-3. Arapostathis and Dutfield, Knowledge Management and Intellectual Property; Arapostathis and Gooday, Patently contestable, 2. Hughes, American Genesis, 67 ff.; Hughes “The electrification of America.” As quoted in: Bowden, Chemical achievers, 127. As quoted in: Mercelis, “Leo Baekeland’s transatlantic struggle for Bakelite,” 366. Schröter, Friedrich Engelhorn; Abelshauser et al., German Industry and Global Enterprise. As quoted in: Abelshauser, German Industry and Global Enterprise, 5.

Notes

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38. Davids, Lintsen, Van Rooij, Innovatie en kennisinfrastructuur, 49; Bekooy, Philips honderd 1891-1991. 39. The classic study is: Chandler, The visible hand. 40. Nelson, “Industrial Engineering and the Industrial Enterprise.” 41. Gilbreth, The psychology of management, 18-19. 42. Davids, Lintsen, Van Rooij, Innovatie en kennisinfrastructuur. 43. www.ft.com/cms/s/0/988051be-fdee-11e3-bd0e-00144feab7de.html (consulted March 5, 2015). 44. Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Also: Balthrope, “Bellamy’s Looking Backward”; Davis, “Remaking the nation.” 45. Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, 204-209. 46. Von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation; Von Hippel, The democratization of innovation. 47. Melo, “The paradoxical empowerment of consumer-citizens.” 48. Fischer, America Calling. In the Netherlands: De Wit, Telefonie in Nederland 1877-1940. 49. Schivelbusch, The railway journey; Nielsen and Fogh, Frygt og fascination. 50. Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, 108-17; Feys, “Bounding Mass Migration across the Atlantic.” 51. As quoted in: Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, 84. 52. Mom, Atlantic Automobilism, 64; Bijker, Bikes, Bakelite and Bulbs. 53. Mom, Atlantic Automobilism; Mom, The Electric Vehicle. 54. To be distinguished from the concept “imagined users,” which applied to companies, users, and non-users’ imaginations. Müller and Tworek, “Imagined use as a category of analysis.” 55. Oldenziel, “Man the Maker, Woman the Consumer.” 56. Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, chapter 4. 57. Oldenziel, “Man the Maker.” 58. Canel, Oldenziel, and Zachmann, Crossing Boundaries, 11-49. 59. Oldenziel, “Man the Maker.” 60. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, Chapters 1, 6 , 9. De Wit, “Radio tussen verzuiling en individualisering.” 61. Hansen, Poul la Cour. Van der Vleuten, “Electrifying Denmark,” 40-6. 62. Van der Vleuten, “Electrifying Denmark,” 80-94. 63. Von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation; Von Hippel, The democratization of innovation. 64. Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe. 65. Lieb, “Organization and Administration of National Engineering Societies,” 65. 66. As quoted in: Lieb, “Organization,” 65-6. 67. Currently L’association Ingénieurs et scientifiques de France. 68. For Europe: Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on expertise, 39-53. For the Netherlands and Belgium: Lintsen, Ingenieurs in Nederland; Ver-

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82. 83. 84.

bong, Techniek, beroep en praktijk; Lagast, Vijfhonderd jaar geschiedenis van de ingenieur. Royal Institute of British Architects, “The Charter 1837, Supplemental Charter 1971, and Byelaws November 2009.” www.architecture.com (consulted February 25, 2015). The founding document is available at https://imechearchive.wordpress. com/2014/01/20/imeche-in-objects/ (consulted February 25, 2015). E.g. the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians (1871) that became the Institution of Electrical Engineers; the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (1908); the Society to Promote the Science of Management (1910) that became the Institution of Industrial Engineers; and so on. For a historiographical overview: John, Downey, Diogo, “Engineering education and history of technology”; Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 21-54. Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 167. Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 1-39. Walker, “Impact of the Great Exhibition.” Harwood, “Engineering education between science and practice.” Ibid.; Verbong, Techniek, beroep en praktijk; Bertomeu-Sánchez and Arapostathis, “Experts and Peripheries,” 958. As quoted in: Downey and Lucena, “Knowledge and professional identity in engineering,” 401-2. Kranakis, Constructing a Bridge. Ibid. Canel, Oldenziel, Zachmann, Crossing Boundaries, 11-49, 88, and 145-53; Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 47-8. Meiksins, “‘The Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered”; Lintsen, Ingenieur van beroep, 39 ff. “De ingenieur in onze maatschappij,” 65-6. Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on expertise, 65-6. Robert Knox (1860) as quoted in: Adas, Machines as Measures, 184.

2

The Age of Crisis, 1914-1945

1. 2. 3.

As quoted in: Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise in the Twentieth Century, 68. Christie, “A proposed code of ethics for all engineers,” 99. For a critical discussion of the concept: Doumanis, “Europe’s Age of Catastrophe”; Adamthwaite, “‘A Low Dishonest Decade’?” Lommers, Europe-on air; Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe; Schipper, Driving Europe; Zaidi, “‘Aviation Will Either Destroy or Save Our Civilization’”; Berkers, “History of Nuclear Energy and Society.” Högselius et al., Europe’s infrastructure transition, Chapter 5. On the consequences of the war: Mazower. Dark Continent. Hughes, American Genesis, Chapter 3. Ekstrand, “Award ceremony speech”; Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Notes

