Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (43 page)

Notes

1.
Michael M. Weinstein, “A Test You’re Apt to Flunk,”
New York Times
, March 28, 1993.

2.
Donald A. Norman,
The Psychology of Everyday Things
(New York: Basic Books, 1988); Henry Petroski,
The Evolution of Useful Things
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

3.
Dave Duehls, “Fit to Be Tried,”
Runner’s World
, vol. 28, no. 10 (October 1993), 26–27; Nicholson Baker,
The Mezzanine
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 16–18; Jerry Fodor, “The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanation,”
Journal of Philosophy
, vol. 65, no. 20 (October 24, 1968), 627–28.

4.
Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 290–91; Geoffrey Wolff,
The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990),
52; Ed Dentry, “Hikers Need Lessons in Tying the Knot,”
Rocky Mountain News
, August 1, 1997; Melvyn P. Cheskin,
The Complete Handbook of Athletic Footwear
(New York: Fairchild Publications, 1987), 203–4; Joe Ellis, “Lacing Lessons,”
Runner’s World
, vol. 21, no. 4 (April 1986), 59; Jane E. Brody, “When the Elderly Fall, Shoes May Be to Blame,”
New York Times
, February 26, 1998; Molly Martin, “Fine-Tuning
the Fit: It’s OK to Play with Your Shoelaces,”
Seattle Times
, March 19, 1995.

5.
Evelyn cited in Susan Swann,
Shoes
(London: B. T. Batsford, 1982), 20; Suman Bandrapalli, “Where Do Sneakers Come From?”
Christian Science Monitor
, December 1, 1998; Bill Taylor, “Not Fit to Be Tied,”
To r onto Star
, February 14, 1998; Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell,
Scouting for Boys
(n.p.: Boy Scouts of America,
1946), 223; British army boot lace requirement described by Phillip Nutt, telephone interview, November 15, 1999; Ian Stewart,
The Magical Maze
(New York: John Wiley, 1997), 198–203.

6.
Helena de Bertodano, “Billionaire Scarred by Poverty,”
Sunday Telegraph
(London), December 13, 1998; Jeff Meyers, “He Has Become Phantom of Marathons,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 19, 1990; Patrick Reusse, “Cuba
Dumps U.S. in L-o-n-g, B-o-r-i-n-g, Sloppy Game,”
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis), July 30, 1992.

7.
“‘Miracle’: Rescuer Describes Man Forced to Cut Off Leg,”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, July 23, 1993; Carolyn Hughes Crowley, “College Cribbers,”
Washington Post
, January 6, 1992.

8.
J. H. Thornton,
Textbook of Footwear Materials
(London: National Trade Press,
1955), 55–56, 210–14; Jeff Bailey, “Unfit
to Be Tied: It Really Isn’t You, It’s Your Shoelaces,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 28, 1998.

9.
Stewart Brand,
How Buildings Learn
(New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 12–23.

10.
Hans Fantel, “Portable CD Players Advance,”
New York Times
, May 17, 1987; Jon Van, “Teletubby Infatuation Gives Fermilab Inspiration,”
Chicago Tribune
, September 13, 1999; “Totally Random,”
Scientific American
, vol. 278,
no. 5 (November 1997), 28.

1.
Sally Holloway,
London’s Noble Fire Brigades
(London: Cassell, 1973), 51.

2.
William Booth, “3 Bears Too Clever to Live; At Yosemite, Sharing Human Tastes Can Be Deadly,”
Washington Post
, December 11, 1997; John J. Fialka, “Yosemite Bears Prefer Toyotas and Hondas for Late-Night Snacks,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 13, 1999.

3.
Sandy Bauers, “Philadelphia’s
Simian Version of the Great Escape,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, June 13, 1999.

