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lournal <>/" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes

Nature, Technology, and Nation

Edward Jones-Imhotep

This essay explores the early cold-war attempts of the Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL) tolink shortwave radio disruptions to the unique geophysical phenomena of northernregions. Born out of prewar traditions of geophysical research and apphed to the com-munication demands of the Second World War, this approach placed the laboratory inthe midst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereignty overthe Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation. The laboratory'sapproach to linking nature and technology, however, required an additional act of sov-ereignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research on which those associationsdepended. The resulting arguments from the laboratory echoed with broader post-warunderstandings of how the North and technology were intertwined.

Le present article examine les premieres tentatives du Laboratoire de radiophysiquc (RPL)pendant la guerre froide de relier les interruptions des radios en ondes courtes auphenomene g^ophysique unique des regions du Nord. Issue de traditions de recherchesgeophysiques precedant la guerre et appliquee aux demandes en matiere de communicationsde la Seconde Guerre mondiale, cette demarche pla^a le laboratoire au milieu de programmesplus vastes apros la guerre pour faire valoir la souverainete territorialc et cognitive sur leNord canadicn afin d'habiliter et de definir la nation. La demarche du laboratoire visanta relier la nature avec la technologie necessita toutefois une mesure additionnelle desouverainete—unc reforme des pratiques dc recherche gcophysiquc dont ces associationsdependaient. Les observations issues du laboratoire ont aide a mieux comprendre apresla guerre les rapports entre le Nord et la technologie.

I n the closing days of November 1967, Glenn Gould^the renowned

Canadian concert pianist turned radio producer and philosopher of tech-

nology—scrambled to pull together the first and most famous installment of

his Solitude Trilogy, a sound documentary entitled Tiw Idea of North. The aim of

the documentary was to explore views of the Canadian North (and of the soli-

tude that Gould believed it imposed) through the experiences and perceptions

of five "outsiders" who had confronted the region directly. For weeks, Gould

had struggled to select only the most apt segments from hours of interview

tape. Now desperate to fit his material into the hour-long format, he hit upon

the idea of layering fragments of conversation simultaneously upon one

another, fading them in and out, so that ideas, as well as sounds, might play

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Edward jones-lmhotep

counterpoint.' Anxious that the format might prove unsettling to his listeners,Gould introduced two narrative devices: he asked his listenei s to imagine thecompeting and reinforcing voices as elements of scattered and overlapping con-versations taking place on a railway car, travelling from Winnipeg to Churchill,1,000 miles north, on the shores of Hudson's Bay; and he implored his audienceto heed the words of his de facto narrator for the documentary, Wally Maclean—a retired surveyor who had travelled this very railway line for many years andwhose experience would help guide listeners on how best to c^btain an "idea ofNorth." Against the steady percussion of train wheels striking breaks in the rail,Maclean himself introduced an anonymous and seemingly incidental characteraround which to structure his own narrative: an imaginary, young, lone govern-ment researcher travelling north to Churchill, to study the northern lights.

It is the world of this anonymous figure that interests me here. My motiva-tion is historical: such people existed. Maclean's imaginary figure was drawn fromlife, imaginatively sketched from the steady stream of technicians and scientistswho travelled to Churchill, often by train, in the opening years of the Cold Warto study the aurorae. Where did they come from? What business did func-tionaries of the state have in the seemingly ethereal realms of auroral physics?How did their work figure in the broader attempts to refashiion the post-warnation? The scientists that underlay Maclean's narrative were, almost to a man(they were exclusively men), employees of the Canadian government's RadioPhysics Laboratory (RPL), a small research laboratory on the outskirts of Ottawawith roots in wartime code-breaking, counter-intelligence and anti-submarinewarfare. In the decade after the war, the laboratory's goal was to extend reliableshortwave radio transmissions to the vast, sparsely populated, and strategicallycrucial Canadian North. It souglit to carry out that task by linking the peculiargeophysical phenomena of high northern latitudes—auroral displays, magneticstorms, ionospheric disturbances—to the often severe high-freqtiency radio dis-mptions that plagued communication circuits throughout Canada. The aim ofthe laboratory, in short, was to link nature and technolog;/ with a view tosecuring the nation.

For decades, scholars have treated the relations between nature and tech-nology in Canada as oppositional. Nature (they have argued)—whetherinstantiated in muskeg or granite, in hostile climate or impossible terrain—hasopposed technology; and technology, for its part—whether realized in railwaysor telegraphs, shortwave radios or communications satellites—has enabled thetentative conquests of a harsh, unforgiving, and expansive northern nature. Indoing so, technology has provided the conditions for the possibility of thenation.^ Against this view of the conquest of nature through technology, othershave argued for a different set of oppositions. The narratives of conquest are, in

Journal o/" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes

this view, shot through with subjectivity. They are built upon a homogenizedand mythologized understanding of northern nature as hostile, frigid, andbarren; and as such, the argument continues, they do violence to the objectivereality of isotherms, microclimates, and treelines captured by the systematicinvestigations of modern science.'

Both of those views figure partly in this story. For the members of RPL,nature diti oppose reliable communications; and scientists and technicians atChurchill and elsewhere did struggle to lay out what they saw as an authentic(if circumscribed) natural order of the North. For all their force, however, eachnarrative misses a crucial point. Placing technology and nature in binary oppo-sition overlooks the ways in which each of those categories has historicallybeen used to define the other; and stressing the disjuncture between an imag-ined North and an objective reality threatens to overlook the ways in which the"ideas of North"—visions of a remote and isolated region like the ones at workin Gould's documentary—were in fact underwritten by the assertions of science.'The aim of the Radio Physics Laboratory was to link shortwave radio disruptionsto the unique geophysical phenomena of northern regions. Bom out of prewartraditions of geophysical research and applied to the desperate communicationdemands of the Second World War, that approach placed the laboratory in themidst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereigntyover the Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation.'' Tocarry through its program, however, RPL had to assert an additional sover-eignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research that would allownature and technology to be linked. Far from opposing one another, then,nature and technology were mutually constitutive in the work of RPL. The actof articulating their interconnections was not straightforward or inevitable, butcontingent and problematic; and the relations that resulted did not opposewider cultural associations, but rather buttressed them.

Over the course of what follows, then, I would like to raise the members ofRPL, their investigations, and their practices from the level of subtext to that ofprotagonists. I want to explore how the interrelations between communications,solitude, and the idea of North—the very core of Gould's project—rested cruciallywith them and with their work. 1 want to begin getting at how these workershelped articulate the relations presupposed by Gould's project and by so manyothers in post-war Canada. Finally, I want to understand how the act of articu-lation—the sum of the practices that helped establish those powerful symbolicrelations—was itself a problematic site of tension over sovereignty and identityin the opening decade of the Cold War. In order to do that, we must begin withthe conditions that motivated the future members of RPL to bring nature andtechnology together in the first place.

