Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity Read online

  Acclaim for EDWARD TENNER’s

  OUR OWN DEVICES

  “Insightful and provocative.… Tenner has become a worthy successor to such luminaries as business philosopher Peter Drucker, social critic Lewis Mumford, and historian Lynn White in connecting technology’s past, present, and future.”

  —Nature

  “Fascinating.… Delves into, mulls over, and teases apart eye-glasses, shoes, chairs, and other innovations that have changed our bodies in unexpected ways.”

  —Scientific American

  “Ambitious, stimulating work.… The lesson Tenner transmits so cogently, unpredictably, and delightfully is that in the best designs ease and complexity cohabit, furthering and reflecting evolution itself.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “[A] cautionary tale.… The only law that can be said with complete confidence to apply is the law of unforeseen consequences, the law so eloquently stated in the immortal formulation of Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller: One never knows, do one?”

  —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

  “Edward Tenner has drawn a singular path in academia that traces the practical and symbolic impact of design and technology on our lives, from revolutionary inventions to everyday objects.”

  —Steven Heller, In Print

  “Our Own Devices is an erudite foray into the meeting places between man and the manmade. Designers, as they endeavor to make those interactions smarter (or at least softer), would do well to kick off their Nikes or Birkenstocks and consider Tenner’s investigations.”

  —I.D.

  “Before you buy anything else, buy Our Own Devices by Edward Tenner—with humor and insight, it demonstrates just how oddly a lot of ‘can’t-live-without’ gadgets have affected our bodies.”

  —Bill McKibben, author of

  Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age

  EDWARD TENNER

  OUR OWN DEVICES

  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. Tenner lives in Plainsboro, New Jersey.

  ALSO BY EDWARD TENNER

  Why Things Bite Back:

  Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences

  Tech Speak

  To the memory of my father

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One: Technology, Technique, and the Body

  Chapter Two: The First Technology: Bottle-Feeding

  Chapter Three: Slow Motion: Zori

  Chapter Four: Double Time: Athletic Shoes

  Chapter Five: Sitting Up Straight: Posture Chairs

  Chapter Six: Laid Back: Reclining Chairs

  Chapter Seven: Mechanical Arts: Musical Keyboards

  Chapter Eight: Letter Perfect?: Text Keyboards

  Chapter Nine: Second Sight: Eyeglasses

  Chapter Ten: Hardheaded Logic: Helmets

  Epilogue: Thumbs Up

  Notes

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Preface

  TECHNOLOGY APPEARS to have become a synonym for electronic systems. It should not be so. Just because microprocessors are all machines does not mean that all machines, even all important machines, are built around chips and circuits. In fact, in the early 1990s the economist Edwin Mansfield found that improved thread and stain removers had done more for America’s productivity than personal computers. The time is right to think again about technology, and to start with some of the simplest forms.1

  In Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, I defined technology as the human modification of the natural world. This book is about the changes we have made in ourselves: how everyday things affect how we use our bodies—how we sit, stand, walk, and communicate. And it is about their symbolic side: how they affect our images of each other. They are, literally, our own devices. Though people have been able to do surprisingly well without them, these everyday things are today part of a technological treadmill from which it is difficult to step down.

  I started to consider these themes after participating in an on-line forum on technology and design sponsored by the Discovery Channel’s Web site in 1996. The other guests were the cognitive psychologist Donald Norman and the civil engineer and historian of technology Henry Petroski, both of whom had written important and insightful studies of everyday objects. It was the best kind of discussion, and I regret that it is no longer available on the Web. One of the things I learned from our agreements and disagreements was that nobody had yet looked at ordinary things as the outcomes of a ceaseless interplay of technology, economics, and values.2

  An engineer can look at the proliferation of tableware in the nineteenth century, for example, and consider the mechanics of producing and using specialized knives, forks, and spoons. A food chemist can evaluate the appropriateness of glassware shapes for wines and spirits. But science-based analysis does not tell us why men and women of one period were paying for proliferating variety. Some social historians believe that the Victorian upper classes were making daily rituals as complex as possible to intimidate and entrap upstarts. Likewise, paper clips could probably have been made in the eighteenth century; it was not only new metalworking machinery but mountains of new paperwork that hastened their development. Technology, often regarded as a prime mover of change, is also a response to long-standing trends.

  A psychologist can identify many ways to make objects easier to use. Many tools could still be improved by scientific study. But performance is not the only measure of value. Our needs are complex and sometimes paradoxical. One of the most popular fields for awards of U.S. patents is new golf equipment, yet the U.S. Golf Association maintains a large, professionally staffed laboratory that rejects many of these innovations, not because they fail to work or are difficult to use, but because they are too effective or too easy to operate. Golfers, like other sports participants, must balance the search for a technological advantage with the prestige that comes from learning a difficult technique. In Why Things Bite Back I considered how innovation can maintain or undermine the challenge, the artificial difficulty, that underlies sports. Even the most fervent technology enthusiasts have not (yet) proposed to turn golf and other sports over to robots whose progress can be observed on monitors at the clubhouse bar. Manual skills have not declined; they have been migrated from work to hobbies and sports.

