CHAPTER FOUR

Technological Trends in the Twentieth Century

TECHNOLOGICAL ACTIVITY DURING the twentieth century has changed in its structure, methods, and scope. It is this qualitative change which explains even more than the tremendous rise in the volume of work the emergence of technology in the twentieth century as central in war and peace, and its ability within a few short decades to remake man’s way of life all over the globe.

This over-all change in the nature of technological work during this century has three separate though closely related aspects: (1) structural changes—the professionalization, specialization, and institutionalization of technological work; (2) changes in methods—the new relationship between technology and science; the emergence of systematic research; and the new concept of innovation; and (3) the “systems approach.” Each of these is an aspect of the same fundamental trend. Technology has become what it never was before: an organized and systematic discipline.

The Structure of Technological Work

Throughout the nineteenth century technological activity, despite tremendous success, was still in its structure almost entirely what it had been through the ages: a craft. It was practised by individuals here, there, and yonder, usually working alone and without much formal education. By the middle of the twentieth century technological activity has become thoroughly professional, based, as a rule, on specific university training. It has become largely specialized, and is to a very substantial extent being carried out in a special institution—the research laboratory, particularly the industrial research laboratory—devoted exclusively to technological innovation.

Each of these changes deserves a short discussion. To begin with, few of the major figures in nineteenth-century technology received much formal education. The typical inventor was a mechanic who began his apprenticeship at age fourteen or earlier. The few who had gone to college had not, as a rule, been trained in technology or science but were liberal arts students, trained primarily in classics. Eli Whitney (1765–1825) and Samuel Morse (1791–1872), both Yale graduates, are good examples. There were, of course, exceptions such as the Prussian engineering officer Werner von Siemens (1816–92), who became one of the early founders of the electrical industry; also such university-trained pioneers of the modern chemical industry as the Englishman William Perkin (1838–1907) and the Anglo-German Ludwig Mond (1839–1909). But in general, technological invention and the development of industries based on new knowledge were in the hands of craftsmen and artisans with little scientific education but a great deal of mechanical genius. These men considered themselves mechanics and inventors, certainly not engineers or chemists, let alone scientists.

The nineteenth century was also the era of technical-university building. Of the major technical institutions of higher learning only one, the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, antedates the century; it was founded at the close of the eighteenth century. But by 1901, when the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena admitted its first class, virtually every one of the major technical colleges active in the Western world today had already come into being. Still, in the opening decades of the twentieth century the momentum of technical progress was being carried by the self-taught mechanic without specific technical or scientific education. Neither Henry Ford (1863–1947) nor the Wright brothers (Wilbur, 1867–1912; Orville, 1871–1948) had gone to college.

The technically educated man with the college degree began to assume leadership about the time of World War I, and by the time of the Second World War the change was essentially complete. Technological work since 1940 has been done primarily by men who have been specially educated for such work and who have earned university degrees. Such degrees have almost become prerequisites for technological work. Indeed, since World War II, the men who have built businesses on new technology have as often as not been university professors of physics, chemistry, or engineering, as were most of the men who converted the computer into a saleable product.

Technological work has thus become a profession. The inventor has become an engineer, the craftsman a professional. In part this is only a reflection of the uplifting of the whole educational level of the Western world during the last 150 years. The college-trained engineer or chemist in the Western world today is not more educated, considering the relative standard of his society, than the craftsman of 1800 (who, in a largely illiterate society, could read and write). It is our entire society—and not the technologist alone—that has become formally educated and professionalized. But the professionalization of technological work points up the growing complexity of technology and the growth of scientific and technological knowledge. It is proof of a change in attitude toward technology, an acceptance by society, government, education, and business that this work is important, that it requires a thorough grounding in scientific knowledge, and, above all, that it requires many more capable people than ‘natural genius’ could produce.

