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Aristotle, Hugh of St Victor, Johann Beckmann and Talcott Parsons, for instance, had been instrumentalists. The Kultur-oriented German engineers of the nineteenth century, Lewis Mumford, and the Sixties critics of know-how took the cultural view of technology. Schatzberg has offered an exquisite service by tracing the conceptual history of expertise so clearly. This intervening power is the character, the essence if you will, of technology. It is present within the sublime of planetary science but in addition the mundane of fixing gear while driving a car, or even brushing your enamel. Investigating this intervening energy is a method of opening up what ‘designed’ and ‘material’ imply within the definition of technology as a designed, material means to an end. For engineers, particularly American engineers, ‘applied science’, together with its higher status, could be claimed as their own autonomous body of data. For scientists, such as John Tyndall and Henry Rowland, ‘applied scien