The First Atomic Age

Scientists, Radiations, and the American Public, 1895–1945

Matthew Lavine

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137307224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

At the close of the 19th century, strange new forms of energy arrested the American public's attention in ways that no scientific discovery ever had before. This groundbreaking cultural history tells the story of the first nuclear culture, one whose lasting effects would be seen in the familiar "atomic age" of the post-war twentieth century.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In March 2011, three nuclear reactors melted down at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant when their safety systems were overwhelmed by the effects of a tsunami. Radioactive substances were released into the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean. A number of workers and emergency responders received more exposure to radiation than the legally permissible lifetime limit. The historic poignancy of Japan once again suffering the effects of an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction was not lost on commentators. Sam Biddle, writing for the pop technology website Gizmodo, reported that the cesium-137 released by the reactors was the radiological equivalent of 168 Hiroshimas. Lest he be misunderstood, Biddle immediately acknowledged the difference between an exploding bomb and a melting reactor. Whereas most of the victims of Hiroshima had been killed by the instantaneous heat or pressure, “Fukushima’s release is slower—more insidious. A deadly leak that’s seeped into the earth, water, food, and urine of Japan.”¹ Others quickly pointed out that the danger was not limited to Japan. Beneath a photo composition of a tin can bearing the nuclear trefoil warning symbol, Fox News’s health correspondent Chris Kilham fulminated that three months after the incident, American “milk, fruits and vegetables show trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daichi power plants, and the media appears to be paying scant attention, if any attention at all.”² Kilham was correct about the radiation but mistaken about the attention it was getting. For months after the incident, the American media landscape was saturated with risk assessments of nuclear energy, claims and counterclaims about the relative dangers of radioisotopes, and what (if anything) individual Americans might do to protect themselves.

Several years earlier, the journalist Ron Rosenbaum had also reflected on the victims of Hiroshima. From the perspective of what he called the Second Nuclear Age (the first, in his reckoning, having spanned the period from the bombing of Hiroshima through the end of the Cold War), Rosenbaum mused on the special status accorded to the city’s dead. “What made the bright line between nuclear mass slaughter and non-nuclear mass slaughter so bright? Was it the radiation, in its invisible insidiousness and—more importantly—in the longevity of its deadliness?” He concluded that after 63 years of rebuilding, the city of Hiroshima might once again have become “too normal” for anyone’s good, with the physical and moral horrors that it had once represented sanitized through an overabundance of museums. “We checked in to the First Nuclear Age that day in 1945, and yes, sometimes we check out, in the sense of repressed memory, willed or unconscious denial, cultural amnesia. . . . That all-too-brief ‘holiday from history,’ some called it.”³

Notwithstanding Rosenbaum’s experiences in the modern Hiroshima, radiation’s “invisible insidiousness” has been the subject of fresh anxiety in recent years. The introduction of backscatter x-ray machines at airline security checkpoints provoked concerns about their effect on health, and because the images they produced were sometimes immodestly explicit about the shape of their subjects’ bodies.⁴ Video clips showing cell phones cooking eggs or popping popcorn have circulated on the Internet, provoking amusement or horror depending on whether or not the viewer subscribes to the belief that cell phones emit dangerous radiations. One of the videos was part of a viral advertising campaign for a manufacturer of wireless headsets.⁵ The Radiological Society of North America, a professional organization representing the medical professionals responsible for administering much of the typical American’s annual dose of radiation, cited public alarm and negative press coverage of the cumulative effects of diagnostic x-rays and CT scans when it announced in 2010 its campaign to reduce unnecessary imaging.⁶ These concerns can be put on a long list of contemporary nuclear anxieties that includes environmental radon, radioactive “dirty bombs,” and nuclear waste storage.

The collective public response to all of these radiation stimuli has been fairly predictable. We know, from repeated experience, how people in our present “Nuclear Age” tend to respond to such things. Fukushima was unexpected, but not the nature of the discourse that followed it, because it had been rehearsed after Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and dozens of lesser nuclear crises. Some version of Rosenbaum’s meditation on Hiroshima and cultural memory appears every so often, usually around the August 6 anniversary of the bombing. The historical literature is so deep, in fact, that it defies easy synthesis or even summary. Critical work exists on, among other subjects, the iconography of the mushroom cloud, the gender politics of nuclear power in the 1980s, and the national identity constructed for nuclear technologies by French engineers.⁷ Yet these studies have focused on the post-Hiroshima world, to the near exclusion of anything that happened before the Trinity test. This gap in the scholarly reckoning has implications not only for our understanding of the postwar confrontation with those energies, but also for the relationship between the laity and the scientific and medical establishments of the early twentieth century.

