The Strength of American Materials -- An Environmental History of Engineering Science

From the Franklin Institute's General Report on the Explosions of Steam-Boilers  

One of the many pleasures of writing "Tocqueville's Ghost" for HSNS (discussed on AmericanScience here) was revisiting Ann Johnson's “Material Experiments: Environment and Engineering Institutions in the Early American Republic,” from Osiris in 2009.

It's a fascinating essay and makes a convincing case for rethinking the sort of science and engineering going on at West Point and in the Corps of Engineers in the early nineteenth century. Johnson shows how the West Point/Corps project adapted the French Polytechnique model in research as well as teaching, creating in the process a very productive "research school." She shows how prominent men of science like Alexander Dallas Bache carried on later celebrated work (most prominently his steam-boiler experiments, above) that owed much to their time working with Joseph Totten and the Corps of Engineers at Fort Adams.

Just as interesting for our blog and our HoTeEs/HoTMESs discussions, is the way Johnson succeeds in fusing environmental history with the history of science and of technology. Johnson forces us to think about the material conditions of early American engineering research.


Johnson centers her story at Fort Adams, a Corps of Engineers construction site, where Totten (a West Point grad, surveyor, and then engineer with the Corps) developed a research program for determining the qualities of American building materials—from stone to lumber to mortar--- while supporting the building of the fort. Totten’s West Point training led him to appreciate French mathematical engineering—he wanted to fit discoveries to formulas. But he remained a committed empiricist too. 

Totten was also an effective organizer and committed to innovative experimentation. He arranged to have a steady flow of West Point graduates come through Fort Adams, ensuring they devoted themselves to scientific research, and built the Fort in the process. Those grads developed experimental techniques and wrote papers that were published in the best American scientific journals: American Journal of Science and Arts and especially the Journal of the Franklin Institute after Alexander Dallas Bache took over at the Franklin Institute. These studies concerned practical problems but the results they produced, including various material constants for a variety of American materials, were meant to contribute to broader international, theoretical scientific investigations.

Johnson draws our attention to scientific raw materials here---that's the contribution of environmental history---and it strikes me as very important. Her researchers faced peculiar challenges brought on by use of unfamiliar materials---materials that didn't appear in their European engineering books. In this sense, engineering bears a remarkable resemblance to a field science or to medicine (think bioprospecting).

Johnson couches these points---which most interested me---in a more difficult to substantiate argument about national identity and character—her main claim is that Americans understood themselves in part via the mediation of men of science like Totten, who explained the remarkable natural world of the Americas, understood themselves and their nation to exist within a providential scheme, and used that nature and scheme as their method for getting a foot in the door of international science.

The danger here is creating some version of American exceptionalism. Thinking about the history of science in America in particular, Nathan Reingold worried about a "scientific analogue of the Turner thesis"*---an argument that American nature somehow made American science peculiar or unique. Reingold saw this happening in arguments that the wealth and newness of American materials caused American scientists to avoid theory, that the abundance of stuff to count and catalog obviated the need for theoretical sophistication. Johnson safely avoids those shoals---she shows that this is a theoretically interesting operation. But we do hear about "uniquely American materials" and hear that these engineer's sense of the strangeness of their environment could help define the nation. If there is an exceptionalist position---and I am not sure if there is---its different than those that came before.


*Nathan Reingold, “American Indifference to Basic Research: A Reappraisal,” in Science, American Style, 68.

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. Fat

II. The So-Called Cures

III. Facing the Tissue


Excerpt from the book

A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes--one on herself and the other on her husband. Half the comedy in the world is predicated on the paunch. At that, the human race is divided into but two classes--fat people who are trying to get thin and thin people who are trying to get fat.

Fat, the doctors say, is fatal. I move to amend by striking out the last two letters of the indictment. Fat is fat. It isn't any more fatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it's a darned sight more uncomfortable. So far as being unreasonably thin or unreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin person has the long end of it. I never was thin, so I don't know.
However, I have been fat--notice that "have been"?

And if there is any phase of human enjoyment, any part of life, any occupation, avocation, divertisement, pleasure or pain where the fat man has the better of it in any regard, I failed to discover it in the twenty years during which I looked like the rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a bale
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When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent, directly or indirectly, in the assay. The personal equation is the ruling equation.

Women want to be thinner because they will look better--and so do men. Likewise, women want to be plumper because they will look better--and so do men. This holds up to forty years. After that it doesn't make much difference whether either men or women look any better than they have been looking, so far as the great end and aim of all life is concerned.

