On page 426 of issue 937 Nicholas Valery wrote in the Comment section “ Britain's manufacturing industry today is the result of self-inflicted wounds through profit-taking at the expense of investment. Since the war, we have consistently spent only 4p in the pound on new tools and plant, against the Japanese, US and German figures of at least double this amount. This is what the Industry Bill is all about – and the National Enterprise Board ( NEB ) is our last ditch chance to rescue the remnants of our manufacturing industry. “ Expressing surprise at the opposition from Michael Heseltine to the bill championed by Tony Ben, Valery explained how it was necessary to combat years of industrial under-investment caused by lazy reliance on cheap colonial sources of materials and captive markets. “..we also import as much machinery as we export - and this is not because we cannot make these products in Britain, but because continuous under investment in this sector has strangled the industry's competitiveness ” The establishment of the National Enterprise Board was intended to emulate “...that enlightened state intervention that rebuilt the post-war wealth of the giant Zaibatsu corporation of Japan.”

50 years later, the U.K. Government is still struggling with the concept of economic policy based on state-organised investment.

Page 442 of issue 937 has an informative biography of Charles Lyell who's 100 year death anniversary was marked by John Sutton. Lyell was one of the last of the gentlemen natural philosophers who had independent means ( a Scottish estate purchased by his wealthy father) who was able to travel, research and write a book that was the “..most influential in the history of geology”. Principles of Geology was the first modern text book of geology and drew on the work of James Hutton and John Playfair to explain how the Earth had been modified over long periods of time. Lyell regarded the development of living things to part of geological evolution and was a friend of Charles Darwin. “..Lyell did not establish any new law of science, put forward any novel theory or make a make practical advances as immediately useful as those of Kelvin and Lister..he simply wrote a book; without doubt the most influential in the history of geology". Lyell was a skilled organiser of his own and other's knowledge.

The article ends with with an intriguing anecdote. “ One day in August 1836, on a steamer sailing to Arran, Mrs Lyell fell into conversation with a young man who was reading the Principles (of geology) which he had won as a prize in the chemistry class at Glasgow. She took him to meet her husband and thus Lyell met Lyon Playfair. Fifteen years later these men played key parts in the Great Exhibition; another 40 years later a scholarship funded by the profits of the Exhibition brought Rutherford to Britain and, in turn, supplied the key to the dating of crystalline rocks which is so critical to the geodynamic view of our planet first envisaged by Lyell.”

Page 454 of issue 937 reported that Margaret Thatcher was the new leader of the Conservative Party – illustrated by a photograph of her visiting CERN. “As Secretary of State for Education and Science 1970 – 74, there is no evidence that she paid any more attention to science spending, which is admittedly only 4 per cent of the DES budget ( but 10 times as high as the cost of school milk  when she took office)

 

New Scientist 20th February 1975. Vol 65 No 937.

Tucked away towards the back of issue 937 is a piece by Richard Lewis about the plans for a joint USA-USSR space project known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project ( ASTP ) which involved launching American and Russian space capsules and docking them together in Earth orbit. The plan was to launch a Soyuz capsule from Baikonur spaceport and an Apollo command/service module from Kennedy Space Center seven and a half hours later. Because Apollo and Soyuz capsules had incompatible docking systems and different cabin atmospheres, it was necessary to design an adapter module that would enable the two spacecraft to dock. Soyuz used an Oxygen and Nitrogen atmosphere at 10lb/square inch, whereas Apollo used pure oxygen at 5lb/square inch, so the module had to function as a decompression chamber as well as an docking facility.

The one-off mission was lacking any significant scientific objective.“ While the event has a certain news value as an exhibition of detente, it has become technological irrelevant because of the development of the space shuttle, the new aerospace plan, which makes both space ships obsolete.” As a largely symbolic mission intended to pave the way to future space co-operation, it was expected that the most significant moments would be televised images of American and Soviet Astronaut/cosmonauts shaking hands in space.

In 1975 the Space Shuttle was expected to be operational in 1979, but development problems delayed the launch to 1981. The Space Shuttle was eventually launched into orbit on 12 April 1981, exactly twenty yeas after Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight on Vostock 1. The choice of the Space Shuttle flight launch date was either a tribute to the historic Soviet launch, or an attempt to demonstrate superiority over the Russian space programme (not quite in the spirit of the 1975 ASTP mission).

The Apollo capsule was available because the Apollo 18,19 and 20 missions had been cancelled by 1971, partly as a public attempt at appeasing public disquiet over the cost of manned space flight and partly because the risk of disaster. However, political expediency dictated that the $243 million cost, including $45 million for the development of the single-use adapter module, justified the ASTP mission just four years later.

In February 1975, Richard Lewis was intrigued by the ages of the ASTP astronauts. “Middle aged males around the world can take heart in the fact that the average age of the five pilots (three in Apollo, two in Soyuz) is a substantial 44 years. Donald K. Slayton, one of the Apollo pilots, is 51. The “baby” of the joint mission is 40-year-old Valeri Nikolayavich Kubasov, flight engineer of the Soyuz spacecraft.”

50 years later, it is acceptable for astronauts to be even older than this, as long as they meet fitness standards. Also, it is no longer assumed that astronauts have to be male.

