Technological change and Post Office communications in Britain, 1918–1945

The pressures of both World War I and World War II made the British Post Office a central concern in national politics. Yet this development has received little attention in the historiography of the Post Office or the British state. The demands of war and expectations for service from individuals living in a consumer society raised questions as to how to improve technology and infrastructure to satisfy these divergent needs. The Post Office’s position as a department within the Civil Service meant that debates over the nature of technology, and the levels of spending required to sustain and improve Post Office services inevitably led to heated discussions concerning the practicalities of increased spending during the economic downturns of the 1920s and 1930s, and the subsequent pre-war planning period from 1937. This article will explore these issues by examining the nature of the Government-Post Office relationship in this period, and trace how the relationship evolved to accommodate the growing needs of the domestic and wartime economy. It will show the growing centrality of the Post Office to the nation’s communications planning. Moreover, it will demonstrate how a mixture of new technology, and an adaptation of working practices helped it adapt to both the peacetime economy of the 1920s, and the pressures of the World War II.     

Integrated IT-based Geography Teaching and Learning: A Macquarie University case study

Use of information technology (IT) is increasingly common in geography teaching and learning. This paper outlines a still relatively unusual initiative involving the integrated use of a variety of IT-based components across all aspects of a large course unit. Multiple evaluations reveal strongly positive reactions to the IT-based approach and the time and place flexibility offered; there are few technical impediments to, and no detectable gender differences in, students' use of the system. Most aspects of the integrated approach work well, although it has not yet succeeded in facilitating a genuinely participative online dialogue. Many aspects of the initiative can be transferred cost-effectively to other contexts.     

Structural ways to embed a research laboratory into the company: A comparison between Philips and General Electric 1900-1940

This paper compares the Philips Research Department and the Research Laboratory of the American company General Electric (GE). 1 It argues that it is, above all, the issue of the organization of industrial research, appropriate leadership and the embeddedness of a research department in the company as a whole that is important for an historical analysis of an industrial research department. The complex structures that Gilles Holst (the first Philips research director) and Willis Whitney (the GE research director during the first decades of the twentieth century) set up in their organizations enabled scientists to keep in touch with the resources provided by the universities, and made it possible for them to come up with articles, patents and devices for their respective companies. It enabled them also to strengthen their contacts inside and outside the laboratory's walls. However, more than his colleague Whitney at GE, Holst at Philips intended to integrate the research laboratory into the company as a whole. Holst's policy as a research director will be illustrated using the case of Philips' radio research. A comparative discussion of industrial research in the 1930s within both companies shows that the "successful" integration of research activities is context-dependent.     

Displaying the future: techno‐nationalism and the rise of the consumer in Postwar Japan

This paper explains how, in the aftermath of World War II, a type of techno‐nationalism emerged that linked being Japanese to science and technology and the increased consumption of electrical appliances. By closely examining official exhibitions, we can see how the state and private sector strongly encouraged this techno‐scientific dreaming. Dazzling displays highlighted how the peaceful atom would help lead the nation to achieve high economic growth. At the same time, through the judicious purchase of labor saving appliances, consumers could reconcile the need to spend with the need to save.     

The atomic meal: The cold war and irradiated foods, 1945–1963

Following World War II, food technologists in the US participated in an Army‐led program to develop food irradiation technology. The program involved over 120 military, government, industrial, and academic institutions. Focusing on the MIT Department of Food Technology, I trace the networks that formed between these groups and their motivations for developing the technology. I argue that food irradiation was Cold War science directed towards the development of a consumer product, and that it highlighted the links between large‐scale military‐funded research and consumers' everyday lives. I suggest that researchers advocated for irradiation not because the technology produced better processed food, but because the development of the technology produced a number of valuable benefits for the researchers. These included increases in funding, materials, and prestige.     

The Machines of War: Western Military Technology 1850–2000

From the standpoint of military technology, the 20th century divides between two eras. The first half of the century saw the culmination of the mechanization of armed forces that had begun midway through the previous century. During most of this period, European innovations dictated the pace and direction of change. World War II changed all that. Europeans became followers of military change driven by the arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union. Two innovations, both largely products of World War II, dominated the second half of the century but proceeded with surprisingly little interaction. One was the elaboration of nuclear arsenals and their delivery systems. The other was the radical reconstruction of conventional warfare through applied electronics, especially from the 1960s onward.     

