technicians || guest editorial: technicians

Guest Editorial: TechniciansAuthor(s): Rob IliffeSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 62, No. 1, Technicians (Mar.20, 2008), pp. 3-16Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20462647 .

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NOTES & RECORDS Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2008) 62, 3-16

'OF THE ROYAL doi: 10. 1098/rsnr.2007.0053 SOCIETY Published online I I January 2008

GUEST EDITORIAL

Technicians

Rob Iliffe *, Department of History, School of Humanities, Arts Building A,

University of Sussex, Falmer, Sussex BNI 9QT, UK

Almost two decades ago, Steven Shapin pointed to the lack of attention paid by historians of science to the role, work, and even existence of 'technicians' in the scientific process. Men and women who assisted scientists and astronomers were triply 'invisible', being (i) ignored by those who managed the places where they worked, (ii) absent from contemporary published literature (they could not be authors of, or even mentioned by name in, scientific publications), and (iii) passed over by modem historians. Using the example of Robert Boyle, Shapin noted that the social and moral organization of Boyle's laboratories and publications was related to the social structures that existed in seventeenth-century England. Referred to generically as 'operators', 'workmen', 'servants' or 'laborants', Boyle's assistants were employed on a contractual basis

or were trustworthy servants in his household; depending on their levels of skill and expertise they variously did menial, physically demanding and 'technical' work, ranging from the purchase and preparation of animals for experiments, to the operation and repair of machines and the recording of data. These assistants worked under Boyle's supervision or direction, and their

work was considered merely ancillary to the production of knowledge about the natural world. Assistants, and artisans as a whole, had no credibility or credit as producers of knowledge, despite numerous calls by natural philosophers such as Boyle to respect or learn from their practices. Instead, the value accorded to the 'mental' work of an elite supervisor of collective activity conferred the right on that person to be considered as the 'author' of the results produced by that group. 1 These well-known divisions between activities associated with the hand and the brain are related to deep social distinctions existing in many societies-both in the West and elsewhere.

Shapin's study has proved useful for studying the differences and continuities between the various roles of assistants over the past four centuries. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, assistants to chemists and natural philosophers tended to operate on a continuum between servitude and apprenticeship, and to varying degrees they could be considered part of the household or even the family. Assistants to astronomers also operated like this, but given the fact that their work required precision measurements that were not characteristic of natural philosophy, their work was subject by the end of the eighteenth century to much more rigorous forms of discipline than were other sorts of assistant. By the middle of the nineteenth century, another sort of assistant came into being as a result of the research school system pioneered by Justus Liebig in Giessen. These were Liebig's own students, who combined the roles of research student and technician. Over the past four and a half centuries, some work situations have demanded assistants with a substantial degree of experience, independence and initiative, whereas others have required individuals who can do simple and routine tasks for extended periods. There have also been different roles and expectations for those who possess various sorts of academic qualifications and those who do not.

*r.iliffe @ sussex.ac.uk

3 This journal is (C 2008 The Royal Society



4 R. Iliffe

Bearing its modem meaning only at the end of the nineteenth century, the term 'technician' in the context of scientific work is a useful designation for earlier periods only in the context of organized and collaborative scientific work that occurs in a particular setting. A few highly skilled artisans acted in this capacity, but most did not; Elizabethan mathematical practitioners, for example, were not assistants in the sense discussed in this issue of Notes and Records. That said, the division between a closed group working in an observatory or laboratory and the outside world is not watertight, and astronomers and scientists have invariably required both equipment and skilled assistance from external support personnel. From the late seventeenth century onwards, assistants worked in societies, academies, universities and laboratories, and many worked for private individuals. By the late eighteenth century, taking on the role of a demonstrator or assistant in a major institution could be a significant path to a major scientific career, either in a similar institution or in a university or college. Perhaps the best example of this is Michael Faraday, who began as an assistant to Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution and who-despite never attending university rose to have a spectacular career in the same place.

Although technicians have been largely discounted as contributors to scientific knowledge, some attention has been paid to their role within the workplace. The organization of scientific activity in laboratories, observatories and other scientific locations has been related to historical work patterns that exist in other elements of society. Just as the factory system coexisted with other forms of work organization, and never displaced them entirely, so at any given time there has never been a single model for organizing scientific activity. In certain special instances, scientific work has been explicitly modelled on specific forms of organization or production. Boyle's management of the scientific process according to genteel social norms of the seventeenth century is one such instance, as is the Manhattan Project of the mid twentieth century. This demanded a pattern of work that was on an industrial scale, and itself became the basis of the Military-Industrial complex described by Eisenhower.2

THE TECHNICIANS' ROLE

The understanding of scientific work has been transformed in the past three decades by work published in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). In contrast with previous accounts, in which scientists were held to engage (and proper scientific work was held to consist) purely in the creation and testing of theories, numerous authors have pointed to the pivotal role played in science by the skilled manipulation of apparatus.3 However, despite the attention paid to scientists' practical skills, and to the material culture of the laboratory, technicians remain absent from virtually all sociological and historical accounts of scientific practice. In a sense, they have remained obstinately invisible because sociologists have transferred to scientists various features that have usually been held to characterize the work of technicians.