“Green light for Soviet space?” on page 438 of issue 937 attempted to discern the

The unused Soviet LK module

intentions of the Soviet space programme. Dr Sarah White and Professor Grigori Tokaty outlined the military background to the early Russian space programme. Commenting on the late start to their civilian rocket development, necessitated by their need to match the American strategic advantage provided by long-range bombers based in Europe, White and Tokaty also cited the deaths of important rocket scientists ( Korolyov, Isaaev, Yangel and Babakin) as a factor in the failure to match the rapidly developed Apollo project, they erroneously repeated the propaganda line that the U.S.S.R. had never been interested in the moon-race. In 1975 was not widely known that a Russian lunar module had been developed and tested, without astronauts, but the catastrophic failures of the very large N1 rockets made missions to the Moon impossible.

After Apollo 11 won the 'moon race' in 1969 the U.S.S.R. concentrated their efforts on space stations. Salyut 1 was built quickly with low quality engineering. The first crew to visit the orbiting module died when the docking mechanism damaged the hatch of the Soyuz capsule, resulting in a fatal decompression. Although unaware of the extent of the abandoned secret Soviet Moon plans, the article is sceptical about another technical development.

“ There is, however, still some confusion over what really went wrong with Soyuz-15 last August, when it failed to dock with Salyut-3 and returned to Earth after just two days in space. General Shatalov, the Soviet cosmonaut chief, claimed it was testing an automatic docking system being developed for Soyuz's “tanker” spacecraft (these will rendezvous with manned or unmanned Salyut stations to replenish their supplies and prolong their useful life in orbit). The system apparently worked to within 30 or 50 metres of the Salyut, but then each time something started to go wrong. According to Shatalov, the crew continued to use the automatic system so as to collect as much information on its malfunctioning as possible. Western space officials are dubious that this is the whole story.”

50 years later, automatic supply missions to the International Space Station are routine and the Soviet Union did pioneer this technology, but the idea, at the end of the article, that orbiting modules would need to be welded together in the future seems slightly odd. There then follows another article by Academician Boris Paton – director of the Institute of Electrical Welding attached to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev – Welding in space comes down to Earth. In the abridged version of an article that first appeared in Aviatsiya i Kosmonavtika, 1974/no 11, Boris Paton described metal welding experiments conducted in weightless conditions on aircraft that lead to the design of a Vulcan welding unit that could achieve metal cutting and welding with “electron beam, compressed ray, and fused electrode “ in space. Paton expressed the hope that the developments would eventually be useful on Earth.

BBC Nationwide 21st February 1975

 New Scientist 13th February 1975. Vol 65 No 936.

The main article for 13^th February was Promises, promises:health for sale. “Some over-the-counter remedies and health aids are a boon, but many are useless or promoted in misleading terms. Where does UK protection fail, and what's to be done?”

Dr Donald Gould's piece on the proliferation of supposedly health-improving products examined the proprietary medicines industry and its increasingly television-lead advertising campaigns. While acknowledging that non-prescription medicines such as pain relievers, indigestion tablets and some skin preparations reduce the demands on NHS GPs through responsible self medication, Gould described how many products were promoted in misleading advertisements. In 1975 there were over 50 acts of Parliament governing advertising practice including the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 and the Medicines Act 1968 as well as a Code of Standards of Advertising Practice, administered by the Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB) and British Code of Advertising Practice administered by a committee of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which worked with a staff of 12 until Shirley Williams organised an expansion funded by a surcharge on press advertising expenditure, intended partly to make the ASA better known.

“His Lordship ( ASA chairman Lord Drumalybn) acknowledges that at the moment the man in the street is ignorant of the machinery designed for his protection, but, astonishingly, it appears that the brand managers – the advertisers themselves – are hardly better informed. In 1972 the British Market Research Bureau asked a number of brand managers whether the advertising industry had a code to regulate the content of advertising. A large majority said “Yes”, but when asked who controlled press advertising 32 per cent were straight “don't knows”, and the rest suggested various possibilities from the Press Council to the Newspaper Publishers Association , with only 16 per cent correctly identified either the CAP committee or ASA as the body involved. A survey is planned to establish the extent of the ignorance that has to be dispelled.”

Despite the proliferation of regulation of proprietary medicine advertising, including the pre-broadcast vetting of television commercial, the “ad men” either found ingenious ways round the definitions of wrong doing, or simply ignored the rules. According to Gould, the Phyllosan (“fortifies the over forties”) simply ignored the rule “that a full, varied and properly prepared diet needs to be supplemented by vitamin or mineral products.”

The Phillips Tonic Yeast advertisements cunningly stated that “if you're lacking these essential vitamins, Phillips Tonic Yeast could give you the extra vitality to cope with life” without mentioning that you would have to be so ill as to need hospitalisation or living on a near starvation diet of maize to need the product.

Beecham's Pills avoided the rule that no advert should state that laxative medicine needed to be taken on a regular basis by saying “Take Beecham's Pills at bedtime.” leaving the audience to jump to the conclusion that they were needed every night.

Gould wrote that that Ironplan contravened the rule the advertisements should not cause anxiety resulting from the belief that a viewer might suffer from a disease without the consumption of a product or suggest that its consumption might lead an individual to not seek medical attention for a disease. (“The kind of iron therapy doctors prescribe most” “Start a course of Ironplan before you get too low.”)

