SMITH, Merritt Roe 1940-

PERSONAL:

Born November 14, 1940, in Waverly, NY; son of Wilson N. (an optometrist) and Mary Eleanor (a teacher; maiden name, Fitzgerald) Smith; married Bronwyn M. Mellquist (an editor), August 24, 1974. Education: Georgetown University, A.B., 1963; Pennsylvania State University, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1971.

ADDRESSES:

Home—17 Longfellow Rd., Newton, MA 02462-1505. Office—Department of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Building E51-194B, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Ohio State University, Columbus, assistant professor, 1970-75, associate professor of history, 1975-78; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professor of science, technology, and society, 1978-89, Metcalfe Professor of Engineering and Liberal Arts, 1989-92, director of Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1992—, Leverett and William Cutten Professor, 1993—. University of Pennsylvania, visiting professor, 1976. Member of board of trustees of American Precision Museum, Hagley Museum and Library, Museum of American Textile History, and the Charles Babbage Institute. Member of board of advisors of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum. Consultant to Franklin Institute.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for the History of Technology (member of executive council, Dexter Prize committee, museum committee, vice president, president, 1989-91), Society for Industrial Archeology, Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, Business History Conference, Newcomen Society of North America, History of Science Society, Phi Kappa Phi, Phi Alpha Theta.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Philosophical Society grant, 1974; Harvard-Newcomen fellow at Harvard University, 1974-75; Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, 1977, for Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology; nominated for Pulitzer Prize, 1977, for Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology; Certificate of Commendation, American Association of State and Local History, 1978; Distinguished Teaching Award, Ohio State University, 1978; fellow of Regional Economic History, Research Center at Eleutherian Mills Library, 1978-79; Pfizer Award, History of Science Society, 1978; Honorable Mention, Thomas Newcomen Award in Business History, Newcomen Society of North America and Business History Review, 1980; Guggenheim fellow, 1983-84; NSF Scholar, NSF, 1984; Regents fellow, Smithsonian Institute, 1984-85; Leonardo da Vinci Medal, Society for the History of Technology, 1994; award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1994; LHD (honorary), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1997.

WRITINGS:

Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1977.

(Editor) Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1985.

Responsible Science: The Impact of Technology on Society/Nobel Conference XXI, edited by Kevin B. Byrne, Harper & Row (San Francisco, CA), 1986.

(Editor, with Everett Mendelsohn and Peter Weingart) Science, Technology, and the Military, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 1988.

(Editor, with Leo Marx) Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1994.

(Editor, with Gregory Clancey) Major Problems in the History of American Technology: Documents and Essays, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

(Editor, with Pauline Maier, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles) Inventing America: A History of the United States, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby and P. A. Earl, University Press of Virginia, 1974; War, Business, and American Society, edited by B. Franklin Cooling, Kennikat, 1977; and Technology in America, edited by Carroll Pursell, Voice of America, 1978.

Also contributor to professional journals. Associate editor for Johns Hopkins Press. Member of editorial board of Business History Review; advisory editor of Technology and Culture, 1972—.

SIDELIGHTS:

Merritt Roe Smith once commented, "I am particularly interested in how people respond to change in early industrial societies and in developing countries generally." Smith, a professor of science, technology, and society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is an award-winning author. Smith has edited and contributed to numerous books on the role technology plays in shaping society and has studied and written extensively on the relationship between the military and technology. His first book, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1977.

In Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, Smith, according to J. Baldwin of Whole Earth Review, provides a "detailed look at eight very different examples of technology changing the military and civilian social structure." The compilation of essays from several authors, including Susan J. Douglas, Thomas J. Misa, David Noble, and Peter Buck, explains to readers how American military forces have introduced new technologies to society and have had a tremendous influence on technological change. In the book, Smith describes "military enterprise" as "a broad range of activities through which armed forces have promoted, coordinated, and directed technological change." Business History Review 's Robert D. Cuff explained that the authors discuss such topics as "the military's various roles in design and dissemination of new technologies, the evolution of modern business management, the testing and quality control of industrial materials, and the continuing search for order in modern society." Daniel J. Kevles pointed out in Technology Review that Military Enterprise and Technological Change is "not a moral tract against military enterprise: the authors show that the military has both stimulated technological development and distorted the allocation of resources in the national economy." Kevles concluded, "By suggesting that U.S. military enterprise has been a mixed economic and human blessing, they lead us to question the continuing U.S. propensity for relying on the military as the government's principal agent of technological innovation." Stuart W. Leslie of Science wrote, "this collection of essays convincingly demonstrates that the so-called military-industrial complex is nothing new. Searching for the imprint of military enterprise on American technology across nearly two centuries, this volume raises a range of important, and for the most part neglected, questions about the place and meaning of the military in American life." Leslie concluded, "Smith is certainly correct in claiming that the military shares with most other important American institutions—educational, governmental, and corporate—a set of 'values that underpin industrial civilization as we know it today.' What invites further study is just how these fundamental shared values shape and reshape the various institutions they have created and continued to support."

