Robert W. Seidel
Abstract. I examine the reconstruction of artifacts by museums, the use of artifacts in reconstructions of history by historians, and the potential of virtual reconstruction for historical purposes based upon past efforts to
display and to explain the development of high-technology objects like the particle accelerator, laser, and computer at the University of California's Lawrence Hall of Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Smithsonian Institution. The historical reconstruction of the development of the cyclotron and of the laser shows the importance of teamwork between historians, scientists, and engineers in formulating accurate historical reconstructions.
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Introduction
The current interest in the simulation, reconstruction and reactivating of early computers reflects an enthusiasm on the part of the practitioners. The historian's interest in artifacts is different from the practitioner's. The difference between their perspectives creates a tension between the historian's use of artifacts and the
practitioner's reconstruction of them that should be reconciled if both are to profit from such reconstructions. I would like to reflect on the nature of such a reconciliation, not least because it goes to the heart of the nature of the museum and of the history of technology.
A brief review of the history of science museums and the disciplinary construction of the history of technology indicates some of the major difficulties historians, scientists, and museum professionals have had in interpreting artifacts. Although artifacts exist, and can be validated using historical techniques, the task of the
historian/curator in interpreting their meaning is fraught with pitfalls.1 The historian's interpretation is no longer (if it ever was) privileged, but it is "authoritative" in a constrained sense.
1 Cf., inter alia, Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, History from Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington & London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).
As Paul Forman2 has argued, the task of the historian requires critical independence, but an exchange of views between historians and their subjects can be mutually instructive.3 Historians of science and technology have deferred to their subjects as the valuators of "historic" accomplishments, and have used their representations of historical reality, although their interpretations involve critical assessment of historical testimony, text and artifact. It is in the careful use of his critical tools that the historian discovers history.
This is evident in museums, where historians have interpreted technology for centuries. Such colossi as the Deutsches Museum, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the National Air and Space Museum, and the Science Museum of London are testimonies to the accomplishments of modern technology, richly funded by government and industry, overflowing with artifacts, only a small percentage of which can be displayed, and staffed by museum curators whose expertise ranges from undergraduate study to advanced degrees in history.
Their disciplinary interests, when blended in the crucible of exhibit development with the institutional interests of museum administrators in patronage and popularity, are often diluted. However, when the artifact is
subjected to an interpretation that takes into account not only its construction, function, and the details of its invention and development, but also its political, social, and economic contexts, both the historian and the participant can take pride in the accomplishment.4
In historical publication, as opposed to display, the three-dimensional aspect of the artifact must give way to a two-dimensional graphic representation or a verbal description. In such research, particularly in the mature areas of the history of technology, the artifact seems to recede into the background as the context within which it developed swells to fill the mental picture that the historian paints. The use of the artifact as a primary source, however, may answer crucial questions about that development, and new media, like virtual reconstructions in cyberspace, may enhance the historian's use of that information.
Although some historians portray the business, military, and scientific contexts of computers, most history of computing still focuses on artifacts and their makers. As in the case of other artifacts, large sums are still available for their celebration and display, often from the makers themselves. Hence, the Computer Museum in Boston is the work of the same individuals who built Digital Equipment Corporation. The Microsoft, Intel, Magnavox, and DEC museums represent and celebrate the accomplishments of these corporations. The Smithsonian Institution relies heavily on the private sector for funding and the raw materials of their exhibits.
As in other forms of patronage, questions of autonomy and emphasis arise.
2 Paul Forman, "Independence, Not Transcendence, for the Historian of Science," Isis 82 (1991), 71–86.
3 Cf., e.g. Roger Stuewer, ed., Nuclear Physics in Retrospect: Proceedings of a Symposium on the 1930s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 318–322.
4 Edward Tenner, "Information Age at the National Museum of American History," Technology and Culture 33 (Oct. 1992), 780–87.
