Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 369 are worth mentioning. First, if a thirteenth chapter had been possible, it would have been fascinating to have one location, urban or otherwise, provide the focus for a more extensive cartographic study. Although this was done in a limited sense with certain cities (e.g., using Palmatary’s 1857 Bird’s-eye View of Chicago, or several San­ born insurance maps of Louisville, Ky.), the lacing together of the map varieties by illuminating social and physical changes in one place where those varieties abound would have been outstanding. The second criticism is that more complete information about reproduced maps was sometimes lacking. How large are the images, and where are all of them located? Although an appendix provides sources of General Land Office maps, sometimes the reproductions lack an indication of location. These minor faults should not demean a major effort that clearly succeeds where so few have gone before. From Sea Charts to Satellite Images merits use, applause, and a follow-up volume for those whose appetites are only whetted by this collection. Jeffrey Cody Dr. Cody is a visiting assistant professor in Cornell University’s Department of City and Regional Planning, where he teaches courses related to historic preservation planning and American and Chinese urban history. U.S. Coast Survey vs. Naval Hydrographic Office: A 19th-Century Rivalry in Science and Politics. By Thomas G. Manning. University: University of Alabama Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 202; notes, bibliography, index. $21.95. Thomas Manning has fashioned an account of the bitter rivalry between the Coast (later, Coast and Geodetic) Survey and the U.S. Navy’s Hydrographic Office for control of marine science and its associated technologies from the Civil War to the 1920s. The preem­ inent federal scientific agency until the 1870s, the survey continued its tradition of scientific excellence thereafter. But the American people turned their attention away from the sea to the interior, and the survey (now the National Ocean Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) had to fight for its life as Congress responded to the triple problems of how to employ the navy’s officers and ships in times of peace, how much of the nation’s resources to devote to science, and how solidly based in scientific theory a bureau’s practical work ought to be. It did not help that control of the government kept shifting between Democrats and Republicans after 1885. Skilled staff lost their con­ centration on the esoteric problems of geodesy and gravity when their employment became uncertain. Despite the international fame that C. S. Peirce’s work brought the survey, he was too self-directed to survive as a federal employee. Yet (though Manning fails to mention 370 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE it) these quadrennial shifts of political control led Congress to fashion a civil service system to replace patronage. Marine science and geodesy surely suffered in the short term; they probably gained in the long. No one has explored the primary sources more thoroughly than Manning. In this account of the politics of American science after the Civil War, with its copious detail and scant interpretation, the persis­ tent reader finds echoes of current themes. Jimmy Carter wasn’t the first president to seek an outsider, rather than an expert in the relevant science and technology, to lead this scientific agency. That honor goes to Grover Cleveland, who made his friend Frank Thorn, lawyer and journalist, the survey’s head in 1885 when he forced out Julius Hilgard, allegedly a drunkard (p. 69). The Democrats of the 1880s showed the same reverence toward the private sector and suspicion of public expenditure that the Republicans of the 1980s did. And Manning has mined nuggets of pure gold from the archives. After Hilgard, following two decades as second-in-command, became superintendent of the survey in 1881, he reimbursed himself through a scam with the survey’s engraver for the champagne party that launched a ship (pp. 24-25). “Uncle Joe” Cannon, Republican of Illinois, stalwartly defended civilian science in general and the survey in particular as he rose to power in the House of Representatives (pp. 51-52). (There...