This post is a little different from anything I’ve put up before.  It’s a sort of blog-ised version of an academic semiotic analysis I made earlier in the year as part of my Science Communication endeavours at Imperial College.  It’s here thanks to a posting on Twitter earlier tonight by Chris Anderson (of TED fame) of an alert to David Hoffman’s film now on YouTube: ‘The Sputnik Moment – the Year America Changed its Schools’.  It’s all about how Sputnik, launched on October 4th 1957, shocked the USA into massive investment in, and reform of, the education system.  I’ve embedded the vid at the end of this post.

What follows is not directly linked to Sputnik; it refers to the previous year – 1956, but does perhaps remind us that the wheels were already turning towards a golden age of science.  And I guess that made the advent of Sputnik all the more shocking.

If you’re not familiar with the techniques of semiotic analysis (I certainly wasn’t), it can look a little contrived.  But be assured, there are folk out there right now using it to design stuff that will subtly manipulate you.  It’s not evil – but I think it’s useful and fun to practice deconstructing these things.  Anyhow, if you get bored, just skip to Hoffman’s vid :-).   So…

Home Chemistry in the Golden Age of American Science

“And so each citizen plays an indispensable role. The productivity of our heads, our hands, and our hearts is the source of all the strength we can command, for both the enrichment of our lives and the winning of the peace.”

So proclaimed U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his First Inaugural Address of 1953[1] – emboldening a populace who, through the experience of science and technology at war, knew the peaceful role it might play in delivering America’s future.

And it’s to this background ethos of goal achievement and individual contribution that we’ll learn in this short essay how the innocuous chemistry set punched above its weight in preparing the nation’s youth for the golden age of American science.

For a deeper insight into what that meant in 1950s’ America, I’m going to look beyond the obvious, and pass a semiotician’s eye over, or maybe under, the cover-art of an instruction manual to a 1956 A.C.Gilbert Experiment Lab.

The idea is to start with a review of what the picture denotes – what is explicitly shown.  The aim of the semiotic approach is then to explore the less obvious and wider connotations of the picture, treating it as a ‘text’ that tells a certain story – to which the embedded and inter-related vignettes also contribute. We need to remember this is a story of, and in, its time – and it’s only going to make sense in the cultural context of the period.  Likewise, any connotations need to be interpreted in terms of the meanings and ideologies that might have engaged a contemporary reader.

That’s the approach – so what next?   Every good semiotic analysis needs a formal argument if it’s not to fly totally off the tracks.  So, I’m going to argue that:

‘marketing texts accompanying 1950’s American chemistry sets were consciously designed to support the myth of American progress achievable through an ideology of military and industrial global leadership; and contributed to an environment, the underlying ideology of which Eisenhower would in 1961 articulate as the ‘military-industrial complex’[2]’.

(some folk have found my double reference to Eisenhower’s speeches confusing – so to clarify: The first reference is to his inaugural speech, the second is to his statement in his farewell address, where he first mentions the (in)famous ‘military-industrial-complex’. The point is that the MIC wasn’t something Eisenhower set out intentionally to put in place; rather it was something he realised had pretty much evolved by the end of his term – and was something to be concerned about.)

On with the analysis of the picture….

With reference to popular images from the great American telescopes of the day[3], a hazy nebular against a dark blue sky forms the backdrop to iconic representations of the Rutherford-model atom whirl and a cartoon electric thunderbolt.  Two boys, maybe 10 and 14 years of age, do chemistry experiments at a bench.  Six small graphic vignettes arc around the boys, each denoting a real or imagined scene from one of: space exploration, chemical engineering, aviation, medicine, nuclear physics, and electronics.  A white capitalised title banner: ‘FUN WITH CHEMISTRY’, and a more reserved strap line: ‘today’s adventures in science will create tomorrow’s America’, frame the page top and bottom.   A small maker’s logo and red safety shield complete the picture.

First Impressions

The eye immediately tracks to the boys, particularly the elder boy. We’re helped by his central positioning; and the electric thunderbolt, symbolic as pointer in one direction and megaphone in the other, placed contiguous with his mouth.  The presence of two boys connotes camaraderie, but also hints at paternalistic leadership by the elder – a theme enhanced by their dress and respective positions (smaller boy leans forward, elder stands) and engagements (younger boy stirs, older boy analyses).

