English Technology and the Rise of the U.S. Air Pollution Monitoring Network, 1914 -- 1953

Peter Ore, Queens College, CUNY

A private group of wealthy scientists and engineers built the first national air monitoring network in England in the decade before World War I. The network relied on the "deposit gauge," a late-nineteenth century device that quantified air pollution by collecting dustfall in standardized dishes. In the decades that followed, the US Public Health Service, Department of Agriculture, and Bureau of Mines produced their own large, temporary monitoring infrastructures with automated, near-continuous air monitoring devices the British invented but never used. Institutional differences explain the uneven development. Nascent British and American air pollution regulatory institutions were both fundamentally investigatory, but adopted distinctive epistemic orientations. The British institutions were inductive; they sought to address the problem by promoting mass observation. British gentlemen-reformers theorized that more hygienic behaviors would follow from better information. American institutions were deductive; federal agents tackled politically sensitive air pollution episodes with forensic analyses meant to promote technical adjudication between industry and complainants. In practice, US federal bureaucrats' technical expertise crushed budding grassroots resistance to air pollution while promoting voluntary control within industry. Putting British ambient monitoring devices in American hands brought an inductive technology into contact with a deductivist social organization. The American system of air pollution monitoring formed through repeated efforts to make this disjunctural arrangement work, but not in the ways its designers intended. The translation of monitoring networks from the British to the American context highlights the importance of disjuncture --- mismatches in institutional and infrastructural transformations --- for institutional change.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 213. American Politics in Transition: Economic Nationalism, Legal Battles, and Geopolitical Challenges