  The line between manufactured things and information is also arbitrary. Our knowledge is filtered through objects. A second inspiration for this book came during a question-and-answer session after a lecture I gave in 1997 in the Urania-Gesellschaft in Berlin, one of the world’s oldest and liveliest adult education centers. One member of the audience, an older man who (to judge from my hosts’ disapproving glances) liked to confront the speakers, challenged me to name the most important invention in history. I thought for a moment and replied, “Eyeglasses, so as many people as possible will buy my book,” breaking the tension but also provoking myself to think more about the body as information system. The questioner, who himself was wearing glasses, joined in the approving response. Perhaps there is such a thing as constructive heckling.

  This book looks at everyday objects through a pair of terms: technology and technique. The first consists of the structures, devices, and systems we use; the second, of our skills i
n using them. Historians of technology customarily focus on the devices themselves, if only because user habits are poorly documented. Designers—often rightly—aim to make some skills obsolete. What virtue was there in trimming a wick, cranking an automobile, tuning a crystal radio set, or even (for casual amateurs) focusing a camera manually?

  In fact, technique is much more important in our lives than we realize. Many things seem to act almost magically on their own. We can sustain this illusion at length, but sooner or later we need an expert urgently to correct an “automatic” system gone awry. The zero-insertion-force floppy drives of older Macintosh computers—before Apple turned against the floppy disk on principle—were such a technology. They swallowed disks gracefully after only a gentle nudge. Unlike the IBM-compatibles, they released them again by software control from a pull-down menu on the screen, not with a vulgar spring-loaded button. But the drives were still machines, and the disks sometimes stuck. A simple technique was needed: straightening a paper clip and poking it in a discreet little hole with a recessed switch. Even users of well-designed objects need to know a few tricks.

  The interplay of technology and technique is literally at our feet. The shoelace can encapsulate the themes of this book. For all the embrace of advanced materials in athletic shoes (which we will explore in Chapter Three), shoe fastening has changed little for two centuries or longer. The obsessive protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine observes, “Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.” Generations of inventors have proposed alternative fasteners, and many children today begin with the interlocking fabrics trademarked as Velcro. But sooner or later, just about every child in the world’s wealthier countries learns to tie his or her own shoes. Few of us remember studying the procedure, yet it is complex enough to justify manufactured learning aids for teachers and parents and extended Internet discussions of methods. Try, without manipulating an actual pair of laces on shoes, to write a paragraph explaining to a novice—and there must be at least a billion or two around the world—how to tie the knot. If you can do that in your mother tongue and are proficient in another, try to explain the procedure in your second language. You will probably find it easier to restate the ontological argument for the existence of God, or any other philosophical or theological idea. Tacit knowledge, what we can do but seldom explain, is essential. The special vocabulary of the everyday is obscure. How many people know the proper words for the plastic- or metal-bound ends of shoelaces, aglets or tags?3

  Baker’s narrator could have discovered even more about shoelace technique. Simple objects can call for a surprising level of skill. Henry David Thoreau, for all his acuteness as an observer of nature, took some time to understand that his leather laces were constantly coming undone because he was tying granny knots rather than square knots. Subcultures have their own shoelace techniques, sometimes highly refined. In his memoir The Duke of Deception, the writer Geoffrey Wolff recalls learning only one useful thing from his detested maternal grandfather, a mean-spirited, self-made officer: the navy method of tying shoelaces so they would not unravel. Soccer players knot their laces on the radial (outer) side of the foot to avoid interference with kicking. Experienced hikers can adjust lacing patterns to terrain, keeping the toe box loose and the ankle tight uphill (to prevent twisting) and reversing the pattern on the way down (to protect the Achilles tendon), using a double-twisted knot to separate the two parts of the lace. Still another lacing can seat the heel firmly in the back of the boot. A skilled hiker can skip eyelets and use other lacing tricks to improve performance and prevent blisters. Athletes in other sports too learn to adjust lacing patterns. Joe Ellis, a sports podiatrist, has published instructions for varying laces to stop heel slippage, improve midsole flexibility, and protect tender toes and insteps. Many manufacturers, beginning with Nike, have even introduced variable-width lacing with alternating inner and outer rows of eyelets to permit wider and narrower fittings of shoes made on the same last. (Most wearers still use all the eyelets.) Even for the less active elderly, orthopedists recommend laced shoes over slip-ons because they better accommodate orthotics and swollen feet. In fact, experienced shoe fitters can show people of all ages how to use lacing patterns borrowed from hiking to compensate for mismatches between shoe shapes and individual feet. They warn that “advanced” shoes with loops instead of eyelets and round laces may cut into the foot.4

  Old technologies, then, stay alive by assimilating new techniques as well as materials. But they also confer symbolic meanings. Shoelaces have an important cultural side, even religious implications. In most traditional Islamic societies they were avoided as inconvenient in removing and replacing shoes at the entrances to mosques. Slip-on footwear is obviously easier to use wherever custom dictates removing shoes at entrances to private homes. Social class also helps define closures. In 1666, King Charles II of England began a new fashion when, according to the diarist John Evelyn, he “put himself solemnly into the Eastern fashion, changing … shoe strings [forerunners of laces] and garters into buckles, of which some were set with precious stones.” Through the eighteenth century and until around 1820, gentlemen in Europe and America used buckles on their shoes, not laces. When Thomas Jefferson adopted shoelaces at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he was defying criticism to embrace a democratic fashion he had observed as a diplomat in Paris at the eve of the Revolution.

