Am I the only one who's interested in how hat pins were made in the 18th century, or how radios were built during world war 2, and the material that went into them? Or factory lay outs and various machine tools... I have seen videos and articles on cool stuff like tank engines, and chainmail armor, and I know that locomotives are the passion of some - but the more mundane stuff would be interesting too; if only because no one really covers it.
Military history is a gigantic and very pedantic interest; youtube videos on battlefield logistics sometimes bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers. I feel like the same sorts of people could be into this 'sub genre', as it were, as well. Am I wrong? If so, why? Why aren't people so enthusiastic about industrial history?
Industrial history, history of technology, is very much a field and it is safe to say there are very enthusiastic people who do it. The Society for the History of Technology ( of SHOT) has about 1500 members, worldwide, and a journal, Technology and Culture.
However the character of a lot of research has changed, especially the academic. A typical history of, say, the Ford Model T, would once have looked at mostly the technical challenges of coming up with a good design, how heavy to make it, how complicated, whether to run it on alcohol or gasoline. Then the technical challenges of figuring out how big the plant would have to be, how it was decided to maximize economies of scale. And then, a discussion of the characters involved, like Henry Ford, the various engineers and managers. Although faults, disasters, and stupidity might not be avoided, it was typically what we'd call now Whig History: a story of progress being made, usually made by wise, great men, and in the context of a Western society also making progress, and with the best technology always winning. Though such heroic narrative histories are still being written, they're not the only ones. As SHOT puts it,
Despite the many recent academic contributions to the history of technology, the mutual interactions between technology and society have often been neglected in the high school, college, and even university curricula. When teachers unfamiliar with its rich historiography do consider technology, they all too often treat it as inert or determinate, lending their authority to the fallacy that it advances according to its own internal logic. Most historians of technology now largely agree that technologies (and technological systems) are socially constructed; that technologies succeed or fail (or emerge at all) partly because of the political strategies employed by “actors”—individuals, groups, and organizations—that have conflicting or complementary interests in particular outcomes. Most of them also agree that success or failure is also contingent on inescapable physical realities, “that the human fabric depends to a large degree on the behavior of atoms,” as the distinguished historian and metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith put it. But there is no doubt that technological designs are shaped by ambient social and cultural factors—nor, indeed, that the shaping of technology is integral to the shaping of society and culture.
So, there's a pretty wide-range of stuff that we'd call industrial history, now. If you're a geek, there are some wonderful technical museums out there ( want to see 200 years of different piano actions? the Vienna Technical Museum has examples , and reproductions of them that you can actually try) . If you want straightforward narrative histories of things or industries, they're still there ( like Stephen Watt's bio of Henry Ford, The People's Tycoon, or David S. Landis history of timekeeping and timekeeping devices, Revolution in Time). Or the history of an idea ( like David Hounshell's From the American System to Mass Production). But there is a lot more being done with technology in a bigger social and cultural context, especially in T&C: a random example would be an article of Oct. 2016, "From Natural Monopoly to Public Utility: Technological Determinism and the Political Economy of Infrastructure in Progressive-Era America". You can tell there's not going to be a deep-dive into all the different kinds of ceramic insulators for power lines, here.
TL:DR It's not that there aren't enthusiasts: it's just that the field has expanded beyond geeky enthusiasm.
PLAISS, ADAM. “From Natural Monopoly to Public Utility: Technological Determinism and the Political Economy of Infrastructure in Progressive-Era America.” Technology and Culture 57, no. 4 (2016): 806–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26406052.