Smith coedited and contributed to Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, a collection of essays which attempts to determine how much influence technology has on a society's political, social, economic, and cultural forms. G. Pascal Zachary of Technology Review described "technological determinism" as "the view that machines make history, that our tools and technologies determine the nature of our society." Zachary explained that many people fear technological determinism because of the impact it could have on society. Zachary noted that Smith "locates the source of technological determinism in 'the early stages of the Industrial Revolution,' when, ironically, the notion inspired not fear but hope." In its early stages, people viewed technology as a way to improve economic conditions in America and to help them meet the goal of having a better life. Today people fear certain technologies for the impact they could have on society, such as weapons of mass destruction. Smith's coeditor and contributor, Leo Marx, ended his essay with the opinion that technology does not drive history. "Rather, the driving force is seen to be the decisions people make about how to use technology," observed Zachary, who considered one flaw of the book to be the authors' "failure to more fully examine the conflicts spawned by technology."

Smith, with Pauline Maier, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles, compiled Inventing America: A History of the United States, a textbook that offers a survey of American history through the lens of technology, invention, and innovation. This highly anticipated textbook met with much praise upon its release. The book covers America's history from the founding fathers' "invention" of the U.S. government to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Alan Earls of the Christian Science Monitor wrote, "As both a textbook and a highly readable narrative, the volume takes a fresh look at America, not as a nineteenth-century primer might have seen it—a collection of great, invariably white men, nor from a revisionist post-Vietnam/Watergate/Civil Rights Movement vantage point. Instead, the Great Republic is seen through a lens that is both unifying and comprehensive." The book resembles other history textbooks, but Earls noted, "the additional focus on invention and inventiveness as an important element in the nation's history adds interest and vitality to a familiar story.…The result is a textbook brimming with life and interest and, notwithstanding its daunting 1,000-plus pages, reads with ease, making it a worthwhile endeavor for anyone interested in a fresh view of the nation's history." Sylvia Nasar of the New York Times Book Review remarked, "Starting with an elegiac chapter on ancient America, the authors document successive waves of invention and provide examples of how new technologies, spread by businesses large and small, unsettled politics, altered work and lifestyles, triggered booms and busts, and otherwise contributed to change." However, Nasar felt that the authors "lack compelling explanations of why America has produced so much innovation and growth since 1870 and why so many other societies haven't."

Upon its publication, Inventing America received much attention from the general public and from educational institutions, which coveted the book for classroom use. As Amos St. Germain noted in the Journal of Popular Culture, "Inventing America is the first survey of American history to give appropriate treatment to science, engineering, and technology." St. Germain concluded, " Inventing America is something new, different, and altogether overdue. This book will take a place among the very best survey treatments of United States history produced in recent years." Diana Muir of the Boston Globe found that the book "makes the past intelligible in ways that are useful for the future."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Smith, Merritt Roe, editor, Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1985.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October, 1986, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, p. 1039.

American Scientist, November-December, 2002, review of Inventing America: A History of the United States, p. 566.

Boston Globe, October 27, 2002, Diana Muir, "A New History, Inventing America, Focuses on the Spirit of Scientific Inquiry and Exploration in the United States," review of Inventing America.

Business History Review, winter, 1986, Robert D. Cuff, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, pp. 683-685.

Choice, February, 1985, review of Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change, p. 785; January, 1986, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 779; February, 1995, review of Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, p. 952.

Contemporary Sociology, January, 1987, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 136.

Economic Books: Current Selections, June, 1986, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 48.

Journal of American History, June, 1986, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 167.

Journal of Asian Studies, May, 1995, review of Does Technology Drive History?, p. 520.

Journal of Economic History, June, 1979, review of Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology, p. 592; June, 1986, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 556.

Journal of Economic Literature, June, 1995, review of Does Technology Drive History?, p. 957.

Journal of Military History, October, 1995, review of Does Technology Drive History?, p. 728.

Journal of Popular Culture, November, 2003, Amos St. Germain, review of Inventing America, pp. 367-369.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1985, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 712.

Nature, December 22, 1994, review of Does Technology Drive History?, p. 737.

New York Times Book Review, September 15, 2002, Sylvia Nasar, "A Textbook Case: A New Interpretation of America's Story Puts Innovation at the Center," review of Inventing America, p. 17.

Perspective, January, 1986, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 9.

Reviews in American History, June, 1995, review of Does Technology Drive History?, p. 370.

Science, January 17, 1986, Stuart W. Leslie, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, pp. 277-278.

Science Books and Films, January, 1995, review of Does Technology Drive History?, p. 6.

Technology and Culture, October, 1998, review of Does Technology Drive History?, p. 755; July, 1999, review of Major Problems in the History of American Technology, p. 648.

Technology Review, November-December, 1986, Daniel J. Kevles, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, pp. 76-77; May-June, 1995, G. Pascal Zachary, review of Does Technology Drive History?, pp. 74-75.

Whole Earth Review, summer, 1987, J. Baldwin, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change, p. 80.

ONLINE

Bob Frost's Digital Home at the University of Michigan,http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~rfrost/ (January 16, 2003), Christopher W. Meyer, review of Military Enterprise and Technological Change.

Christian Science Monitor,http://www.csmonitor.com/ (January 2, 2003), Alan Earls, "The Mother of Invention: A New History of America Looks Back through the Lens of Technology," review of Inventing America.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology,http://web.mit.edu/ (January 16, 2003), "Merritt Roe Smith"; (May 5, 2004), "Merritt Roe Smith."

Newsweek,http://www.newsweek.com/ (January 15, 2003), Malcolm Jones, "Mother Lode of Invention: A Smart New Textbook Brings American History into Focus through the Lens of Innovation and Technology," review of Inventing America.*