Technological work has also become increasingly specialized during the twentieth century. Charles Franklin Kettering (1876–1958), the inventive genius of General Motors and for thirty years head of General Motors Research Corporation, represented the nineteenth-century type of inventor, who specialized in invention rather than in electronics, haloid chemistry, or even the automobile. Kettering in 1911 helped invent the electric self-starter, which enabled laymen (and especially lay-women) to drive an automobile. He concluded his long career in the late thirties by converting the clumsy, wasteful, heavy, and inflexible diesel engine into the economical, flexible, and relatively lightweight propulsion unit that has become standard in heavy trucks and railroad locomotives. In between, however, he also developed a nontoxic freezing compound which made household refrigeration possible and, with it, the modern appliance industry; and tetraethyl lead, which, by preventing the ‘knocking’ of internal- combustion engines using high-octane fuel, made possible the high- performance automobile and air-craft engine.

This practice of being an inventor characterized the nineteenth-century technologist altogether. Edison and Siemens in the electrical industry saw themselves as “specialists in invention,” as did the father of organic chemistry, Justus von Liebig (1803–73) of Germany. Even lesser men showed a range of interests and achievements that would seem extraordinary, if not unprofessional, today. George Westinghouse (1846–1914), for instance, took out important patents on a high-speed vertical steam engine; on the generation, transformation, and transmission of alternating current; and on the first effective automatic brake for railroad trains. The German-born Emile Berliner (1851–1929) contributed heavily to early telephone and phonograph technology and also designed one of the earliest helicopter models. And there were others.

This kind of inventor has not yet disappeared—there are men today working as Edison, Siemens, and Liebig worked a century ago. Edwin H. Land (1909–), of Polaroid fame, quit college to develop polarizing glass, and has ranged in his work from camera design to missiles, and from optics and the theory of vision to colloidal chemistry. He deliberately describes himself in Who’s Who in America as an “inventor.” But such men who cover the spectrum of applied science and technology are not, as they were in the nineteenth century, the centre of technological activity. There we find instead the specialist who works in one increasingly narrow area—electronic circuit design, heat exchange, or high-density polymer chemistry, for instance.

This professionalization and specialization have been made effective by the institutionalization of work in the research laboratory. The research laboratory—and especially the industrial research laboratory—has become the carrier of technological advance in the twentieth century. It is increasingly the research laboratory, rather than the individual, which produces new technology. More and more, technological work is becoming a team effort in which the knowledge of a large number of specialists in the laboratory is brought to bear on a common problem and directed towards a joint technological result.

During the nineteenth century the laboratory was simply the place where work was done that required technical knowledge beyond that of the ordinary mechanic. In industry, testing and plant engineering were the main functions of the laboratory; research was done on the side, if at all. Similarly, the government laboratory during the nineteenth century was essentially a place to test, and all the large government laboratories in the world today (such as the Bureau of Standards in Washington) were founded for that purpose. In the nineteenth-century college or university, the laboratory was used primarily for teaching rather than for research.

Today’s research laboratory had its origin in the German organic-chemical industry. The rapid rise of this industry from 1870 on rested squarely on the application of science to industrial production, unheard of until then. However, even those German chemical laboratories were at first given mainly to testing and process engineering, and it was not until 1900 that they were devoted primarily to research. The turning point came with the synthesis of aspirin—the first purely synthetic drug—by Adolf von Baeyer (1835–1917) in 1899. The worldwide success of aspirin within a few years convinced the chemical industry of the value of technological work dedicated to research alone.

Even Edison’s famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey—the most productive research centre in the whole history of technological discovery and innovation—was not altogether a modern research laboratory. Although devoted solely to research, as is the modern research laboratory, Menlo Park was still primarily the workshop of a single inventor rather than the team effort that characterizes the industrial or university research laboratory of today. Many of Edison’s assistants became successful inventors in their own right, for instance, Frank J. Sprague (1857–1934), who developed the first practical electric streetcar. But these men became productive technologists only after they had left Menlo Park and Edison’s employ. While there, they were just the great man’s helpers.

After the turn of the century, new research laboratories suddenly appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. The German chemical industry rapidly built great laboratories that helped to give Germany a worldwide monopoly on dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, and other organic chemicals before World War I. In Germany, too, shortly after 1900, were founded the big governmental research laboratories of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (now the Max Planck Society), where senior scientists and scientific teams, free from all teaching obligations, could engage in research alone. On this side of the Atlantic C. P. Steinmetz (1865–1923) began, at about the same time, to build the first modern research laboratory in the electrical industry, the great research centre of the General Electric Company in Schenectady. Steinmetz understood, perhaps even better than the Germans, what he was doing, and the pattern he laid down for the General Electric Research Laboratory is by and large that followed by all major industrial and governmental research centres to this day.