More perhaps from the parents’ viewpoint, the scene connotes an ideal of family life, reminding the reader of the vulnerability of a harmony so recently recovered from the disruption of war (US engagement in Korea until 1953).   From the child’s perspective, domestic clutter has been erased – leaving a brave future world in which the boys are abstractly suspended between deep space and the exciting promise of the vignettes – the whole entangled with the modernity of the atom whirl.

A Golden Career

Qualifying traits to enter this world are symbolised by the boy’s trim haircut and white vest – connoting military order, responsible self-discipline, and an appeal to conformity in an America struggling with McCarthian legacy[4].  The manual itself is symbolic of instruction and procedure; worry not – there is a plan.

Correctly, the boys do not laugh stupidly over their toy, but exude a serene dignity and confidence in the handling of their equipment; imagery that would endear any paying parent to Gilbert’s product.   And where the parent approves, the young owner idolises – the elder boy: god-like before nebulae, proclaiming through lightning, holding forth with test-tube as sceptre.

The ideals put upon the boys are echoed and reinforced by the white coated, neck-tied exemplars of the medical and electronics vignettes, their adjustments and measurements further connoting values of care and precision. (The absence of personal protective equipment for the boys reminds us they are not yet professionals.)

For the world of the vignettes is where Gilbert Experiment Lab owners are destined to go.  In his mind, the contemporary teenager leaves home through this text’s imagery, entering an educational way-station toward an ordained industrial career in ‘tomorrow’s America’ and the Golden Age of Science.  A golden age, defined by exponential consumerism, a highways programme that would drive automobile and refinery demand for the next twenty years, and an age of popular successes in American chemistry (DDT) and medicine (Jonas’s polio vaccine).

Gilbert and his main competitor, Porter Chemcraft, reinforced the career message to both parent and child through explicit statements in associated texts[5] ; for example, the rear box cover of the Experiment Lab displayed the banner:

“Another Gilbert Career-Building Science Set”

While Porter Chemcraft’s box banner pulled no punches with:

“Porter Science Prepares Young America for World Leadership”

The Vignettes – Windows on the Military-Industrial Complex?

Given their importance to the whole, the vignettes warrant closer examination. Taken individually they denote aspects, both realistic (submarine) and speculative (space station), of their respective industries -but achieve more as elements of the greater text.  For example, collectively they reference the shear pervasiveness of chemistry as a discipline across mankind’s endeavours.  And (core to my argument), they variously reference the repeating themes of American dominance in the military, industrial, and aerospace fields – politically prescribed activities for the ‘enrichment of lives and winning of peace’[6].

On a technical level we can acknowledge the clever use of white borders around the vignettes, signifying them as real photographs, fooling us that even obviously speculative scenes represent real life captured.

For a contemporary reader, the wheel-like space station of the space exploration vignette provokes a strong reference to Wernher Von Braun’s 1952 conception of a navigation-military platform [7].

The scene would also be familiar from science fiction texts, both print and film, and space programme news items anticipating the first US earth-orbiting satellites (Explorer I launched in 1958).

The station dominates the globe of earth.  A globe which itself is dominated by an American continental outline – a reference to the ideological exaggeration seen in the nation-flattering Rand McNally Mercator projections and consumer advertising copy of the period.[8]

The combined effect is to establish a concept of an America that, projected into space, is positioned to both dominate the earth in one direction and explore the cosmos in the other.

Beside the romance of space exploration, we might today frame as pedestrian the industrial world of chemical engineering; not so in 1956 America.  Cropped of peripheral clutter, the spherical white pressure vessels become molecules – uniting with the boys’ glassware, the analytics of the medicine vignette, and the chemistry set itself, as icons of professional chemistry.  Reference to the boys’ large flask is enhanced by that vessel’s exaggeration beyond anything actually found in the set, the parallel rendered complete by the rubber tubing imitating pipe and gantry.

The aviation and nuclear physics vignettes both denote forms of transport. The swept delta wing and compact size of the jet aircraft signifies a military product, while the streaming contrails index for progress, movement, speed – and power.  The choice of submarine as nuclear physics exemplar, against the option of a civilian reactor or a particle physics laboratory, reinforces the military imperative.  Directly referencing the recent launch of the first nuclear powered submarine Nautilus [9], the image flatters the reader’s knowledge of this event.