4.
Ruben Castaneda, “FBI Probing Canine Unit,”
Washington Post
, April 4, 1999.

5.
Jacques Ellul,
The Technological Society
, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 42–44, 134.

6.
Ibid., 28.

7.
See William H. McNeill,
The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since
A.D.
1000
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 126–39; William H. McNeill,
Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 127–29; Geoffrey Parker,
The Military Revolution of the Seventeenth Century
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6–24. John Keegan, in faulting McNeill for presenting the de Gheyn book as a drill
book, argued that it is instead “an industrial safety manual” designed to keep musketeers out of each other’s range of fire. But of course it had to be both, even if drill did not include modern cadenced marching. See John Keegan, “Keeping in Time,”
Times Literary Supplement
, July 12, 1996, 3–4, on which I have also relied for some details of the preparation of
Weapon Handling
.

8.
David Heathcote,
“In Every Home an Architect,”
Eye
, vol. 8, issue 31 (Spring 1999), 38–39.

9.
Ellul,
Technological Society
, 13–15.

10.
Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques,” in
Sociology and Psychology: Essays
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 95–105.

11.
Ibid., 99.

12.
Ibid., 99–100; H. L. Brock, “The Gentle Art of Walking,” in George D. Trent, ed.,
The Gentle Art of Walking: A Compilation from the New York
Times
(New York: Arno Press/Random House, 1971), 1–2.

13.
McNeill,
Keeping Together
, 1–11; Mauss, “Body Techniques,” 99, 114–15.

14.
On the history of Prussian and German drill, see Mary Mosher Flesher, “Repetitive Order and the Human Walking Apparatus: Prussian Military Science versus the Webers’ Locomotion Research,”
Annals of Science
, vol. 54, no. 5 (September 1997), 463–87.

15.
Jane E.
Brody, “Baby Walkers May Slow Infants’ Development,”
New York Times
, October 14, 1997; Connell quoted by William Hamilton,
Morning Edition
, National Public Radio, September 14, 1998; Joyce Carol Oates, “To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet,”
New York Times
, July 19, 1999.

16.
Flesher, “Repetitive Order,” 468; Jan Bremmer, “Walking, Standing, and Sitting in Ancient Greek Culture,”
in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds.,
A Cultural History of Gesture
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 16–23; Fritz Graf, “The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators,” in ibid., 47, 49.

17.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri,
The Continent of Circe
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 226–27; Nicholas D. Kristof, “Walk This Way, or How the Japanese Kept in Step,”
New York Times
, April 18, 1999; Tim Ingold,
“Situating Action V: The History and Evolution of Body Skills,”
Ecological Psychology
, vol. 8, no. 2 (1996), 171–82; Steele F. Stewart, “Footgear—Its History, Uses and Abuses,”
Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research
, vol. 88 (October 1972), 127; Koichi Kishimoto, “Japan Skipped Along to Power—and Owes Debt to Foreigners for It,”
Daily Yomiuri
(Tokyo), November 5, 1997.

18.
N. C. Heglund et
al., “Energy-Saving Gait Mechanics with Head-Supported Loads,”
Nature
, vol. 375, no. 6526 (May 4, 1995), 52–54; Eugenie Samuel, “Walk Like a Pendulum,”
New Scientist
, vol. 169, no. 2273 (January 13, 2001), 38.

19.
Mauss,
Sociology and Psychology
, 116; Thomas V. DiBacco, “Way Cool! Today’s Common Sense Was a Long Time Coming,”
Washington Post
, November 4, 1997.

20.
Robert McKay, “The Amazing
Dr. Henry Heimlich,”
Saturday Evening Post
, November 1986, 42–45; Candy Purdy, “When People Choke,”
Current Health 2
, vol. 16, no. 6 (February 1990), 24–25; Fenly [
sic
], “Simply Brilliant: ‘Maneuver’ Is Just One of His Important Medical Discoveries,”
San Diego Union-Tribune
, February 12, 1990; Henry Heimlich, “Don’t Slap a Choker on the Back,”
New York Times
, July 12, 1988; Pamela Warrick, “Heimlich’s
Audacious Maneuver,”
Los Angeles Times
, October 30, 1994.