Edward Jones-lmhotep

Northern Communications

Nature, Technology, and the North AtlanticThe roots of the Radio Physics Laboratory lay in the technological demands ofwar. By the late spring of 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic had reached its mostdesperate phase yet. While British code-breakers at Bletchley Park scrambled tokeep up with changes in the Enigma code—the cipher used to encrypt top-secrettelecommunications of the Nazi command—"wolf packs" of German U-boatscommenced their crippling attacks on Allied convoys in the North Atlantic.The expansion of the theatres of war following the entry of the United Statesin late 1941 threatened to stretch AUied maritime forces even thinner. TheRoyal Canadian Navy had scrambled to provide support where it could; havingcontributed escorts to shepherd convoys through the perilous "mid-Atlanticgap" early in the war, the navy began in early 1942 to focus its thin resourceson a critical technical dimension of the conflict."

Since 1939, military radio operators had reported severe disruptions, oftencomplete blackouts, in the shortwave radio circuits that criss-crossed the NorthAtlantic. Known since the 1920s and documented throughout the 1930s, thedisruptions now wreaked havoc on wartime radio and direction-finding circuitsin the region, thwarting naval telecommunications and facilitating the work ofGerman U-boat commanders. To help address the problem, the navy hadassembled in 1941 a small research group at its Ottawa headquarters. Housedwithin Section 6 of the navy's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC/6)—a unitconcerned (like its British counterpart) with code-breaking, counter-intelli-gence and anti-submarine warfare—the group had been charged withintercepting German radio transmissions in the high-frequency range and withpotentially identifying the location of enemy submarines in the process.' Inearly 1942, with the situation in the North Atlantic growing desperate, thenavy was anxious to secure any advantage it could; it expanded OIC/6's activi-ties to include all questions of radio propagation in the vicinity of the auroralzone." Under the direction of Frank Davies, a Welsh emigre attached to Britishintelligence early in the war and later seconded to the navy from the NationalResearch Council, OIC/6 began tackling problems of communications, detection,and direction-finding in the North Atlantic by mounting the first systematicCanadian studies of the ionosphere—the ionized regions of the upper atmospherethat reflect high-frequency radio waves, making shortwave telecommunicationspossible. The path to reliable radio, Davies and his unit would argue, required ascientific excursion through the geophysics of high northern latitudes."

[ournal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes

Northern Communications and the Order of NatureDavies's background and interests in atmospheric phenomena are crucial tounderstanding his group's approach to the problems of reliable radio. Davieshad come to ionospheric research through an abiding interest in meteorology.'"Educated as a physicist, his professional training in meteorology had takenplace in a mode of natural investigation that harkened back to what Susan FayeCannon has called "Humboldtian science"—the investigation of widespreadinterrelated natural phenomena through geographically dispersed precisionmeasurements, synoptic studies, careful mapping, and a preference for fieldresearch over the "sterile accumulation of insulated facts" that characterizedthe laboratory (1978, 81). Fields like terrestrial magnetism, geology, meteor-ology, hydrology, oceanography, and solar investigation had provided the basisfor this new form of professional science (so crucial to navigation, commerce,and empire in the first half of the nineteenth century) before ceding some ofits professional and political status to the laboratory. Throughout the early twen-tieth century, however, this mode of science still held enormous appeal andprovided a model for young scientists like Davies. In the late 1920s andthroughout the 1930s, Davies served on a number of scientific expeditions to theArctic and Antarctic, aiding meteorologists and chief scientists in their investiga-tions of ice-crevasse temperatures and crystal structure formations, and carryingout the magnetic, auroral, and ionospheric observations that fascinated him.Following a posting as director of the Carnegie Geophysical Observatory inHuancayo, Peru, in the late 1930s, he joined the National Research Council in theearly years of the Second World War and was eventually attached to OIC/6(Davies n.d.).

What linked Davies's researches across three continents and two poles was anintense interest in the geophysics and meteorology of extreme environments."Obscure and exceptional conditions," in Davies's words, fascinated him(Canadian Radio Wave Propagation Committee [CRWPC] 1947, 7). His interest ingeophysical measurements and atmospheric observations would stay with himall his life. Long after his professional duties had turned administrative, carefulmeteorological notes on temperature, wind properties, and precipitationwould find their way into his personal diaries. His commitment to geophys-ical investigations as a means of improving communications after the warwould perplex and sometimes enrage his military overseers, who came to seethe post-war Radio Physics Laboratory as an academic luxury—an organizationengaged in basic research, and therefore a purely scientific establishment ratherthan a defensive unit." In the spring of 1942, however, with naval authoritiesdesperate for any advantage against the U-boat threat, Davies was enlisted to

Edward |ones-lmhotep

turn his knowledge of aurora and geophysics towards the problem of fracturedradio communications in North Atlantic waters.

Using ionospheric investigations to improve wartime radio communicationswas by no means unique to OlC/6. Aircraft disasters in Europe early in the warhad led to the creation of ionospheric laboratories in Britain and Australia; theNazi Command had used alliances and early victories to set up a network ofionospheric stations providing long-, medium-, and short-range radio forecastsfor its navy (Dellinger and Smith 1948, 258; Pestre 1997, 187). The approach ofDavies and his group, however, emphasized the physical and the causal, ratherthan the statistical and the correlative. Whereas most investigations sought tocorrelate statistical data on the ionosphere with statistical data on radio recep-tion conditions, OIC/6 aimed at "understanding the phenomena" byinvestigating more closely the geophysical processes responsible for ionos-pheric formation and dynamics (Meek 1969, 4). The thrust of i:he approach wascaptured in a secret document entitled "The Application of IonosphericMeasurements" and circulated confidentially within the Canadian military inlate 1944. Written with all the urgency of the wartime context, the report gavemilitary officials a general overview of the role of ionospheric data in reliableshortwave radio. In its structure and substance the document characterized theapproach of Davies's group. Less than a third of the way through its 36 pages,following truncated discussions of wave motion and ionospheric propagation,the document presented its readers with a view of the atmosphere in cross-sec-tion (fig. 1). Starting at the earth's surface and moving up through thetroposphere and stratosphere, the document sketched out tlie various ionos-pheric layers—the D, E, and F regions. In the midst of the electron plasma, Daviesand his group situated two crucial geophysical phenomena: cosmic rays, repre-sented as particles showering through the upper ionosphert:; and the auroraborealis, the northern lights, believed to be associated with (if n(3t responsible for)radio blackouts and shortwave disruptions throughout the northern hemisphere.