The vessel is large and dark, with whale-like power, its speed helpfully indexed by the artist as turbulence in the ocean streamlines.  Like America, it is unstoppable and, as the scattering fish signify, all must make way before it.

A further subtle, yet reinforcing, reference to the defensive aspects of militarism can be read in the use of the red shield icon to frame the words ‘Safety-Tested’, whereby feelings of comfort and reassurance are induced on the twin planes of home and national security.

Military references are absent from the medical and electronic vignettes, these rather providing a visual link with the boys’ home activity.  The medical scientist’s equipment mirrors the boys’ rig – right down to the colour of liquid in the flask.  The electronic laboratory’s blackboard is an iconic reference to scientific intellectualism and progressive theory, but also a familiar reference to the boys’ schoolroom blackboard.  The inclusion of medicine as a theme is a calculated reference to improvements in health and quality of life – the ultimate public justification for industrial and military progress.

The predominant portrayal of individual human actors in the vignettes promotes an inaccurate myth of scientist as lone worker, at a time when the power of teamwork, recently exemplified by the Manhattan Project, was widely recognised.  A more realistic representation may simply have been viewed as overcomplicating or jeopardising of the text structures used to link home and career.

Other Features – Stereotyping

The apparent gender and racial stereotyping through omission is alerting to our modern eye, but typical of the day.   A fairer representation of gender, but never balance, is evident in later texts such as the 1960 Golden Book of Chemistry[10] – itself an icon of the genre – where boys and girls are seen working together both at home and in the professional laboratory.

Race would certainly be the basis for an oppositional reading of this text.  Despite the Immigration & Naturalisation Act of 1952, supposedly removing racial and ethnic barriers to citizenship, and the banning of racial segregation in schools in 1954, a black readership would likely receive Gilbert’s racially exclusive offering as just another slam of the door to white privilege.

Conclusion

 

Gibson could have produced his chemistry manuals with plain covers; they would certainly have appeared business like and practical.  Yet that would disallow, as this analysis has shown, an induction into, and repeated reminders of, the world of work and modern America to which the set promised entry.   A world of progress, Gilbert’s artwork tells us – with its speeding aircraft and submarines, and the restless whirl of the electron.

We have revealed evidence of Gilbert’s subscription to an ideology of American global leadership.  And how, by integrating military and industrial images, and linking them through themes of progress and the pervasiveness of chemistry, he expertly references the whole to the domestic life and career ambition of his customer.   In doing so, Gilbert, representing a substantial share of the 1950s chemistry set market, endorses my core argument.

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[1] Dwight D. Eisenhower First Inaugural Address, (January 20, 1953)

[2] Dwight D. Eisenhower,  Farewell Address (January 17, 1961)

[3] The Hale 200 inch telescope was first operated in 1948; eight years earlier.  See: Florence, Ronald. The perfect machine: building the Palomar telescope, Harper Perrenial 1995

[4] Although McCarthy was ostracised two years earlier in1954, the threat of communist conspiracy and suspicion of outsiders or the unusual remained

[5] Nicholls, Henry. The chemistry set generation, Chemistry World Dec. 2007

[6] Ibid 1 Eisenhower

[7] Von Braun’s Wheel. NASA Archives. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960302.html

[8] A schoolroom series of maps by Rand McNally placed America centrally on the globe and split the former soviet union in two.  See: George Simmons, ‘Training with map power’ in Cultural Detective at  http://www.culturaldetective.com/worldmaps.html

[9] U.S. Navy Submarine Force Museum, http://www.ussnautilus.org/index.html

[10] Brent, Robert. The Golden Book of Chemistry, Golden Press New York, 1960

Here is David Hoffman’s film

 

Also of interest:

Cold War in the Classroom – Harvard Univ. Dept History of Science Exhibition 2011

 

Various Chemistry Set related Web-links:

Twelve Angry Men Blog – ‘Endangered Species – the Chemistry Set’

Twelve Angry Men Blog – ‘Endangered Species – the Chemistry Set – Sightings in the Wild”

Royal Society of Chemistry – ‘The Chemistry Set Generation’

Notes from the Technology Underground – ‘Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab’

Wired – ‘Don’t Try this at Home’

Wired – ‘DIY Science’