The essence of the modern research laboratory is not its size. There are some very large laboratories, working for governments or for large companies, and also numerous small research laboratories, many employing fewer technologists and scientists than did some nineteenth-century establishments; and there is no apparent relationship between the size of the research laboratory and its results. What distinguishes today’s research laboratory from any predecessor is, first, its exclusive interest in research, discovery, and innovation. Second, the research laboratory brings together men from a wide area of disciplines, each contributing his specialized knowledge. Finally, the research laboratory embodies a new methodology of technological work squarely based on the systematic application of science to technology.

It is a great strength of the research laboratory that it can be both “specialist” and “generalist,” permitting an individual to work alone or a team to work together. Quite a few Nobel Prize winners have done their research work in industrial laboratories such as those of the Bell Telephone System or the General Electric Company. Similarly nylon (1937), one of the first building blocks of today’s plastic industry, was developed by W. H. Carothers (1896–1937) working by himself in the DuPont laboratory during the thirties. The research laboratory provides an individual with access to skills and facilities which greatly increase his capacity. It can at the same time, however, organize a team effort for a specific task and thus create a collective generalist with a greater range of skills and knowledge than any individual, no matter how gifted, could possibly acquire in one lifetime.

Before World War I the research laboratory was still quite rare. Between World War I and World War II it became standard in a number of industries, primarily the chemical, pharmaceutical, electrical, and electronics industries. Since World War II, research activity has become as much of a necessity in industry as a manufacturing plant, and as central in its field as is the infantry soldier for defence, or the trained nurse in medicine.

The Methods of Technological Work

Hand in hand with changes in the structure of technological work go changes in the basic approach to and methods of work. Technology has become science-based. Its method is now “systematic research.” And what was formerly “invention” is “innovation” today.

Historically the relationship between science and technology has been a complex one, and it has by no means been thoroughly explored nor is it truly understood as yet. But it is certain that the scientist, until the end of the nineteenth century, with rare exceptions, concerned himself little with the application of his new scientific knowledge and even less with the technological work needed to make knowledge applicable. Similarly, the technologist, until recently, seldom had direct or frequent contact with the scientist and did not consider his findings of primary importance to technological work. Science required, of course, its own technology—a very advanced technology at that, since all along the progress of science has depended upon the development of scientific instruments. But the technological advances made by the scientific instrument maker were not, as a rule, extended to other areas and did not lead to new products for the consumer or to new processes for artisan and industry. The first instrument maker to become important outside of the scientific field was James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine.

Not until almost seventy-five years later, that is until 1850 or so, did scientists themselves become interested in the technological development and application of their discoveries. The first scientist to become a major figure in technology was Justus von Liebig, who in the mid-nineteenth century developed the first synthetic fertilizer and also a meat extract (still sold all over Europe under his name) which was, until the coming of refrigeration in the 1880s, the only way to store and transport animal proteins. In 1856 Sir William H. Perkin in England isolated, almost by accident, the first aniline dye and immediately built a chemical business on his discovery. Since then, technological work in the organic-chemicals industry has tended to be science-based.

About 1850 science began to affect another new technology—electrical engineering. The great physicists who contributed scientific knowledge of electricity during the century were not themselves engaged in applying this knowledge to products and processes; but the major nineteenth-century technologists of electricity closely followed the work of the scientists. Siemens and Edison were thoroughly familiar with the work of physicists such as Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and Joseph Henry (1797–1878). And Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) was led to his work on the telephone through the researches of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) on the reproduction of sound. Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) developed radio on the foundation Heinrich Hertz (1857–94) had laid with his experimental confirmation of Maxwell’s electromagnetic-wave propagation theory; and so on. From its beginnings, therefore, electrical technology has been closely related to the physical science of electricity.

