American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm

America Genesis claims to cover a century of innovation, but the core of the book is much more tightly focused on the Second Industrial Revolution, electrification, motor transport, and mass production, and the rise of the immense technological systems which characterize modern life. Biographical sketches of major inventors like Edison, Telsa, the Wright brothers, along with system builders like Henry Ford, Samuel Insull, and the architects of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

However, American Genesis makes some 'interesting' choices about content, which combined with the length of the book can be rather frustrating. Land grant colleges and the influence of the German scientific style on American universities are not mentioned. DARPA, show more NASA, the NSF, NIH, and most of the post-war Federal scientific system are similarly glossed over. The Atomic Energy Commission and the nuclear Navy get a lot of space, but they're not particularly characteristic of American science. Soviet technical development (the USSR basically imported an entire industrial plant from America in the 1920s) is interesting, but not really relevant to the book. And while I enjoyed the section on Modernism as an artistic and architectural movement as a European reflection of the American technological style, it felt totally extraneous.

As a whole, I found America Genesis discursive and unfocused. The individual anecdotes of inventors and events are interesting, but the theoretical development surrounding the rise of 'system builders' isn't as rigorous as it could be. Hughes basically did not examine what I thought to be the most interesting historical question of the period: How scientific and technical knowledge became a core input of industry in the same way that coal or steel was, and how that reconfigured society. show less

Hughes was a seminal historian of technology, but the coverage of even American dimensions here is uneven, and the argument is at times strained.

Good history of technology

In American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870 – 1970, Thomas P. Hughes “argues that inventors, industrial scientists, engineers, and system builders have been the makers of modern America. The values of order, system, and control that they have embedded in machines, devices, processes, and systems have become the values of modern technological culture” (pg. 4). Further, Hughes argues, “Technology was, and is, socially constructed” (pg. 5). Hughes “presents practitioners of technology confronting insolvable issues, making mistakes, and causing controversies and failures. [He] shows the practitioners creating new problems as they solve old ones. This book intends to present the history of show more modern technology and society in all its vital, messy complexity” (pg. 5).
Hughes writes, “If we wish to understand the nation’s rise to industrial and technological pre-eminence, we ought to fathom the complex character and manifold activities of the independent inventors. Instead of accumulating more biographical sketches of a heroic cast, we need to discover and understand the characteristics the inventors shared” (pg. 15). Hughes counters the rags-to-riches narratives, demonstrating how the men typically had enough funding to remain independent and to follow their own interests. Additionally, the inventors were rarely focused on established theory and mathematics as they wished to go beyond those boundaries. Hughes writes, “Industrial scientists were often constrained to choose problems to solve that would improve and spur the growth of existing systems in which the corporations were heavily invested. The system-originating inventions can be labeled radical, the system-improving ones conservative” (pg. 53).
In examining the early military-industrial complex, Hughes turns to the naval arms race of the early twentieth century. He writes, “As the armaments race proceeded, the United States turned to a much-celebrated resource believed to be uniquely American – the creative genius of its independent inventors” (pg. 99). Hughes continues, “Industrial scientists, well publicized by the corporations that hired them, steadily displaced, in practice and in the public mind, the figure of the heroic inventor as the source of change in the material world. Between the world wars, the industrial laboratories came to be seen as the source of ‘better things for better living’” (pg. 138-139). Looking at this growth, Hughes writes, “Before World War I there were at least one hundred industrial laboratories in the United States; by 1929 there were more than a thousand. By 1920 physicists employed in industrial research laboratories made up a quarter of the membership of the American Physical Society, the leading professional organization” (pg. 180-181).
Turning to system builders, Hughes writes, “They found that a nation committed to mass consumption, freedom of enterprise, and capitalism particularly suited their goal of technological-system building, whether it was socially benign or destructive. Some were motivated by desire for power and money, but they shared a drive to order, centralize, control, and expand the technological systems over which they presided” (pg. 185). In this way, “mass-production and mass-consumption principles permeated the American industrial and social environment about the turn of the century” (pg. 205). Hughes writes, “The United States had never enjoyed greater respect, or been more envied, than after World War I. Many foreign liberals and radicals perceived its examples as opening for their nations a path to the future. Their image of America was one of inventors, industrial scientists, and system builders. Other peoples were fascinated by, and derived from, the example of the creation of modern America” (pg. 249).
In this way, “with the perspective of distance, Europeans perceived the transformation to be more than a technological and an industrial revolution, that it bore the seeds of a cultural mutation as well. European intellectuals, architects, and artists making the second discovery [of America] believed that the United States was leading the world into a uniquely modern era” (pg. 295). Examining the underlying ideology of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Manhattan Project, Hughes writes, “The overarching logic combining electric power and regional development conveyed in these issues was straightforward: The nature of power use has shaped various eras of modern history. During the era of coal and steam, power transmitted over long distances by rail and distributed for short distances by leather belt resulted in concentrations of industry and population at grimy mines, near grim factories, and at the nexus of rail lines. In the new era, power from electric generating plants at coal mines and at dam sites would be transmitted over long distances by high-voltage electric networks, or grids, and over short ones by lower-voltage systems” (pg. 356). show less

The nuts and bolts of the research and development of the engineering infrastructure.