Appended to A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 1880-1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980)

For a good many years before its one-hundredth anniversary there had been an interest at ASME in a history of the organization that would follow up Frederick Remsen Hutton's 1915 account. The idea for his book had originated in 1903 and the plan was to have it available for the Society's twenty-fifth anniversary in 1905. Hutton's successor, Calvin Winsor Rice, who had a deep interest in museums of the history of technology, wrote a brief article in 1930 for the fiftieth anniversary issue of Mechanical Engineering entitled 'Fifty Years of the ASME,' but that still left open the prospect of a more detailed study.

George A Stetson, editor of Mechanical Engineering, thought the sixtieth anniversary presented a suitable occasion for publishing a Society history, and in 1938 he drafted a memo suggesting the notion to fellow staff members Clarence E. Davies, Ernest Hartford, and Clifford B. Le Page. Stetson also pointed out that something should be done while those 'closest to the events' of Rice's long tenure as secretary were still alive. Clarence Davies like the idea, but he told Stetson his own belief was that the job should be done by 'someone outside the immediate scope of staff operation.' The obvious candidate was Joseph Wickham Roe, professor of engineering at New York University, an active member of the Society, author of a historical study of British and American tool builders, who had also written the life of James Hartness in ASME's biography series. But Roe decided not to take on the task, as did L.P. Alford, Henry L. Gantt's biographer.

That left Stetson, and when he retired in 1956, almost twenty years later, he started gathering materials for the work. Known to many in the Society as 'Prof' for his scholarly temperament, Stetson spent the next two years combing Council minutes and other records and he filled out thousands of the file cards with the name of every person, committee, and subject that was in any way related to the Society. It was an approach that would have daunted any but the most faithful and Stetson was only able to complete a hundred pages of the first draft of a manuscript before he died.

When O.B. Schier became a secretary of the Society, he hoped Colonel Davies might use his retirement to write a history, and a History Committee chaired by Lou Rowley was formed in 1961 to help advance the project, with the expectation that a book would be available by ASME's centennial in 1980. However, Clarence Davies found it difficult to work on the history of the organization he knew so well. The first problem was that he was so often called upon to do other jobs such as manage the United Engineering Center. But another handicap proved just as troublesome; he kept getting absorbed by historical incidents that side-tracked him from the main purpose. 'It will take me a bit of time,' he wrote Rowley, 'to be developed into a historian.' Davies came back to the task in 1967 when he was reappointed to ASME's staff, and Schier started up the History Committee again, with Rowley still in charge. Some progress was made in identifying subjects and categories of source materials, but the project bogged down once more.

Although no one could recognize it explicitly, the great stumbling block was that a complete, documented record of the Society's people and its programs--the sort of thing most institutional histories aimed at--was impossible to write. Davies intuitively sensed part of the difficulty when he reacted against an 'official' history because so many of them 'did not seem of much value.' But even if the extraordinary amount of detail that George Stetson's card file hinted at could have been managed in a book of reasonable size, the source materials on which to ground the enterprise were not there. For want of space and a program to preserve its historical resources, ASME's housekeepers had long before disposed of its membership records-one of the few sources of information about the rank and file-as they had also discarded the correspondence of its staff, of its elected officers, and any letters that came in from the membership. The financial records are incomplete and so are those of local sections, technical divisions, and of the Society's education and research activities.

Miscellaneous as they are, and derived mostly from the last thirty years, the records that remain still comprise a substantial amount and they proved useful to me. As the footnotes reveal, however, this study depended mostly on ASME Council minutes, its periodical publications, the Transactions and Mechanical Engineering, and upon those papers of Society leaders in archives and libraries or still in private hands. ASME records, whether published or not, often mask the truth in controversial matters. Yet Council minutes and the Society's publications are extremely good sources of information, as well as nice indicators of the organization's styles and rhythms. The personal correspondence of active figures in the drama, however, gives a substance and dimension to history that no other source provides. I used the papers of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Morris L. Cooke, for instance, to learn some uncomfortable facts that were not in the official record of that era, just as the Flanders papers gave me an enhanced regard for the sensitivity of many mechanical engineers in the 1930s to difficult human problems.

The connection between candid, original documents and balanced history is a fact engineers need badly to recognize. They are prone to care about the judgment of history, but the historians who make the judgments are dependent upon the documents they see. Clarence Davies complained, for example, that the complete truth of Morris L. Cooke's relations with the Society was never known. But, ironically, Davies saved practically none of his own records, which might have more evenly illuminated that episode in ASME's history, while Cooke preserved every scrap of his papers.

As part of the Centennial observance, the various subdivisions of the Society were encouraged to write their individual histories. Those kind of topically limited efforts have the potential to serve much better the legitimate desire for 'works of record' that a centennial stimulates. But local sections, technical divisions, and the other units of ASME are even more disadvantaged than headquarters concerning source materials of their history. Their officers, who come and go each year, imagine that New York keeps what they find unable to save for themselves. Almost inevitably, therefore, the chronological coverage of the histories they prepared for the Centennial was fixed by the memories of those who wrote them. That I nonetheless found many of them valuable is a testimony to the care with which many engineers tried to reconstruct their past.

The footnotes in this book have been mostly limited to the identification of the source of quoted material, since it did not seem appropriate to me to lumber them with the additional references suitable to a study aimed primarily at scholars. Similarly, it seems unnecessary to catalogue all those published works that bear on the history of engineering and its institutions. But I am happy to acknowledge my intellectual debts to the literature I found most immediately to the point. Three recent studies proved especially helpful in connecting ASME's history to related issues in America's past. Burton Bledstein's The Culture of Professionalism (New York: W.W. Norton 1976), gave me very useful insight into the ambitions that professionalism served and a better sense of the scale of that movement. The other two studies, although they approached the subject from substantially different perspectives, helped me to see ASME in an institutional context that to a considerable degree reflected industrial capitalism's drive for order and system. One was Alfred D. Chandler's jr's [sic] The Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1977), and the other was David F. Noble's America by Design (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1977).

I also drew heavily on two well established investigations into the institutional history of American engineering. Anyone interested in the history of mechanical engineering must read Monte A. Calvert The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830-1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press 1967), which I did again, to my benefit. And Edwin T. Layton's book The Revolt of the Engineers (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University 1967), remains the best analysis there is of engineering politics in America. Finally, there is a splendid through little-known essay by Eugene S. Ferguson that aided me a great deal. Entitled 'Sense of the Past: Historical Publications of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers,' it was written in 1974 when Ferguson was a member of the Society's History and Heritage Committee. Happily, it has been printed in Richard S. Hartenberg ed National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmarks (New York: ASME 1979). Characteristically, it is full of good information and wisdom.