How Maintenance Technicians Became the Subject of Cold-War Psychological Research

What is it about?

This chapter forms part of a flourishing interest in histories of maintenance. It explores how maintenance and repair became an object of intense interest for the cold-war human sciences. Some of the key concerns of maintenance are to watch, observe and guard—all activities central to the experience of the Cold War. In that context, the figure of the maintenance technician itself became a focus of intense observation and anxiety for the human sciences. Taken up by engineering psychology, it was quickly positioned at the intersection of a newly rationalized material culture of war, and a set of legible human capacities designed to repair that culture when it broke down. The problem of making electronics reliable was, for engineering psychologists, a problem of defining technicians as figures who could think and act in trustworthy ways.

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Why is it important?

The chapter illustrates how the history of maintenance is central to the history of technology, and the history of the Cold War.