Frederik Nebeker

In 1914, electricity was already a fairly well-established technology in most developed countries, but its use was pretty much confined to three main areas: telecommunications, lighting and transportation. Thirty-one years later, at the close of World War II, there was a huge electronics industry looking to switch to peacetime products, there were several electronic digital computers in operation, William Shockley and his colleagues at Bell Labs were heading towards the development of the transistor, manufacturing industry was almost completely based on electric power, and there was practically no area of human activity where electricity wasn't used as a power source or for transmitting control and monitoring signals.

Along the way, we also saw the creation of permanent R&D establishments in both government and industry, with targeted research programmes. And electrical and electronic engineering became professional disciplines with their own qualifications, teaching programmes, professional bodies, standards committees, and all the rest (even in-house historians!).

In principle, the story of how this happened and how it changed the way we live is a fascinating one, but because electricity appears in so many different applications and contexts, it turns out that you can't really disentangle it from all the other things that were going on between 1914 and 1945. Lenin was obsessed with the electrification of the Soviet Union, whilst Hitler and Mussolini both owed a lot of their success to effective manipulation of new technologies like p.a. systems, cinema films and radio broadcasts, but how meaningful is it to focus on that one aspect of their careers in a book that also has to cover the construction of hydroelectric schemes, the development of radar, the social effects of broadcast radio, telephones, and refrigerators; the role of the telephone operator, the early days of medical imaging; the automobile self-starter, and a thousand other trivial and not-so-trivial applications of electricity? Nebeker often seems to get lost along the way, and it becomes quite hard to see any kind of plan or analytical insight in the book. It's never quite analytical enough to be social history, but it's rarely quite specific enough to be technical history either: Nebeker's explanations of developments in electronics are often hair-raisingly imprecise.

It doesn't help that the IEEE obviously didn't put more than the minimum of funds into the project, and that clearly wasn't enough to pay for any kind of editing. The book is a mess, even by the standards of 21st century technical books, full of grammatical errors, unintended repetitions, and minor inconsistencies — Nebeker seems to be a specialist in quoting two different but quite similar statistics for the same thing in different parts of the book, for example. And the picture editing was clearly even more on-the-cheap than the text. It doesn't look as though they allowed him to use anything that wasn't royalty-free.… (plus d'informations)