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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
4 Comments:
Thanks for stopping by, Colin! I intend to post here more often than I do, but my reading is progressing slowly this summer.
out of curiosity, how do steamboats and telegraphs tie into the idea of emulation? did morse emulate... smoke signals? wow, that makes me sound really stupid putting it that way.
forgive me.
it reminded me of my student (a patent inspector) who tried to convince me that all inventions were merely products of laziness.
damn I wish I could say something helpful...
keep plugging girl.
k
The argument is that these inventors were trained as craftsmen or as painters, and that both trades were taught through systems of emulation. So this way of thinking was crucial to the eventual inventions.
The story about the telegraph is actually that Morse was travelling home from England on a steamship after having looked at some electrical inventions on his journey, and combined his experience with painting and printing with his knowledge of elecricity to design a scheme for transmitting words with electricity. The first method he designed for transmitting type was directly related to a printer's layout stick (I can't remember the right name-- the clampy thing that you compose lines of type on before putting them into the press) and the first machine he built was made out of a converted canvas stretcher.
Similarly, the men who designed the steamboat were all thinking about designs for other things-- some looked like native canoes, some used steam-driven poles to move through canals, and some used the ubiqitous wheel to move water. None were just 'out of the blue' inventions, however-- all involved taking an exemplary design and surpassing it, often by combining it with another exemplary design.
He also points out that those inventors who were most successful in both fields didn't concern themselves with the nitty gritty. For example, the fellow who built the first really useful steamships didn't bother himself over designing the best steam engine, but rather bought one ready-made from England, where they made the best steam engines. Similarly, Morse didn't have the electrical expertise to bring his invention to fruition, but rather than learn those skills, he hired people who had them.
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