abstract:
In 1926, during an economic crisis that severely impacted the mining industry, Guggenheim Brothers, the Guggenheim family business, implemented a new technological system to extract saltpeter from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Known as the Guggenheim system, this cutting-edge technological innovation had a significant impact on regional society and facilitated the introduction of Chilean saltpeter into the global fertilizer market. For this system to succeed, however, it had to incorporate a sociopolitical strategy based on a highly hierarchical and well-controlled labor force. Through their political and cultural influence in the region, the Guggenheim family's industry transformed a remote area into a state periphery, creating new ways of inhabiting the desert within a strict framework in which workers' lives were regulated by company-imposed labor discipline. With more political power than the state, the Guggenheim family sought to suppress any social agency deemed dangerous to the production of saltpeter.
abstract:
As the U.S. military became embroiled in "jungle warfare" across the Pacific during World War II, it was caught off guard by the rapid deterioration of materials and equipment in the tropics, where the air was hot, humid, and teeming with fungal spores. This article tells the story of how American scientists and engineers understood the "tropical deterioration" of portable radios and electronics and developed techniques to counteract it. Examining scientific efforts to prevent tropical decay reveals how exposure to tropical conditions during World War II shaped the development of portable electronics. Contributing to envirotech history and environmental media studies, this article uncovers the importance of climate proofing to the history of electronics miniaturization. Tropical deterioration, furthermore, provides a technology-focused lens for enriching our historical understanding of the tropics as an environmental imaginary.
abstract:
Diego Rivera's mural El hombre controlador del universo (1934) can be read as foreshadowing the anxieties and optimisms about atomic power that shaped popular culture in Mexico during the nuclear age. In epic fashion, Rivera's vision affirms the agency of ordinary people in the face of a technological epoch while eerily anticipating the bipolarity of the Cold War, themes that would be revisited by Julián Soler in his film Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida (1969), which bears out the prophecy of Rivera's mural.
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Ulf Otto's The Theater of Electricity examines a wide range of electrical presentations and technologies in use on the western European stage in the titular time period. Geographically, Otto examines mainly German cases, although the book also covers certain performances in France and England. His case studies include examples from opera, spectacular theater, dance, and technological exhibitions. Using these, Otto analyzes how electrical technologies, such as carbon-arc and incandescent lights, were integrated into and developed within theatrical material culture and how famous performances involving these and other technologies both influenced and were influenced by the cultural meaning of this new source of power. He is interested in particular in what he calls the "aesthetic regime" of electricity, which makes it possible to reconcile then-developing modernism with industrial materiality by permitting audiences and artists to avoid directly perceiving the labor that made electrical power possible.
Otto shows the collaborative influences of theater, culture, and electrical technologies through eclectic historical examples; in fact, The Theater of Electricity often feels densely packed with these examples, each one seeming as though it could be expanded into a more detailed study. He draws on a rich variety of primary and secondary sources, exploring his thesis from many angles. Importantly, he is careful not only to describe the effects of electrical technologies on audiences and performers but also to integrate the backstage engineers and technicians to provide a fuller picture.
However, for scholars who focus on the technological, not the theatrical, this wide-ranging approach is sometimes disorienting. This is in part because the author aims this book at an audience familiar with histories of theater but less so with histories of technology. His historiological purpose, he explains, is to criticize the tendency of history of theater to treat science and technology as distinct entities developed in the world outside the theater and then adapted for theatrical practice. Instead, he argues through example, performance histories must regard theater and technologies as interconnected, each influencing the other within the larger context of social, cultural, and economical changes. He explicitly incorporates approaches learned from histories of technology, such as Morus's work on electrical demonstrations in Victorian England, and integrates STS concepts, such as Latour's actor-network theory. Because Otto assumes readers' background in historiographie
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