Figure 1. Oliver Evans's Mechanized Mill. (Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command; A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York; Oxford University Press, 1948. 83)

Jefferson, grounded in history, literature, architecture and math, with practical experience in business and politics, serving as an expert in a patent case, was looking for a new mechanical process, perhaps something like a regulator in a clock. Inevitably he identified the historical antecedents of the mill's machinery, and perhaps he looked with a dour eye on a production line process that mechanized agriculture and released laborers for possible employement in the city.  In 1790 Jefferson's image of the ideal American society still excluded manufacture not because of the machinery, or even because of the division of labor, but because of the image of the English factory city with its pale, ill-educated and easy mobilized masses. ²  Evans's mill, with its recognizably ancient devices, and its "inhuman" production line resemblance to the factory, may have had little to recommend it to Jefferson.

Evans's patent difficulties illustrate a familiar point: the technical ability to carry out some process does not suggest that the process will be easily or successfully adopted, or bring unqualified benefit to the inventor: ability does not equal acceptance. Evans's difficulties also capture a question of interest to historians of technology. How and when do technologies metamorphose from ideas and possibilities into tools that rationalize a new process used to create value? When do tools become conventions that are unquestioningly seen as "the way business is done?" What social changes lead up to and follow the creation and widespread adoption of new business tools?

During the last semester I read a selection of books to inquire whether or not business tools can be linked to deep structural changes in societies and if so, how these tools then organize and represent business, social and cultural thought processes. The selection was as follows: Machines as the Measure of Men (Michael Adas), The Wheels of Commerce (Fernand Braudel), The Great Wave (David Hackett Fischer), Mechanization Takes Command; A Contribution to Anonymous History (Sigfried Giedion), The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Stephen Kern), The Unbound Prometheus (David S. Landes), History from Things (Lubar and Kingery), Technology in World Civilization (Arnold Pacey), The World Economy (W.W. Rostow), and Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (Julie Wosk). Rostow, Braudel, and Fischer focused on economic interpretations of history. Wosk, Kern, Giedion, and Kingery used aesthetic studies to address historical problems, and Adas, Pacey, and Landes foregrounded cultural questions. Although each author had a specific problem he or she was concerned with, they addressed some questions in common: how does technology interact with culture? Why was Western Europe the leader in the Industrial Revolution? Is technology a primary mover of social change? Implicit and explicit in these works was the question -- what does the juggernaut of technology mean to terms upon which life is lived the late 20th century? I looked to these authors to determine what facts, theories and perspectives they offered to my inquiries into the role of business tools and social change.

Considered together, these works suggested a pattern of technological expansion and acceptance. Channels or opportunities for new technologies to develop enter a society in one of three ways: First, standard methods for meeting basic material and spiritual needs are called into question by pressure on these standard methods. Pressure may appear as environmental scarcity produced by population growth or warfare, although population growth or warfare are not alone sufficient causes for the development of technology. While insufficient to serve as a cause of technological change, this first kind of pressure makes it more obvious to the groups with the power to respond effectively that some material investment in social change may be necessary. The search for alternative fuel sources and new weapons illustrate the first kind of pressure. Second, it may be that a desired item can be produced more efficiently or cheaply by a new technology, and the old technology is then abandoned, sometimes willingly, sometimes perforce. In this case, the impetus to change is supported by steady or growing internal demand for the item in question and the technology is a system or process which permits penetration of goods or services to all levels of society. Evans's mill and Industrial Revolution-era textile mills are examples of this sort of change, and new agricultural methods imposed by imperialist colonizers are another. Also included in this category are services like quick communication and public time keeping. Third, pressure on a society's basic way of meeting material needs may take the form of a new belief, for instance, the belief that slavery or meat-eating or is wrong and ought to be abolished. Non-material pressure may also be applied by those material goods which have never before been a basic need, like sugar, tea, coffee or chocolate, but which become a highly desired item and status symbol through their initial scarcity. Non-material pressures also create powerful internal demand and support for technological innovation. Of course any historical period under consideration situation may experience one or all of these pressures simultaneously.

These three broad avenues are a way of categorizing and understanding the root causes of social change. They suggest that social change comes primarily as a response to pressure on developed methods for meeting basic needs. However, an important qualification to this pattern must be acknowledged: there is a strong, but not a necessary, connection between technological innovation and material need. "Tinkering," or play, or efficiency, or some other desirable qualifier which is pursued for its own aesthetic sake -- is invariably a part of human activity. Although innovation can be de-coupled from value exchange (i.e. business), it cannot be de-coupled from an understanding of what might be valuable to do or have. The pattern proposed here leaves open the question of what basic needs may be -- food, shelter, security, work, sex , children -- because "basic" needs seem to change in character and complexion according to the society and time period under consideration. What is important is to determine what the society in question deemed to be essential.

For the most part Fischer, Rostow, Landes, Kingery and Pacey, who suggested these three avenues of technological development, were not technological determinists. They acknowledged that "better" method did not always "win:" a new technology may have produced an inferior product, but have been accepted for reasons that were not specifically technical. The technology used to develop a new product may simply have remained a curiosity if there were no perceived social need or pressure for the goods it produced or services it performed. Moreover, a promising new technology might not have had the support of those with sufficient capital and organizational capability to bring it into widespread use. Braudel argued that at some point in the process of development it was necessary for a class or group people who perceived an advantage to themselves to choose to invest in the development of the new technology. The innovators themselves were not necessarily concerned with creating opportunities for value exchange; rather, someone or some group must have imagined how the new technology could be linked to business.

These pressures and conditions, then, create avenues for the general acceptance of new technology and the context for its development. Technologies, in turn, generate new business tools that structure and capture social change. It is my argument that a new technology's social impact may be best evaluated when, like Evans's mill, the technological process has been simplified into a single-end-user tool which indicates its own use in a relatively unambiguous way and becomes an accepted and unquestioned method for meeting basic material and spiritual needs. Business tools encapsulate important social mores and offer structure to society. They suggest at least four important aspects of a society's framework: 1) who may exchange with whom; 2) how exchange is to be justly valued and administered, as well as what is valuable to measure; 3) how risk is to be minimized and monitored; and 4) with regard to time and space, how exchange may be made convenient, and in this vein, the limits of what can be imagined.

