Technicians
2008; Royal Society; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1098/rsnr.2007.0053
ISSN1743-0178
Autores Tópico(s)History and Developments in Astronomy
ResumoYou have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Iliffe Rob 2008TechniciansNotes Rec. R. Soc.623–16http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2007.0053SectionYou have accessGuest editorialTechnicians Rob Iliffe Rob Iliffe [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Rob Iliffe Rob Iliffe [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Published:11 January 2008https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2007.0053Almost 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 modern 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.Bearing its modern 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.2The technicians' roleThe 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.4Finally, 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.5In 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.6Scientific 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 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.7The 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'.8Technicians' 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.9The history of technicians' workAlthough 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.10 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 Mæcenas, 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 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.11Although 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.12Many early modern 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. René 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-François 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.13The 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.14By 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).15Different 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 Châtelet 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.16Nineteenth-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.17 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 V1 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.18In 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 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.19Women 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 re
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