Rosenbaum began his chronology of the “nuclear ages” in 1945 for reasons that are clear enough, but if a nuclear age is characterized by an awareness of the destructive potential of uranium and the fear of radiation, then his chronology itself reflects a different sort of “cultural amnesia.” In fact, starting with the discovery of x-rays in 1895 and radioactivity in 1896, Americans of all sorts took part in discussion about, debate on, and displays of the energies that arose from scientists’ inquiries into the atom. Far from a “holiday,” this was a period in which the laity took an active interest in the new phenomena. Nevertheless, there are many questions about it that remain largely unanswered. How much information did the public receive about x-rays, radioactivity, gamma rays, cosmic rays, and other new emanations from the atom? Where did it come from, and what interests did those sources have in disseminating it? What events or agents had the power to shape the evolving ray-rhetoric? Why was there such a broad range of opinions and knowledge about the phenomena?

Nuclear Culture

Kirk Willis coined the term “nuclear culture” in an essay demonstrating that it was alive and well in Britain long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that “the knowledge, imagery, and artifacts of applied nuclear physics” had become a part of many Britons’ mental furnishings by virtue of the many popular books, movies, science fiction magazines, newspaper articles, demonstrations, and so forth that injected those topics into the public discourse.⁸ The concept makes intuitive sense: the “atomic age,” like the space age or the jazz age, is more than a convenient shorthand for cultural historians.⁹ These informal periodizations suggest the continuous influence of an idea at work across a broad swath of a culture. Americans’ understandings of radiation and radioactivity were complicated enough to persist beyond any momentary experiential or rhetorical contact with them. They were, in other words, one of the lenses through which Americans interpreted the broader culture of which they were a part. A patient of 1905, sitting for her first x-ray examination, would most likely have a fairly good idea of what the actual machine could do, what sorts of ailments it could diagnose, and what its images would look like. But she would also have a decade’s worth of experiences of “x-ray” as a rhetorical and metaphorical entity: within that time the word had come to connote omniscient, penetrating, exposure (psychological and physical), modern, mystical, vital, inscrutable, and scientific. Radium might be, for such a person, at various times an intellectual curiosity, a sign of the times, a symbol of wealth, a consumer novelty, and a medicine of last resort.

Notwithstanding Willis’s example, most studies of nuclear culture have dealt with the postwar period.¹⁰ Yet many of the individual anecdotes and episodes of early American nuclear culture have proven attractive to historians. Often (and appropriately) these works draw much of their narrative impact from what is now a rather striking disconnect between the nuclear fears of today and the levels of irradiation that Americans once experienced, or the casualness with which some actors allowed themselves to be exposed. It is all but impossible not to marvel at what looks like naïveté in the story of the millionaire who drank radium tonic until his jaw fell off, or the sangfroid of Elihu Thomson when he decided to sacrifice his left little finger in order to better establish the upper limit for x-ray tissue damage.

Yet, for the most part, the emphasis in each of these carefully focused studies has been on something other than the cultural impact of the new energies. For instance, in their admirably thorough article on shoe store fluoroscopes, Charles Duffin and Jacalyn Hayter explain the “rise and fall” of such machines by way of exploring the concept of scientific motherhood and the growing commercial appeal of science in the twentieth century.¹¹ Rebecca Herzig’s excellent exploration of beauty parlor x-ray depilation is really a story about the “larger problems of race, sex, and science in the interwar period.”¹² Claudia Clark’s consideration of the storied “radium girls,” whose long and public martyrdom to both the element itself and to the callous indifference of their employers was a crucial turning point in American nuclear culture, is first and foremost a work about industrial health reform.¹³

In these studies, what the general public understood about radiation at any given moment is referred to only in general terms, and varies greatly. With the exception of Spencer Weart’s Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (1988), which explores the symbolism of nuclear energies in an attempt to elucidate their collective psychological underpinnings, there is no baseline study for the prewar period against which the invariable reference to the “public sentiment” can be calibrated. Almost no work has been done that accounts for the experience of those energies across the various sites of encounters that nonscientists had with them: the clinic, the studio, the beauty parlor, the sideshow, the shoe store, and so forth. Likewise, while the popular presentation of x-rays has been considered in specific instances—most radiologist-authored histories of the technological development contain a few pages on the extraordinary attention they received in the newspapers during 1896, for instance—little consideration has been given to how that attention varies across different media, or in different stages of the rays’ public life.¹⁴

* * *

Like everyone else I am aware of who has studied the early years of radiation in the public domain, I have had a certain experience many times over. I am introduced to a person of a certain age—born, say, before 1955—who inquires after my work. Upon being told that it has to do with radiation and how people interacted with it, he or she immediately urges me to look into an extraordinary curiosity they encountered as a child: the shoe store fluoroscopy machine.¹⁵ I have also had versions of this conversation in which my new acquaintance tells me about prospecting for radioactive glass souvenirs at bomb-testing sites, or describes the x-ray machine that gathered dust in a beauty parlor they went to as a child, or relates the story of how a doctor used massive doses of x-rays to treat their eczema or other minor ailment. Of course, these sorts of encounters were in fact quite common, but before I get the chance to launch into the ten-second summary of my work, my partners in these conversations move swiftly to the moral of their stories: it’s amazing the risks we took when we didn’t know any better.

