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Civil War High Tech: Excavating the Hunley and Monitor

Moderator: Merritt Roe Smith
Maria Jacobsen David A. Mindell PhD '96 Brendan Foley PhD '03: April 25, 2003; Running Time: 3:02:22

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In the last few years, archaeologists have recovered two of the Civil War’s most ingenious inventions: the Union ironclad warship Monitor and the Confederate submarine Hunley. In this symposium panelists discuss the newest technology projects that have brought these inventions to light from the sea depths, and what they can teach about technology and the Civil War.

Lecture Details

Location: Killian Hall

About the Speakers

Moderator: Merritt Roe Smith

Leverett and William Cutten Professor of the History of Technology

Maria Jacobsen

Hunley Project conservator

David A. Mindell PhD '96

Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing
Chair, MIT150 Steering Committee MacVicar Faculty Fellow

David A. Mindell is founder and director of MIT's Laboratory for Automation, Robotics, and Society. His research interests include the social implications of automation and remote systems, deep ocean robotic archaeology, and the history of space exploration. His book, War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), won the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology for the best book in the field accessible to a broad audience. He has also written Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (MIT Press, 2008), which won the Emme Award for Astronautical Literature from the American Astronautical Society.

Mindell is also co-leading a 10-year collaborative project with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Greek Ministry of Culture to explore the deep Aegean sea for ancient and bronze-age shipwrecks using autonomous underwater vehicles. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Literature from Yale University in 1988. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT in 1996.