It was in a workshop and the moving and roaring artifact at the center of this materially messy space was an injection moulding machine. The university-trained engineering students and battle-hardened craftsmen surrounded the machine, which was composed of a material hopper, an injection ram or screw-type plunger, and a heating unit. Thermoplastic resin pellets were loaded into the hopper, and the molds had been carefully installed by experienced craftsmen onto the assembled machine, to which were connected some dozen pipes providing pressure. They were conducting test rounds, and there were heated debates between the two sides on how to proceed properly and what should be changed in the next round, without assuming whose experience and knowledge was more practical to the improvement of the final production. The 2004 documentary When Professor Meets Black Hand: The Era of Plastic Injection Molding was produced by the late scholar Chyuan-Yuan Wu (吳泉源), an associate professor at the Institute of Sociology at National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan. After training as an engineer at undergraduate level and receiving a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, his research had focused on elaborating and characterizing the technoscientific community in Taiwan and its roles and contribution in the postwar era. He had devoted himself to a detailed depiction of the history of technology in Taiwan, taking both field surveys and oral history as his main approaches. Through accumulating solid documentation of the iconic cases, ranging from the "traditional industries" such as tennis racket manufacture and plastic molding to the "high-tech industries" such as semiconductor manufacture, he put...
