Unit 9: Technology in America

Late Twentieth Century

Digital Art

In the last half of the twentieth century, several new technologies intruded onto the American scene. First, television, whose commercial development was delayed by World War II, rapidly gained a place in American homes, spreading far faster than radios did in the 1920's. The pioneers of television, much like Edison and his motion picture machine, believed that the primary use of this new device would be educational. Instead of sitting in the back of a large hall trying to see the demonstrations performed by an instructor, students could clearly see everything close up. The Age of Visual Information had arrived! But experience showed that the average person was bored with educational programs, and that sports activities, quiz shows, and theatrical shows were more to his liking. Furthermore, already busy Americans seemed to be able to find time to watch television for hours at a time. At the end of the century, it was apparent that American schoolchildren were spending less time studying, and less time playing sports, and more time sitting passively in front of a TV set. Adults too were turning into "couch potatoes" much to the alarm of health officials.

As World War II approached, the U.S. military began to sponsor research into militarily useful inventions. Large organizations of engineers and scientists were assembled, pushing aside the lonely, eccentric inventor. And there were significant technical developments useful for military purposes. Yet in peacetime many of these military developments found a use in the wider society: radar for traffic control, microwave cooking (using the radar microwave generator for heating), nuclear energy, peaceful uses of computers, etc.

IBM's Office in 1924

Electronic computers were developed to assist artillery to predict the path of fired shells, and also to break enemy cryptographic messages. These machines were enormous in size, using miles of wires and thousands of vacuum tubes. They consumed great quantities of electricity. Peacetime applications seemed limited. Indeed, Thomas B. Watson, President of IBM, stated that there would be need for only a dozen computers in postwar America. In 1947 the transistor, a solid-state semiconductor, whose properties mimicked a simple vacuum tube, was discovered. This device promised to reduce the tremendous amount of electricity needed to run a computer. Next, many transistors could be incorporated together with no wiring in a complex 'chip ' of material. This led to a reduction in the size of circuits and also minimized the need for wiring components together. The large Research and Development (R & D) organizations still envisioned only those large computers used by the military during the war.

A Portable PC

It was up to two young visionary tinkerers, in the American tradition of amateur inventors, to devise a smaller, personal computer (PC). Young Steve Jobs, working in his garage with his friend Steve Wozniak, was finally able to package a small desktop computer that could process' symbols. Few people realized at the time that the most widespread use of the PC would be for word processing (and communications).

Bill Gates

There is another lesson about technology embodied in the development of personal computers. Steve Jobs founded the Apple Computer company and began to sell PCs to individuals. IBM, the foremost office machine company then, was not at all interested in making or selling such machines. But when they saw the commercial success of Apple computers, IBM decided to make and sell their own brand of computers. The heart of any computer is a set of coded instructions that instructs the components in how to react to different sorts of inputs (depressed keys, magnetized tapes or disks, etc.). Of course, Apple computers had copyrighted their system, so IBM needed a different system of coded instructions. Another young man, Bill Gates, had devised just such a set of instructions, a Disc Operating System, or DOS. Gates sold the rights to this system to IBM, becoming an overnight millionaire (and now a billionaire). The company founded by Gates, Microsoft, has gone on to develop other operating systems such as Windows 95. In the meantime, IBM with its immense credibility with office machine users is beginning to crowd Apple out of its share of the market. Ironically, most experts consider Apple's operating system to be technically superior to any of those devised by Gates and used by IBM. It is not always the case that better mousetraps attract customers! And, it is not always the case that corporation leaders can foresee the technologies that will develop around a new invention.

A Rocket

Rocketry is another example of the results of military research and development being used for peacetime activities. It is also an example of how the solitary, individual tinkerer has been replaced by organized research teams. Inspired as a young boy by fanciful tales of space travel, Robert Hutchings Goddard pursued an academic career in physics and turned his research interests to the construction of rockets. Supported for a number of years by individual grants, but only annual renewable ones, Goddard was able successfully to launch rockets into the stratosphere, ostensibly for weather research, yet always with the eventual goal of space exploration. Goddard's rockets were now using liquid propellants rather than combustible dry chemicals. He tried to interest the U.S. military in rocket propelled naval torpedoes or infantry missiles, but in the period between the two world wars, the U.S. military had little funds for speculative research; it was difficult enough to purchase traditional weapons. As America became more and more drawn into World War II, the military turned to Goddard for help in developing rockets to assist (propeller driven) aircraft to take off on shorter runways.

In Germany the story is very different. Because rockets were not specifically forbidden by the Versailles Treaty following World War I, Hitler was willing and able to support financially the R&D groups in rocketry, whose work initially replicated Goddard's and eventually surpassed him. While Warner von Braun's team worked to develop inter-continental missiles, the Allies developed solid propellant small weapons suitable for battleground warfare, the motorized batteries of rockets used so effectively by the Russians, and the single man, antitank missile of the Americans called the 'bazooka '.

A single person, even as brilliant and dedicated as Goddard, even had he had long term funding, would have found it next to impossible to construct the immense testing facilities, to organize and supervise the vast support staff, to maintain the complex monitoring and communications systems, that are all needed for developing the gigantic missiles and space exploration vehicles we have all watched with fascination. Modern technology requires a division of labor and an organization. The Goddards of the world are being replaced by team leaders such as von Braun.

Curiously enough, the most important contributions of rocketry to our present lives is from communication satellites, a use not foreseen by the early developers of this technology.

Finally there is the potentially most significant technology of the latter part of the twentieth century: nuclear energy. Here again, a laboratory discovery by two academic scientists working on a table top, with crude and simple apparatus became a subject for concerted effort by massive teams of scientists funded by unprecedented amounts of money for military purposes. Not even an Edison with his small band of technicians and skilled workmen could have achieved a nuclear fission bomb with any amount of money. It required the gigantic organization jointly administered by civilian scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and army officer General Leslie Groves to accomplish this feat. The development of modern technologies is no longer the province of solitary, possibly eccentric inventors, but is now a territory inhabited by large-scale R & D organizations, funded less and less by corporations venturing into the unknown, but more and more by governments expanding on the uses of already known devices and phenomena.

Atomic Bomb Explosion

The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant

What motivated most scientists and engineers in America to develop an atomic bomb in the first place was to prevent Nazi Germany from using such a device --to prevent the use of such a weapon. Once it was developed, however, pressure developed from other sources, military and political, to actually use the bomb on people. Then, after the war was over, this vast organization for producing fissionable material had to find peaceful uses for nuclear materials. So it was that applications in nuclear medicine were searched for, and national commissions began urging the deployment of nuclear reactors to generate electricity. The electric power generating companies at that time were decidedly cool towards the idea, for they thought the costs, especially the risk of devastating accidents for which they would be held financially liable, would not make nuclear generated electricity profitable. Legislation was enacted limiting the liability of commercial companies, and in many other ways, companies were assisted in developing nuclear energy plants. America now is busy trying to find technological solutions to such problems as accident-free generating plants, thermal pollution both atmospheric and hydrological, and nuclear waste disposal. The bottom line of the entire balance sheet has not yet been calculated.

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