Technology and Culture

Memorial HUGH G. J. AITKEN (1922-1994) SUSAN J. DOUGLAS Like many members of SHOT, I was in Atlanta on April 14, 1994, attending the annual meeting of the Organization of American Histo­ rians. It was spring in Atlanta, which may seem a trite (and obvious) thing to report. But for those of us from up north, having been clobbered by one of the most relendess winters on record, the azaleas and magnolias of Adanta were the first convincing sign that we were going to make it, that the snow was going to melt, that new beginnings were possible. So it was especially surreal and unbelievable when the phone message came from back home. Hugh Aitken was dead, the message went. Just like that—final, flat, matter-of-fact. How could this be? He had just finished an article for Technology and Culture, as well as an essay for Antenna that outlined an entire book proposal. He was planning other essays on the history of radio and on the spectrum. He hadjust finished making a fresh batch of beer. He was looking ahead. The news just didn’t seem real. It still doesn’t. To those of us who were his friends—and he had so many friends in the field—Hugh’s death is a terrible personal loss. We have also lost one of our major intellectual leaders and a gifted writer. Hugh Aitken was awarded the Dexter Prize twice, first in 1976 for Syntony and Spark: The Origins ofRadio, and then in 1988 for The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932. (He probably also would have won it for Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915 if there had been a Dexter Prize in 1960.) In 1986, he received the highest honor our society awards, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. He was elected vice-president and president-elect of SHOT in 1991 but stepped down because of concerns about his wife’s health and about his own stamina. He donated the prize money from his second Dexter Prize back to the society to establish a travel fund for graduate students and Dr. Douglas is the author of Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) and Where the GirlsAre: Growing Up Female with Mass Media (New York: Times Books). She teaches at Hampshire College. Permission to reprint a memorial may be obtained only from the author. 906 Hugh G. J. Aitken (1922-1994) 907 junior scholars who might not be able to afford to attend the annual meetings without some assistance. He was, in sum, a major figure in the field, intellectually and financially generous to us individually and to SHOT as an organization. Hugh Aitken was born in Deal, England, and raised in Aberdeen, Scodand. He attended the University ofSt. Andrews, but his studies were interrupted by World War II when he served as an airplane mechanic, and he then began cultivating a lifelong interest in mechanical and then electronic tinkering. (The word “tinkering” hardly seems to do justice to a man who could assemble his own ham radio station or build his own color television set and computer.) In 1947 St. Andrews awarded Hugh an M.A. with First Class Honours in economics and philosophy, and the next year he went to study economic history at the University of Toronto, where he worked with Harold Innés. He then moved to Cambridge and received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1951. Two critically important things happened in Cambridge: he met his wife,Janice Hunter, and he became centrally involved with the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard, which played a key role in revitalizing economic history in the United States. Hugh became a key figure in the center, where Arthur Cole, Joseph Schumpeter, Tom Cochran, Alfred Chandler, Leland Jenks, Harold Passer, and others began moving the study of entrepreneurship away from the deductive theories of neoclassical economics and into more empirically based work that drew from sociology, history, and social psychology. In 1965, Hugh edited Explorations in Enterprise, a classic collection which summa­ rized the pathbreaking work of the center. In 1955, Hugh joined the economics...