Conclusion

This chapter extends the book’s insights about nature, technology, and nation to the larger history of the modern period. While the modern nation loses its grip as a locus of identity and analysis, attempts to understand the operation, disruption, and collapse of continental and global infrastructures continue to mix the natural and the machinic in ways that define them both. Those vulnerabilities emphasize large-scale catastrophe; historiographically, they mask the crucial role of small-scale failures in the experience and culture of late modernity, including its definition of nature. Historical actors turned the uneven geographical distribution of small-scale failures into a marker of distinctive local natures and an element of regional and national identity. Attending to those failures helps not only situate cold-war technologies in the larger modern history of natural and machinic orders; it helps provincialize the superpowers by casting problematic “other” natures as central and primary.

Infrastructures and Ionograms

This chapter explores how the Alouette satellite’s reorientation of global data flows and mass-production of ionograms altered the natural order at the core of DRTE’s research. The satellite’s unexpected reliability demanded an automated system of data analysis. Automation, when applied to the ionogram, effaced the complexity used to characterize the ionosphere above Canada and explain violent communications disruptions. The chapter first analyzes the debates over the organization of the satellite’s global ground station network, the control of the satellite, the collaboration with NASA, and the sharing of data. It then examines how these considerations formed part of the technical design of the satellite, and specifically how they required a system for mass-producing ionograms from global data gathered around the world. The chapter’s final section focuses on the resulting problems of data analysis that this system produced and the new reading techniques devised to analyze the overwhelming number of records.

Machines and Media

This chapter sets the stage for DRTE’s linking of nature and technology by examining anxieties about ionosondes — the chief instruments of ionospheric research. The ionosondes that emerged from World War II could not be trusted to capture rapidly-changing high-latitude phenomena. The chapter focuses on the efforts of Frank Davies and the Radio Physics Laboratory to create a coherent group of instruments, collectively responsible for mapping northern sectors of the global ionosphere. In doing so, it illustrates how efforts to standardize ionospheric equipment, as well as the multiple meanings of that standardization, opened up important possibilities for variation and difference in international collaborations. For Frank Davies and his group, the machines and the records they produced became a way of solving all-too-local problems with the North as a place of experiment and with the people occupying it.

Electromagnetic Geography and the Unreliable Nation

This chapter examines the rise and fall of the “radio geographies” of the North and, with them, of the relationship between Northern nature and shortwave radio disruptions in Canada. It focuses on maps created around the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)’s shortwave transmissions and their place in the large-scale state initiatives of the 1950s and 1960s. These geographies defined the failure of radio broadcasts according to a specific human geography of the North, a spatial distribution of radio transmitters, and a natural order of high-northern latitudes. That fallibility, in turn, was used to define the North as a region. Government officials envisioned shortwave radio as a medium naturally suited to the customs and culture of indigenous people. In the late 1960s, satellite communications, which promised to overcome radio disruptions, were seen as a threat not only to indigenous culture but to the definition of the region itself.

Hostile Environments and Cold War Machines

This chapter explores the place of satellite technology in the ionosphere’s transformation from natural order to hostile environment. It begins by examining geographic conceptions of hostile environments, their origins in World War II, their development in the early Cold War, and their extension in the late 1950s to include the deep oceans and outer space. It positions the DRTE satellite project (S-27) as part of a broader practice of using the threatened failure of machines to define environmental hostility. In addressing the problem of electronic failure in satellites, DRTE’s engineers drew on a military philosophy of hyper-reliability, generated by widespread concerns about the technological effects of punishing environments, and directed that philosophy towards the problem of reliably generating "topside" ionograms from space. S-27 formed a hinge between DRTE’s decade-long attempts to catalog a distinctive natural order and its eventual use of satellites to bypass it and secure Northern communications.

Reading Technologies

This chapter examines the efforts to make the high-latitude ionogram legible, tracing the effects of that new legibility into wider, resonant views of the relationship between the North and communication failures. It first focuses on the transformations in the way the high-latitude ionogram was read. The same geophysical phenomena that disrupted Northern radio communications made high-latitude ionograms unreadable using standard techniques. Led by one of its founding members, Jack Meek, the Radio Physics Laboratory developed a set of reading regimes that would make these records readable for the first time. The second part of the chapter investigates how the connections built up through these techniques resonated far beyond the laboratory. By linking Northern geophysics and communications disruptions, the Laboratory furnished visual arguments for how defining elements of Canada’s northern-ness threatened reliable communications, feeding back into broader cultural narratives put forward by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin.

A Natural History of Survivable Communications

This chapter examines two ill-fated DRTE projects intended to circumvent the problematic ionosphere above Canada, providing “survivable communications” during the Cold War. The first sought to use meteor trails as reflection surfaces for shortwave radio communications; the second attempted to build machines that automatically probed the ionosphere and chose the best communications frequency for a given radio circuit. Each system embodied concepts central to later forms of “distributed communications” like the internet: in the first case, store-and-forward communications; in the second, real-time channel switching. The chapter illustrates how the history of those concepts is, in part, a history of the natural orders that helped support these systems and generate their central concepts. Together, the two projects signaled the shift to alternative natural and machinic orders, creating the conditions for the final abandonment of the Northern shortwave project.

The Nature of War

This chapter sets out the relationship between nature and machines that will run through the rest of the book. It explores how World War II researchers interpreted natural phenomena of all kinds through their effects on specific groups of machines. In the upper atmospheric research so crucial to wartime communications, radio scientists crafted a stripped-down “nature” that transformed ion distributions and atmospheric dynamics into weapons against the enemy. Those disruptions began as a generalized problem of northern regions, but they quickly turned into an issue of the anomalous and turbulent polar ionosphere and geophysics, and were finally transformed into a question of a uniquely Canadian natural order and its relation to radio failures. What emerged from WWII was a commitment to use ionospheric research as a way of articulating the precise connections between Canada’s northern nature and the shortwave disruptions that threatened the country as the Cold War took shape.

Introduction

This chapter proposes the modern nation as a crucial site for elaborating the historical relationship between nature and technology. Nations emerged as both natural and technological objects partly through attempts to link distinctive natural orders (as opposed to natural environments) with technological failures. Focusing on radio disruptions in the Canadian North, the chapter argues that scientists at the Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) used upper atmospheric research to define an essential antagonism between a hostile Northern nature and reliable communications to the region. That case illustrates the important place of specific machines and their behaviors (machinic orders) in defining historical natures, including the hostile natures at the core of Canadian national identity and of the Cold War.