Technology and Culture

454 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE that is still with us. Sonnenberg points out that smog has caused more deaths in the last fifteen years than boiler explosions ever did. Undoubt­ edly in the early days pollution was regarded as more of a nuisance than a serious health hazard, but people certainly paid a good deal of attention to it. Attacks on the smoke nuisance began to appear long before the age of steam, around 1300, when coal became a common fuel, and early regulation of the steam engine was often as much concerned with smoke as with explosions. All kinds of approaches to the problem were tried: investigating commissions; regulations governing fuel, com­ bustion, and height of chimneys; prize contests to stimulate invention of smoke-consuming devices; appeals to public spirit—all without notice­ able progress. The lesson that I see in this piece of history—if it is permissible for history to teach a lesson—is that it takes a painfully long time for a soci­ ety to learn how to cope with the evils associated with technical prog­ ress, and that the devising of politically acceptable and effective social agencies for determining and implementing safety policies is a more difficult achievement than a scientific understanding of the evils. People learn slowly that they cannot rely for public safety on the self-interest of owners or the prudence of operators, and that human failure must be anticipated by fail-safe logic. The achievement of safety, Sonnenberg also wants to say, is a joint product of science, technology, industry, and government. The book is paperbound and printed by offset from typewritten copy, so that it is not easy to read. It has an excellent sixteen-page bib­ liography, but alas! no index, so that all this useful detailed information is practically irretrievable. Lynwood Bryant* A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (1133-1304'). Edited by Robert E. Schofield. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966. Pp. 415. $13.50. From painstaking searches of archives in Europe and America, Robert E. Schofield has drawn together in this volume 180 carefully selected letters, mostly written by Joseph Priestley to his colleagues and friends. With these Schofield has provided a self-portrait of Priestley as a scien­ tist, compensating for the fact that in his own memoirs Priestley dwelt mostly on theological matters and did not provide much information about his scientific activities. The letters begin in 1765, when Priestley was carrying out his earliest known experiments in preparation for writing his History of Electricity. They continue through all of the important phases of his career: the years 1768-73, when he was making the transition from electrical investigations to the experiments on vari­ ous kinds of airs which produced his most important discoveries; the • Professor Bryant, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written studies on the early history of the internal-combustion engine. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 455 period 1773-80, when this work was one of the leading factors in the emergence of a new chemistry; the decade 1780-90, when Priestley found himself defending a system under attack; and the final years when he carried on with his experiments under difficult circumstances on the frontier of Pennsylvania. The result is a charming picture of Priestley’s scientific personality. The letters convey very well the spirit in which he carried on his work, his attitudes toward and relationships with his colleagues, and the impor­ tance to him of communicating his ideas to them. They record the change in tone as his confidence and stature grew, and then as he drifted gradually into an isolated position. A fascinating aspect of his personal­ ity which they reveal is his propensity for informing numerous friends and other chemists of his discoveries as soon as he had them. The variations in the details and manner of presenting the account as he repeated it suggest the nuances in the rapport which he had with differ­ ent correspondents. Such letters also emphasize, as Schofield notes, his eagerness to convey his achievements to the scientific world without waiting for the formal channels of communication. With respect to the way in which Priestley’s scientific ideas and...