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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Dunikowska and Turko, “Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist.” As quoted in: Harris, “To Serve Mankind in Peace and the Fatherland in War.” Compare Haber, “Chemical Warfare.” As quoted in: Slotten, “Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism?”; Freemantle, The Chemists’ War: 1914-1918, 203. Murray and Millett, Military innovation in the interwar period. Based on: Högselius et al., Europe’s infrastructure transition, Chapters 3-4. Ibid; Lagendijk and Van der Vleuten. “Inventing electrical Europe”; Van der Vleuten et al. “Europe’s system builders.” Högselius et al., Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 124-8. Hughes, Human-built world, 53-75. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 359-63; Marcuse, “Some social implications of modern technology”; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Cheng, Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science, 143. Diogo and van Laak, Globalizing Europe, 85-6; Stannard, “Interwar crises and Europe’s unfinished empires.” Zaidi, “‘Aviation Will Either Destroy or Save Our Civilization’.” As quoted in: Baker, Human smoke, 8. Ibid, 93-5. Hilberg, “German railroads/Jewish souls”; Högselius et al., Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 207-9. For a critical discussion: De Swaan, “Dyscivilization, mass extermination and the state.” Millward, Private and public enterprise in Europe, 146-165; Anastasiadou, Constructing iron Europe, 153-5. Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, 68-70, 81; Mazower, Dark Continent, 106-32; Maier et al., Inventing America, 751-758. Van Gerwen and De Goey, Ondernemers in Nederland, 95. Sluyterman and Bouwens, Brewery, Brand, and Family, 150-67. As quoted in: Högselius et al., Europe’s infrastructure transition, 148. Levenstein and Suslow, “International Cartels”; Schröter, “Easy prey?”; Schot and Kaiser, Writing the rules, 179-217. Hughes, American Genesis, 186. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” 59. Hughes, American Genesis, 139. Sturgeon, “How Silicon Valley Came to Be,” 23-6. Lawrence Lessing as quoted in: Hughes, American Genesis, 141. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 144-86. Bijker, Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs, 169. Jacoby, “Union-management cooperation”; Noble, America by Design, 82. Heyck, “Embodiment, Emotion, and Moral Experiences.” Blanken, The History of Philips Electronics, 370-371. Ibid. As quoted (in Dutch) in: Vermij, “Gedwongen tempo.”

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42. 43. 44. 45.

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65.

As quoted (in Dutch) in: Davids, “Het Philipscomplex,” 366. As quoted (in Dutch) in: Vermij, “Gedwongen tempo,” 21. Wistoft et al., “Elektricitetens Aarhundrede,” 244-9. These posters can be found on: www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/nl/items/ NAGO02xxCOLONxxIISG-30051001762027/; www.geheugenvannederland. nl/?/nl/items/NAGO02:IISG-30051001777363; www.geheugenvannederland. nl/?/nl/items/NAGO02xxCOLONxxIISG-30051001762456/ (consulted April 7, 2015). Mohun, Risk, 91-115 and 280, notes 1 and 7. Savage, The economics of railroad safety, 1; Radhakrishna, “27,581 Indians died in railway accidents.” Oldenziel and Albert de la Bruhèze, “Contested Spaces.” Mohun, Risk, 163. World Health Organization, Global status report on road safety, preface. For more recent figures see the WHO website. Fraunholz, Motorphobia. Norton, Fighting Traffic; Norton, “Streets Rivals”; Fridenson, “La société Française et les accidents”; Moran, “Crossing the Road in Britain.” Oldenziel and De la Bruhèze, “Contested Spaces.” Bartrip, “Pedestrians, Motorists, and No-Fault Compensation.” Schmucki, “Against ‘the Eviction of the Pedestrian.’” Wickenden, “The engineer in a changing society,” 465. Ibid., 465. Ibid., 471. Hirsch, “The Image of the Scientist.” Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 143-75. Graham, Ghost of the executed engineer. Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 144. Ibid. As quoted in: Heinemann-Grüder, “Keinerlei Untergang,” 33. Fritz Todt as quoted in: Guse, “Nazi Ideology and Engineers at War,” 154. Also: Thomas, “Nazi Coordination”; Hoffmann and Walker, The German Physical Society. “What is technocracy,” 3.

3

The Age of Technocracy, 1945-1970

1. 2.

Bush, Science—the Endless Frontier. Ibid; Wiesner, Vannevar Bush, 1890-1974; Pielke, “In Retrospect: Science—The Endless Frontier.” As cited in: Godin, “The Linear model of innovation,” 654. For a debate and state of the art: Edgerton, “The linear model”; Balconi et al., “In defence of the linear model.” Above all: Hughes and Hughes. Systems, experts, and computers. Van Santen et al., 2030, 15-20 and 259-71.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

3. 4. 5.

Notes

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

181

Edgerton, “The linear model.” Balconi et al., “In defence of the linear model.” Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 205-16, there 208. Krige, American hegemony, 57-73. As quoted in Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 212. Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 216; Tuertscher et al., “Justification and interlaced knowledge.” Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 243-25. Krige et al., NASA in the world. Michelsen, “An Uneasy Alliance”; Hristov, The communist nuclear era; Rubio et al., “Spain. HoNESt History of Nuclear Energy and Society Country report.” Gates, “Basic Research in Europe”; Armytage, A social history of engineering, 306-34; Lundin and Stenlås, “Technology, state initiative and national myths”; Van Lente and Schot, “Technology as politics,” 396. Freeman et al., Science, economic growth and government policy; Godin, “The linear model.” Krige, American hegemony, 10. Edgerton, “The linear model”; Forman, “Behind quantum electronics.” Army R&D chief Arthur Trudeau in 1962, as quoted in: Forman, “Behind quantum electronics,” 3. Godin, “The Linear model,” 658. Sherwin and Isenson, “Project Hindsight,” 1571. Clark, “Programing for Space Defense,” 20. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, 12 and 15-67. Evangelista, Unarmed Forces. For the following: Disco and Toussaint, “From projects to systems”; Van der Vleuten and Disco, “Water Wizards”; Berkers, “Modern ontwerpen.” Lintsen, “Two centuries of central water management.” Lundin, “Mediators of Modernity”; Blomkvist, “Roads for flow-roads for peace”; Högselius et al., Europe’s infrastructure transition, 246-7. Schot and Kaiser, Making the rules, 79-111; Judt, Postwar, 67-72; Lagendijk, “Divided Development”; Hristov, The Communist Nuclear Era; Janáč and Van der Vleuten. “Transnational System Building across Geopolitical Shifts”; Hughes, “Lessons from Soviet Science and Technology”; Hecht, “Planning a technological nation.” Salman and Uprety. Conflict and cooperation, 52-4; Lagendijk, “The nature of development.” Berthelot, Unity and diversity in development ideas; Lagendijk, “The Structure of Power”; Van der Vleuten, “‘Feeding the peoples of Europe’”; Schipper, Driving Europe; Schot and Kaiser, Making Rules. Schot and Kaiser, Making rules. Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers; Amir, The technological state in Indonesia.

