Events for December 2, 2009

December 2, 2009

Christine Hallett, University of Manchester

‘Death and the Maiden’:  Purity and Self-Sacrifice in the Image of the First World War Nurse

Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »

Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 2U Conference Room, Room 2019, Claire Fagin Hall
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing

The First World War was one of the most horrific conflicts of modern times.  Vast numbers of largely-inexperienced volunteer-soldiers were exposed to its highly destructive weaponry with devastating consequences.  The trauma they experienced was both physical and emotional.  Descriptions of First World War field hospitals have likened these institutions to butcher’s shops and charnel-houses.  Into these scenarios came trained and volunteer nurses - pristine in their white dresses and flowing veils - projecting an image of unsullied and invincible purity.  This paper will examine the myths and realities that lay behind this untouchable image of the First World War nurse and will consider the ways in which nurses engaged with the horrors of war, and with its physical and emotional consequences.  It will focus on the conflict that was created by their efforts to present themselves as pure, fearless and morally incorruptible, as they faced the grim realities of their experiences.  Finally, it will consider the self-sacrificing nature of nurses’ behaviours in staging these performances and will examine the consequences of these efforts of ‘self-containment’.  Christine Hallett, PhD, is Senior Lecturer and Director of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery, The School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University of Manchester, Manchester, England.

December 2, 2009

Philip Scranton, Rutgers University & Hagley Museum and Library

Histories and Historical Ethnographies of Technical Practice: Creating Jet Propulsion in the US and France

Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science | Visit site »

Join scholars from the area at the Regional Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine to to discuss Philip Scranton’s comparative study of jet engine development in the U.S. and France.  Commentary by Stuart W. Leslie.

Please note special day.  Please download and read the paper in advance. 

Philip Scranton is University Board of Governors Professor, History of Industry and Technology, at Rutgers University, and he is Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society at the Hagley Museum & Library.

Stuart W. Leslie is professor at the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University.

Abstract:For about six years Philip Scranton has been working on reconstructing the technical and organizational dynamics that underlay the development of a literally propulsive innovation--the jet engine, which commenced as a military device and within a decade began to reshape first civilian aviation, then global migration (of both people and microbes). The standard storylines are narratives of technical progress, based on upbeat newspaper and magazine stories and a handful of memoirs. Yet this framework was the result of retrospective rationalization of a nearly-chaotic and profoundly non-linear process, which was also secret, as it represented one element of emergent Cold War initiatives (which the US hardened into “weapons systems").

Jet engines proved an extravagantly-difficult technology, for though they resembled structurally the steam turbines which powered factories and electrical plants, they had to be light enough for liftoff and sustained flight, reliable under a range of stresses not found on the ground, and durable despite intense heat, vibrations, and turbine speeds of 10,000 rpm. The US course to operable jet propulsion involved repeated failures, vast expense, and, crucial to this project, virtually perpetual redesign, retrofitting, contract revisions, and at times explosive conflicts between the military and corporate contractors (and their subcontractors). France, by contrast, acquired Nazi engine designs and an “équipe” of 160 engineers and technicians from BMW, but had neither the funds nor the resources to experiment on a grand scale as were US developers. Yet both were richly messy projects, in which intense engineering innovations and rapid shop-floor revision of an unstable technology took place in the absence of anything like adequate scientific understandings of metallurgy, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, and stress failures in materials. Hence, here the significance of reconstructing technical practice is especially salient, for this entire exercise in innovation inverted the often-cited linear sequence in which scientific understandings are applied to technical problems and yield progress.

Having completed the bulk of his research on the American trajectory, ca. 1943-65, he turned to researching the French attack on jet propulsion puzzles. In winter and spring 2005-06, he spent eight weeks at the Archives de l’Armée de l’Air in Paris, with the goal of reconstituting technical practice in a nation politically and financially at a polar opposite to the US, yet with a strong tradition of technical excellence and innovation. The paper for PACHS will draw on both sets of records and will contrast US and French technical and organizational practice for jet engine building.

Its relevance to ethnography arises because these labor-intensive initiatives were stunningly complex, and because the actors had no choice but to work on a sustained trial and error basis. It thus becomes valuable to use technical documents to help reconstruct actors’ situations, dispositions and efforts looking forward in the 1940s and 1950s facing a Cold War (which they couldn’t know was actually going to be Cold) and technological challenges with layers of unknowns, including unknown unknowns (at time T1) which exploded into sudden significance (at time T2).

Second, unlike a current-day ethnography, this research proceeds through exploring historical sources, which suggests a useful question: what can the form and content of documents (including technical reports, engineering change orders, drawings, et al.) tell us about how actors conceptualized the efforts and the problem sets that had to be addressed in moving across error-filled innovation spaces.  Thus the paper will compare and contrast innovation strategies, along with the values and structures informing them.

December 2, 2009

Peder Anker, New York University

Spaceship Earth

Department of History and Program in History of Science, Princeton University | Visit site »

Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University

Abstract. Why did scientists and lay people alike in the 1970s talk about the Earth in terms of a Spaceship? And in what way did this frame the environmental debate? With a point of departure in the famous earthrise image, this lecture reviews the history of “spaceship earth.” The photo came to represent a dream of a globe in ecological harmony, yet it was taken by a crew of astronauts sent out in space to demonstrate the superiority of the United States in a world divided by Cold War tensions. Spaceship earth was not a vague analogy or metaphor, but that it reflected instead efforts to build a closed ecosystem within the spaceship in order to secure the health of astronauts. In other words, the Earth was literally understood as being construed as the spaceship and the environmental havoc was caused by humans not behaving like astronauts. Environmental ethics became an issue of trying to live like astronauts by adapting space technologies such as bio-toilets, solar cells, recycling, and energy-saving devices. Technology, terminology, and methodology developed for spaceships became tools for solving environmental problems onboard Spaceship Earth. Spaceships came to represent the rational, orderly, and wisely managed contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill managed environments on Earth.

Peder Anker is Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.