Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (6 page)

Even, or especially, with results like these, skaters’ views of the new technique are divided. Already before Nagano, one American official compared using clap skates to doping and corking bats, and a U.S. team member proposed changing to a mountain bicycle with studded tires. But afterward, Nick Thometz, the program director of U.S. Speedskating, acknowledged that his team would need
to learn the new style. According to Schenau, the new style of coordination “requires its own type of perfection.” To defenders, clap skates mainly permit a more efficient but still demanding technique; to critics they substitute strength for skill. Interestingly, the speed skaters who depend most on bursts of power, male sprinters, are the only ones loyal to conventional equipment, believing
the new skates impede explosive starts. As computer-assisted design (CAD) makes it possible to retool the mechanical components more and more easily, they too may switch. Equipment and skating style will probably continue to coevolve for better or worse. Meanwhile, the clap skate illustrates a paradox: what athletes at first rejected as too difficult now is criticized as too efficient.
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In bowling, the great innovations have been chemical rather than mechanical; dimensions of alleys, pins, and balls have changed little. But the techniques of the game have been transformed. While a strike is every bowler’s goal, games among proficient bowlers once were won by converting spares, much as golf matches have been decided by putting rather than driving. More
than a thousand different leaves, or combinations of pins,
may appear after the first ball hits, and serious bowlers once spent years learning the proper approaches to configurations with names like the bucket and the washout.
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For nearly three quarters of a century, bowling’s technology and body skills were stable, founded on the control of a hard rubber ball rolling on a surface of any of
several kinds of wood finished with lacquer or shellac, and striking solid maple pins. By the 1970s, equipment began to change. To compensate for their new protective plastic coatings and to save on the cost of wood, pins now had hollow zones that some said made them livelier despite American Bowling Congress (ABC) test results to the contrary. New finishing materials gave the lanes a smoother surface,
and some bowlers began to soften their balls in dangerously flammable solvents to increase the balls’ gripping power. This discovery led to a series of balls that could be thrown to hook more strongly than ever as they reached the pins. The ABC set hardness standards, but new cover stock materials, such as urethane in the 1980s and reactive urethane in the 1990s, have continued to make balls
more powerful. Meanwhile, with the help of CAD software, engineers have designed complex internal systems of weights for balls that let them hook as sharply as an older style of outlawed ball doctored with metallic salts, the “dodo ball.” (Polymers and ceramics were unimagined as core materials when antidodo rules were written.) Because reactive urethane balls can retain more of their energy as they
slide through their early trajectory and roll down the lane, they use their superior grip to generate a powerful, sharp hook in the pocket between the 1 and 3 pins. Perfect 300 games, once uncommon even for the leading pros and rare achievements for other strong bowlers, have increased about a hundredfold from the days of the hard rubber ball. In 1997 a college sophomore rolled the first perfect
900-score three-game series ever sanctioned by the ABA. But many of the pros who had developed the strongest hooks with conventional balls were dismayed to find that reactive urethane balls were letting lower-scoring colleagues catch up. In fact, “crankers” had to unlearn their formidable deliveries, and some leading pros had to retire from the tour.
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As with the clap skate, a new generation
of competitors forced the established champions to adapt their technique to the new equipment. Not all succeeded. But to many veteran instructors and pros, the loss has been collective as well as individual. In their view the urethane ball threatens the game’s integrity by upsetting the historic balance between strikes
and spares. “With today’s balls,” says one, “you don’t have to make a good
shot to knock down 10 pins; you pay $160 [for a bowling ball], hit the pocket, and you strike.” And another observes that “[l]ots of dedicated people practice. But most of them practice just to strike,” instead of studying how to achieve spares as well.
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While the cultivation of some techniques has declined in the United States, other techniques have flourished as Asia has embraced the game.
In the 1980s, players in Taiwan began to develop a radical new style of delivery. Using balls typically weighing eleven pounds rather than the sixteen pounds customary for Western men, they gripped them from above and used their thumbs to impart a rapid backward horizontal rotation to the ball, strong enough to continue down the lane like a top, scattering the pins with explosive force. (In the epilogue
we will consider the thumb as the Cinderella of the hand.) With proper spin, hitting the 1–3 pocket precisely becomes unimportant. A ball aimed at the head pin can miss by as many as seven boards on either side, giving the spinner or helicopter ball a fourteen-board strike zone rather than the Western three-board zone. Some Taiwanese bowlers wager on their ability to roll “perfect” strikes,
not just toppling all the pins but removing them from the deck. This technique of the lighter Asian players not only has surprised Western pros but has taken world titles, first when You-Tien Chu of Taiwan won the AMF World Cup in Mexico City in 1983 and most recently in November 1998, when Cheng-Ming Yang, also of Taiwan, won the AMF Bowling World Cup competition in Japan. Unlike other bowling
techniques, the Taiwanese method is unaffected by the many variables of lane conditioning. In fact, as one of the Taiwan coaches put it, the style was “developed in self-defense” against lanes “swimming in oil.” It is also considered easy to teach.
