The Pen at Work

Autor(en)

Sebastian Felten

Abstrakt

Historians of science consider eighteenth-century codifications of mining knowledge as precursors of modern technoscience. The present article uses technician-scientist Abraham Gottlob Werner’s codification of hard-rock mining techniques as a starting point to address three questions: How were labour processes translated into a knowledge structure? What was lost (or captured) in the process of textualization? And what purpose did codification serve? By analysing printed technological writings, Werner’s manuscript papers, and reports from the mining administration of Saxony, it makes a three-fold argument: First, hard-rock extraction generally involved embodied knowledge about rock and tools, which was verbalised and distributed among the workforce of a mine. Second, from the sixteenth century onwards, experts textualised some of this knowledge, which created the problem of aligning words and things. Third, attempts to rationalise mining administrations in the eighteenth century highlighted the problem that books, academic lectures, and bureaucratic writing only partially captured hard-rock mining as the dynamic interaction of tools, bodies, and natural environments. Technique, as distributed and embodied knowledge, eluded full systemization and control.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Geschichte

Journal

Artefact: Techniques, histoire et sciences humaines

Band

22

Seiten

65-103

Anzahl der Seiten

38

ISSN

2273-0753

DOI

https://doi.org/10.4000/14bha

Publikationsdatum

2025

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

107003 Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 504026 Sozialgeschichte, 207309 Geschichte des Bergbaus

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/a3e4d3c9-f922-4419-bde9-7a39b7e22f52