For example, if we evaluate the mechanized mill as a single-end user tool, certain aspects of American society emerge. Evans's mill suggested who could interact with whom by cutting out a layer of hierarchy in business, making the miller the owner of equipment rather than the employer, master and teacher of other skilled men. As a tool the mill gave no direction on how the flour was to be valued, except perhaps to lower its price and increase its availability to people in the vicinity of the mill. In eliminating human error the mill machinery eliminated some risk to the process of turning grain into flour, but created the possibility that undesirable and inedible elements might enter the flour because there was no one to check the process during its various stages. Since the mill relied on water power, it had to be situated where there was a suitable fall of water, and so the geographic convenience of exchange was limited. Likewise, the mill could only speed up the processing of what was brought to it, not facilitate the faster growing of the grain, or economic distribution of the end product.

What does this evaluation of the mill as a tool tell us about the structure of eighteenth-century America? The mill suggests a society without a sufficient labor force to produced finished goods, and without a labor force entrenched in specific production tasks. It suggests a fluid hierarchy, without a landed class and without a state-monopolized production process for meeting basic needs like flour. It suggests a society willing to accept a less-than-perfect product in order to have more available to everyone. It also suggests that scarcity was such that the distribution network for the excess flour was not of immediate concern. Evans's mill was certainly welcomed and used since its exclusive patent was challenged as oppressive. Since Evans imagined a process that was entirely mechanical from start to finish, later historians see in Evans's mill the germs of the American system of manufacture, but for at least 100 years many other basic needs were met by processes that required skilled labor. In that lag perhaps the limits of American imagination are shown. Jefferson was right that the mill was simply a new configuration of old technology, but he missed the significance of what he was seeing, of the social needs the mill addressed and articulated.

Having offered a preliminary review and application of the pattern suggested by these works, I turn now to a closer examination of the authors and their individual arguments so that further directions and qualifications can be added to the pattern sketched above. Most helpful in shaping the my understanding of a society responding to pressure were Rostow, Fischer and Kingery. Answering the question of why English society seemed readiest to accept and use technology were Landes and Braudel. Pacey and Adas created contrasting perspectives on the flow of technology transfer and the generation of business tools. Gordon offered the framework for describing and differentiating a tool from an artifact. Wosk, Kern and Giedion limned the creation and boundaries of cultural spaces, and the new technologies and new business tools that explored those limits.

One of the more obvious social pressures of 20th century was population. Rostow accounted for the off-the-charts rise in world population through an 18th century population surge, combined with the industrial revolution and modern medicine. (see figure 2, below). Population limited and directed what was possible and desirable to do in many parts of the world. Furthermore, agriculture and food production were and are still significant for many nations.

Rostow described the relationship between the relative abundance or scarcity of foodstuffs and raw materials and the leading sectors in major economies as these affected population movements, housing construction, urban infrastructure. In general, when foodstuff prices were high, other sectors were depressed, as excess capital was absorbed by the price of food.
 

Figure 2. Long Range Trend of Population Growth. (W. W. Rostow, The World Economy: History and Prospect. 6)

Rostow argued that war distorted relationships by encouraging manufacturing sectors while keeping food prices high. Also, disaster years for agriculture created unexpected relationship between sectors. He also argued that times of full employment combined with physical bottlenecks for raw material acquisition caused peaks, excess capital and resultant slumps. Population and food prices figured importantly in Rostow's arguments, but even more important was investment in technology.

Rostow described and classified 20 specific countries according to their progress on a "growth chart:" take-off, a drive to technological maturity and a state of high mass-consumption. Within a country, industries developed in groups, among the earliest food, leather goods and textiles; in the middle, rubber, wood, chemicals; and following last, clothing printing, metals, paper, metal products. From his survey, Rostow made four conclusions: later-comers can catch up; India and China have special difficulties due to their overwhelming populations; it may be difficult to decide when "affluence" has been reached, and the leading growth sectors for the future are an open question. Rostow's 20-country review raises the question of how to evaluate a society before it reaches the state of industrial take-off, and perhaps analysis of a society's business tools may offer insights into pre-industrial societies.

Rostow's general thesis rested on two key ideas: first, the creative and unpredictable impulses and capital benefits embodied in technology must be directed through the economy by "correct" investment; that is, those who can invest, should see and choose to benefit in the technologies that are most likely to bring not only personal gain but also a higher standard of living for all. Second, to properly understand, evaluate, and make correct policy decisions, economists must view the sectors of the economy in a disaggregated fashion -- that is, in enough detail to see which sectors require investment. His approach might be called a dynamic disaggregated theory of optimal sectoral equilibrium. Rostow attributed the lags or distortions in an economy to investors' decisions to turn away from optimum sectoral paths. Investors seek short-term profits, act as a "herd," and mis-apprehend the level of investment already placed in promising sectors. Rostow did not explicitly link agricultural or population pressure to technological ascendancy, but he suggested that investment channels are "opened" or "closed" by these pressures and he supported the idea that specific groups of investors are significant to technological development.

Rostow sketched the same general price revolutions charted by Fischer in The Great Wave. Fischer contended that history may be organized, and to some extent understood, through the lens of price revolutions and price equilibriums. Fischer documented four major world price revolutions in the thirteenth century, the sixteenth century, the eighteenth century and the 20th century. For each of the four price revolutions, he considered four areas: first, he examined the timing, magnitude, rhythm, volatility and sequence of secular price increases. Second he demonstrated a pattern of price relatives for commodities across the four revolutions; third he documented the movements of real wages, and finally he presented the pattern of change in rent and interest across the revolutions. Fischer argued that price waves occurred because of a set of predictable contiguities, decisions made at the individual, peer group and state level. The sequence of the wave is as follows: first, relative prosperity which leads to optimism, and relaxed family planning. Families grow larger because young people choose to marry earlier and have more children. Prices begin to drift upwards as optimism and prosperity obtains.
 