Recent controversies between scientists, veterans, congress, and the curators of Smithsonian exhibits have cast a pall over historical interpretation of science and technology. The disputes over the Enola Gay and ''Science in American Life" exhibits have made it clear that historians employed by museums do not enjoy the academic freedom guaranteed to their academic colleagues, and that the director who relies too heavily on revisionist history will be toppled by the powers that be. More traditional historians may face the criticism of
postmodernists, feminists, animal rights advocates, political activists, and other "politically correct" special interest groups in their attempts to reconstruct the past. The historian may well feel safer writing a monograph than facing the political consequences of building a museum exhibit that expresses the same interpretations.
Within the museum, moreover, artifacts dominate the representation of history. Text, when used, serves
primarily to describe the artifact. While the broader contexts of development may be suggested by the grouping of artifacts in exhibits or displays with thematic unities which, like those of the dramatic arts, suggest the time, place, and circumstance within which their construction took place, but, as one might imagine, the suggestion of technological determinism by the dominance of the artifact is seldom balanced by an account of the
determination of the technology by its environment. As historians of technology have moved toward an understanding of the sociological, economic, and other environmental determinants, practitioners and possessors of artifacts have often refused to follow.
The historical reconstruction of computers by practitioners also privileges the artifact, although often in virtual form. In the past twenty years, the volume of "hardware" history has grown as the computer itself shrank from gigantic proportions to the desktop and the microchip processor. As the artifacts of modern computing become invisible, older, larger computers supply a symbol of computing to practitioners, the public, and patrons which is not only visible, but comprehensible.
The inherent lack of interesting visual clues has plagued the interpretation of the computer from ENIAC to the present. The visual presentation of computers has required "special effects" enhancements ranging from the PingPong ball hemispheres used to magnify the blinking lights of the ENIAC, to the gigantic and elaborate movie computers of Colossus: The Forbin Project, and other films. While simulation of the operation of actual computers can represent the functionality in more significant ways, substituting software representations for glorified hardware, it is unclear how this serves the purposes of display, the act of historical interpretation, or the antiquarian passions that have fueled interest in artifacts in the past.
The reconstruction of the artifact can help the reconstruction of the past. However, the use of artifacts for historical reconstruction requires the same critical apparatus that has informed the study of texts. Critical questions should be posed in the design of projects to reconstruct artifacts, but seldom are. In what follows, I compare museum, historical, and virtual reconstructions to illuminate this process.
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Museum Reconstructions
The museum was once, for the professional scientist, the laboratory within which he conducted his experiments and, quite literally, sought his "Muse." Museums deconstructed reality. The identification, classification, and organization of nature were their scientific raison d'être.5 Whatever assistance the carefully arranged and labeled collections of museums gave to memory, it was not through the reconstruction of the reality they purported to represent. The act of classification itself does violence to reality in order to make it accessible to reason. Indeed, most reconstructions of memory were literary, from journals and diaries of observant travelers who brought their own impressions of the noble savage and the heart of darkness to their readers in the form of structured narrative.6
Historians built their discipline on textual criticism. In formulating their narratives of the past, they seek to interpret the evidence of the past to construct an intelligible story for the present. The physical analogue of this effort is the restoration of historic sites. The ruins of ancient Anasazi pueblos in the southwest, industrial cities like Lowell in the northeast, and historical Williamsburg in the mid-Atlantic United States provide an
experience of the past that is more "authentic" than outdoor museums that assemble buildings from other locales. These reconstructions limited by the imagination and knowledge of the curators and exhibit staff, the materials available, and the interpretation by guides.
Indoor museums present a different sort of problem for those interested in reconstructing the past. A focus on the design, function, performance, or operating characteristics of an artifact, without regard for intellectual, economic, social, political, technical, and other influences or effects, may help visitors to understand a machine and appreciate its technical evolution but not why it came into being when it did, looked like it did, or was used as it was. Similarly, celebratory exhibits that present the "myth of progress" and the "heroic inventor" as
sufficient explanation for the origins, development, and impact of technology give short shrift to the underlying historical forces that determine them. 7
5 Pickstone, John V., "Museological Science? The Place of the Analytical Comparative in 19th-Century Science, Technology and Medicine," History of Science 32 (1994), 111–138.
