The Winners
Laudatio
In the 2023 appeal, 15 papers from scholars working in 8 countries had been presented. The subjects deal with a number of interesting questions in several fields: geology in Panamá and the Anthropocene; sexuality and medicine; techniques of pharmaceutical measurement; experimental cities; technoscience and environment; technologizing the languages; fire alarm and politics; restoring medieval buildings in the XIX century; early aviation techniques in France; agriculture technology in Andalusian heritage; inequalities in Soviet institutions; early aviation in Mexico; electricity as a promise in early XX century Spain; co-innovation in the former German Democratic Republic; spinning machinery and the mass production in China.
Given that the papers presented were published in peer-reviewed journals and books, the standard of all of them is very high. Thus, the committee has had actual difficulties to select the best among the papers presented.
In 31 July 2023, after the corresponding deliberations, the committee has decided to award ex-aequo two papers, that would share the 2023 prize; it has also decided to give two honorarium mentions.
Thus, the ICOHTEC Maurice Daumas Article Prize 2023 (the thirteenth) is awarded to:
Rebecca L. Jackson, “The Uncertain Method of Drops’: How a Non-Uniform Unit Survived the Century of Standardization”, Perspectives on Science, vol. 29, no. 6, 2021, pp. 802-841. DOI 10.1162/posc_a_00395
ex-aequo with:
Jan Hua-Henning, “Opening the Red Box: The Fire Alarm Telegraph and Politics of Risk Response in Imperial Germany, 1873–1900”, Technology and Culture, Volume 62, Number 3, July 2021, pp. 685-708. DOI 10.1353/tech.2021.0104
Rebecca L. Jackson is at present PhD Candidate in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at the Indiana University, USA. She has an education in fields of mathematics and history and philosophy of medicine. Her focus in this paper is the striking use of “drops” as measurement in the field of pharmaceutics from the XIX century. The text is as good as it is well researched. In the tradition of Siegfried Giedion, she follows to feed on the small or neglected aspects of scientific civilization – in this specific case, the importance of the drop as a unit of measurement. Her analysis is mainly based on professional journals but she is able to study a professional practice.
Jan Hua-Henning is assistant professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Duke Kunshan University, China. In 2022, he got his doctorate at the University of Toronto. Previously, he studied at the University of Darmstadt. His paper analyses the fire alarm telegraph installed in Frankfurt in the second half of the XIX century, under liberal local administrations. The network of telegraph covered all the quarters of the city, whatever their social level, including, at the same time, a system of social control. The author deals with a non-common subject in the history of cities and risk and open the way to a new perspective of urban development in Europe and the States in the XIX century.
The committee would like to give two honorary mentions to:
Pete Soland, “Flying machines as a measure of Mexico. National Reconstruction, the Cultural Revolution, and the Maturation of Mexico’s National Aviation Program 1921-1945”. In J. Justin Castro; James A. Garza (ed.) Technocratic Visions. Engineering, Technology, and Society in Mexico, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022, p. 157-180.
Szilvia Gellai, “Minnesota Experimental City, oder: Zukunft als Experiment”, Technikgeschichte, Bd. 88, 2021, H. 1, p. 43-77. DOI 105771/0040-117X-2021-1-43
Pete Soland is Assistant Professor of Latin American and World History at the Department of History and Anthropology, Southeast Missouri State University, USA. His paper is devoted to the examination of early Mexican aviation as a focal point of social, political, and cultural tensions. This unique viewpoint follows the narrative of various influences and is based on the reexamined evidence and discussions surrounding aviation.
Szilvia Gellai is a postdoc researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria, Department of German Studies, Modern German Literature / Media Theory. Her paper deals with the “Minnesota Experimental City Project” which was developed and promoted between 1966 and 1973 and aimed to work out a universal prototype for solving urban problems. On the basis of a convincing theoretical approach, the author analyses the origins and development of this project and the failure to put it into reality.
PRIZE COMMITTEE
Antoni Roca-Rosell (Chair)
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
antoni.roca-rosell@upc.edu
Mirjam Brusius
German Historical Institute London
m.brusius@ghil.ac.uk
Guillermo Guajardo Soto
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
guillermo.guajardo@unam.mx
Bertrand Guillaume
Université de technologie de Troyes (UTT), France
guillaume@crans.org
Eike-Christian Heine
Historical Institute of the Universität der Bundeswehr München
eikechristian.heine@googlemail.com
Laurent Heyberger
Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard
laurent.heyberger@utbm.fr
Sarah Qidwai
Universität Regensburg
sarahaqidwai@gmail.com
Thomas Schuetz
University of Stuttgart
thomas.schuetz@hi.uni-stuttgart.de
Liliia Zemnukhova
Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany
l.zemnukhova@gmail.com