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The helicopter shot does not depend on the sophisticated cores and advanced cover stocks developed by ball manufacturers, although some new balls
must be especially well suited to it. As a technique, it could have been introduced a hundred years ago. Obscure bowlers may have experimented with it, but it does not appear in Western bowling histories. Lighter balls have always been legal and available, yet even smaller male bowlers, many of whom could probably have improved their game by using them, shunned anything less than the sixteen-pound
maximum. Asian athleticism, with its tradition of lightness and maneuverability, was a more promising cultural tradition.
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Skaters, rowers, fencers, and bowlers form networks of athletes, coaches, manufacturers, and engineers. Technique changes as knowledge is shared within this diverse community. Innovation in technique, like other invention, demands the power to see
beyond daunting early problems and to visualize ultimate benefits. Successful experimentation can be painful. Ying-Chien Ma, a pioneer of the helicopter shot, suffered serious pain and needed seven wrist-related operations. His injuries illustrated the autonomy and power of technique in Ellul’s sense, its frightening ability to take over life and endanger health. But Ma’s success signifies the creative
and autonomous side of technique, the power of athletes to overcome pain in upsetting the orthodoxies of their sport. Neither negative nor positive unintended consequences are the full story.
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Technique is crucial for the evolution of technology. As the economist Paul Romer has observed, a change in athletic technique often paradoxically requires a temporary decrease in speed as the fine points
of the new style are worked out. Many inventions in their early stages underperform the best conventional equipment; early medieval cannon were distinctly inferior to the well-developed stone-hurling trebuchet. It takes many hours of practice to determine the potential of any device or technique. Romer’s point is that landmark inventions are only the beginning of a process of refinement in which
many people invest time. We can take his idea further to say that technologies and techniques coevolve. Inventors cannot foresee the uses and abuses of a major invention. Especially in the world of electronics, inventors are often unlike the people who will apply their ideas. In a survey of computer professionals, the most frequently endorsed maxim for software interface authors was “Know the user,
and you are not the user.”
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We all know how technologies can rebound against their inventors when others acquire them and learn or improvise techniques for deploying them. The Maxim gun, favored by European powers for suppressing colonial resistance in the nineteenth century, begat the rugged and portable Kalashnikov brandished by guerrillas and terrorists, and the automatic-weapons arsenals
of gangsters and narcotics traffickers, in the twentieth. In our day, deviant techniques flourish, from the shattering of spark plugs to produce ceramic fragments (“ninja rocks”) to break into automobiles in the United States, to the “social engineering”—usually confidence
tricks—that criminals use to obtain computer passwords and personal identification numbers for fraudulent electronic transactions.
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If it is a truism that any security hardware can eventually be defeated by criminal ingenuity, there should be a corresponding maxim that almost anything can be made better by user experimentation. There is a benign and positive side to the unintended. Inventors also can scarcely foresee the changes in values that will give new meanings and techniques to what they have produced. Some of the most
common things in everyday life reflect not only the ingenuity of the original producers but the experiences of generations, sometimes millennia, of users. When we use simple devices to move, position, extend, or protect our bodies, our techniques change both objects and bodies. And by adopting devices we do more. We change our social selves. In other species, natural selection and social selection
shape the appearance of the animal. In humanity, technology helps shape identity. Our material culture changes by an unpredictable, dialectical flux of instrument and performance, weapon and tactic.

E
VOLUTION HAS GIVEN
us an enormous advantage over other animals, and a corresponding burden. We are specialized in applying techniques to our needs, and in transmitting techniques more complex than those of other organisms. While the complexity of many but not all artifacts has grown over the millennia—and we will see in the next chapter that
some artifacts of “simpler” societies actually reflected skills more sophisticated than those of contemporary industrial peoples—the human capacity for complex techniques appears to have been present from the outset.

