Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  As in swimming, it was an Australian who began a revolution of technique, and at about the same time. (The American Orthodox style was only a modification of English Orthodox.) In the early twentieth century, Steve Fairbairn (1862–1938), the coach of Jesus College, Cambridge, introduced a revolutionary call to use the body’s weight, and especially the legs rather than the shoulders, to move the boat. His crews’ successes were the first major challenges to Orthodoxy. The next great innovations, building on Fairbairn’s ideas, came in the 1960s. A club in the north German town of Ratzeburg at last developed an alternative method, now known as International Modern. By accelerating the slide in its approach to the front stop, the coach Karl Adam was able to assure a steadier hull speed, help the West German crew win the gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, and guarantee the technique’s international influence. Adam also made significant changes in conditioning and in equipment, including a longer oar with a broader blade, and he was a ferocious morale builder, but his great revolution was in rowing style. Through their mastery of body motion, Fairbairn and Adam reinvented the sliding seat.36

  GETTING THE POINT

  In fencing as in rowing, technology and technique have evolved together. Users of weapons have always sought more effective maneuvers, and their tactics have in turn inspired modification of their instruments. The fencing historian Nick Evangelista has described medieval swords as “‘can openers,’ hacking and whacking devices, whose sole purpose was to find a way through armor,” but professionals at the Royal Armories in Leeds have been reconstructing early combat techniques with replica weapons and now believe that even these apparently ungainly implements required considerable skill as well as strength. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, a lighter sword called the rapier coevolved with new techniques. It started as a heavy, sharp-edged blade with a complex and bulky hand guard, used offensively and backed up by a piece of heavy clothing or a smaller weapon in the left hand. Used by soldiers, duelists, masters, and armorers, the rapier became a different weapon as the possibilities of various techniques were explored. Cutting was found to be inefficient; the rapier became a thrusting weapon without a sharpened edge. It grew lighter and simpler, and the secondary defensive weapon disappeared. Not that this was a smooth evolution. For a time, blades lengthened, reaching up to six feet before legislation restricted them to three. Ultimately the weapon became the eighteenth-century smallsword. Each change in form was linked with a new style of practice, which had to be learned from a master. Fencing masters rose in society as they developed a body of techniques (with an extensive specialized vocabulary) for teaching as well as dueling and, like Maurice of Nassau, published diagrams of their maneuvers in illustrated volumes.37

  The foil, today’s basic fencing instrument, is a notable example of a technology developed for the sake of technique. It was a modified version of a dueling sword to be used in instructional exercises according to a system of rules and is still called a “conventional” weapon. (The épée, with its stiff, triangular blade, was introduced in the nineteenth century as an “unconventional” weapon that could score with a hit anywhere to the opponent’s body.) While an unsuccessful electric scoring system was introduced as early as 1896 and the épée was adapted for electric scoring in 1933, it was the electrification of the foil in the 1960s that had the most radical, if mainly temporary, effect on technique.38

  In the interest of objective judging, fencing officials adopted electric scoring for the foil. To accommodate the contact at the tip of the blade, the weapon itself was modified; the wire was run through a more rigid, weightier blade. Equipment at first could shock the perspiring athletes wearing it, and specially trained technicians now check the wiring. But these were the least of the new challenges to good technique. More important, certain light touches that judges might not have noted now could set off the scoring buzzer if the foil was handled with a new rapid motion.

  Just at this time, the fencers and coaches of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were emerging as an international force. Backed by generous state support, rejecting traditional techniques in favor of speed and mobility, they perfected new moves that took advantage of the tip’s sensitivity. Others found the new equipment harder to master. Marvin Nelson, a veteran fencer, official, and coach, deplored the “sloppy, pig-sticking” style that flourished as officials allowed fencers to maintain attacks when procedural rules (“right of way”) should have given the touch to the other side. The flashing light overrode their knowledge of the rules. Meanwhile, the flexible weight-tipped blades whipped away from targets. Nelson recalled that he, like others, “was forced to fence with absence of blade and reduce my game to much more simple actions.”39