Within the context of wartime ionospheric investigations, the OIC/6 illus-tration was not a generic translocal representation of atmospheric stnicture.Rather, it was part of a still-speculative and highly circumscribed natural orderof high northern latitudes—a physical and conceptual ordering of geophysicalphenomena that years of observations and geophysical studies had thought tobe implicated in radio propagation near the auroral zone. Weaving back andforth between this speculative geophysics and its likely effects on radio propa-gation, Davies and his colleagues arrived at the communications order thatresulted (fig. 2), the spatial ordering of shortwave radio disruptions that

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journal y/" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes

• • • • • • • • • • • • * • • • • " % *

V—**

THE RESIOW op THE

Figure 1: The Regions of the Atmopshere (1944). The illustration shows the various regions of

the ionosphere—D, E, Fl, F2—and locates cosmic rays (shown as the shower emanating from

upper right) and the auroral tights (shown throughout the ionospheric regions). Source: Canadian

Radio Wave Propagation Committee 1944. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.

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ftm fVoirtrioii w Nannat Hcnamtu — liujtrujm Auiou - A«u(rnm Zmcs.

Figure 2: Rorfio wave absorption in the Northern Hemisphere (1943). The polar-proiection map

itluatrates the spatial extent of shortwave radio disruptions. Note the extetisioti of the zone south

into Canada. Source: Davies Papers. Courtesy of Communications Research Centre.

pointed to the cause of troubles in the North Atlantic, even as it implied thatCanadian radio circuits would suffer these disruptions more frequently andmore seriously than any other nation in the world.

In 36 pages, Davies and his staff put forward a compelling argument for thelink hetween reliability of northern radio communications and the geophysicalpeculiarity of northern regions, and thus for how and why nature and technology

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Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes

came together so problematically for Allied ships and planes in the NorthAtlantic. In particular, the report emphasized two key points that Davies wouldplace at the centre of his arguments for the creation and goal of the RadioPhysics Laboratory after the war: first, that disruptions in radio phenomena innorthern regions were linked to unique and characteristically northern geo-physical phenomena (aurorae, magnetic storms, and ionospheric turbulence);and second; that because of its northern character (as defined by these geo-physical phenomena), Canada was in a unique position to contribute to theinvestigation of northern geophysics and the solution of shortwave radio prob-lems.'- In this way, the document pointed beyond the immediately crucial butnarrow technical concerns of the North Atlantic to the national and Interna-tional importance that Davies would claim for his research after the war; and itsignalled a focus on the intersections of nature and technology that wouldcharacterize the work of his group for the next two decades.

The Laboratory and the Nation

Reclaiming the North—Radio, Science, and SovereigntyWhat carried OIC/6's research over into peacetime was the way it engaged twocrucial sets of anxieties about the Canadian North in the mid-1940s. The firstwere a set of long-standing concerns over territorial control in the North andthe place of science and technology in asserting that control. The technologicalfocus of Davies's group—its emphasis on the improvement of radio in northernlatitudes—and its scattered field stations made its research useful in estab-lishing territorial sovereignty over the North. Its scientific focus—its emphasison investigating the natural order of the northern regions—placed it at thecentre of broader programs to control the North in cognitive, as well as territo-rial, terms." In doing so, its work became central in the efforts to use northernknowledge to refashion the post-war nation.

It was one of the great ironies of the Second World War that the region somany identified with the prospects and identity of Canada was, in fact, filledwith Americans. By June 1943, an estimated 43,000 US military personnel andcivilians were in northern Canada, sent to help build much of the infrastructureof the northeast and northwest staging routes (Grant 1988, 125). Their efforts leftthe region dotted with airfields, weather stations, supply roads, and militarybases, raising questions within the Canadian government about US intentionsand Canadian impotence. The post-war situation looked similarly unpromising.With the looming threat of Soviet attacks across the pole and uncertainty aboutthe future of US bases in Greenland, American intelligence reports asserted that

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the US would defend its interests in the North with or without Canadian consent,leading Prime Minister Mackenzie King to speculate that "the long range policyof the Americans is to absorb Canada" (Pickergill and Foster 1970, 219).

The most comprehensive attempts to assert Canadian sovereignty in theNorth were mounted by a small but influential group of former academics(Mackenzie King called them "the intelUgentsia") (Owram 1986, 256). Centralistand interventionist in their outlook, heavily concentrated in the Department ofExternal Affairs, the group responded to anxieties about the late-war North byattempting to weave US infrastructure projects into a vision of a "New North"that would underwrite Canada's post-war autonomy (Grant 1988, 52, 120-210).The leading figure in those efforts was the ubiquitous Hugh Keenleyside—wartime undersecretary of External Affairs, secretary of the Canadian section ofthe Permanent Joint Defence Board, and later deputy ministt^r of Mines andResources.'̂ Keenleyside shared Mackenzie King's concern that (Canada might becutting its ties with Britain only to be absorbed by the United States. After all, hequipped, Canada had "not gained independence from London in order to relin-quish it to Washington" (qtd. in Grant 1988, 191). Colleagues like Escott Reidstressed the cultural role of the North for the post-war nation, "the possiblenational interest to be served by making the development cif the North aninspiring and somewhat romantic national objective for the people of Canada"(qtd. in Grant 1988, 127). Keenleyside, however, placed the North at the heart ofCanada's post-war political and economic independence from both Britain andthe United States. Waxing historical, Keenleyside envisioned a new geopoliticalepoch taking shape; "What the Aegean Sea was to classical antiquity, what theMediterranean was to the Roman world, what the Atlantic Ocean was to theexpanding Europe of Renaissance days, the Arctic Ocean is becoming to theworld of aircraft and atomic power" (qtd. in Grant 1988, 210). In Keenleyside'splan, US infrastructure projects would be purchased after the war; expandedmining and petroleum operations would help underwrite Canadian economicexpansion; and administrative, educational, and social reforms would bring theemerging welfare state to the northern regions and their residents whileasserting Canada's administrative and political jurisdiction over the region(Grant 1988, 199-200).

Because of its ability to transmit signals over enormous distances, the tech-nology of shortwave radio was crucial to Keenleyside's visions. The shortwavestation at Baker Eake, for example, transmitted streams of scientific data—weather reports, ionospheric observations, auroral data, and radio receptionconditions—interspersed with Air Force radio traffic, communications for theRCMP, and commercial traffic for trappers, miners, and residents of the town

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lournal o/" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes

(Fraser 1949). The Inuit and other Native peoples would soon make the tech-nology integral to their life and culture." What was more, the electromagneticwaves themselves soon took on a symholic force. Figure 3 illustrates the stakes inthe mid-1950s. The map formed part of a doaiment submitted hy the Yukon ter-ritorial government to the Royal Commission on Broadcasting, which had beencreated primarily to draft policies that would govern the newly expanded CBC.The arrow5 sweeping into the Yukon and labeled USA and USSR did not depictinvading military forces {though, in the minds of many, they just as well mighthave). Instead, exploiting military cartographic conventions in which thebreadth of arrows represented the strength of troop deployments, the mapillustrated the source and reception quality of shortwave radio broadcasts. Thereport explained,