More generally, SSK has been concerned with epistemic rather than organizational issues; that is, with knowledge rather than work. Because scientists get most, if not all, of the credit for work that counts as scientific knowledge, the contribution of technicians has been automatically discounted. One should not go to an opposite extreme, however, and claim that technicians do the real, or hard work. Instead, as many writers have pointed out, scientific results are produced by a joint process involving several people with different roles and skills. There would be no science without technicians, and, as John Martin puts it in his recollections in this issue, without scientists there would be no technicians.4



Technicians 5

Finally, it should be pointed out that a central part of the tasks undertaken by technicians is directed towards making machines run smoothly, so that the creation of usable data is unproblematic. They must make the working of laboratory apparatus and procedures faultless and invisible so that scientific work can be published and can thus count as knowledge. The more successful they are, the less visible they-and their work-becomes. Because technicians are no longer 'servants' in the way that many laboratory assistants remained until the first half of the twentieth century, their status is anomalously positioned between a craft and science. As it has become more organized in the twentieth century, encompassing different grades and various levels of training, the role of the science technician has come to share features of other technical workers, combining elements of both blue-collar and white collar work; in Britain, as in other parts of Europe, technicians have long been a part of unionized labour.5

In the scientific world, as elsewhere, there are many sorts of technician, with varying degrees of competence, qualifications and experience, so that it is difficult to delineate features that apply to all technicians. It is not clear that it makes sense to define technicians' work as intrinsically 'technical', although much of it involves working with machines, and the knowledge associated with this may be esoteric and hard to acquire. In so far as they prepare experiments, monitor and record data, and care for and repair machines, twenty-first-century technicians do some of the same general tasks as Boyle's servants. In general, they are supposed to make scientific equipment function seamlessly -they are responsible for making the machines 'work' -and they manage the ordering and integrity of information and other

materials in the laboratory. A vast portion of their work is 'troubleshooting' -anticipating, diagnosing, solving and documenting difficulties that arise, particularly with machines and the smooth production of usable data. At the lowest technical grades, technicians do routine tasks such as cleaning and preparing materials and recording data; more experienced technicians are in charge of machines and the production of high-quality data, and in bigger laboratories senior technicians are in charge of equipment and personnel. Experienced technicians are also responsible for passing on both formal and informal practices to newcomers, and in a university setting they often teach classes. At the interface between scientists and nature, many individual technicians are irreplaceable, and their knowledge of central aspects of laboratory life makes technicians essential to the scientific process. This is also true of the many technicians who safeguard the infrastructures of banks, universities, communications systems and the military.6

Scientific technicians, especially those who have been in a laboratory for a long time, have an excellent sense of the function and purpose of the equipment, and in some cases have a better understanding of the science involved than scientists who are in charge of the project. Many scientists and technicians agree that in some circumstances the work done by senior technicians and scientists in any given laboratory cannot easily be differentiated. For the most part, one might say that technicians and scientists have a different understanding of the various phenomena on which they work, with the former possessing a more 'local' and material-based knowledge of the laboratory set-up, and the latter having a more abstract and theoretical grasp of their field. However, this is by no means a clearcut division. Many technicians do the same work as undergraduate or graduate students (or even postdoctoral scientists), and in a laboratory students often function as technicians, despite lacking a contractual relationship with the institution and possessing different career prospects. However, many technicians have an MSc or a PhD, and for decades they have sought to learn about the more formal elements of their subject by attending classes after hours. Reversing



6 R. Iliffe

the sociological approach to scientific work in the last few decades, more work needs to be done to find out what scientific knowledge technicians know rather than what they practically do.7

The moral economy of a scientific laboratory also relies on working assumptions about the

different sorts of work and qualifications that are appropriate to technicians and scientists. In their excellent study of technicians at monoclonal antibody and flow cytometry laboratories in the USA, Stephen Barley and Beth Bechky noted that technicians often had qualifications that were well in excess of what was required for their grade. On the other hand, many scientists claimed that experience was much more significant than formal qualifications. Technicians had a number of working assumptions about what distinguished their own work from that of scientists. According to one interviewee, the latter were 'committed with their whole being and mind', kept up with the field and with new techniques, and acted independently. People who were 'merely' technicians were seen as those for whom work was 'just a job', although many technicians were said to be straightforwardly 'doing science' -conversely, scientists often did things that were 'unscientific'. Technicians claimed that good technicians had 'artistry' and 'a knack for the work', but some, when asked

about status differences between themselves and scientists, complained that people in the laboratory where they worked were 'infatuated with erudition'.8

Technicians' work is fixed to a particular location in a way that scientific work is not. In

contrast with the more universal quality of scientists' work, which is demonstrated by the abstract nature of the theories and symbols they use, by publication in journals, and by their ability to give papers in international conferences, the activities of most technicians (with obvious exceptions such as photocopier technicians) are necessarily constrained by the practical and equipment-specific nature of their work. Technicians have extensive knowledge of how apparatus functions and have numerous (written and unwritten) protocols to ensure that various operations are performed properly. As we have seen, it would also be a serious

mistake to ignore the formal scientific elements of knowledge that technicians bring to bear on their task. Moreover, beyond the practical management of equipment, the work of many technicians is characterized by the remorseless written documentation of laboratory practice in notebooks and logs. This practice tracks both data and procedures, the latter being important as a source for locating the origin of trouble should equipment malfunction in any way.9

THE HISTORY OF TECHNICIANS' WORK

Although they have been absent from the published historical record until recently, highly skilled workers were essential to the great engineering achievements of the classical world. Between about AD 700 and 1400 they were central to the architectural and engineering successes of the Islamic and Chinese empires, and they can be glimpsed as support personnel to the well-known artist-engineers of late medieval and Renaissance Europe.'0 The earliest

'big' science requiring large numbers of assistants, at least in Europe, was to be found in

Tycho Brahe's observatory on the island of Hven between 1576 and 1597. Here, acting as a visionary Mecenas, he brought together high-precision instruments and teams of printers, poets, scholars, technical assistants and instrument-makers to create what John Robert Christianson has called a 'complex, multidimensional research institute'. Tycho managed to reproduce and renew various features of the team that he treated as one big 'family' and coordinated a Europe-wide network of correspondents, many of whom he had trained



Technicians 7

himself. Everything about his project was performed on a massive scale, in keeping with his ambition; at one point, for example, paper shortages led him to build his own papermill so that he could print his Introduction to the Instauration of Astronomy-a task that in turn required the recruitment and supervision of many men to build dams. New personnel were hired when he set up shop in Prague in the summer of 1599 under the patronage of Rudolf II, and by the time he died just over two years later, he had worked with over 100 assistants of various sorts.'