 

Figure 3. Consumables as they represent price revolutions. (David Hackett Fischer. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythms of History. 4)

An increase in population leads to a rise in the price of necessities, particularly food and fuel. Wealthy individuals, who have the means to protect themselves financially, tend to buy more food and fuel, thus driving prices higher. They also pressure the state for tax breaks or other financial subsidies, and the gap between rich and poor begins to grow at an alarming rate. Markets become unstable due to speculation and the economic future of the young seems uncertain but most probably bad, and homicide and robbery rates rise along with prices. A triggering event -- a change in climate, a run of bad harvests, a war or plague -- which could be withstood in better times, but not in a time of multiple stresses and pressures, causes a social crisis and collapse. A sharp drop in population and prices levels off into an equilibrium; prices of food, fuel, and rent return to levels that a large part of the middle class can afford. A mood of social optimism grows, prices and populations begin to rise, and a new wave gathers force.

Fischer believed that deep changes were caused by ecological or population pressure on access to basic necessities. He argued that money shortages reinforce inflation and were frequently mis-managed by governments trying to keep prices down. Referencing Marxist models, he averred that the wealthy, as a group, pressured the state (in whatever form the state took) to protect their interests, and also tried to hoard necessities, creating volatility and instability in markets. Fischer, like Rostow, argued that food and population pressures may bear indirectly on the development of new technologies, but Fischer also pointed to simple optimism or pessimism as playing a powerful role in social change.

Fischer specifically raised the question of the causes of deep social change and suggested, in my mind, the three avenues technological changes as described above: new methods to supply traditional necessities; barriers to the traditional ways to supply necessities; and newly devised necessities. Taken together Rostow and Fischer supported the model of a society directed by external and internal material and non-material pressures. They suggest that any analysis of a business tool in its context must include agriculture as represented by the prices of consumables, the population level as it puts additional pressure on fuel, excess capital as it is invested and the elites as they protect themselves against economic uncertainties.

Through Fischer and Rostow I was able to consider the broad and underlying forces of social change. An equally important question raised by these and other authors in the selection focused on specific historical conditions. What permitted the rapid rise of industry in Western Europe as opposed to other parts of the world? What made Western Europe different than other places? Landes and Braudel both argued that sufficient capital was necessary to support new technology. In other words, a group capable of investing, who see the advantage of technology, had to arise, in order for the conditions of a technological take-off, as described by Rostow, to be met.

"[T]he Englishman of 1750 was closer in material things to Caesar's legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren." ³ Landes's The Unbound Prometheus canvassed the momentous change from an agrarian economy to one dominated by machine and asked two key questions: why did the first breakthrough in the modern industrial system occur in Western Europe, and why did change at the time and place that it did? Landes worked out in impressive detail the complex factors that promote or retard economic growth, from the financial policies of governments and individuals, to jerky and somewhat unpredictable industrial discoveries, to the political and social fears and desires that channel the development and investment of monetary, natural and human resources. Landes followed not only the "lifespan" of new technologies, but also the lifespan of technological dominance for nations. He focused particularly on the growth of specific industries: cotton, wrought iron, trains, steel, chemicals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals. England started ahead of Europe in cotton, steel and chemicals, but failed to retain her dominance, yielding it to Germany at the turn of the century because (apparently) British industrialists failed to see the need to make the costly continuous improvements necessary. Landes considered the distorting effects of both world wars, of the waste of resources, of the following stagnation and reprisals, and also of the misdirected international economic policies that bracketed both wars.

Perhaps most interesting is his analysis of the chemical industry, rising as it did from the waste products of industrial processes. The chemical industry exemplified two problems: efficiency and fuel sources. Efficiency was a cultural mind-set; fuel sources were a fundamental limit in the placement of and conception of machinery, and both of these material and non-material pressures governed the process of change across the two centuries in question. Landes attributes ongoing modernization to a continued entrepreneurial spirit and a continued abundance of material goods. In opposition to Rostow, Landes believes that the long trends are "optical illusion" and that more accurate picture is obtained by looking at the price series, which show a long deflation, the result, he believes of unprecedented productivity gains brought about by manufacturing.

By offering an entwined cultural and economic historical analysis, Landes makes it difficult to extract principles for development; however, Landes argued that modernization and industrial growth requires at least three things: a society with sufficient ready capital and financial instruments that permit moving capital from lenders to borrowers; a group with access to that money who favor the growth of a middle class and have a concomitant preference for reinvestment in business rather than estates and honors; and finally a society which rewards "native genius" -- whether technically trained scientists or amateurs and tinkerers-- a group, although he does not say this directly, of people interested in efficiency, production, and competition as ends in themselves. A reading of Landes suggests that financial instruments are important business tools to consider in any of the several time periods that my study might cover, and that "efficiency" as a concept also ought to be considered across the time periods that my study might cover. Landes and Rostow together indicate that it is important to know what status symbols are desired by the group with the power to invest in new technologies.

Braudel's Wheels of Commerce is at once broader and more sharply focused than Landes's study. Braudel's three volume study spanned the systems and the tools that supported the rise of capitalism and Braudel 's analogy was of exchange as a river flowing between consumption (vol 1) and production (vol 3); this image of a narrow and turbulent dividing river suited his purpose of focusing on circulation in volume 2. He argued that the capitalists and capitalism rose before there were "means of production" to control, and not being linked to production, rested rather in the exchange of bills, the field of credit and banking, and long distance trade -- essentially speculation upon the lack of complete information from one place to the next. He began with the instruments of exchange themselves, turned next to the markets and the economies, centered on what capitalism is, and how it operates "away from home and "at home," and concluded by describing the pluralism of society and how capitalism took its place in classes, religions and cultures.