While the Yukon has been neglected by Canadian radio, it is not only theUnited States which has, unconsciously, stepped into the breach. The reg-ular broadcasts of the Soviet North are widely heard if not appreciated.One need cast no refiection on the residents of the Yukon to note howinteresting a target the Yukon can be for radio Moscow. Here is an area of200,000 square miles with only one weekly newspaper, no adequateCanadian radio, a sense of isolation and hunger for news and entertain-ment. The operators of the Soviet service may well consider that residentsof such an area are likely to tune in to Soviet programs of music, forget-ting to switch off the set when less rewarding fare follows. They may alsolook upon the Yukon as an interesting battleground of Soviet andAmerican ideologies through the medium of radio, while Canadian view-points are completely absent (CBC 1956, 4-5)

Within this context, the communications order that OlC/6 had fleshed outduring the war took on new significance. The radio disruptions that had threat-ened wartime North Atlantic communications now threatened the nationalistpost-war projects of Keenleyside and his allies. Just as it had during the war, thesolution to those problems seemed to pass once more through OIC/6. In thefall of 1945, as units across the Canadian military began demobilizing, Daviesand his staff were disbanded and reconstituted as the Scientific Staff of theIonosphere Propagation Group (IPG). The IPG formed the technical core of theCanadian Radio Wave Propagation Committee (CRWPC), the organization thatgoverned all scientific and regulatory aspects of radio propagation in Canada.While it conducted radio reception studies and frequency allocation programsfor various groups, the IPG was principally charged with collecting ionosphericdata from the Canadian ionospheric stations at Prince Rupert, Churchill, Clyde

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Edward )ones-lmhotep

YUKON TERRITORY

RADIO SOURCES

Width of arrow indicates relativejency of reception

populatian

•fh

Figure 3: Raii'to Reception in the Yukon (1956). Note the arrows marked "Canada" near the

tower right corner. Source: F.H. Collins, 1956, 4-5. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.

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Figure 4: Organizational links of the Ionospheric Research Group of the Canadian Radio WavePropagation Committee (1945). The block marked "other companies" included the CBC. Source:Wylle, 1945. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.

River, Ottawa, and Torbay. The station data, called "daily signals," were thenforwarded from Ottawa to Washington's Interservice Radio PropagationLaboratory (IRPL) or to England's Radio Research Station—the two laboratoriesresponsible for generating global frequency predictions for the Westernnations. Radio operators then used those frequency predictions for military andcivilian communications throughout the globe. From the British and US labo-ratories, the prediction charts then made their way back through Davies'sgroup, and through the distribution channels shown in figure 4, to the mainfunctionaries of the Canadian state, the primary agents of Keenleyside's pro-gram—the army, the navy, the air force, the Department of Transport, and"other companies" including (crucially) the CBC.

If the technology of radio helped underwrite projects for a "New North," thescientific approach that had characterized the work of OIC/6 also mattered criti-cally for Keenleyside's ambitions. Alongside political and economic maneuverings,Keenleyside saw the logistical dimensions of scientific research, particularlygeophysical investigations, as a key force in the struggles to control the North(Grant 1988, 199-200). As a student of history, he was keenly aware of the his-torical role that northern research, particularly magnetic and geophysicalinvestigations, had played in early Canadian nationalism, and the links thisresearch had forged with political patronage and military power." As a memberof the Permanent Joint Defence Board, Keenleyside had witnessed first-hand thevast wartime network of US weather stations set up across northern Canada forthe northeast and northwest staging routes. The creation and operation of thosenetworks had raised deep concerns over American ambitions and Canadiansovereignty in the region.'^

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In April 1947, acting as chair of the Arctic Research Advisory Committee,Keenleyside presided over a meeting on magneto-ionospheric research in theCanadian Arctic. As secretary of the meeting and the head of Canadian iono-spheric research, Frank Davies recorded Keenleyside's prescriptions for USinvolvement: "(1) That U.S. activities in the region should be limited to what wasabsolutely necessary. (2) We should find out from the U.S. what they want toknow. (3) We should see if we have or can get this information, (4) If not, and ifwe consider further investigations are essential, then we might be prepared toaccept U.S. participation" (Davies and Rowley 1947). Apart from the obviousterritorial concerns at their core, Keenleyside's prescriptions provided a mutedversion of a broader political statement: that the producticn of knowledgeabout the Canadian North was a means for the nation to create power in thepost-war world. What underlay Keenleyside's comments were deep anxietiesover epistemic sovereignty—sovereignty over Northern knowledge and its pro-duction. Graham Rowley, Davies's colleague and co-secretary for the Aprilmeeting, would put the point more bluntly, asserting that it was "a good thingto establish the principle that information on Canada should come fromCanada rather than Washington" (1953). More than just proprietary or territo-rial, Rowley's concerns recognized that knowledge about the North was avaluable political currency.

Keenleyside's associate at the Arctic Institute of North America, the geo-physicist and University of Toronto professor J. Tuzo Wilson, underscored thisunderstanding of the politics of northern knowledge. Before the war, Wilsonhad served as an assistant geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada; hewould later go on to make fundamental contributions to the theory of platetectonics and continental drift; but in the intervening years, Wilson servedoverseas with the Royal Canadian Engineers and was eventually appointedDirector of Operational Research at Canadian Army Headquarters in Ottawa,where he co-ordinated the mapping of glaciers in northern Canada. Throughthat experience, Wilson came to see northern scientific research as the key toCanadian political and military influence after the war. Canada's small popula-tion and industry, Wilson reasoned, gave it little hope of influencing thedevelopment of conventional weapons and warfare. "It is in new or unusualdiscoveries and research," Wilson surmised, "that we can exercise the mosteffect." Northern research, in Wilson's view, afforded Canada the greatest hope forpower during the Cold War: "In no new field have we greater natural advantagesthan in Arctic and winter research. In no other field are our allies and particularlythe United States more interested in our work.... !n no other way could we more effec-tively and powerfully play a part in the allied programme than by concentrating upon

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northern warfare and research.... It would be difficult for a small power to achievethis desideratum hy any other means" (1948, 1; my emphasis).

Davies was immersed in these post-war debates about re-appropriating theNorth as an object of knowledge through his membership in the Arctic Instituteof North America (where his colleagues included Keenleyside and Wilson), andthrough his involvement in the smaller Arctic Circle (a group primarily made upof government officials interested in exchanging information on the Arctic andsub-Arctic and discussing plans for future research). His commitment to geo-physical investigations as the key to reliable radio helped make his groupinstrumental In broader attempts to reclaim the North, in both territorial andepistemic terms, for the benefit of the nation. Equal parts geophysics and radioengineering, the work of the IPG fit almost squarely within Keenleyside's visionof the "New North"; almost, that is, because of a rather serious problem withpredictions.

