Abstract
The International Geophysical Year (IGY), a “mass attack” on the problems of global Earth science in the 1950s, is remembered in the early twenty-first century mainly by scholars and the dwindling number of participant-scientists still alive.1 At the time, though, the IGY commanded the attention of the world. In 1957 and 1958, nearly 70 countries participated in the largest and most ambitious scientific collaboration the world had ever seen. Tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and support personnel established stations and even small cities everywhere from Arctic ice floes and the South Pole to Pacific islands and—via the first human forays beyond Earth’s atmosphere—to artificial satellites Sputnik and Explorer.
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Notes
Sydney Chapman, “Mass Attack on Earth’s Mysteries,” Popular Mechanics, 1955, 104: 107–112, 260, 262, 264, and 266.
Gregory A. Good, “Sydney Chapman,” American National Biography 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 716.
T. G. Cowling, “Sydney Chapman, 1888–1970, Elected F. R. S. 1919,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 17 (London: Royal Society, 1971), 54.
Sydney Chapman and P.J. Melotte, “Photographic magnitudes of 262 stars within 25’ of the North Pole., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1913, 74:40–49.
Arthur Schuster, “The Diurnal Variation of Terrestrial Magnetism, With an Appendix by H. Lamb. On the Currents Induced in a Spherical Conductor by Variation of an External Magnetic Potential,” Philosophical Transactions 180A (1889): 467–518; “On the Origin of Magnetic Storms,” Proceedings ofthe Royal Society of London 85 (1911): 44–50; and “Critical Examination of the Possible Causes of Terrestrial Magnetism,” Proceedings of the Physical Society of London 24 (1912): 121–137.
Sydney Chapman, “Charles Chree and his work on Geomagnetism,” The Proceedings of the Physical Society 53 (1941): 629–634.
Sydney Chapman, “The Lunar Atmospheric Tide at Greenwich, 1854–1917,” Quarterly Journal ofthe Royal Meteorological Society 44 (1918): 271–280.
Sydney Chapman, “An Outline of a Theory of Magnetic Storms,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 95A (1918): 61–83; “The Energy of Magnetic Storms,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 79 (1918): 70–83; “Solar and Lunar Diurnal Variations of Terrestrial Magnetism,” Philosophical Transactions 218 (1919): 1–118; and “Theories of Magnetic Storms,” Observatory 42 (1919): 196–206.
David O. Edge and Michael Mulkay, Astronomy Transformed: The Emergence of Radio Astronomy in Britain (London: Wiley, 1976);
Karl Hufbauer, Exploring the Sun: Solar Science Since Galileo (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991);
and David DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the U.S. Space Sciences after World War II (New York: Springer, 1992).
The ideas of inherently complex sciences in the movement of scientists from one research problem area to another are explored in Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003, second edition, 2008)
and in Gregory A. Good, “Magnetic World: The Historiography of an Inherently Complex Science, Geomagnetism, in the 20th Century,” Earth Sciences History 26 (2007): 281–299.
See Gregory A. Good, “From Terrestrial Magnetism to Geomagnetism: Disciplinary Transformation in the Twentieth Century,” in D.R. Oldroyd, ed., The Earth Inside and Out: Some Major Contributions to Geology in the Twentieth Century, (London: Geological Society Special Publications, 2002), 229–239.
Sydney Chapman, “Electrical Phenomena Occurring at High Levels in the Atmosphere,” Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1920): 209–222.
Sydney Chapman to Adolf Schmidt, August 7, 1929, Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Nachlass Adolf Schmidt. Chapman refers to Sydney Chapman and T.T. Whitehead, “The Influence of Electromagnetic Induction within the Earth Upon Terrestrial Magnetic Storms,” Proceedings of the International Mathematical Congress, Toronto (1928): 313–317.
Sydney Chapman, “Tides in the Air (Presidential Address, Meteorological Association, IUGG General Assembly, Washington),” Meteorological Magazine, 1939, 74:273–281. This article was also published in Procès-Verbaux des Séances de l’Association de Météorologie, II, Mémoires et Discussions (Bergen: Imprimerie John Grieg, 1940), pp. 3–40.
Sydney Chapman and V.C.A. Ferraro, “The electrical state of solar streams of corpuscles,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1929, 89:470–479; “A new theory of magnetic storms. Part I. The initial phase,” Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity, 1932, 37:147–156 and 421–429; and “A new theory of magnetic storms. Part II. The main phase,” Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity, 1933, 38:79–96.
