IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 14

Book Reviews

two years. He had a favorite parable: passengers
clinging to the outside of electric streetcars, while
standing on their attached platforms, frequently
fell off and were maimed and killed despite signs
demanding that they stay off. Scott pointed out that
the problem was solved by engineers who simply
removed the platforms, not by politicians or sociologists. Fellow members of the Alliance, many with
a leftist slant, were such big names as the electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz and the sociologist
Thorsten Veblen; the movement had roots in the
trend toward scientific management promoted by
Frederick Winslow Taylor. During the depression,
Scott helped found the Committee on Technocracy
centered at Columbia University. He explained,
" the word technocracy ... means government by
science, social control through the power of technique. " Local chapters were formed which included
engineers and their admirers but excluded active
politicians; the movement had faded by the time of
Scott's death in 1970.
Turning to the next-generation techno-optimists,
Johnston presents the chemist Richard Meier. Unlike
Scott, Meier had a formal education in his field,
receiving his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1944
from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
A research chemist during World War II, he was one
of the founders of the Federation of American Scientists whose purpose was to use political means to
effect the peaceful use of science and technology for
national and global benefits. Meier's major postwar
career was as an academic on the staff of the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and
the University of California at Berkeley, where he
became a major, much published, source in regional
planning and an advocate for the rational rebuilding
of cities. Johnston describes him as someone seeking " realistic utopias " which, for example, exploit
nuclear power and the mass cultivation of algae as
a means of supplying power and food to a planet in
need of postwar reconstruction; Johnston sees him
as carrying the spirit of the technocrats into the academy without their brash insistence on government
by engineers. Meier showed sensitivity to social conditions and advocated that technologists be aware
of them, while arguing that social dilemmas might
be reduced to science and engineering problems. A
visionary, he argued in the early postwar years of television that it could evolve into an integrated system
of entertainment, communications, and banking,

foreseeing the Internet. He was a pioneer in the
planning of resource-conserving and ecologically
sound cities.
Meier was to have a formative influence on Alvin
Weinberg, who read Meier's book Science and Economic Development and was impressed by the statement, " Most people would instinctively exclude
the scientist and the technologist in the search for
solutions. Yet, in many instances, a social problem
can be restated so that it is also a scientific and engineering problem that is not only researchable but
soluble. "
Weinberg was a better thinker than the air conditioning fix that I mentioned might suggest. Unlike
the technocrats, he did not advocate replacing politicians with a science/engineering elite. Long seen
as an advocate of nuclear power, he proposed in
1972 a " generation of safe reactors carefully sited in
clusters far from populations in high-security nuclear
parks tended by a nuclear priesthood of specialists. "
Weinberg did not downplay the problems of nuclear
waste and plant safety. Johnston mentions in passing
that in 1973, during the Nixon administration, Weinberg was dismissed from his position of Head of the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory for publicly expressing his concerns about nuclear safety. It is unfortunate that we are not told more about this event.
Johnston has used an abundance of primary
source material in his writing on Meier, Weinberg,
and Scott. The remainder of his book presents information that will, in many cases, be familiar to students of the 20th- and late 19th-century history of
technology. Inevitably, there is a discussion of Edwin
Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward 2000-1887,
which portrays an American society in which the
means of production are owned by the government
and where the necessities and comforts of life are
distributed free to all, thanks to a " scientific socialism " such as that promoted by Marx and Engels. The
book and its sequel, Equality, inspired over 100 Bellamy Clubs, some lasting into the 1930s, whose goal
was to bring about such a society where everyone
could retire at the age of 45, thanks to central planning and advanced technology.
Johnston includes some familiar examples of
tech-fixes that have had tragic outcomes. DDT was
used extensively in the 1940s and 1950s to kill lice,
fleas, and potato beetles. It was a boon to soldiers
during the war and to farmers in the postwar decades. This changed in 1962 with the publication of

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

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