Southern California is the land of sunshine, outdoor adventures, and opportunities. It is the place of movies, aerospace industry, and a bastion of scientific research activities. These images are the result of active promotion by the region’s boosters for the past 150 years, as Southern California lacked natural resources with only the climate to boast of. With incoming railroads in the 1880s, Southern California developed via rampant land speculation and boosterism of all sorts that ranged from orange cultivation to wholesome living to tourism. Astrophysicist and science statesman George Ellery Hale was one of these successful boosters of Southern California. Arriving in 1903, he founded the Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO) in 1904 with grants from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. MWO soon became one of the world’s leading astronomical observatories. The Observatory was put into brochures advertising the region along with its hotels, gardens, and churches, as well as becoming a tourist attraction. 

I propose that Hale was a speculator both in the financial and scientific sense. Hale succeeded in founding and developing MWO into a leading research institution because he chose the right place at the right time. Hale was able to court patrons both nationally and locally and to attract good scientists because of the ongoing promotion of Southern California had generated enthusiastic expectation that the region will grow in size and importance. MWO can be regarded as the starting point that put scientific research as one of the faces of Southern California. 

 

Project Sanguine was a controversial program to develop a network of power stations, amplifiers, and 6000-miles of antenna cable to serve as a communication transmitter capable of sending signals to submerged submarines around the globe. Publically proposed in 1968, northern Wisconsin was chosen as a suitable site, with full operational deployment of Sanguine expected in 1975. The project generated a great controversy in the state and was met with vigorous opposition in Madison, where the state capital and the University of Wisconsin were located. 
Navy tests in the 1960s had aimed to determine if service personnel who worked in close proximity to the hardware were exposed to undue risk, mainly from electrical shock, with no attention to possible effects of the electromagnetic fields on the general public or to the biotic environment otherwise. Why was it, then, that the Office of Naval Research in 1971 charged the American Institute of Biological Sciences to appoint a committee of biologists to investigate possible hazards? This presentation will offer explanations to this question in the context of the biological rhythms research in the 1950s and 1960s and the theoretical explanation for why even very weak ELF fields might present biological dangers to both vertebrates and invertebrates, when much stronger intensities at higher frequencies were shown to be harmless.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 – the American manned space mission that for the first time sent to Earth true photographic images of the planet. Scholars have argued that the images had a direct impact on the American environmental movement and helped to shape political culture in later decades.
 This paper argues that a six-foot geo-physical globe model located in major institutional spaces across North America had already showed the planet’s true physical features due to the collaboration of popular magazine artists and leading scientists.  Little scholarship has examined how this globe model contributed to science education and our visual understanding of Earth.
 This study rests on a broad foundation of primary source research. Through photographic representation in major American magazine publications, archival research from the Rand McNally and Company records, oral history interviews with globe manufacturers, geographers, museum professionals, and cartographers, this paper shows how Rand McNally brought together the work of visual artists and scientists to add to our knowledge about Earth
 This presentation asks the following questions: How did Rand McNally’s geophysical knowledge reach the American public through a giant globe? How did post-war advances in biology, astronomy, oceanography, geography, geology, and cartography help our understanding of what the Earth looked like before space exploration? How did the globe's prominence decline as technology advanced in other ways?
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cobb Seamount, first discovered in 1950 off the coast of Washington, was the focus of a multi-year scientific research program named “Project Sea Use” from 1968 until 1975. This collaborative effort, involving private industry, state government, and the U.S. military, aimed to install a manned underwater habitat in international waters on the summit of a submerged volcano. Ultimately, the aims of “Project Sea Use” were never fully realized, but the story of this ill-fated endeavor reveals important scientific, political, and military characteristics of marine research at the height of the Cold War. “Project Sea Use” embodied the hopes and fears of a generation of scientists, explorers, and politicians who envisioned a near future when humans would colonize the seafloor. The oceans presented a new frontier for exploration and seemed to promise untapped natural resources. But accompanying this fantasy was the nightmare of an overpopulated earth, thermonuclear war, and new forms of colonial competition between maritime nations.