Although he craved a Tychonic degree of status and state support, the First Astronomer Royal of England, John Flamsteed, remained bitter and frustrated for most of the four and a half decades that he held the post (from 1675). Nevertheless he worked closely with assistants such as James Hodgson, Joseph Crosthwait and Abraham Sharp, all of whom lived on site as part of Flamsteed's household. Despite the long hours and tedious nature of the work, they remained supportive colleagues after they left Flamsteed's employ, and even after his death. Although their tasks changed, the formal requirements for astronomical assistants did not alter greatly before the mid nineteenth century. Nevil

Maskelyne, who held the same post from 1765 for a slightly longer period than Flamsteed, began with one assistant who performed observations, reduced the data and did computations under his direction. Most of his assistants were schoolmasters, and many left after a few weeks, although Thomas Taylor remained as an assistant from 1807 to

1835, long after Maskelyne had died. For many, the time spent with Maskelyne was an excellent preparatory education for later employment in the service of the state. As with Flamsteed, the position of assistant was a cross between a servant and a colleague; as Mary Croarken puts it, 'part of the household but most definitely not part of the family'. Some astronomers, such as Caroline Herschel, relished the prospect of long nights, but

according to Thomas Evans, Maskelyne's assistant from 1796 to 1798, the lonely experience of such work was soul-destroying.12

Many early modem natural philosophers who relied on the work of highly skilled assistants and artisans nevertheless believed it would be a good idea if machines could replace their imperfect work. Rene Descartes, for example, started his philosophical career

believing that craftsmen possessed a type of ordered reason that allowed them to direct their practical actions, often in conjunction with some machine, towards some specific purpose. As such, the disciplined artisanal orientation to the world of work could be harnessed by natural philosophers in the pursuit of scientific truth. His attitude to artisans changed in the mid-1620s, not long after he called on the assistance of the brilliant artisan Jean Ferrier on the construction of a hyperbolic lens. As Graham Burnett and Jean-Fran,ois Gauvin have pointed out, Descartes's collaboration with Ferrier showed both the limits of skilled human labour and also the infinite capacity that existed for automating the construction of instruments. Ironically, artisans were figured by Descartes as inadequately 'mechanical' for his purposes, at the same time as he conceived of the human body, and The World as a

whole, as a machine. The idea that machines could be made to make other machines-and that instruments (and scientific methods) could be used to augment the organs of fallen

Man-was accepted by many of Descartes's contemporaries. Robert Hooke had productive relations with the best artisans that late seventeenth-century London could offer, but he believed that knowledge could be perfected only by developing machines that would enhance the perceptual faculties of humans and reduce and remove error. However, it is unclear to what extent he believed that skilled craftsmanship could be wholly replaced by machines.13



8 R. Iliffe

The collaborative work undertaken in the observatory of Tycho and in the laboratory of Boyle shared many of the characteristics of contemporary social relations. Although their working arrangements differed from each other in many respects, both managed their workers according to a hybrid of norms appropriate for servants and apprentices. As work relations have changed over the last three centuries, so the organization of scientific labour-and thus the position of technicians-has to some extent conformed to more general working practices. With the exception of Tycho and a few others, it was the norm for wealthy natural philosophers or astronomers to employ one or two assistants. Depending on the way in which work was organized, both skilled and unskilled workers might be employable in an observatory or laboratory, but in such places there was nothing like the degree of division of labour that appeared in the late eighteenth century. Outside the observatory or laboratory, there was no fixed system for working with complex machinery. Even if deskilling and specialization became characteristic of the factory system in the Industrial Revolution, it did not remove the need for the individual know-how of highly skilled craftsmen, who remained central to the successful implementation of technology in a number of fields. As John Harris pointed out, industrial espionage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was far more a matter of transplanting personal skills, knowledge and tools than it was a question of stealing designs. In other areas, new forms of work organization accompanied developments such as the standardization and interchangeability of parts. Although some workers were deskilled, often deliberately, new machines would always require the highly skilled work of the few.14

By the mid nineteenth century, work in science and particularly in astronomy had been scaled up. Managers of observatories and, some time later, directors of laboratories faced similar problems to those of factories. Should observatories and laboratories have unskilled assistants, or able Oxbridge graduates, or highly skilled artisans? In chemical laboratories in the mid to late nineteenth century, for example, one model, descended from the archetype at Justus Liebig's research school at Giessen (see Catherine Jackson's paper in this issue), made use of lower-status assistants as well as graduate students who functioned as a hybrid of technicians and researchers. Another form of work organization, which was prominent in most small to medium-sized laboratories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offered one role and career path to university-educated students and another to those without qualifications, whose position variously assumed the character of an apprentice or a servant (see the papers by Hannah Gay and Tilli Tansey in this issue).'5