RPL and the Politics of ParticularityThe Radio Physics Laboratory was created out of combined territorial and epis-temic concerns. The impetus for its creation came mainly out of worries over theBritish and American prediction systems that the IPG's research served. Under thedemands of wartime communications, the frequency predictions had formed thebasis for almost all long-distance fixed and mobile telecommunications for theAllies (Dellinger and Smith 1948, 264). Even during the war, however, Davies'sgroup had begun noticing that the British and American prediction systemsbroke down for northern radio circuits. The two systems differed in importantways, but both divided the globe longitudinally (since ionospheric conditionslargely follow diurnal variations), and superimposed on those divisions a tax-onomy that carved the world into three communications zones: polar, temperate,and equatorial.'" Because they treated the world as a series of internally homoge-nous regions, the prediction systems suffered from oversimplification, Davies andhis colleagues argued, particularly when applied to Canadian radio circuits.'" In acomment that linked his North Atlantic research with post-war domestic con-cerns, Davies explained to US colleagues in October 1945 that, "In some areas,mainly those associated with the auroral zones, we can not depend entirely onthe general predictions and have to study individual ... circuits. This is particu-larly true for Canadian circuits.... This marks the great contrast between ourcommunications area and most of the rest of the world" (46). His superiors at theCRWPC had sought to resolve these inaccuracies by simply providing the US lab-oratory with "more and better data" from Canadian locations (CRWPC 1944, 1).Davies's team, however, maintained that the problem rested with the prediction

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systems, rather than with the data that went into them. The models simply didnot take into account the peculiar geophysical conditions that affected high-latitude communications.

In place of CRWPC's suggestions, Davies argued that Canada required itsown, specially designed prediction system hased on the study of individual com-munication circuits: "We can not get away from that joh in Canada by any sucheasy method as depending upon very general regional predictions" {1945, 59).The system, Davies elaborated in 1946, would have to he base<l on the investiga-tion of the northern geophysical phenomena that dominated the ionosphereabove Canada. Although focussed on Canada in particular, those investigationswould nevertheless shed light on northern ionospheric phenomena in general.In laying out the requirements for the prediction service, Davies stressed that itwas "important to visualize Canada's part in such geophysical studies as being farwider in scope than for other countries, with the possible exception of Russia"(1946, 2). By the late winter of 1947, Davies had moved even further in sug-gesting the importance of his group's research. Positioning Canadian ionosphericeffects as a major source of advances in ionospheric studies, he stressed to hissuperiors that, in coming years, "Advances in our knowledge of the ionospherewill depend largely on analysis of obscure and exceptional ionospheric condi-tions and on improvements in our measurement techniques" (CRWPC 1947, 7).

Although the geophysical investigations would be of global interest, Daviesalso stressed that the project "must be done and be done by a Canadian group"(Meek 1946, 1). Arguing that other groups had only a passing interest in theproblems of Canadian domestic communications, Davies pointed to the impor-tance of keeping this specialization in northern research in Canadian hands.Supported by his OlC/6 colleague Jack Meek, Davies proposed that this type ofinfluential investigation could best be carried out by the scientific staff of the IPGthrough the creation of a "Central Experimental Ionosphere Laboratory"(CRWPC 1947, 7). The new body would oversee the field stations and establishits own prediction system uniquely suited to the problems of communications innorthern Canada (Meek 1946, 5). With the National Research Council refusing totake over the operation of the ionospheric field stations from the individualarmed services, the CRWPC agreed to Davies's proposal.

The Radio Propagation Laboratory (RPL) that emerged from these pressuresin late February 1947 was shot through with the politics of sovereignty and par-ticularity. Two months after its creation, it was placed under the control of thenewly established Defence Research Board (DRB), created to allow the NationalResearch Council to return to its peacetime pursuits while avoiding competi-tion over scientific manpower and resources between the three armed services.™

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Its guiding principle, formulated in an effort to avoid duplication in Alliedresearch, was to provide "a unique contribution" to the research activities ofthe United States and Britain by focussing on fields in which Canada possessedspecial talent or facilities, and especially those best suited to its northern geo-graphic position (Goodspeed 1958, 25). Here RPL's research would furnish anarchetype for DRB's principle. As one secret report suggested, ionosphericresearch was precisely in keeping with the Defence Research Board's emphasison northern particularity: "Research on arctic problems, on radio propagation inthe auroral belt and on underwater sound transmission in Canadian coastalwaters are examples of problems selected in accordance with this principle"(1951, 1; my emphasis). Alongside the broader projects of the Defence ResearchBoard—climatic investigations, topographical analyses, and entomological exper-iments—and operating from a handful of stations scattered over the country,with Ottawa as the base of operations, RPL now assumed primary responsibilityfor establishing reliable communications over the Canadian North by examiningthe peculiar ionospheric conditions above it.

The Science of Sovereignty

The creation of the laboratory alone did not solve the problems of cognitive andterritorial control over the North. The authority of the Radio PropagationLaboratory and its intellectual products rested on the ionospheric data generatedby the field stations. The stations were not so important in isolation; RPL soughtto argue that their collective data could capture the distinctiveness of ionosphericphenomena above Canada even while they represented one larger entity, thehigh-latitude ionosphere. For Davies, brought up in the tradition of geophysicalinvestigations, the field stations were the heart of ionospheric research.Remembering OIC/6's wartime investigations, Davies recounted the "long hours"of tedious desk work in Ottawa "lightened by visits to the ionospheric stations"(1969, 4). Throughout the months immediately following the Second World War,however, IPG had directed enormous efforts against the destabilizing tendenciesof the outposts. The very characteristics that mythologized northern nature inCanadian culture worked against the disciplined scientific practices required atthe stations.

Operated by five different agencies, the Canadian stations were spartanaffairs. They resembled moderate cabins (the military referred to them as"huts") and were often removed from the nearest town by several kilometres toavoid interfering with civilian radio communications and to protect the sensirivityof the information they produced." Both people and machines at the stations

21


bore the effects of the isolation and the harsh environment. Kquipment at thestations had been hastily built during the war and inadequately maintainedbecause of scarce parts. By 1945, the instruments were wearing out and requiredincreasingly skilled technicians to operate them (Davies and Scott 1946, 2); butmass demobilization had made experienced wireless operators, the stock oper-ators of the field stations, a scarce commodity (Worth 1947). Stressing themagnitude of the turnover at the stations, Davies wrote in July 1947 that 70operators had passed through three stations in less than two years (1947, 1). In1948, in the same secret report in which he argued for northern research as thekey to Canadian influence, J. Tuzo Wilson fleshed out Davies's ohservation bylisting a number of the factors affecting what he considered "the very seriousproblem" of suitable personnel in the North:

(1) Isolation, loneliness and & severe sense of being cut off fromcivilization

(2) the depressing effects of infertile surroundings(3) monotony(4) unnatural seasons disturbing sleep or causing enforced idleness and

boredom(5) lack of internal resources and lack of incentive or enthusiasm when

faced with the Arctic(6) carelessness arising from being "bushed"—a state that arises due to

some of the above factors even in much less severe conditions. (14)

Inexperienced personnel, a harsh environment, and aging equipment ledto questions about the data produced at the field stations. A;. Davies observedin July 1946, the manual equipment at the stations "although of specializedvalue in the hands of highly qualified observers, is in practice subject to seriouserrors in interpretation" (Davies and Scott, 1946, 1-2). On-site training of opera-tors, "sometimes by men who have not had sufficient training themselves," onlymade matters worse: "Inaccuracy and serious errors in data have occurred becauseof this" (Davies 1947, 1). To overcome these problems, Davies and his colleaguesemphasized the moral component of the station operator's job, stressing thatpersonnel "should be intelligent and keen on their work," and that they shouldbe instructed about the serious consequences their research had for northerncommunications and national survival (2).- In order to overcome the vagariesof instruments at individual stations, the RPL staff also proposed a "travellingcalibration party"^a small team equipped with calihration instruments—thatwould tour the stations and ensure the operation of the equipment and thetraining of the personnel. The main solution, however, lay in the introduction

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loiirnal o/̂ Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes

of a new scientific record that the RPL believed would produce the reliableknowledge on which the larger technological, political, and scientific aims ofthe laboratory were based.