Sydney Chapman, “On the Variations of Ozone in the Upper Atmosphere,” Beiträge zur Geophysik 24 (1929): 66–68; “On the Annual Variation of Upper Atmospheric Ozone,” Philosophical Magazine 10 (1930): 345–352; “On Ozone and Atomic Oxygen in the Upper Atmosphere,” Philosophical Magazine 10 (1930): 369–383; “The Absorption and Dissociative or Ionizing Effect of Monochromatic Radiation in an Atmosphere on a Rotating Earth,” Proceedings of the Physical Society 43 (1931): 26–45; and “The Absorption and Dissociative or Ionizing Effect of Monochromatic Radiation in an Atmosphere on a Rotating Earth. Part II. Grazing Incidence,” Proceedings of the Physical Society 43 (1931): 483–501.
Sydney Chapman, “Some Phenomena of the Upper Atmosphere (Bakerian Lecture),” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A132 (1931): 353–374. J. A. Ratcliffe gives a succinct overview of this important article in “Ionospheric Physics and Aeronomy,” in Akasofu et al., Sydney Chapman, 27–30.
Daniel J. Kevles, “‘Into Hostile Political Camps’: The Reorganization of Science in World War I,” ISIS 62 (1971): 47–60.
Union Géodésique et Gèophysique International, Deuxième Assemblée Générale, Réunie a Madrid du 1er au 8 Octobre 1924: Procès-Verbaux des Séances (Toulouse: Imprimerie et Librairie Édouard Privat, 1925), 129–131.
See Gregory A. Good, “Geophysical Travelers: The Magneticians of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,” in P.N. Wyse Jackson, ed., Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge, and Camel (London: Geological Society Special Publication 287, 2007), 395–408.
On some of the effects of the Great Depression on the funding of science, see Gregory A. Good, “The Rockefeller Foundation, the Leipzig Geophysical Institute, and National Socialism in the 1930s,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 21 (1991): 299–316.
ICSU replaced the International Research Council in 1932 as the encompassing international scientific organization. It later played a prominent role in the International Geophysical Year in the 1950s. For a detailed history of ICSU see: Frank Greenaway, Science International: A history of the International Council of Scientific Unions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Akasofu, et al., Sydney Chapman, Eighty, 1968, p. 70. Burgers wrote a philosophical monograph, Experience and Conceptual Activity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965) at the end of his career.
Chapman first told this story in print in “Mass Attack on the Earth’s Mysteries,” Popular Mechanics 104 (1955): 262. This story became canonical in Harold Spencer Jones, “The Inception and Development of the International Geophysical Year,” in Annals of the International Geophysical Year, vol. 1 (London: Pergamon Press, 1959), 383.
See also Fae L. Korsmo, “The Birth of the International Geophysical Year,” Physics Today 60 (July 2007): 40.
See James Rodger Fleming, “Advancing Polar Research and Communicating Its Wonders: Quests, Questions, and Capabilities of Weather and Climate Studies in International Polar Years,” (with Cara Seitchek), in Smithsonian at the Poles: Contributions to International Polar Year Science, I. Krupnik, M. A. Lang, and S. E. Miller, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2009), pp. 1–12. The First International Polar Year had two stations at low latitudes in the southern hemisphere, The Second International Polar year also attempted vertical observations as well and was temporally near the Byrd Antarctic expedition (although this was a separate effort).
Sydney Chapman, “The International Geophysical Year,” Nature 4373 (August 22, 1953): 327–329. Chapman gives a quick overview of how he and Berkner carried this proposal through the various international scientific bodies in this article.
Allan A. Needell, Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), especially chapters 11 and 12 “Berkner and the IGY” and “IGY Satellites and the Launch of Sputnik.”
Needell, Science, Cold War, 299. Jeffrey T. Richelson examines the intelligence context of science in the United States in The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2002). Chapter 1 discusses the immediate post-war period.
Gregory A. Good, “Ernest Harry Vestine,” in American National Biography vol. 22 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 343–344;
and David Hounshell, “The Cold War, RAND, and the Generation of Knowledge, 1946–1962,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 27 (1997): 237–267.
Spencer Jones, “Inception and Development of IGY,” 383–384. See also Harold Bullis, The Political Legacy of the International Geophysical Year, Prepared for the Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), 6–10.
See Ronald E. Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 635–666.
Doel discusses the “two-Chinas” question more directly in: Ronald E. Doel, Dieter Hoffmann, and Nikolai Krementsov, “National States and International Science: A Comparative History of International Science Congresses in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Cold War United States,” Osiris 20 second series (2005): 68–70.
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© 2010 Roger D. Launius, James Rodger Fleming, and David H. DeVorkin
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Good, G.A. (2010). Sydney Chapman: Dynamo behind the International Geophysical Year. In: Launius, R.D., Fleming, J.R., DeVorkin, D.H. (eds) Globalizing Polar Science. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114654_11
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