Consequently fat men and fat women after forty want to be thinner for reasons of health and comfort, or quit and resign themselves to their further years of obesity.

Now I am over forty. Hence my experiments in reduction may be taken at this time as grounded on a desire for comfort--not that I did not make many campaigns against my fat before I was forty.

I fought it now and then, but always retreated before I won a victory. This time, instead of skirmishing valiantly for a space and then being ignominiously and fatly routed by the powerful forces of food and drink, I hung stolidly to the line of my original attack, harassed the enemy by a constant and deadly fire--and one morning discovered I had the foe on the run.

It always makes me laugh to hear people talk about losing flesh--unless, of course, the decrease in weight is due to illness. No healthy person, predisposed to fat, ever lost any flesh. If that person gets rid of any weight, or girth, or fat, it isn't lost--it is
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Eye-Candy for HoTeES

"

After a week of great posts by my colleagues, I give you a bit of fluff, a Flickr account dedicated to "Science and Tech Ads" from the 1950's and 1960's. An informal pass through the materials finds ads mostly for science-intensive technology firms, but the page should suit the fancy of most historians of science and technology, especially those interested in the Cold War. Plenty of military imagery there. And a cool breeze of existential horror blows through the lot.

Link

Big Histories of Science

For some time now, historians of science--including those who transformed the field with their carefully wrought, local, micro-studies--have been lamenting the lack grand narratives. Nevertheless graduate students continue to be trained to drill deep, sacrificing breadth for depth. And even if and when junior scholars contemplate "going big," they find precious few examples to follow. Writing stories that transcend a single community, idea or even place, involves thinking differently about sources and about audience.

Big histories also require the historian to think differently about herself and her relations to other scholars, those whose local stories have slowly carved out the vast canyon that becomes recognized as a national treasure. I'm suggesting that the best big histories make visible the canyon and the river, they reinterpret the accretion of "small" but powerful studies without which such sweeping narratives cannot be well told.

This kind of metaphorical talk invites debate (so, bring it), but the reason I'm motivated to write about this at all is that I can't stop thinking about Jill Lepore's new book, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (Knopf, 2012). Lepore, Chair of Harvard's History and Literature program, initially published many components of the book through her other gig as a staff writer at the New Yorker. Bound together, the whole is greater than the parts, a fantastic resource for thinking about what it means to write "big histories" for audiences comprised of our peers and other reading publics.

The narrative conceit is deceptively simple: tracing a shift in attention to life and death "from the library to the laboratory" over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing so, Lepore tackles some massive questions about the consequences of the rise of experimental knowledge and the apparent displacement of humanistic approaches as central to ideas about life and death.  

The form of the book is ontogenic, each chapter recapitulating a stage of human life in America. After some clever framing in terms of the history of the board game "The Mansion of Happiness," familiar to many more of us as "The Game of Life," she presents a critical reading of Lennart Nilsson's iconic photos of fetuses, moving on to debates over infant feeding, sex, marriage, work, parenting, aging, dying, and so on.

Lepore did plenty of archival research to write this book, but she also drew deeply and generously on the expertise of a vast range of historians of science, technology, and medicine, including Steven Shapin, Ruth Cowan, Charles Rosenberg, Dorothy Ross, Karen Rader, Lynn Morgan, and the list goes on and on. I read Lepore's Mansion of Happiness as a calling card for history of science, in particular, the history of the life and human sciences, big and small.

Few readers of AmericanScience will be surprised that Lepore makes evident that high and low forms of literature have shaped and been shaped by the apparent scientization of American culture. But, perhaps most intriguing to us practitioners is the note on history with which Lepore chooses to conclude.

Following an account of cryonics and a visit to a warehouse of frozen bodies (!) in a penultimate chapter titled "Resurrection," she writes, "Hiding between the covers of this book . . . lies a theory of history itself, and it is this: if history is the art of making an argument by telling a story about the dead, which is how I see it, the dead never die: they are merely forgotten or, especially if they are loved, remembered, quick as ever."

Against claims that the library--in this case, the archive--has become a kind of laboratory for making knowledge about the past, Lepore would have us remain attuned to the fact that the laboratory and its inhabitants have left rich libraries for understanding what it means to be human. In this project, her account is neither the first nor will it be the last. But it goes far in demonstrating that historians of science, medicine and technology are asking questions whose answers are of consequence beyond the bounds of our allied disciplines; there is still plenty of room to grow.

