First of all, thank you for being on the ETZ podcast today.
You've published two books on the topic of Grauzonen der
Technikgeschichte, that's what they're called in German in the
original, and loosely translated into English they are called Grey
Zones on the History of Technology.
Maybe we could start with the question, what motivated you to research
this topic and why does it fascinate you so much?
Well, the history of technology is such a large and fascinating field
that few researchers in Germany are not enough, so to speak, to tackle
all the interesting problems and interesting fields connected with the
history of technology, especially with the history of technology
connected with other fields, with the history of arts, for example,
with the history of our body, with the history of our senses,
sociology, and so on.
So what I try to do in these books is to identify areas which are
under -researched and which to me sound very fascinating.
I talked about, for example, the history of technology in criminal
cases.
First -time users of technology sometimes were criminals, simply, and
this field is under-researched.
Or I am talking about the design of cameras or tanks, for example.
I'm writing about energy sources of the past, which did not work out.
This approach of finding interesting fields of technology and writing
about short essays is, in my opinion, the best way to interest the
larger public for our fascinating field.
Of course, writing books about the history of technology is more
academic in a way, but this does not reach the greater public.
I'm aiming at people who are culturally interested, not only
interested in technology, and people who probably haven't heard yet
about this new field of history of technology, and try to interest
them for things which interest me.
It sounds like a very broad field.
You mentioned there's the energy factor or the transportation factor.
Is there a factor that is your favorite or one that you enjoy
researching most?
In my academic life, I studied a lot of transportation and mobility
history, but I branched out to military history, for example.
And what interested me in the past years is what technology did with
our bodies.
Some technologies are very close to our bodies, not all, of course,
but take your example of driving a car.
You get a sort of symbiotic relation to your car, and you have to do
very complex coordination work in driving a car, for example, or even
more in flying.
Your left foot is normally stronger than your right foot, because you
have to work the clutch.
And it's widening your senses in a way.
150 years ago, nobody would have dreamt that you would be able to keep
speeds of 150 kilometers an hour on the motorway.
And even 100 years ago, this was regarded as the capability of only a
small portion of people which had to be identified.
And this field of what does technology to us, what does it to our
feelings, also our wishes, for example, why do we crave certain
technologies?
This is quite an interesting field.
I did a little research in an essay on balancing, for example.
When the bicycle was introduced, balancing was not a cultural
technology which most people would be able to do.
So they had to be slowly familiarized with riding a bicycle in this
precarious situation between falling down and driving.
And on the other hand, if you would be able to ride a bicycle, it
would be much easier for you, let us say, around 1920 to fly a plane,
because this is balancing as well.
And so the widening of our senses by technology is a subject of mine.
I researched a little bit on 360 degrees looking around, which is also
not that common around 1900, for example.
But fighter pilots in the First World War would have to acquire this
new technology.
And now, if we drive on a motorway, we have three mirrors.
And we have to be aware of what's happening beside us and behind us by
very high speeds.
This is quite a fascinating cultural technology.
And I'm a bit reluctant to describe technology as a sort of loss
history.
A lot of people say, well, our children can't identify birds anymore.
But they have other qualities.
They've acquired quite different skills, which have nothing to do with
the skills which I have, for example.
So new technologies create new skills, and new skills create new
symbiotic combinations.
And we are all cyborgs.
We are in close connections with technology.
And that interests me.
We have artificial eyes by cameras.
We have artificial speed machines and all that.
And I think this should be in the focus of our looking at technology.
You said it, the times are changing.
We're adjusting as well.
So I'd like to also take a look at the name of your book or your
books, Grey Zones on the History of Technology.
Just specifically the grey zones.
Why did you choose this name?
And what exactly do you mean when you say grey zone in a technological
scenario?
What can be understood by this?
The idea of a grey area, so grey zones, refers mostly to research
vision.
We have very clear fields where we know a lot about the history of
cities and infrastructures of cities.
We know a lot about production processes.
We know a lot about assembly lines, for example.
And there are very dark areas which are not researched yet.
And in between there are these areas which sound very interesting, but
research has not developed yet.