The new records were known as panoramic ionograms. They had first beenintroduced into ionospheric research in 1933 as a way of producing as muchinformation as possible about the ionosphere on a single graphic record takenfrom the ground.^' They were generated by an instrument called an ionosonde—essentially a modified radar set, often assembled from surplus radar equipmentand therefore sharing extensively in the material culture of its sibling (Villard1976). Through a series of timing, gating, and amplifier circuits, the ionosondeemitted a series of pulses of gradually increasing frequency. Its receiver pickedup any reflections from the ionosphere and displayed the results on an oscillo-scope. Photographic equipment then parsed the resulting play of light intosnapshots, capturing the images on film in the form of ionograms. Theresulting graphs gave the "virtual height" of ionospheric layers as a function ofthe radio wave frequency, allowing researchers to determine the structure anddynamics of the ionosphere and the usable frequencies for shortwave circuits.In this way, the graphs materially instantiated the combined geophysical andtechnological interests of the RPL.

The new ionograms had originally been introduced to save time and labourand to reduce error by automating manual techniques. Those techniquesrequired field station operators to vary frequencies skilfully by hand while theyplotted ionograms from the display data.'^ The records also aimed to capturemechanically the details of a rapidly changing ionosphere in a way thatescaped the manual abilities of humans (Gilliland 1933, 561). The great appealof the panoramic ionogram lay in this arresting feature, in the way the instru-ment transformed the process of ionospheric research from one rooted inmanual tracing by humans to one based on seemingly instantaneous photog-raphy carried out by machines.-'' By standardizing their instruments withAmerican equipment, the members of RPL believed they would have a standardvisual format, within which the particularity of the northern ionosphere couldemerge as authentic rather than artifactual, and a medium by which thoseeffects could enter the larger global networks of ionospheric research. In fact,Davies's group saw the new ionogram as so important that the first act of thenewly formed laboratory was the adoption of the new images. The creation of theionospheric laboratory, the reliability of distant technicians, and the investigationof distinctive ionospheric effects were linked to the adoption of the new image forthe members of the laboratory.

23


RPL's adoption of the panoramic ionogram brought its own problems,however. With previous records, inexperienced technicians had interpreted rel-atively simple information from an oscilloscope and plotted it on a graph. Thenew instruments captured much more of the peculiar details at the heart ofRPL's work; but because of this they demanded a much more sophisticatedinterpretation of a much more complex image. In the most interesting cases—the obscure and exceptional conditions that Davies and Wilson hademphasized—the standard techniques of ionographlc interpretation, whichhad been developed for the simpler and more common phenomena on US andBritish ionograms (see fig. 5), made reading the Canadian records almostimpossible.'" The standards of ionographic interpretation in Ihe late 1940s hadno way of treating them. Records like figure 6, obtained during ionosphericstorms or under the generally turbulent conditions of high latitudes, wereanomalies in the standard scheme; their complexity created what one US offi-cial called "the most difficult problem in the world, from an ionosphericist'spoint of view" (Davies 1945, 59). Gaping omissions in the daily tabulationcharts of the field stations throughout the polar regions testified to their awk-ward status.

Throughout the late 1940s, then, the laboratory struggled with how to readthe high-latitude ionogram. Most efforts were led by Jack Meek, one of the orig-inal members of OIC/6, a founding member of RPL, and the head of thetravelling calibration party. Meek had served as a Naval Intelligence Officerduring the war, and had been attached to OIC/6 because of his background andinterests in meteorology and radio physics. In 1947, as RPL was taking shape,he led a small research team in operating RPL's Mobile Observatory^—a con-verted Canadian Pacific Railway car designed to make observations across theauroral zone by moving along the rail line between The Pas and Churchill.''During the war. Meek had begun questioning the standard interpretive frame-work for ionograms. In a 1949 article in the foiinml of Geophysical Researchentitled "Sporadic Ionization at High Latitudes," Meek continued his attemptto move the bulk of high-latitude ionograms beyond the sphere of idlecuriosity. He laid out a visual taxonomy of sporadic effects—spread echoes,polar spurs, forked traces, and oblique reflections—that he beUeved character-ized ionograms in "northern regions," and he elaborated the system into a newreading regime for high-latitude ionograms (1949, 343). Together with his RPLcolleague CA. McKerrow, he recorded the system in RPL's new instructionmanual for ionospheric observers, published in 1951. The techniques wouldcontribute disproportionately to the section on high-latitude analysis in themanual for the International Geophysical Year (Benyon and Brown 1956).

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6 6

doo

600

200

Figure 5: A "typical" mid-iatitiuie panoramic ionogram. The vertical ami horizontal grid linesare frequency and height markers, respectively. Records like tiiis were common in British and USionospheric research, and fortned the basis of reading techniques developed for the ionogram.Note the distinctness of the traces and the precise heiglit measurements possible for a given fre-quency. The labels on the record were added after analysis. Courtesy of the CommunicationsResearch Centre.

Figure 6: A severe case of "spread echo" (1949). Taken at Churchill, Manitoba, this ionogramshows the common traits of high-latitude records. The blurred shadow on the right is producedby reflected radiation. Note the difficulty in determining a precise height for a given frequency.Such phenomena rendered the ionogram unreadable according to the standard ntles of interpre-tation. Courtesy of the Communications Research Centre.

