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Good Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses

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Good Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses 08_bijker 600– 618:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 8/18/13 4:17 PM Page 600 DAVINCIMEDALADDRESS Good Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses WIEBEE.BIJKER I am very honored by receiving SHOT’s Leonardo da Vinci Medal. It was also a bewildering experience to listen to Arne Kaijser, immediate past pres- ident of SHOT and chair of the da Vinci Committee, reading the citation: Is this about me?1 I shall try to answer this question by taking up the invi- tation by Bernard Carlson, SHOT’s secretary, to use this da Vinci lecture to provide “a mix of major ideas as well as autobiographical reflections.” So, I will look into the mirror; but as a dyed-in-the-wool social constructivist, I will especially describe what then appears as the context in which I have been working. How has the history of technology during the past three dec- ades shaped me? The bottom line of my story is that I have been extremely fortunate. I have been fortunate to meet Thomas Hughes and I have been fortunate to meet Trevor Pinch. How different they are: Trevor is the Irish-British “rock star of the STS community,” while Tom is the southern gentleman; Trevor always emphasizes that “a good presentation makes one and only one point,” while Tom sees wider around and farther beyond than I could ever imagine.2 But they are similar too: both pushed to include a reference to pink champagne in our joint introduction to the SCOTS volume.3 For me, Trevor and Tom epitomize the sociology and history of technology. But on which stage did these actors meet? The history of technology in the Netherlands was almost nonexistentbefore the 1980s. One outstanding exception was the Scottish-Dutch chemist and historian Robert Jacobus (or James) Forbes (1900–1973), who actually was SHOT’s very first da Vinci medalist in 1962. Then there was Harry Lintsen’s Ph.D. thesis on the his- Wiebe E. Bijker is professor of Technology and Society, Maastricht University, the Neth- erlands. ©2013 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/13/5403-0006/600–618 1. “Awards,” 139–43. 2. Personal communication about Trevor’s status in music and scholarship from one of the Cornell STS (Science, Technology, and Society studies) students. 3. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P.Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construc- tion of Technological Systems. 600 08_bijker 600– 618:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 8/18/13 4:17 PM Page 601 BIJKERK|KGood Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses tory of Dutch engineers (1980) and the research project on the history of the synthetic dye industry in Nijmegen with Wim Hornix and Ernst Hom- burg.4 In 1984, we established, with Harry Lintsen and some others, the Dutch Yearbook for the History of Technology and Business (Jaarboek voor de geschiedenis van bedrijf en techniek)—a yearbook because we did not see enough potential articles for a full journal, and a combination of business history and the history of technologybec ause either field seemed too small DA VINCI to sustain a scholarly publication on its own. MEDAL The history of technology in the Netherlands really took off when Lint- ADDRESS sen, Arie Rip, and Johan Schot established, in 1988, the Foundation for the History of Technology, which produced the six-volume series History of Technology in the Netherlands—the Making of a Modern Society, 1800– 1890, followed by an equally monumental seven volumes on Technology in the Netherlands in the 20th Century.5 The current Tensions of Europe pro- gram was built on these two programs and extended Dutch history of tech- nology into international collaboration.6 Back to my looking into the mirror. I was trained as a physicist and en- gineer: So how did I end up in the history and sociology of technology? Before my big fortune in meeting Trevor and Thomas, I had the small for- tune of being kicked out of school. I was teaching physics in a secondary school in Rotterdam (1974–80) when the decreasing number of students made me redundant. (Also, getting into that teaching job was quite acci- dental: studying in a technical university, I had no intention of becoming a teacher, but this school needed a temporary substitute and I liked it and stayed on.) I then found a part-time job on a history-of-technology project at the University of Twente (while during the other half of the week I par- ented my first daughter, who was born in 1981). The Twente project, fundedby the German Volkswagenstiftung, aimed at developing a theoretical understanding of technological change. It was designed to study sixty to eighty inventions, to code these and then perform a