Generally, however, the relationship between scientific work and its technological application, which we today take for granted, did not begin until after the turn of the twentieth century. As previously mentioned, such typically modern devices as the automobile and the aeroplane benefited little from purely theoretical scientific work in their formative years. It was World War I that brought about the change: in all belligerent countries scientists were mobilized for the war effort, and it was then that industry discovered the tremendous power of science to spark technological ideas and to indicate technological solutions. It was at that time also that scientists discovered the challenge of technological problems.

Today technological work is, for the most part, consciously based on scientific effort. Indeed, a great many industrial research laboratories do work in “pure” research, that is, work concerned exclusively with new theoretical knowledge rather than with the application of knowledge. And it is a rare laboratory that starts a new technological project without a study of scientific knowledge, even where it does not seek new knowledge for its own sake. At the same time, the results of scientific inquiry into the properties of nature—whether in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, or another science—are immediately analysed by thousands of ‘applied scientists’ and technologists for their possible application to technology.

Technology is not, then, “the application of science to products and processes,” as is often asserted. At best this is a gross oversimplification. In some areas—for example, polymer chemistry, pharmaceuticals, atomic energy, space exploration, and computers—the line between “scientific inquiry” and “technology” is a blurred one; the scientist who finds new basic knowledge and the technologist who develops specific processes and products are one and the same man. In other areas, however, highly productive efforts are still primarily concerned with purely technological problems, and have little connection to science as such. In the design of mechanical equipment—machine tools, textile machinery, printing presses, and so forth—scientific discoveries as a rule play a very small part, and scientists are not commonly found in the research laboratory. More important is the fact that science, even where most relevant, provides only the starting point for technological efforts. The greatest amount of work on new products and processes comes well after the scientific contribution has been made. “Know how,” the technologist’s contribution, takes a good deal more time and effort in most cases than the scientist’s “know-what”; but though science is no substitute for today’s technology, it is the basis and starting point.

While we know today that our technology is based on science, few people (other than the technologists themselves) realize that technology has become in this century somewhat of a science in its own right. It has become research—a separate discipline having its own specific methods.

Nineteenth-century technology was “invention”—not managed or organized or systematic. It was, as our patent laws, now two hundred years old, still define it, “flash of insight.” Of course hard work, sometimes for decades, was usually required to convert this “flash” into something that worked and could be used. But nobody knew how this work should be done, how it might be organized, or what one could expect from it. The turning point was probably Edison’s work on the electric light bulb in 1879. As his biographer Matthew Josephson points out, Edison did not intend to do organized research. He was led to it by his failure to develop through “flash of genius” a workable electric light. This forced him, very much against his will, to work through the specifications of the solution needed, to spell out in considerable detail the major steps that had to be taken, and then to test systematically one thousand six hundred different materials to find one that could be used as the incandescent element for the light bulb he sought to develop. Indeed, Edison found that he had to break through on three major technological fronts at once in order to have domestic electric lighting. He needed an electrical energy source producing a well-regulated voltage of essentially constant magnitude; a high vacuum in a small glass container; and a filament that would glow without immediately burning up. And the job that Edison expected to finish by himself in a few weeks required a full year and the work of a large number of highly trained assistants, that is, a research team.

There have been many refinements in the research method since Edison’s experiments. Instead of testing one thousand six hundred different materials, we would today, in all probability, use conceptual and mathematical analysis to narrow the choices considerably (this does not always work, however; current cancer research, for instance, is testing more than sixty thousand chemical substances for possible therapeutic action). Perhaps the greatest improvements have been in the management of the research team. There was, in 1879, no precedent for such a team effort, and Edison had to improvise research management as he went along. Nevertheless, he clearly saw the basic elements of research discipline: (1) a definition of the need—for Edison, a reliable and economical system of converting electricity into light; (2) a clear goal—a transparent container in which resistance to a current would heat up a substance to white heat; (3) identification of the major steps to be taken and the major pieces of work that had to be done—in his case, the power source, the container, and the filament; (4) constant feedback from the results of the work on the plan; for example, Edison’s finding that he needed a high vacuum rather than an inert gas as the environment for his filament made him at once change the direction of research on the container; and finally (5) organization of the work so that each major segment is assigned to a specific work team.

