Michael Brian Schiffer: Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricitybefore Edison .Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity before Edisonby Michael Brian SchifferReview by: By Peter   ShulmanIsis, Vol. 100, No. 3 (September 2009), pp. 679-680Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649187 .

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ties and differences of the three periods he exam-ines. He is careful to stress the differences betweenthe playback heydays: while Garner’s work wasunderwritten by late nineteenth-century beliefsthat evolution and human races were essentiallyhierarchical, such views were anathema to Marlerand his collaborators. He also points to importantcommonalities: at both times a gradualist (ratherthan saltationist) view of evolution predominated.But what of the intervening period? Thankfully,this is much more than an excursus into an ab-sence. Indeed, it is here that Radick really hits hisexplanatory stride. He offers lucid discussions oftheoretical considerations (including technologicaldeterminism and counterfactual history) and ablydemonstrates that much is to be gained from ex-amining these developments across disciplines.The book is a delight to read and should be ofconsiderable interest to historians of the animal/human boundary, animal behavior studies, evolu-tionary biology, comparative psychology, and an-thropology.

TANIA MUNZ

Michael Brian Schiffer. Power Struggles: Sci-entific Authority and the Creation of PracticalElectricity before Edison. xii � 420 pp., figs.,bibl., index. Cambridge, Mass./London: MITPress, 2008. $38 (cloth).

After Edison, if an inventor imagined a device thatheated up, rotated, oscillated, or engaged in justabout any kind of movement, electricity couldmake it work. Before Edison, however, the uses ofelectricity were less clear; it required dangerousand expensive batteries and on-site technical ex-pertise and had to compete economically with ri-val sources of power like muscle, water, andsteam. What did inventors in the middle of thenineteenth century imagine electricity could do?Why were some uses of electricity widely adoptedwhile others, even technically feasible ones, werenot? Nineteenth-century electrical science is pep-pered with claims and counterclaims to “practical-ity.” What makes one device practical and anothernot? Who decides?

Michael Brian Schiffer explores these questionsin Power Struggles, an innovative book linkingelectrical science at the turn of the nineteenth cen-tury to the construction of central stations aroundthe turn of the twentieth. Schiffer analyzes deci-sions pertaining to practicality by borrowing con-ceptual terms from behavioral archaeology, espe-cially “performance characteristics,” or sets ofqualities that make devices suitable for particulartasks, and “performance requirements,” or thosefeatures needed to accomplish a particular pur-

pose. The better the fit between a device’s perfor-mance characteristics and a purpose’s perfor-mance requirements, according to Schiffer, themore likely the device will be judged practical.With this framework, Schiffer ask the reader toimagine Edison and his light and power systems ofthe 1880s not as a technological beginning butinstead as a culmination of decades of creativeexperimentation, successful adaptations, and tech-nological dead ends.

In establishing judgments of practicality, scien-tists played an influential role. A positive endorse-ment could open up desperately needed funding,as Samuel Morse found after Joseph Henry praisedhis telegraph and subsequently loosened the pursestrings of Congress. A negative ruling could end acareer. The mechanical huckster Henry Paine metthis end after Henry Rowland dismissed his claimsto have disproved the conservation of energy (itdid not help that Rowland also discovered a hid-den steam engine that evidently provided the oth-erwise inexplicable power for Paine’s machines).Yet as influential as scientists could be, Schifferacknowledges they could be overruled (as WilliamThomson found when Cyrus Field rejected hisinitial design for the Atlantic telegraph cable infavor of a less expensive and ultimately less func-tional one)—or they could be just wrong (like theEnglish Electrician General of the Post Office,William Preece, who claimed that small electriclights were impossible, or the chemist Cyprien DuMotay, who dismissed on physical and chemicalgrounds Edison’s claims to have developed anincandescent lamp).

To illustrate the relationship between scientificideas and technological change, Schiffer incorpo-rates most major figures in the history of electricalarts and science. Galvani, Volta, Davy, Faraday,Oersted, Coulomb, Ampere, Joule, Morse,Thompson, and Edison all appear, and, as dean ofAmerican scientists and arbiter of new technolo-gies for the federal government, Joseph Henryplays a major role in much of the book. The heartof the story, however, is what inventors did withelectrical ideas.

