Session Chair: Karl Grandin (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sweden)
Exploring the Impact of Weight Scales Used to Appraise Children’s Health in Early Twentieth-Century America
Author: Dana A. Freiburger
For many of us weight scales today serve to satisfy our desire for information that we can relate to our personal health. From the bathroom floor scale found in our homes to the distinctive upright scale stationed in medical offices, these scientific instruments tell us our weight so that we might live healthier lives. Knowing one’s weight can have such an impact.
My talk looks back to the early twentieth century to when weight scales were not so ubiquitous and one’s weight was not regularly measured. For young American school children of the period this situation changed when a relationship between poor academic performance and poor nutrition was acknowledged (A. Ruis, 2017), and that poor nutrition could be detected by measuring a child’s weight (L. Holt, 1918). Here was born a need for weight scales serviceable in the school setting.
Children came to enjoy being regularly placed on a scale as it became like a game to see who had gained the most weight. Those performing the weighting, mainly schoolteachers and public health nurses, appreciated the data scales produced as it gave them license to intervene into a child’s dietary circumstances in school and at home. And scale manufacturers, such as Continental Scale Works of Chicago, quickly came to appreciate the promise of this lucrative new market by satisfying the need for scale features such as ease of use, portability, and, of course, accuracy.
How these realms of impact – children’s health, the authority of public schools, and the scale manufacturer’s marketplace – interconnected comprise the main elements of my discussion.
A state of precision? Instrumentation and the British fiscal-military state, 1815-1860
Author: Edward J. Gillin
During the early nineteenth century, the British government invested increasingly large sums of taxpayer money into the survey sciences. Usually as part of naval voyages of discovery, army and naval officers took experimental measurements of a range of natural phenomena, especially those relating to terrestrial magnetism and geodesy. With data collected from around the world, this state-financed scientific investigation relied on instruments of increasing precision and reliability. In 2020, the author reworked some of these experiments by taking an original 1840s’ dipping needle on a voyage around Africa and the Indian Ocean, trialing its accuracy and ease of use. Then, in 2022, the author collaborated with a team of historians to rework pendulum experiments in a Cornish mine to determine the density of the Earth, similar to those undertaken during the 1820s. Drawing on these experiences with instruments for measuring the Earth’s properties, as well as archival material and published parliamentary papers, this paper explores the extent to which the British fiscal-military state established a culture of precision among its scientific servicemen. This was a radical moment at which, through organized military discipline, public money directly sustained the development of scientific instruments of increasing sophistication and delicacy.
Art and Science and the Modeling of 20th-century Canadian Agriculture
Author: William Knight
This collection-based presentation looks at the role of art and 3D models in Canadian agricultural exhibition and education. Painters and modelers, in the service of state and educational institutions, used their skills to create high-fidelity representational works of fruit, plants, and insects. These paintings and models, now part of the Ingenium collection, recorded varieties of economically important plants and ecological relationships that affected production, and were used to educate students, farmers, and the public in schools and at public exhibitions. These materials demonstrated the importance of state-directed science and its power to see, understand, and shape agricultural practices across a widely dispersed settler-colonial society. As historical, material traces of agricultural science in Canada, the painting and models in the Ingenium collection provide important evidence of art-making in service to science and the state, and how such works helped model a vision of a scientifically improved agrarian nation.
The Role of Portable Weather Instruments in the Development of Organized Data Collection in the U.S.
Author: Michael Trapasso
In 2017, the College Heights Weather Instrument Museum at Western Kentucky University was gifted the Roger Rees Barometer Collection, which included numerous, pocket-sized barometers. A few of these hardy and compact instruments were carried by the U.S. Military during the American Civil War (1861 through 1865). During the early years of the new and evolving United States of America; the military represented an organized and systematic means of data collection. Especially during the tumultuous years when the country was at war with itself.
The role of weather observer/recorder fell upon the army’s “men of science.” For most military camps this was the post surgeon. Medical personnel were mandated to keep weather diaries utilizing these types of portable instruments. In addition, the role of data collection and reporting was also assigned to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, (topographical mapping engineers). Recorded weather observations would eventually be handed to the U.S. Army Signal Corps for further transmission to headquarters. In 1870, the Signal Service of the War Department assumed the mission of weather data collection and transmission, nationwide. The civilian-run U.S. Weather Bureau took over the task in 1890. In 1970, the U.S. Weather Bureau officially became the National Weather Service; the entity we know today. Some of the instruments which bridged these gaps in time will be shown and discussed.