These steps together constitute to this day the basic method and the system of technological work. October 21, 1879, the day on which Edison first had a light bulb that would burn for more than a very short time, therefore, is not only the birthday of electric light; it marks the birth of modern technological research as well. Yet whether Edison himself fully understood what he had accomplished is not clear, and certainly few people at the time recognized that he had found a generally applicable method of technological and scientific inquiry. It took twenty years before Edison was widely imitated, by German chemists and bacteriologists in their laboratories and in the General Electric laboratory in the United States. Since then, however, technological work has progressively developed as a discipline of methodical inquiry everywhere in the Western world.

Technological research has not only a different methodology from invention; it leads to a different approach, known as innovation, or the purposeful and deliberate attempt to bring about, through technological means, a distinct change in the way man lives and in his environment—the economy, the society, the community, and so on. Innovation may begin by defining a need or an opportunity, which then leads to organizing technological efforts to find a way to meet the need or exploit the opportunity. To reach the moon, for instance, requires a great deal of new technology; once the need has been defined, technological work can be organized systematically to produce this new technology. Or innovation can proceed from new scientific knowledge and an analysis of the opportunities it might be capable of creating. Plastic fibres, such as nylon, came into being in the 1930s as a result of systematic study of the opportunities offered by the new understanding of polymers (that is, long chains of organic molecules), which chemical scientists (mostly in Germany) had gained during World War I.

Innovation is not a product of the twentieth century; both Siemens and Edison were innovators as much as inventors. Both started out with the opportunity of creating big new industries—the electric railways (Siemens), and the electric lighting industry (Edison). Both men analysed what new technology was needed and went to work creating it. Yet only in this century—and largely through the research laboratory and its approach to research—has innovation become central to technological effort.

In innovation, technology is used as a means to bring about change in the economy, in society, in education, in warfare, and so on. This has tremendously increased the impact of technology. It has become the battering ram which breaks through even the stoutest ramparts of tradition and habit. Thus modern technology influences traditional society and culture in under-developed countries. But innovation means also that technological work is not done only for technological reasons but for the sake of a nontechnological economic, social, or military end.

Scientific discovery has always been measured by what it adds to our understanding of natural phenomena. The test of invention is, however, technical—what new capacity it gives us to do a specific task. But the test of innovation is its impact on the way people live. Very powerful innovations may, therefore, be brought about with relatively little in the way of new technological invention.

A very good example is the first major innovation of the twentieth century, mass production, initiated by Henry Ford between 1905 and 1910 to produce the Model T automobile. It is correct, as has often been pointed out, that Ford contributed no important technological invention. The mass-production plant, as he designed and built it between 1905 and 1910, contained not a single new element: interchangeable parts had been known since before Eli Whitney, a century earlier; the conveyor belt and other means of moving materials had been in use for thirty years or more, especially in the meat-packing plants of Chicago. Only a few years before Ford, Otto Doering, in building the first large mail-order plant in Chicago for Sears, Roebuck, used practically every one of the technical devices Ford was to use at Highland Park, Detroit, to turn out the Model T. Henry Ford was himself a highly gifted inventor who found simple and elegant solutions to a host of technical problems—from developing new alloy steels to improving almost every machine tool used in the plant. But his contribution was an innovation: a technical solution to the economic problem of producing the largest number of finished products with the greatest reliability of quality at the lowest possible cost. And this innovation has had greater impact on the way men live than many of the great technical inventions of the past.

The Systems Approach

Mass production exemplifies, too, a new dimension that has been added to technology in this century: the systems approach. Mass production is not a thing, or a collection of things; it is a concept—a unified view of the productive process. It requires, of course, a large number of “things,” such as machines and tools. But it does not start with them; they follow from the vision of the system.

The space programme today is another such system, and its conceptual foundation is genuine innovation. Unlike mass production, the space programme requires a tremendous amount of new invention, as well as new scientific discovery. Yet the fundamental scientific concepts underlying it are not at all new—they are, by and large, Newtonian physics. What is new is the idea of putting men into space by a systematic, organized approach.

