2 Fluxes

A creative engineer is an inventor, a species of artist. He’s no organization man. . . . Impose conformity on him and he must cease to be creative.1

J. H. McPherson, 1965

The trenches had been dug decades earlier. But never before had such colorful and caustic volleys been exchanged.

Sitting on one side of the battle line was a “rough, uncouth fellow wearing boots and an open flannel shirt”—the Engineer. Having no manners nor wanting any, his fleeting familiarity with the arts and literature was “limited to cheap movies” and “comic books.” Defiantly “crass, materialistic, insensitive,” the only intellectual tools he allegedly needed were “a transit and a slide rule.” Career victories usually happened when he “pushes jobs through by beating up his men with his bare fists.”

Staring at him from across the divide was the Artist. A “pale, ascetic dreamer,” the “arts man” was devoted to modern art, music, and literature, talking “incomprehensibly about all three” while nursing a crippling addiction to books. Possessing “pinkish” politics and “forever in need of a haircut,” neither practical skills nor scientific knowledge were a burden to bear. What professional accolades he received came primarily via his considerable “gift of gab.”2

These caricatures appeared courtesy of a study conducted in the mid-1950s by the American Society for Engineering Education. It was one in a steady succession of reports produced after World War II by professional societies and universities about what knowledge and skills novice as well as experienced engineers needed to possess. These concerns grew in urgency as technology became one of the key arenas for fighting the Cold War. Engineering and business leaders worked to redesign university curricula, adding classes and programs that would reflect the new technological needs of the national security state as well as a rapidly changing industrial landscape. Engineering schools gradually replaced traditional, often hands-on training with increasingly abstract “engineering science” courses that made students learn more basic physics, chemistry, and math instead of professional skills. By 1965, a student’s roster of classes would have looked dramatically different from what Frank Malina and other engineers-in-training had learned just a few decades earlier.3 Associated with this was engineers’ ongoing preoccupation with their professional status. Engineers continued their struggle to be accepted as the professional equal of scientists instead of rough-hewn louts who acquired their expertise on a gritty job site and not in some clean and tidy lab.

Economics and demographics helped drive engineers’ pursuit of reinvigorated educational goals. New industries such as aerospace and microelectronics stimulated a near-desperate need for engineers’ talents and helped catalyze their community’s growth. The majority of these technical experts worked for a handful of America’s biggest corporations: Ford, General Electric, and AT&T.4 Over time, young engineers often graduated from building and maintaining large technological systems to managing them, moving from the shop floor to corporate offices.

With more and more young engineers being trained in narrower and more specialized topics, engineering leaders and educators asked how they could best construct a sufficiently well-rounded education. An increasingly rigorous engineering curriculum left little room for electives, so plans for integrating the arts and humanities presented a persistent challenge. And yet the hope was that the arts and humanities could provide more than just a “cultural veneer” and actually serve a utilitarian purpose by enhancing engineers’ creativity.5 But what exactly was a “creative engineer”?6

As they earnestly wrote reports addressing these questions, engineering educators came into close quarters with a debate that, in a somewhat different guise, was already roiling outward from the lecture halls of Cambridge and Oxford to the pages of highbrow literary journals. In October 1956, the British scientist-turned-novelist C. P. Snow publicly voiced his concerns about the widening gap between humanists and scientists, noting that they shared “little but different kinds of incomprehension and dislike.”7 Less than three years later, Snow took the stage at the Senate House in Cambridge to give the annual Rede Lecture. His talk, titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” offered a broader diagnosis of the problem. The inability of literary scholars and scientists to understand and communicate with one another was not just an intellectual loss, Snow claimed, but something that threatened the ability of modern states to address the world’s problems.8

Throughout the 1960s, “the two cultures” existed as both a phrase and a commonly understood set of ideas. It provided a reliable reference point for artists, art writers, and engineers to justify art-and-technology collaborations and situate them in a larger framework. And, as we’ll see, it proved so remarkably durable that traces of Snow still appear in twenty-first-century reports and articles about the nexus of art, technology, and science.

Snow’s diagnosis, derivative from the outset but possessing great persuasive power, appealed to engineers and scientists who sought to redesign their approaches to educating tomorrow’s technologists. Even as it ripened into a bland phrase of the sort commonly found in commencement speeches—its vagueness was a strength—the idea of two incommensurate intellectual cultures suggested a need for introspection and improvement. When Snow’s argument migrated to the United States, it lost its original British baggage and assumed a more simplified form. In the process, it became a shorthand term for something both more anodyne and yet also reflecting some uniquely American concerns. Snow’s argument, if not his exact phrasing, was routinely adopted by engineering educators, especially as they reimagined what an engineer should ideally know and do. Coupled to this were assumptions about the working world of engineers employed in industries made prosperous by the Cold War.

Snow’s Storm

Despite considerable differences in physical appearance—jokesters wisecracked that Snow’s “well-rounded” nature wasn’t limited to his intellect—Frank Malina and C. P. Snow shared some biographical features. Both grew up in lower-middle-class families and attended second-tier schools (University College, Leicester for Snow and Texas A&M for Malina) before moving on to elite institutions for graduate training (Cambridge and Caltech, respectively). Both men had their views toward science and the humanities shaped by their experiences in the 1930s. Like Julian Huxley, Snow and Malina considered science and engineering as hopeful endeavors with the power to address social inequities and economic mismanagement. Likewise, in the 1930s, both men made significant contributions to research (although Snow’s forced retraction of his claim to have artificially synthesized vitamin A left lasting professional and emotional damage). Just as Malina decided to become a professional artist, in the 1930s, Snow turned his energies toward a career as a novelist.

