Making Old Tools Work Better: Pragmatic Adaptation and Innovation in Gold-Rush Technology

As any American with a newly purchased computer can attest, rapid technological change is both inevitable and unpredictable in modern, urban-industrial societies. Patterns of rapid change seem inherently modernist and international at first glance, a twentieth-century by-product of economic competition, social upheavals, and the clash of arms around the globe. They also appear to be confined to the most eco nomically advanced nations or regions, those having long passed the frontier or for mative stage of development. This brief study of the Gold Rush provides a broader historical view of techno logical change. It looks at changing patterns of technology in one region on the fringes of Euro-American industrial civilization, initially isolated but rapidly inter nationalized and altered in ways neither predictable nor invariably progressive. What it finds are similar forces at work, and similar consequences, whether in postmod ernist California, 150 years beyond its Argonaut heritage, or in frontier California during the 1840s and 1850s. The legacy of the Gold Rush lives still in cities and in dustries that benefited from mining technology, and in the attitudes, lifestyles, and material culture of modern Californians.