Taming tempests through telegraphy and media appearances: Science communication and the construction of a Swedish storm-warning system before the Great War

Summary

The aim of this paper is to explore relations between science and the public. Specifically, Swedish meteorology around 1900 and the rôle of media relations in the construction of a storm-warning system will be discussed. It is argued that science–public interaction can be a factor in the process of establishing priorities in science.

This paper draws upon and is an expansion of a paper previously published in Swedish.50 It has benefited from comments from Anders Ekström, Mark Elam, Jenny Larsson, and Sven Widmalm, as well as the colleagues at the Research Policy Institute, and two anonymous referees, which are thankfully acknowledged. It was written within the RPI project ‘Kunskapssamhällets konfliktlinjer’, with financial support from the Swedish Research Council.

Notes

¹Stephen Hilgartner, ‘The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses’, Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519–39; Bruce V. Lewenstein, ‘Cold Fusion and Hot History’, Osiris 7 (1992): 135–63; Nelly Oudshoorn, ‘On Masculinities, Technologies, and Pain: The Testing of Male Contraceptives in the Clinic and the Media’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 24 (1999): 265–89; Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor J. Pinch, How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Peter Weingart, ‘Science and the Media’, Research Policy 27 (1998): 869–79.

²Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, 1999) chapter 4, quote: 200.

³Nelly Oudshoorn (note 1).

⁴Sven Widmalm, Det öppna laboratoriet: Uppsalafysiken och dess nätverk 1853–1910 (Stockholm, 2001) Chapter 6.

⁵Gunnar Eriksson, Kartläggarna: naturvetenskapens tillväxt och tillämpningar i det industriella genombrottets Sverige 1870–1914 (Umeå, 1978); Thomas Kaiserfeld, Vetenskap och karriär: Svenska fysiker som lektorer, akademiker och industriforskare under 1900-talets första hälft (Lund, 1997); Anna Tunlid, Ärftlighetsforskningens gränser: Individer och institutioner i framväxten av svensk genetik (Lund: Avdelningen för idé- och lärdomshistoria, 2004). The many cases of extramural activities in the history of Swedish science in this period could make the country a case along the lines of Pestre, in the critique of notions of such connections being of recent date. Dominique Pestre, ‘The Production of Knowledge between Academies and Markets: A Historical Reading of the Book The New Production of Knowledge’, Science, Technology, and Society 5 (2000): 169–81.

⁶Elisabeth Crawford, Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect (Canton, MA, 1996); Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY, 1993); Axel Wallén, ‘Nils Gustaf Ekholm’, KVA Årsbok 23 (1925): 273–85; Anders Ångström, ‘Ekholm, Nils Gustaf’, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1949).

⁷Sven Widmalm. Det öppna laboratoriet: Uppsalafysiken och dess nätverk 1853–1910 (Stockholm, 2001).

⁸One instructive example was when Ekholm, at a meeting with the physics society on 11 March 1899, criticized Kristian Birkeland's theories on aurorae and sunspots, a field in which Ekholm had published several works together with Svante Arrhenius and therefore had an interest in creating opinion against Birkeland's work. The open meeting of the Physics Society and the newspaper coverage for the meeting were used as arenas of public scientific debate. It was also a space where it was possible to say things in a rhetorical tone other than in the scientific literature, like calling Birkeland's theories outright ‘fantastic fiction’. ‘Solfläckarna och norrskenen’, Aftonbladet, 15 March 1899.

⁹For more on boundary organizations, see David H. Guston, ‘Boundary Organizations in Environmental Policy and Science: An Introduction’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 26 (2001): 399–408; David H. Guston, ‘Stabilizing the Boundary Between US Politics and Science: The Role of the Office of Technology Transfer as a Boundary Organization’, Social Studies of Science 29 (1999): 87–111.

¹²‘Cosmic’, in The Encyclopædia Britannica (New York, 1910).

¹⁰Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (Kent: Dawson, 1978) chapter three.

¹¹The scientists doing cosmical physics had synthetic ambitions, pertaining to a conceptual unity, but that had not yet been institutionalized in departments, chairs, a pro cess that happened in the twentieth century with the creation of institutional structures, sources of funding, and patronage that supported a subset of what had been cosmical physics: the earth sciences. Ronald E. Doel, ‘The Earth Sciences and Geophysics’, in Companion to Science in the Twentieth Century, edited by John Krige and Dominique Pestre (London, 2003).

¹³Svante Arrhenius, Lehrbuch der kosmichen Physik, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1903).

¹⁴Elisabeth Crawford (note 6) Gustav Holmberg. Reaching for the Stars: Studies in the History of Swedish Stellar and Nebular Astronomy, 1860–1940 (Lund, 1999), 171–81.

¹⁵Gustav Holmberg (note 14), Sven Widmalm (note7).

¹⁶Graeme Gooday, ‘Sunspots, Weather, and the Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart's Anti-Materialist Representations of “Energy” in British Periodicals’, in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA, 2004).