And if you ask some questions to technology, we have to look where the
questions are.
We don't have to look where it is light.
We have to look where it is darkish.
We know there are fields which should be researched, but we are not
yet there.
So what I try to do is then write an essay about it.
Find out what's interesting in that.
CB And could you give an example of such a grey zone or such a topic
you chose to then research?
LR Well, I talked about a tank, for example.
I talked about people as well which are under-researched.
About a naval architect, for example, who is a very eccentric
personality.
But he drew about 200 ships and boats for do-it-yourself processes.
So he delivered for us the possibility to build our own boats, for
example.
Typical grey areas are, for example, the history of specific products.
Specific cameras, for example, which look very odd.
And I try to explain why they look odd.
Or I wrote about new energy forms like brown coal.
I looked at towns or places which played a certain role in the history
of technology, but we know not very much about it.
I wrote about an airport, Ganda, which was at one time the most busy
airport in the world.
At that time when it was the jumping-off point for transatlantic
flights in the 1950s and early 1960s.
But now it's a very quiet place with two, three flights a day.
And it's a huge airport with huge runways for starting and for taking
off.
And this place has gone into retirement in a way.
But there are a lot of traces what happened at that time.
So I call these places the ruins of tomorrow or the archaeological
places of tomorrow.
It's quite interesting for us to approach the history of technology
with some methods which you can derive from archaeology, for example.
And now that you've mentioned it, the Gander airport, because the way
it sounds, it was very big.
Was it ahead of its time?
Or why did it fail?
If we take a look into the history, was it a technology ahead of its
time?
Yes, you had to have very large airports for the transatlantic flights
in the 1950s at the extreme points of the continents.
Gander was in Newfoundland, and on the other side of the Atlantic, you
have Shannon airport in Ireland.
So the propeller planes of that time, the big superstar constellations
of the 1950s, very beautiful planes, were able to make just a jump
from Gander airport to Shannon airport.
Then they have to fuel up, for example, and in a lot of cases, one of
the four engines failed, for example, so they had to be repaired and
serviced and so on.
And then they could fly on from Shannon airport to London, to Paris,
and so on.
So the planes of the 1950s were not capable for really long range
flights.
When the big jets came, it was completely easy and simple to fly,
let's say, from New York to London Heathrow.
You don't need these airports anymore.
And they were sliding back into the past.
Yeah.
There's an example that just came to mind now, because you also
mentioned the flight time, New York to London or Paris.
The Concorde is maybe also an example of...
Yeah.
The Concorde is an interesting example for a technology that was
widely advertised.
It was regarded as one of the fascinating machines man ever built.
The double speed of sound for travel that was in the 60s, on the same
level as extreme cheap energy by atomic power, for example, or other
technologies which would promise a beautiful, bright future.
But, well, not the technology changed, but the social requirements of
these technologies changed.
And you don't need any very fast transport, but you need cheap
transport.
And the Concorde was not cheap at all.
It was one of the most expensive planes to use and to maintain.
And so the Concorde was a future high technology, which was also
sliding into a gray zone.
As we know, if we also take a look into the now, we live in a world
that's fast paced, a lot of change, especially technology is changing
very fast.
But as we just talked about, that was already the case in the past
too.
Now, are there projects that... we just talked about Concorde.
Were there other projects that were being worked on that you think
became outdated before they were even realized?
A future technology that maybe was just there at the wrong time?
Well, yes, in the history of technology, you have a lot of examples of
failed technologies, even of big projects, which turned out to cause
problems, for example, which were not implemented.
There are many different ways of failing technologies.
But for us, it's sometimes difficult to find out what's meant by
failed technologies.
Is the Zeppelin, the airship, a failed technology?
It was used.
It was used as a bomber.
It was used as very fast and very comfortable traffic.
And it was ended by a catastrophic situation.
I would not say that the Zeppelin was a failed technology, but we can
learn a lot about it.
Some technologies are ahead of its times, for example.
Some technologies fail for technological reasons.
Some fail for different social ways.
What do I want from a technology?
Some fail because they are loony.
