This doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports research in history of technology. The project focuses on the changing role of maritime technology as scientific instruments in oceanographic fieldwork between 1870 and 1930. The central theme of the work is the changing conception of the research vessel over this period, as it underwent a change from the ship as instrument, to the ship as laboratory, and finally, in its most recent incarnation, to the ship as invisible technician operating within an ocean transformed into credible scientific space. The plan is to develop a comparative study of marine expeditions and scientific correspondence of naturalists from the United States, France, and Britain. The grant supports archival research at various locations in these three countries.
Intellectual Merit
Most histories of the field sciences treat terrestrial topics, rather than marine ones. However, the abstract notion of ?the field? has been applied to marine environments. While the importance of laboratories as a space for scientific work has been well established by historians, and though there has been a growing body of recent scholarship on the history of field science, the link between ships, laboratories, and the development of oceanography as a field science has yet to be fully explored. Tracing this history will serve to set the history of oceanography within the larger history of science in the field and thereby offer to the history of science a contribution that bridges two subfields, the history of the development of laboratory and field sciences and the history of the exploration of the marine environment.
Broader Impact
This study will sheds light on the social and cultural processes involved in the emergence of global sciences framed in terms of large-scale systems, both physical and political. By tracing the development of oceans as scientific spaces, this work will demonstrate how the idea of a "Pacific World," with roots in nineteenth-century expeditionary science, contributed to the self-conscious geopolitical construction of this concept in the interwar period. Public proclamations about the Pacific World, along with the development of museum exhibits focused on marine science and interpreting the results of oceanographic expeditions, demonstrate the ways in which popular culture and politics interacted with the cultures of marine science.
This grant from the National Science Foundation supported dissertation research on the part of Antony Adler of the University of Washington, under the supervision of Professor Bruce Hevly of the University's Department of History. The funds made possible Adler's travel to archives in North America and Europe as he undertook the task of understanding important aspects of the history of oceanography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adler's work compared research undertaken in Germany, France, Monaco, Italy, Britain, and the United States. It has sought to understand why and how some scientific communities undertook research at sea, necessitating the establishment of ships as sites for reliable work, and others placed greater faith in work undertaken in seaside marine stations. It is important to note that much of the scholarship on the history of laboratories has focused on terrestrial field sciences. Adler has worked to understand how the case of ocean sciences challenges this earlier work; the oceans represent a dynamic environment, one less amenable to direct observation, and one in which the association of measurements with precise locations in space is considerably more difficult than it is on land. Adler's study has also undertaken the task of moving the history of oceanography from thet Atlantic World to the Pacific World. Looking at World's Fairs held on the West Coast of the United States, particularly in the interwar period, has opened up questions about how oceanography may have functioned symbolically as a realm of international cooperation. Adler's travels have also allowed him to speak at meetings and to interact with colleagues around North America and in Europe as well, setting him on the path to be an important working scholar. Because of the importance of ocean sciences for our understanding of the Earth's environment and global climates, historical work such as his provides important perspectives on the processes that have produced this knowledge.
