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ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 101 under the strict control of a single professor. The conflict at Langley can thus be seen as rooted in fundamentally opposed views on the nature of engineering knowledge and the nature of engineering as a social practice. Munk's behavior at Langley certainly was unusual by American standards. He considered himself the absolute master of the division he directed and, like a German university professor, expected to set the research goals for all members of the division and receive primary credit for all the division's accomplishments. He offended the junior engineers at Langley by treating them like German graduate students. They were obliged to attend a theoretical seminar that he conducted in a way they found rude and condescending. They also considered his supervision of experiments vague and overbearing and found his analysis of problems obtuse and excessively mathematical. This was not simply a confrontation between theory and practice, however, for many of the Langley engineers were well trained mathematically and they both acknowledged Munk's personal ability and shared with him the general goal of developing better aeronautical theories. When they found they could not work with Munk, they attempted to work around him. When that tactic failed, all the section heads of the division resigned. When Munk refused reassignment, he was forced to resign, at which point the section heads resumed their positions. The causes and consequences of the revolt against Munk are still the subject of debate. What can be said, descriptively, is that the in-group at Langley, the so-called "NACA nuts," found the cultural dissonance created by his working there too great and Munk himself an unacceptable eccentric, this despite the fact that Munk was the best classical theorist ever to work at Langley. In cultural terms, the case appears to demonstrate that within engineering the attitudes and values of specific subcultures are frequently of greater importance than the more general values, honored by all engineers as well as others, of seeking reliable knowledge and looking for practical solutions. It is these more specific patterns of belief and behavior that have the greatest bearing on the engineer's ability to make use of knowledge from diverse sources and to adapt to changing circumstances within engineering. Responding to Innovation Innovation, the development of new products and processes and their introduction into standard practice, is, like creativity, an aspect of engineering that all engineers consider important, and yet the actual experience of adapting to innovation can be very upsetting. Engineers,
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 102 like other people working in relatively stable jobs, learn to use familiar materials and follow established procedures as they go about their business. They are, of course, expected to suggest ways of improving how their work gets done, and by and large engineers welcome the kinds of incremental innovations that can be fairly readily integrated into established patterns of work. But the appearance of a major innovation can have a revolutionary effect on the way certain engineering tasks are accomplished. When this happens, the existing organization of work and the knowledge and skills employed are subject to reexamination, and the adaptations required to accommodate truly novel devices and procedures frequently create great stress within specific subcultures of engineering and great disruption in individual careers. The invention of the transistor and its introduction into electrical engineering was a case of this latter type. Robert Friedel has studied this case in detail and his investigation helps us understand the kinds of difficulties and dislocations that a major innovation can cause in a specialized field of engineering. The invention and utilization of the transistor was one of three major innovations in electronics since World War II, the other two being the development of integrated circuits and of microprocessors. The transistor was invented by three physicists working at Bell Laboratories, Walter Brattain, William Schockley, and John Bardeen, but as the laboratory authorization for the research that led to this invention reveals, the research program was closely linked to the perceived needs of the Bell system. New switching devices and other components were required to handle increasing telephone traffic, and the research directors at Bell Labs had reason to think that a fundamentally new approach to these problems might be fruitful. In July 1945 the three inventors of the transistor were therefore authorized to undertake research in solid-state physics while concentrating on "the fundamental investigation of conductors, semiconductors, dielectric insulators and other electric and magnetic materials." After listing the specific materials to be investigated, the Research Authorization stated why this research was considered important: "Communication apparatus is dependent upon these materials for most of its functional properties. The research carried out under this case has as its purpose the obtaining of new knowledge that can be used in the development of completely new and improved components and apparatus elements for communication systems." The prescience of this authorization is extraordinary. Two and one half years after this authorization was issued, the Bell research team had invented the point-contact transistor, an amplifier that was the first clearly operable solid-state analog to the vacuum
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 103 triode. With the advantage of hindsight, which, as Melvin Kranzberg reminds us, cannot readily be converted into 20/20 foresight, we can now see that this was an invention of great consequence, but in December 1947 its implications were hardly evident. Bell Labs, with characteristic conservatism, let six months pass before publicly announcing the invention. And while the first point-contact transistor was the direct progenitor of the junction and field-effect transistors developed subsequently, it was itself a transitional device that had very limited immediate utility. Students of innovation are fairly familiar with the stages by which the transistor entered the world of electrical engineering, but many of the engineers involved found the process highly disruptive. While economists talk abstractly about the substitution of technology B for technology A, historians know that the introduction of a radically new device or procedure almost always alters both what is produced and the process of production in ways that are entirely unanticipated. Those involved in the process of integrating fundamental innovations into existing systems of design and production begin by treating them as direct analogs of certain elements in well-known systems. They begin, as the economists suppose, by attempting a direct substitution of the new for the old, but then, as previously unnoticed properties of the new devices are discovered and the analogy with the element of the old system begins to break down, the implications of the innovation become apparent. This, in rather general terms, is the way major innovations progressively transform technological systems, finally rendering useless previously established ways of operating. And this is the kind of effect that the introduction of the transistor had within electrical engineering. The electronics community was at the outset fairly well prepared to welcome certain features of the new transistors. The intense development of radio and electronic engineering during World War II had led to an enormous reduction in the size and weight of tubes and circuits and had made possible the creation of such devices as the proximity fuse. In fact, the degree of miniaturization achieved during the war was proportionally greater than that brought about by the use of transistors. Electronic engineers were therefore keenly aware of the advantages of small size, low power requirements, and ruggedness, and they welcomed the transistor because they believed it promised great improvement on each of these points. Thinking they could substitute transistors for existing vacuum tube rectifiers and amplifiers, they believed the new devices could be utilized without any fundamental reconceptualization of their design criteria.
