Robert MacDougall is a Canadian-based historian of science, technology, communication, and American history. He is Department Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Western University (University of Western Ontario) in London, Ontario. He received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2004.
MacDougall's research focuses primarily on the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the ways information, communication, science, and technology interact with political, economic, and cultural change.
He is the author of The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), a study of the independent telephone movement in the United States and Canada and its struggle with the expanding Bell System. The book received the 2016 Albert B. Corey Prize, awarded jointly by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association.
MacDougall has also conducted extensive historical research into nineteenth-century scientific controversy, pseudoscience, thermodynamics, and attempts to develop so-called perpetual-motion machines. A major focus of this work has been Philadelphia inventor John Worrell Keely and the Keely Motor. His article, “Sympathetic Physics: The Keely Motor and the Laws of Thermodynamics in Nineteenth-Century Culture,” was published in Technology and Culture in 2019 and received the Society for the History of Technology’s 2022 Abbott Payson Usher Prize.
MacDougall describes his continuing Keely research as part of a broader cultural history of thermodynamics and the nineteenth-century dream of perpetual motion. Rather than attempting primarily to reconstruct Keely's physics as a working scientific system, his published work examines the Keely Motor as a historical and cultural phenomenon: how Keely's claims were understood by supporters and critics, how they intersected with contemporary ideas about energy and thermodynamics, and what the controversy reveals about science, technology, economics, and American culture during the period.
His other research interests include the history of games, simulations, and digital methods in teaching history. He has taught American history, history of science and technology, media history, business history, digital history, and related subjects at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Institution: Department of History, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada
Academic degree: PhD, Harvard University, 2004
Research fields: American history; history of science and technology; communications history; information networks; nineteenth-century scientific culture; thermodynamics; John Worrell Keely.
Website: www.robmacdougall.org
Email: rmacdou at uwo.ca

One point worth emphasizing: MacDougall is not merely somebody who mentioned Keely in passing. He has done sufficient research on Keely for the article to win SHOT's Usher Prize, and Western currently describes his larger book project as being centered on the Keely Motor.
At the same time, his published framing is quite explicit. He treats Keely within the histories of perpetual motion and nineteenth-century pseudoscience, and the 2019 article concentrates largely on the cultural, financial, and intellectual “work” performed by the Keely controversy rather than asking whether Keely's sympathetic-vibratory system contained technically valid principles.