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Next Week: PACHS Introductory Symposium

As many of you know, the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS) anchors an increasingly rich array of HPS offerings—talks, conferences, fellowships, and even a blog—on offer in Philly. They've got events almost every day of the week, drawn together from institutions spread up and down the Delaware.

In about a fortnight, PACHS is hosting its 2012 Introductory Symposium. This is a chance for scholars from around the area to present brief synopses of their current projects. It should provide a great cross-section of current work in HPS, much of which (by the looks of the program) falls within the purview of AmericanScience.

There are projects spanning from the colonial period, through the Early Republic, the Gilded Age, and across the twentieth century. Lots of comparative work, tons of connections between science and politics, agriculture, and industry, and even a tiny bit on the scientific method. 

The all-day event is being held on Friday, September 28th, at (I believe, though it's not obvious—to me—from the website) the Library Company of Philadelphia. 

Trust in Standardized Test Scores

If you are like me, you have been following the Chicago Teacher's strike over the past week.  Last Friday, it seemed as though the labor dispute was about to be resolved and schools would re-open on Monday, but that turned out to be wrong.  Union delegates met on Sunday and voted against the city's proposed contract and it now looks like the strike will continue until Wednesday at least.

A close friend of mine belongs to the Chicago Teachers Union.  I've been struck by how different her take on the situation is from the one we get in the local and national media.  Over the weekend, for example, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial under the headline Don't Cave, Mr. Mayor whose opening paragraph read:

"Over the weekend, Chicago Public Schools leaders offered teachers a sweet deal that would make most workers in the city envious. Teachers stood to reap a remarkably generous 16 percent raise over four years in a new contract. Guaranteed."

Despite the fact that Chicago is broke, the editorial continued, "Everyone knows the Chicago Teachers Union response to the CPS offer: No way."


If you talk to union members, however, the overwhelming concern is not about salary issues at all.  Rather, it's charter schools and standardized testing.

Due to dropping enrollment, Chicago plans to close a large number of failing schools in the coming years -- many of which will be replaced by private, charter schools.  The argument for charter schools is that they provide parents with a choice, which means public schools have to compete.  This, in turn, gives teachers an incentive to improve, or face the threat of school closure.  But from the union's perspective, there is something more sinister going on.  That's because charter schools can hire non-union teachers, whom they tend to pay a lot less (and who also tend to be a lot younger).

Since charter schools get to pick and choose which students are allowed to enroll, they can turn away the most difficult (read: expensive) students to educate.  The latter will then be overrepresented in public schools, which all but ensures that unionized teachers will have lower standardized test scores.  These low scores would then provide the city with a convincing argument -- couched in the numerical language of statistics -- to lay off unionized teachers, close public schools, and replace them with cheaper, private, charter schools.  The fear, then, is that charter schools are basically a form of union-busting, kind of like a 21st century version of the Pinkertons!

I have my own views on both charter schools and standardized tests, but let's leave those aside for now.  One thing that I've been very struck by in the recent debate is the lack of data to support various policy proposals.  Everyone, it seems, likes to shroud themselves in the mantle of pragmatism and say that they will support whatever policy actually works best for the children, but nobody seems to agree on what works and what doesn't.

If you buy the pro-union argument that I've articulated above, you will most likely harbor an a priori suspicion about data-driven policy decisions.  This is a healthy suspicion -- I fully agree -- but, at the same time, one wonders why all those in favor of using statistics from standardized tests to gauge teacher effectiveness so rarely have good numbers about the effectiveness of standardized tests.  Why would The New York Times publish an editorial entitled Chicago Teachers Folly that roundly criticizes the strike without giving any evidence that the city's proposals for school reform are likely to succeed.

Then I came across this open letter by some 88 education professors from the Chicago area (including the infamous ex-weatherman Bill Ayers!) that addressees precisely this point.  Apparently, it's even worse than I thought!  In fact, the kind of data on the effectiveness of charter schools or the reliability of standardized tests that I'm looking for mostly don't yet exist.  For this reason, the open letter pleads with the city to implement its reform efforts slowly, beginning with targeted pilot studies, thereby providing a window of opportunity in which to make sure these efforts do not do more harm than good before they are implemented across the board.

To my mind, the most damning claim the authors of this letter make is about the use of standardized tests as a measure of teacher effectiveness.  Not only does their implementation invariable incentive teachers to teach the test, the letter also cites a number of studies that show existing tests are actually a highly unreliable measure of student improvement.  A teacher's rating based on such tests can significantly change from year to year, class to class, and even from test to test!  Thus, although there may be some correlation between a student's real educational achievements and their performance on standardized tests, the latter is simply too noisy to serve as a reliable indicator for policy decisions.  The letter-writers deploy the following analogy to make their point: "Using [standardized test scores] to measure [teacher effectiveness] is akin to using a meter stick to weigh a person: you might be able to develop a formula that links height and weight, but there will be plenty of error in your calculations."

