Summary

Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines--death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example--developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to its disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, Accident Prone offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences.

Here, John C. Burnham shows that as the machine era progressed, the physical and economic impact of accidents coevolved with the rise of the insurance industry and trends in twentieth-century psychology. After World War I, psychologists determined that some people are more accident prone than others. This designation signaled a shift in social strategy toward minimizing accidents by diverting particular people away from dangerous environments. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the idea of accident proneness gradually declined, and engineers developed new technologies to protect all people, thereby introducing a hidden, but radical, egalitarianism.

Lying at the intersection of the history of technology, the history of medicine and psychology, and environmental history, Accident Prone is an ambitious intellectual analysis of the birth, growth, and decline of an idea that will interest anyone who wishes to understand how Western societies have grappled with the human costs of modern life.

Choice Review

Burnham (Ohio State) has crafted a fascinating study of the rise and decline of the concept of being accident-prone. It is not clear if the periodization of the phases of the birth of the term (early 20th century in Germany and England), life (through the 1950s), and afterlife in contemporary popular culture is entirely valid or rigorous. This is either because of a slight lack of clarity in the text or, perhaps more significant, represents the ambiguities and lack of consensus in the scientific, policy, and actuarial communities about the validity of the concept over the course of the 20th century. Entangling the concept of being accident-prone with transformations in epidemiological thinking and the emergence of a risk society provides a useful framework for the narrative. Less productive is the implicit model of scientific consensus and conflict that understates the dissent about the reliability and validity of the concept, even when it appeared to be at its zenith. A contribution to scholarship on scientific ideas, the history of psychology, and the history of technology. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. L. Croissant University of Arizona