Thomas P. Hughes

Thomas Parke Hughes (born in 1923) is an American Historian of Technology. He is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and is a visiting professor at MIT and Stanford.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1953.

He, along with John B. Rae, Carl W. Condit, and Melvin Kranzberg, are responsible for the establishment of the Society for the History of Technology and he is a recipient of its highest honor, the Leonardo Da Vinci Medal.

He has contributed to the concepts of technological momentum, technological determinism, large technical systems, social construction of technology, and has introduced systems theory into the history of technology.

Main works

• Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. ISBN 0801846145.
• Edited with Wiebe E. Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1987.
• Edited with Renate Mayntz. The Development of Large Technical Systems. Frankfurt am Main: Boulder, CO: Campus Verlag; Westview Press, 1988.
• American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. New York, NY: Viking, 1989. Which was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
• Edited with Agatha C. Hughes. Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual. New York: 1990.
• Rescuing Prometheus. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
• Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ISBN 0226359336

External links

• Oral history interview with Thomas Parke Hughes, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.