Where did modern capitalism start? Braudel argued that capitalism has always existed where trade networks exist. "Above the markets, the shops, and the travelling pedlars, rose a mighty superstructure of exchange in the hands of extremely skilled operators. This is the level at which one finds the major workings of the large scale economy, and necessarily of the capitalism which could not have existed without it. " ⁴  But where there key industries, or key organizational schemes? Taking the second question first, Braudel followed the model of Hubert Bougin who offered four categories: the largest category, the family workshop with a master and one or two apprentices; the scattered manufactories which all worked on one product and were linked by the product and the merchant entrepreneur who organized the work (e.g. getting the wool from spinner to weaver and dyer); the concentrated manufactories who brought all the processes together under one roof (breweries, tanneries, glassworks); and finally factories using machinery that was powered by running water and steam. Within Europe, all of these types were present, but in the rest of the world, the first two types were most strongly in evidence. Braudel remarked that despite their rich craft tradition, the development of complex tools in China and India was hindered by the sheer numbers of people -- no labor saving devices were required. City guilds were an organizational force, especially as they fostered the division of labor. So, too, was the putting out system (Verlagssystem) in the countryside; the merchant then became the mediator between organizational schemes in town and country. If these were some of the organizational schemes, what were the key industries? Textiles appear to be one key industry, first wool, then silk and finally calicoes. Mining was the other. Both of these industries were dominated and organized by merchants and supported by technology. As mines deepened, the money required to establish and run them increased, so the wealthy alone could afford to pursue organizing mines. "The growing part played by capital -- both fixed and circulating -- is beyond doubt. The initial investment was sometimes great." ⁵  However, choices made by capitalists tended to minimize industry, because capitalists tended to take their profits out of industry and invest elsewhere where higher gains were to be had. Braudel said that industry in a region rose and fell because there was not enough demand or capital in the lower classes to support more than one industry.

The model that Braudel generated was a three-fold grouping: commodities or articles consumed on the spot, commodities marketed over short distances, and finally goods became big business -- a "capitalist game" -- when they were gathered and transported over long distances. ⁶  The proportional size of an economic activity was not tantamount to its importance; although banking and trading were a relatively small proportion of the economy in England (8 million pounds of 600 million) it nevertheless represented the business model of the future and the dawn of colonialism, two significant trends. Braudel concluded with a view of capitalism on home ground and the groupings within society. The real impetus for capitalism, he asserted, was not the division of labor in manufacturing, but the division of labor in capital and trade markets, and that rested on the "spontaneous expansion of the economy, at the grass roots." ⁷

Our brief survey of Braudel, Fisher and Rostow and Landes suggest that price, population and agricultural needs do provide "channels" for later technological innovation, but they do not necessarily generate the required conditions for innovation. (It may be that pressure on the conventional ways of meeting basic social needs without sufficient capitalization is more apt to generate new forms of social hierarchy than new technologies.) Landes and Braudel argue that capital accumulated through trade networks permitted England and Europe to assume technological ascendancy. Explicit in both arguments is the necessity of a transportation system. Put more simply, before the Industrial Revolution, tools supporting travel are perhaps the most significant tools of value exchange, and seeing technological development and business tools in this light may suggest particular focal points for further investigation.

Before we turn to the cultural analyses of the rise of technology offered by Adas and Pacey, we should pause to look at an instance of non-material social pressure (many other instances could be adduced): the development of Italian istoriato ware. Kingery's "Technological Systems and Some Implications with Regard to Continuity and Change," (in the above-listed History from Things) offers a complex artifact-centered "technological social" system which allows the historian to discuss the recycling and redistribution of products, and includes the aesthetic and cultural considerations bound up in the production of a product. Kingery cites the development of Italian istoriato ware during the last quarter of the 15th century as the coming together of two separate "species" of art. Although pottery is a follower, not a leader of social change, he explores the context that permitted the development of this tri-layered, vividly colored, essentially pictorial pottery. While acknowledging its limitations, he suggests as a simplified tenet that "a radical change in design technology ... or manufacturing technology invariable implies a change in use technology and vice versa." ⁸  His examination of istoriato ware suggests that the banking system of the Italian cities permitted the development of new wealth, new urban behavior, and new manners. The price of labor and materials was reasonable; public display of tableware became a part of the new consumer behavior; thus there was a market for the new tableware. Kingery concludes that "the impetus leading to istoriato maiolica was a change perception of the value and role of technical expertise in the urban society of Renaissance Italy." ⁹  To consider the event another way, a new non-material need arose -- the need for plate ware -- and because sufficient capital was present, technology was developed and used to satisfy that need.

The idea of "non-material" pressure generating new technology requires some further exploration. For instance, the need for a tomb does not determine the technology that supports the Pyramids, nor does the need for a place of worship determine the technology that supports Notre Dame. What I would suggest in a general way is that well-capitalized visions are a powerful force driving the development of new technology, and consequently, developed business tools may indicate as much about non-material needs as they do about material needs.

It may be useful to sum up the import of the readings so far. Rostow and Fischer offered a view of social change through agriculture, population and price and the avenues their pressures open to technology. Because, as Rostow and Fischer aver,  the data on country trade and technological development are difficult to gather before the 18^th century, a clearly defined method of describing and investigating business tools may be a fruitful way to examine the structure of business culture in pre-industrial cultures. Braudel and Landes supported the idea that capitalization is crucial to the development of technology, and indicated further investigations of the tools for travel. Powerful social groups must invest in a new technology for it to become common practice. Kingery offered and example of capitalization and social climbing through maiolica ware as another route to the development of technology, and suggested that, as imprecise and difficult as it may be, it will be important to understand the "visions" and commonly agreed-upon non-material needs of a particular group at a particular time.

For Landes, Rostow, Fischer, and Braudel,  the Europeans became the particular group, at a particular time, who were supported by the technology, capital and "non-material" need to organize the rest of the world around their own standard practices.  In Machines as the Measure of Man Michael Adas also asks the question "why Europe?" but sets it in the context of the non-Western world.  When did Western Europeans start to see themselves as technologically advanced, and how did that vision change their relationship to other cultures? Adas's questions lead to the next step in my own investigation:  how and when did advanced technological tools for value transfer-- business tools -- come to be seen as significant?