To some extent, the post hoc astonishment we presently feel at the radiation exposures of yesteryear is an understandable consequence of the fact that medical professionals, who have now all but cornered the market on the artificial irradiation of the human body, have learned to do much more with much less. The oft-repeated factoid that a transatlantic flight exposes passengers to some fraction of the radiation dose of a routine chest x-ray goes out of date fairly quickly, thanks to incremental improvements in the technology that require less and less ionizing radiation. Even the most heroic therapeutic irradiation today is positively homeopathic in comparison to the initial standard of care, which was to point the emitter at the problem and leave it on until the skin burned.

But (as I am at pains to tell my new friends), it is simply not the case that we have only recently become “knowledgeable” with respect to these energies. It only seems that way because the points of contact between radiation and our bodies and minds are far fewer and have become far more constrained. In the glare of atomic fireballs, some sense of the extent to which these energies once pervaded the experiences of nonscientist Americans has been lost. Consider, for example, John Bradley’s edited volume Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader. In its introduction, titled “Invisibility,” Bradley enumerates the iconography of the Nuclear Age: the rubble of Hiroshima, the Doomsday clock, Bert the Turtle, and Slim Pickens perched atop an atom bomb. For Bradley, though, the most compelling images are those of “everyday people,” which leads him into the story of his visit to Ottawa, Illinois, the site of a factory that produced radium-luminous paints, and which was, like several other such plants, the subject of much-publicized lawsuits in the 1930s, filed by employees who had contracted radiation-related illnesses. Standing on the site of the now-demolished factory, Bradley sees the affair as “largely forgotten, another missing chapter in our nation’s nuclear history.” His evidence for “forgetfulness” is compelling: the still-radioactive site had been used in intervening years as a farmer’s market.¹⁶ But only one of the 24 essays that follows deals with any prewar encounters with radiation—Catherine Quigg’s recounting of her interviews with surviving workers from the Ottawa plant, and that mostly as a preface to her treatment of tritium dial painters in the 1970s.¹⁷

This elision is problematic for several reasons beyond the fact that it simply fails to reflect the reality in which Americans conjured with the rhetoric and reality of fantastical new energies on a daily basis. For one, as I have already suggested, both the scientific and medical establishments looked different to Americans when viewed by the light of the x-ray tube or radium paint. Their light, as the public quickly came to understand, flickered in unpredictable ways. “The news of scientific effort is overshadowing all other news,” rhapsodized the New York Times in 1913. “More significant than a change of ministry in France or the issue of a Balkan war is the announcement a Soddy or a Ramsay may make tomorrow about the loosening of forces in groups of atoms. . . . They are the mighty men of these days. They have done much, and they promise more.”¹⁸ The occasion for this cheerful acknowledgment of scientists’ newfound social currency was the apparently successful treatment by radium of a New Jersey congressman suffering from cancer. When he died anyway a few months later, the Times put this in the headline of his obituary: “Cancer Victim Whom Radium Could Not Save Had Faith in It to the End.” Bremner’s “absolute faith” in his doctors’ modern armamentarium persisted until the moment he lapsed into his final coma, it reported, and he had spent much of his last days working on a bill that he hoped would make radium treatment more widely available.¹⁹ But his decline had led the Times to editorially denounce the state of affairs that had led Bremner to put such faith in radium in the first place. Palpably angry with the physicians who had asked journalists to exercise restraint in their treatment of radium’s healing potential, for fear that it would create false hope and delay treatment, the Times editorialist fumed that doctors “could hardly hope for a more thorough enlightening of the public on this point than it receives through the spectacular failure of the much-heralded remedy in the case of Congressman Robert Bremner.”²⁰ This particular hairpin turn in one newspaper’s pronouncements on radium did not foreshadow any sort of sea change in how radium was regarded by its readers. Diametrically opposed sentiments about radiation coexisted in the public discourse for decades after Bremner’s death. But it does illustrate how closely the prestige of science and medicine was tied to these energies.

Another problem with an overly simplified received history of early American nuclear culture is that it neglects a broad network of actors who helped shaped the public discourse. X-rays and radium were utterly commercialized, in every possible way: not only were the energies themselves bought and sold, but so was access to the discussion about them in the form of books, lectures, and news reports. The crowds of entrepreneurs behind everything from ersatz cure-all radium ointments to x-ray portraiture studios figured heavily in the reception that those energies had.

Historians of science no longer assume that science popularization is a simple process of diffusion or translation from active knowledge-makers to passive lay audiences, but the enthusiastic appropriation and reinterpretation of radiation and radioactivity by nonscientist Amer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1   Introduction
• Chapter 2   Crazes
• Chapter 3   Commodification and Democratization
• Chapter 4   Backlash
• Chapter 5   Toward the Second Atomic Age
• Notes
• Index