  Laces also represent group identity. In North America, Europe, and Asia, school authorities occasionally ban colored laces for their association with gangs. Leaving laces threaded but with ends untied has been an emblem of youthful rebellion. Not wearing them at all with lace-up shoes has, like baggy trousers, been part of inner-city prison chic. (At the other extreme, Lord Baden-Powell established a “Scout’s way” of tying laces that concealed both the knot and the end of the string.) And even among conservatively dressed adult males there are notable differences in shoelace technique. Europeans tend to tie parallel laces across the instep, using hidden offset zigzags; Americans prefer the crisscross like a series of X’s. Nobody knows when and why these patterns diverged. In the British army in World War II, soldiers were taught parallel lacing to aid medics in cutting to remove the boots of the wounded, but the custom is probably much older. Some American commanders have ordered troops to lace each of two pairs of boots with a different style, as a reminder to alternate them. Once I observed that a visiting European colleague had used a different pattern on each shoe. (The American method uses slightly less lace, according to the mathematician Ian Stewart.)5

  In social interactions laces are no mere symbols. They serve as invaluable props. A loose shoelace justifies a time-out, the interruption of a conversation, the chance to observe. A London journalist reported that a financier she was interviewing would begin to adjust his eyeglasses and untie and retie his shoelaces when questions became uncomfortably personal. Viewers of D r. Strangelove will recall the Soviet ambassador stooping to retie his laces at the apocalyptic end for a last bit of clandestine photography of the War Room. In fact, the shoelace enables many a devious maneuver. Cheaters in marathon races wait on the sidelines, bend to tie their shoes when the pack passes, then rise to join it in the excitement. During the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the Cuban baseball team used frequent shoelace-tying to slow down the game and defeat their American opponents—at least, so U.S. journalists saw it.6

  Finally, shoelaces show the power of technological improvisation, our ability to find unexpected uses for familiar things. Flat, strong, braided thread is easy to knot. In its benign aspect, a shoelace is a wonderful tool wherever a flexible cord is needed, for example, looped to make it easier for people with disabilities to open doors with knobs, or as an emergency tourniquet. It also has sinister uses, ranging from the concealment of crib sheets by students to suicide and murder. Prison and mental hospital authorities the world over often confiscate shoelaces from new inmates. (Airport alarms are tripped by metal arch reinforcements, but laces raise no q
uestions.) Like clothespins, paper clips, and duct tape, shoelaces are technologies that leave especially ample room for new techniques elaborated by our imagination.7

  Laces show that a simple body technique can be so valuable that changes become incremental rather than revolutionary. Production of shoelaces has long been automated, down to the attachment of the plastic aglets—quite a technological feat because laces are braided from multiple strands that must be woven together much as hanks of hair are braided, but on a minute scale. The only important recent innovation has been elastic laces that eliminate the need for knotting and make removal and replacement of shoes easier for people with disabilities and for those living in societies where shoes are for street wear only.

  But fashion can make unexpected demands on technique. When shoe manufacturers began to turn to neat-looking but slip-prone round synthetic laces for a sleeker appearance in the 1990s, wearers complained. A winning New York Marathon runner from Kenya sponsored by Nike failed to break a record after his round nylon Air Streak Vengeance laces came untied three times, costing him crucial seconds. (Speaking of technological revenge, Nike paid him the $10,000 bonus he would almost certainly have won had the laces held.) Yet some shoe executives insisted that with proper knotting skills the laces would stay put.8

  The manufacturers of nineteenth-century laced footwear and shoelaces could scarcely have foreseen the variety of motor and symbolic skills their innovations would unleash. They no doubt were thinking of more comfortable, flexible, and fashionable alternatives to buckles, buttons, and slip-ons. Communities of users—athletes, young people, criminals—developed new techniques for manipulating laces. Of course, new technology could in turn serve these trends: braiding machines with today’s sophisticated controls can produce patterns in laces, including ways to identify corporate and school affiliation. Technique and technology reinforce and modify each other, coevolving unpredictably and endlessly. Building on the ideas of the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, the writer and designer Stewart Brand has illustrated how structures “learn” by absorbing the additions, subtractions, innovations, and restorations of successive owners. Adaptability is equally vital in designing the smaller things in life. What Brand writes about buildings, that each is a prediction and a wrong one, applies to our tools as well.9