PERSON
David Edgerton
British-Uruguayan historian of technology (b. 1959), Hans Rausing Professor at King's College London, whose career has been a sustained empirical assault on the innovation-centered frameworks that dominate public understanding of technology.
David Edgerton was born in Uruguay in 1959 and educated at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He has spent over three decades at the leading edge of the history of technology, holding the Hans Rausing Chair in the History of Science and Technology at King's College London since 2013. His work spans British military-industrial history, the history of twentieth-century technology globally, and the methodological foundations of how technology should be studied. Across that range, his consistent argument has been that the rhetorical and analytical frameworks dominating popular and policy discourse about technology — innovation, breakthrough, disruption, transformation — systematically distort the actual historical record. He is widely regarded as one of the most rigorous and contrarian voices in the field.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Edgerton's intellectual project began with British history. England and the Aeroplane (1991) reframed Britain's twentieth-century military aviation industry, demonstrating that the country was, contrary to its self-image, a major military-industrial power throughout the