After World War II ended, Snow continued writing fiction but also began a new career as a well-placed civil servant, shuttling between bureaucratic appointments in Whitehall and British industry. In the 1950s, Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers” series received widespread attention from critics, winning awards and becoming book-of-the-month-club selections. Its eleven installments followed the life of Lewis Eliot—Snow based the character on himself—as he climbed from provincial beginnings to a law career before becoming a Cambridge don and influential senior adviser. With books like The New Men, which appeared in 1954, Snow used fiction as a vehicle to describe the industrial world of the Atomic Age and the role of liberal technocrats in managing it.

When C. P. Snow—soon Sir Charles and, later, Lord Snow—started speaking about the divides he perceived between the two cultures, he joined a dialogue that had been under way in his country for some time. In the nineteenth century, for example, biologist Thomas H. Huxley and poet Matthew Arnold debated the merits of a scientific versus literary education, discussions which were as much about British social and institutional conceits as intellectual values.9 Given his multiple careers (“By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer”), Snow believed this was a conversation—albeit not necessarily an original one—to which he was uniquely suited to contribute.

Although his 1959 Rede Lecture bestowed international recognition on Snow, he already had been presenting his ideas on the two cultures for several years. Earlier articles in the New Statesman, the Atlantic Monthly, and Nature gave Snow the opportunity to practice his argument’s basic premise. In his lecture, his diagnosis sharpened as he derided literary intellectuals as an insular community of pessimistic Luddites responsible for Great Britain’s national decline. In contrast, it was scientists—Snow famously cast them as optimists with the “future in their bones”—who could spread progress and prosperity at home and abroad. Snow claimed that the gulf between the scientific and literary cultures did not just deprive the two communities of intellectual enlightenment. As more nations sought independence and decolonization, political leaders would need technical and scientific experts to guide and assist them. But with the British civil service dominated by those with a backward-looking literary orientation, Snow claimed the Soviet Union, where scientists and engineers were more influential, won an advantage.

Part of the power of Snow’s phrase lay in its binary nature—the image of two cultures was easily grasped—and this aspect remains what is most widely referenced today. But regardless of how scientists and literary intellectuals were separated from one another by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” both communities, Snow noted, shared an antipathy for engineers and their knowledge about the “industrial society of electronics, atomic energy, [and] automation.”10 Despite their neglected status, Snow, whose grandfather had been an engineer, argued that technologists had made Britain’s rise to world dominance possible. Still, Snow said, scientists and humanists alike remained “dim-witted about engineers and applied science,” failing to see the challenges engineers tackled as “intellectually exacting” problems with their own “satisfying and beautiful” solutions. The result was a “snobbism” that relegated engineers to “second-rate minds.” Throughout the first wave of art-and-technology activity, art critics and journalists likewise often expressed similar surprise that engineers possessed any special knowledge and skills which demanded its own form of creativity.

Snow’s diagnosis sparked a storm of heated objections, ad hominem attacks, and retaliatory articles, the most spectacular of which came from literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis.11 His essay’s subtitle (“The Significance of C. P. Snow”) suggests the level of personal antagonism the debate rose (or fell) to. In order to discredit Snow’s claim that he understood both cultures, Leavis dismissed Snow’s accomplishments as a novelist. Like the chasm between the two cultures itself, the Snow-Leavis volleys drew deeply on long-standing divides in British society when it came to class, education, and authority.

Seen another, equally nationalistic way, the fight was also about the role of scientific and technological expertise in postwar Britain with Snow largely cheering for the technocrats.12 Besides transforming Snow into a well-known public intellectual, his lecture (and the rancorous debate it provoked) turned “two cultures” into a metonym. The phrase offered an abbreviated and efficient, if not always precise, way to signal a more complex set of concerns while acquiring an “occult force,” one writer noted, “comparable to that of ‘Strength Through Joy’ or ‘The Great Society.’”13 As a result, throughout the 1960s, Snow’s phrase acquired considerable interpretative flexibility, making it a universal solvent into which all sorts of concerns, anxieties, and remedies could be mixed.

Although Snow’s lecture provoked an immediate sensation in Great Britain, initial reactions in the United States were more muted. It received no notice, for example, in the New York Times until a lengthy review of Snow’s ideas, now converted into a modest-size book, appeared in January 1960. J. Tuzo Wilson, a Canadian geophysicist, gently rebutted some of Snow’s claims while demonstrating, pace Snow, his own familiarity with contemporary literary culture. Just as there were some scientists whose contributions were uninspired and second rate, were there not also some humanists “alive to the terrifying speed of change” that modern science and technology caused?14 Nonetheless, Wilson concluded that “no one has yet refuted” Snow’s basic argument.

In the months that followed, Snow’s diagnosis, now transplanted to the United States, generated an avalanche of discussion. Columbia University made the book required reading for all freshmen while then-senator John F. Kennedy praised Snow for his insights on a pressing “intellectual dilemma.” American book clubs began to offer The Two Cultures to their members.15 As a result of this exposure, what was originally formulated to diagnose to specific British conditions started to diffuse into American public discourse. Speaking of the two cultures at an American engineering conference, however, became something quite different than debating in the pages of high-brow British magazines.

The different significance Snow’s phrase acquired in the United States can be traced, in part, to renewed attention, bordering on obsession, that policy makers, industry leaders, and researchers gave to science and technology circa 1960. A prime catalyst for this was the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 and the accompanying anxiety that the United States trailed its Communist challenger in technological prowess. Sputnik galvanized American efforts to reform engineering and science education as Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. This massive infusion of funds, coupled with the needs of the space race and the arms race, dramatically increased the number of young people entering fields like physics and engineering.16 Consequently, discussions of the two cultures that engineers and scientists had in the early 1960s are best imagined with an insistent Sputnik-generated “beep-beep-beep” chirping in the background.

