“Drip Drip Drop goes the Factory Clock: Ecology, Climate, and the Design of American Cotton Mills, 1830-1870”

Kate Wersan (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

While the factory clock occupies an iconic place in the historiography of industrialization, during the nineteenth century many Americans also pursued increased productivity, discipline, and efficiency by rejecting the regular units of the clock and seeking to align their labor more closely with the rhythms of the natural world. In this paper I argue that for cotton mill managers and operatives, as well as the inventors of American water-powered textile machinery, the goal of “perpetual production” required a closer relationship with the natural environment, and a deep, though often narrow, knowledge of local ecosystems. In water-powered cotton mills, ecology was a form of timekeeping, and harmony with nature another name for efficiency. This paper suggests that the mid-nineteenth century factory building developed as a technology to interpret and correlate processes in the natural environment (inputs), monitor them continuously based on predetermined, standardized, and universalized processes (programs), and produce place-specific temporal information that could then be used to organize and regulate labor within the mill (outputs). Necessitated by the biology of the cotton plant, the ecology of labor in the mill, and the mechanics of water-powered cotton machinery, the very structure of a mid-nineteenth century cotton factory became a tool of anticipation: an organic timekeeper and a type of early analog computer. Far from suggesting that the synchronicity with natural processes these timekeepers enabled created more humane work environments, this line of argument helps us understand many of the subtleties of mid-century contestations over factory work schedules, expertise, and machine intelligence.

“Arresting the Finger of Time: Temporality, Mobility, and the Science of Artificial Refrigeration, 1860-1900”

Rebecca Woods (University of Toronto)

By the close of the nineteenth century, mechanical refrigeration was widely celebrated as a triumph over the natural world. By harnessing the novel science of thermodynamics, steam-powered refrigerating engines forestalled putrefaction in animal flesh, dairy, and eventually fruit. Doing so, they seemed capable of reordering time and space. This paper examines contemporary claims of this nature, arguing that nowhere was the impact of artificial refrigeration more apparent than in the context of the British Empire, where it effectively redrew the map, pulling the pastoral “ghost acres” of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—as well as Argentina and the United States—closer to metropolitan Britain. Equally, mechanical refrigeration appeared to bring time itself under the aegis of mankind, reordering traditional seasonality (for example, by making antipodean lamb available to British diners in December as well as in April) and forestalling the effects of death (rot and decay) if not death itself. Yet claims made on behalf of the novel technology—by statesmen, scientists, boosters and engineers—were often overblown. Early efforts to apply novel refrigeration technology to colonial trade routes were plagued by technological failure. Breakage was commonplace, and even where machinery functioned properly, frozen cargo was always vulnerable to the vicissitudes of climate, on land (especially in the Australian colonies) and at sea. Thus, although the technology promised to make “climate, seasons, plenty, scarcity, [and] distance...all shake hands,” according to an early Australian booster, the new arrangements of time and space ostensibly ushered in by refrigeration technology were partial at best.

“Excavating Planetary Time: G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Making of a Biosphere”

Leah Aronowsky (Harvard University)

In the mid-1940s, Yale ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson began an ambitious research project: to survey and assemble all existing knowledge about the planetary phosphorus cycle. Stemming from his career-long effort to pioneer the discipline of biogeochemistry, Hutchinson’s survey focused primarily on the cycle as mediated by guano, the phosphorus-rich animal droppings produced by seabirds and heralded the world over as a potent agricultural fertilizer. As part of his research, Hutchinson aimed to develop the natural history of colossal guano deposits that had accumulated on islands off the coast of Peru. These deposits had long ceased to exist—an effect of industrial-scale extraction during the 1860s international Guano Rush—but Hutchinson was able to reconstruct these deposits by using a historical photograph. Using the guano’s geologic-like layers of stratification captured in the image, Hutchinson outlined an absolute chronology for the origins of these deposits, ultimately concluding that the formations were relatively young in age.

This paper charts Hutchinson’s efforts to survey the planet’s guano-mediated phosphorus cycles, arguing that, in placing the guano deposits on the same timescale as human—rather than geological—history, the ecologist subtly rebuked theories of history as applied to the human realm: prevailing scientific interpretations cast the guano deposits as essentially prehistoric, a hypothesis that was, I show, in keeping with theories of history that cast “primitive” nations like Peru as literally living in a different time. By contrast, Hutchinson used his findings about the natural historical timescale of phosphorus to implicitly argue for the coevalness of cultures.

“Matter of Time: Making and Measuring the Ovarian Reserve”

Jenna Healey (Queens University)

Within the context of reproductive medicine, the “ovarian reserve” has become a popular term to describe the number and quality of germ cells remaining in the ovary. Beginning in the early 1990s, the ovarian reserve was deployed clinically to forecast a female patient’s chances of conceiving, with or without the use of assisted reproductive technologies. Fertility specialists have argued that ovarian reserve is a better predictor of conception than chronological age alone, building on the assumption that reproductive tissue ages at a different rate than the rest of the body. This paper will examine the history of the “ovarian reserve” to understand how biologists and physicians have ascribed a unique temporality to reproductive tissue. Asserting that a patient’s ovarian age could diverge from their chronological age required a reconceptualization of the ovary as particularly vulnerable to the passage of time, as well as to toxic environmental exposures that could accelerate the aging process. This temporal vulnerability was inevitably gendered: while the ovary was understood to be in a constant state of decline, the continuous generation of sperm cells made them invulnerable to aging, an assumption that has only recently been challenged by studies of the male reproductive system. The increasing use of assisted reproductive technologies in the 1980s and 1990s allowed the oocyte to become an independent object of study, while cultural concerns about the ticking of a woman’s “biological clock” encouraged the development of several competing methods for quantifying and measuring ovarian age.