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Natures and technologies have long been central to the making of modern nations. Only recently, however, have scholars seen nations as sites where the very understandings of the “natural” and the “technological” were articulated, contested, and remade in the interests of the nation. This book examines the role of technological failure in crafting both national identities and the distinctive natures that support them. Focusing on the mid-twentieth-century attempt to extend reliable radio communications to the Canadian North, it explores how a group of Canadian defense scientists sought to visualize, map, and catalog the connections between a distinctive natural order of ionospheric storms, auroral displays, and magnetic disturbances on one side, and the particularly severe communication failures that cut the North off from the rest of the nation on the other. Through that project and its related efforts, they gradually transformed machine failures in hostile environments, from the Arctic to outer space, into a defining characteristic of Canadian identity at a time of national redefinition. Tracking those efforts through continental defense strategies, engineering practices, clandestine maps, and material cultures, the book argues that the real and potential failures of machines came to define the nation, its Northern nature, its cultural anxieties, and its geo-political vulnerabilities during the Cold War. More broadly, it argues for technological failures as key sites for linking historical technologies and historical natures, and for writing the histories of “other” nations during the Cold War.

Cet essai se sert des cultures visuelles et matérielles de deux laboratoires afin d'engager une discussion historiographique sur ce que signifie écrire l’histoire de la science et de la technologie au Canada. Il emploie un sujet potentiellement familier, la conception et la construction du satellite Alouette, pour illustrer la façon dont la discipline pourrait se défaire de sa préoccupation consciente pour les découvertes et les innovations et se concentrer plutôt sur une exploration révisée de la question : qu’y a-t-il de canadien dans la technologie et la science canadiennes ?This essay uses the visual and material cultures of two laboratories as a way of initiating an historiographical discussion about what it means to write the history of science and technology in Canada. It uses a potentially familiar topic—the conception and construction of the Alouette satellite—to illustrate how the discipline might shed its self-conscious preoccupation with discoveries and innovations, and instead focus its attention on a revised exploration of the question: what is Canadian about Canadian science and technology

This essay explores the early cold-war attempts of the Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL) to link shortwave radio disruptions to the unique geophysical phenomena of northern regions. Born out of prewar traditions of geophysical research and applied to the communication demands of the Second World War, this approach placed the laboratory in the midst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereignty over the Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation. The laboratory’s approach to linking nature and technology, however, required an additional act of sovereignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research on which those associations depended. The resulting arguments from the laboratory echoed with broader post-war understandings of how the North and technology were intertwined.

The Pianist Glenn Gould has often been portrayed as a musical idealist who embraced mundane recording media as a way of escaping the anxiety of the concert hall. In pursuing his musical ideals, however, Gould obsessed over material objects-the qualities of a chair, the action of piano keys, the placement of splices in magnetic tape. This paper argues that for him, the detailed properties of machines and electronic media were crucial, not just as tools for pursuing disembodied aesthetic aims, but as instruments and material sites for a moral project. Locating Gould's concerns among the techniques and technologies that inspired him, the concert hall he despised, and the jazz and chance music he tolerated, the paper explores how Gould's famed philosophy of technology was rooted in a "technological self" that tied morality and aesthetics, and intimacy and isolation, to concrete ideals for the kinds of people we ought to be.