Fear and emotional blackmail seem to have been behind some advertisements. There was no evidence that vitamin E can be absorbed through the skin, but that did not stop advertisers from stating that you might delay the onset of age related wrinkles by spreading their cream on your face. Senatogen Junior Vitamins ran the shameless copy “You can't follow your child to school. We can.”, implying that it would be negligent to allow your child to face the dangers of infection at school by simply providing good food.

50 years later the internet is awash with 'influencers' pedaling any amount of unnecessary health and beauty products as well as wellness programmes that suggest support for mental health. A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Today fibre-optic cables bring the internet and television to millions of homes but in 1975 the technology was new. Page 384 of issue 936 has a report of a new cable connector device than was designed for engineers working on sites such as tunnels and voids. The device, developed at the Canadian Bell Research centre comprised two sections, a lower piece with a V shaped channel and an upper locking shell with wires which press the two cut ends of fibre optic cable together. No patent number was given and the initial report is attributed to the first 1975 issue of Electronic Letters. 50 years later optical devices abound and optical computers are an emerging technology.

Page 383 CCD cameras arrive on the scene reports on the first video cameras using charge couple devices (CCDs) to be commercially available later in 1975. Built by RCA the new cameras had an array of 160 000 elements and a resolution comparable to 2/3 inch vidicon tube. The units were intended for surveillance/monitoring and were short of contemporaneous broadcast standards. In 1975 the technology to use digital signals did not exist, and the output of the new CCD cameras would have been immediately converted to an analogue video signal. “The cheapest of the CCD elements is priced at $1500 and the cheapest CCD cameras are $3000. Nevertheless RCA says that the volume of sales should build up quickly, so the CCD elements will be selling for about $30 in the 1980s.”

Unlike today's New Scientist, issue 936 has 16 pages of classified advertisements and a double page advertisement for the new Hewlett-Packard HP-55 pocket calculator. Retailing at £226-80 ( £1723 at Dec 2024 prices) the calculator boasted 86 pre-programmed functions, 20 memories and 49 program steps. 

Vela Satellites were placed in high orbits to avoid the Van Allen radiation belt

New Scientist 6th February 1975 (continued)

 Pages 313 to 315 of issue 935 features Cosmic gamma-ray bursts by Dr Andrew Fabian and Dr James Pringle. “ Transient phenomena are becoming a natural aspect of high-energy astrophysics. In recent months short bursts of gamma rays have been observed from a number of space platforms, leaving theorists perplexed- although not altogether tongue-tied – as to their origin”

In 1975 mysterious bursts of gamma rays lasting about ten seconds emanating from space were mysterious as no known astronomical objects were known to be located at their points of origin. The open question was made more intriguing by the accidental nature of their discovery. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty forbade the atmospheric (surface) testing of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and five Vela satellites were placed in Earth orbit to detect gamma rays from any clandestine explosions. As soon as the satellites registered gamma rays the events would have been taken very seriously.

Although the satellites were launched one week after the implementation of the treaty it was ten years before the detection of the Gamma ray bursts was revealed. “R.W. Klebesadel, I.B. Strong and R.A. Olson of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory announced the discovery of the first 16 cosmic gamma-ray bursts in 1973. Since then another eight or so have been reported, as well as other sightings of several bursts by detectors on OGO-3, IMP-6, OSO-7 and the Apollo16. This last system, in the Apollo 16 command module, was designed for determining lunar surface composition by by fluorescence techniques.”

By triangulating from the arrival times of the gamma ray bursts at different satellites, it was initially determined that they emanated from beyond the solar system and the burst that was detected by satellites as well as the Apollo 16 astronauts orbiting the moon was traced to region away from the plane of the Milky Way and close to the Small Magellanic Cloud. From the perspective of 1975, the mystery surrounding gamma ray bursts was compounded by the lack of data. The success of triangulation from the arrival times of bursts at the positions of different satellites was limited by timing errors, which resulted in the search zones 15 degrees wide. Theories ranged from comets plunging into neutron starts, through star quakes and super flares, to nuclear holocausts resulting from global warfare on alien planets.

 

New Scientist 6th February 1975. Vol 65 No 935.

6^th February 1975 was something of a watershed moment in Earth Science and its relationship to the public. Not one but two articles in New Scientist that week featured James Lovelock. The first, co-authored by Lovelock with Dr Sidney Epton, outlined the  Gaia hypothesis, and the second written by Martin Sherwood was a profile of “Jim Lovelock” and his wider scientific and technological achievements.

The Quest for Gaia has the useful sub heading “Do the Earth's living matter, air, oceans and land surface form part of a giant system which could be seen as a single organism? Could man's activities reduce such a system's options so that it is no longer able to exert sufficient control to stay stable?”

In 1975 It had been long believed that distinct ecologies had populations of species that were adapted to the geological and climatic conditions of their environment but James Lovelock suggested that this was a two way process, with living organisms collectivily combining micro-forces to effectively engineer the atmosphere and the oceans as well as maintaining them within ranges of temperature and salinity that are favourable to life. The article is careful to refer to the Gaia concept as a hypothesis and not a theory, as no planetary scale experiments are possible, although it could be argued that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that we worry about now are a kind of accidental test with unpredictable results.

The Gaia hypothesis remains controversial today. Opinion ranges from enthusiastic comparison with the Copernican revolution in astronomy to dismissal of Gaia as new age mysticism, but for the majority of scientists in the middle James Lovelock's work has given a tremendous impetus to Earth systems science.

