Universal Engineering: Technological Experts’ Claims for Nationalist and Internationalist Citizenship during the Interwar Period”

Heidi Voskuhl (University of Pennsylvania)

Engineers’ efforts to constitute themselves as a new professional group (and political and cultural elite) during the “Second” Industrial Revolution (c. 1870 to 1930) was both a national and a global phenomenon. Engineers set down accreditation rules for their professional knowledge and ethical codes, constituted themselves in associations and interest groups, developed curricula at a range of institutions of learning, lobbied governments for social and political recognition, and popularized engineering knowledge and practices. They forged institutional bonds within nation-states and across the globe, through international engineering associations and sustained migration. In my paper, I analyze how engineers relied in this process on distinctly internationalist ideas and principles, connecting them to their newly developed models of engineering knowledge and practice, their concerns for social recognition and social mobility, and their concerns for their respective nation states (and the publics in them) in a period of massive economic, diplomatic, and military crises. I first look at how ideas of internationalism were negotiated as essential parts of engineering knowledge and practice, which elevated the status of engineer as role model for both nationalist identities and functional internationalist institutions and agreements. Second, drawing on the examples of Germany and the U.S., I study ideological tensions between engineers’ claims for bourgeois cosmopolitanism, engineers’ claims about the knowledge and ethos of their profession as supposedly universal and global, and the aggressive nationalisms and regionalisms of engineers’ newly founded professional organizations.

“Joint Disagreements: Chemical Information, Chemical Naming, and Internationalism as Process, 1919- 1930”

Evan Hepler-Smith (Harvard University)

The standardization of nomenclature and terminology is often taken for granted as typical subject matter for international cooperation. But what were the affinities that bound nomenclature reform and international organizations together in the first place? This paper will investigate this question through a study of nomenclature reform activities of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) between 1919 and 1930. During these fragile early years of IUPAC, an organization that has since come to play a prominent role in global chemistry, the development of international standards for naming chemicals was a signature task justifying the Union’s existence. This paper argues that nomenclature took on this role for two reasons. First, nomenclature was bound up with providing access to chemical information, a matter of universal concern to academic and industrial chemists. Second, nomenclature was a good subject for disagreement. Lying at the intersection of language, information, chemical taxonomy, and publishing, naming proved a fruitful site for chemists to pursue a wide range of aims informed by diverse values and interests. IUPAC rules of nomenclature did not take hold in an especially broad range of nations and settings, but their development did cement IUPAC as a good place for working out political, economic, intellectual, and economic disagreements among chemists. This paper thus contributes to the historiography of scientific internationalism and of scientific information by showing how concerns about information impelled a process of international cooperation that constituted an enduring organization.

“Cooperation or Collaboration?: DIN, Nazi Germany, and the Finnish Construction Industry”

Nader Vossoughian (New York Institute of Technology)

Like scientific and bibliographic organizations, standards organizations have played a significant role in promoting internationalist causes. Nation-states rely on them to broadcast national economic interests globally. Corporations partner with them to gain access to foreign markets. Economic policymakers use them to enforce globalization. Managers use them to maintain quality across national and linguistic boundaries. This presentation addresses the history of standards organizations, internationalism, and quality control in the field of industrial engineering. I consider the emergence of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), founded in 1917. During the last two years of World War II, Germany's Nazi government used DIN to export its economic, military, and political goals. This represented an unlikely union, as DIN remained a private non-profit corporation throughout World War II, an unusual level of independence in Nazi Germany. I argue that DIN gave Nazi officials an informal channel for coordinating with private companies throughout Europe. It made it possible for a company to cooperate with the Nazis economically without giving the appearance that it was collaborating politically. Agreements between DIN, Germany's Nazi government, and the Finnish lumber and construction industry illustrate this dynamic. The Finnish construction industry made important contributions to the mass production of Nazi camp barracks and emergency shelter design during the latter half of the war. I explore how these relationships may have influenced the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC), raising broader questions about the relationship between standardization, politics, and globalization in 20thcentury culture.

“The Thaw in the Pole: Cold War Science and Showcasing at the Siberian Science-city and Antarctic Expeditions (1955-1964)”

Ksenia Tatarchenko (University of Geneva)

This paper contributes to the session’s focus on the making of international science by revealing how the Cold War highlighted a key ambiguity of Soviet science: producing universal knowledge in socialist ways. We now know that circulating people, ideas, and artifacts operationalized, breached, and occasionally transcended geopolitical divisions. This paper adds another dimension to such entanglements – Big Science as spectacle. It argues that showcasing was a constitutive element, not an accidental byproduct, of Khrushchev-era massive investment into ostensibly civilian scientific infrastructures across Siberia and Antarctica. In 1957, the year of Sputnik, the Soviet press announced the creation of the first Siberian science-city, Akademgorodok, and the images of “Ob,” the flagman of the Soviet expedition sailing south for the third time, proliferated. The aim here is not only to correct misleading historiographic claims conflating remoteness with “freedom" and de-Stalinization with deSovietization, but to explain the very size of the historical record associated with these projects. Situated across the globe, Siberian science-cities and Antarctic bases were presented in an unexpectedly similar way, as model scientific communities. Both locales enticed numerous visitors to record and share their experiences. Yet such visitors often passed over a key aspect of these sites – the co-dependency between the openness of international science and the secrecy regimes of national defense. Akademgorodok had many ties to “plutopias,” the closed cities of the Soviet nuclear program, and Antarctica's international “science and peace” to the Arctic's cold war frontier.