Different sorts of social forces have served to exclude the work of another group of assistants from the historical record. Women have always provided unpaid and invisible support for scientists and astronomers, and concentration on a few well-known individuals such as Madame du Chatelet and Caroline Herschel has hidden the substantial contributions of many others. Margaret Flamsteed, for example, did some of the more routine work performed by John Flamsteed' s other assistants in addition to the household chores that made Flamsteed's life possible. Other women made much more substantial contributions to the work of what has been described as a 'creative couple'. As Barbara Becker has argued, Margaret Huggins was in no way merely an 'able assistant' to her husband William, and her expertise in photography was essential to the spectrographic astrophotography performed in

William's observatory at Tulse Hill. The Hugginses operated as 'complementary collaborative investigative partners' who nevertheless transmitted to posterity a more traditional image of the wife as able assistant.16



Technicians 9

Nineteenth-century astronomy demanded techniques for comparing data produced by a global network of observatories, and the nature and goals of various kinds of scientific work required different organizational solutions. As Simon Schaffer has shown, at the Royal Greenwich Observatory the Astronomer Royal George Airy set out to find a practical solution to the problem that various observers produced serious differences in their results when independently measuring the transit times of stars. The 'eye and ear' method pioneered in the middle of the eighteenth century by the third Astronomer Royal, James Bradley, was overthrown in 1854 by a new set of procedures in which relatively unskilled observers were trained to adopt better observing habits by looking at artificial stars whose passage across finely graduated micrometers was objectively timed by a galvanic barrel-chronograph. By the end of the century, the RGO had over 50 members of staff, of whom about half were 'computers'. Another sort of discipline was instilled in the newly created Cavendish Laboratory in the 1870s and 1880s by James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh.'7 On becoming Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics in 1871, Maxwell set out to establish a more accurate value for the ohm. In a university where there was a premium on the ethical and even religious significance of science and mathematics, this had to be accomplished without turning the laboratory into a 'manufactory' where labour and skill were to the fore. The new Cavendish standards programme could be achieved only by instilling new work practices, making use of the skills of undergraduates, engineers and newly qualified 'Wranglers', and by fostering a much closer engagement with high-quality equipment, and external instrument-making or engineering firms. Maxwell's attempt to make Cambridge values the centre of global electrotechnological standards was carried on after his death in 1879 by his successor Rayleigh, who greatly increased the quality of technical support at the Cavendish by employing highly skilled craftsmen such as George Gordon. In creating pioneering structures of scientific teamwork, the laboratory employed substantial numbers of demonstrators and technicians, often using students or

Wranglers as technicians or technical supervisors. The students would go on to work in technical colleges, firms or the Church of England, for all of which life at the Cavendish was excellent training.

Small, medium and large scientific laboratories all proliferated in the early twentieth century, in industry, in the military, or in the university or more usually, in combinations of these. In such places technicians and engineers proliferated, along with training schools. Countries such as Sweden and France continued to take pride in the production of technically proficient experts, who collectively exercised a substantial degree of political power. The mid twentieth century witnessed the industrial organization of scientific work for military purposes. The German VI and V2 projects, the Manhattan Project and its Soviet counterpart, and the later Soviet and American efforts to build the 'Super', required hundreds of thousands of technicians. At its Oak Ridge and Hanford plants the Manhattan Project used about 125,000 people in construction, engineering and technical support between 1943 and 1945, and their work was organized on an industrial model. After the war, thousands of German scientists and technicians were captured by the Americans and the British and were brought back to work on postwar military projects. In the histories of these episodes, the crucial contribution of technicians and engineers has invariably been passed over in favour of accounts of the importance of scientists and scientific knowledge.18

In the twentieth century, scientific practice often drew heavily from styles of work management in the 'outside' world. In particle physics, for example, small-scale cloud chambers of the first decades of the twentieth century were replaced by bubble chambers and hydrogen



10 R. Iliffe

chambers between 1940 and 1970, as the study of microphysics became industrial both in scale and in organization. As Peter Galison has argued, the use of nuclear emulsions necessary for capturing the tracks of particles in cloud chambers was transformed when the routines, techniques and equipment (and some personnel) used by Cecil Powell at Bristol were transferred to Berkeley after the war. At various points in this period, the development of new procedures and the advent of larger, more powerful and more dangerous machines always threatened to deskill not merely technicians but also experimentalists. For a brief period in the mid 1950s, technicians at Berkeley built on their pioneering development of a hydrogen chamber that could produce various particle tracks, and they were able to produce a number of papers resulting from this work. However, by the 1980s, when much scientific work was concerned with data processing and a scientific paper could be authored by more than 100 people, even experimentalists had little ability to exercise individual authority over an experiment.'9

Women performed a number of significant technical roles in large or industrial-size projects, such as the ENIAC system for automating calculations of ballistic trajectories during World War II, and the Manhattan Project. Working as 'computers' on the ENIAC at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania involved programming the machine or calculating missile trajectories at intervals of 0.1 second or even 0.01 second. This was highly skilled work, which required women who had received training in mathematics or engineering to find solutions to nonlinear equations in a number of different variables. Nevertheless, it was classified as non-professional or clerical work. As Jennifer Light points out, there was an assumption that software was 'women's work', whereas the design and construction of machines were male (engineering) domains; nevertheless, female workers were soon identifying, diagnosing and fixing material problems with

machines. They were not deskilled by the ENIAC but were made redundant by other machines designed to automate the production of firing tables, at which point the term 'computer' began to refer to a machine. Thereafter, the contribution made by these women

was erased. Women also had a key role in the interpretation of nuclear emulsions produced in high-energy physics from the 1930s to the 1950s. The job of female 'counters' or 'scanning girls' changed during this period alongside the development of new machines that were much larger than before, and alongside the production of new techniques for recording particle interactions. Women stopped being named in papers as 'discoverers' of new particles shortly before they were removed entirely from the process by new forms of automation.20