Adas chronicles the history of the interaction between Europe and Africa and Europe and Asia using the accounts of European explorers and diplomats, businessmen, generals and civil servants, and he contends that the European evaluation of foreign cultures shifted from early religious and social comparisons to later technological judgements. In the nineteenth century Europeans became aware that other cultures lacked the essential business tools of civilization.

Before the industrial revolution, explorers, traders and diplomats of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries tended to focus on the differences in religious beliefs and the social, especially family, structures. The rituals of Hinduism, the strictures of  Confucianism, the wealth and cleanliness of cities, the power of kings, the wearing of costly clothes: Westerners focused on these things. The Chinese Ming and Qing Empires and the Mughal Empire in India were overwhelming and impressive to travelers and priests who had left starving hordes and squabbling princes in Europe. Nevertheless, European accomplishments in abstract time and distance measurements -- mathematics, clock-making, astronomy and shipbuilding -- were noticeably superior. And if the Portuguese sailing down the coast of Africa didn't see any boats able to contend with their own, there were still material goods, cloth and metalwork that could be exchanged.

After the industrial revolution, from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, for Westerners the ability to measure distances accurately using specialized instruments, and the ability to move materials and build structures using machines were the hallmarks of civilization. Non-Western civilizations were then significantly re-evaluated. The Chinese li , for example, was a flexible unit of measure, depending on the type of surface being traversed. Without a standard unit of measure, no European could determine the distance between any two points, and (apparently) neither could the Chinese. More significantly, the Chinese were perceived as being too proud to acknowledge the superiority of European systems, of European clocks, guns, and ships; the Chinese were hopelessly mired in old philosophies and hierarchies. Indians, too, were the inheritors of a great but long-since declined civilization, the blind followers of an old, error-ridden philosophy of astronomy. The Africans, by contrast, had never had a great civilization, and thus had no sense of time beyond the present, no planning beyond the gratification of present sensual needs. As the empires of the East collapsed, and were pressured to respond to the market- and resource-hungry West, the African, Indian and Chinese civilizations were labeled and dismissed: primitive, superstitious, sunk in useless tradition, desperately in need of the civilizing, guiding hand of the West.

Self-discipline in punctuality, separating leisure and work, and learning new skills for new tasks, were a source of pride, especially to those self-made men of the industrial age for whom the mastery of these things was seen as essential. Lack of punctuality, lack of curiosity, indifference to the importance of "hard work" became a source of offense: people in Africa, Asia and India apparently didn't value these personal qualities and were thus seen as children who couldn't tell time, or master complicated skills, or be self-disciplined at work. How were these people to be improved? Ruskin, an anti-industrialist, during his travels around Shanghai, relates a revealing and amusing encounter:

Pacey offered an interesting counter to Adas's view of Western technology and technology tools. Pacey followed the rise of technologies such as navigation, paper- and cloth- making, timekeeping, weapon-making, mining, power-production and precision machining.  He was at pains to correct the view that the West had everything to offer and nothing to gain from the rest of the world. A key concept for Pacey was the "technical dialogue," and the central contention of his work was that technology was frequently transfered East to West, although rarely if ever simply transferred without change. Rather, the knowledge of what could be done and was being done in another place spurred local artisans to create new methods and new technologies according to local needs. "The reality is that transfers of technology nearly always involve modifications to suit new conditions, and often stimulate fresh innovations." ¹¹  Technology was borrowed, adapted, and reinvented. A second central contention was that similar economic and environmental pressures, if applied even to widely diverse parts of the world, might inspire the same set of technological solutions.

Chinese luxury goods began the technical dialogue. Silk and paper entered the long East-West exchange; windmills from Iran influenced Chinese design. Pacey argued that Chinese iron working stimulated the economy within China so that trade in iron weapons was carried via improved waterways. At the same time Arab trading linked agriculture in India, Ethiopia and Spain. Waterwheels, weapons and agriculture flowed east to west. Islam and Africa became the focus of 1150-1490. After 1490 American silver in metal-poor Europe stimulated mining in Europe itself, and helped Europeans to buy Asian goods which could only be exchanged for money, as few European goods were attractive to Eastern markets. America also contributed significantly to world staple crops, and added stability to regions previously plagued by bad harvests. Naturally in the 1550s and beyond, printing and books became a significant method for technological exchange. Pacey focused not on the scientific revolution but on the habit of thinking about processes, and about actions as they could be divided into separate motions and imitated by machines. This was the heart of the technological revolution. Interestingly, such a view can be limiting as well as liberating: the Chinese saw clocks in the 16th century not as symbols of cosmological significance, but simply as attractive but useless mechanical toys. ¹²  From 1700-1815 Pacey related the history of three industrial movements and one influential country: the British development of steam engines, iron and coal, cloth and textiles, and the exchange of ideas between Britain and India in shipbuilding. As Britain grew, it tightened its hold on its colonies and pursued a policy of deindustrialization as a way of consolidating power. Railroads were developed in all areas of the world, and simultaneously identified and collapsed the distinction between the markets of the world. The world, which had been loosely linked since the start of Pacey's narrative, was firmly drawn together at the end of the 20th century.

Pacey told two stories -- the first of the technical dialog that goes on whenever two distinct but open cultures meet and see the skills and work being done in each other's domains (as in exchanges between British and Indian shipyards); the second of what happens when an advanced culture with strong views of its own self-sufficiency shares or does not share its technical superiority. In this vein, Pacey asked some interesting counterfactual questions: what if Zheng He's successors were still sailing the Indian Ocean when the Portuguese arrived? What if the Americans had paid attention to African expertise instead of encouraging techniques that made African farm soil barren and worthless? Pacey was not so much chronicling the "rise" of technology in one particular area as conveying a vision of technology as an endless dialog running from one end of the earth to the other.

