IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB770612333

From the Radio Shack to the Cosmos: Listening to Sputnik during the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958) (2023)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 114
Issue: 1
Pages: 123-149
Publication date: 2023
Language: English

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/723592

DOI: 10.1086/723592

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Amateur radio; ham radio Sensory history; sensory studies Radio Amateurs Radio astronomy Citizen science; community science Sputnik 20th century, late International Geophysical Year (IGY)

Whereas literature on satellites and outer space exploration has usually been dominated by vision, humankind’s initial encounter with the Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, was overwhelmingly sonic. Tracking was originally enabled by the signal continuously transmitted by its radio beacon. Embedded in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) citizen science programs, radio amateurs played a crucial role in receiving the signal and assisting professional scientists in tracking the satellite in its initial phases. Their established existence as a distinctive worldwide community of skilled operators and experimenters made hams special allies to IGY scientists and, in many respects, set them apart from other groups of amateur scientists. This essay focuses on radio amateurs’ practices and spaces of listening to Sputnik within the wider framework of the IGY. In transcending national and terrestrial boundaries, Sputnik’s signal shaped new spatialities at a variety of scales: from the macroscales of the globe and outer space to the intimate microscale of the domestic radio shack. Focusing on radio amateurs’ personal experiences and on the invisible agencies of Sputnik’s signal, the essay uses sound as a way into the sociocultural, political, and scientific importance of the IGY. More broadly, it contributes to a multisensory history (and geography) of science.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB770612333

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book McCray, W. Patrick; (2008)
Keep Watching the Skies! The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age

Article McCray, W. Patrick; (2006)
Amateur Scientists, the International Geophysical Year, and the Ambitions of Fred Whipple

Article Ismay Milford; (2024)
Working for the Wireless World: Radio Uganda Technicians and the Wo/manpower of 1970s Cosmopolitanism

Article Dunbar-Hester, Christina; (2008)
Geeks, Meta-Geeks, and Gender Trouble: Activism, Identity, and Low-Power FM Radio

Article Roman Gilmintinov; (2019)
“We can and we must”: The scientificity of trade-union history-writing in the Soviet Union in the 1920s

Book Aya H. Kimura; Abby Kinchy; (2019)
Science by the People: Participation, Power, and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge

Book Tobias Scheidegger; (2017)
"Petite Science": Außeruniversitäre Naturforschung in der Schweiz um 1900

Article Laura Miralles; Eva Garcia-Vazquez; Eduardo Dopico; (2021)
Game-based learning for engaging citizens in biopollution control

Article Dana Mahr; Sascha Dickel; (2019)
Citizen Science Beyond Invited Participation: Nineteenth Century Amateur Naturalists, Epistemic Autonomy, and Big Data Approaches Avant La Lettre

Article Martin Rohde; (2019)
Local knowledge and amateur participation. Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1892–1914

Article Karen Kovaka; (2021)
Evaluating Community Science

Article Stefano Giovanardi; Gabriele Catanzaro; Giangiacomo Gandolfi; Gianluca Masi; (2018)
E Lucevan Le Stelle: Engaging the Public of Rome in a Cultural Repossession of the Urban Sky

Thesis Jonathan Isaac Cluck; (2015)
Parasite Labs: Laboratory Protocols of Do-It-Yourself Biology

Article Delbourgo, Robert; McCulloch, Peter M.; (2013)
Graeme Reade Anthony (“Bill”) Ellis 1921--2011

Book Bruce B. Campbell; (2019)
The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany

Article Hang Zhang; Hongguang Zhang; Fuling Nie; (2024)
Government controls, non-government reactions: Private radio manufacturing and the development of amateur radio in China (1912–1949)

Article Launius, Roger D.; (2010)
An Unintended Consequence of the IGY: Eisenhower, Sputnik, and the Founding of NASA

Article Launius, Roger D.; (2007)
Sphere of influence: The sputnik crisis and the master narrative

Article Launius, Roger D.; (2007)
Sputnik and the dawn of the space age: A conversation with Roger D. Launius

Article Launius, Roger D.; (2010)
An unintended consequence of the IGY: Eisenhower, Sputnik, and the founding of NASA