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30. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, 9-13; Bruland and Mowery, “Innovation through time.” 31. Davids et al., Innovatie en kennis, 135. 32. Stevens, “A report on industrial research,” 5-16 on p.6. Compare Godin, “The linear model,” 646-7. 33. Stevens, “Report on industrial research,” 6. 34. Sarlemijn, Tussen academie en industrie, 77-96. 35. De Vries and Boersma, 80 years of research, 130-5. 36. Graham, Ghost of the executed engineer, 352. 37. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire. 38. Philips Company Archive (PCA) D 22.24 (0.41), Stand der ontwikkeling en fabricage 1947; PCA 75:8, 27/2/952; 25/3/1952; H8, 109 (83); PCA 75:8 TAG 1/10/1952-1/12/1953; PCA D.22.24 (0.41); PCA E 11.34, Bijlage 532, 1953. De Vries, 80 Years of Research, 123. De Wind, “Philips Semiconductors Nijmegen.” 39. Choi, “Between Research and Production”; Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire. 40. De Vries, 80 Years of Research; PCA E.11.34, 1/1953-12/1956. 41. PCA 75:8, 25/3/1952 & 8/4/1952; PCA 75:8, 1/1/1953-1/1/1954; PCA 75:8, 1/1/1955-1/1/1956. 42. Albert de la Bruhèze and Oldenziel, Manufacturing Technology, Manufacturing Consumers, 21-22. 43. Davids, “Technology as the New Frontier.” 44. Van Rooij, The company that changed itself, 14-26; Lintsen, Research tussen vetkool en zoetstof. 45. Also: Whittington et al., “Chandlerism in post-war Europe”; Whittington and Mayer, The European corporation. 46. Kaijser and Tiberg, “From operations research to futures studies,” 397 and note 38. 47. As quoted in: Bugos, “System Reshapes the Corporation,” 115. 48. Hounshell, “The medium is the message”; Jardini, “Out of the blue yonder.” 49. Harald Cramér as quoted in: Kaijser and Tiberg, “From operations research to futures studies,” 396. 50. Original statutes as quoted on: http://ifors.org/history/ (consulted November 6, 2016). 51. As quoted in: Edwards, “The world in a machine,” 236. 52. Tjong Tjin Tai and Davids. “Evolving roles and dynamic capabilities.” 53. Veernis and Oldenziel, “Barsten in het bolwerk,” 133-45 on 140-5. 54. Goverdien Bruekers as quoted in: Ibid., 144. 55. Ibid. 56. Grabacke and Jörnmark, “The political construction.” 57. Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels; Oldenziel and Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen.

Notes

183

58. For a discussion of this “relative success” see also: Bijker and Bijsterveld. “Women walking through plans.” 59. Oldenziel et al., Cycling Cities. 60. Furness, “Biketivism and Technology.” 61. Oldenziel and Albert de la Bruhèze, “Contested spaces,” 32. 62. Oldenziel et al., Cycling Cities, 18; Oldenziel and Albert de la Bruhèze, “Contested spaces,” 39. 63. Oldenziel et al., Cycling Cities, 13, 187. 64. Ibid., 165. 65. Mazower, Dark Continent, 302. 66. Furness, One Less Car, 53. 67. Ibid. 68. Lintsen, Ingenieur van beroep, 161-80. 69. Zachmann, “Mobilizing Womenpower.” 70. Armytage, A social history of engineering, 316. See also 288-293; Layton, Revolt of the Engineers, 3. 71. Baggen et al., “Opkomst van een kennismaatschappij”; Valderrama et al. “Engineering Education”; Bassett, “Aligning India in the Cold War era”; Krishna and Khadria, “Phasing scientific migration.” 72. Kourvetraris, “Brain drain and international migration of scientists.” 73. As quoted in: Brown, “New Horizons,” 344. 74. Seely, “The other re-engineering of engineering education”; Layton, Revolt of the engineers, 251; Ferguson. Engineering and the Mind’s Eye; Akera and Seely. “A Historical Survey”; Williams, Retooling, 41-3. 75. Schippers, Van tusschenlieden tot ingenieurs, 129-39. Compare: Christensen and Newberry, “The Role of Research in Academic Drift Processes”; Delahousse and Bomke, “Structural Transformations in Higher Engineering Education.” 76. Layton, Revolt of the engineers, 2, 50, 251. 77. As quoted in: Baggen et al., “The rise of a knowledge society,” 262. 78. Brown, “New Horizons in Engineering Education,” 343. 79. As quoted in: Brown, “New Horizons,” 345. 80. Layton, Revolt, 252. 81. Brown, “New Horizons,” 346. 82. Ibid. 83. Williams, Retooling, 65-9. 84. Layton, Revolt of the engineers, 1-2. 85. As quoted in: Layton, Revolt of the engineers, 7. 86. As quoted in: Ibid., 13-4. 87. Ibid., 251. 88. Van de Poel and Royakkers. Ethics, technology, and engineering, 33-40. 89. Mitcham, “A historico-ethical perspective on engineering education,” 39. 90. As quoted in: Downey, Lucena, Mitcham, “Engineering ethics and identity,” 471. Also: Schultze, “Ueber der Verantwortung des Ingenieurs,” 411; Van de

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92. 93. 94. 95.

Poel and Royakkers. Ethics, technology, and engineering, 38; Mitcham, Thinking through technology, 66. The Engineers Council for Professional Development—another US umbrella organisation of engineering societies, as quoted in: Mitcham, “A historico-ethical perspective,” 41. “Society for Social Responsibility in Science,” 3. Van Lente and Schot, “Technology as Politics,” 396. As quoted in: Pieterson, Het technisch labyrint, 300-5. Layton, Revolt, 252; Wisnioski, Engineers for Change.