6 Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800, (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).
In an effort to go beyond this stage, historians of technology, whose sympathy for internal history of artificial devices is greater than many of their colleagues, have undertaken to review museum exhibits to answer questions such as "whether the exhibit has a unifying theme of purpose. If it does, is it clearly stated, . . . valid in the context of other historical work [and] innovative? . . . Is the theme argued effectively? . . . Is there a structure to the exhibit that leads the visitor through the development of the theme?"8
Within this framework, artifacts may be used as evidence of scale, of use, of origins, of inventive style, and of cultural and social context. "Academic historians," one curator warns, "are not familiar with the study of three-dimensional objects and have seldom if ever used museum exhibits as sources for research." Reviews in Technology and Culture and American Heritage of Invention and Technology suggest that the best sources for such research are the records of research conducted by curators in the construction of the exhibit. These should be saved and made accessible to scholars, and, "at the very least, there should be an annotated copy of the exhibit script – including a list of artifacts."9
Yet, the reconstruction of history should include involvement with the material culture of the past, just as the reconstruction of the artifact should include an understanding of history. In order to understand why this is not yet a common practice, I want to turn now to an exploration of the kind of reconstructions historians have done.
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Historical Reconstruction
I found little interest in material culture among most historians of nuclear science and technology at the Bradbury Science Museum. To my knowledge, in the years since it has systematically collected and documented artifacts of the atomic age in its warehouse, no scholar has asked to examine that collection. I attempted to stimulate such interest in the conventional manner by convening a symposium10 on postwar technology transfer. It included the first public display of the neutrino detector with which Fred Reines
conducted his Nobel Prize-winning detection of the free neutrino. Peter Galison, already engaged in the study of
"the material culture of microphysics" made use of the occasion.11
7 Joseph J. Corn, "Interpreting the History of American Technics," in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana and Chicago, 1989), 237–261.
8 Bernard S. Finn, "Exhibit Reviews: Twenty Years After," Technology and Culture. 20:4 (Oct. 1989), 996–998.
9 Ibid., p. 1002.
10 Robert W. Seidel and Paul Henriksen, Proceedings of the Symposium On The Transfer of Technology from Wartime Los Alamos to Peacetime Research (Los Alamos, Bradbury Science Museum, 1989). Among the attendees were David Allison, Bill Aspray and Peter Galison.
This reluctance to use material culture seemed to change in the early 1990s when Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery published History from Things. A number of scholars who had used artifacts in their studies of history contributed to the collection.12 Further evidence of this interest could be found in monographs like Robert Smith's The Space Telescope.
From Homer to Hayden White, history has used and created texts. There is nothing in this procedure that rules out reading artifacts as texts:
In the terminology of history, artifacts are primary sources: Several scholars have observed that any artifact . . . is a historical event . . . An artifact is something that happened in the past, but, unlike other historical events, it continues to exist in our own time. Artifacts constitute the only class of historical events that occurred in the past but survive into the present. They can be re-experienced: they are authentic, primary, historical material available for first-hand study. Artifacts are historical evidence.13
What have these kinds of reconstructions to tell historians? Bern Dibner wrote of the monumental efforts required to move Egyptian obelisks to Rome, Paris, London, and New York. They have, he maintained, "been chiseled, raised, lowered and moved again by methods revealing to our engineers . . . we are fortunate to have clear records of the mechanics used in the moving and erection of the Vatican obelisk in 1586 . . . by means that must have, in some measure, resembled those used by the Roman engineers, if not by the Egyptians
themselves."14 Although the intended audience is engineers, the intent of the study is to reveal what engineers have failed to do:
Not only did the Egyptian engineers not have such modern aids but the cutting and finishing of the hard granite, its transportation over hundreds of miles, and its erecting, were accomplished by these ancients with a modesty that has kept such deeds from being adequately recorded. Whereas there exist thousands of sculptures, bas-reliefs, gems, paintings, papyri, and models of the religious, regal, and domestic life of the Egyptians, their advanced technology is illustrated by extremely few known examples.
