Communicating the nation: Northern radio, national identity and the ionospheric laboratory in Cold War Canada

This dissertation explores the re-imagination of the nation in postwar Canada through the practices, products and machines of the ionospheric laboratory and its field stations. It focuses on the laboratory's use of one scientific image—the ionogram—in attempting to establish cognitive and technological control over the Canadian North in the two decades following the Second World War. Shared by both ionospheric physicists and communications engineers, the ionogram was the prime resource in geophysical arguments linking Canada's uniquely northern status to its arguably singular disruptions in shortwave communications. In these images members of the laboratory read the unique natural and technological orders in which the nation resided. By focusing on the ionogram, the concerns over its reliable production, the practices, people and machines that surrounded it, this thesis illustrates the creation and dissolution, within the laboratory and without, of a culturally compelling portrait of nation, nature and technology. Chapter One introduces the central myths of postwar Canadian nationhood and suggests how we might begin reading the creating of the nation within the material, practical and pictorial cultures of the ionospheric laboratory. Chapter Two focuses on the creation of the laboratory itself and the adoption of the ionogram as an instrument to re-appropriate the North as a domestic object of study. Chapter Three extends the analysis from images and the standardized machines that produced them to the realm of graphic interpretation and scientific practice. It situates the development of novel interpretive practices suited to Canadian ionograms within the broader attempt to carve out a unique image of Canada, and a natural and technological order in which to place the nation. The second section of the dissertation, made up of Chapters Four and Five, explores how the work of the laboratory begins unravelling its own creation. Focusing on the move to produce ionograms from space, these chapters delve into the issues of technological reliability that surrounded the mass production of ionograms using satellites. They tie these issues and the scientific and communicative technologies they spawned into the disappearance of the ‘northern’ ionogram and of the vision of the nation it represented. A concluding chapter suggests how we might see, within this dissociation, the larger transformation of the nation itself.