4

The Age of Participation, 1970-2015

1. 2.

As quoted in: Wisnioski, Engineers for Change, 73. Hughes, American Genesis, 443-42; Hughes, Human-built world, 141-52; Jamison, The making of green knowledge, Chapter 3. For a critical counterculture discussion: Spates, “Counterculture and Dominant Culture Values.” Edwards, “The world in a machine,” 236. Sherwin and Isenson, “Project hindsight”; Wise, “Science and Technology.” Jamison, “Social movements and science,” 54. Wisnioski, Engineers for Change; Jamison, “Social movements and science,” 54. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus; Jamison, “Social movements and science.” Inspired by Bogner, “The Paradox of Participation Experiments.” For the following: Kirchhof and Meyer, “Global Protest Against Nuclear Power”; Hughes, “Civil disobedience in transnational perspective”; Kirchhof, “Spanning the globe”; Kirchhof and McConville, “Transcontinental and Transnational Links in Social Movements”; Kirchhof, “Finding Common Ground in Transnational Peace Movements.” Meyer, “Where do we go from Wyhl?” For these and other examples see www.honest2020.eu/ (consulted November 27, 2016). For an Eastern Europe example: Hristov, The Communist Nuclear Era, 76 and Chapter 4. Van den Bosch, De angst reactor. Kalmbach, “Radiation and borders”; Kalmbach, Meanings of a disaster. For the following: Bijker, “The Oosterschelde storm surge barrier”; Disco and Van der Vleuten, “The politics of wet system building”; De Schipper, Slag om de Oosterschelde. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, 197-253; Hughes, Human-built world, 168-70. Van Hengel, “De Brede Maatschappelijke Discussie”; Hajer and Houterman, “Energiebeleid en democratisering”; Hagendijk and Terpstra, “Technology, risk and democracy.” Sclove, Democracy and Technology; Sclove, Reinventing Technology Assessment; Van Est, “The Rathenau Institute’s approach to participatory TA.”

91.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Notes

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

185

“World Wide View: A Methodology for Global Citizen Liberation,” www. wwviews.org (accessed April 1, 2013). Schot, “Towards new forms of participatory technology development”; Hoogma et al., Experimenting for sustainable transport. “Liberaal Manifest 1981”; Lucardie, “Individualisering, beambtendom en populisme.” Dolsma, van den Braak, and Klamer, Perspectief op een participatiemaatschappij. Summary report: Senate of the Dutch Parliament, Lost connections? Full report: Parlementaire Onderzoekscommissie, Verbinding verbroken? Also: Stellinga, Dertig jaar privatisering. Jamison, The making of green engineers, 6. Senate of the Dutch Parliament, Lost connections? Hagendijk and Irwin. “Public deliberation and governance”; Hagendijk et al., Science, Technology and Governance in Europe. Bruland and Mowery, “Innovation through time,” 372. Davids et al., Innovaties en kennisinfrastructuur, 137, 171-2. De Vries, 80 Years of Research. Eissing and Boekhoorn, “Er is leven na Philips.” Chesbrough, Open innovation; Chesbrough, “The era of open innovation.” https://www.hightechcampus.nl/ (consulted December 24, 2016). Von Hippel, The democratization of innovation, 15-6, 136-42, 148. As quoted in: Ritter et al., Foundations for designing user-centered systems, 33. As quoted in: Schuler and Namioka, Participatory design, ix. Ibid., ix. Ehn, “Scandinavian design.” Greenbaum, “A design of one’s own.” Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, Chapter 7. Van Est, Winds of change; Heymann, Geschichte der Windenergienutzung; Wistoft et al., Elektricitetens Aarhundrede, 211-217. Verbong, “Wind power in the Netherlands.” Furness, One Less Car. Ibid. Oldenziel et al., Cycling Cities. Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe.; Oldenziel and Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, Chapter 8. Ibid. and Veraart, “Losing meanings: computer games in Dutch domestic use”; Veraart, “Transnational (Dis)connection in localizing personal computing.” As quoted in: Wisnioski, Engineers for Change, 127. For the following see 123-85. As quoted in: Hecht and Edwards. “The Technopolitics of Cold War,” 290.

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47. Wisnioski, Engineers for Change, 123-85; De Charentenay, “Ingénieurs Sans Frontières.” 48. As quoted in: Wisnioski, Engineers for Change, 67. Layton, Revolt of the engineers, vii-viii. 49. For example, Paschkis lectured there on technology & society and responsibility issues. Wisnioski, Engineers for Change, 80. 50. Sjoberg and Imsen. “Gender and science education”; Lucena, “Women in Engineering; Bix, Girls Coming to Tech! On African Americans in US engineering programs: Weinberger, “Engineering Educational Opportunity.” 51. Ramirez and Wotipka. “Slowly but surely?” 52. Kodate and Kodate. Japanese Women in Science and Engineering, 4. Osborn, “Status and prospects of women.” 53. Bijker, “Interdisciplinary technology studies”; Waks, “STS as an academic field and a social movement”; Yager, Science/ technology/ society as reform in science education; Cutcliffe, “The STS curriculum.” 54. Christelle and Derouet. “Social responsibility in French engineering education.” 55. Kline “Using history and sociology to teach engineering ethics”; Brumsen, “Ethics in engineering in the Netherlands”; Downey, Lucena, Mitcham, “Engineering Ethics and Engineering Identities.” 56. Jorgensen, “Historical accounts of engineering education.” 57. As cited in: Seely, “The other re-engineering of engineering education,” 292. 58. Froyd et al., “Five major shifts.” 59. For an overview: Steinhaus, “With or Without You.” 60. On the historical role of Dutch science shops: Sclove, “Research by the people, for the people.” An early history: Pennings and Weerdenburg, Een deurtje in de toren. 61. Steinhaus, “Development of Science Shops”; Mulder and DeBok, “Science shops as university-community interfaces”; Leydesdorff and Ward, “Science shops.” 62. Ibid. and Martin et al., “Embedding community-university partnerships”; www.livingknowledge.org/science-shops/about-science-shops (consulted December 1, 2016) 63. Simões et al., Sciences in the Universities of Europe; Akera and Seely, “A Historical Survey.” For similar developments in Brazil: Silva et al., “Engineering Brazil.” 64. Martin et al., “Embedding community-university partnerships”; www. wetenschapswinkels.nl (consulted December 1, 2016).