Both Adas and Pacey mark the startling non-response of the Chinese to clocks, even though the Chinese had themselves pioneered clock technology. Apparently, there was simply no social need corresponding to a tool that facilitated public and common time. This point -- how to determine whether or not a "social need" pre-existed a technology or business tool -- bears much further consideration in my work. In contrast to Adas, Pacey believed that a two-way technological dialogue was still occurring world-wide. He saw Westerners as imposing their tools and technology on Southern and Eastern societies, to the impoverishment of those societies. Adas and Pacey illustrate that it will also be helpful to define cultural imperialism clearly and consider how it drives the development of technology and new business tools.

Before taking the next step to consider, through Wosk, Kern and Giedion's cultural studies, how technological systems create business tools, it may be interesting to ask via Gordon's article "The Interpretation of Artifacts in the History of Technology," what tools tell us about the systems that generate them. How do historians typically analyze an object like a clock or a ship?  Gordon's artifacts, largely unsupported by written documents, can be convincingly interpreted when evaluated by archaeometry -- chemical analysis of materials used in the artifacts; measurement of form and internal structure; surficial markings and physical properties -- as well as through the context in which they are found, using backward linkage and forward linkage.

For instance, use of archaeometrical methods allowed the historians to identify the function of Eli Whitney's crucibles through chemical analysis of the slag and to reproduce pattern-welded swords of early medieval Europe by examining the internal structure. An analysis of form inspired historian Derek Price to suggest that bronze fragments found in a shipwreck could be a complex gear train used to make calendar determinations. Using an astrolabe Gerald Forty discovered how and why errors in 16th-century navigation might be made. Gordon himself used surficial markings to determine the role of artisans in creating interchangeable gun lock parts.

Context, however, is needed to support, correct and position the data gathered through archaeometry. For instance, what social structure needed to exist order to produce a particular artifact? The question of backward linkages can be difficult to answer if no supporting documents exist. The Springfield Armory, because it has been well documented and has produced many artifacts, has become a standard site for studies in backward linkages. Forward-linkage components are composed of the work or working situations that can be determined from the artifact; for instance, historians who tested a spool lathe found that it was a full challenge to the the operator's abilities. Users and observers are both inherent in the design of an item such as a steam engine in the form of a Greek column (see figure 6, below); the form contributes nothing to the function, but the makers apparently assumed that observers of this new and frighteningly powerful machine needed the reassurance of a familiar classical form.

Gordon does not distinguish between tools and artifacts, possibly because of the logical pitfalls inherent in the idea "a tool has an obvious use"; however, with all logical perils acknowledged, I would like to distinguish the tool from the artifact.  Tools may be distinguished from artifacts in that two messages inhere in all tools. First, it is valuable to do the activity the tool was created for. Few (or none) would take time and trouble to create a tool to do something that had no value. So a tool in widespread use indicates some of the actions that the culture believes it is valuable (or "good" -- the action may not have monetary value) to do. Further, a tool indicates the "best" way to accomplish an action. A tool says "here is what is good to do, and here is how to do it." A scythe indicates that grain is valuable to harvest, and that this kind of swing is the most effective (efficient) way to do so. An artifact, by contrast does not have a message, or a story, inherent. A Faberge egg may tell us quite a bit about the culture that produced it, but it does not indicate an action to be performed or suggest the way to go about it. Tools may be distinguished from artifacts, and tools themselves may be further divided into tools that indicate an action, and tools that indicate a unit of measure. Instruments are a subset of tools that suggest what is valuable to measure and how to measure it.

What have Gordon, Pacey and Adas added to the framework built through Kingery, Landes, Braudel, Rostow and Fischer? The pressure of price, population and agricultural needs provided avenues for later technological innovation, and capital accumulated through far-flung networks of trade and dis-synchronous information permitted merchants in England and Europe to build toward technological ascendancy. Tools supporting travel were perhaps the first significant tools for value exchange. Westerners valued and used the consistent ability to measure distance and time on land and on the sea . They expected and respected  internal and social obedience to these measures. Self-discipline in punctuality, the ability to separate leisure and work, and the facility to learn new skills for new tasks were a source of pride; lack of punctuality, lack of curiosity, indifference to the importance of "hard work" were a source of offense. Western cultural imperialism becomes the use of technology and business tools for the re-organizing of non-Western cultures.  Certainly a technological dialogue may spark the entrance of a new technology, but whether or not a "social need" pre-existed a technology or business tool, may be difficult to determine.  Users and observers are inherent in the design of artifacts and tools, as the column steam engine illustrates.

The oddly compelling image of the steam engine in the Greek column leads us to the three concluding cultural historians in our survey, Wosk, Kern and Giedion, who limn the boundaries and colors of particular times, who gloss the works of art and tools that articulate the space and time of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Wosk, Kern and Giedion created from the art, artifacts, literature and tools of the nineteenth and twentieth century a multi-layered image of Western culture. It would be helpful, then, to examine to the canvas, or stretchers, they use hold the image they create. None specifically answered the question "how and when did advanced technological tools for value transfer-- business tools -- come to be seen as significant?" but as they touched on significant artifacts and tools, they opened up specific tools and perspectives for further consideration.

Wosk's Breaking Frame focused on the broad social anxiety and excitement attendant upon industrialization as these feelings were expressed in the visual arts. In the early 19th century painters began to include the railway in their landscapes, but generally in a distant and non-threatening fashion. Newspaper artists and engravers, by contrast, saw humor and horror in technology, and fore-fronted technophiles as pre-occupied fools, almost non-humans. Americans, Wosk said, tended to be more enthusiastic and less satiric that the French or English in their public response to technology.

Wosk used both paintings and newspapers to explore the dwarfing of humans by machines (reminiscent of Chinese landscapes) so prevalent in mid-century illustrations. She also chronicles the dismay of artists and writers responding to the new decorative arts made possible by electroplating, cast-iron sand-casting, die cutting, and other means of mechanically copying artisans' work. Sheffield plate, ornamented stoves and artifacts ornamented with grape leaves, flowers, animals and classical figures were subjected to scorn by cultural critics. As it became possible for the average person to afford more luxuries, some writers (American Horace Greeley) celebrated the good influence to be had through public exposure to the arts, while others (British John Ruskin) feared the swallowing up of good taste in bad. To the contemporary eye the cast-iron artwork made by the Coalbrookdale Factory offers scope for both responses.
 