Lovelock was clear about the complexity of earth systems and the challenge of understanding their exact functioning. "Gaia is still a hypothesis. The facts and speculations in this article and others that we have assembles corroborate but do not prove her existence but, like all useful theories right or wrong, Gaia suggests new questions which may throw light on old ones.” Lovelock then went on to describe how the oxygen produced by photosynthesis, early in Earth's history, would have been toxic to the majority of living organisms. The availability of oxygen subsequently made possible the evolution of more complex life. From the perspective of 1975, the capacity of humans to create a pollution problem as damaging as the 'great oxidation event' seemed quite trivial by comparison, but Lovelock had a warning for the future. “If one showed a control engineer a graph of the Earth's mean temperature against time over the past million years, he would no doubt remark that it represented the behaviour of a system in which serious instabilities could develop but which had never gone out of control. One of the laws of system control is that if a system is to maintain stability it must possess adequate variety of response, that is, have at least as many ways of countering outside disturbances as there are outside disturbances to act on it.”

In one eloquent paragraph James Lovelock explained that the need to maintain biodiversity was not to meet an aesthetic ideal. The survival of humans depends on the continued functioning of Earth systems which have complexities that we may not understand.

Pages 313 to 315 of issue 935 features Cosmic gamma-ray bursts by Dr Andrew Fabian and Dr James Pringle. “ Transient phenomena are becoming a natural aspect of high-energy astrophysics. In recent months short bursts of gamma rays have been observed from a number of space platforms, leaving theorists perplexed- although not altogether tongue-tied – as to their origin”

In 1975 mysterious bursts of gamma rays lasting about ten seconds emanating from space were mysterious as no known astronomical objects were known to be located at their points of origin. The open question was made more intriguing by the accidental nature of their discovery. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty forbade the atmospheric (surface) testing of Nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and five Vela satellites were placed in Earth orbit to detect gamma rays from any clandestine explosions. As soon as the satellites registered gamma rays the events would have been taken very seriously.

Although the satellites were launched one week after the implementation of the treaty it was ten years before the detection of the Gamma ray bursts was revealed. “R.W. Klebesadel, I.B. Strong and R.A. Olson of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory announced the discovery of the first 16 cosmic gamma-ray bursts in 1973. Since then another eight or so have been reported, as well as other sightings of several bursts by detectors on OGO-3, IMP-6, OSO-7 and the Apollo16. This last system, in the Apollo 16 command module, was designed for determining lunar surface composition by by fluorescence techniques.”

By triangulating from the different arrival times of the gamma ray bursts at different satellites, it was initially determined that they emanated from beyond the solar system and the burst that was detected by satellites as well as the Apollo 16 astronauts orbiting the moon was traced to region away from the plane of the Milky Way and close to the Small Magellanic Cloud. From the perspective of 1975, the mystery surrounding gamma ray bursts was compounded by the lack of data. The success of triangulation from the arrival times of bursts at the positions of different satellites was limited by timing errors, which resulted in the search zones 15 degrees wide. Theories ranged from comets plunging into neutron starts, through star quakes and super flares, to nuclear holocausts resulting from global warfare on alien planets.

 

New Scientist 30th January 1975. Vol 65 No 934.

The Monitor section of issues 934 has two items, “The big hole that Skylab’s rocket made” and Do motor vehicles wind up the atmosphere?” that would today be regarded as belonging in Anthropocene studies. Quoting Science (vol167, p343) monitor described how Michael Mendillo of Boston University, Gerald Hawkins of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and John Klobuchar of the Airforce Cambridge Laboratories in Bedford Mass had detected a reduction in the electron content of the Ionosphere after the hydrogen-burning third stage of the Saturn 5 rocket, that launched the Skylab space station, dumped over one ton of water vapour per second into the F layer. The monitoring of radio signals from the ATS 3 satellite in geosynchronous orbit revealed a 1000km “hole” that stretched from Labrador to Illinois that lasted for 90 minutes before beginning to recover. The three workers suggested that the effect had not been noticed in the previous 12 Saturn 5 launches as the rockets had delivered their payloads into lower (parking) orbits.

Monitor also reported a paper from Nature vol 253, p254 that theorised an observed increase in the number of tornados in the USA in the previous 40 years could be caused by the energy imparted to the air between opposing streams of traffic on highways. The paper was written by John Isaacs, James Stork, David Goldstein and Gerald Wick.

Noting that air located between vehicles traveling in opposite directions would be rotated in an anticlockwise direction, the four scientists wondered if this kinetic energy could trigger larger vortices in conditions already favourable to tornado formation. Their mathematical model suggested that Americas two million cars and 600,000 trucks would produce more vorticity than the Earth’s rotation over one week of driving. Intriguingly, the statistics available to them indicated that there was a 14% reduction in the number of tornadoes on Saturdays, when the daily commutes to work were over and many trucks did not operate.

With the benefit of hindsight, the increased number of tornadoes might be explained by early onset climate change, combined with natural variability.

The Monitor section of issues 934 has two items, “The big hole that Skylab’s rocket made” and Do motor vehicles wind up the atmosphere?” that would today be regarded as belonging in Anthropocene studies. Quoting Science (vol167, p343) monitor described how Michael Mendillo of Boston University, Gerald Hawkins of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and John Klobuchar of the Airforce Cambridge Laboratories in Bedford Mass. had detected a reduction in the electron content of the Ionosphere after the hydrogen-burning third stage of the Saturn 5 rocket, that launched the Skylab skylab space station, dumped over one ton of water vapour per second into the F layer. The monitoring of radio signals from the ATS 3 satellite in geosynchronous orbit revealed a 1000km “hole” that stretched from Labrador to Illinois that lasted for 90 minutes before beginning to recover. The three workers suggested that the effect had not been noticed in the previous 12 Saturn 5 launches as the rockets had delivered their payloads into lower (parking) orbits.