Epilogue: Engineering the Future 1. 2. 3.

Mote, Dowling, Zhou. “The Power of an Idea.” Ibid, 4. Ibid, 4.

Notes

4. 5.

187

Ibid, 4. Compare Van Santen et al., The thinking pill, 227-237; Van Santen et al., 2030. Another example is Holdren. “Science and technology for sustainable wellbeing.”  6. Beck, World at Risk; Cottle, “Global Crises in the News”; Cottle, “Taking global crises in the news seriously.” 7. Lundin, “Making History Matter”; Van der Vleuten, “A History of Technology for an Age of Grand Challenges.” Hicks, “Grand Challenges in US Science Policy”; Cagnin, Amanatidou, 8. Keenan, “Orienting European innovation systems towards grand challenges”; Bos and Van Lente, “Unpacking the grand challenges.” 9. Hicks, “Grand Challenges in US Science Policy,” 6-9. 10. As quoted in: Rhisiart, “Foresight and ‘grand challenges’,” 31. 11. https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/what-horizon-2020 (consulted December 18, 2016). 12. Boin, Ekengren, Rhinard. The European Union as crisis manager; Boin, Ekengren, Rhinard, “Protecting the union”; Van der Vleuten et al., “Europe’s Critical Infrastructure and its Vulnerabilities.” 13. Hicks, “Grand Challenges in US Science Policy,” 3-5. 14. As quoted in: Rhisiart, “Foresight and “grand challenges’,” 36. 15. Rip, “Science institutions and grand challenges”; Simões et al., Sciences in the Universities of Europe. 16. Rip, “Science institutions and grand challenges”; Kuhlmann and Rip, “The challenge of addressing Grand Challenges.” 17. Berman, “How GE and IBM are Playing Global Development.” 18. www.ni.com/company/programs/grand-challenges/ (consulted December 18, 2015). 19. As quoted from an advertizing in: Global Grand Challenges, 7. 20. Frans Van Houten, “De grote uitdaging”; Henk Van Houten, “Speech Henk van Houten”; Van Delft and Maas, Philips Research 100 jaar, 273. 21. Frans van Houten. “Speech by Frans van Houten.” 22. ‘PHIA.AS – Q4 2013 Koninklijke Philips NV Earnings Conference Call.’ Edited Transcript. Thomson Reuters Street Events, January 28, 2014. Available at www.philips.com (accessed May 29, 2014). 23. Boerman and Van Leeuwen, “Frans van Houten: ‘Philips moet een machine zijn’” (our translation). Compare: Frans van Houten, “The spoken word prevails.” 24. CTO Jim Andrew in: From insight to impact. 25. Smith, US Views of Technology and the Future. 26. ‘A REScoop manifesto’; Vansintjan, “REScoop.eu comments on the DG Competition Draft.” 27. Dunn et al. “Learning from hackers; Goldsmith and Wu, Who controls the Internet?; Oldenziel, Hacking Europe; Oldenziel, Cycling cities; Murphy, “Tiny houses as appropriate technology.”

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28. E.g. De Hoop, Pols, Romijn. “Limits to responsible innovation”; Vries et al., “Sustainability or profitability?”; Verbong et al. “Smart Business for Smart Users”; Schot, Kanger, Verbong, “The roles of users.” 29. Hicks, “Grand Challenges in US Science Policy,” 16-18. 30. Global Grand Challenges. Report, 3. 31. Mote, Dowling, Zhou. “The Power of an Idea,” 5. 32. Holdren, “Science and Technology,” 432, 433. 33. Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer, 2030, 269, 270. 34. Mote, Dowling, Zhou. “The Power of an Idea,” 5. 35. As quoted in: Rhisiart, “Foresight and ‘grand challenges’,” 31. 36. Rhisiart, “Foresight and ‘grand challenges’.” 37. DSM CTO Emmo Meijer interviewed in: Schutte, “Innovatiekracht van het Nederlandse bedrijfsleven.” 38. Henk van Houten, “ Speech ter gelegenheid.” 39. Frans van Houten, “The spoken word”; Boerman, “Hoe uitvinder Philips zichzelf opnieuw uitvindt.” 40. Kuhlmann, Rip. “The challenge of addressing Grand Challenges”; Emmo Meijer, personal communication (Valkenswaard, December 22, 2015).

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Illustration credits

Cover: Chippers in a shipyard [ Shipbuilding. Three women working], 1942. Department of Labor. Women’s Bureau. U.S. National Archives. Number 522892. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Chippers_in_a_shipyard_(_Shipbuilding._Three_women_working)_-_NARA__522892.tif?uselang=nl) Page 12/154: Original caption: Anonymous-Hacker at CeBIT 2016 in Hannover. Photo by Frank Schwichtenberg, Creative Commons License. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Anonymous_%E2%80%93_CeBIT_2016_00.jpg?uselang=nl) Page 22/28: Workers and locals here celebrate the meeting of the two bores of the Gotthard tunnel in 1880. The full train service started in 1882 when the approach lines had been completed. Plate from the Illustrated London News vol. 80/1, 257. Permission by Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. Ref. no.10413079. Page 32: Train on the Demmeni bridge across the Atjeh River (Sumatra), 1886. Courtesy Foundation for the History of Technology. Also available in collection Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, land- en Volkerenkunde. Page 38: The BASF factory complex at Ludwigshafen, Germany, in 1881. Painting by Robert Friedrich Stieler (1847-1908). Courtesy BASF Company Archives (BASF Unternehmensarchiv). Page 42: Workers on the first moving assembly line put together magnetos and flywheels for 1913 Ford autos, Highland Park, Michigan. U.S. National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency (306-PSE-73-1534). (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_assembly_line__1913.jpg) Page 48: Women Repairing Bicycle, c. 1895. Courtesy Montana State University (MSU) – Library Historical Photographs Collection. Photo ID parc-000135. Page 49: Bersey Cabs of the London Electrical Cab Company. Source: Gijs Mom, Geschiedenis van de auto van morgen (Deventer: Kluwer Bedrijfsinformatie, 1997), page 146. Courtesy Gijs Mom. Page 53: Wind-electric turbine Poul de Cour, 1890s. Courtesy Poul la Cour Museum, Denmark. Page 62/83: Cartoon De Hel by Jordaan. Het Leven 15 (1920). Page 65: British Vickers machine gun crew wearing PH-type anti-gas helmets. Near Ovillers during the Battle of the Somme, July 1916. Photo by John Warwick Brook, British Army. Ministry of Information First World War Official Collection. Imperial War Museums, Q3995. IWM Non-Commercial License. Page 78: Publicity photo of Charlie Chaplin for the film Modern Times, 1936. (https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chaplin_-_Modern_Times.jpg?uselang=nl)

