Jones, Russell Douglass (Author)
Case Western Reserve University
Pursell, Carroll
Edition Details: Advisor: Pursell, Carroll
Physical Details: 383 pp.
Language: English
During the 1920s, the industrial museum emerged as a new type of museum institution. These museums were endowed and organized by wealthy industrialists, but mainly operated by engineers, scientists, and a few historians. Unlike builders of large technological systems, who attempted to limit public choices through technical criteria, the industrial museum attempted to limit public debate about technological change by demonstrating, through the linear organization of historical technology, the inevitable course of technological evolution. This dissertation examines the promoters rhetoric surrounding the foundation of the Henry Ford Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, and the New York Museum of Science and Industry, as well as a similar proposal for the Smithsonian Institution. Beginning in the 1880s at the Smithsonian Institution, the collection and organization of historic technology followed natural science typologies and rejected alternative, contextualist approaches to the explanation of technological development. Many of the business leaders and engineers who were involved with promoting and establishing one or more of the industrial museums in the US were also involved in the promotion and establishment of vocational education programs in the public schools. Engineers and industrialists founded the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education in an effort to gain greater control over the education and socialization of the American worker. Their promotion of industrial museums followed similar aims. Many promoters argued that the industrial museum would continue and foster technological progress by being a research institution for invention. However, as the investigation into the processes of invention would reveal the social nature of technological change and contradict the cultural hegemony of the ideology of autonomous technology, directors and managers of these museums eliminated what few research capabilities they had. Realizing that the dual threats to business, increased government regulation and labor activism, could be changed through the museum's educational mission, engineers designed and constructed exhibits that reflected their conservative views. These exhibits explained the necessary reasons for business organization and how the corporation had a deep social responsibility to advance American society.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 62 (2002): 3160. UMI order no. 3027296.
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