Power Struggles. Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison

by Michael Brian Schiffer
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
440 pp., illus. 51 b/w. Trade, $38.00
ISBN: 978-0-262-19582-9.

Reviewed by Michael Punt

mpunt@easynet.co.uk

Michael Schiffer’s book is one of a growing collection of histories of technology that promise much to those interested in serious histories of technology but deliver little. Its topic, scientific authority and the creation of practical electricity, announced in the subtitle, provides at best a periodisation for a collection of mini biographies of men who were part of the huge international network of contributors to a particular technological form of electricity that many of us across the world might recognise through daily use. At worst it is a rather trivial attempt to claim national priority in the shaping of technology. ‘At worst’, because there is no sense given in the book as to why priority or an overdue revision of the received scholarship in the field might be important in our understanding of how we have arrived at a particular technological understanding of electricity today. The frustration is compounded by the promise of the first chapter that summarises much of the theoretical underpinning of the history of technology as it has developed over the past 25 years. Identifying and synthesising some of the key moves used in the academic study of how technological form becomes consolidated, and why it changes, the book appears to ignore its own wisdom and reverts to the kind of whig history that has been so misleading in the formation of policy, the education of scientists and technologists and in product design. It reads more a series of extended notes delivered in as a sort of series of comfortable fireside chats that seem to reflect a certain insecurity about the role of the United States of America in the history of science. As far as it goes this can be at times diverting although some may find its incipient gendering of action rather distasteful. In this style the book not unexpectedly ends rather inconclusively since its argument is never properly unravelled. To its credit however, it has an extensive bibliography that will be valuable for others interested in the way in which the technologists and engineers in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century shaped scientific knowledge through what is now fashionable to call ‘action research’. The great tragedy here is that much of what is so carefully listed seems not to have impacted on the book itself. For example the research on William Sturgeon by I.R. Morus appears to have informed much of Shiffer’s biographical account, whilst Morus’ pioneering argument built upon Sturgeon’s career in relation to the epistemological significance of display has simply been ignored. Similarly the significance of the Adelaide Hall as part of a network of opportunities for lay observers to evaluate and contribute to the project of scientific and technological enquiry becomes somewhere where the American Joseph Saxton made his mark.

In its rather misplaced jingoism Power Struggles represents a missed opportunity to encourage a wider audience, largely informed by bad history, to rethink the relationship between science and technology – more particularly their own contribution to the shaping of technology. As David Nye has shown electricity is a perfect topic through which to situate the achievements of women and men in the United States of America during the nineteenth century as contributions to a discourse that comprises both science and technology. Having set out the strategy to revise histories of science and technology in its first nine pages the book reverts to type and merely repeats the errors Technology Studies encourages us to rectify. In this context it would be a pity if Power Struggles was ever confused by an unprepared reader with those approaches by historians over the past three decades that have struggled to raise awareness of the impact of collective agency and have tried to develop inclusive accounts of why technology (and science) takes the form it does today.