Monitor also reported a paper from Nature vol 253, p254 that theorised an observed increase in the number of tornados in the USA in the previous 40 years could be caused by the energy imparted to the air between opposing streams of traffic on highways. The paper was written by John Isaacs, James Stork, David Goldstein and Gerald Wick.

Noting that air located between vehicles traveling in opposite directions would be rotated in an anticlockwise direction, the four scientists wondered if this kinetic energy could trigger larger vortices in conditions already favourable to tornado formation. Their mathematical model suggested that Americas two million cars and 600,000 trucks would produce more vorticity than the Earth’s rotation over one week of driving. Intriguingly, the statistics available to them indicated that there was a 14% reduction in the number of tornadoes on Saturdays, when the daily commutes to work were over and many trucks did not operate.

With the benefit of hindsight, the increased number of tornadoes might be explained by early onset climate change, combined with natural variability.

A third item in Monitor is Test driving the new Anglo-Australian Telescope reported on a talk by Dr Paul Murdin of the Royal Greenwich Observatory given at the Junior Astronomical Society. Dr Murdin was enthusiastic about the new telescope and showed a photograph of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae that he had recently taken. 50 years ago, the telescope incorporated the latest computerised controls, but also featured an observers cage in which an astronomer could view objects through an eyepiece.

“ But the system is not without its weak spots. One was discovered while Murdin was riding the prime focus cage, high above the floor. A false fire alarm went off in an adjoining building, causing the air conditioning to shut down automatically. This resulted in the hydraulic systems shutting down, so both the telescope and the “cherry picker”, designed for such contingencies to get the observer out of difficulties, were immobilised. Murdin was stuck in the telescope until the power could be restored. As a result, until the systems are improved, a rope ladder is to be carried in the prime focus cage, so that in event of a fire the observer will be able to shin to safety, a starry-eyed Errol Flynn.”

 

Feedback (page 270) 0f issue 934 has an item covering a story that would run for many years. Baby milk men are still tuned in reports on the controversial use of radio to advertise the products of Nestle and Cow and Gate in African countries were semi-literate families were less likely to appreciate the risks of using formula baby milk where water supply hygiene was inadequate. Feedback noted that under pressure from health authorities the manufacturers had reduced advertising in Nigeria, only to increase it in Sierra Leone, where 30 second baby milk advertisements were being broadcast twenty times a day in English, two vernaculars and Krio. According to the senior paediatrician in Sierra Leone, Dr D.J.O. Robbin-Coker, the widespread introduction of milk powders was a major factor in the increase in infant malnutrition and gastroenteritis. . There was a consumer focused boycott of Nestle products in subsequent years.

 

New Scientist 16th January 1975. Vol 65 No 932

Some issues of New Scientist contain examples of the prevailing zeitgeist that are more redolent than others. Issue 932 contains two interesting insights into science and technology in the U.K. Dr Martin Sherwood’s article Do Graduates need careers? attempts an authoritative overview of the complicated pattern of population growth, university undergraduate growth and economic problems. Set against a background of economic crisis of energy price rises, looming 25% inflation and the culture shock of mass unemployment, the article has tacit assumptions that are different from today.

“With economic darkness heralded daily in the British press, and reinforced by the sound of household-name companies crashing around us, prospects for this year’s science and engineering graduates might seem grim” It should be made clear that what Sherwood meant by “household-names companies” is engineering and manufacturing companies and not retail chains such as Woolworths or British Home Stores. 50 years of progressive de-industrialisation have created a completely different mindset in British culture.

Sherwoods’s discussion of the value of “a year between school and university” is as meaningful today as it was in 1975, but the assumption that a school leaver might experience work related to an intended science or engineering degree by simply stepping into the nearest technology-based company now seems quaint.

Tokamak at the crossroads by Michael Kenward reports on the planning stages of the Joint European Torus (JET) thermonuclear energy project. It is a perennial joke that the generation of electricity by controlled thermonuclear energy is always twenty years in the future and the JET tokamak, although never intended to produce electrical power, has made valuable contributions to the design of later machines over its 40 year operating life. Dr Paul Rebut lead a team of 40 people at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy laboratory at Culham in Cambridgeshire who took 18 months to design the machine. The plan to confine the high temperature plasma to a D-shaped region within a “tight” torus was considered to be advanced at the time. Today the JET project at Culham is being decommissioned, but over the last 50 years it has contributed design ideas to the new ITER project as well as helping to give personal hands-on experience with operating a tokamak. The optimism evident in this New Scientist story 50 years ago is similar to the sense of anticipation of the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) planned for Nottinghamshire in the next ten years.

 

The Monitor section pf issue 932 reported the imminent launch of the second ERTS satellite. When the programme of Earth Resources Technology Satellites (ERTS) started 50 years ago it was uncertain as to how much information to support agriculture, hydrology and land use planning could be gained from automatic satellites. “Judging from reports to date, Earth resources space technology is very much in its infancy, at the stage where people are still finding out what you can see from space by electronic imaging (space photographs have substantially better resolution but require manned spacecraft for their realisation).”

