Technology and Culture

Objects like microscopes are gendered depending on their context. The introduction of the electron microscope at Leeds University in early 1940s Britain was under the control of high-status physicists, most of whom were men, who regulated its access over and against biologists. Moreover, the microscope required physical strength more associated with men than women, combined with a sound knowledge of physics. This article explores the challenges women encountered including access to scientific instruments when entering post-World War II electron microscopy through Irene Manton's career...

This essay concluding the special issue "Bovine Regimes" reflects on the consequences of applying technological terms and ideals to nonhuman animals. Dealing with more recent theoretical provocations of "maintenance" in the field, the essay outlines how U.S. scientists used "maintenance" to both measure and define cattle bodies in the early twentieth century. Metabolic maintenance numbers signaled thresholds to meet and surpass in the production of meat and milk for human consumption. Just meeting this threshold, however, had crucial significance for keeping bovine companions alive...

This article explores the little-studied technological practice of instrument making in South India, where the introduction of bovine hide brought new musical possibilities to a community of musicians. It narrates the animal-human relationship embedded in the everyday technology of making and maintaining sound instruments between 1930 and 2010 and how various actors sought to reduce the sound of bovine instruments. Based on fieldwork and historical sources, this article contributes to the discussion of nonlinear chronology in the history of technology, showing how technological processes are centered around local time, seasons, and animal-human (professional) life cycle rather than global standardized time...

Automatization has changed the interaction between cows and humans in subtle ways. Automated milking systems (AMS) have been used commercially since the early 1990s, first in the Netherlands, then in Western Europe and North America, before reaching Finland. By 2021, nearly 27 percent of Finnish dairy farms have adopted them. Based on fieldwork at AMS farms and Finnish trade journal items, this article argues that as technology users, both humans and cows are engaged in agential entanglements with milking robots...

Freemartinism is a biological phenomenon in genetically female cows born from a dizygotic twin pregnancy. Placental connections-blood and hormones between the freemartin and their male twin-generate an intersex cow unable to conceive. In this study, the freemartin emerges in a constant state of flux: between waste and use; becoming a technology and supplemented by other technologies; defined by human anxieties about gender; and a tool underscoring dominant gendered ideas about normative family life, human sex, and sexuality...

Photography, also an innovative technology at the time, engaged with two interconnected bovine technologies in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India: cattle as the animal power behind other agrarian technologies and cattle breeding. The Ongole cattle of Nellore district in south India, ancestors of the internationally renowned zebu cattle, were famed for their beauty, their strength as haulage and tillage animals, and their milk yields. Along with other Indian breeds, they were systematically photographed, beginning with the 1865 Addanki cattle show...

Are animals technologies? This special issue centers on bovines to analyze the circumstances intertwining and merging the management and understanding of animals with technological systems. The geographically diverse historical and anthropological contributions employ temporality as a central lens to examine the changing proximity of animals to technology over time. Collectively, they demonstrate how bovine bodies have been important sites for manifesting the relationships between people, technology, and power structures...

Close analysis of an image coupled with documents and material culture draws attention to complex connections between political ideas and material realities. Zoltan Kluger's 1940 photograph of a woman manufacturing cow vaginal specula was framed by the campaign for Zionist settlement. The essay explains how relationships between people, animals, and technologies were formed and displayed in the context of settler colonialism in Palestine.

This article reconsiders the production of tropical forest commodities during the industrial age. It argues that writing the global history of jungle commodities requires combining an analysis of local production with larger histories of trans-local interaction and exchange. To that end, this article exposes the nineteenth- and twentieth-century production connections between jungle frontiers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and industries and research laboratories in Europe and North America. While tropical forests are usually seen as places of basic raw material extraction, this article alternatively presents them as complex technological landscapes, where production is entangled with chemical, consumer, electrical, and pharmaceutical industries...

When Thomas Edison handed over his 1877 invention of the phonograph-the new sound recording technology-to a group of investors to market across the U.S, the company lacked the proper expertise, manufacturing, and supply networks to do so. This article traces one company's struggle in dealing with the recurring malfunction of exhibition phonographs, which impacted how audiences came to view the innovation. In doing so, the article revisits the issue of technological determinism as parsed by scholars such as Bruno Latour, Robert Heilbroner, Thomas Hughes, Donald MacKenzie, and Judy Wajcman...