  These problems passed. Suppliers introduced better points and stiffer blades. And technique changed as well. Competitive fencers practiced with foils simulating the feel of the electric models. In fact, by the mid-1970s Nelson noticed a more vigorous game: “Fencers are ‘carrying’ the weapon more effectively—showing an improvement in awareness of the different parts of the blade. Thrusts or actions are being made from positions not usual in standard foil or in the first period of electric foil.… Foot movements are increasingly efficient.” Still, these more sophisticated techniques have brought other changes in technology, notably grips with small projections for more secure finger holds. Introduced as “orthopedic” grips for fencers with missing fingers or other disabilities, these are now widely used as “pistol” grips. They promote a more vigorous style at the expense of lightness and flexibility and have been labeled by one authority as “this monstrous brood.” And electric scoring demands self-discipline, as some athletes focus their attention so much on the gratification of a light or buzzer that their minds wander from the bout itself, letting their opponent score the touch.40

  NEW MUSCLES FOR OLD

  A second group of sports changed significantly in the last century thanks to new materials and manufacturing processes. In these cases, too, the crucial change was not so much the new equipment as the development of body motions to optimize it. Most skating remains relatively conservative in equipment despite countless refinements of skates and great improvements in ice conditioning equipment in recent years. Speed skating, too, changed little until very recently. In 1488, Leonardo da Vinci studied it but lost interest after failing to create a new design. Four hundred years later, in 1890, a Canadian and a German independently developed and patented a skate hinged at the toe and spring loaded, so that the boot could separate temporarily from the blade. Neither model appears to have gone into commercial production.41

  Gerrit Jan van Ingen Schenau, a professor of biomechanics at the Free University of Amsterdam, originally wanted to design a safer skate, not necessarily a faster one. He told a journalist from a Japanese news service that from the early 1980s, many skaters had complained to him of pain in their shins. “I then realized that skating is a uniquely unnatural movement—different from walking or running—because the heel does not rise freely in motion.” The lever mechanism let the skater lift one leg at a time, the one not doing the pushing, while keeping the runner on the ice, in principle reducing strain on the calf muscles. At some point his team noticed that speed skaters kept their ankles locked and pushed off their heels—unlike jumpers, who extended their ankles and pushed off their toes. The hinged skate in principle allowed the ankle to move with the blade still fully on the ice, using the calf muscles for a longer stride.42

  In execution, the idea was not so easy. Early hinged skates had mechanical problems. A post on the upper part now fits into a cylinder near the heel of the blade for stability. Even so the blades did not, and still do not, make learning easier for beginners. Expert skaters, who had refined their techniques on conventional fixed blades, saw no advantage that would offset the physical cost of retraining themselves to use new muscle groups. And the clacking sound of the blade snapping back to the shoe could be disconcerting. The best of the experienced Dutch skaters even considered the new eq
uipment dangerous. The inventors’ breakthrough came with the youngest skaters who had invested less in conventional technique and had most to gain from learning a new style. They found that the skates—with the new technique—improved their personal records. Then the women on the national team tried them and changed over. When the men saw improving results, they followed. German, Japanese, and American skaters resented the new equipment but by 1996–97 the main objection was not to the new design but to that fact that the patent licensee, the Dutch manufacturer Viking, was allocating its limited production to the Netherlands team and other regular customers.43

  The records of 1997 confirmed the skates’ value. They helped athletes cut a full second, a long time indeed in international winter sports competition, from each 400-meter lap of longer events. In November and December 1997 alone, adopters of the clap skates equaled or exceeded sixteen world records. In the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, the Dutch skater Gianni Romme won the 5,000-meter race clocked at 6 minutes 22.20 seconds; his previous Olympic record was 6:34.96.44

  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.45

  GOOD FORM AND BETTER MATERIALS

  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.46

  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.47

  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.48

  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.49

  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.50

  TECHNIQUE AND INNOVATION

  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 powe
r of athletes to overcome pain in upsetting the orthodoxies of their sport. Neither negative nor positive unintended consequences are the full story.51

  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.”52

  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.53