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Page 80: Top: Portable Philips X-ray machine, 1928. Bottom: Philips Pedoscope at Wouters shoe store Eindhoven, 1935. Courtesy Philips Company Archives. Page 88: Original caption “Prozess RSHA SS – Angeklagte zu Beginn des Letzten Verhandlungstages”, 1948. Permission by Ullstein Bild DPA, ref.no. 00022718. Page 92/101: Johan Forrester and his team with the Whirlwind computer at MIT Digital Computer Lab in 1957. Courtesy MIT Museum. Page 97: Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project. Draper Laboratory, 1969. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Margaret_Hamilton.gif) Page 99: Exhibition “Het Atoom”, Schiphol 1957. Photo by Elli van Zachten. Permission by Maria Austria Instituut. Picture number: 030025001079. Page 100: Original caption “Igor V. Kurchatov (in the middle, with beard) during his visit at AERE Harwell, 25th April 1956. On his right is Nikita S. Khrushchev, to his left is Nikolai A. Bulganin. Opposite is Sir John D. Cockcroft, Director of AERE Harwell,” 1956. Permission by EDFA. Page 116: Members of Women’s Advisory Committee (VAC) participating in a meeting. Landelijk Contact VAC’s Utrecht. Courtesy Foundation for the History of Technology. Page 118: Cartoon from Northampton Chronicle and Echo, reprinted in CTC Gazette, April 1935. Page 130/151: Student and teacher volunteers constructing windmill at Tvind, ca. 1975. Courtesy of Collection Tvindkraft, Denmark. Page 134: Protest against the reactor plant in Kalkar, 1979. Photo by Anefo. Collection Nationaal Archief. Creative Commons License. Photo number: 930-2955. Page 138: Oosterschelde storm surge barrier, February 27, 1990. Photo by Afdeling Multimedia Rijkswaterstaat. Courtesy https://beeldbank.rws.nl, Rijkswaterstaat. Page 144: Jan Timmer (CEO Philips) demonstrates a CD Player, Rolling Stone Mick Jagger is watching, 1981. Courtesy Philips Company Archives. Page 152: Critical Mass Event Budapest, April 19, 2009. Photo by Marion Schneider and Christoph Aistleitner. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Budapest_CM_035.jpg?uselang=de) Photo 162: Solar car Stella. Photo by Bart van Overbeeke Fotografie (www.bvof.nl).

Index accident 79, 81-85, 120, 136 Advanced Research Project Agency 101, 155 American Chemical Society 67 American Society of Civil Engineers 56, 137 anti-nuclear 133, 135-136, 138, 150, 196 application research 107-109 applied research 94, 96, 100, 106, 110, 132, 143, 145, 170 Armstrong, Edwin 76 assembly line 42, 77-79, 207 AT&T 75-76, 106, 108, 145 Atomic Energy Commission 96 aviation 64, 68, 106 Baekeland, Leo 37, 55, 76-77, 176, 199 bankruptcy 6, 40, 72-73, 76, 168 BASF 38-39, 42, 66, 74, 189, 207 basic research 94-102, 106-107, 132, 143, 145, 170 beer industry 74 Bell Laboratories 108, 145 Bellamy, Edward 44, 50, 55, 177, 189-190, 192 bicycle 5, 47-48, 50-51, 119-120, 152-153, 200, 207 biketivists 7, 152-153, 170 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 165 Bohr, Niels 67 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 59 built environment 6, 51, 115 Bush, Vannevar 93-94, 96, 126, 180, 191, 205 business challenges 15, 112, 142, 167-168 business landscape 15, 24, 41, 43, 112 business model 15-16, 35-37, 39, 46, 61, 168, 170 business opportunity 15, 34-35, 40, 43, 73, 85 car 5-6, 18, 47-49, 51, 54, 71, 74, 81-82, 84-86, 110, 117-120, 152-153, 169, 208 car-centered city 6, 117-118 cartel 75 Casimir, Hendrik 107, 109 Centre national de la recherche scientifique 99 Chaplin, Charlie 78-79, 207 chemical engineer 35, 51, 57 Chevalier, Michel 26-28, 31-35, 55, 57, 60, 63-64, 165, 176, 191-192 Chinese Academy of Engineering 163 Cisco Systems 145 citizen conference 139-140 city 6, 29-30, 34, 37, 43, 49, 54, 56, 59, 78-79, 82, 103-104, 115, 117-121, 137, 200 civilizing mission 5, 31-33, 70-71, 189 Club of Rome 132 Cold War 93, 99, 182-183, 185, 190, 194-196, 199, 201, 204, 206 Collingridge dilemma 17, 159 colonialism 31-33, 201 communism 69