25


For Meek, the reading techniques were a means to an end. He was primarilyinterested in developing new forecasting methods for the ionospheric disruptionsresponsible for radio blackouts on northern circuits. Those scientific interests ledhim in the early 1950s to try to correlate magnetic, auroral, and ionospheric vari-ations in the hope of predicting the timing and severity of ionospheric storms.Between December 1951 and April 1952, Meek and A.G. MacNamara (a physicistat the University of Saskatchewan where Meek was completing his doctorate)carefully measured variations in geophysical phenomena implicated in radio dis-turbances. Those measurements (they hoped) would reveal a sequence of eventsthat would allow them to chart the course of a radio disturbance, particularly itsextent and magnitude, once it had begun (Meek and MacNamara 1954). To dothis, they transcribed four groups of observations—visual auiora, radio echoes,ionospheric height measurements, and magnetic variations—onto synchronoustimelines (fig. 7). In doing so, they tied data from Canadian ionograms into awider set of visual technologies and graphic devices: auroral charts, radio echographs, and magnetographs. The graph not only brought together geophysicalphenomena and radio effects (the aim of Meek's work since OIC/6); it also simul-taneously depicted the occurrence of visual aurora (responsible for makingionograms "unreadable" under British and US techniques) and the height of spo-radic ionization (measured precisely from these previously "unreadable"ionograms).

Depictions like this formed powerful visual arguments for how radio waves,auroral displays, and magnetic field variations were linked in C;anada. They cameto form the logical bridge holding together otherwise elhptical statements aboutthe relation of communications and the North. As one report justifying RPL'sresearch in the late 1950s explained, "Radio communications in Canada arebedevilled by difficulties which are unique." The report then went on to list,not difficulties in radio communications at all, but rather geophysical factorswhose links to radio disturbances had been carefully traced out through thepost-war research of Meek and his RPL colleagues. The account continued, "TheNorth Magnetic Pole lies wholly within Canadian territory; the NorthGeomagnetic Pole on the north-western edge of Greenland is closer to Canadathan to any nation, and the phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis, or NorthernLights, has an adverse affect on radio communications throughout most of theDominion" (Goodspeed 1958, 195). What was remarkable in the work of RPLand its allied investigations was how the drive towards distinction and partic-ularity had the effect of "naturalizing" technological effects—specifically theradio disruptions in Canada's northern regions—by linking them to theinherent properties of northern geophysics.

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SASKATOON - DISTURBANCE OF SEPT. 19-20 1953

LOCAL STANDftflO TIME

Figure 7: Meek and MacNamara's correlation of auroral, magnetic, and kmographk data. Notethe simultaneous charting of ionospheric heights and visual aurora between 21:00 and 22:00hours. Source: Meek and MacNamara 1954, 327. Courtesy of the National Research Council ofCanada.

Through these associations built up in the laboratory, elements of the nat-ural order like the northern lights were made to point implicitly to theproblems of radio. The science and technology of radio were even enlisted inattempts to define the North. Almost a decade after the CBC formed itsNorthern Service in 1958, its officials conceded that their "North" had no pre-cise boundaries. In a move that spoke to the identification of shortwave radiowith the northern territory, officials turned to what they called "the inherentnature of radio transmissions" in order to define the Northern Region. Thisregion, the CBC's documents explained, was defined as the region served by

27


shortwave radio, extending "north to the Pole and south to an imaginary linethat would include those listeners who do not receive a consistent and adequatebroadcast signal from CBC network stations or private stations located 'outside'"(CBC 1964, 16; my emphasis). By that definition, the territory covered almost2 million square miles (CBC 1963, 1). The definition resonated with the con-temporary work of Louis-Edmond Hamelin, a geographer at Quebec's LavalUniversity, who in the late 1950s almost single-handedly founded the field ofnordoiogy—the study of the cold regions of northern latitudes. The keystoneof Hamelin's new discipline was the concept of "nordicity," which he definedas the "state or quality of northerness or being north" (Hamelin 1975, 35).Unsatisfied with the qualitative definitions of northerness being bandied aboutin the post-war period and wary of unjustified claims to the epithet "Nordic,"Hamelin set out to develop a "nordicity index," based on a number of criteriathat would help determine a nation's "true" nordicity. In assembling his ambi-tious index, Hamelin drew on wide swaths of northern post-v/ar research for hispreliminary criteria—meteorology, geography, topography, and populationstudies. He also crucially included the undifferentiated criterion of "communi-cations." While respecting minimum latitude and isothermal requirements, heargued without explanation or justification that the poorer a region's commu-nications, the more properly northern it was (Hamelin 1964).^"

The figurative linking of the North to tenuous communications also hadwider purchase in 1950s Canada. In the coming years, the laboratory itselfwould find its way into CBC documentaries and National Film Board features.The notion it helped articulate—that Canada was an inherently northernnation whose northerness was defined by problematic communications, andvice versa—was restated again and again. In Harold Innis's geographic deter-minism, in Northrop Frye's "obliterated nature," as in Hamelin's index and theNorthern Service's maps, the RPL would see its vision of nature, technology,and nation echoed over and over. With the backing of science and technology,the North would function throughout the 1960s as the place of relative solitudeand isolation that Glenn Gould would explore in his documentary. In an ulti-mate irony, the radio waves that in 1967 carried Gould's Idea of North—thedocumentary that pointed so subtly to the work of the laboratory and its field sta-tions—would still have trouble reaching the region that furni;;hed its subject.

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Conclusion: The Nation in the Lab

For Davies and his colleagues, nature and technology were only partly opposi-tional. The lahoratory ultimately naturalized the problems of shortwave radio,just as the CBC drew in part on the work of RPL to technoiogize the North,defining the geographic region in technological terms. The scientific approachthat ultimately produced those relations implicated the laboratory (as much asthe laboratory implicated itself) in the projects of territorial and epistemic sover-eignty in fhe post-war North. As RPL's struggles with the ionogram suggest, theability to inscribe knowledge, to articulate the links between the North and com-munications in Canada, was itself an act of sovereignty in the opening years ofthe Cold War. Articulating those associations took work; hringing together ionos-pheric phenomena and shortwave disruptions demanded changes in scientificpractice. The ionograms gathered from the field stations formed crucial boundaryobjects mediating between the disciplines of upper atmospheric physics andradio engineering; they furnished the primary resources for articulating the dis-tinctive natural order and technological orders the nation occupied. Theunreliable production and interpretation of ionograms in the field, their peculiarcomplexity, and their marginalization under the dominant interpretive schemesof British and US experts nevertheless called into question their reliability and thelarger scientific and political projects that rested on them. The scientific prod-ucts that overcame those constraints, Meek's graphic correlations among them,lent the rigour and authority of science to the broader visions of an inherentlyisolated North.

By the time the Idea of North aired in December 1967, though, the effortsthat went into creating those scientific associations—the disciplined field stationschedules, the ionosonde maintenance routines, and the specialized readingtechniques—were already disappearing from view. The practices, concepts, andmachines that had acted as scientific vehicles for some of the most compelling"ideas of North" in post-war Canada were already being pushed aside in favourof communications satellites and microwave relay stations. The ionogram andthe geophysical and technological worlds it mediated were the specific historicaland cultural expressions of a period when radio already existed, but satellites werenot yet a reality. As in Gould's documentary, they increasingly occupied the sub-text of discussions about the idea of North, about the troublesome northerncommunications at its core, about the solitude those fractured communicationsimposed, and about the unique geophysical conditions responsible for them. In

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the end, all that was left were the seemingly transhistorical associations the lab-oratory had helped produce ... and perhaps also the ghosts that haunted Gould'sdocumentary: the memory of lone government researchers travelling North, inthe early years of the Cold War, to study the northern lights.

