The Pen at Work: Codifying Mining Techniques in Central Europe (ca. 1750-1820)

Historians of science consider eighteenth-century codifications of mining knowledge as precursors of modern technoscience. The present article uses technician-scientist Abraham Gottlob Werner’s codification of hard-rock mining techniques as a starting point to address three questions: How were labour processes translated into a knowledge structure? What was lost (or captured) in the process of textualization? And what purpose did codification serve? By analysing printed technological writings, Werner’s manuscript papers, and reports from the mining administration of Saxony, it makes a three-fold argument: First, hard-rock extraction generally involved embodied knowledge about rock and tools, which was verbalised and distributed among the workforce of a mine. Second, from the sixteenth century onwards, experts textualised some of this knowledge, which created the problem of aligning words and things. Third, attempts to rationalise mining administrations in the eighteenth century highlighted the problem that books, academic lectures, and bureaucratic writing only partially captured hard-rock mining as the dynamic interaction of tools, bodies, and natural environments. Technique, as distributed and embodied knowledge, eluded full systemization and control.