Table Of ContentTHE SHOCK OF THE OLD
‘Offers a view of technology that matters in a world convinced that it
is discovering everything for the fi rst time’ Guardian
‘Alan Bennett’s history boys have a keen rival in audacious
revisionism in David Edgerton’s latest book. Where the young
historians delighted in proclaiming that “Stalin was a sweetie and
Wilfred Owen was a wuss”, Edgerton focuses on unquestioned
assumptions about the history of technology.’ TLS
‘A quiet pleasure and salutary corrective … Edgerton leaves us with
an infi nitely more nuanced, balanced and perceptive account of
technology and social change than conventional accounts would
allow.’ David Goldblatt, Independent
‘The Shock of the Old is a book I can use. I can take it in two hands
and bash it over the heads of every techno-nerd, computer geek and
neophiliac futurologist I meet.’ Simon Jenkins
‘I liked Edgerton’s challenging thesis, and I want to cheer it on in the
face of our throw-away world of non-stop neophilia’ John Cornwell,
Sunday Times
‘Edgerton’s innovation is to focus on the technologies we actually
use rather than Tomorrow’s World-style bright new things that
mostly never catch on or last.’ Peter Forbes, Daily Mail
‘Original and timely … a compelling tour de force’ Nature
‘A pathbreaking work’ American Scientist
‘Newfangled things are sexy, but how signifi cant are they? …
Edgerton provides a corrective by emphasising some of the
overlooked technologies that affect the lives of many’ John Sparks,
Newsweek
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‘Packed with iconoclastic, thought-provoking ideas that challenge
our innovation-centric view of technology.’ Icon
‘Lucid and completely convincing … points are made without a
trace of romanticism, which only adds to the power of his argument.
[The] optimistic political message is merely one of this splendid
book’s strengths.’ Journal of American History
DAVID EDGERTON is the Hans Rausing Professor at Imperial
College London, where he was the founding director of the Centre for
the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. He has challenged
conventional analyses of technology for twenty years, and is a regular
in the press, on television and radio. He is married with three children
and lives in London.
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THE SHOCK OF THE OLD
Technology and global history since 1900
DAVID EDGERTON
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This paperback edition published in 2008
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3a Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London ec1r 0jh
www.profi lebooks.com
Copyright © David Edgerton, 2006, 2008
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Minion by MacGuru Ltd
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Bookmarque, Croydon, Surrey
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part
of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the
publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 86197 306 1
This book is printed on FSC certifi ed paper
Cert no. TT-COC-002227
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CONTENTS
Introduction ix
1 Signifi cance 1
2 Time 28
3 Production 52
4 Maintenance 75
5 Nations 103
6 War 138
7 Killing 160
8 Invention 184
Conclusion 206
Notes 213
Selected Bibliography 240
Acknowledgements 248
List of Illustrations 250
Index 251
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For Andrew
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I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as
the New.
It hobbled up on new crutches which no one had ever seen before
and stank of new smells of decay which no one had ever
smelt before.
Bertolt Brecht (1939), from ‘Parade of the Old New’, in Bertolt Brecht: Poems
1913–1956, John Willett and Ralph Manheim (eds) (London: Methuen,
1987), p. 323
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Introduction
Much of what is written on the history of technology is for boys of all
ages. This book is a history for grown-ups of all genders. We have lived
with technology for a long time, and collectively we know a lot about it.
From economists to ecologists, from antiquarians to historians, people
have had different views about the material world around us and how
it has changed. Yet too often the agenda for discussing the past, present
and future of technology is set by the promoters of new technologies.
When we are told about technology from on high we are made to think
about novelty and the future. For many decades now the term ‘technol-
ogy’ has been closely linked with invention (the creation of a new idea)
and innovation (the fi rst use of a new idea). Talk about technology centres
on research and development, patents and the early stages of use, for
which the term diffusion is used. The timelines of technological history,
and they abound, are based on dates of invention and innovation. The
most signifi cant twentieth-century technologies are often reduced to
the following: fl ight (1903), nuclear power (1945), contraception (1955),
and the internet (1965). We are told that change is taking place at an ever-
accelerating pace, and that the new is increasingly powerful. The world,
the gurus insist, is entering a new historical epoch as a result of technol-
ogy. In the new economy, in new times, in our post-industrial and post-
modern condition, knowledge of the present and past is supposedly ever
less relevant. Inventors, even in these post-modern times, are ‘ahead of
their time’, while societies suffer from the grip of the past, resulting in a
supposed slowness to adapt to new technology.
There are new things under the sun, and the world is indeed changing
radically, but this way of thinking is not among them. Although
the emphasis on the future itself suggests originality, this kind of
ix
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the shock of the old
f uturology has been with us a long time. In the nineteenth century
the idea that inventors were ahead of their time and that science and
technology were advancing faster than the ability of human society to
cope was a commonplace. By the early twentieth century this notion
was made academically respectable with the label ‘the cultural lag’. In
the 1950s and even later, one could claim without embarrassment that
scientists ‘had the future in their bones’. By the end of the twentieth
century, futurism had long been passé. The technological future was as
it had been for a long time. Intellectuals claimed there was a new kind
of future, one prefi gured by ‘post-modern’ architecture. Yet this new
kind of future was to be brought about by an old-style technological
or industrial revolution which would change everything.
In the case of technology reheated futurism has held its appeal long
after it was declared obsolete. The technological future marched on
as before. Consider the case of the fi rst successful fl ight of NASA’s X-
43A space aeroplane on 27 March 2004. Although it lasted all of ten
seconds, it made the news the world over. ‘From Kitty Hawk to the X-
43A has been a century’s steady advance’, wrote one newspaper; from
‘seven miles an hour to Mach Seven is a striking indication of how far
powered fl ight has travelled in a hundred years’.1 Soon we would be
enjoying, yet again, almost instant travel to Australia from London.
Just below the surface was another history, which blew great holes in
this old-fashioned story. Every few weeks between 1959 and 1968 B-52
aircraft took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California, with one of
three X-15s under their wings. Once high up the X-15s fi red their rocket
engines and were actively fl own by twelve ‘research pilots’, clad in silver
pressurised space suits, reaching speeds of Mach 6.7 and touching the
edge of space. These hard-drinking engineer-pilots, mostly combat
veterans (among them Neil Armstrong, the fi rst man to set foot on
the moon), looked down on mere ‘spam in the can’ astronauts, as
Tom Wolfe observed in The Right Stuff . While the astronauts became
famous, the elite X-15 pilots were left to lament, as one did, that in the
early 1990s he was still ‘one of the fastest airplane pilots in the world. I
am too old for that. Someone younger should have that honor.’2 Past
x
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