computer 15, 54, 101, 106, 112, 121, 132, 145, 147-148, 154-155, 180, 185, 190, 193, 195-197, 205, 208 conglomerate 110-112, 144-145 consensus conference 139 cooperative movement 45, 50, 52-54, 79, 147 Corporate Social Responsibility 148-149, 205 Corps des Ponts et Chaussées 28 counterculture 131, 151, 156-157, 160, 172, 184, 203 Crystal Palace 24, 194 cyclists 50, 82, 84-86, 119-121 Dawling, Ann 14, 171, 175 de Forest, Lee 76 Delft University of Technology 89 design 4, 17-18, 20, 23, 43, 45-48, 55, 59, 85, 136-137, 139-140, 146-150, 153, 159-160, 165, 172, 176, 179, 185, 193, 195, 198, 200, 202, 204 DSM 109-110, 124, 173, 188, 198, 204 Duveyrier, Henry 33, 195 École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures 58 École des Mines 26 École Polytechnique 26, 57, 59 economic crisis 19, 67-68, 144 Edison, Thomas 36-37, 40, 50, 55, 66 Eindhoven University of Technology 9-10, 160, 199, 204 electric car 49 electric power 36, 54, 64 electrical engineer 35, 40, 57, 66, 69, 76, 94, 122, 124 electricity 27, 31, 36, 49, 51-52, 54, 66, 68, 79, 85, 141, 198, 204 employment 74, 94-95 energy 9, 13-15, 19, 23, 36, 43, 54, 63, 68, 78, 96, 98, 104-105, 110, 121-122, 125, 133, 135, 140, 142, 149-150, 164, 166-169, 171, 178, 181, 190, 195, 200-202, 204-205 Engelhorn, Friedrich 38-39, 55, 176, 202 engineering associations 9, 13-14, 56-58, 86, 89-90, 122-123, 125-127, 157, 159, 184 engineering education 5, 7, 9, 14, 20, 25, 57-60, 84, 89, 108, 122-125, 156-159, 161, 163-164, 172, 178, 183, 186, 189-195, 197, 199-203, 205-206 engineering ethics 9, 20, 31, 127, 158-160, 178, 183, 186, 192-193, 197 engineering profession 15-16, 19, 23, 25, 35, 55-58, 60-61, 63, 86-87, 89, 122-123, 125, 127, 156-157 engineering science 9, 16, 19, 23, 25, 56-57, 124-125, 128, 164 Engineers Without Borders 157 ethical codes 6, 126, 128, 157, 159 European Molecular Biology Laboratory 98

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European Organization for Nuclear Research 96 European Space Agency 98 European Union 68, 105, 158, 160, 166, 172, 187, 191, 198 experts 8, 18, 20, 40, 57, 84, 89, 91, 93-96, 98-100, 102-105, 107-116, 118-121, 123, 126-128, 131, 141, 147, 149, 161, 164, 170-171, 173, 178, 180, 190-191, 193, 195-197, 199, 202

Institution of Mechanical Engineers 57 international machinery 5, 31 international organization 31, 34, 122, 196 International Railway Congress Association 31 internet 16, 27, 101, 154-155, 169-170 inventor 5, 36-37, 39, 50, 52, 55, 75-76, 150, 189 inventor-entrepreneur 5, 36-37, 50, 52, 76 IT&T 110

Factory Engineering 109-110 fascism 69 Feynman, Richard 67 First World War 19, 64-69, 74, 207 Forrester, Jay 101, 112, 208 Franck, James 67 freedom 8, 69-70, 85, 96, 104, 107, 120, 154 Fundamental Research 94, 106-109, 123, 173 future of engineering 14, 18, 164-165, 171

Jobs, Steve 155

Gates, Bill 14 General Bakelite Company 37, 76-77 General Electric 75, 106, 112 General Motors 74, 84, 118 German Engineering Society 56, 90, 202 Gilbreth, Lillian Moller 41, 177, 194 Grand Challenges for Engineering 164, 200 Grand Challenges for Global Health 165 Great Depression 19-20, 64, 67 Great Exhibition 23-26, 37, 175, 178, 191, 198, 205-206 Greenpeace 131, 140, 148, 149 Grignard, Victor 66 Haber, Fritz 66-67, 178-179, 193, 195, 203 hacktivists 7, 153-154 Hahn, Otto 67 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène 30 health 13-15, 24, 26, 30, 34, 60-61, 94, 96, 109, 127, 163-167 Heisenberg, Werner 67, 97-98 Herrold, Charles David 52 Hertz, Gustav 67 history of technology 9, 164, 178, 200-201 Holocaust 64, 72 household technology 45 housing 15, 23, 25, 30, 43, 45, 50-52, 60-61, 105, 115-117, 121, 134, 163 humanities 9, 125-126, 158 IBM 101, 145, 153-155, 167, 187, 190 ICI 75 industrial engineering 35, 41, 43, 57, 77 Industrial Revolution 19, 23-24, 26 infrastructure state 5, 27-28, 33-34, 43, 45, 55, 61, 176 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 126, 194, 199, 205 Institute of Industrial Engineers 77 Institution of Civil Engineers 56

la Cour, Poul 54-55, 150, 177, 195, 207 labor union 44, 77, 139 Lang, Fritz 78, 189, 197 Le Corbusier 103 League of Nations 71 liberty 6, 24, 26-27, 69 linear model of innovation 7, 94-96, 100, 106, 108-110, 112-113, 121, 123, 131-132, 142-143, 170, 172, 180, 194 Liverpool-Manchester railway 34 Lockheed 131, 167 Marconi, Guglielmo 51-52 Marcuse, Herbert 70, 179, 199 meaningful innovation 168 mechanization 69, 77 media 16, 27, 33, 46-47, 70-71, 84, 102, 137, 149 Metropolis 78 Meyer, Konrad 88, 184, 197, 199 MIT 51, 97, 101, 112, 124-126, 132, 155-156, 159, 189-191, 193-201, 204-206, 208 mobility 7, 9, 13, 15, 19, 23, 47, 63, 68, 81, 84-86, 117, 119, 121, 149, 152-153, 170, 199, 201 motorways 64, 103 Mumford, Lewis 70, 121, 179, 200 NASA 96, 98, 181, 198 National Academy of Engineering 13, 163, 167 National Science Foundation 94, 96, 123, 132 NatLab 40, 78, 107-108, 113, 144-145 neoliberal 74, 140-141, 161 Nobel Prize 51, 66, 89, 97, 128 nuclear technology 19, 64, 67, 91, 93, 96, 98-100, 102, 110, 121, 124-125, 131, 133-136, 138-139, 142, 146, 150, 156, 181, 195-196, 197 Oosterschelde storm surge barrier 136-138, 184, 190, 192, 208 open innovation 7, 143, 145-146, 185, 191 operations research 111, 146, 182, 197 opportunity-seeking entrepreneur 5, 36-39 Organization for European Cooperation and Development 100, 158, 194 Ortega y Gasset, José 69 Palchinsky, Peter 89 Palmer, Henry Robinson 56 participation by delegation 7, 140-141

