Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology 1st Edition

If Henry Petroski is the engineer interpreter of everyday technology, Edward Tenner is its philosopher. This fascinating collection of essays delves into, mulls over, and teases apart eyeglasses, shoes, chairs and other innovations that have changed our bodies in unexpected ways. Tenner, the author of Why Things Bite Back, is a researcher at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Editors of Scientific American

Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back (1996), offers a fascinating look at how devices we have created have affected our development. He looks at everyday objects (reclining chairs, thong sandals, running shoes, eyeglasses, musical keyboards, and the typewriter) and explores how they were created, how they have developed, and the often unintended ways they have influenced us, including how we sit, stand, walk, and communicate. Technological advancements have enhanced our comfort and expanded our capabilities, but they have also prompted increased dependence and changed the way we evolve physically. For example, the invention of the typewriter has increased reading material and facilitated public education but weakened eyesight (a problem addressed through the technology of eyeglasses). Tenner's lively writing style (as well as the illustrations of early designs) and appreciation of the politics and economics that accompany scientific developments help put everyday technology in perspective. Tenner concludes with a chapter on trends and what we can expect as we learn new body skills, ever-adapting techniques to match the technology. Vanessa Bush
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“An intellectual thrill ride. . . . [A] memorable mosaic, a big picture that illustrates how human progress is half a matter of striding and half of stumbling. . . . Illuminating reading.” —The New York Times Book Review

"In this stellar fusion of how we design and use technology, and how technology in turn transforms us, the simple shoestring is a . . . path to understanding everything that matters. . . . Tenner brings both scholarly precision and droll humor to his topics."
—ThePhiladelphia Inquirer

“This quirky romp . . . explores how common objects redefine us as fast as we redesign them. . . . Tenner offers many profound insights.” —Wired

“Accessible, elegant. . . . Tenner covers a remarkable broad canvas. . . . He has an eye for the odd detail and the little-known fact. . . [and] will take you to some fascinating places.” —Boston Review



From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the author of Why Things Bite Back– which introduced us to the revenge antics of technology–Our Own Devices is a wonderfully revealing look at the inventions of everyday things that protect us, position us, or enhance our performance.

In helping and hurting us, these body technologies have produced consequences that their makers never intended:
• In postwar Japan traditional sandals gave way to Western-style shoes because they were considered marks of a higher standard of living, but they seriously increased the rate of fungal foot ailments.
• Reclining chairs, originally promoted for healthful brief relaxation, became symbols of the sedentary life and obesity.
• A keyboard that made the piano easier to learn failed in the marketplace mainly because professional pianists believed difficult passages needed to stay difficult.
• Helmets, reintroduced during the carnage of World War I, saved the lives of countless civilian miners, construction workers, and, more recently, bicyclists.

Once we step on the treadmill of progress, it’s hard to step off. Yet Edward Tenner shows that human ingenuity can be applied in self-preservation as well, and he sheds light on the ways in which the users of commonplace technology surprise designers and engineers, as when early typists developed the touch method still employed on today’s keyboards. And he offers concrete advice for reaping benefits from the devices that we no longer seem able to live without. Although dependent on these objects, we can also use them to liberate ourselves. This delightful and instructive history of invention shows why National Public Radio dubbed Tenner “the philosopher of everyday technology.”

Edward Tenner has been a visiting scholar in the Departments of Geosciences and English at Princeton University. Recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he is currently senior research associate at the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He lives in Plainsboro, New Jersey.

Chapter One

Technology, Technique, and the Body

IN A GARY LARSON cartoon, a number of dogs are tinkering with building hardware at laboratory workbenches. The caption explains that they are striving to improve canine life by mastering the Doorknob Principle. What makes this funny is partly the idea of pooch scientists standing on their hind legs, manipulating screwdrivers and even microscopes. It recalls the long-discarded notion that we humans are the only tool-using animals. It points indirectly to the unique versatility of the human hand, with its range of grips, and the relative specialization of other creatures' paws and claws.

There is something even stranger than Larson's image, though. Other animals have a surprising ability to manipulate human technology. Not all understand what people do with things, but they develop ways to work with human-made objects, and they transmit this knowledge socially. At the dawn of industrialization, the rats of early-nineteenth-century London, with no direct auditory or visual cues, had long known that water flowed through the lead pipes servicing houses. When sufficiently thirsty, they gnawed right through them. Unfortunately, by the 1830s the pipes sometimes contained gas; the holes left by the disappointed rodents added to the risk of explosions. (Rats also loved the wax covering early matches, brought them back to their dens, and ignited the phosphorus with their teeth, causing still more fires.)

Bears in Yosemite National Park have learned to twist open screw-top jars of peanut butter, to break into food lockers with a combination of paw and snout, and to raid Dumpsters through supposedly protective slots. Bears cooperate to defeat other human technology; sow bears appear to send cubs into branches to dislodge carefully cached food, and young bears learn from observation how to break open automobile doors and penetrate the flimsy barrier separating the backseat from the food the owners thought they were protecting in the trunk. According to park rangers, who call the practice clouting, bears recognize specific brands and models, for example Honda and Toyota sedans, that are most vulnerable to attack, and use similar techniques on each model. When a particular model and color yield a rich cache of food, bears begin to attack similar vehicles every night. Mother bears show cubs how to pry open rear side doors by bending the door frame with their claws until it becomes a platform for reaching the backseat and trunk partition. Bears also brace themselves against neighboring cars to break the windows of vans more readily.

