Information in Instrumentation¹.

C.N.M. Jansz
C. le Pair

STW - Technology Foundation (The Netherlands)

1. INTRODUCTION

History is a respected branch of learning, as is archaeology. However, although both deal with the past, they approach it from different angles and, thus, see different things. Unfortunately, the interaction between the two disciplines is weak. One of the most famous historians of our time, Lynn White, observed this phenomenon and won renown by integrating archaeological knowledge of mediaeval artefacts with academic knowledge². Following White other historians rewrote parts of the economic and political history of the Middle Ages. The picture that emerged was quite different from the one that existed before. Not only did the 'dark ages' become less dark, in some aspects they even seemed to be more enlightened than the early Renaissance. It became apparent that, in these so-called dark ages consistent use was made of ancient knowledge. Gimpel³ showed, for example, that mediaeval engineers had a fairly good knowledge of the works and writings of their counterparts in ancient Rome. The scholarly writers of the period, who are the main sources for students of history, were not aware of this. The fate of Vitruvius' work illustrates this point. The ten books on Architecture by this Roman engineer who lived at the time of Emperor Augustus were 'rediscovered' in 1414 hy the humanist Poggio. Renaissance scholars believed them to have been lost during the Middle Ages. They were wrong, however, for 55 examples of the book still exist today, which were copied between the 10th and 15th century. In other words, mediaeval engineers knew and used Vitruvius' work, but their scholarly contemporaries were unaware of its existence.

Some years ago a summer school was organised in The Netherlands on the subject of the interaction of science and technology with national governments. Among the lecturers were some of the most outstanding historians of science⁴ in the country. They were fascinated by the topic. They admitted that, with regard to this area there was a real gap in our historical knowledge⁵. The role of technology in society had been greatly overlooked. One of the participants suggested that this was an extension or rather a generalization of the concept of C.P. Snow's 'two cultures'⁶. Examples were given of some far-reaching historical descriptions, given by famous writers who had an unprecedented influence on political thinking, but who had clearly not made a proper assessment of the impact of technological developments⁷. Some years before H. Mark⁸ had described how the growth of Portuguese maritime dominance in the 15th century had come about as a result of advanced navigational and geographical technology, promoted and cherished by the Portuguese government.
Similar developments could be traced in The Republic of the Netherlands but they seem to have gone unnoticed by the chroniclers. There is evidence that the growth of centralised power in Europe in the 15th century, eventually leading to the building of the Habsburg empire under Charles V, and, ultimately, to the supremacy of Spain, was rooted in the advanced state of weapon technology in the Low Countries⁹. The starting capital came from the same region: more than one third of the imperial income came from the Low Countries. And, since that was precisely the area that had hardly any natural resources, the strength was based on manpower and skills, in short: on technology. At that time and in that area there was but little emphasis on scholarly knowledge. This is illustrated by the distribution of universities in Europe in that period, as shown in fig. 1: the north-western corner of European continent is quite empty.

Fig. 1. The distribution of universities and law schools in 15th century Europe¹⁰.

Nevertheless, the Netherlands defeated Spain and grew to be a world-power in the 17th century. In most traditional history hooks we read that the Dutch defeated Spain and that subsequently the arts and the sciences prospered. Only recently has it become clear that one of the major causes of the Dutch success was their technological leadership, which was revealed for example in their skill in building faster and cheaper ships¹¹.

2. INSTRUMENTATION IN SCIENCE

It is not only in the humanities that the role of technology is neglected. Even in the natural sciences there is a tendency to overlook the crucial role that technology and instrumentation play in the development of our understanding of nature. Mukerji¹² also finds a persistent cultural subordination of technology to science.
Kuhn formulated the theory, that scientific revolutions, the milestones in the development of science, are marked by the downfall of a paradigm caused by internal crises. His theory has itself been a paradigm for years. However, in a number of cases the development of a new instrument has led to a break-through in science. Casimir¹³ has pointed out that there is a continuous flow of development from science to technology to science etc., which he calls the science-technology spiral.

When considered from this viewpoint, the Copernican Revolution becomes a triumph of technology. Price¹⁴ gives a very clear account of the developments at the time. At the roots of the Revolution we find an improvement in the craft of making eye-glasses. This technological innovation led to the invention of the telescope. News of this reached Italy when Sacharias Janssen and Hans Lipperhey from the Dutch town of Middelburg tried to sell their invention to the Medici family for military purposes. They did not succeed commercially, but Galileo heard of the device and was quick to replicate the invention. He was the first to turn the instrument skywards and he published his results. His Siderius Nuncius of 1610 had a great impact and created tremendous enthusiasm for the instrument among a large group of people. It was this, rather than the work of Copernicus, which created the ‘Copernican Revolution’.

