Screening Science: Spatial Organization and Valuation at Jodrell Bank

Abstract

In this exchange, two aristocrats in Churchill’s second administration discussed the position of Jodrell Bank, a radio astronomy observatory run by Manchester University. The observatory’s centrepiece was the ‘expensive apparatus’: a colossal steerable radio telescope, promoted and recognized as an object of national prestige. The radio astronomy observatory, as well as being constructed as a icon of national science, was also a sociotechnical organisation, in which components were spatially organized to define and protect a central quiet productive space, access to which was selective. In this chapter I offer an analysis of the invention of Jodrell Bank’s spatial dynamics. While holding back from arguing that spatiality was a ‘determining factor’ in the workings of the observatory, I do suggest that it was deeply implicated in the site’s organization, in the constitution of the authorities of key actors, in guiding the display of the instrument, and in the onto-logical processes of radio astronomy.

Nationally we are now going into this thing [radio astronomy] in a big way. ... we shall look ridiculous politically if, this expensive apparatus having been financed by the Government, we prevent its effective use by letting the ether in its neighbourhood get hopelessly overcrowded. There is already ... a certain amount of public comment on this question.

(‘Bobbety’, Marquess of Salisbury, Lord President of the Council, to ‘Buck’, The Earl De La Warr, Post Master General, 22 December 1953, PRO)

Geographical location is a determining factor, of course, and unfortunately the astronomers could hardly have chosen a worse site than Jodrell Bank from the point of view of avoiding interference....

(‘Buck’ to ‘Bobbety’, 19 January 1954, PRO)