Index

participation by mediation 7, 138-139, 141 participation by protest 7, 134 participation society 141 participative approach 18, 20, 133, 137, 142, 159, 161, 170 participatory design 147-148, 195 patent 6, 37, 40, 43, 52, 75-77, 175, 205 peace 5-6, 19, 23, 26-27, 34, 63-64, 67, 102, 111, 135, 179, 181, 184, 189-190, 195, 197 Philips 35, 39-40, 55, 75, 78-80, 107-108, 113-114, 144-146, 148-149, 168-169, 173, 176-177, 179, 182, 185, 187-188, 190, 192-195, 204, 208 Philips Research 145-146, 187, 204 Philips, Gerard 35, 39-40, 55 planning 6, 13, 60-61, 68, 103-105, 110, 122, 126, 147-148, 153, 159 progress 5, 23-24, 26-27, 34, 44, 46, 52, 59-60, 63-64, 67-68, 70, 84, 119, 193 progressive-liberal engineer 60 Project Hindsight 132, 181, 202 project research 107 promise, global 5, 31 promise, national 5, 27 promise, urban 5, 29-30 Public Works 28-30, 89, 103, 153 Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs 102 radio 44, 51-52, 54, 64, 69, 76, 78-79, 94, 113, 124, 126, 160, 177, 193, 199 Radio Corporation of America 76, 108-109, 192 railway 5, 8, 26, 28-35, 40-41, 45-47, 57, 61, 65, 68, 73-74, 81-82, 165, 176-177, 180, 195, 201-202 RAND Corporation 111, 196 Rathenau, Walter 69 Research & Development 6, 43, 76, 106-108, 144, 181, 204 research laboratory 36-37, 42 Rijkswaterstaat 29, 89, 103, 137, 208 Ritte, Carl 32 Royal Academy of Engineering 13, 163, 171 Royal Institute of British Architects 57, 178 Russell-Einstein Manifesto 102 scaling-up 40-41, 107 Science Fiction 70, 87, 128, 191, 196 Science for the People 156 science shops 160-161, 186, 199, 203 Science, Technology and Society 157-158, 160, 186, 192, 198, 205 science-based 35, 42, 57-58, 89, 108 Science—The Endless Frontier 93-94, 96, 180, 191, 201 scientific management 20, 41-43, 77-79 Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action 133, 156 Second World War 64, 68, 71, 82, 88, 91, 93, 98, 104, 106, 113, 115, 119, 126-127, 157, 195 security 9, 13, 15, 37, 47, 67, 104, 164, 166-168, 194 Shell 74, 118, 173

211 socialist visionaries 60 Societal Challenges 6-7, 15, 34, 95, 102-103, 105, 110, 112, 142, 165-168, 170-172 Société des ingénieurs civils de France 56 Society for Social Responsibility in Science 184, 203 software 15, 43, 145, 147, 155, 169, 190, 208 Stalin 69, 89 Strategic Niche Management 140 sustainability 14, 27, 34, 140, 167, 170, 199 Systems Dynamics 112, 132 Systems Analysis 111, 146 systems approach 6, 94-96, 102-103, 110-113, 117, 131, 170-171, 193, 195-197 target research 107 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 41-42, 55, 77 technocracy 6-8, 18, 20, 91, 93, 95, 100-102, 105-106, 113, 116-118, 120, 126-128, 131-133, 156, 159, 165, 170-172, 180, 193, 205 technocratic approach 18, 93, 95, 103, 105-106, 112, 128, 131, 170 technology-based company 19, 24, 43, 45, 64, 73-74, 168 telegraphy 24, 27, 29, 31, 36, 40-41, 45 telephony 5, 44-46, 55, 121 Tennessee Valley Authority 126 Third World War 93, 105 thirty-year crisis 19, 64 traffic separation 118 transistor 76, 108-109, 113 Trans-Sahara railway 33 unemployment 20, 90 Unilever 109, 113-114, 192 unintended consequences 16-17, 203 Union of Concerned Scientists 156 United Nations 71, 104-105, 110, 140, 165 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 105 Universal Postal Union 31 Urban Machine 5, 29-30, 45, 176, 195 user communities 15, 45, 55, 63, 151, 169 user-activists 5, 25, 44-45, 50-51, 55, 70, 84, 131, 135, 137, 148, 150-155, 157, 169 user-centered design 20, 146-148 user-centered innovation 143, 146 user-consumers 5, 45, 51, 55, 113 users and misusers 6, 82, 84 users, professional 24, 52, 109, 114 users, projected 6, 49, 55, 113, 115, 118, 169 user-tinkerers 5, 7, 51, 55, 149-150, 169 vacuum tube 76, 78, 108, 113 van Santen, Rutger 13, 175, 180, 187-188, 204 Verein Deutscher Ingenieure 56, 90, 127, 202 Vietnam War 71, 132, 156 Volunteers for International Technical Assistance 156

212 

Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past

waterways 27, 29 Whirlwind computer 101, 112, 208 White Label League 50-51 windelectric turbine 15, 52, 55, 150-151 worker 6, 42, 64, 77-78, 89, 93, 147-148, 160 working class 34, 50, 58, 119

World Expo 24, 31 World Wide Views 139-140 World Wide Web 98, 155 x-ray 78, 80, 208