Last seen around here playing Calamity James as an adorable autist, Doris Day sings "Que Sera, Sera," an incomprehensibly popular hit considering the other things people were listening to at the time, but certainly a compelling bit of music in its own right. For that reason I grant a full and free pardon to whoever named the Que Sera Sera, the that gave a name to the Dakota that flew in the Polar battalion of Seabees and the construction materials from which were erected, at the freaking South Pole in freaking 1957, Amundsen-Scott Station.
The International Geophysical Year of 1957 is pretty pivotal to the history of science and technology on account of Sputnik, but if I want to have material to Technological Appendix about in 2027/8, it might be best to leave Sputnik, and Vanguard, until they come up chronologically. But the point of my appendices is to follow up on things as they blow up in the postblogging, and, oh boy, the Antarctic has blown up this fall.
There's actually an International Geophysical Year reason for this, which is that people do everything backwards and upside down in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Antarctic exploration year runs from November to roughly May, so November 1954 is only two Antarctic exploration years before the Big Show starts with Que Sera Sera landing att he South Pole on 31 October 1956 in what is already the second year of OPERATION DEEP FREEZE.
Much of the coverage that actually comes to mind is related to a historical article in Flight. I don't actually find Flight's interest in aviation history as ridiculous as my narrator does. I just don't think it's worth much coverage in a postblogging series. I only give The Economist's "One Hundred Years Ago Today" series so much attention because of the way that it penetrates the veil of obscurity to reveal just how different --and discreditable-- the bourgeois vision of events during the Nineteenth Century actually was. And by that I don't just mean James Wilson, Wait 'till we get to the sainted Walter Bagehot's Civil War coverage!
Which brings me naturally to the other big thing in the Antarctic coverage, which is the first stirrings of the 1957 Soviet programme, the 1st Soviet Antarctic Expedition, which won't leave Kaliningrad for another year to establish Mirny Station, but which occasions Newsweek's beyond bizarre blitherings about potential Soviet atomic tests in the vastnesses of Antarctica far away from hostile observers, albeit sure to awaken the shoggoths. I'm sure things will get less strained when the Expedition reaches the Antipodes and puts into Australian and New Zealand ports!
As for actual things actually happening in Antarctica, this is the year that the Australians established Mawson Station at Holme Bay in Mac Robertson Land, which you would think would be a big deal on account of it being "the oldest continuously inhabited Antarctic Station south of the Antarctic Circle," but, come on, it's Australian. (Also, it's pretty small. And low budget. The Aussies waited eight years to establish it because they took their time rustling up an icebreaker. No hurry, guys. You take your time to rustle up that one ship.) It was probably because the Australians already had an atomic testing site on a vast and essentially uninhabited (somewhat sub-)antarctic continent.
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| The Wiki article for the Ferguson TE 20 is illustrated with the ones used in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Nice! By Cliff Dickey, electronics technician, U.S. Navy.[1] Please also credit National Science Foundation. - http://www.usap.gov/; exact source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4983889 |
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| A Tucker Sno-Cat By Appie Verschoor - Flickr: Tucker sno-cat, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15014979 |
In retrospect, what with the United Kingdom (along with Argentina) being the only country ever to do something substantive over its Antarctic claims, I am not sure how true that actually was. They also put some guy named "Vivian" in charge. Who named his daughter, "Hilary!" Which I will forgive if it was some kind of incredibly sly self-own.
I'd like to tell you more about Mawson Station, but the Australian Antarctic Program hasn't updated the web page in over four years. Can any readers maybe double check to see if Australia is still trying to be a real country? It would have been an excellent place for the Trans-Antarctic Expedition to set out from, but it's in the thick bit of Antarctica,so that would have been too much of a trip, and wouldn't have involved the advance party living in crates after a botched landing.
This isn't a Technological Appendix because all the ample machinery used in the International Geophysical Year was, understandably enough, mature and reliable designs. The most spectacular machine on this page is the Tucker Sno-Cat, and it took a bit of poking around the Internet to even find the company, which is still up and running. It isn't surprising that Sno Cat is obscure. It builds specialised machinery for ski resorts, so the advertising isn't aimed at us, and I have no idea whether its long-ago involvement in Antarctic exploration has any bearing on its sales today. It's the same with the Antarctic as a scientific project. I mean, what were they trying to accomplish? On the other hand, that's a pretty presentist perspective, since, for example, the Van Allan Belt was only discovered at this time, and and the final confirmation of continental drift theory is also attributed dto the IGY. It's amazing what we didn't know before we went to the Antarctic in a serious way. Yes, it was heroic, but the reason that the Antarctic was only explored in the Fifties is because it is a very hostile environment and we needed a lot of new technology to explore it properly. I bet things like zippers and rubberised fabrics were hugely important, but are less photogenic than Sno Cats.
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| An Auster Antarctic, RuthAS picture credit. |
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| The changing fabrics of Antarctic exploration? I feel like there's a lot to be said. I just have no idea quite what. |
Something similar, one imagines, could be said about the IGY's other frontier of exploration. We generally talk about the spin-offs of space exploration and this post comes to you from the Vancouver of Gore-Tex and Lulu Lemon, so there's a lot to be said about progress in winter wear, and just out of curiosity I just looked up the Wikipedia article on Gore-Tex and Holy Moley is that the story of scientific progress and textiles and fashion in microcosm or what! It also involves a New Zealander working prior in 1966, so maybe there is some kind of Antarctic connection. The New Zealand Environment Ministry, which pursued the issue as part of its look at flourocarbon contamination, has tracked the story back to a contract for producing Teflon tape from Du Pont, but Scotchgard, from 3M, is another precursor product closer to the period and of undoubted usefulness for Antarctic exploration, although probably more for boots than clothes.
Well! Fabrics for Antarctica turned out to be an interesting and profitable digression. I will have to remember to get back on the Goretex trail in 2036, assuming [insert March 2025-appropriate political comment here from the perspective of whatever future year you hail from, reader, because I honestly can't think of a single thing to say that will have aged well from the perspective of next month, never mind next year].
And so with that note of pre-Apocalyptic whimsy, I leave you, oh reader, until next week, assuming that there is a next week.
The long hoped-for convergence of Erik Lund and Derek Guy is happening!
ReplyDeleteAs so often I feel like there's all these experts out there who could answer the questions that I suddenly find I have; and that's the best thing about month-by-month techblogging. You catch up on the things that no-one's written a well-regarded PhD thesis in the history of science and technology about, and should.
ReplyDeleteYou know, so their definitive history of boot water repellent treatments can get them a tenure track teaching job at a major state university. Sigh.