Just as techniques (including the hardware now customarily called technology) were essential from the origin of our species, so they are present in human life from birth. Of course,
there are prenatal techniques, too—not only the variety of practices followed by prospective parents but also technologies for assisting in conception and diagnosing and monitoring conditions of the fetus. Like other techniques, these probably will have unforeseen consequences for the shaping of the human body. Genetic manipulation may ultimately reduce the frequency, at least in certain populations,
of genes responsible for certain birth defects. It may also promote other genes that are culturally held desirable, governing body type, appearance, and intelligence test scores. Neither most advocates nor most opponents of these techniques have fully thought out the implications of calling them “engineering.” Civil engineers—as Henry Petroski has argued in a series of books—advance through
mistakes and even disasters, but misdesigned people cannot be rebuilt as failed bridges, collapsed tunnels, and failing roads may be. At the very least, in vitro fertilization may actually
help increase the incidence of infertility, as we have seen that genetic testing can inadvertently spread genes for hereditary diseases while preventing their expression in a given family. Over the coming century,
for an increasing number of couples, parenthood might require medical assistance. Already one in six American couples receives some kind of fertility treatment. It is easy to imagine that this proportion might increase.
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As common as prenatal tests have become in industrial societies, they have a small effect on the human body compared with those of an older form of intervention in our development:
bottle-feeding. For the majority of people in the developed world, infant formula and its physical apparatus of bottles and nipples is the first technology. And its effects, if usually subtle, are lasting.

Human nursing is different from the lactation of other mammals, even of other primates, because (as part of the price of our hyperdeveloped
brains) the human infant is uniquely dependent. Other primate infants are born as vigorous little individuals who know how to look out for themselves. They need no help in finding and latching on to the mother’s nipple. Other primate mothers do have infant care skills to learn, and second infants are easier for them, but by the time they are ready to nurse they have learned what they need, and the
infant does the rest. By contrast, the human infant needs its mother’s body not just for nourishment and shelter but for immunological protection; it has been called an “external fetus.”
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Once more, human performance requires technique, as breast-feeding advocates are the first to acknowledge. Being a baby can be hard work. While sucking is a reflex, an infant must use sixty-three different nerves
to suck, swallow, and breathe, according to lactation specialists, and about one in ten has some difficulty. Maternal behavior, too, has to be learned. New mothers are not innately prepared for many contingencies: insufficient or excessive breast milk, cracked nipples, and a great variety of infant behaviors. In the words of an African infant nutrition activist: “We make the mistake of believing
breast-feeding is natural, an intuitive thing. But it’s a learned behavior passed on from generation to generation. In the old days, the older women would sit there and encourage and tell you to do this and that—it was part of education.” Now breast-feeding advocacy organizations and lactation consultants have taken the place of grandmothers.
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Humanity has a long history of feeding arrangements
for mothers
unable or unwilling to nurse their own children. Of course, the great majority of mothers did so, if only because there was no available alternative. In Greece and Rome the affluent often employed wet nurses, free as well as slave. Wet nursing was a thriving profession in the Middle Ages, a specialty of whole districts like the Casentino and Valdarno valleys in Italy, whence young
married women and their husbands traveled to the Florence fairs to advertise their skills in verse. Wet nursing remained the rule for most Europeans who could afford it well into the eighteenth century. But religious and medical authorities were turning against it. The Catholic church vigorously promoted maternal breast-feeding not only to assure infant health but, modern historians have argued, to
limit women’s growing cultural and political influence. And the authors of the
Encyclopédie
, the multivolume summary of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, advocated maternal nursing as a duty that they also hoped would reduce the public influence of women. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century medical writers all over Europe extolled the natural benefits of lactation for mothers and
infants and warned of the dangers to bodily mechanisms from frustrating the natural flow of milk. And romanticism continued what religion and rationalism had begun: the women of the American antebellum South were among history’s most fervent believers in maternal suckling, on the grounds of natural duty, despite what became the postbellum cliché of the slave wet nurse.
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Bottle-feeding did not
begin in the nineteenth century. There is a long history in many societies of feeding infants animal milk or cereals. The practice was most common in cold regions with abundant and relatively easily preserved animal milk, but it was not confined to them. Feeding vessels for infants have been found at sites as much as six thousand years old, and the Romans used artificial nipples. In late medieval
and early modern Europe, feeding technology was the norm in areas of Scandinavia, southern Germany, northern Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and Russia. The historian Valerie Fildes has found evidence of centuries-old debates on artificial feeding and breast-feeding. In Upper Bavaria, peers denounced a woman born in northern Germany as swinish and filthy for attempting to nurse her own baby. Their aversion
appears to have no local environmental basis; the reasons for it are unclear. And the physician of Louis XV of France reported no ill effects on the health of Muscovites and Icelanders from their custom of letting the smallest babies suck on tubes placed in containers of milk or whey. A twentieth-century demographer has confirmed the effects of artificial feeding, in Bavaria at least. After
a higher rate of infant
mortality in the first year in districts where artificial feeding was usual, there was a far lower rate in the next four years of childhood, possibly because the surviving one-year-olds had developed resistance to organisms in their diet. Artificially fed children also remained with their parents, avoiding the medical problems associated elsewhere with wet nurses.