ERTS 2 used a pioneering multispectral scanner which used a moving mirror to sweep a path 920 kilometres wide as it orbited every 103 minutes. The satellite also had three vidicon cameras(red, green and blue), developed from the imaging systems used on earlier mariner probes to Mars.

The tentative first steps with the ERTS satellites have evolved into a whole fleet of Landsat surveillance platforms which now monitor the Earth day and night. In the last 50 years the emphasis has shifted from supporting agriculture, oil exploration and mining towards environmental protection and measuring the effects of climate change.

New Scientist 9th January 1975. Vol 65 No 931

Before the internet made ‘doom-scrolling’ a thing, the New Scientist issue 931 (9^th January 1975) made that possible in print. Revelations about nerve gas and nuclear proliferation cast a shadow over the otherwise optimistic publication.  Writing in the comment section, Julian Perry Robinson reported that the recent publication of the patent for VX nerve agent agent described the process that can be used to synthesise the weapon. Surprisingly, the chemical formula had already been published by ICI, Beyer and the Swedish chemical defense laboratories 17 years previously. “VX is the most powerful of the West’s nerve gases, a milligram or so constituting a lethal dose. The two new patents give simple step by step recipes for making it in standard laboratory apparatus using commercial chemicals. No descriptions anything like as detailed have ever been published for VX.”

Robinson expressed surprise that the chemical formula for VX was ever declassified and patented. Anyone in the world can see the documentation of patents, unless they are made secret. He concluded by saying that the only good thing that would come from the revelations was that they might give impetus to renewed negotiations around an international treaty. 50 years ago, it was not a consideration that what we now call (euphemistically) ‘non-state bad actors’ would be interested in VX. It was an unspoken assumption in 1975 that the world order was defined by the relationships between nation states that could negotiate treaties. Terrorists were usually rebellious groups who were against their own government and were not trans- national as they are today. Robinson ends with “It is to be hoped that ratification of the Geneva protocol by the United States later this month will remove the final obstacle to serious negotiations”.

In an addition to the comment piece, the editor Bernard Dixon reported that the United States was looking for a chemical company to manufacture “ton quantities” of non-toxic chemicals which could be combined in artillery shells (after they were fired) to produce the next-generation binary nerve agents. Fortunately, the large-scale deployment of strategic quantities of nerve agents has not occurred.

 Page 91 of issue 931 a headline asks, “Will Canadian reactor sales lead to more nuclear bombs?” With the benefit of hindsight we can say, yes. Thomas Land reported that, under the Pierre Trudeau Pierre Trudeau administration Canada had decided that nuclear technology would be sold to countries that had not signed the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty so long as there were safeguards “in the spirit” of the treaty. 50 years later India has developed a significant nuclear weapons stockpile using plutonium ultimately derived from a Canadian reactor. In response Pakistan has also developed nuclear weapons. Although Canada is a non-nuclear weapons state, it has created a situation where a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could result in the “exchange” of 200 warheads. Let us hope that never happens. The motivation was the prospect of $3000 million in exports.

An altogether more optimistic article by Dr R.S. Bhathak titled” Science museums can be Fun” describes how new science museums such as the Evoluon in Eindhoven were move away from the idea of displaying historical objects to a new concept of education by interaction. In a pre-internet age, a museum with an ever changing programme of interactive exhibits would be a useful addition to the slowly changing school curriculum with decades-old textbooks.

Page 66 of issue 931 has a useful reminder that generation of electricity by nuclear power does use fossil fuel because the mining of uranium uses machinery and vehicles powered by fossil fuels.  The article energy analysis of nuclear power has an interesting comparison of a coal fired station and a nuclear-powered station. Over their lifetime the coal powered unit would consume 2200 million tons of coal, versus 400 million tons equivalent for a nuclear station, “assuming that ore containing 3 per cent uranium provided the nuclear fuel.” In today’s terms, nuclear energy is not zero carbon.

Issue 931 has a two-page advertisement by the Digital Equipment Co Ltd proudly announcing that “Graphics computing is no longer a rich man’s tool”. For a mere £8,240 (£62,612 at Nov 2024 prices) you could buy a minicomputer that does graphs on a screen (as opposed to powering a paper plotter). You could buy approximately 225 medium priced laptop computers for the same cost now.

If the cost of computing has fallen enormously in the last 50 years, some things never seem to change. Page 86 of issue 031 has EEC notebook.in which Tony Benn is lambasted for his anti common-market views. “…it was inevitable that Benn, Wigg and Co would make a last desperate attempt to shore up the structure with the finest xenophobic, reactionary-provoking, gut-reacting subject in the whole anti-EEC dogma – the issue of “sovereignty” of the British Parliament…..the EEC Commission is nothing more than a supranational civil service. Though it has the capability to instigate new legislation, when the crunch comes, legislative decisions are made by the Council..it cannot pass any measure if any single country among the Nine  objects.”

If a high-profile person, with a ability to argue with this level of conviction, had been in charge of the remain campaign in the 2016 referendum, Britain might still be a member of the E.U.

The Monitor section of issue 931 has two closely related items about the search for a vaccine against cancer. Featuring the work of R. Laufs and H. Steinke in Germany and Robert Gallagher, Robert Gallo and Zaki Salahuddin in America the page concludes “Even if it turns out that leukaemia and perhaps other cancers are the result of infection with a contagious agent, epidemiological evidence indicates that these diseases are not contagious in the usual sense, otherwise cancer would be much more common than it is.” 50 years later the search for a cancer vaccine continues.

