I’ve written or edited several books about the history of technology and science. Each was extraordinarily fun to write and each posed challenges in terms of gathering evidence and creating narrative. And, at some point in writing every one of them, I promised myself and anyone who would listen that if I could finish it, I would never write another. I haven’t kept the promise. The research for my books has taken me to some great places: from museums in Venice to observatories in Chile and Hawaii to rifling through boxes of correspondence in Silicon Valley. I am currently at work on a couple of new book projects which are mentioned below.
README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (The MIT Press, forthcoming in late 2025)
In order for computers to become ubiquitous, people first had to become interested in them, learn about them, and take the machines seriously. A powerful catalyst for this transformation was, ironically, one of the oldest information technologies we have: books. README offers a literary history of computers and, more broadly, information technologies between World War II and the dot.com crash of the early twenty-first century. From the electronic brains and cybernetics craze of the 1940s to the birth of AI, the rise of the personal computer, and the Internet-driven financial frenzy of the 1990s, books have proven a durable and essential way for people to learn how to use and think about computers. By offering a readable half-century of bookish history, README explains how computers became popular and pervasive.
Greedy Science: Creating Knowledge, Making Money, and Being Famous in the 1980s (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025)
This collection of essays, written by more than a dozen leading historians of science (and co-edited by myself and Michael D. Gordin) looks at the intersection of science, money, fame in the 1980s. It is, in many ways, a sequel to the 2016 collection Groovy Science which explored science and the counterculture in the 1970s. The authors argue that greed was an ever-present and expansive trait of science during this time, encompassing a host of behaviors such as covetousness, acquisitiveness, rapaciousness, and conspicuous consumption.
Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (The MIT Press, 2020)
Despite C. P. Snow’s warning of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to create visually and sonically interesting multimedia works. This new artwork emerged from corporate laboratories, artists’ studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses and it involved some of the biggest stars of the art world. Less famous and often overlooked were the engineers and scientists who contributed time, technical expertise, and aesthetic input to these projects. This book restores the role of technologists to the foreground, explores the era’s hybrid creative culture, and recounts the many ways that artists, engineers, and curators have collaborated over the past fifty years. Making Art Work shows that the borders of art and technology over the past half century are anything but fixed. Just as striking is that the original ideals and ambitions that animated the 1960s-era art-and-technology movement have not faded. Today, creativity, collaborations, and interdisciplinary research are promoted by academic and corporate leaders alike. What emerges is a long history of artists and technologists who have repeatedly built new creative communities in which they can exercise imagination, invention, and expertise.
In 2022, I discussed my book on the podcast Peoples and Things.
Recent reviews of Making Art Work are here and here and here.
Some extended discussions of the book and its relation to art, technology and culture are here and here.
Making Art Work was a 2021 finalist for a PROSE award in the “Art History” category.
Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and the American Counterculture, co-edited with David Kaiser (The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
This collection of essays challenges the idea that the counterculture was anti-science; discussion of it is here along with a review in Nature.
The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton University Press, 2013).
Like the title says, Visioneers is about the community of scientists and engineers who, from the 1970s to the 1990s, worked to overcome limits - planetary resources, energy sources, even life itself - by proposing plausible (if not-yet-realizable) ideas for space colonies and nanotechnologies. Fundamentally, it’s a book that explores radical ideas of futures made possible via new technologies. As I define it, a “visioneer” is a person who has some sort of science or engineering background; has a particular (and often all-encompassing) vision of the future; and works to build prototypes, public support, and patronage to achieve it. I find “visioneer” to be more concrete category - one that is based on actual people doing specific things - than alternative terms like “sociotechnical imaginary.” Visioneers was challenging to research and write but I believe the result sheds light onto a particular arena of activity that some engineers and scientists engage in.
Winner of the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize, History of Science Society, 2014
Winner of the Eugene M. Emme Award, American Astronautical Society, 2013.
Keep Watching the Skies! The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age, (Princeton University Press, 2008).
When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, thousands of ordinary people across the globe seized the opportunity to participate in the start of the Space Age. Known as the “Moonwatchers,” these largely forgotten citizen-scientists helped professional astronomers by providing critical and otherwise unavailable information about the first satellites. In Keep Watching the Skies!, I tell the story of this network of pioneers who, fueled by civic pride and exhilarated by space exploration, took part in the twentieth century’s biggest scientific endeavor.
Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambitions and the Promise of Technology, (Harvard University Press, 2004).
Every night, astronomers use a new generation of giant telescopesaround the world to study phenomena at the forefront of science. Giant Telescopes tells the story behind the planning and construction of modern scientific tools, offering a detailed view of the technological and political transformation of astronomy in the postwar era. Besides exploring how and why scientists embraced the promise and potential of new technologies, it also considers how these new tools affected what it means to be an astronomer and do science.
Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft, (Ashgate Press, 1999).
My first book - based on my dissertation research (1991-1996) - presented Venetian glassmaking from a consumer’s perspective using a rich array of material culture.