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The
industrial revolution, then, did not introduce the feeding bottle. Whether to absorb milk surpluses or (consciously or unconsciously) to control family size through higher infant mortality, many earlier communities used crude expedients. But they were the exception. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought three changes that ultimately made many and sometimes most infants in Europe and North
America dependent on artificial food: new devices for milk delivery; new scientific and medical attempts to equal the quality of breast milk; and the rise of national and international dairy food markets. These turned out to have serious unintended consequences for both infants and their mothers.

None of the feeding devices for infants before the nineteenth century
had a chance of becoming a technological and cultural icon. Many of the problems were functional: the vessels must have been difficult to keep clean. Some were technical: there was no satisfactory artificial nipple. (When infants were not presented directly with the neck of a ceramic, pewter, or tin vessel, or with a cow’s horn punctured at the tip, they were given a piece of stitched parchment with
a bit of sponge inside. Nipples were also made of wool, chamois leather, linen, and even alcohol-preserved cows’ udders. The preferred material for nipples in early-nineteenth-century America was silver, not simply for display but for chemical stability.) But the greatest problem was economic. Feeding devices had to be hand produced at great expense. Since elite families often employed wet nurses,
the market for feeding technology had to be limited. Still, inventors began to patent new styles of feeding bottle. The first in America was the Lacteal of Charles Winship in 1841, shaped like a human breast, contoured to fit on the mother, and claimed to persuade the baby that the milk was hers (“a useful deception,” in the inventor’s words). But the delivery system was literally a technological
bottleneck: the child was to suck on a sponge-stuffed deerskin teat.
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Four years later, the real revolution in infant feeding began. Elijah Pratt of New York, using Charles Goodyear’s new vulcanization process,
patented the first rubber nipple. A series of patents followed, becoming a wave in the late 1860s and early 1870s—a sign of the market’s growth. These devices in turn helped make possible
more successful containers; one of these, the o’Donnel bottle patented in Great Britain in 1851, was popular in the United States between the Civil War and the 1890s. It featured a flasklike bottle with a long rubber tube that had a nipple on the end. The tube was prone to bacterial contamination. A British alternative design of the 1860s, called the Mamma, had a feeding end modeled, probably
of rubber, from a human breast and secured to the glass body, shaped vaguely like a whale, with an elastic band. Toward the end of the century, other models appeared that could be strung over an infant’s cot for overnight feeding on demand or deposited on its chest with small legs.
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While the U.S. Patent Office had recognized a minimum of 230 feeding bottles by 1945, by the 1920s most had taken
the form they have
today: wide-mouthed containers—originally, they were made of glass— simplified for sterilization and topped by rubber nipples. (The hygienic movement and wide acceptance of the germ theory did not eliminate other variations, including figural novelties shaped like shoes, turtles, and rabbits.) Early in the past century, rubber formulations were developed that avoided the cleaning
problems, stiffness, and offensive taste and odor of the nineteenth-century product. Meanwhile, an automatic glassblowing machine invented by Michael J. Owens of Toledo, Ohio, and beginning commercial operation in 1903 was, by 1920, able to produce nearly 13,000 bottles daily, significantly reducing their cost—and also assisting distribution of bottled milk. (Even in the 1880s and 1890s, bottle
production was only semiautomatic, and the lip had to be added by hand.) In 1919 the Corning Glass Works patented Pyrex, a heat-resistant glass that had grown out of its work with railroad signal lights; Pyrex nursing bottles appeared in 1922. Sterilizable, wide-mouthed bottles enhanced the hygienic aura of artificial feeding and remained the familiar standard until after World War II. Pediatricians
and hospitals welcomed disposable, formula-filled bottles like the plastic Mead Johnson Beniflex of 1962 and later glass models, which replaced the unpopular and sometimes careless hospital formula technicians. Following early experiments with built-in thermometers, some plastic bottles for home use now change color to reflect the temperature of their contents.
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