In the years following Snow’s original lecture, articles and letters agreeing with, referencing, or rebutting his claims appeared in American science and engineering journals. Scientific American, for example, ran a lengthy piece by historian Asa Briggs who expressed some agreement with Snow’s general argument while challenging Snow’s binary reductionism.17 Reviews found in Physics Today, Nature, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists struck similar notes.

Engineers may have felt the thrust and parry of the debate even more acutely than their scientist colleagues. The distinction in public discourse between engineers and scientists remained elusive and indistinct. And, although Snow had clearly praised the importance of engineers (his “applied scientists”), when the two cultures discussion migrated to the United States, this point was frequently lost in the flurry of articles Snow’s talk precipitated. It’s not hard to imagine many engineers believing they were not much welcome in either culture or that, in the stereotypical view held by some people, they didn’t have a professional culture. Ironically, Snow himself perpetuated the image of the uncultured engineer reluctant to challenge the social order. His 1954 novel The New Men juxtaposed liberal-minded physicists with the “people who made the hardware,” judging the latter as those most likely to be “conservative in politics, acceptant of any regime in which they found themselves, interested in making their machine work, indifferent to the long-term social guesses.” The engineers, Snow broadly claimed, “buckled to their jobs and gave no trouble” while it was the scientists who were the “heretics, forerunners, martyrs, traitors.”18

Despite university classes that increasingly focused on teaching complex scientific principles—solid-state physics, quantum mechanics, aerodynamics, and theories of jet propulsion all became part of the Cold War engineer’s curriculum—the standard bearers for science in the 1960s remained physicists. Consequently, one can sympathize with engineers who may have wanted to join the two cultures debate, as they faced two challenges. One was reminding people that they too were a part of Snow’s broader “scientific” culture. This was relatively easy compared to the second task: demonstrating that they also were creative, liberally educated professionals. “Humanizing the engineer” eventually emerged as a potentially valuable outcome, which might happen when engineers collaborated with artists.

Of course, one rebuttal to Snow’s sweeping claims was that neither scientists nor humanists were a monolithic group. The same, of course, can be said for engineers. Let’s consider a single yet especially significant segment of their community. By the mid-1960s, almost 20 percent of America’s engineering community worked primarily on electronics of some sort (up from about 10 percent just fifteen years earlier) as Cold War military needs and the growth of computer and microelectronics industries drove market demand for their skills.19 The translation of new laboratory breakthroughs, such as the transistor and the integrated circuit, into an array of commercial products spurred the need for even more electrical engineers. Enjoying considerable job security, electrical engineers displayed the most enthusiasm and interest when it came to joining art-and-technology collaborations in the 1960s. Likewise, the technologies that artists wanted most to experiment with—such as lasers, computers, complex lighting and sound systems, and holography—were exactly the topics in which electrical engineers had expertise. So how these technologists anticipated and reacted to the general diagnosis of a “two cultures divide” assumes a central importance.

In February 1962, an editorial in the leading journal for electrical engineers noted that “we . . . are finding ourselves drawn, with increasing frequency, into discussions of the interrelationships of science and the humanities.”20 Whether such a gap actually existed—and whether it was the responsibility of engineers to “humanize” themselves or, instead, for humanists to learn more about technology and science—were topics engineers rightly had to debate. Nonetheless, the essay—which cited C. P. Snow, Aldous Huxley, and playwright William Saroyan—concluded that, as responsible professionals, electrical engineers were obliged to recognize “value judgments” and “social responsibility” as they carried out their work.

The letters engineers wrote in response likewise drew on literature, philosophy, and classics so as to challenge conventional stereotypes of their profession. Opinions on Snow’s diagnosis varied widely. The “body scientific,” one person noted, bore the responsibility for “closing the gap between human cultures” in part because of the new dangers it had unleashed on the world. Another respondent, bringing the question down to less apocalyptic terms, argued that the public first needed to see that “scientists and engineers are people too.” As such, some are “well-informed on politics, art, literature . . . some are dull, some are clever, some are shrewd, some naïve.” But where scientists were freer to speak publicly, engineers, who more often than not were employed by companies, “were expected to remain silent” on issues that might affect their employers. Other readers resorted to engineering analogies, claiming that humanist-scientist comparisons created a “whole darn system [going] into wild oscillations” that could only be fixed by “inserting a corrective feedback circuit.” Opinions aside, all of the letters agreed that some problem existed which needed attention. “Does anyone, really, seriously, think that we can do without a dialogue between the scientists and the humanists?,” one reader asked. While thoughts about the two cultures sometimes soared to planes of abstraction, engineers, electrical or otherwise, saw the education of future engineers as one of the best places to build bridges between cultures and create more “humanized engineers.”21 Indeed, as electrical engineer James Lufkin argued, while citing both former Harvard president (and professional chemist) James Conant and poet Mark Van Doren, “liberally educated engineers” were the community best suited to communicate with both scientists and the educated public.22 But the question remained of how exactly a new community of well-rounded technology experts should be built.

Humanizing Engineers

The dialogues that engineers were having with one another and with experts from other disciplines were part of a much more expansive conversation about American education in the postwar period. In 1943, James Conant, for example, commissioned a prominent study, published two years later as General Education in a Free Society, which proposed that all students receive a holistic liberal education that would foster creativity and more flexible, open minds.23 The Harvard report—a published version sold over 40,000 copies—emphasized a need to balance coursework in the humanities and sciences so as to avoid the sort of noncommunication and specialization later seen as pervasive in Snow’s two cultures. The search for an ideal mix of classes took on especial significance at schools such as MIT, which after World War II, transformed itself from a polytechnical school oriented more to the needs of industry into a modern research-based university that, as one MIT president phrased it, was “polarized around science, engineering, and the arts.”24

