New Materials
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
New Materials TOWARDS A HISTORY OF CONSISTENCY Edited by Amy E. Slaton Copyright © 2020 by Amy E. Slaton Lever Press (leverpress.org) is a publisher of pathbreaking scholarship. Supported by a consortium of liberal arts institutions focused on, and renowned for, excellence in both research and teaching, our press is grounded on three essential commitments: to publish rich media digital books simultaneously available in print, to be a peer-reviewed, open access press that charges no fees to either authors or their institutions, and to be a press aligned with the ethos and mission of liberal arts colleges. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. The complete manuscript of this work was subjected to a partly closed (“single blind”) review process. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines at https://www.leverpress.org/peerreview DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11649332 Print ISBN: 978-1-64315-013-0 Open access ISBN: 978-1-64315-014-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954802 Published in the United States of America by Lever Press, in partnership with Amherst College Press and Michigan Publishing Contents Member Institution Acknowledgments v Chapter One: Introduction 1 Amy E. Slaton PART I: MATERIALS TESTED, SUCCESS DEFINED Chapter Two: Muddy to Clean: The Farm-Raised Catfsh Industry, Agricultural Science, and Food Technologies 39 Karen Senaga Chapter Three: Room at the Bottom: The Techno- bureaucratic Space of Gold Nanoparticle Reference Material 73 Sharon Tsai-hsuan Ku PART II: MATERIALS PRODUCED, LABOR DIRECTED Chapter Four: The Scientifc Co-Op: Cloning Oranges and Democracy in the Progressive Era 119 Tiago Saraiva Chapter Five: Plyscrapers, Gluescrapers, and Mother Nature’s Fingerprints 151 Scott Knowles and Jose Torero PART III: MATERIALS INTERPRETED, COMMUNITIES DESIGNED Chapter Six: The Inmate’s Window: Iron, Innovation, and the Secure Asylum 177 Darin Hayton Chapter Seven: Cultural Frames: Carbon-Fiber-Reinforced Polymers, Taiwanese Manufacturing, and National Identity in the Cycling Industry 203 Patryk Wasiak Chapter Eight: Grenfell Cloth 237 Rafco Ruiz Afterword: Old Materials 271 Projit Bihari Mukharji List of Contributors 279 Acknowledgments 283 Index 285 iv Contents Member Institution Acknowledgments Lever Press is a joint venture. This work was made possible by the generous support of Lever Press member libraries from the follow- ing institutions: Adrian College Denison University Agnes Scott College DePauw University Allegheny College Earlham College Amherst College Furman University Bard College Grinnell College Berea College Hamilton College Bowdoin College Harvey Mudd College Carleton College Haverford College Claremont Graduate Hollins University University Keck Graduate Institute Claremont McKenna College Kenyon College Clark Atlanta University Knox College Coe College Lafayette College Library College of Saint Benedict / Lake Forest College Saint John’s University Macalester College The College of Wooster Middlebury College MeMber InstItutIon ACknowledgMents v Morehouse College St. Olaf College Oberlin College Susquehanna University Pitzer College Swarthmore College Pomona College Trinity University Rollins College Union College Santa Clara University University of Puget Sound Scripps College Ursinus College Sewanee: The University of the Vassar College South Washington and Lee Skidmore College University Smith College Whitman College Spelman College Willamette University St. Lawrence University Williams College vi MeMber InstItutIon ACknowledgMents CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Amy E. Slaton We live in the time of nanopants. New, fuid-repellent textiles based on molecular-level innovations in fabric design have brought about pants that resist stains and require less frequent washing than conventional garments. Antibacterial nanosocks, highly durable nanopaints and newly efcacious nanopharmaceuticals have also reached markets over the last decade, each bringing some perceived enhancement in product performance. Each commodity derives from manufacturers’ shifting investments, with resources directed toward the inventive eforts of scientists and the sub- sequent production of goods for consumers in pursuit of novel goods. The result: with sufcient cash in hand, an unprecedented form of pants—or socks, paint, or drugs—can today be yours. And yet, arguably as much is old in this landscape of innovation as is new. Scientists have been refning the raw materials used by industries for many generations, and markets have thrived on the exchange of novel goods throughout human history; industrial scientists’ very choices regarding which topics merit research sup- port long-established distributions of social and economic infu- ence. The uncertain environmental and health consequences of nanoscale manufacturing operations for workers, downstream communities, and consumers echo the risks of countless previ- ous industrial production processes and follow similar patterns of class, race, or other social demarcations. Mass-produced trou- sers have existed since the mid-nineteenth century, generated through extremely robust patterns of capital-labor relations. Even stains have a history, their stigmatization expressing prevailing standards of hygiene and self-discipline and, in many cultures, class constructs. So perhaps we might ask under what circum- stances, exactly, nanopants, refecting so many institutional and cultural continuities, can come to seem new at all. What’s more, the results of “successful” materials research and development may extend widely to alter global living conditions but alternatively—if designed or priced for narrow distribution, selectively marketed, or subject to legal and trade constraints—leave many communi- ties untouched. Given these contingencies, where does the sense of pervasive technological change and, frequently, technological advancement in the face of new industrial objects or material prop- erties come from?1 In other words, what has historically counted as a new material in industrial cultures, to whom, and why? The point of this collection, which gathers disparate cases of materials development from North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia over the last two hundred years and approaches the rubric “industrial” itself with criticality, is to see what social land- scapes might emerge when we pay attention to the attention paid, historically, to “new materials.” Both parts of that locution, “new” and “material,” remain relatively undertheorized by historians of commerce and industry. This book is not a comprehensive survey of industrial innovation (however one might choose historically to delimit that category) nor is it meant to highlight materials that have had a singular impact on human experience (however 2 new MAterIAls one might choose to measure such an impact). Instead, the chap- ters in this volume suggest that when some matter is seen to be novel in a particular time and place, defned as a useful material for commerce, or simply delineated as the result of human arti- fce, a signifcant set of social enactments has occurred. Follow these enactments—whether the development of Quaker asylum locks, massive wood skeletons for high-rise buildings, or farmed catfsh—and we fnd patterns of cultural change and accretions of power, both local and widespread. As well, a refexive focus on the development of new orange breeds of the 1910s or carbon-fber - reinforced polymer bicycle parts of the 2000s can help reveal our own analytical investments in particular distributions of goods or resources, as either writers or readers of material biographies who fnd some things and not others worth thinking about. A subset of recent scholarship focused on the “origins, careers, and misad- ventures of particular things,” this collection asks how materials that emerge in societies that see themselves as modernizing—from Protestant medical missionaries’ weatherproof clothing of 1915 to nanoscale drug ingredients a century later—have come to seem novel to particular audiences and what it means for historians to take up that actors’ category.2 In the simplest sense, any perception of material novelty involves demarcating some matter or object as distinct from and perhaps preferable to some other. But for a sense of newness to prevail, that demarcation must also be foregrounded while atten- dant continuities in economic structures, political authority, or cultural infuence are relegated to the background. In other words, “newness” is a specifc way to demarcate a material (or, for that matter, a behavior or ideology) from others and one that serves its claimants by efacing that which is not to be renewed or replaced, that which is to be naturalized as ongoing. Tracking those conti- nuities might easily be seen as the purview of academic history- writing and, in fact, the social and economic structures from which industrial invention has been seen to arise over time are familiar IntroduCtIon 3 topics for historians of technology.3 Yet, the literature on instances of innovation and invention in industrialized societies has in large part taken shape without deeply problematizing the cultural choice to foreground some human activities and push others to the background. That is, only a small number of historians have questioned how it