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Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890–1930s (review)

287 actors, but the way he frames the development of scientific and technical knowledge will raise more questions than it answers for STS specialists. Instead, his strength lies in explaining current medical theories of lead poisoning (chapter 2 provides an exceptionally clear explanation of the health problems associated with protracted, low-grade exposure to lead—an issue about which definitive research has emerged only in the last decade) and in presenting statistical data in a clear, comprehensible form: he confines extended statistical explanation to a series of informative appendixes. The intersection of technology and the environment has earned increasing attention in recent years (see the July 1997 special issue of this journal, for example). Martin Melosi, Joel Tarr, Richard White, and other waterand-waste historians have helped lead the way. Troesken adds a suggestive nuance to this line of inquiry, one that should be of interest to all readers of Technology and Culture. The chemistry of soft water distinguishes water infrastructure from, say, an electrical network—Thomas Hughes’s paradigmatic example of a Large Technical System. As a consequence, local material conditions may fundamentally alter water technology. A lead pipe that would have delivered safe drinking water to a man in New York City, for example, would have delivered poison to a pregnant woman in Boston. Such extraordinary local variation calls to mind John Law’s concept of “heterogeneous engineering,” but with the added reward of demonstrating the intersection of macroand microat their most intimate juncture: inside the human body.