¹⁷Olov Amelin, ‘Physics as Ideology: Svante Arrhenius as a Writer of Popular Science’, in Center on the Periphery: Historical Aspects of 20th-Century Swedish Physics, ed. Svante Lindqvist (1993).

¹⁸Svante Arrhenius, Världarnas utveckling (Stockholm, 1906).

¹⁹Urban Wråkberg, The Centennial of S.A. Andrée's North Pole Expedition: Proceedings of a Conference on S.A. Andrée and the Agenda for Social Science Research of the Polar Regions (Stockholm, 1999); Ångström (note 6).

²⁰Sverker Sörlin, ‘The Burial of an Era: The Home-Coming of Andrée as a National Event’, in The Centennial of S.A. Andrée's North Pole Expedition: Proceedings of a Conference on S.A. Andrée and the Agenda for Social Science Research of the Polar Regions, ed. Urban Wråkberg (Stockholm, 1999), 100–111.

²¹ Riksdagens protokoll vid lagtima riksmötet år 1872. Andra kammaren, vol. 2 (Stockholm, 1872) bilaga no 7.

²²‘Meteorologiska byråns framtid’, Dagens Nyheter, 7 November 1902.

²³Letter from Nils Ekholm to Svante Arrhenius, 27 February 1916. Folder E01:1, Nils Ekholm Collection, Center for History of Science, The Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.

²⁴Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago, 2005).

²⁵‘Orkanen och dess härjningar’, Svenska Dagbladet, 29 december 1902, ‘Orkanen på västkusten’, Svenska Dagbladet, 28 December 1902.

²⁶‘Stormarna och den moderna meteorologien. Inrättande af stormvarningar å Sveriges kuster’, Svenska Dagbladet, 9 January 1903.

²⁷‘Sammankomster. Fysiska sällskapet’, Dagens Nyheter, 16 February 1903.

²⁸Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology.

²⁹‘Rationell metod för väderleksförutsägelser’, Stockholms Dagblad, 26 October 1903, ‘Rationell metod för väderleksförutsägelser’, Dagens Nyheter, 26 October 1903, ‘Vid fysiska sällskapets sammankomst’, Aftonbladet, 26 October 1903.

³⁰See, for example, Nils Ekholm, ‘Om telegrafering utan tråd’, folder F01:5, Ekholm colle ction, Center for History of Science, The Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.

³¹‘Om stormar’, Stockholms Dagblad, 14 May 1904.

³²Katharine Anderson (note 24).

³³Compare the Swedish case with 10 other countries presented in Ibid. table 2.1.

³⁴‘Stormarna och den moderna meteorologien. Inrättande af stormvarningar å Sveriges kuster’.

³⁵ Riksdagens protokoll vid lagtima riksmötet år 1872. Andra kammaren, vol. 2, 542 ff.

³⁶Nils Ekholm, ‘Om lufttryckets ändringar och därmed sammanhängande företeelser’, Ymer (1908).

³⁷‘Fiskerikonferensen i Marstrand’, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 18 July 1904.

³⁸Nils Ekholm, ‘Det svenska stormvarningsväsendet’, Nils Ekholm Collection, Center for History of Science, The Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.

³⁹Nils Ekholm (note 36); Nils Ekholm, Stormvarningarna i Sverige: En liten historik (Stockholm, 1910); Nils Ekholm, Stormvarningarna på Sveriges västra och östra kust 1905–1910: Omdömen och iakttagelser (Stockholm, 1911).

⁴⁰Nils Ekholm (note 38).

⁴¹Nils Ekholm (note 36); Ekholm, Stormvarningarna på Sveriges västra och östra kust 1905–1910: Omdömen och iakttagelser, ‘En ohygglig ovädersnatt’, Göteborgs-Posten, 19 July 1907; ‘Olycksnatten i Marstrand’, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 19 July 1907.

⁴²‘Kungl. Maj:ts nådiga proposition nr 236’, Bihang till riksdagens protokoll 1913 1 saml (Stockholm, 1913).

⁴³See, for example, Katharine Anderson (note 24).

⁴⁴‘Strömberg och verkligheten’, Dagens Nyheter, 27 October 1913.

⁴⁵‘Strömberg och verkligheten’, Dagens Nyheter, 2 December 1913.

⁴⁶Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeeth-Century England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).

⁴⁷‘Strömbergs väderleksbyrå’, Dagens Nyheter, 19 October 1913.

⁴⁸‘Strömbergs väderleksbyrå’, Dagens Nyheter, 19 October 1913.

⁴⁹‘Amanuensen Strömberg överger astronomien’, Dagens Nyheter, 24 September 1913.

⁵⁰Gustav Holmberg, ‘Nils Ekholm, stormvarningarna och allmänheten’, in Den mediala vetenskapen, edited by Anders Ekström (Nora: Nya Doxa, 2004).