The same technological advance led to the invention of the microscope and the discoveries made with it by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and others. This instrument and its successors had a great impact on the development of science. David Cahan also stresses the importance of the microscope and the improvements made in it around the beginning of this century¹⁵. And these are by no means the only examples of technological innovations opening up whole new fields of science.
Rabkin's¹⁶ outline of the history of chemistry shows the importance of instruments in the development of that discipline. Similar views on the role of instruments in the history of other fields are expressed in several contributions in this volume¹ (e.g. Shaffer, Mukerji, Georghiou and, to a lesser extent Feeney).

Although there have been periods during which instruments had greater social standing¹⁷, those who initiate such innovations rarely receive proper recognition. Recently some Nobel prizes have been awarded for technological achievements: e.g. to Van der Meer at CERN for accelerator development, to Ruska for the invention of the electron microscope and to Binnig & Rohre for their scanning tunneling microscope. However, these exceptions are so rare that they do not really indicate an increase in the appreciation of the influence of technology on science, or of the influence of instruments on society in general.

During the last few decades, tight budgets have caused policy-makers to look for more and more refined evaluation methods by which to judge scientists and their work. In line with the historical picture drawn above, these methods mainly concentrate on the paper outputs. Unfortunately, not all those who apply bibliometric methods are aware of the possible traps and pitfalls. The recent article in Science on 'uncitedness'¹⁸ and the ensuing flood of letters and comments provide a clear illustration of the difticulties encountered in bibliometric analyses. In most evaluative studies, the role of instruments as the output of research is ignored. For an engineer, however, the instrument itself is often the primary 'publication' of the results of his research.
Le Pair postulated the existence of a 'citation gap' in such cases¹⁹. Subsequently, several studies have been undertaken to estimate the size of that gap and the implications of its presence.

3. THE CASE OF THE ELECTRON MICROSCOPE

The work of the technologists who introduced the study of the electron microscope in The Netherlands is known only to others working in the field. The impact of their work has been tremendous, both economically (here lie the roots of the ca. 70% market share which the Philips company that utilised their results was able to achieve at a certain time) and scientifically (research done with the instruments has led to important discoveries in various fields). But, with today's emphasis on publication and citation counts, these people are almost invisible.

We considered the electron microscope to be a very suitable instrument on which to base a study of the citation gap since it is directly comparable to a paper publication. The electron microscope makes the results of research available to other scientists and it is used primarily for further scientific research, i.e. knowledge is used to produce more knowledge. In addition, much of the research work done with the instrument is in fields where paper publications are the main output. An instrument does not have a title page mentioning the authors, so it will not be found in the list of references. However, it may be mentioned in the text; we counted these references in a random sample of the literature in order to estimate the number of 'invisible' citations.

Table 1

Auteur	SCI	Instr.cit.
W.H.J. Andersen S.L. van den Broek A.C. van Dorsten J.B. le Poole C.J. Rakels J.C. Tiemijer K.W. Witteveen	9 0 2 11 2 0 0	2275 1470 1470 1470 6335 6335 4830

Table 1. Citation counts for the main 'authors' of the electron microscope in The Netherlands for the period 1981 - 1985; comparison of normal citations taken from the Science Citation Index (SCI) and textual citations of the instruments (Instr.), showing the citation gap.

The results have been published²⁰ and they clearly confirm the existence of a citation gap and they show its magnitude. Table 1 enables a comparison of the citation counts for the main 'authors' for the period 1981 to 1985, taken from the Science Citation Index (SCI), with the results of our study.
The SCI numbers refer to the entire work of these authors, whereas we, in our literature search, considered only three instruments. Moreover, the authors with the lowest instrumental counts were involved only with the earliest instrument, developed in 1958. For these reasons our estimate must be a conservative one. The actual citation gap is even larger.

4. THE CASE OF THE STORM-SURGE-BARRIER

Another case that illustrates the lack of proper paper output for technology and the resulting citation gap is that of the Storm-Surge Barrier in the Eastern Scheldt, the most innovative

Fig. 2. The Netherlands. Without dikes, the Western part, i.e. more than half the country would be under water.

(A) Brouwersdam; (B) Haringvliet Dam: (C) Volkerak Dam; (D) Hollandse IJssel Storm Surge Barrier; (E)Zandkreek Dam; (F) Veerse Gat Dam; (G) Grevelingen Dam; (H) Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier; (I) Philips Dam; (J) Oester Dam. Fig. 3. The South-western corner of The Netherlands with the estuary of three large European rivers (the Rhine, the Maas, and the Scheldt), showing the location of the main waterworks constructed to shorten the coastline.

part of the impressive waterworks constructed in the southwestern part of The Netherlands; figures 2 and 3 show the location. This project seemed of particular interest because many different disciplines played a role in the design of the barrier, ranging from civil and electrical engineering to ecology and marine biology.