Automation is a systems concept, closer to Ford’s mass production than to the space programme. There had been examples of genuine automation long before anyone coined the term. Every oil refinery built in the past forty years has been essentially automated. But not until someone saw the entire productive process as one continuous, controlled flow of materials did we see automation. This has led to a tremendous amount of new technological activity to develop computers, process controls for machines, materials-moving equipment, and so on. Yet the basic technology to automate a great many industrial processes had been present for a long time, and all that was lacking was the systems approach to convert them to the innovation of automation.

The systems approach, which sees a host of formerly unrelated activities and processes as all parts of a larger, integrated whole, is not something technological in itself. It is, rather, a way of looking at the world and at ourselves. It owes much to Gestalt psychology (from the German word for “configuration” or “structure”), which demonstrated that we do not see lines and points in a painting but configurations—that is, a whole—and that we do not hear individual sounds in a tune but only the tune itself—the configuration. And the systems approach was also generated by twentieth-century trends in technology: the linking of technology and science, the development of the systematic discipline of research, and innovation. The systems approach is, in fact, a measure of our newly found technological capacity. Earlier ages could visualize systems but they lacked the technological means to realize such visions.

The systems approach also tremendously increases the power of technology. It permits today’s technologists to speak of materials rather than of steel, glass, paper, or concrete, each of which has, of course, its own (very old) technology. Today we see a generic concept—materials—all of which are arrangements of the same fundamental building blocks of matter. Thus it happens that we are busy designing materials without precedent in nature: synthetic fibres, plastics, glass that does not break and glass that conducts electricity, and so on. We increasingly decide first what end use we want and then choose or fashion the material we want to use. We define, for example, the specific properties we want in a container and then decide whether glass, steel, aluminium, paper, one of a host of plastics, or any one of hundreds of materials in combination will be the best material for it. This is what is meant by a ‘materials revolution’ whose specific manifestations are technological, but whose roots are to be found in the systems concept.

We are similarly on the threshold of an “energy revolution”—making new use of such sources of energy as atomic reaction, solar energy, the tides, and so forth; but also with a new systems concept: energy. Again this concept is the result of major technological developments—especially, of course, in atomic power—and the starting point for major new technological work. Ahead of us, and barely started, is the greatest systems job we can see now: the systematic exploration and development of the oceans.

Water covers far more of the earth’s surface than does land. And since water, unlike soil, is penetrated by the rays of the sun for a considerable depth, the life-giving process of photosynthesis covers infinitely more area in the seas than it does on land—apart from the fact that every single square inch of the ocean is fertile. And the sea itself, as well as its bottom, contains untold riches in metals and minerals. Yet, even today, on the oceans man is still a hunter and a nomad rather than a cultivator. He is in the same early stage of development as our ancestors almost ten thousand years ago when they first tilled the soil. Comparatively minor efforts to gain knowledge of the oceans and to develop technology to cultivate them should therefore yield returns—not only in knowledge, but in food, energy, and raw materials also—far greater than anything we could get from exploiting the already well-explored lands of the continents. Oceanic development, rather than space exploration, might well turn out to be the real frontier in the next century. Underlying this development will be the concept of the oceans as a system, resulting from such technological developments as the submarine, and in turn sparking such new technological efforts as the Mohole project to drill through the earth’s hard crust beneath the ocean.

There are many other areas where the systems approach is likely to have a profound impact, where it may lead to major technological efforts, and through them, to major changes in the way we live and in our capacity to do things. One such example is the modern city—itself largely a creation of modern technology.

One of the greatest nineteenth-century inventions was invention itself, as has been said many times. It underlay the explosive technological development of the years between 1860 and 1900, ‘the heroic age of invention’. It might similarly be said that the great invention of the early twentieth century was innovation: it underlies the deliberate attempt to organize purposeful changes of whole areas of life which characterizes the systems approach.

Innovation and the systems approach are only just emerging. Their full impact is almost certainly still ahead. But they are already changing man’s life, society, and his world view. And they are profoundly changing technology itself and its role.

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First published in vol. 2 of Technology in Western Civilization, ed. Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).