Especially fascinating is Schiffer’s examinationof some lesser known applications of electricity inthe nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety ofsources, especially the English Mechanics Maga-zine, its transatlantic counterpart Scientific Ameri-can, and a broad synthesis of specialized studies,Schiffer describes a range of devices designed toput electricity to work. Beginning in the 1830s,electrometallurgy became one of the earliest in-dustries to begin relying on battery-powered elec-tricity to create printing plates and to electroplatethin layers of one metal atop another. At nearly thesame time, Robert Hare, Samuel Colt, Matthew

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 3 (2009) 679

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Maury, Frederick Abel, and others began develop-ing underwater mines triggered by electricalcharges. The dangers of coastal navigation encour-aged the development of carbon arc lamps forlighthouses, thus facilitating the only commer-cially successful mode of electric illumination be-fore the incandescent lamp. Lighting remained theproblem in the newly rebuilt Capitol dome inWashington, D.C., which provided a high-profilesite for Samuel Gardiner, Jr., to develop and pro-mote his controversial electric gas lighter in the1860s. All told, between 1840 and 1880 a wideand sometimes bizarre range of devices prolifer-ated, from navigational devices and remote-controlled torpedoes to fire and burglar alarms,medical devices, thermo-regulators for maintain-ing constant temperatures, master and slaveclocks, electric organs, and railroad signalers. Inevery case, practicality meant satisfying not onlytechnical constraints but financial, political, andsymbolic ones as well.

There is an implicit challenge, however, in fo-cusing on performance requirements and judg-ments of practicality to explain technologicalchange. The reasons a manufacturer, governmentagency, or investor might have had for adopting orignoring a new invention are hard for the historianto come by—and even when they can be found,the stated reasons might not be the actual ones. Inconsequence, Schiffer is forced occasionally tospeculate. Looking at the 1840s and 1850s, forexample, he explains the failure of most smallmanufacturers to replace their old battery systemswith new magnetos by listing the likely factors apotential adopter would consider (costs of instal-lation and operation, risks of switching from theknown and reliable battery to the unknown elec-tromagnetic generators, etc.) and then speculatingthat these reasons likely explain the small extent ofmagneto adoption. It’s a reasonable assumptionbut a soft foundation to stake a thesis on. Never-theless, the book is an important contribution tothe history of electrical science and offers a lucidaccount of the process of invention, practical orotherwise.

PETER SHULMAN

Jagdish N. Sinha. Science, War, and Imperial-ism: India in the Second World War. (SocialSciences in Asia, 18.) xiv � 278 pp., apps.,bibl., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008. $118(paper).

The historiography of science, particularly thatdealing with twentieth-century science, is heavilyladen with moral and political messages, and thisbook is no exception. Its basic argument is that the

British colonial authorities prevented the develop-ment, particularly, of basic or fundamental re-search in British India during World War II, withserious consequences for the Republic of India’seconomic and social development as an indepen-dent state after 1947 (British India and the postwarRepublic of India were very different geographicalentities). The argument is that, unlike in Britain orthe United States, or in the white settler colonies,in India such research was not seriously pursuedby the colonial authorities. The case is based on aparticular reading of the British experience inWorld War II—one encouraged by the scientificleft, which, as Science, War, and Imperialism fur-ther confirms, was very influential among Indianintellectuals. It is assumed that the war saw theexpansion in Britain of basic or fundamental re-search, when by any reasonable measure it fellback radically. The Council for Scientific and In-dustrial Research set up in India during the war,and modeled on the British Department of Scien-tific and Industrial Research, may have been punyby comparison, but the metropolitan DSIR was nota significant player in wartime research and devel-opment. The assumption that basic or fundamentalresearch was central to the success of Britain, andits lack to India’s failure, imposes the linear modelbeloved of analysts of science on a much morecomplex situation.

In fact, the very useful survey Jagdish Sinhaprovides of the impact of the war on science,technology, and medicine (all quite broadly de-fined) in British India points, rather, to similarity inthe effects, once we compare like with like ratherthan Indian realities with myths about Britain. Forin Britain, as in India, the story is essentially one ofmeeting the requirements of massively enlargedarmed forces, which meant accelerated mass train-ing of technicians, the development of new indus-tries, the deployment of academics in new roles,and the pursuit of specifically military researchesin, for example, poison gases. It is often forgottenthat the Indian Army of 1945 had over two millionmen, making it probably the largest volunteerforce in history. As the book makes clear, supply-ing and maintaining that army required that theBritish change their approach to Indian industryand technical training. The senior officers of thisarmy, as well as its scientific advisors, technicalofficers, and operational researchers, were whiteBritish—not Indian—as were many of the seniorcivilian scientific, technical, and medical officersof the Raj (though not the CSIR). There is thus agreat deal of room for confusion between sciencein India and Indian science. Yet it is precisely thisdistinction that needs to be brought into sharpfocus in discussing the impact of the war on sci-ence in India, for such a distinction was bound to

680 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 3 (2009)

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