“Mining, Mobility, and the Routes/Roots of Vertical Science in the Time of Humboldt”

Patrick Anthony (Vanderbilt University)

Around 1760 travel took on a new dimension in Europe as savants ventured up mountains and into grottos and mines in an unprecedented surge of vertical mobility. By the turn of the nineteenth century, enthusiasm for subterranean travel crystallized in the narrative genre of the Voyage métallurgique and the bergmännische Reise, “the miner’s journey.” And just as historians of the Annales School have suggested that annual rhythms of transhumance imbued shepherds of the early modern period with unique conceptions of space and time, so I argue in this paper that patterns of vertical mobility in mines encouraged new ways of thinking about nature in the late Enlightenment. This way of thinking is particularly palpable amongst German savants of Alexander von Humboldt’s generation, many of whom zealously devoted themselves to the mining industry. If, as historians have argued, Humboldt’s way of thinking ultimately became the cornerstone of a “vertical consciousness” in nineteenth-century science, this study shows how Humboldt drew upon and contributed to a pre-existing mode of vertical thinking generated by late eighteenth-century mining. Borrowing James Clifford’s terminology, I conceive of mines as powerful sites of “dwelling/traveling”—fixed locations that offered dynamic mobility, the “routes/roots” of a vertical conception of nature. After examining this late-Enlightenment surge of subterranean travel and the industrial impulses undergirding it, I demonstrate how Humboldt and his contemporaries translated into scientific knowledge the physical experience of vertical mobility. In this underground—and underappreciated—episode in the history of science, experience was epistemology.

“Transposed Places, Mountain Faces: Local Knowledge and British Mountaineering in the Alps and Himalayas, 1821-1938”

Sarah Pickman (Yale University)

David Chambers and Richard Gillespie have articulately called for new thinking about “local knowledge” that goes beyond simply equating this concept with indigenous communities or colonized locales. So what can happen when local knowledge moves across different geographic spaces? If it doesn’t have to reside inside the original informant, but can effectively be transferred to others, at what point does it then become, simply, knowledge?

This paper uses British mountaineering in the Alps and Himalayas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as case studies to probe these questions, examining what it means for knowledge to be local and how Alpine knowledge became the general and portable practice of mountaineering. It draws on the writings of both mountaineers and guides, particularly of Matthias Zurbriggen, a native of Switzerland who served as a guide to early British expeditions in the Himalayas. The paper examines the precise skills and information that mountain guides were expected to have and how they pushed the limits of the “local.” Rather than relying only on their quotidian understanding of their native landscape, Sherpas became the preferred Himalayan climbing guides by learning an imported system of skills and behaviors developed in the Alps. Ultimately, the paper will argue that unpacking the concrete knowledge, skills, or assets in question is crucial for understanding the different levels at which “local-ness” operates in any context, and will ask whether there is a useful distinction between “local knowledge” and “knowledge” full stop.

“Andean Man and the Astronaut: Space, Race, and Cold War Altitude Physiology”

Jordan Bimm (York University)

In the early Cold War, the United States Air Force (USAF) School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) forged a relationship with physiologists at the Institute for Andean Biology (IAB) in Lima, Peru. In exchange for grant money and expensive equipment like altitude chambers, the Peruvian experts arranged for USAF experts in the nascent field of space medicine—the practice of selecting and protecting humans being sent to outer-space—to perform risky experiments on high-altitude indigenous miners thought to be specially adapted to labour in low-pressure environments. The Air Force experts—led by former Nazi physiologist and mountaineer Bruno Balke—believed the bodies of the indigenous miners held clues to conditioning future astronauts to the artificially-thin atmospheres of future spacecraft. Beginning in 1954, Balke compared the performance of Peruvian miners in pressure chambers to his own efforts to maximally acclimatize to altitude in the Andes. Balke’s Peruvian hosts, led by Alberto Hurtado promoted the indigenous miners as examples of a pre-colonial “Andean Man”, a sort of exceptional human unique to the region that confounded traditional medical categories of normal and pathological. Balke, on the other hand, viewed them as useful curiosities, whose unique physiology he hoped to appropriate in constructing the astronaut as a new kind of military “superman”. Contrasting the history of these two views reveals the colonial roots of high-altitude physiology as an expeditionary science constructed around an evolving conception of race, and assumptions about evolution and “the future of humanity” that persist in the field of space medicine.

“The Case of the Algatron; or Coping with Shit in Space.”

David Munns (John Jay College, CUNY)

Abstract: Forget liquid oxygen or neutron engines, what was really going to power manned space travel was algae. As the space race ramped up after 1957, the problems of creating a livable environment in space moved to the forefront, in particular the issue of waste both respiratory (CO2) and bodily (urine/feces). Two sanitary engineers from U.C. Berkeley proposed ‘The Algatron.’ The Algatron was a bioregenerative solution, using suspended algae in a controlled environment the algatron system would take human waste and feed it to algae whose own waste would then be consumed by the human space-farers. Moreover, the Algatron was a product of the underappreciated movement of biologists as late as the 1960s to develop conceptions of nature and technological systems that embraced nature’s feedback cycles and looked to understand its overall complexity. They lost out to a biology that was fundamentally reductionist and medicalized: by 1965 NASA had removed biological systems from its space vehicles and astronauts were condemned to poop in plastic bags and store the waste for return to earth and medical testing. In short, the categorization of biological “waste” represents a moment when biology faced a clear choice between methodologies, and so allows us access to what drive the biologists towards one and away from the other, namely towards a medicalized biology of reductionist molecules and away from an ecological biology of integrated whole organisms.