The end of World War II marked a major shift toward the emphasis on “engineering science” in university education as complex mathematics and scientific theory were stressed. This contrasted sharply with the prewar situation when students would learn skills like drafting and take courses in design. As a result, prewar engineering students were quite possibly more attuned to the skills of visual artists than their postwar colleagues. After 1945, the change in curricular focus toward abstract scientific theory proved especially true for electrical engineers. Frederick Terman, an electrical engineer who, as a dean and then provost at Stanford, led the school’s rise to national prominence, described how the training of future electrical engineers would increasingly emphasize basic science “at the expense of traditional engineering subjects.” A cartoon that accompanied his article shows a young engineer with a slide rule exclaiming “I can calculate the deflection of a beam!” His engineering professor responds, “Who cares?”25 In Terman’s (influential) view, this new generation of highly trained electrical engineers would occupy a position somewhere between “pure science” and “traditional engineering” and, once in the workforce, they should expect to work in collaborative, interdisciplinary environments.

Even as engineering courses were being redesigned to include more cutting-edge science, engineering educators were wrestling with how to also best insert more liberal arts education into an already crowded curriculum. Although C. P. Snow’s claim of a culture gap helped provide some rhetorical justification for these efforts, proposals to give the humanities greater prominence in engineers’ university training emerged years before his ideas became prominent. One of the more notable efforts, based on extensive site visits and interviews, was carried out in the mid-1950s by the American Society for Engineering Education. It emphasized that producing young engineers who appreciated the liberal arts meant discarding stereotypes while also encouraging engineers to see the arts and humanities as valuable in their own right. Hoping to do more than just make engineers “acceptable in polite society,” the humanities could enhance engineers’ understanding that “every professional act has human and social consequences.”26 Statements such as these acquired greater urgency toward the end of the 1960s, when student activists, opponents of the Vietnam War, and critics of large, impersonal, and destructive technological systems increasingly labeled engineers as amoral technocrats beholden to the corporations they served. Such charges insinuated themselves into the art-and-technology movement, as we’ll see later.

Education experts who wanted to see engineering students enrolled in more economics, management, or sociology courses—subjects which claimed, at least, some patina of quantitative rigor—faced an easier task than those encouraging studies in literature and the visual arts. But, traditionally, engineering was a highly visual activity with design standing as a central component of what a practicing engineer actually did. Moreover, talents in drafting and drawing, as well as the ability to envision and represent objects in space, had long been part of engineers’ critical skill set. So, how did humanities and engineering faculty at a prominent research university like MIT imagine the visual arts could be further woven into the education of future technologists?

Like Harvard, MIT embarked on a major study to help chart a new course in the Cold War era. Ironically, the committee, chaired by chemical engineer Warren K. Lewis, excluded humanists even though one of the study’s recommendations was closer integration of the humanities into the undergraduate curricula.27 But the visual arts were given short shrift, an omission that precipitated, in the best tradition of academic institutions, more follow-up studies. MIT’s administration created the Committee for the Study of the Visual Arts, which was led by leading art history professors and directors of major East Coast museums. Consultants included Rudolf Arnheim, an art critic and perceptual psychologist, and Josef Albers, a former Bauhaus painter. Joining them was Hungarian-born Gyorgy Kepes, another artist with a Bauhaus connection. Throughout his career, first at the Institute of Design in Chicago and then as a professor of the visual arts at MIT, Kepes sought to reconcile art and science by creating forums for discussion and practice. His efforts culminated, as we’ll see later, with the establishment of a new center at MIT where established artists could collaborate with engineers and scientists.

John E. Burchard, dean of MIT’s humanities and social sciences school, released the result of the committee’s efforts in 1957. Beginning with a quote from British philosopher and critic G. K. Chesterton—“art consists of drawing a line somewhere”—Burchard stated MIT’s first major task was deciding where that line should be drawn with respect to the education of future engineers and scientists. The report observed that too many people who graduated with university degrees were “visually illiterate.”28 Addressing this shortcoming certainly resonated with Kepes who had long promoted art as a means to “train the eye.”29 As Kepes wrote in his 1956 book The New Landscape in Art and Science (a work to which Burchard contributed a foreword) “vision is itself a mode of thinking.” It was this characteristic that MIT sought to instill in its students. While research in engineering or science “makes sense by an appeal to reason,” art “grows from a reaction to something seen or felt.” Fostering a robust visual arts program, the report claimed, would coordinate “eye and hand to qualify the theoretical by the empirical.”30 (MIT’s motto, after all is Mens et manus, i.e., “mind and hand.”) In other words, the arts might serve as an effective bridge across disciplinary divides.

MIT’s School of Architecture—Kepes’s institutional home—had already expressed interest in developing some sort of “experimental arts program.” Starting in 1957, for example, MIT students could take courses in art history as well as try their hand at art making. To lead MIT’s studio arts program, Kepes recruited painter Robert Preusser. Initially, the school’s students, for whom “Picasso is more an enigma than Einstein,” presented him with a challenge.31 Rather than trying to teach students basic skills like sketching or pastel work, Preusser decided to play to their inherent strengths by drawing on their existing fields of study. Electrical engineering students, for example, took tiny circuit boards and figured out how to print photographs on them while those studying metallurgy could experiment with metal casting.

Even in this one, rather brief, report, it’s possible to sense the tensions inherent in efforts to promote the visual arts at a research-oriented institution in the midst of massive expansion fueled by Cold War-derived defense grants and contracts.32 Were these courses to be an entertaining diversion for already overworked students? Or did they carry their own intrinsic value, pragmatic or otherwise? Advocates for the visual arts often (and understandably) resisted the idea that their expertise existed only to humanize engineers or, worse, provide them with a patina of cultural sophistication. As Preusser later noted, he and his colleagues had to learn how to engage the minds of budding technologists “without diluting the essence of the art experience or encouraging a superficial dabbling.” The goal was not to convert engineering students into artists but rather to showcase how technology, science, and art all relied on “imaginative thinking and inventive procedures.”33 Later, when advocates for the art-and-technology movement focused their attention likewise on practicing engineers, similar beliefs and goals undergirded their rhetoric and rationales.