quantitative analysis on the coded data set. I accepted the job on the con- dition that I could turn it into a qualitative, historical analysis of a few case studies. (I was not desperate to get the research job, since I really liked teaching physics and would have been happy to find another position in a secondary school. The principal investigator at Twente, however, was des- perate enough to take me on.) 4. Harry Lintsen, Ingenieurs in Nederland in De Negentiende Eeuw. H. van den Belt, H. G. J. Gremmen, E. Homburg, and W. J. Hornix, De Ontwikkeling van de Kleurstofindus- trie (The development of the dye industry) is a case study of the social factors that deter- mine the development of the sciences, of the technological-scientific factor in industrial development, and on the social role of the scientist. 5. For a compilation in English, see Johan Schot, Harry Lintsen, and Ar ie Rip, eds., Technology and the Making of the Netherlands. 6. See http://www.tensionsofeurope.eu/. 601 08_bijker 600– 618:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 8/18/13 4:17 PM Page 602 TECHNOLOGYANDCULTURE Joining this project constituted what I would later call my “academic detour.”As an engineering student, I had been active in protests against the arms race and nuclear energy, and against what we then perceived as a lack of social responsibility among scientists and engineers. This science and society movement was quite successful within the institutions—for exam- ple, in realizing reforms in university and secondary school science curric- JULY ula. It was less successful outside, in the real world. That spurred my detour 2013 into academia: by first studying the relations among science, technology, VOL. 54 and society, one might perhaps reach a better understanding and then be politically more effective too. Ellen van Oost was hired at the same time, and together we started to do historical case studies of the bicycle, Bakelite, fluorescent lighting, the transistor, the Sulzer weaving machine, and alu- minum. A year later, in 1982, we presented our first paper on the social construction of technology at the founding meeting of EASST (the Euro- pean Association for the Study of Science and Technology) in Burg Lands- berg in Austria. It was at that meeting that Trevor and I met for the first time. In addi- tion to presenting our paper, Ellen and I had come to Austria with another task. Our department at the University of Twente had some extra money to invite a guest researcher and we had been asked to look for candidates. Trevor’s contract at the University of Bath happened to be running out in a few months. Over some glasses of pink champagne, we agreed that Trevor would join Twente for six months, starting from the 1st of January. The rest, I am tempted to say, is history. When Trevor arrived in his Volkswagen Beetle on the Harwich–Hoek van Holland boat in the first week of January, we felt that combining his social construction of science work with my social construction of tech- nology work was worth atry —but we did not have a grand plan. A detailed comparison of Trevor’s study of solar neutrinos and mine of the bicycle, however unlikely, sparked creativity and proved fruitful to build the larger argument that would be published in Social Studies of Science one year later. But we certainly did not yet think of such an ambitious publication at that moment. Although I cannot remember how we identified the occasion, suddenly there was the possibility to test our first explorati ons in Paris, at a workshop organized by Pandore, Techniques, Sciences, Sociétés, a small newsletter in which Bruno Latour and Michel Callon participated. We decided to pres- ent our work there. I would go alone: we had only money for one train ticket and my French was better than Trevor’s. I vividly remember looking forward to it and not really being nervous. After all, if this would blow up in my face, I would quite happily return to secondary school and teaching physics. It was different for Trevor: he knew Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Steve Woolgar, and David Bloor—who would all be there—as key figures in the emerging field of the sociology of scientific knowledge, in which he 602 08_bijker 600– 618:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 8/18/13 4:17 PM Page 603 BIJKERK|KGood Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses had just received his Ph.D. and was keen to make a living. Almost up to the train platform, Trevor was anxious to give me advice and warn me how not to make a fool of myself. Anyway, probably because of his advice, my pres- entation went quite well; I had made my overhead transparencies with a series of successive overlays to present the line of argument dynamically (quite similar to what PowerPoint animations now do), as I was used to do as a schoolteacher.
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