Sometimes it feels that history, although not moving in circles, moves forwards in time in a spiral, with the rotation along its axis revisiting things that are similar to the past. An opinion piece on page 87 of issue 931 by Peter Laurie posits that faith in the tendency of developments in information technology to improve society is naïve. Starting his historical overview of information management by government with the role of the Church of England during the time of William of Orange, he described how circular letters to Bishops would set of what the government wanted to be promoted in Sunday sermons.  

When the power of the church was eclipsed by newspapers and broadcasting, the control of the flow of information became influenced by a complicated ecology of diverse financial interests and government. “It is not by accident that the Post Office physically handles every broadcast in Britain between studio and transmitter: the government has not forgotten the General Strike, which it won largely by having control of broadcasting while the TUC had only newspapers.”

Differentiating between direct censorship and self-censorship by the internal culture of newspapers, Laurie took a swipe at the National Union of Journalists who he blamed for restricting contributions to print media by non-NUJ members and by implication denying the public a range of opinion. Heaping Government, unions, newspaper owners and broadcasters into one rather disagreeable heap does sound rather like modern conspiracy theorists.

Laurie concluded with: “Consideration of all this makes one wonder what will become of the technologically possible dreams of “free” neighbourhood television, or of telephone clubs using electronic exchanges, which will tend to bypass this elaborate and at times top heavy machinery of control.”

50 years later, with the internet dominated by tech billionaires, algorithms, disinformation and ‘troll farms’ the answer is rather complicated.

New Scientist 2nd January 1975. Vol 65 No 930.

The cover price of 20p (£1-52 after 50 years of inflation) is not the only difference between 1975 and today. The majority of articles in the publication are not written by journalists, but by experts working for institutions or within industry. Writers include a professor of biochemistry at McMaster University, the director of hardware and quality assurance at International Computers Ltd, a research fellow at Middlesex University, a research assistant at at UCL and a researcher at Exeter University.  A profile of the Soviet environmentalist Alexander Vinogradov was written by Boris Belitzky, a science journalist at Radio Moscow.

While the access to writers who were directly involved in research might be advantageous for a publication, the possibility of an article suffering from a partial view would have had to have been countered by the ten-strong editorial team. Another interesting difference between today and fifty years ago is that now every hospital trust and university has a communications department which would be involved in the contacts between staff and editors. Half a century ago hospitals and universities were much more under the control of doctors and academics.

The Comment section of issue 930 is a half-page piece by the editor Bernard Dixon about the energy crisis and economic turmoil caused by inflation and scarcities. Before global warming was identified as a threat, the drastic oil price increases of 1973 as well as the perceived future shortages of oil and pollution by toxic combustion products were the main reasons to to seek energy efficiency. In his editorial Dixon announced "New Scientist will be holding a conference in London to examine the technical and political possibilities for greater self-sufficiency for Britain, in food, energy and raw materials". Half a century later new houses are being built in the U.K. without solar panels and with heat insulation standards that are the lowest in Europe. Many solar panels are imported from China.

Today we are concerned by the addition of Carbon Dioxide to the atmosphere and the resulting global warming, but the energy crisis of the 1970s was seen mostly in terms of the need to extend the post-war boom in industrial production. The lack of awareness of climate change is illustrated by two items in issue 930.

Firstly a job advertisement from the Open University Energy Research Group for a job vacancy for a research officer (£2400 -£2900 pa) to assist with research into "a selection of novel sources of liquid fuels such as oil shales, liquid hydrogen and oil from coal."

Secondly, the 'patents review' section has a review of German proposal (BP 1 371 269) to create drinking water in the Sahara and in Arabia by using natural gas. "The gas escaping from oil wells is frequently burnt off because it is uneconomical to collect, store and transport." The German patent states that water created by burning the hydrogen in in natural gas could be collected and purified into drinking water. Almost as an afterthought the item mentions that the energy from burning the gas could be used for local electricity generation.

New Scientist carried advertisements in the 1970s. Just inside the cover is a full page advertisement for Hoechst inflatable buildings, to be used mostly as warehousing. The value of the pound was falling at a disturbing rate. Inflation was 19% in 1974 and would reach an all time peak of 25% in 1975.  Using the slogan "how we beat inflation by inflation" the copy offers inflatable air halls as a quick and easy way to avoid the increasing cost of building materials. Apparently the price of the electricity needed to keep these structures inflated was not a problem in 1975. The fabric used was Hoechst's brand Trevira. "PVC coated fabrics made from this are waterproof and rotproof, but most important, airproof. So all you have to do is inflate, and there's your building."

Ironically, the 'technology review' section has an item about the challenge of setting safe exposure levels to vinyl chloride, used in the manufacture of PVC. the new standard in the U.K. was to be 50 parts per million compared with the U.S. standard of 1 part per million. Exposure to vinyl chloride gas has been associated with liver cancer.