These tensions between instrumentalism, pragmatism, and idealism appear in other lengthy reports that piled up like so many bricks on the desks of education reformers throughout the 1960s. Although these might not reference the “two cultures problem” explicitly, they didn’t necessarily need to. Building rapport between engineering, science, and the humanities had already been absorbed by educators and many practicing engineers as a goal worthy of pursuit (if indeed not easily attainable). For instance, Julius Stratton, an electrical engineer who also served as MIT’s president in the early 1960s, sprinkled references to the unhealthy bifurcation of the modern university into his speeches.34

The seemingly esoteric question of what university students should be taught also found its way into more widely read discussions about American society. In the fall of 1956, Simon and Schuster published the now-classic book The Organization Man. Authored by William H. Whyte, a writer for Fortune magazine, the book advanced the idea that the needs of large corporations had systematically stamped out individuality and creativity in favor of conformity. Whyte’s book stayed on the New York Times’ bestseller list for much of 1957, becoming an influential midcentury work of popular sociology.35

Whyte devoted a whole chapter, titled “The Practical Curriculum,” to the question of proper balance in university education. As he saw it, humanists and scientists alike were becoming marginalized by all the young people “studying to be technicians.” And when it came to educating these future engineers, Whyte stressed that, for many, the idea of having engineers learn more arts and humanities remained a controversial, even unwanted, goal. As evidence, he cited an article in Technology Review (a magazine, ironically, that MIT published) whose author argued for less, not more, liberal arts education. In light of Cold War threats from the Soviet Union, it claimed that “no silly humanities” should unduly burden engineering curricula.36 Whyte’s counterpoint was that denying engineers and scientists exposure to the liberal arts contributed to conformist thinking and, ultimately, led to Soviet-style collectivism. As Whyte painted it, the liberal education of technologists was both practical as well as patriotic.

By the mid-1960s, the national conversation regarding the “two cultures” had shifted from a phrase that conveyed a sense of crisis to something of a cliché. Much of the fury, if not the sound, emanating from two cultures debaters had dissipated. In its familiarity, something—maybe not contempt, but a certain whiff of condescension—emerged instead. Samuel Florman, a civil engineer who authored an impassioned critique of 1960s-era antitechnology sentiments, wrote, “All of us today are in favor of liberal education for engineers, just as we are in favor of motherhood and the American flag—instinctively, almost mindlessly.”37 However, even as intellectuals picked apart the stereotypes and simplicities of Snow’s original formulation, the goal of bridging cultural gaps and expanding educational vistas had become part of the landscape of engineering in the 1960s. Regardless of how flawed the two cultures as analysis might be, as a concept it offered art-and-technology advocates a useful touchstone. It also gave a rationale for those engineers who bravely decided to cross the cultural no-man’s-land and shake hands with artists. However—as we’ll see—once the first art-and-technology wave started gaining prominence, funding, and supporters, people from both sides of the two cultures stood up and challenged this rapprochement.

The Engineers’ Sensibility

In 1963, Time-Life Books launched a new book series called the Life Science Library. With C. P. Snow serving as a consulting editor, it explained modern science and technology to the general public and offered colorful illustrations of the people—almost always white men—who worked in these worlds. When it came to showcasing the work of physicists or molecular biologists, the series’ editors had a relatively straightforward task. There were many prominent discoveries and equally famous scientists to draw on for the slickly produced volumes. But when it came to describing the engineers’ profession, the editors found themselves facing a challenge. Who, exactly, was an engineer? There were no Albert Einsteins, Marie Curies, or Edwin Hubbles to serve as well-known reference points that would resonate for the average reader.

Time-Life’s volume The Engineer instead suggested technologists in the 1960s composed a vibrant community permeated by both confidence and a sense of crisis. Despite their essential role in (literally) building the modern world, the engineer remained an anonymous “blurred figure, his exact role imperfectly understood.” Delineating what engineers did was also perplexing. It was “difficult to determine where the scientist’s work ends and the engineer’s begins” as both “look alike, talk alike, worry over similar mathematical equations.” Even with their extensive training—described as “education without end”—many people still imagined the engineer as some “solitary boot-shod adventurer,” whose professional work consisted of “damming rivers and driving roads through the wilderness.” This stereotype endured despite the fact that most engineers worked “behind desks or in laboratories . . . with slide rules, computers, and microscopes.” Fitting no single mold, the engineer was “part scientist, part inventor, part technician, part cost accountant,” yet almost always a trained specialist in some narrow field.38

From popular books like this, which attempted to describe (and sometimes critique) the technologists’ working world, as well as their own writings and recollections, we can sketch a rough picture of the engineers’ sensibility. By this, I mean how engineers approached, engaged with, and experienced—in terms of concerns, pleasures, anxieties—their profession. The concept of a sensibility, usually reserved for discussing art and aesthetics, speaks to collective modes of viewing the world.39 What emerges is a consistent but sometimes internally contradictory ensemble of opinions that many engineers shared about themselves and their place in 1960s society. Appreciating the sensibility of engineers helps us better understand that more than a few of them were willing to step across cultural divides and collaborate with artists.

