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Emulation and Invention
Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1981).
In a 2001 obituary, Judith McGaw called Hindle's Emulation and Invention his masterpiece. I, on the other hand, find it a beautiful but confused text.
On the one hand, it seeks to demonstrate the historical coherence of the notion of "emulation," a term which he situates in apprenticeship practice. Emulation, Hindle shows, was the notion of copying exemplary models with the intention of going beyond the masters' perfection; not just copying, emulation was about aspiring to be like the best, and then better than the best. An apprenticeship spent in emulation would be concluded by the production of a "masterpiece," a piece of workmanship which presented something new born out of the old. Hindle draws attention to this notion of emulation as key to training artists as well as craftsmen, and holds up the ways of thinking it inculcates as key to the two major 19th C American inventions: the steamboat and the telegraph.
But Hindle has another agenda. He is worried about engineering education, and in particular about the balance of finger-knowledge and book knowledge being given to engineering students. On this front, his argument seems to be: we need to teach engineering students in the way that they were taught in the 19th C or we will not have great inventors like Morse.
He pulls together the two points with a long but superficial discussion of how the brain works, essentially saying that these inventors were able to do what they did because they were right-brain people, either by nature or by training, and that we need to encourage right-brain skills in training engineers. A weird way to end the book, to be sure.
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Ok, I've been sitting on this little essay for too long without posting it, and leaving it pending is holding me back from moving onto other works. So here's my summary.
Emulation and Invention has a lot of fantastic material on the lives of American inventors, but it left me confused as to it's intended audience and intended purpose, as much of the work being done in the text is not what I would consider 'historian's' work. This text also made me reconsider some of the kinds of questions I have been asking about the Clarks… because I worry that questions like "How did he do what he did," will end up mired in weird discussions about mental skills, vague and un-substaintiable connections, etc. Hindle made me think hard about how I want to be framing my questions on this project, although I haven't come up with good answers yet.
In a 2001 obituary, Judith McGaw called Hindle's Emulation and Invention his masterpiece. I, on the other hand, find it a beautiful but confused text.
On the one hand, it seeks to demonstrate the historical coherence of the notion of "emulation," a term which he situates in apprenticeship practice. Emulation, Hindle shows, was the notion of copying exemplary models with the intention of going beyond the masters' perfection; not just copying, emulation was about aspiring to be like the best, and then better than the best. An apprenticeship spent in emulation would be concluded by the production of a "masterpiece," a piece of workmanship which presented something new born out of the old. Hindle draws attention to this notion of emulation as key to training artists as well as craftsmen, and holds up the ways of thinking it inculcates as key to the two major 19th C American inventions: the steamboat and the telegraph.
But Hindle has another agenda. He is worried about engineering education, and in particular about the balance of finger-knowledge and book knowledge being given to engineering students. On this front, his argument seems to be: we need to teach engineering students in the way that they were taught in the 19th C or we will not have great inventors like Morse.
He pulls together the two points with a long but superficial discussion of how the brain works, essentially saying that these inventors were able to do what they did because they were right-brain people, either by nature or by training, and that we need to encourage right-brain skills in training engineers. A weird way to end the book, to be sure.
---
Ok, I've been sitting on this little essay for too long without posting it, and leaving it pending is holding me back from moving onto other works. So here's my summary.
Emulation and Invention has a lot of fantastic material on the lives of American inventors, but it left me confused as to it's intended audience and intended purpose, as much of the work being done in the text is not what I would consider 'historian's' work. This text also made me reconsider some of the kinds of questions I have been asking about the Clarks… because I worry that questions like "How did he do what he did," will end up mired in weird discussions about mental skills, vague and un-substaintiable connections, etc. Hindle made me think hard about how I want to be framing my questions on this project, although I haven't come up with good answers yet.
posted by inkandpen | 2:43 PM
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