In particle physics, where the cultures of technicians, engineers and experimentalists had to mesh to perform good science, instruments were increasingly 'blackboxed' in the form of subassemblies brought in to the workplace from outside. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in molecular genetics and other forms of 'big science', commercial organizations provide reliable and standardized pieces of equipment that in the previous generation (or decade) would have been produced in house by experimentalists, engineers, technicians, mechanics and postgraduate students. Among other considerations, this provides some sort of guarantee of standardization across the field, but cost considerations and a need to express autonomy and ingenuity mean that there is still a premium on the artful creation of substitute apparatus that 'works just as well'. In all this, technicians who program computers, produce data and ensure that the machines and (increasingly) complex systems operate properly, are more central than ever to the scientific process.21

This collection of papers starts with Larry Stewart's account of the pivotal role of skilled artisan experimentalists in the Industrial Revolution. Like many university graduates before him, William Lewis took the plunge into offering public demonstrations



Technicians 1 I

in natural philosophy in the Metropolis. He became a successful lecturer and chemical

consultant, and proposed to distil the essence of good artisanal practice so that each trade or art could be brought to perfection. His servant and laboratory assistant, Alexander Chisholm, travelled widely with Lewis and worked with him on numerous experiments with dyes and coloured glass. Versed in French and German chemical techniques and discoveries, Chisholm went to work at Josiah Wedgwood's Etruria factory after Lewis died in 1781. He continued to experiment on glass and spent a great deal of time testing out the composition of various clays and glazes, while he also acted as a scientific tutor to

Wedgwood's sons. Stewart's paper shows how concentrated archival research can produce valuable information about the pivotal role of skilled craftsmen in late-eighteenth-century industrial laboratories.

Catherine Jackson shows how students and assistants at Justus Liebig's research school in Giessen constituted a new sort of research community, playing an active and significant role in developing both the ethos and the products of the school. In particular, the group worked assiduously to perfect the design and use of the kaliapparat that became the key instrument for organic analysis in Liebig's system. Much later, his students recalled that the instrument was successful because it was so easy to use, but in so doing they effaced the work that they themselves had performed to make this the case. His students published innovative results using this piece of equipment, and after five years' work with the kaliapparat Liebig pronounced that the use of this instrument and associated procedures was a gateway to a revolution in the chemical analysis of organic compounds. It was the combined authority of the papers and trained researchers emanating from Liebig's laboratory that in time made the apparatus an unproblematic transmitter of scientific evidence.

Hannah Gay's paper sheds a great deal of light on the worlds of scientific assistants in late nineteenth-century London. She shows that the sorts of work performed by assistants varied enormously. Some stayed in subservient positions all their working lives, but, given a modicum of academic training, the position of assistant could be an excellent springboard for later success as a scientist. By the late nineteenth century there was a pressing need for skilled teachers at the various chemical, physical and engineering colleges in the London area, and

many assistants went on to work successfully in these institutions. In the laboratories themselves, the complexity of equipment required for state-of-the-art research meant that

materials were increasingly brought in ready-made from outside, often from people who could make cheaper equipment than what was found in the shops. Nevertheless, in-house skills such as glassblowing, although available in London workshops, became essential for the proper functioning of Victorian laboratories.

Tilli Tansey's paper shows how the more paternalistic system of nineteenth-century scientific work persisted in many locales even up to the mid twentieth century, despite the appearance of much larger institutions such as the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories (WPRL) and the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). Many who were later designated as 'technicians' joined on the lowest

rung as 'boys' and worked their way up through a system that, in the WPRL, combined both 'servant' and 'apprenticeship' models. At the NIMR, management style involving issues such as the extent of credit that technicians could be accorded in papers depended largely on the attitude of the relevant director, although junior technical staff tended to be treated as servants. A pay scale was introduced for technicians from the 1920s, with a pension scheme

following soon afterwards. With moves to unionize the workforce, and the creation of the National Health Service after World War II, more formal training opportunities existed, and



12 R. Iliffe

slightly later, entry qualifications were increased. Despite these efforts to professionalize the

organization, the institute still maintained a marked social distinction between technical

and scientific staff (brown-coated technicians were not expected to be seen in the library!)

until the 1960s. The final interviews with William Kay, T. J. Shurman and Clive Hood, and the

recollections of John Martin, give fascinating first-hand evidence of the changing patterns of the life and work of technicians in the laboratory in the twentieth century. The sort of

evidence embedded in these interviews and recollections is, however, extremely rare, and

there is little detailed record of what technicians did before 1900. With the advent of the Internet as the primary means of communication for both scientists and technicians, future

historians may have fewer and fewer resources at their disposal to understand the real work that made modern science possible. The Wellcome Witness Seminars, run by Tilli

Tansey for over a decade, have brought various medical practitioners together to recall

and discuss many different features of twentieth-century medical research that would

otherwise be lost to historians. A similar sort of forum for bringing together scientists

and technicians to discuss aspects of twentieth-century science that are not in the

historical record would be a tribute to those whose names and work are otherwise fated to 22

be lost to history.

Notes

1 S. Shapin, 'The invisible technician', Am. Scientist 7, 554-563 (1989); Shapin, A social history of truth. Civility and science in seventeenth-century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994),

pp. 355-407, esp. pp. 359-365, and cf. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, 'Invisible work', Social Prob.