That's possible also.
And some great technological projects fail because nobody really wants
it.
And problems are always lurking when new technologies need new
infrastructures.
It's the problem we have now with the proposed changing of transport
technologies.
When you have to use, for example, to build up new technologies for
charging batteries or for hydrogen tanking, for example, hydrogen
fueling, then there's always the problem that somebody has to invest
in these infrastructures.
It's normally not the owners of cars.
It's not the companies who built cars.
It's not the state.
It's somewhere in between investing in these infrastructures.
On the other hand, there is always the problem if the infrastructures
are not there, there is no incentive to buy the new transport.
So new technologies are bound to be keeping in the same groove.
So there's a lot of inertial drive in technologies.
Simply stick to what you have.
And new technologies have to be very attractive, and it's better if
they don't need new infrastructures, or only infrastructures which are
easy to build.
For example, the smartphones are extremely attractive, of course.
They created a new culture, and the infrastructure of building masts
is not that complicated to implement.
You can put that on the roofs of skyscrapers, for example.
So the combination of low infrastructure requirements and high
attractivity, that's a formula for success.
KS.
So if I understood it correctly, because it almost, to me, almost
sounds like a paradox, to move forward technologically speaking, we
should actually be looking and working with what we already have
instead of inventing new, so to speak.
Yeah.
That's also a research field for the history of technology.
I have a British colleague, David Edgerton, who has a whole research
project on the keeping of old technologies.
And he keeps telling us we are looking much too fascinating to new
technologies and to inventions and innovations, and we don't actually
look at the technologies which are normal to us, which surround us and
which are sometimes very old.
So the book he wrote is called The Shock of the Old.
We have to look at that which is not evidently springing into our
eyes.
And old technologies are around us all the time, but we are not very
prone to notice them and to give them their due attention.
And that's also a field of research for me.
I call it infranormality, which means normality below our viewpoints.
Things which are there and which we don't notice.
For me, it's a sort of private research project.
It's definitely food for thought.
It's a very interesting point.
It also reminds me of the saying, we only appreciate what we have once
it's gone.
We have to look for textures, for example, and ways.
And this infranormality, this normality which we don't think about,
which we don't research, is part of our lives, of course.
How we live, how we sit, what's our position on the table, what's
allowed in social contexts, for example.
And what is the proper way, for example, of code of behaviors of using
technologies.
And this code of behavior, for example, has sometimes to be discussed.
We have no proper code of behavior yet for smartphones.
Where do you use smartphones?
Where is it normal to use smartphones?
Where is it frowned upon?
And probably in a couple of years, they will be slid back into
normality, which is not the case now.
Yeah, time will tell.
And there's also very often downsides to technologies or technological
developments.
I mean, arguably, a smartphone could also be a discussion point for
this.
But a current example is, for instance, the carbon emission scandal
concerning diesel vehicles.
So a lot of these innovations bring negative aspects with them.
But what technologies or technological projects do you personally see
as most promising or beneficial to mankind?
I think the energy question is in the center of everything.
Because in the history of technology, you see that cheap energy was in
a lot of cases, the source for industrial growth, for innovation as
well.
Take the Dutch society of the 17th century.
They had cheap energy in form of wind energy, and in form of lignite,
peat.
And we know now that a lot of the industrial growth of the 1950s to
70s was pushed by cheap energy, especially by cheap oil.
Energy is in the center of our attention, and politics knows about
that and tries to remedy this.
So in the case of mobility, in my opinion, it's unique.
And it's maybe for the first time that the German government actually
is giving directions what technology to use.
In the past times, when it's emissions concerned, then they gave you
the amount of emission, for example, but kept technology open.
Now, they don't keep technology open, they foster electric cars.
Not hydrogen cars, not alternative renewable fuels, and so on.
At this technological path, mobility means electric cars in the middle
future.
It's, in my opinion, rather problematic, mainly because of storage of
energy.
The batteries which we have now are very difficult, if ever, to
recycle.
They use materials which are either expensive or dangerous or
detrimental to the environment.
So maybe, and then here, the study of history of technology is also
very beneficial.
