Content area
Full Text
The Greenwood Technographies: Life Stories of Technologies
Greenwood Press has released a fourteen-volume series of what it calls "technographies," each subtitled The Life Story of a Technology-short, accessible histories of important artifacts, written by well-known historians of technology, most if not all of whom are SHOT members.1 Each volume, according to the series foreword, is designed "to help students and the general public better understand how technology and society interact" and to combine "a discussion of technical developments with a description of the technology's effect on the broader fabric of society and culture-and vice versa." Something akin to a human biography, each book seeks to lay out the artifact's antecedents or "family" background, its "youthful" development, subsequent maturation, and either its eventual absorption into ubiquitous societal adoption or its decline and obsolescence. The volumes published to date fall loosely into three main categories: communication (the book, telephone, radio, electronics, computers, and sound recording); transportation (the ever-popular planes, trains, and automobiles, as well as a volume on trolleys); and military-related technologies (firearms, rockets and missiles, and American military developments). An additional volume on robots by Lisa Nocks is due to be released in early 2007. In addition to the text, each study includes a fairly detailed timeline, a brief glossary of difficult terms, and a several-page bibliography of key secondary sources. Each is illustrated with a selection of images appropriate to key points being delineated in the text.
For a review of this sort, one should ask how well the series fulfills its stated goals.While all the volumes provide both technical description and discussion of the artifact's societal context, the balance ranges from volumes that are far heavier on the technical description (H. Roger Grant's The Railroad [182 pp.]; Roger Pauly's Firearms [180 pp.]; and David L.Morton and Joseph Gabriel's Electronics [201 pp.]) to those that include more in the way of context (Rudi Volti's Cars and Culture [171 pp.]; a second volume by Morton, Sound Recording [215 pp.]; and David Mercer's The Telephone [151 pp.]). Several of the volumes tend to focus more on the American scene (most obviously Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining's American Military Technology [205 pp.], but also Brian Regals's Radio [152 pp.]; Eric G. Sweden and David L. Ferro's Computers...