1985: RAF Cosford

I was looking for a subject for study, a case study in the social analysis of technology. I’d done some work in an actor-network tradition on a fifteenth-century technology (Portuguese shipbuilding and naviga­tion) but the sources were poor, and even worse for a nonhistorian, the details of design had been irretrievably lost for the Portuguese ves­sels in the fourteenth century, no doubt when the craft traditions of the Iberian shipyards in which they were built died out.10 So I wanted to study a more or less contemporary project and tease out the net­work of relations, the character of heterogeneous engineering and the malleability of the social. I wanted to explore an approach that in­sisted the human was no different in kind from the nonhuman. Or, more exactly, that if this were true then it was an effect rather than something given in the order of things. So I was looking for an object of study, but I didn’t know what.

One day I took my then five-year-old son for a day out to an aero­space museum called RAF (Royal Air Force) Cosford, which isn’t far from where I live in Shropshire. The two of us walked round inside the hangars, looking at the aircraft. Some were civil airliners. Most, however, seemed to be military, ranging from First World War bi­planes, through Battle of Britain Spitfires, to examples of some of the more elderly types still in service. The child was pleased with what he saw, and wanted to know how fast each aircraft flew and

craft well from twenty years earlier. I remembered it because it was controversial for a whole lot of reasons, including its cancellation. So I looked at this aircraft carcass and I thought, ‘‘Good God, have they got one of those here? Crikey, I didn’t know that any of them had sur­vived.” And, in the same instant I thought, ‘‘That’s what I’ll study! That’s what I’ll look at! The TSR2 project.’’