The two main contributions to this issue explore the postwar world of computing: David Brock’s article “From Automation to Silicon Valley: The Automation Movement of the 1950s, Arnold Beckman, and William Shockley” and a book forum on Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Brock’s account broadens our understanding of the early history of computing and semiconductors by explicating their connection to the period’s preoccupation with factory and process automation – a preoccupation that motivated, brought together and shaped the interests of two central figures in the development of Silicon Valley, Arnold Beckman and William Shockley. In this vein, the article contributes to that well-developed literature on the intersections of science, technology, the state, and business in US mid-century and Cold War contexts.
As such, too, it provides a contrast with Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries, in which the larger geopolitical frame of the Cold War in the 1960s and early 1970s provides critical context for understanding how cybernetics and technocratic thinking became integral to Salvador Allende’s vision for a socialist Chile. In highlighting the integral role of technology, Medina’s analysis recalibrates standard political histories of Chile and the Cold War (especially, the US’s active antagonism toward Allende) and makes clear the transnational flow of cybernetic ideas and experts that informed Chile’s experiment in political–economic governance. With essays by Ron Kline, Michael Dennis, and Tiago Saraiva, and a response by Eden Medina, the forum explores the multiple historical and methodological questions posed by the book.
Not least, the issue includes an Images, Technology, and History essay by Charles Kostelnick, “Visualizing Technology and Practical Knowledge in the Encyclopédie’s Plates: Rhetoric, Drawing Conventions, and Enlightenment Values.” As a specialist in the history of visual communication, his essay is particularly instructive in how conventions of drawing help situate the Encyclopédie as a specific enlightenment project and in a longer trajectory of visual practice.
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