A variety of evidence, ranging from mass-marketed books like The Engineer to publications from engineers’ professional societies and the recollections and opinions of individuals, helps us recover a glimpse of this sensibility. While the specific concerns expressed over thousands of pages of articles and advertisements in venues such as Mechanical Engineer, Chemical Engineering Progress, and IEEE Spectrum are field specific, there is enough commonality that a representative picture emerges. Data from sociological studies, such as surveys funded by the National Science Foundation in the mid-1960s, helps fill in this picture.40

A critical component of the engineers’ world in the mid-1960s was confidence. Engineers displayed an overall sense of self-assurance, derived from prosperity and seemingly endless possibility, which contributed to their willingness to collaborate with artists. Engineers had solidly established themselves as upwardly mobile members of the middle class. There were almost one million engineers of all kinds working in the United States by the mid-1960s. Engineers represented the second largest segment of American professionals—only school teachers composed a larger community—and it was the most common occupation pursued by white-collar men. The Cold War’s technological needs coupled with the affluence of the 1960s gave engineers increased visibility, a sense of responsibility, and job security.

Those engaged with electrical systems and electronics engineering saw some of the largest gains in job growth and career opportunities. In 1950, manufacturers of electrical products and equipment employed something like 44,000 people, almost all of them white, middle-class men. This professional community grew about 8 percent per year such that, by 1966, some 160,000 electrical engineers practiced their profession in the United States.41 At the same time, the unemployment rate for electrical engineers was a miniscule 0.4 percent, about a tenth of the national average. The scores of advertisements for well-paying positions that appeared in professional magazines every month reflected this swell of confidence, as did student enrollments. In 1965, nearly half of MIT’s class of engineering graduates specialized in electrical engineering.42 In short, to be an electrical engineer in the 1960s was to join a booming professional community where economic opportunity and job prospects were plentiful.

A distinguishing feature of engineers’ college education and subsequent professional life was an increased emphasis on cutting-edge technical knowledge grounded in basic science. The basic curriculum in fields like electrical engineering was steadily infused with courses in circuit design and solid-state physics, while new electronic devices such as computers and lasers became subjects practicing engineers needed to know about. Stanford’s Frederick Terman predicted that electrical engineers would, reflecting their expanding intellectual world, eventually be called “electronics scientists.”43 Relative to counterparts in other fields, electrical engineers were among the best educated, being the most likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree and also most likely to pursue advanced degrees.

However, a corollary to engineers’ engagement with new electronic technologies, products, and applications was a perceived need in the community for continuing education and training. As IEEE Spectrum, the flagship journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, phrased it for its 150,000 readers, “Always a student!”44 There was, however, a darker side to this cheery-seeming pronouncement. As engineering became more science-based and infused with computers and methods of systems management, engineers worried that their technical knowledge might soon become obsolete. Ernst Weber, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) first president, claimed that the time in which an engineer’s knowledge lost about half its value had, by 1960, shrunk to less than ten years.45 There was considerable irony in this as engineers themselves were often blamed for a culture of planned obsolescence that marked Cold War America.

Continuing education, of course, was the “antidote for obsolescence” as were advanced degrees and attending conferences. Engineers were encouraged to keep up with the technical literature, a task that grew ever more challenging. In 1946, American organizations for electrical engineering published about 3,000 pages of material across three journals. Two decades later, the page count had shot up to 30,000 pages spread over forty-two increasingly specialized publications.46 To assuage engineers’ anxieties, corporate advertisements promised recruits the opportunity to learn new skills through continued education. “We won’t let an engineer become obsolete,” claimed Hewlett-Packard.47 Another firm likened engineers at competing companies to hamsters spinning on their wheels while their own employees were continually challenged by “one-of-a-kind problems.”48 Eager for variety and new experiences, a small cohort of engineers sought intellectual revitalization through means other than taking more night classes. Collaborating with artists gave them a chance to apply their skills in a new setting.

The surge of membership in the electrical engineering community was boosted by an influx of people from other fields, especially physics. This contributed to the ever-blurry distinction between science and engineering when it came to professional identity. But, with a few exceptions, it was a man’s world. Page after page of engineering magazines were illustrated with images of white men wearing white dress shirts and nondescript ties. The cultural processes through which engineering and technology became male-dominated domains had begun decades earlier. But, by the 1960s, the effects were systemic and some engineers found the results stifling. One survey of ten American engineering programs in 1964 showed that out of the nearly 20,000 students, only 175 were women. And, across the entire country, fewer than 2,000 women were enrolled in engineering departments and, statistically at the time, women had a relatively high dropout rate. Put another way—in 1960, the entire community of future women engineers could be comfortably seated in a large university lecture hall.49

This masculine world was reflected not just in statistics but in fiction. When Dell published Joseph Whitehill’s 1959 novel The Way Up, the paperback’s cover described the main character, Paul Mockley, as “the engineer in the grey flannel suit . . . capable of handling everything—but women.”50 Central to its plot was an anomaly, a female coworker—a “woman in a man’s shoes”—whose presence at the electronics factory where they worked together challenged Mockley until romantic currents flowed. Based on images of the engineers’ workplace as depicted in professional magazines and advertisements, it’s quite possible that collaborating with a woman artist might have been the first time that many male engineers had the opportunity to actually work with someone of the opposite sex. Seen more broadly, collaborating with artists offered engineers a chance to encounter greater diversity than they typically found at the office or factory.

If engineering in the 1960s was largely a white man’s world, it was also a militarized one. Engineering journals were replete with articles and advertisements featuring military systems that companies like Motorola and Hughes Aircraft contributed parts and expertise to. Ads from General Dynamics, for instance, boasted about the sophisticated electronics that the F-111, its newest fighter-bomber, carried. Poignantly, even as engineers encountered these advertisements, artist James Rosenquist finished another interpretation with a mural he titled F-111. The eighty-six-foot-long painting, finished in 1965, fused a sleek image of a menacing looking aircraft with scenes of American consumer goods and a rising mushroom cloud. Just as the F-111 interposed itself in Rosenquist’s painting, images of submarines, satellites, radar dishes, and missiles appeared with an almost relentless frequency in the magazines engineers read in the mid-1960s.