21.
Fenly, “Simply Brilliant”; Warrick, “Heimlich’s Audacious Maneuver.”

22.
Cathie Viksjo, “Art of Flintknapping Carved in Stone,”
Trenton
(N.J.)
Times
, June 12, 1999; Arnold Pacey,
Technology in World Civilization
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 166–67.

23.
Donald A. Norman,
The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail,
the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 162, 170–73.

24.
Edwin Gabler,
The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 79–80, 82–83; Claude S. Fischer,
America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 48,
155.

25.
Stephanie Faul, “New Directions for Steering,”
Car and Road
(American Automobile Assn.), September/October 1996, 6–7; Eric C. Evarts, “Buckling Up Isn’t as Easy as It Sounds,”
Christian Science Monitor
, March 10, 1999.

26.
“Often Outgunned, Police Are Bolstering Firepower,”
New York Times
, September 27, 1987; “Armed and Unready: City Pays for Failure to Train Officers with Sophisticated
Weapon,”
Washington Post
, November 18, 1998.

27.
Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen,
The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool
, ed. Helen Searing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 27–36.

28.
Charles Sprawson,
Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 19–23; van Leeuwen,
Springboard in the Pond
, 36–39; Cecil M. Colwin,
Swimming into
the 21st Century
(Champaign, Ill.: Leisure Press, 1992), 1–49, 69–73; Frank Litsky, “Allen Stack, 71, a Swimmer Who Broke 6 World Records,”
New York Times
, September 19, 1999.

29.
James Fallows, “Throwing Like a Girl,”
Atlantic Monthly
,August 1996, 84; John Thorn and John B. Holway,
The Pitcher
(New York: Prentice-Hall Press, 1987), 147.

30.
Thorn and Holway,
The Pitcher
, 4; Mark Heisler, “It
Can Be One Pitch from Over,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 9, 1990.

31.
Mike Marqusee, “Getting Cricket Straight,”
New York Review of Books
, vol. 44, no. 7 (April 24, 1997), 65.

32.
Thorn and Holway,
The Pitcher
, 149–54; “Sports,”
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 15th ed. (1998), vol. 28, 158–59; Jeff Lyon, “Outer Limits,”
Chicago Tribune
, October 6, 1991,
Good Health Magazine
, 14.

33.
Wiebe E. Bijker,
Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 30–45, 54–100.

34.
John R. Hale, “The Lost Technology of Ancient Greek Rowing,”
Scientific American
, vol. 274, no. 5 (May 1996), 82–85.

35.
Neil Wigglesworth,
A Social History of English Rowing
(London: Frank Cass, 1992), 87–89; Thomas C. Mendenhall,
The Harvard-Yale Boat Race, 1852–1924
and the Coming of Sport to the American College
(Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1993), 47–49, 86; Eric Halladay,
Rowing in England: A Social History
(Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1990), 204–9; Thomas C. Mendenhall,
A Short History of American Rowing
(Boston: Charles River Books, n.d.), 29–37.

36.
Ian Fairbairn, ed.,
Steve Fairbairn on Rowing
(London: Nicholas Kaye, 1951),
17–45, 81–85, 93–102; Christopher Dodd,
The Story of World Rowing
(London: Stanley Paul, 1992), 155–68; Walter Wülfing, “‘Der Ruderprofessor,’” in Hans Lenk, ed.,
Handlungsmuster Leistungssport: Karl Adam zum Gedenken
(Schorndorf, West Germany: Verlag Karl Hofmann, 1977), 20–37.

37.
Nick Evangelista,
The Encyclopedia of the Sword
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 26, 491–92, 546–47, 233;
Marvin Nelson,
Winning Fencing
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1975), 4–5.

38.
Evangelista,
Encyclopedia of the Sword
, 254–55, 208–11.

39.
Ibid., 197–201; Nelson,
Winning Fencing
, 5, 109–12.