34, 403-415 (1987). For salient comments on the general tendency of low-status workers to

become more invisible, in opposition to Robert K. Merton's celebrated 'Matthew Effect', see

Margaret Rossiter, 'The Matilda Effect in science', Social Stud. Sei. 23, 325-341 (1993)

and Michael Strevens, 'The role of the Matthew Effect in science', Stud. Hist. Phil. Sei. A 37,

159-170(2006). 2 See Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American science: the Military-Industrial-Academic

Complex at MIT and Stanford (Columbia University Press, 1994), Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly

(eds), Big Science: The growth of large scale research (Stanford University Press, 1992) and

Patrick McGrath, Scientists, business and the State, 1890-1960 (University of North Carolina

Press, Chapel Hill, 2001). For alternatives to the factory system and mass production see Charles

Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds), Worlds of possibilities: flexibility and mass production in

Western industrialization (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1997).

3 The highly skilled, local and embodied nature of scientific work is examined inter alia in

Jerome Ravetz, Scientific knowledge and its social problems (Oxford University Press, 1973);

Derek J. de Sol?a Price, 'Of sealing wax and string', Nat. Hist. 84, 49-56 (1984); Michael

Lynch, Art and artifact in laboratory science: a study of shop work and shop talk in a research

laboratory (RKP, London, 1985); Harry Collins, Changing order: replication and induction in

scientific practice, 2nd edn (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Bruno Latour and Steve

Woolgar, Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts, revised edn (Princeton University

Press, 1986); Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and power: towards a political philosophy of science

(Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1987), esp. pp. 58-126; Frank Nutch, 'Gadgets, gizmos and instruments: science for the tinkering', Sei. Technol. Hum. Values 21, 214-228 (1996);

Lucy Suchman, Plans and situated actions (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Davis



Technicians 13

Baird, Thing knowledge: a philosophy of scientific instruments (University of California Press,

Berkeley, 2004). Many of these works refer back to the short but canonical analysis of skill and

connoisseurship in Michael Polanyi, Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy

(University of Chicago Press, 1958 and 1974), ch. 4; see also Hubert L. Dreyfus, What

computers still can't do? The limits of artificial intelligence, revised edn (Harper & Row,

London, 1979). 4 See Stephen Wood, 'The transformation of work?' in The transformation of work? (ed. Stephen

Wood), pp. 1-43 (Unwin Hyman, London, 1989), and Peter Meiksins and Peter Whalley,

Putting work in its place: a quiet revolution (Stanford University Press, 2002). For a riveting account of collaborations between different groups at CERN in the 1970s and 1980s see John

Krige, 'Part B: Some socio-historical aspects of multi-institutional collaborations in high-energy

physics at CERN between 1975 and 1985', in AIP study of multi-institutional collaborations,

Phase 1 (High energy physics), Report no. 4 (Historical findings on collaborations in high energy physics) (CERN, Geneva, 1991) (www.aip.org/history/pubs/collabs/phaselrep4.htm).

5 This conception of 'work' is clearly not intended to imply that 'technical' work is inferior to

'scientific' work, or that technicians merely work while scientists do research. The best

introduction to the work of technicians is Stephen Barley and Julian Orr (eds), Between craft and

science: technical work in U.S. settings (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1997); see in

particular Peter Whalley and Stephen Barley, 'Technical work in the division of labor: stalking the

wily anomaly', at pp. 23-52, and Stephen Barley, 'Technicians in the workplace: ethnographic evidence for bringing work into organization studies', Admin. Sei. Q. 41, 401-441 (1996).

6 The organizational power of a small number of technicians?their capacity to bring a modern

system to a halt simply by not doing their job (rather than actively wrecking it)?has been

understood for over a century. See in particular Roy MacLeod and Kay MacLeod, 'The

contradictions of professionalism: scientists, trade unionism and the First World War', Social

Stud. Sei. 9,1-32 (1979). Although this article is mainly about efforts by a number of scientists to

achieve recognition by unionizing after World War I, the MacLeods cite (at p. 6) the claim made

by the Society of Technical Engineers that 'a score of technicians could ... bring industry to a

standstill more effectively than 1000 manual workers. Staff workers have only just begun to

realise the power they wield'.

7 See in particular Stephen Barley and Beth Bechky, 'In the backrooms of science: the work of

technicians in science laboratories', Work Occup. 21, 85-126 (1994), esp. pp. 88-95, and Gerald

M. Swatez, 'The social organization of a university laboratory', Minerva 8, 36-58 (1970). For

medical technicians see Mario Scarselletta, 'The infamous 'Lab Error': education, skill, and

quality in medical technicians' work', in Barley and Orr, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 187-209; for

photocopier technicians see Julian Orr, Talking about machines: an ethnography of a modern job

(Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1996). Arguably the most relevant work for understanding the sort of scientific knowledge possessed by senior technicians is Walter Vincenti, What

engineers know and how they know it: analytical studies from aeronautical history ( Johns

Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1993).

8 Barley and Bechky, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 96-99, 116 and 120.

9 For technicians' own remarks on the geographically rooted nature of their role (and that of

scientists they termed 'supertechs') see Latour and Woolgar, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 217-219. This

work, which examined the work of scientists working at the Jonas Salk Institute in the 1970s, is

one of the few books in the SSK tradition (as opposed to the sociology of work and occupations) that treats?albeit briefly?the work and attitudes of technicians. For extensive documentation

and labelling activities in the laboratory, see Latour and Woolgar, op. cit. (note 3), p. 48, and

Barley and Bechky, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 106-107. For the embodied nature of technical work,

involving skills acquired through on-the-job experience, see Michael Zenzen and Sal Restivo,

'The mysterious morphology of immiscible liquids: a study of scientific practice', Social Stud.