In keeping with engineers’ longstanding concerns about their professional status, in December 1964, the establishment of a National Academy of Engineering was announced. Based in Washington and operating in parallel with the century-old National Academy of Sciences, the new organization was seen both as a honorific group and a delivery system for policy advice to the government. The founding of the National Academy of Engineering signaled that engineers were professional partners, with knowledge and skills that overlapped with their scientist colleagues, in serving the country’s economic and security needs. After decades of laboring in the shadow of scientists, the community of engineers had arrived.

Or had it? To read engineers’ professional journals is to enter a mildly schizophrenic world. On one hand, the community’s fortunes were positively booming as jobs were plentiful and the economy was robust. Prominent efforts like the space program touted the importance of engineers’ labors to the public. But, relative to scientists, engineers still felt marginalized and anonymized.51 When the press lauded progress made in launching rockets, developing nuclear power, or desalinating water, engineers often complained that it was scientists who received the credit.52 After watching television coverage of the Gemini 10 flight in 1966, a scathing letter went to CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite protesting how scientists’ work was praised “without mentioning the contribution of engineers.” CBS staff resorted to etymology and pulled from the “twelve-volume Oxford” to justify their word choice, claiming scientists and engineers were both “knowledge producers.” This response failed to satisfy the executive director of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers who noted that such a fine distinction was likely lost on the “millions of ‘little guys’ who watch TV” but didn’t read the Oxford English Dictionary.53 To add insult to injury, university-trained engineers—some holding advanced degrees—were still regularly conflated with less educated technicians who carried out routinized tasks and maintenance.54

Industry employed about 70 percent of all American scientists and engineers, a fact that made university-based researchers an anomaly, not the average. Nonetheless, on those infrequent occasions when engineers and scientists working in industry were considered, the normative baseline was still provided by their university-employed counterparts. The view from the ivory tower of engineers, and industrial research in general, was both patronizing as well as misinformed.55 This picture was further distorted by the preference journalists and writers gave to university-based researchers, a trend exacerbated by the relative reticence (perhaps prompted by concerns about security or corporate secrecy) of engineers and industrial researchers to describe their working worlds. As a result, academics and the general public alike based whatever vague images they had of engineers on unreliable information. Similar issues and tensions later arose in the art-and-technology movement as art writers were often at a loss to understand what they did or to recognize technologists as artists’ creative partners.

One element engineers correctly understood as an obstacle in their quest for enhanced status and distinction as a profession stemmed from the relationship they had with their employers. It was assumed that their place in private industry restricted their intellectual freedom as their managers sought conformity, not creativity. This, at least, was the view suggested by William Whyte, who devoted a full three chapters of The Organization Man to capturing the stunted life of the “organization scientist.” Whyte described, for instance, how “The Organization”—corporations, federal laboratories, and even university departments—were trying to “mold the scientist to its own image.” Gone were the days in which research was done by “the lone man engaged in fundamental inquiry.” Instead, Whyte argued, industrial managers and other administrators wanted to “rationalize curiosity” and marginalize individual expression.56 An example of how teamwork, not individual genius, was desired is seen in a documentary film made by Monsanto Chemical Company. As it showed young men in a lab, “No geniuses here,” the voice-over said, “just a bunch of average Americans working together.” As Whyte depicted it, the Organization Man was a team player who managers steered toward collaborative projects with specific goals. The push for conformity was, Whyte implied, a broader drift toward Soviet-style organization, a stark warning from a book published at the peak of the McCarthy era.

Scientists and engineers presumably encountered this pressure to conform years before they joined the ranks of industrial researchers and system tenders. The boom after World War II and then, again, after Sputnik, affected the ways in which core courses like physics were taught to young scientists and engineers as class sizes soared at American universities. Teaching efficient and repeatable methods of calculation in an assembly line manner became a dominant pedagogical style.57 A sense of these Fordist-inflected teaching techniques can be also be seen in Time-Life’s The Engineer. In a section profiling students’ experience at MIT, a large photo captioned “A New Crop of Engineers” shows hundreds of largely identical students crammed into a gymnasium for an exam. With latecomers overflowing into the bleachers, it could be read as a gloomy image of nascent Organization Men about to enter a world of project-driven, team-based corporate research where their individual creativity would be quashed.

There is, however, another interpretation. Some engineers liked, even wanted, to be part of collaborations. Throughout the 1960s, company advertisements in engineering journals depicted teamwork not as a disturbing and distorting trend, as Whyte saw it, but as something potential employees would view as desirable. Obviously, such images can’t be read as a direct statement of engineers’ sensibility. But, given as they were designed to recruit new talent, such advertisements indicated what companies and advertising firms imagined engineers wanted from their professional environment. And this message differed markedly from the anti-Organization Man jeremiads people like Whyte presented.

These advertisements depicted teams and group-based activity not as something to be avoided but an environment that engineers would find comfortable. For example, a 1968 advertisement from General Dynamics showed three men in dress shirts standing around a chalkboard. Titled “The day the Avionics boys ate lunch at 4PM,” it presented team-based problem solving as something so exciting that it caused the engineers to delay a meal.58 Similar ads showed engineering as a cooperative activity, highlighting how even newly hired engineers will “experience the sheer excitement of working on a team” as they solved technical problems together.59 A similar message from 1967 featured an engineer exclaiming that, at his company, “I’m not just a ‘part’ of a project. I am the project.”60 Team-based work didn’t automatically have to mean loss of individual freedom. Based on these advertisements and dozens more like them, engineers wanted to work collaboratively with people, including those from other fields and disciplines, on discrete goal-oriented projects. So, for engineers who joined formal groups like Experiments in Art and Technology, project-focused and team-based efforts were already familiar territory.