Figure 4. Deerhound Hall Table. (Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1992. 151.)	Figure 5. (Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1992. 175.)

Wosk described how classical references in machine design gradually gave way to an emphasis on the marriage of form and function (Greek ideas, not Greek things). For instance, as the nineteenth century opened, steam engines were cast as Greek columns to dignify and make "safe" their dangerous strength. As the century moved on, engineers saw less need for ornamented engines, preferring the spare, simple lines that demonstrated and depended upon the power of good design alone.
 

Figure 6. (Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers UP, 1992. 187.)

Wosk closed with a review of a puckish post-modernist plaza, embodying the classical and modernist styles, and moving beyond them to a new integrative, playful style very different from the eclectic but fundamentally serious style of the Victorian era. Wosk suggests that Americans and English saw themselves as powerful countries, moving forward, using immense machines to do so, fearing and admiring themselves as they went.  Wosks's review of technology and the visual arts focused on the public and mechanical arts, not only because her subject was best approached from this angle, but also presumably because these arts were laden with commonly understood cultural values which could be accessed and understood by later viewers. Following the thought offered by Gordon, we might ask, "to what extent can we enter the minds of the 'users' and 'observers' of art?"  Without the confidence that some approach to the historical users and observers is possible, art history is merely self-discovery.  The classical steam engine above, for instance, might almost serve as a metaphor for imperialism. But who constructs and who reads the metaphor? What Wosk offers to these inquiries is the idea that machines can be public art, expressive of fears and aspirations.  Business tools, likewise, might considered in this light.

Wosk uses the words "integrative, puckish, playful," to capture the post-modern era.  Can an age be summed up in a word? Kern proposed that the essence of the twentieth century is simultaneity. He crossed that time period and that hypothesis in a variety of ways. He grouped fin de siecle scientists, artists and writers around the questions of time, space, distance and war.

Kern described the newly fragmented and layered nature of time (past, present and future), citing Proust and Joyce as major artists who emphasize or even create the notion of a personal experience of time. While this personalization was being created, however, the standardization of time zones was also taking effect, and soldiers and workers were being drilled in a public time which governed their actions. Time became at once highly individual and publicly regimented. European countries embarked on the effort to preserve their historic past; nevertheless, culture became, by the turn of the century, wired and connected, present- and future- oriented more than past-oriented. The public and lightning-swift reaction to the sinking of the Titanic was a moment possible only in the twentieth century.

The bicycle, the railroad and the cinema all contributed to the freeing, frightening sensation of speed. Large ocean liners pursued record goals for ocean crossings and trains ran faster each year. Small fragments of time began to be significant -- minutes and seconds were possible to be "used" as people passed on bicycles. Just as strategy consultants were a logical investment for twenty-first century corporate behemoths, so too, time and motion studies were financially logical to the immense factories of the twentieth century; even the grammar of English was stripped down so as to be transmitted speedily over the telegraph wire.

Space (understood as form, distance and direction) was intimate, immediate, classless, uncertain. Einstein's theories unsettled the notion of space as a single-perspective experience, and painters explored multiple views and non-representational forms. For the person who could afford to travel, railroads began to blur the distances and views that travelers had long known at a steady 5 miles per hour. Even more than railroads, telephones bridged formerly unsurpassable distances and fundamentally changed the way business and war could be thought about and conducted. It was, however, airplanes that permanently fractured the old vision of earth by adding a third dimension to all landscapes, especially those spaces which could not ever before have been seen from a height.

Kern finished his challengingly comprehensive overview by weaving his understandings of these categories into the key event of that time period, wire-crossed, gruesomely fast, mud-mired World War I. He argued that the diplomats of the period were unable to react in the time periods made possible by telephone and wire. "Observers during and after the First World War agreed that the telegraph and telephone had shaped the pace and structure of diplomacy...[and] all the leading diplomats at that time failed to fully appreciate their effect on the conduct of diplomacy." ¹³  Generals were chosen rather for their ability to orchestrate at a distance than for their inspiring courage on the front, and that the soldier, carried by precisely timed trains, became a cog in a war machine. He concludes that the telephone represented simultaneity, and was the defining invention of the twentieth century.

Just as Wosk’s Breaking Frame indicated that the arena of machine design and public art may offer useful insights, Kern’s work suggested that the bicycle, telegraph, telephone and railroad must be considered as they affect public understandings of time and space, and so become tools that faciliate value exchange and stretch the limits of what can be imagined about convenience.  Kern's organizational scheme – speed, space, time – required a specific time period in order to be intelligible, and though it will be difficult for me to organize the same structure around a specific tool, his approaches does highlight important artifacts and tools to be considered.

The final work for consideration, Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command; A Contribution to Anonymous History, returns us to Evans’s mechanical mill, which Giedion discussed at length. Even more than Kern and Wosk, Giedion’s work resists imitation; the analysis is as idiosyncratic as it is brilliant. Giedion built, layer upon layer, an anonymous history; showing when ideas about mechanization first appeared, how they spread across nations, and how they create and reflects dominant cultures. Giedion began with movement, or motion. He centered on the work of E. J. Marey and Frank B. Gilbreth who captured in charts and sculptures the essence of motion. "Movement, the ceaselessly changing, proves itself ever more strongly the key to our thought." ¹⁴  Mechanization reaches to the level of the atom, to the level of the cell. Not unlike Kern, Giedion saw immediacy -- the impulse to analyze and divide movement into its "constituent" parts -- as crucial to understanding 20th century work and life.
 
 

Figure 7. Trajectory of Responses in a Frog's Leg.  (Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command; A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York; Oxford University Press, 1948. 19.)

Figure 8. Horizontal Projection of a Flying Seagull.  (Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command; A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York; Oxford University Press, 1948.  23.)