Eroticism and Technological Regression: The Stag Film

It is commonplace to observe that pornography drives the development of media technologies. Examples abound, from the mania for capturing naked bodies that led Charles Baudelaire to complain in 1859 that photography had been coopted, to the story of how American pornographers in 1976 decided that JVC’s VHS would dethrone Sony’s Beta videotape format. It is also common to assume that sexuality is more stimulating when it is most technological, most divorced from ‘nature.’ By severing sex’s connection with reproduction, says Georges Bataille, pornographic representations become more exciting than the real thing. The history of pornographic film, however, suggests that makers of both early stag films and modern videotapes and DVDs are highly ambivalent about the representational technologies they employ. Of the hundreds of stag films made before 1965, only five were shot in sound, and only four were shot in color. Although the whole point of a hard‐core genre would seem to be graphic realism, stags clung to primitive technology. Stag filmmakers deliberately subverted not only realism but also the medium through conscious ineptitude: the performers knocked over light stands, or the cinematographer intruded into the frame, for example, and they did so time and again. By choosing retrograde technology, producers asserted their outlaw status; cultivated amateurishness asserted the authenticity of human sexuality as well. Despite much better equipment, today’s more sophisticated pornographers exhibit similarly ambivalent postures. Complicating matters is the ostensible purpose of such films, which calls for performers to demonstrate techniques for management and control of unleashed desire. On the one hand, the pornographic filmmaker’s conflicted stance points backward to traditional issues of representation faced by any artist determined to depicit sexuality, and on the other, forward to more recent obsessions with hegemonic gazes, gender regimes, and old‐fashioned fetishes. But such contradictions also raise questions about the fundamental relationship of the technological and the erotic. Those questions in turn should give pause to those who are enthralled by pornographic movies and those who are appalled by them. This paper will, so to speak, flesh out the discussion.     

Voting Technology,Political Institutions,Legal Institutions and Civil Society: A Study of the Hypothesis of Cultural Lag in Reverse

The 2000 Presidential election was plagued by butterfly ballots and ‘pregnant chads’. Electronic voting systems, lacking verifiable paper trails that are subject to possible fraud, promise to wreak havoc with the 2004 Presidential election. There is a great diversity of systems of voting technology in the 50 states: from paper ballots, lever‐operated machines and punch cards to optical scanners and electronic systems. Associated with each technology is an estimated error rate. The underlying theory of this paper was set forth by William F. Ogburn in his famous book entitled Social Change, published in 1922. Dividing culture into material and non‐material elements, Ogburn argued that non‐material elements lag behind material elements. His explanation for this lag is that technology, which underlies material culture, changes at a faster rate than elements of non‐material culture. Obgurn did not contemplate the possibility of a reverse lag, viz., technology lagging behind non‐material culture. In analyzing the anomalous relationships between voting technology, political institutions and legal institutions, a striking instance of a ‘reverse cultural lag’ is discerned. To eliminate the phenomenon of the reverse cultural lag, there is a need for a federally‐funded program of a uniform, state‐of‐the‐art voting technology, plus an amended Help America Vote Act, to implement the innovations in the 3,114 counties. The complex problems reviewed in this paper point to a vexing question: how do we educate an electorate in a democratic society—such as the United States in the twenty‐first century—to be responsible for ensuring that periodically‐elected representatives implement the will of the people?     

In Search of the Social: Steamboats, Square Wheels, Reindeer and Other Things

This paper examines the concept of the ‘social,’ particularly from an archaeological perspective, and explores how it relates to the ways in which we seek to understand the processes of technological innovation and change. It is demonstrated that the concept ‘social’ is far from well defined and that enquiry is bedevilled by artificial polarization between subject-centred approaches and object-centred particularism. Through the medium of early United States steamboat technology a different approach is forged through the melding of people and things with the idea of viewing artefacts as active social actors along with people. Ultimately, it is argued that maritime archaeologists should be more bullish in their approaches to material things—instead of adopting social theories ‘wholesale,’ we should insist that they include the things we study: boats, material objects, people, artefacts, landscapes and animals.