Merritt Roe Smith
Merritt Roe Smith is the Leverett Howell and William King Cutten Professor of the History of Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1978. He is the author of Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (1977), winner of the OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the History of Science Society’s Pfizer Award; the editor or coeditor of Does Technology Drive History? (1994), Major Problems in the History of American Technology (1998), and Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (2010); and a coauthor of Inventing America: A History of the United States (2002). Smith is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a past president of the Society for the History of Technology from which he received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the society’s highest honor. He currently serves on the national advisory boards of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project and the public television series, “The American Experience,” and he is currently working on a book about technology during the Civil War era tentatively entitled “Yankee Juggernaut.”