Having explored representations of motion that would be subject to mechanization, Giedion turned to the assembly line and scientific management, the all-encompassing "means" of mechanization in the 20th century, a theme which he explored in some detail in the next subject of the work: what happens when man tries to mechanize the "organic?" Once there were admirable world-changing harvesters; now there are horrible cake-like breads and inhumane unemotional slaughter houses: all these are the fruits of mechanization and the organic. Giedion also surveyed mechanization and the home: what was considered comfort, what were the typical postures of the ages, and how would mechanization be used to create the home? Mechanization, asserted Giedion, was either used to create a cheap way of turning out handicraft work, or used to pursue solutions hitherto unknown. (He favored the latter.)  Most importantly, mechanization only facilitated trends that had already appeared. Medieval kitches, Rococo couches, dark ruling tastes of the French Empire, the hideous reign of the upholsterer and the constituent furniture of the 19th and 20th century passed in swift succession. The work concluded with a survey of the mechanization of hearth and home: under Giedion's eye, washing machines, ranges, egg beaters, vacuum cleaners and irons were considered in turn.  Giedion ended with the question of hygiene as it relates to regeneration: what form shall the bath take? Can plumbing be mass-produced? (In Giedion's time, it could not).

In all of these questions Giedion sought to promote the idea of equilibrium between psychic spaces and real spaces, bringing mechanization to a human scale. Giedion's thinking, one suspects, works by intuitive leaps, just as his arguments proceed by metaphorical flourishes. It is partial, passionate, prejudiced, conceived around spaces and not interior mechanics. In his opening remarks, almost as an aside, Giedion brought into focus a key question for my own work: why didn't the Romans create the automatic mill, as was done in1783 by Oliver Evans using principles and equipment no more sophisticated than the Romans possessed? Romans, said Giedion, linked invention to the miraculous, and not to production. This link and interest persisted even to the duck and flautist of Vaucanson -- amazing automata whose internal workings could easily have been adapted to, and in fact were adapted to, spinning silk in France, well before the textile industry's revolution in England. But the French plans were never carried out. Giedion proposed that Vaucanson was working in a society with an orientation toward the miraculous, and just before the industrial revolution "what ... changed [was] the orientation from the miraculous to the utilitarian." ¹⁵ Is Giedion right? Again, we face the art-history and self-discovery problem. How can we know what a whole culture thought or felt? In this field particularly it is an act of faith to assert knowledge. If he is "right," it will be because our own accumulation of impressions and connections about an age are in consonance with his.

Giedion’s significance for my own work lies first in his assertion that mechanization as it is applied is simply the expression of a culture's pre-orientation. Giedion might argue that all technological development, and business tools, are derived from the interaction between material needs and non-material orientations. Giedion, Wosk and Kern together suggest some areas for further inquiry: machine tools and public art, for example, the steam engine as Greek column; public representations of technology in the popular press; the railroad, telegraph, telephone and bicycle. Giedion's look at home furnishing leads to interesting cultural questions. For instance, is the shower is a business tool? Are certain non-odors the pre-conditions for an exchange of value?

I indicated in my opening, what pattern of technological and tool development these authors suggested to me, and in concluding this survey, I must also consider what further directions these authors might point out. Fischer, Rostow, Braudel and Landes describe new technologies being channeled into society when standard methods for meeting basic material and spiritual needs were put under pressure, although population growth, or agricultural scarcity, or warfare had to be supported by sufficient capitalization in order to foster the development of technology. Braudel in particular offers some of the tools for developing capitalism. If I were to focus on particular tools, it might be that ships, shipbuilding factories, and letters of credit would be good points of beginning. Likewise, if I were to locate these tools in particular times, I would want to look at the prevalent prices, population size, agricultural practices, and capitalization of local business, as well as networks of transport extant in these times. Following Adas, Pacey and Kingery, who consider when and why cultures adopt and use technology, it would be interesting to see what tools were specifically identified as hallmarks of civilization and served as a signal that other items of value could be exchanged. Was it the post office, the clock, the white shirt? Furthermore, is there a pattern to the moment when a class or group of people perceive that investing in technology will be advantageous to themselves? It might be helpful to look at technology transfer from the light of perceived value and the limits of imagination. Gordon’s archaeometry guidelines will help set a framework for inquiry, and his inherent user and observer may be of use in explicating a particular tool’s appearance and design. Wosk’s work, like Rostow’s and Fischer’s, suggest an area for inquiry: in their case it was prices, populations and investments in technology; in hers, it is machines and the public arts. Kern’s analysis, like Giedion’s is partially structured around space. If I were to choose some of the tools that Kern and Giedion analyse, I might look at the railroad, telegraph, telephone and bicycle. Finally, using Giedion's categories, if I identify a particular business tool, it may be helpful to consider a tool not only in terms of the conditions of its locale (population, agriculture, etc), but also whether it mechanizes an organic procedure or a household procedure, and how I might persuasively argue its effect on public conceptions of space and time.
 
 

ENDNOTES:

1. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command; A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York; Oxford University Press, 1948. 84

2. Merritt Roe Smith and Gregory Clancy, eds. Major Problems in the History of American Technology. Major Problems in American History Series, Gen. Ed. Thomas G. Paterson. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 105-106.

3. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus; Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969. 5.

4. Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce; Civilization and Capitalism 15-18th Century. Vol 2., trans. Sian Reynolds, New York: Harper & Row, 1982. 81.

5. Braudel, 338.

6. Braudel, 456.

7. Braudel, 382.

8. David W. Kingery, "Technological Systems and Some Implications with Regard to Continuity and Change, " History from Things: Essays on Material Culture. Ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. 227.

9. Kingery 227.

10. Ruskin qtd. in Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Cornell Studies in Comparative History. Eds. George Frederickson and Theda Skocpol. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. 223.

11. Arnold Pacey, Technology and World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998. 51.

12. Pacey, 96.

13. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1983. 275.

14. Giedion, 28

15. Giedion, 18.