And what of claims that teamwork destroyed individuals’ initiative? Again, evidence from engineering magazines suggests a different reading. Recognizing that anxiety about being branded a conformist was part of many engineers’ sensibility, industry advertisements highlighted phrases like “original thinker” and “creativity.” A 1964 advertisement featured a cartoon school of identical fish, save one creature happily swimming the other direction, and exclaiming “Welcome to left field.”61 Xerox urged engineers to “be yourself” when sending their résumés so the company could spot “the creative, responsible, non-conformist.”62 Breaking stereotypes of conformity extended to one’s personal appearance. “Your beard won’t bug us,” claimed Friden, a company that made electronic calculators, “We’re looking for talent, not a smooth chin.”63 A significant fraction of the ads published in the mid-1960s implied (or stated directly) that future hires wouldn’t be company drones overseeing the routine production of devices, parts, and systems. Instead, newly hired engineers could expect to engage in novel research, some of it of their own design. For instance, General Telephone and Electronics asked electrical engineers, “Did da Vinci do the same old thing, day in, day out? Why should you?”64 Read against the grain of the Organization Man stereotype, some engineers received a different message—they could be part of a team and yet not become some conformist trapped on the corporate hamster wheel of routine projects.

Likewise, companies eager to recruit new engineers boasted of how their workplaces offered a “favorable environment” that “enhances creativity.”65 Electronics firm Motorola, for example, claimed its facilities were places where the engineer is “noted, not for his ability to conform—but to create.”66 In advertisements like these, imagination and creativity were depicted not simply as attractive features of a high-tech workplace but as an essential part of what it meant to be an engineer. One might even imagine corporate managers encouragement of creativity and collaboration as an instantiation of enthusiasm for Abraham Maslow’s psychological theories. His “hierarchy of human needs” acquired tremendous popular appeal in the 1960s and suggested that the workplace could become a place for individual self-fulfillment.67 Of course, it’s difficult to tell, given the nature of the historical record, whether engineers actually got to be creative, but the ideals of creativity and imagination were certainly presented to them as desirable. It correspondingly formed part of their larger sensibility.

The promotion of engineering as a creative act (and its practitioners as imaginative problem solvers) emerged out of broader discussions that psychologists, sociologists, and other academics started having a decade earlier. In reaction to fears of Soviet-style conformity, creativity became identified as a positive personality trait, like autonomy and tolerance, that could be both scientifically studied and promoted to help advance American values.68 Given the importance of science and technology in waging the Cold War, fostering more creativity—as opposed to genius, a trait often associated with antisocial tendencies, if not mental illness (think Vincent van Gogh)—was interpreted as an especially critical task. We might think of creativity as something to be produced and stockpiled, like ammunition, in the event of outright war.

By the time Sputnik was sweeping over the United States, academic studies of creativity were growing at a rapid rate.69 For example, the University of Utah sponsored a series of national conferences aimed at “The Identification of Creative Scientific Talent,” which the National Science Foundation funded.70 Among its wide-ranging topics were discussions about how to measure creativity, personality studies of scientists and engineers, and how researchers responded to working in industrial laboratories. The attendees were equally diverse, including a research manager for the Defense Department, several psychologists, and a young physicist turned historian named Thomas Kuhn (soon to become famous for his now-classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Not all observers were persuaded of the merits of such studies. An article by journalist Daniel Greenberg lampooned the pretensions of such conferences. Set up as a conversation between two scientists, one of them invites the other to a meeting, promising that it will be “not only interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary, it’s cross-interdisciplinary. . . . Two Cultures and all that stuff.”71 And, of course, not all engineers wanted to be creative nonconformists. But there were enough notable exceptions—what one recurring advertisement lauded as being “more than ‘just an engineer’”—to prevailing stereotypes of the uncultured boor or gray-suited Organization Man to create a sufficiently deep pool of experts willing to collaborate with artists.

In 1965, in an essay published in the unlikely venue of Mademoiselle, Susan Sontag dismissed Snow’s diagnosis that there were two separate creative cultures. Sontag castigated it as a “crude and philistine statement of the problem” that had gotten nearly everything wrong.72 Chief among Snow’s failings, she wrote, was his preoccupation with the differences that set literary and scientific cultures apart. In his determination to depict a binary, Sontag charged that Snow had failed to perceive a new and “potentially unitary” perspective—what she called a “new sensibility”—that a growing number of artists, engineers, and scientists all shared.

As Sontag saw it, this new attitude sprang from a “sense of ‘research’ and ‘problems’” that was “closer to the spirit of science” than “old-fashioned art.” A person’s ability to appreciate the artworks of Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, a jazz piece by Thelonious Monk, or a dance performance by Merce Cunningham was, she claimed, “comparable to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering.” Nonconformist in spirit and restlessly creative, this “new establishment” was already coalescing around polymaths comfortable with blurring the lines between art and technology. Just as engineers had become familiar with teamwork, Sontag saw the “role of the individual artist” who was “in the business of making unique objects” as increasingly anachronistic.

Sontag’s essay was steeped in technological imagery. She referred to art as “an instrument for modifying consciousness,” where the “analysis and extension of the senses” was paramount. She called the works that resulted from such processes “an experiment” that provided viewers with “new sensory mixes.” This newly emerging creative community was collectively embracing different ways of making art via methods which relied “profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment, upon science and technology.” By freely exploiting new materials, media, and devices not found in the artist’s traditional tool box (“industrial technology . . . commercial processes and imagery”), old boundaries that separated art from technology were being crossed and erased. What Sontag branded as the “one culture” possessed exceptional diversity. It included not only painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, and musicians but also “neurologists, TV technicians [and] electronics engineers.” One of these new professional hybrids, someone Sontag was certainly aware of, was engineer Billy Klüver.