We studied the bibliometric visibility of the innovations²¹. To this end we conducted a number of interviews with people involved in the project, using snowball sampling to produce the list of interviewees. Our spokesmen agreed readily about the innovations but were more reluctant to attach names of 'authors'. A search in various literature databases, including the Science Citation Index, confirmed our fears that the technologists involved are almost invisible bibliometrically. Table 2 shows some of the results of these searches. Evidently, there are some fields where the situation is different. The authors with higher publication and citation counts all work in more fundamental areas.

Tabel 2.

name	field	1	2	3	4	5
Agema d'Angremont Awater Bijker van Duivendijk Engel de Groot Heijnen Huis in 't Veld Leenaarts Lok Nienhuis van Oorschot Saeijs Spaargaren Stelling Verruijt Vos Vrijling	pd co sh co ci pm sm sm co ee me mb co ec gt he sm ci pd	2 6 0 66 0 0 2 0 1 0 2 168 8 29 1 12 109 2 5	0 0 1 2 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 25 1 5 0 5 5 1 0	0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 0	1 5 0 6 0 0 1 5 0 0 0 4 2 3 1 4 12 4 2	0 3 3 10 2 0 1 4 1 0 0 18 4 7 0 1 17 2 2

Table 2. Citation (1) and publication (2) counts taken from the Science Citation Index. Publication counts taken from the bibliographic databases INSPEC (3), COMPENDEX (4) and PASCAL (5), for some of the contributors to the Storm-Surge Barrier in the Eastem Scheldt. Names of principal contributors are underlined. We distinguished the following fields: pd = probabilistic design, co = coastal engineering, sh = soil hydraulics, ci = civil engineering, pm = program management, sm = soil mechanics, ee = electrical engineering, me = mechanical engineering, mb = marine biology, ec = ecology, gt = geotextiles, he = hydraulic engineering.

The reason for the bibliometric invisibility of the technologists cannot be attributed to lack of written material, but is to be sought in the nature of the documents. Numerous reports were produced in-house in many of the organisations involved in the project. Although such reports are accessible, they are not part of the open literature. Many publications are written in Dutch, which severely limits the number of potential readers. And last but not least, many of the written documents we traced, did not even bear the names of the authors. Here we come up against important cultural differences between scientists and technologists.

5. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Technologists, then, have other communication patterns. Although much remains to be done, several points have emerged from our interviews about the methods which technologists use to assess their fellow researchers. Conferences play an important role in the exchange of information. To be an invited speaker is considered to be a sign of recognition as is an invitation to become a member of an international professional association. And, of course, to have taken part in a successful innovative project is also considered to be an asset. This suggests that sources other than paper publications must be used to evaluate technologists and their work. In some fields, patents may be used. Or we can listen to technologists talking about their work; if we do, we recognise other forms of (citation-like) referencing; they refer to other instruments and say "we built it like ..". Other sources of information were suggested during the discussion: inventories of instruments (Rocher) and a comparison of (references in) the curricula vitae of scientists and engineers (Kruytbosch) might yield interesting results.

6. CONCLUSIONS

Information is fashionable. We read about information management, information planning, information systems, etc.; complaints are often heard about the flood of information. Indeed, information plays such an overpowering role that it has been suggested that our society should be called the information-society.

In all these expressions, information consists of words and numbers, or is in computer readable form, i.e. reduced to bits, to zeros and ones. However, everything we see contains information, not only what we can read. The description of an instrument, if the description is complete, contains the same information as the instrument itself; both are representations of the same idea. Likewise, the same infformation is to be found in a plant and in the DNA in one of its cells. But, different skills are needed to extract the information. Reading is only one such skill (to understand a scientific article, one needs more skills than just reading; background knowledge is also essential). While studying a subject, one automatically also acquires the skill needed to 'read' the information as it is coded in that field. Thus, an engineer will learn to 'read' instruments. He will also some to consider an instrument the proper form to publicize the results of his work.
Such communication channels deserve greater appreciation. If we were to include them in our study of the history of science, we would find a confirmation of Casimir's science-technology spiral ²³ as well as of Price's theory that advances in instrumentation and experimental techniques (what he calls instrumentalities) have been of major importance in stimulating and permitting both radical theoretical advances in fundamental science and radical innovations in practical application²⁴. We would thereby obtain a better understanding of the role played by technology in the course of history.

Unfortunately, the increased use of 'science indicators' has led to renewed emphasis on written documents as pointers to developments in science. As a result, other important evidence of advances in knowledge is ignored. Instrumentation is an important source of information.

7. NOTES