Buick Centurion concept car. Photo by Renee.
While prognosticators have long foreseen divergent futures full of turbine power, bubbletopped canopies, and flying cars, production automotive technology has progressed on its own fascinating path, nowadays converging with the high-tech world of computers and the Internet, so what better place for the Society of Automotive Historians to examine the evolution of automobile technology for this year’s conference than the heart of the Silicon Valley?
For its 10th biennial conference, the SAH will travel to Palo Alto, California, the home of Stanford University and the REVS Program at Stanford, a trans-disciplinary program that “aims to put the automobile at the center of the university” and connect “the past, present and future of the automobile.” Arthur Jones, the conference chair for the SAH, said that SAH officials accepted the REVS Program’s invitation to host the conference there because the society has been trying to reach out to more than just car guys.
“The REVS Program isn’t really as full of car guys like we expected,” Jones said. “They’re more focused on the interaction of the automobile and society than they are on the artifact itself.”
As opposed to the histories of the automobiles themselves, of motorsports, and of the business of building cars, Jones said the history of the automobile in society tends to be “rather academic” and draws more professors than enthusiasts. “It’s something we (automotive enthusiasts) have all heard about, but don’t really explore,” he said.
Of course, not every paper that will be presented at the SAH conference concerns the interaction of automobiles in society or the specific technologies of automobiles. “We always welcome off-theme topics,” Jones said. “We just want the best papers we can find.”
Among the papers to be presented at the conference are Alison Kreitzer’s “Building a Bricolage of Speed: Dirt Track Racecar Construction, 1920-1960,” Eric Karl Roth’s “License to Drive: A History of the Driver’s License from New York in 1914 to California in 2013,” Jørgen Burchardt’s “On Balloon Tires into the Automotive Society: The Low Pressure Tire and Other Technologies of Heavy Truck Transportation,” Robert Ebert’s “Byers A. Burlingame and the Studebaker Corporation: Villain or Savior?” and Owen Falk’s “The Molecular Interactions of Cleaning Solutions with Lacquered Vehicles.”
Keynote speaker for the conference will be Rudi Volti, a professor emeritus of sociology at Pitzer College who specializes in the interactions between technology and society. Among his recent publications are Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology.
The conference will take place this Thursday through Saturday at the Vail Automotive Innovation Facility at Stanford. For more information, visit AutoHistory.org or Revs.Stanford.edu.
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