Why was bleaching-despite early concerns about this new food technology-left unregulated for over half a century? This article focuses on the processes developed to artificially whiten flour in the first half of the twentieth century. It shows how, instead of circumscribing adulteration to practices that they could identify precisely, most scientists in fact foregrounded the limits of their expertise and called for a precautionary approach when dealing with new food technologies and the attendant risks. Setting the British case within a more international context provides a window into the difficulties that regulatory regimes faced, narrowing their definition of adulteration to demonstrably harmful practices...

The telephone was a source of disorder in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Although often viewed as a ubiquitous part of modern life, the development of the telephone provoked public discontent, led to strained social relations, and dictated new communication norms. State and commercial firms aimed to associate the telephone with a modern, connected society's ideals and assurances. When firms failed to deliver on their promise of efficient communication, Mexico's citizens expressed outrage over the lack of access to phones and poor service...

The regulations dealing with animal death have undergirded the autarkic aspirations of governments as diverse as revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, and the German Democratic Republic. Three recent works on "fascist," "communist," and "capitalist" pigs reveal parallels between the industrialized slaughter of animals in Germany's twentieth-century authoritarian regimes and the capitalist slaughter system in nineteenth-century America's "red meat republic." In their focus on political ideology, however, these works overlook the politics of professionalization...

This article examines the history of data entry from the 1950s to the 1970s, when office automation required transforming information into computer-legible data. Often women's work, data entry was an essential step in electronic computing-one that automation proponents did not anticipate and historians have largely overlooked. Two West German cases, Allianz insurance company and Sparkassen savings banks, encountered issues when they computerized their offices. Allianz, pioneers of computerization in West Germany, unsuccessfully sought a technological solution for the data entry problem...

Chambers that simulate low-oxygen environments saw use by many of the world's air forces during World War II, yet the hypobaric chamber played an equally important role in rapidly adapting air force personnel's cultural mentality and behavior. Behind its German and American rivals in the field of aviation medicine, Britain's Royal Air Force distinctively mobilized the hypobaric chamber to aid its European bombing campaign, shaping aircrew into crude oxygen detectors long before the wide use of cabin pressurization and electronic sensing technology...

The rise of large cultural performance venues in early 1900s America presented a problem: how to harness the energy and profit potential of the crowd without risking the political and property damage that large masses threatened? The solution lay in crowd control technologies, including turnstiles, stanchions, and seats. Manufacturers framed these products in terms of their ability to generate calm audiences by channeling bodies through venue spaces and seating them in neat rows. Designers and operators of theaters, music halls, and stadiums with crowd control equipment often used the same language of calmness and orderliness...

An unremarkable photograph of a grandstand offers insight into how horse racetrack planners thought about audiences, venues, and documentation. Accounting for not only what the photograph reveals but also how it acts as a specific kind of historical evidence, shows how the history of technology can be enriched by further considering photographic and other kinds of visual and nontextual primary sources.

Public representation of Indian cuisine is important for historians of technology. It shows how progress, modernity, and innovation pervade the general public's understanding of South Asian food history. Based on a popular documentary series, this review shows that technology is an elusive category when discussing food in relation to colonialism, religion, and national identity. Analyzing various dimensions of culinary history gives us an opportunity to rethink research and teaching methodologies by foregrounding indigenous technologies and the role of nonelite actors in shaping technological history and practices...

The Catalan Olive Oil Museum (Museu de l'Oli de Catalunya) deals with the production of olive oil in one of Spain's major oil clusters. Its rich approach to museography has successfully avoided the "book on the wall" or information-dense labeling in other museums. And its direct connection with the local oil cooperative and the Center for Oil Culture has been positive in building a solid narrative for the museum. The excessive emphasis on the "treasures" inside an oil cruet, however, introduces important limitations when looking from a history of food technologies viewpoint...

While there is significant public interest in the culture and history of food, popular and scholarly studies often overlook that food is technological. This article argues that public histories foregrounding food technology offer historians of technology opportunities to engage the public in topics that are both intimately familiar to all and yet riddled with misconceptions about the past, especially on pressing moral concerns relating to public health and the environment. Looking at past innovations in food requires unearthing tacit skills and invisible work routinely done by people whose stories, because of their gender, class, race, or nationality, were often erased from conventional histories of technology...