If that's right, it's hard not to be cynical about Rahm Emmanuel's motivations here.  But then again, he is rumored to listen to Nickelback!

Tocqueville's Ghost

Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences recently gave me the opportunity to review three thought-provoking books and in the process muse on the history of "American science." You can read the entire essay here.

I had a great deal of fun writing this essay, especially because it gave me an excuse to think about of the earliest figures in the field. For instance:

When Shryock and Schlesinger turned to science, they asked with Tocqueville: is there something distinctive about American science? Looking for American distinctiveness was part of their larger project, which multiplied exceptionalisms in the wake of the U.S.’s rise to superpower status. After the atomic bomb—Schlesinger called it “this terrible engine of destruction”—understanding American science mattered even more. Shryock recast and refined Tocqueville’s laments, explaining that industrial society lay behind the dearth of “pure” science in the United States. Shryock had reform in mind: “one way to overcome American indifference to research is to give more attention to its history.” He was looking at the nineteenth century, but thinking about the twentieth. His fundamental assumption, borrowed from Tocqueville and nineteenth-century discussions, was that politics and national character could have a defining influence over science. (336)

My argument, in sum, is that it more than time to "exorcise" Tocqueville's ghost. You can decide for yourselves if I'm convincing.

Note: I owe a special thanks to our blog's dear Hank for his comments, early and often, on this essay, and to the editorial criticisms of HSNS's book review editors, Angela Creager and Michael Gordin.

Cite: (D. Bouk, "Tocqueville's Ghost," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 4 (2012): 329-339.)

Editorializing

Roger Cohen's recent piece in the Times -- The Organic Fable -- has caused quite an uproar!

Briefly put, Cohen reports on a new study out of Stanford questions whether organic food is healthier and more nutritious than conventional foods.  Cohen uses the study as a springboard from which to go on what can only be described as a rant against what he views as an elitist and self-satisfied culture of privilege.  Based on dubious science, the organic food movement, Cohen writes, has "become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it."

I mainly write this post to share a link to Anna Zeide's excellent take-down of Cohen's argument (if you can call it that).

In the opening paragraph of her post, Zeide asks: "How can there be so much bad writing on this topic in the country's leading newspaper? How can an esteemed journalist write such poorly-argued drivel?"

I've been asking myself the same question -- a lot! -- lately.  It's not at all infrequent that I read an editorial in the Times or the Washington Post and wonder how this stuff makes it into print.  Both are very serious newspapers, both of which maintain a very high standard in their reporting.  (Although Lee's recent post puts even that statement in question.)  But in the editorial pages, it often seems like anything goes.  It does not matter if David Brooks has his facts right, or if his argument follows, because he's David Brooks.

I don't know enough about the history of newspaper publishing, but if anyone does, I'd love to learn about how the distinction between reporting and editorializing came into being.  Given my limited knowledge, my sense is that it's a fairly recent innovation.  As recently as the 19th century, entire newspapers were written in what we would now consider an editorial style.

This suggests an intriguing question: what, exactly, is the relationship (moral, epistemic, professional, and institutional) between the editorial pages and the rest of the paper?  Does the myth of objective, fact-based reporting give newspapers the license to print "poorly argued drivel" in its editorial pages.  And what does that make the editorial pages: the newspaper's id?

Down with epistemological rubrics!

I was struck by this passage in Erik Hmiel's review of Joel Isaac's new book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn:

And in seeking to combat their marginalization, they sought crucial points of commonality among the human sciences, the most crucial for Isaac being an epistemology grounded in research practices, pedagogy, and communities of inaugurated and qualified inquirers. In reconstructing this moment in the history of the American social sciences, we see how the "practical, 'everyday' aspects of  the theory of knowledge...in the Harvard complex present a salutary contrast to the inflated role often granted to epistemological rubrics like 'positivism and 'interpretivism' in the formation of the human sciences," aspects that cast the “revolutions” of late-twentieth century thought, most notably Kuhn’s Structure, in a new light, and beg further questions about idea of the social sciences itself.

I had a healthy skepticism for "isms" imparted to me in grad school, so this sounds promising. (Also, full disclosure: I have trouble telling some of the isms apart!)

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