The State of "State of the Art"
The phrase turns 100 (and is not aging well).
By Jesse Smith
You may be on summer vacation, but innovation certainly isn’t! Take Norman, Oklahoma — the City Council there just approved the installation of a state-of-the-art, solar-powered outdoor warning system. Up in New Hampshire, meanwhile, Plymouth State University recently unveiled a state-of-the-art, geothermal ice rink. And earlier this month in Mitchellville, Iowa, the governor joined state officials under the bright summer sun to break ground on a state-of-the-art, $68-million women’s prison that will include a mental health treatment facility.
All across the country, many different “arts” are being pushed to their current limits as state-of-the-art hospital wings and college laboratories and concert halls and coroner’s offices take shape. Peruse the newspaper of any city or region in the country — a quotidian task easily performed on the now-decades old Internet — and you’ll likely find something, or many things, seemingly at the fore of human innovation (No outlet can resist such effusive praise: “...the early indications are that there is likely also to be a great deal of substance, about new methodologies, global developments (such as in China) and even incidents when major firms with state-of-the-art risk-management systems manage to lose a great deal of money...” The New York Times, July 22, 2010).
All these technologies — and the journalists who write about them — can thank an engineer named Henry Harrison Suplee for the four-word phrase that today signals to readers and listeners that something is new and should therefore be considered the best, without really explaining why. The Oxford English Dictionary's first reference to "state of the art" is dated to 1910, when Suplee published The Gas Turbine: Progress in the Design and Construction of Turbines Operated by Gases of Combustion. He wanted to collect in one place all the research on gas turbines, which had failed to reach what was then the “commanding position” of the steam turbine. The world is first exposed to the iconic phrase in the introduction to The Gas Turbine. Suplee writes:
It has...been thought desirable to gather under one cover the most important papers which have appeared upon the subject of the gas turbine in England, France, Germany, and Switzerland, together with some account of the work in America, and to add to this such information upon actual experimental machines as can be secured.
In the present state of the art this is all that can be done, but it is believed that this will aid materially in the conduct of subsequent work, and place in the hands of the gas-power engineer a collection of material not generally accessible or available in convenient form.
Note how Suplee uses the phrase. It reads almost apologetically — Suplee is referring not the latest possibilities (“state”) of gas turbine engineering (“art”), but instead to the field’s limitations. This phrase here is a lament.
Of course the phrase is used for much different purposes today. The OED defines “state of the art” as “the current stage of development of a practical or technological subject; freq. (esp. in attrib. use) implying the use of the latest techniques in a product or activity.” Nothing about “current” or “latest” is inherently qualitative, and yet over the last century, the phrase itself has taken on an almost exclusively positive connotation.
Nobody, for example, describes the Gulf oil spill as a state-of-the-art environmental disaster, even though the deepwater drilling technology that made such an event possible is as state-of-the-art as it comes (according to Oxford’s official definition). But take a refrigerator ad: “The GE Profile refrigerator has a state-of-the-art 3-stack drawer system with a deli drawer, a fresh food drawer and a CustomCool™ drawer that can thaw meat in hours or chill a bottle of wine in minutes.” GE doesn’t describe its refrigerators as being state-of-the-art to suggest limitations or any possible technological glitches that could come with so new a technology as the CustomCool drawer. The phrase instead implies that you can’t do any better than a GE refrigerator — what with its ease of thawing meat and chilling wine — and isn’t doing better the whole point?
Of course, who decides what’s better? Historian of technology Robert Friedel has identified what he calls a “culture of improvement” in the West. In his book of the same name, he describes this as “the ascendancy of values and beliefs permeating all levels of society that ‘things could be done better.’” Friedel is careful, however, to distinguish “improvement” from “progress.” The former, Friedel argues, is contingent — what might be an improvement for you might do nothing for me — and is not the lofty pursuit of worldly change but instead the “daily understanding that human beings have the capacity to improve how they do things.” “To talk of progress,” Friedel says, “is to speak in essentially teleological terms, to suggest that technology...is moving toward a divine end.”
We think of those things “state-of-the-art” as being improvements, when they more closely resemble what Friedel labels as progress. I mean, from what natural hardship arose a single refrigerator draw that can both thaw meat and cool a bottle of wine in less time than normally required? The improvement for that came millennia ago, and it was called “planning ahead.”
I don’t want to criticize what the CustomCool™ drawer does, or to claim that nobody really needs one. I instead want to suggest that maybe, on its 100th birthday, it’s time to put “state of the art” to rest. The phrase reinforces a world of artificial, binary choices between the newest and the not newest. This is true even when something’s state-of-the-artness involves seemingly noble intentions such as expanded mental health care services in a new prison, or a geothermal energy source for an indoor ice rink. In the case of the latter, a nod to the environment allows us to leap over the question of whether or not we should even have an indoor ice rink. The phrase — the sentiment — lulls us into believing we’ve been doing things pretty well all along, and that we just need to tweak things every now and again.
“State of the art” allows us to continue mistaking top-down progress for improvement. If you think your life and your world isn’t perfect and could stand some improvement, that’s an important distinction. And if you think they are perfect, well, you should take a drive up to Plymouth State and try the ice rink. "It's state-of-the-art technology,” Bruce Lyndes, Plymouth State’s media relations manager told The Citizen of Laconia, “and state-of-the-art fun." • 26 July 2010
Jesse Smith is managing editor of The Smart Set.
