This issue presents three articles on a familiar theme: the intersection among science, technology, business, and the state through the mid-to-late decades of the twentieth century. Tilmann Hanel and Mikael Hård’s ‘Inventing Traditions: Interests, Parables and Nostalgia in the History of Nuclear Energy’ reinvestigates the history of the development of nuclear reactors in Germany and Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s and the choice between technologies of heavy or light water reactors. As the title of the article suggests this choice not only was embedded in the politics of a particular period in which nuclear technologies were seen as defining symbols of national identity and geopolitical positioning in the Cold War relations between the US and European nations. But that this historical moment also subsequently became a focal point for collective memory, to ‘invent a tradition’ only loosely connected to period decisions and discussions. Such invented tradition, the authors argue, sought to define a distinct and enduring national identity in a key technological domain (with different valences and meanings in each national case). Elena Kochetkova’s ‘A history of failed innovation: continuous cooking and the Soviet pulp industry, 1940–1960s,’ also explores an implicitly comparative question for the Soviet state: of the national and geopolitical meaning of developing indigenous methods for solving perceived key technological problems vs. importing relevant innovations from Europe or the United States. The ‘failure’ that Kochetkova analyzes is how, in the case of pulp-making technologies, Soviet practices of compartmentalization of communications, institutional rivalries, and the absence of resources at critical moments of development undermined broader state ambitions to create self-sufficient, nationally autonomous innovations. Nils Randlev Hundebøl and Kristian H. Nielsen’s ‘Preparing for Change: Acid Rain, Climate Change, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), 1972–1990s’ shifts the perspective to the United States and state-industry relations around issues of human-generated environmental impacts. Their focus on the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry organized and supported association, brings forward how industrial actors sought to grapple with the political and regulatory implications of environmental and climate change concerns through an Institute-supported research program. In seeking to manage relations between electric power firms and the state, the Institute in its early phase sought to use research as a rationalizing strategy to adjust and re-frame state environmental actions, but later adopted a strategy that emphasized scientific uncertainty and thus of the ability to produce well-grounded policy.
Complementing these articles, is an Images, Technology, and History essay by Jared Buss, ‘Virtual witnessing and space-age media: a case study of The Conquest of Space (1949)’. This book, written by Willy Ley and illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, Buss argues, was one critical initiative, among a series of others in the postwar years, that created through evocative narratives and visuals an intimate, personal sense of the prospects of space exploration. More deeply, he offers, this enculturation to space exploration, especially for a swath of Americans, contributed to the ‘shock’ of the USSR achieving the first venture in space with the successful launch of Sputnik I.
Smithsonian Institution
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