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 104 In practice the transistor could not simply be substituted for vacuum tube rectifiers and amplifiers. Not only were transistors fundamentally different devices having peculiar secondary characteristics that had to be taken into account, the first transistors were not themselves reliable or well understood. It soon became apparent, therefore, that the use of transistors would require both a reconfiguration of fundamental circuitry at a time when electronic technology had reached a high level of maturity and complexity and a great deal of development of the transistors themselves. Friedel cites one engineer who considered this a rather unrewarding prospect: "The transistor in 1949 did not seem like anything very revolutionary to me. It just seemed like another one of those crummy jobs that required one heck of a lot of overtime and a lot of guff from my wife. It wasn't exciting, not exciting at all. My job in the factory was to turn someone else's dream into salable hardware." Despite these difficulties, however, a transistor revolution was effected in electronics. The pivotal year was 1952, by which time Western Electric was manufacturing transistors in earnest. Although they still cost at least eight times more than comparable vacuum tubes, transistors found a market in miniaturized hearing aids. While this demand encouraged further developments in transistorized circuitry, the big push for new developments in electronics in the 1950s came, as it had during World War II, from the military. The market for consumer electronics, having been relegated to second place by American manufacturers, was taken over largely by European and Japanese firms, while U.S. firms concentrated on designing and producing electronics for the space and arms races and on the miniaturization of computers. Friedel draws several challenging conclusions from his study of the introduction of the transistor. One is that in engineering, practitioners frequently have to incorporate new knowledge and slough off old knowledge and skills that are no longer useful. This in itself is a fairly commonplace observation, but when the implications of the new knowledge are as revolutionary as they were in the transistor case, the process may be quite stressful. It would be pleasant if all knowledge change occurred in such small steps that the practicing engineer could stay abreast by reading a few articles and taking the occasional short course. In fact, changes of such magnitude may occur that the central problems the engineer confronts have to be reconceptualized and the design principles brought to bear have to be radically reconstructed. One may be obliged to accept complexity in components that one previously sought to simplify, or machines that were always regarded as single purpose may have to be designed to be multifunctional.
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 105 Changes of this magnitude can seriously disrupt established patterns of thought and practice. Friedel further suggests that the introduction of innovations having the revolutionary potential of the transistor may not be completed until a new generation of engineers has replaced the older generation that worked with the displaced technology. This suggestion is not based on any presumption that the new generation of engineers will be in any absolute sense better educated than its predecessors. Their chief advantage will consist of not having internalized the patterns of thought and behavior associated with the older technology. Harsh as this suggestion appears in human terms, it may simply reflect at the level of the engineering work force a pattern that is visible at the corporate level. Jordan Baruch has pointed out that not one of the major vacuum tube manufacturers succeeded in becoming a major supplier of solid-state devices, and Edward Constant has also noted that no airplane engine company that built piston engines also built jet engines of its own accord. Can anything be done to prevent this displacement of active and useful engineers in mid-career? One option, that of somehow blocking the introduction of innovations with revolutionary implications, clearly is unacceptable. It appears, therefore, that engineers need to be encouraged to prepare to adapt to such changes when they occur. Erich Bloch has noted that there are certain industries that are forced through a cycle of technological obsolescence every few years and that these are the industries that have learned how to survive in the face of rapid change. He has also suggested that leaders in industries that are challenged by rapid technological change must accept responsibility for ensuring that their employees, including their engineers, are prepared to adapt. It must be assumed that everyone who once acquired the knowledge and skills required to do his or her job is also capable of acquiring new knowledge and skills when that becomes necessary. Employers, and especially large corporations, should make the new knowledge accessible to their employees, partly because they have an obligation to do so and partly because they know best what is needed. The resources available in universities may prove useful, of course, since many universities already support extensive programs for continuing education. But universities are broadly concerned with the production and transmission of knowledge and hence can be rather slow in responding to the educational needs created by innovations in industry. The general lesson that Friedel's study teaches is that certain types of technical changes oblige us to intervene in the "natural" process of