Sei. 21, 447-473 (1982); Douglas Harper, Working knowledge: skill and community in a small



14 R. Iliffe

shop (University of Chicago Press, 1987); Stephen Barley, 'The social construction of a machine:

ritual, superstition, magical thinking, and other pragmatic responses to running a CT scanner', in

Biomedicine Examined (ed. M. Lock and D. Gordon), pp. 497-539 (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1988)

and Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating, 'Going monoclonal: art, science and magic in the day

to-day use of hybridoma technology', Social Prob. 35, 244-260 (1988).

10 See Bertrand Gille, Les m?caniciens grecs: la naissance de la technologie (?ditions du Seuil,

Paris, 1980); Anthony F.C. Wallace, The social context of innovation, bureaucrats, families and

heroes in the early Industrial Revolution, as foreseen in Bacon s New Atlantis (Princeton

University Press, 1982), ch. 1; Mario Biagioli, 'The social status of Italian mathematicians,

1450-1600', Hist. Sei. 27,41-95 (1989); Pamela Long, Openness, secrecy, authorship: technical

arts and the culture of knowledge from antiquity to the Renaissance ( Johns Hopkins University

Press, Baltimore, MD, 2001); Yves Gingras, Peter Keating and Camille Limoges, Du scribe au

savant: les porteurs du savoir del'antiquit? ? la R?volution Industrielle (Presses Universitaires

de France, Paris, 2000); Pascal Brioist, 'L'artilleur entre th?orie et pratique', in La transmission

des savoirs au Moyen Age et ? la Renaissance, vol. 2, pp. 165-183 (Presses Universitaires de

Franche - Comt?, Paris, 2005); Mathieu Arnoux and Pierre Monnet (eds), Le technicien dans la

cit? en Europe occidentale, 1250-1650 (CEFR, Rome, 2004); and Eric Ash, Power, knowledge

and expertise in Elizabethan England (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2004).

11 See the excellent monograph by John Robert Christianson, On Tycho's island: Tycho Brake,

science and culture in the sixteenth century (Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 3-5,

131-132, 143 and 151-170; Victor E. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg, a biography of Tycho Brake (Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. ch. 6; and for the astronomical Republic of

Letters see Adam Mosley, Bearing the heavens: Tycho Brake and the astronomical community in

the late sixteenth century (Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 2. Compare also the terms

apparently demanded of some assistants by Tycho, with similar conditions laid down by Boyle, in

Christianson (op. cit., p. 152) and Shapin, op. cit. (note 1), p. 404.

12 For Flamsteed see Lesley Murdin, Under Newton's shadow: astronomical practices in the

seventeenth century (IOP, Bristol, 1985) and for Maskelyne see Mary Croarken, 'Astronomical

labourers: Maskelyne's assistants at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, 1765-1811', Notes Rec.

R. Soc. 57, 285-298 (2003), esp. pp. 285 and 294.

13 See Jean-Fran?ois Gauvin, 'Artists, machines and Descartes's Organon', Hist. Sei. 44, 187-216

(2006), esp. pp. 194-204; Graham Burnett, Descartes and the hyperbolic quest: lens-making machines and their significance in the seventeenth century (American Philosophical Society,

Philadelphia, 2005); William Shea, 'Descartes and the French artisan Jean Ferrier', Annali Inst.

Mus. Storia Sei. Firenze 7, 145-160 (1982) and Giulia Belgiosio, 'Descartes e gli artisani', in La

Biograf?a intellettuale di Rene Descartes attraverso le correspondance (ed. Jean-Robert

Armogathe, Giulia Belgiosio and Carlo Vinti), pp. 113-165 (Vivarium, Naples, 1999). For

Hooke see Rob Iliffe, '"Material doubts": Hooke, artisan culture and the exchange of information

in 1670s London', Br. J. Hist. Sei. 28, 285-318 (1995); Stephen Pumfrey, 'Who did the work?

Experimental philosophers and public demonstrators in Augustan England', Br. J. Hist. Sei. 28,

131-156 (1995) and Jim Bennett, 'Instruments and ingenuity', in Robert Hooke: tercentennial

studies (ed. Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter), pp. 65-76 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006). For

instruments as a means of returning Man to his original state, see Peter Harrison, The fall of Man

and the foundations of science (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 14 See John R. Harris, Industrial espionage and technology transfer: Britain and France in the

eighteenth century (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1998), p. 550. For skill, machinery and the contemporary division of labour in scientific and technical forums see esp. My les Jackson, Spectrum of belief

Joseph von Frauenhof er and the craft of precision optics (MIT Press, London, 2000), chs 3-4,

and Ken Alder, Engineering the revolution: arms and enlightenment in France, 1763-1815

(Princeton University Press, 1997). More generally, see Robert S. Woodbury, Studies in the

history of machine tools (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1972); D. Jeremy, 'British textile



Technicians 15

technology transmission to the US: the Philadelphia region experience, 1770 -1820', Bus. Hist. Rev. 47, 24-52 (1973); Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry armory and the new technology (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1977); Charles More, Skill and the English working class, 1870-1914 (Croom Helm, London, 1980); John Rule, 'The property of skill in the period of manufacture', in The historical meanings of work (ed. Patrick Joyce), pp. 99-118 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 116-117; Robert B. Gordon, 'Who turned the mechanical ideal into mechanical reality?' Technol. Cult. 29, 744-778 (1988); Richard Biernacki, 'Culture and know-how in the "Satanic mills": an Anglo-German comparison', Textile Hist. 33, 219-237 (2002); and Maxine Berg, The machinery question and the making of political economy 1815-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 266-286.