Technological openness would be much better, in my opinion.
We don't know, actually, what kind of energy we use for mobility in 40
years.
And now, to pave the way just for electricity and nothing else is, in
my opinion, rather dangerous.
And there are interesting ways of new technologies, for example,
artificial chlorophyll simulating green plants to produce energy from
sunlight and some nutritional materials, for example, in rather
simple, in inverted commas, reactors, which can be probably put on the
walls of houses.
These ideas, of course, are researched on, but they don't have the
attention which they would deserve because probably economic use is
further off.
We can only hope, then, that they at some point get the attention they
deserve before it's also for the environment too late.
Let's hope so.
I was sometimes asked whether the study of history of technology makes
one pessimistic or optimistic.
There are cases in point for both.
One can get rather pessimistic when we look at failed technologies
which were enthusiastically greeted at some times and which proved to
be problematic, highly problematic, atomic power, for example.
But you can also be rather optimistic when you study histories of
technology because you have so many creative solutions for problems.
There are so many side paths in the history of technology, even in the
use of new fuels, for example.
Around 1900, there was so much creativity concerning new energy
sources, NAFTA, for example, or even cars with compressed air, for
example, and all that.
And these creative approaches to problems is sometimes very
astonishing.
In some cases, I'm really wondering what drove these engineers around
1900, for example.
And sometimes technologies which are discussed now, which are very
interesting, were tried out a long time ago.
For example, charging cars by induction, by driving on the road, was
tested in Moscow in 1955.
So it's a high technology of the past, maybe.
And when you look at the excellent internal combustion engines of
today, with turbos and variable valve timing and all that, these are
technologies of airplane engines of the First World War.
Wow.
But they still found use today, then.
They found use today.
And the fighter pilots flew with turbochargers, with four valve
technologies, with double ignition and all that.
That's a nice thought, though, to think that, or to wonder what our
current technologies might be used for in the future, once they're
outdated.
Then as a final question, in your opinion, why are the studies and the
research of technology futures so important?
You said it a bit now, but why is this research vital?
Every society has ideas what the future is.
Every society tries to mold its future, since the industrial
transformation.
And these historic futures, most fascinating field to study, because
they tell a lot about what are the values of these societies, which
discuss these technologies.
They give you a lot of information about how do these societies try to
steer technology in different directions.
This is completely different, let's say, in war times than in peace
times, and so on.
And these historical futures are also formulated in literature, in
arts, for example.
And the creative imagination in societies is a very interesting field.
And the connection between creative ideas about the future and the
proper future are most fascinating.
The tank, for example, in the First World War was certainly influenced
and inspired by a short story, The Land Ironclads by H.G.
Wells, for example.
And Jules Verne's projectile to the moon was started off in the
fiction of Jules Verne from Florida, from the place where Cap
Canaveral is now.
And the dimensions of these three-person projectile, three persons
like the Apollo program, are more or less the same as the Apollo
capsule.
So sometimes, for us, it's really strange to see that life follows
fiction.
Fiction shapes sometimes technological processes, but not always.
And so one of my latest research results is I tried to point out the
importance of fiction and the importance of imaginative, non-real
objects in the history of technology.
The submarine of Jules Verne, for example, it does not really exist.
Well, now it exists as a form of recreations.
You can buy paper cutout submarines or plastic models or like that.
But it's a fiction object which is very important for our creative
ideas about submarine travel and so on.
The first American submarine reaching the pole was called the
Nautilus, the same as by Jules Verne.
So we have a lot of connections.
At one time, I thought, if you concentrate as a historian of
technology just on the objects you have, on the three dimensional
objects, then it's too short.
You have to look at the objects which probably were never built, which
were the imagination of authors, which happily would not be built, for
example, which stayed in the project phase.
But these objects are not real, but for the history of imagination of
futures, shaping futures, they are very important.
So it's important to imagine and to dream because it could become a
reality one day.
To be technologically creative, I think.
And the history of technology is a school of technological creativity.
And sometimes they're failures.
Thank you so much for your time and for the very interesting talk.
Thank you very much, too.