IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 10

SPectraL LineS_

03.15

When the Past Is Not a Preview
Engineering historians teach the past
to help make a better future
What is the history of engineering about?
A. The "eureka" moments of unusual men and women
B. Groups, tribes, and gangs of creative geeks
C. Robust, durable, and adaptive institutions
D. All of the above
Much time is spent on debating how best to approach the history of engi-
neers and engineering. The stakes are high: Those who define the story of
the past inevitably influence the present and the future. Yet telling the story
of bygone engineers is difficult because the answer to the above question
often says more about who gives the quiz than who takes it.
My choice of D, or all of the above, affirms the complexity of engineering
as an activity and a historical force. Edison, Tesla, Turing, and Jobs under-
standably dominate chronicles of engineering movements, but seminal
figures thrive as part of technical networks or teams. These teams, in turn,
depend on government, universities, corporations, financiers-organizations
and institutions embedded in particular societies at specific times. By fol-
lowing these various threads, the fuller tapestry (D) emerges.
Or nearly so. Engineering has also incubated new social history, arising
from how people adopt, shape, and hack the stuff made by engineers. His-
tories as varied as those about the telephone and the pencil, the automobile
and the computer, electricity and fertilizer, also reveal much about how
and why we use the fruits of an engineer's toil.
The emphasis on process over person helps explain why today's engi-
neering heroes, like those profiled in this issue, tend to go unsung. Deciding
whom to elevate among the many socially committed engineers is trickier
than identifying the historical significance of, say, the "open source" or
"miniaturization" movement in engineering. Without question, Manuela
Veloso's robots and Eben Upton's $35 Raspberry Pi computers have trans-
formed their respective fields. Are they making history? It's too soon to say.
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New engineering histories
such as Andrew Russell's
Open Standards in the Digital
Age illustrate how collective
battles over standards can
trump individual achieve-
ments. Says Russell, a profes-
sor at the Stevens Institute
of Technology, in Hoboken,
N.J., "The kinds of stories we
tell about standards matter
more," because standards set
the rules of the game for indi-
vidual engineers and provide
valuable context for both en-
gineers and consumers.
The prosaic quality of stan-
dards wars creates another
challenge for historians. To
engineers and their financial
backers, the most important
battles are over the future, not the past. Reputa-
tions and fortunes largely rise and fall based on
who defines future artifacts and standards. The
engineer as "tomorrow maker" remains the ulti-
mate metric of achievement. Historical amnesia
would hardly seem to imperil an engineer's career.
Yet the siren song of the future need not blind
engineers to lessons of history that are vital to mak-
ing sound decisions today. Patent disputes often
turn on historical readings. Studies of past mistakes
such as the space shuttle Challenger explosion, for
instance, teach us much about how to prevent in-
evitable human errors from causing catastrophes.
Accounts of movements can also capture the
imagination. In Henry Petroski's magisterial
account of the design of pencils, the names of
individuals can be forgotten, but the "world pencil
war" of the 1890s, ignited by German dominance
and American fears of dependence on foreign pen-
cils, cannot be.
Studying the past in order to improve the future
is reasonable. But to do so risks reducing the past
to mere rehearsal. It is not. Historians revel in un-
derstanding the past for its own sake. Engineers
need not apologize for doing the same.
-G. Pascal Zachary
G. Pascal Zachary is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar
Bush, Engineer of the American Century (MIT Press, 1999).
CorrECtIon: In a photo caption for "The Birth of Innovation" [February], we incorrectly
identified the magazine's founding editor as Richard Colborn. His name was Robert Colborn.

IllustratIon by

Dan Page

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015