We must therefore reconstruct their tools and methods from the results they achieved.15
11 Peter Galison, Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 461.
12 Lubar, History from Things (note 1.)
13 Jules David Prown, "The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction," Ibid, 2–3.
14 Bern Dibner, Moving the Obelisk (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), 7–8.
Reverse engineering of past techniques provides a way to "fill in the gaps" in the text. It can also substitute for the text when "technological processes cannot be adequately described with words. Nonliterate peoples have carried out complex technological processes with such skill and sophistication that duplicating them has proved to be a challenging task for modern practitioners." Even literate scientists and engineers have not necessarily recorded their methods and techniques in forms accessible to the historian. 16
Historians of science tend to focus on scientific instruments, rather than the means of production in craft, manufacture, industry and government. The recent volume on instruments by Robert Bud and Deborah Warner shows the value of this focus, as have the earlier studies of Cohen, Daumas, E. G. R. Taylor, Gerald L. E.
Turner, and others.17 Their use of material culture in these studies has varied. Often, the instruments have served as inspiration for historical research, which in turn enriches the understanding of the instrument. The reconstruction of these instruments is rarer, in part because of the historian's preference for texts over
techniques as secondary sources, and in part because he or she does not have the required skills. Clearly, they are fascinated with machines.18 In order to indicate how this use of material culture has been successful in the historiography of science and technology, I will examine two familiar cases.
15 Ibid. Emphasis added.
16 Robert B. Gordon, "The Interpretation of Artifacts in the History of Technology," in Lubar (note 1), p. 74.
17 Robert Bud and Deborah Jean Warner, eds., Instruments of Science: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1998); Bud and Susan E. Cozzens, eds., Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science Bellingham, Wash.: SPIE Optical
Engineering Press, 1992); Gerard L.E. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Scientific Instruments (London: Sotheby Publications; Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983); E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England, 1714–1840, (London, Cambridge University Press, 1966), The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor & Stuart England (Cambridge: University Press, 1954); Maurice Daumas, Les Instruments Scientifiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siecles. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953) Trans. and ed. Mary Holbrook, Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York, Praeger, 1972);
I. B. Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science; An Account of the Early Scientific Instruments and Mineralogical and Biological Collections in Harvard University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).
18 Otto Mayr, Philosophers and Machines (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), 1–4.
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The Antikythera Mechanism
Derek de Solla Price's investigation of the Antikythera mechanism required over 20 years of work. The device, which he convincingly dates from the first quarter of the first century BC, was discovered in a ship wreck near the island of Antikythera at the beginning of the present century. His studies are illustrative of the kind of investigation a well-trained historian of science can make of an artifact. He thoroughly analyzed the evidence using the most modern techniques, and constructed a solid historical argument that challenges accepted views of the past.
Price's first step was to determine the provenance of the artifact. This process determines the chain of evidence that places the object in space and time. Like its legal analogue, the reconstruction of the chain of evidence is essential to authenticate its place in history. Price did so by determining the circumstances of the discovery of the pieces of the artifact by sponge divers in 1901. He included the precise location, the process of recovery, and the handling of the artifacts by the Athens Museum. He did this, of necessity, from accounts made by others, including curators and archaeologists, like Gladys David Weinberg, who dated them to 80 – 50 B.C.
Amongst these accounts he found a number of hypotheses that had to be reconsidered. None of them were satisfactory, in his view, after a painstaking review of the evidence presented in their support.19
Price's next step was to examine photographs of the artifact from its discovery to the 1950s. Curators had
Price's next step was to examine photographs of the artifact from its discovery to the 1950s. Curators had