Around 1850, a person in New York who wanted to send a telegram to an associate in St. Louis did not care that this message would pass over the lines of three or four separate telegraph companies. For the companies, however, this posed a major challenge. What procedures governed the transfer of this message from one company's network onto another's? How would revenue and cost be apportioned? What level of priority would this message receive? If the message was lost or garbled in transmission, which company would refund the sender's money?
As this example indicates, standards are the ambient environment in which we operate all modern technologies. As JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy show, they “are ubiquitous, critically important, and all but invisible” to the end user (p. 3). And these standards have often arisen from the work of trade organizations and technical committees, not governments. Without standards, everything from typewriter paper to the Internet would be impossible to work with. However, the work of creating and maintaining standards happens behind the scenes and is unglamorous. We remember Thomas Edison for inventing the incandescent lamp (among his other innovations), not for standardizing the threads of the lamp socket.
Not surprisingly, then, until recently historians of technology have paid very little attention to standards and standardizers. To the lasting good of the field, David Edgerton, Andrew Russell, Lee Vinsel, and others have begun to analyze use and maintenance of technologies and have helped shift the field away from its traditional emphasis on innovation. With Engineering Rules, Yates and Murphy significantly advance this program.
Yates and Murphy divide the work of standardizers into three historical periods. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the standardization movement arose to satisfy the needs of new manufacturing, communication, and transportation technologies and networks. The earliest standardization efforts focused on a mundane technology: literally nuts and bolts. The standardization of steel rails followed shortly thereafter. In both cases, standardizers attempted to balance the needs of manufacturers and customers. Standardization in this first era also went hand in hand with the professionalization of engineering and the sciences. As electrical communication and power networks proliferated throughout industrial societies, physicists and electrical engineers worked to standardize basic units of measurement like the volt and ohm.
By World War I, then, “a transnational community of engineers, businessmen, and government leaders” had joined together to create a system of standards that enhanced safety, reliability, interoperability, and efficiency of large-scale technological systems. They saw their work as “a social progressive movement” (p. 81). This movement peaked around 1930 and went into a decline during the Great Depression.
During World War II, a mechanic for the U.S. Eighth Air Force stationed in Britain complained, “We can't borrow plane parts from the British. . . . They don't fit” (p. 141). The Allies also could not share small arms ammunition. Because of experiences like this, a second phase of standardization began. In 1944, the Allies formed the United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee. Two years later, this organization had become the International Standards Organization (ISO). The formation of the ISO fits the general trajectory of international cooperation following the war, alongside organizations such as the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
During this second phase of the standardization movement, from the end of World War II to the 1980s, standardizers shifted from “setting national standards” for goods to “setting international standards that facilitated commerce more broadly” (p. 158). Perhaps the best known, and most effective, example of this type of standardization was the humble shipping container. The shipping container originated in the 1950s with U.S. military efforts to make overseas logistics more efficient. The private shipping industry adopted containerization soon afterward. This had an enormous effect on the shipping industry: “between the 1950s and the 2000s, cargo-loading costs dropped by a startling 93 percent” (p. 178).
The third phase of standard-setting originated around 1990 to deal with growing demand for computer networking. As befits the Internet age, Yates and Murphy describe the standards organizations of this time as “less international” but “ultimately more global than the second-wave organizations” (p. 239). The major organizations, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), developed the protocols on which the Internet operates. Like the first wave of standards groups, government agencies had little involvement with developing these standards. Another point of similarity is that the Internet standardizers, like their engineering forebears, prized technical acumen over commercial considerations. Yates and Murphy describe the 1992 “constitutional crisis” of the IETF, when prominent members rebelled against a networking protocol favored by the U.S. Defense Department. IETF member David Clark delivered a manifesto at this meeting: “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code” (p. 250). Similarly, W3C defines its twofold mission as promoting “Web for All” and “Web on Everything,” irrespective of national or corporate goals (p. 264).
This book is history at its finest. It is not only a technical and business history of engineering standards but also a deeply researched social history of communities of standardizers. It is also elegantly written—a testament to Yates's and Murphy's research and writing skills. Historians of capitalism and technology will find it required reading, but this book also stands a fair chance of engaging a mass readership.