15 See Jack Morrell, 'The chemist breeders: the research schools of Liebig and Thomson', Ambix 19, 1-42 (1972); Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: the scientific enterprise in late Victorian society (Princeton University Press, 1992); Graham Gooday, 'Precision measurement and the genesis of physics teaching laboratories in Victorian Britain', Br. J. Hist. Sci. 23, 25-51 (1990); Hannah Gay, "'Invisible resource": William Crookes and his circle of support, 1871-81', Br. J. Hist. Sci. 29, 311-336 (1996) and Gay, "'Pillars of the College": assistants at the Royal College of Chemistry, 1846-71', Ambix 47, 135-169 (2000).

16 See Rob Iliffe and Frances Willmoth, 'Astronomy and the domestic sphere: Margaret Flamsteed and Caroline Herschel as assistant astronomers', in Women, science and medicine, 1500-1700 (eds Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton), pp. 235-265 (Sutton, Stroud, 1997); Barbara J. Becker, 'Dispelling the myth of the able assistant: Margaret and William Huggins at work in the Tulse

Hill laboratory', in Creative couples in science (eds Helena Pycior, Nancy Slack and Pnina Abir Am), pp. 98-111 (New Jersey Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1996). More generally see Margaret Rossiter, Women scientists in America: struggles and strategies to 1940, new edn (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1984) and Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, 'Marital collaboration: an approach to science', in Uneasy careers and intimate lives: woman in science 1789-1979 (eds Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram), pp. 104-128 (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1987).

17 Even when taking into account the contributions of technicians and engineers, and naming them, it remains almost impossible to discuss their work historically without attributing to great names such as Airy, Maxwell and Rayleigh an overwhelming degree of authority and responsibility for everything done in the institutions of which they were in charge. See Simon Schaffer, 'Astronomers mark time: discipline and the personal equation', Science in Context 2, 115- 145 (1988) and Schaffer, 'Late Victorian metrology and its instrumentation: a manufactory of ohms', in Invisible connections: instruments, institutions and science (eds Robert Bud and Susan Cozzens), pp. 23-56 (SPIE Optical Engineering Press, Bellingham, WA, 1992). More broadly, see also Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison (Penguin, London, 1991) and Bruno Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987).

18 The overwhelming significance of technical know-how for facilitating weapons systems is starkly laid out in Donald Mackenzie and Graham Spinardi, 'Tacit knowledge, weapons design, and the uninvention of nuclear weapons', Am. J. Sociol. 101, 44-99 (1995). More generally, see R. Torstendahl, Dispersion of engineers in a transitional society: Swedish technicians, 1860-1940 (Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1975); Nicholas Lampert, The technical intelligentsia and the Soviet State: a study of Soviet managers and technicians, 1928-1935 (Macmillan, London, 1979); James Edmonson, From mecanician to ingenieur: technical education and the machine building industry in nineteenth century France (Garland, New York, 1987); S.L. Sanger, Working on the Bomb: an oral history of World War II (ed. Craig Wollner) (Continuing Education Press, Portland, OR, 1989); Peter Brown Hales, Atomic spaces: living on the Manhattan Project (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 1997); John Gimbel, Science, technology and reparations. Exploitation and plunder in postwar Germany (Stanford University



16 R. Iliffe

Press, 1990); Linda Hunt, Secret agenda. The United States government, Nazi scientists, and

Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (St Martin's Press, New York, 1991); Matthias Judt and

Burghard Ciesla (eds), Technology transfer out of Germany after 1945 (Routledge, London,

1996); and John Farquharson, 'Governed or exploited? The British acquisition of German

technology, 1945-48', /. Contemp. Hist. 32, 23-42 (1997). 19 Peter Galison, Image and logic: a material culture ofmicrophysics (University of Chicago Press,

1997), pp. 36-37, 198-199, 344-345, 370-410, 557-558 and 779-780; and Galison, 'Three

laboratories', Social Res. 64, 1127-1155 (1997). On big systems of technoscience see Tom

Hughes, Networks of power (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1983). 20 Jennifer Light, 'When computers were women', Technol. Cult. 40, 455-483 (1999), esp. pp.

464-471; W. Berkley Fritz, 'The women of ENIAC, IEEE Ann. Hist. Comput. 18, 13-28

(1996); and, more generally, Ingrid Scholl and Ina Kuller, Micro sisters. Digitalisierung des

Alltags: Frauen und Computer (Elefanten Press, Berlin, 1988). For the scanning girls see

Galison, Image and logic, op. cit. (note 19), pp. 33, 53, 198-200 and 370-384. For women in the

Manhattan Project see Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, Their day in the sun: women of the Manhattan Project (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1999), and for broader aspects of

the skilling and deskilling of women's work in the twentieth century see Ruth Schwartz Cowan,

More work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the

microwave (Basic Books, New York, 1983); Lisa Fine, The souls of the skyscraper: female clerical workers in Chicago, 1870-1930 (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990) and

Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: male dominance and technological change (Pluto Press, London,

1991). 21 On the automation and commercialization of key aspects of laboratory practice at the end of the

twentieth century see Joan Fujimura, Crafting science, transferring biology: the case ofoncogene research (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997); Peter Keating, Camille Limoges and Alberto Cambrosio, 'The automated laboratory: the generation and replication of work in

molecular genetics', in The practice of human genetics (eds Everett Mendelsohn and Michael

Fortun, pp. 125-142 (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1999); and Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch, 'The

dissemination, standardization and routinization of a molecular biological technique', Social

Stud. Sei. 28, 773-800 (1998). 22 On the other hand, there are now a number of websites where retired technicians have given an

account of their careers, and it W\Ould be extremely worthwhile, where possible, to coordinate

these reminiscences and encourage others to leave similar records.



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