Zoo officials "never use the word can't and orangutan in the same sentence," according to the comparative psychologist Benjamin Beck, a specialist in animal survival skills. A young orangutan in the San Diego Zoo became famous for unbolting the screening of his crib, removing the wires, and moving through the zoo nursery, unscrewing lightbulbs. According to Beck, an orangutan, unlike other great apes, understands what a tool like a screwdriver means in the human world and given the opportunity could use it to take its cage apart and escape. Other orangutans have learned to distinguish the faint sounds made by electrified barrier systems and to escape when they detect that the power is off.

It should not be surprising, then, that dogs also learn the Doorknob Principle. An innocent resident of Takoma Park, Maryland, was allegedly mauled by a Prince George's County police dog in her own bed after it was sent in to look for a burglar in her basement apartment. It had gained access by turning a doorknob, which the woman has since replaced by a latch. Bizarre as these anecdotes appear, they make an important point. Those who create things, whether doorknobs or gas pipes, can only begin to imagine how they will be used. If we define technology as a modification of the environment, then we must recognize the complementary principle of technique: how that modification is used in performance. New objects change behavior, but not always as inventors and manufacturers imagine. And changes in behavior of people, as of bears and dogs, inspire new hardware, which in turn engenders more innovations.

TECHNOLOGY = TECHNIQUE?

In many European languages the same term-la technique; die Technik-describes both things and practices. One of the most incisive and influential critics of technology, Jacques Ellul, argued powerfully that modern humanity is enmeshed in such omnipresent, interlocking technological institutions that technology and technique are inseparable. Ellul begins his most important work, The Technological Society, by insisting, against Lewis Mumford, that the machine is only a result of technique, not its source. Mumford established historical periods based on energy-hydraulic, coal, electrical; Ellul sought to understand the spirit behind the power sources and machinery. For him, technology was the product of the ancient Near East; in Western antiquity and medieval Christianity, it was always subordinated to other principles. Even the Renaissance and the seventeenth century pursued humanistic universality rather than technical proficiency; many supposedly practical books of this period lose the modern reader in digression and speculation. The universal application of technique began only with the eighteenth century and the French Revolution. Mechanization was only one consequence of "systematization, unification, and clarification," equally reflected in the suppression of customary law by the Napoleonic Code. History and philosophy as we know them emerged as intellectual techniques. In fact, Ellul argues, industrialization followed rather than preceded these intellectual and cultural transformations. With the rapid industrial development of the nineteenth century-which Ellul does not attempt to explain-came a new relationship of technique to society: "a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its own laws and determinations." Political control of technique is an illusion. It is irreversible, "beyond good and evil," not merely morally neutral but "the judge of what is moral, the creator of a new morality" and thus of "a new civilization." Humanity has become "a slug in a slot machine," setting it in motion without controlling its outcome.

Ellul's arguments are trenchant, brilliantly argued, and often persuasively illustrated. His focus on mental processes and habits as the foundations of technology is especially apt. And Ellul probably would agree that other organisms, including bears and dogs, become subject to the same technological regime. But there is strong evidence for the power of technique well before the revolutionary era. In fact, for better or worse, the dominion of technique is an ancient one. For Ellul, the Greeks simply despised technique and exalted pure theory. He cites Archimedes' destruction of the models that he used to construct his theories, once he had demonstrated his proofs geometrically. He also suggests that Greek ideals of harmony and moderation held back the development of technique. But there is no opposition between aesthetic ideals and the development of techniques. Experience and skill are hardly neglected in the Hippocratic writings in favor of abstract thought.

Ellul also underestimated the power, even "autonomy" in his terms, of military technology before the eighteenth century. Swordsmanship and other martial arts were cultivated and transmitted by generations of medieval and Renaissance masters. But only in early modern Europe did the distinction between technology and technique become apparent. Between 1594 and 1607 Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, showed how technique could transform technology. Matchlock muskets were heavy and dangerous. Soldiers had to hold their weapon in one hand and a lighted fuse in the other. While some hunting weapons already had spiral grooves in their barrels for greater accuracy, this delicate rifling needed more careful loading and maintenance than rough and dirty military field conditions could afford. Thus the military musket was inaccurate as well as awkward to handle. Maurice's genius was to see that organization and synchronized motion could make the crude musket an effective weapon. Inspired by an idea of his cousin William Louis, he assigned another cousin, Maurice's adjutant Johann, to break down the cycle of preparing, loading, aiming, and firing muskets into discrete steps. Johann of Nassau had a series of forty-three plates engraved, each illustrating one stage. It was no longer enough for drillmasters to teach the operation of the musket. Soldiers now had to be able to march forward, rank on rank, as they prepared the weapons for firing when they advanced to the front rank, then countermarch to repeat the process. Only with precision and strict discipline could they avoid serious injury to themselves or their comrades. But once the process-the technique-was mastered, the troops could lay down repeated, formidable volleys. An intense field of simultaneous fire could be effective, even with many shots going wide of the mark. Maurice and Johann's manual, Weapon Handling (1607), with its elegant illustrations by Jacob de Gheyn, transformed battle throughout Europe, especially through the victories of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden two decades later. The press was a technology, and the printer's art a technique, that accelerated the diffusion of countless others.

Here was technological synchronization three hundred years before Henry Ford. Some readers will insist that the musket itself, as a technology, somehow dictated the technique of drill. Certainly, battlefield experience determines which innovations spread and which are abandoned.

But techniques do not create themselves, and neither operators nor their supervisors initially understand the full possibilities of devices. Ellul wrote in the shadow of a modernism that still sought a single best way to do everything, and for which (as the architectural critic David Heathcote recently remarked of the Britis...