Notes

The author would like to thank four anonymous referees for their helpful comments.Previous drafts of this essay were presented at the annual meeting of the History ofScience Society and the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association.

1. Gould gives this account in his essay "Radio as Music" (Gould 1971).2. For some representative views of this opposition, see Keefer (1972), Berton (1970), and

Frye (1971). A notable exception to this trend is the early work of Harold Innis(1930).For more recent accounts of communications in Canadian history, see Babaian (1992),Bahe (1990), R. Collins (1977), Lorimer and Wilson (1988), and Rens (1993).

3. See, for example, the introduction and essays in Sherrill Grace's edited volume ofEssays on Canadian Writing (1996). William R. Morrison also begins his thoughtfulstudy on the Yukon and Northwest Territories with a section i^ntitled "Imaginationand Reality," in which he juxtaposes particularly nineteenth-century visions of theNorth against their more scientific definition in terms of isotherms, geographic latitude,and the tree line (1998). Of course, the juxtaposition of imagination and reality also suf-fers from a category mistake. As Benedict Anderson has shown, imagined nationsnevertheless function as realities (1983). For a fascinating historicization of scientificobjectivity, see Daston and Galison 1992.

4. A notable exception to this is Zeller's work on Victorian science in Canada (1987).5. Patricia Fara has studied the historical uses of auroral research and northern identity

for political prestige (1996, 38).

6. The "mid-Atlantic gap" was the region of the North Atlantic that could not bereached by land-hased Allied aircraft. It would later be closed by long-range aircraft,but in 1942 it consisted of an area about 1,200 kilometres wide stretching fromGreenland to the Azores (Milner 1985, 211).

7. German submarines used shortwave radios to alert their headquarters on weatherconditions and convoy sightings. Using land-based and ship-based high-frequencydirection finding (H/F D/F), Allied radio operators could direct submarine destroyersand aircraft towards the U-boats.

8. The auroral zones are the oval-shaped zones of auroral activity Ihat encircle both thenorth and south geomagnetic poles.

9. This way of approaching radio problems—through physical and dynamical investiga-tions rather than statistical correlations—would gain momentum after the war. Asevidence that this approach characterized the work of Davies's group, Norwegian

30


Defence Research Establishment (NDRE) adopted RPL's more "scientific" approach tothe problems of northern radio communications after a visit to RPL in 1955 (Wicken1997, 214).

10. Although meteorology is generally associated with the study of weather, it is actu-ally a diverse field encompassing applied, dynamic, and physical meteorology,aerology {the study of the free air not adjacent to the earth's surface), and aeronomy(which includes upper atmospheric physics and therefore ionospheric investiga-tions).

11. Suzanne Zeller describes a similar tension in nineteenth-century meteorology (1987,166).

12. The idea that Canada possessed a northern character that made the nation uniquewas, of course, not new. Carl Berger (1966) and Shetagh Grant (1989a, 1989b) haveboth written expertly about this contention. D.A. West has pointed to the more gen-eral use of this argument from uniqueness in Canadian Northern scientific research:"That the Canadian North is different from all other regions in Canada, or in theworld, is the premise from which most scientific research begins" (1991).

1.3, Renee Hulan has pointed interestingly to the symbolic relationship between pos-sessing the North and being Canadian (2002, 12).

14. The Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) was the co-ordinating body for USwartime projects.

15. As Heather Hudson explains, "The shortwave radio, in addition to being a source ofnews and entertainment, is also a valuable companion on hunting and fishing trips.Native people frequently take radios with them on field trips in pursuit of fish andgame. The Cree take radios with them when they go trapping in the bush; manyInuit take radios to hunting and fishing camps ... it is the custom for families in theircommunity to take radios with them on the land. For some hunters a radio is basicequipment. A remote cache of food and supplies for hunters from Pond Inlet onnorthern Baffin Island contains a shortwave radio" (1977, 137). On the wider his-tory of communications and the Native peoples of the North, see Valaskakis (1983,1987); Alia (1999).

16. For a fascinating account of the role of the nineteenth-century "inventory sciences,"including natural history, in forging the idea of a transcontinental nation, see Zeller(1987). On the role of early Arctic science and its ties to navigation, political authority,and military power, see Levere (1993). On the expansion of science into the North asan extension of the state, see Zaslow (1988) and Grant (1988). For a more focussed viewon subsequent developments in relation to the Polar Continental Shelf project, seeFoster and Marino (1986).

17. Weather stations were critical to overall defence not only by virtue of the informa-tion they furnished for airborne operations, but also because their airstrips could beused as secondary bases if necessary.

18. Polar communications were the most disturbed, followed by Equatorial communi-cations and then Temperate. This taxonomy was the basis on which most frequencypredictions were made during the Second World War (Gordon 1944).

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19. Zone boundartes, for example, were based either on geomagretic or geographicallongitude, which diverged greatly in high latitudes. When calculating oblique prop-agation refraction, the British and US systems assumed no horizontal ion densitygradient; ionograms from Canadian stations suggested that this assumption waserroneous.

20. The Radio Physics Laboratory would eventually merge with the Defence ResearchElectronics Laboratory (also run by PRB) to form the Defence ResearchTelecommunications Establishment (DRTE). In 1958, DRTE would begin construc-tion on Alouette I, a scientific satellite designed to explore the "topside" ionosphere.For a history of the Electronic Laboratory's involvement in that project, see Jones-Imhotep (2000).

21. In the case of Prince Rupert (named Hut #10) or St. John's, the stations were situatednear small armed forces bases for ease of operation. In the case of the more northerlystations, such as Churchill and Clyde, they were more isolated.

22. A similar indoctrination was proposed for Canadian grammar school meteorologicalstations in the 1860s (Zeller 1987, 166).

23. On the historical development of the ionogram and its primacy in ionosphericresearch, see Giilmor (1981).

24. In early models, a camera unit attached to one of the additional oscilloscope was trig-gered (using a foot pedal) by operators watching the second additional display. Latermodifications would eliminate the monitoring tube and attach an automatic 16 mmmotion-picture camera to the panoramic display.

25. For the role of photographic equipment in understandings of mechanical objec-tivity, see Daston and Galison (1992). On the broader implications of measurementin relation to two-dimensional images, see Latour (1990).

26. For a more detailed analysis of the problems with reading high-latitude ionogramsand the political overtones implicit in that reading, see Jones-lmhotep (forth-coming).

27. This was the railway line of Gould's radio documentary. In fact, in order to move itto its various observation points, the observatory was hitched to the train on whichWally Maclean regularly rode.

28. Note that the criteria of poor communications had little to do with cultural con-tamination and northern culture. For Hamelin, it was isolation that partially definednordicity rather than merely preserving it.

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