In a strange echo of more recent times, an item about the use of roof beams made from high alumina cement (HAC) in 1170 schools raised the issues of how testing and remedial action was to be paid for.  At the time of printing 433 schools had not been tested and 241 were affected or closed. "The Inner London Education Authority is in a fortunate position because it has the back-up of the Greater London Council's (GLC) Scientific Branch which has the necessary equipment to test for conversion in samples of beams. Other local authorities have to contract out the testing to independent consultants. At £20/test ( £151-97 at 2024 prices ) the cost of this work can be considerable." The perceived need to save taxpayers money by building low quality school buildings is more than reminiscent of today's reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAC) fiasco. 

The GLC was abolished in 1986, but even if it still existed it is difficult to imagine that, after 45 years of privatisation, a local authority would be allowed to have their own Scientific Branch. A pervading assumption behind most of the output of New Scientist in the 1970s was that government had a responsibility to oversea many aspects of science and technology - that governments should actually govern by providing itself with the resources needed to make peoples lives better. Inside the back cover of issue 930 is a full page advertisment for the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC) which invested by direct funding by the taxpayer in new inventions and designs that would contribute to the British economy. After mergers with other departments the organisation was privatised in 1995. Today countries such as India still have a commitment to direct government involvement in the development of technology.

The letters page of New Scientist is interesting. In issue 930 J.H. Burton from Cheshire wrote in response to John Tinker's article "The end of the English landscape". The issue of farming, conservation and landscape is a huge subject that cannot be covered here, but I admire Mr Burton's admonishment of Jon Tinker's use of extrapolation from statistics of current trends. "To illustrate the dangers of extrapolation it is only necessary to consider that, according to figures published by the Federal Populations Commission, by the year 2020 all the population of the U.S. will live in California, own power boats and suffer from venereal disease."

Point taken.

Scans

 

"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance

or of any other past culture. Each age find its own technique."                                                                                                                                                      Jackson Pollock        

Link to SCANS book on blurb.     

Art has seen as much experimentation in the last 150 years as the previous 1500 years. This accelerated rate of change occurred in a period of increased scientific knowledge of nature and parallel social developments. The style of figurative realism that emerged in the Renaissance was challenged by the rebellious era of modern art that started at the Salon des Refusés exhibition in Paris in 1863. During the 20th century three methods of image making: photograms, holography and flat-bed scanners, provide insights into the values of modern art. Although recording images without a camera lens, they all share a similarity to photography. As well as recording objects, they subtly transform their appearance, in different ways that are unique to each method.

Photogram by Man Ray

published in Painting 

Photography Film 

(page 77)

Photograms are cameraless photographs created by placing objects directly onto a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic paper, and exposing the composition to light. Unless reversed by copying, photograms are negatives where exposure to light creates darkness. Because a camera lens is not used, images of objects placed on the film or photographic paper are recorded same size. Photograms are as uncanny as images on a pre-digital radar scope, with potentially recognisable white silhouettes emerging from a dark ground. Photograms are the opposite of picturesque. The brooding darkness of their backgrounds suggests a form of 'technological sublime' (1) that is even more explicit in x-ray pictures.

​Photograms have an ambiguous relationship to the cannon of 'serious' photography as they were often used as an introductory exercise for those learning chemistry-based photography. They were the photographic equivalent of learning scales on a piano, with visible tones instead of musical notes, but they also became associated with modern art. Whereas cameras have been designed to imitate the type of perspective associated with Renaissance painting, the distinctive effects made by photograms aligned with the modernist principle of being "truthful to materials" and the older adage "form follows function".

Anyone who has seen an Anglepoise lamp has experienced these ideas made solid. The car designer George Carwardine invented the iconic desk lamp after researching car suspension systems, creating a functional task lamp that was also attractive in the terms of the Bauhaus-inspired ‘machine aesthetic'. Just as the Anglepoise lamp has a stark beauty arising from the expression of mechanical levers and springs, so a photogram is a rather severe image created by the ability of a photographic emulsion to record the beguiling effects of light passing through translucent objects and around the edges of solids but without the more traditionally pleasing effects of chiaroscuro associated with photographs made with a lens. Objects registered as white shadows are uncanny.

​László Moholy-Nagy included photograms made by himself, and the American photographer Man Ray, in his influential book Painting Photography Film published in 1925 (2) in which he postulated an aesthetic and philosophical revolution called "The New Vision" that would unleash the creative potential of society. He described photograms as "light composition, in which light must be sovereignly handled as a new creative means, like colour in paintings and sound in music." Light could create "a new kinetic space-time rendering". (3) Moholy-Nagy derided the "Ruskin-Morris circle" who he accused of ignoring the need to harness machine production to meet the 'biological' needs of society. The New Vision was to be based on technology.

Solar eclipse on 29th May 1919 

photographed by Arthur Eddington. 

The observed deflection of 

starlight by gravity confirmed 

Einstein's theory of relativity 

and was reported enthusiastically 

worldwide.

Moholy-Nagy speculated that novel optical systems such as prismatic lenses and cameras able to view objects from multiple positions could surpass cubist painting, but new forms of sculpture would acknowledge Einstein's theory of relativity. Whereas the pictures of Futurism showed a superimposition of the object in a sequence of linear movement and Cubism rendered the object as if it were rotated in space, Moholy-Nagy wanted to 'paint' with "flowing, oscillating, prismatic light, in lieu of pigments" to "allow us a better approach to the new conception of space-time." (4) He made light/kinetic sculptures for the 1936 film Things to Come, although they were eventually not included in the finished production.

​A complete 'phase transition' of society suggested by the concept of The New Vision (5) never happened, but in 1949 a photographic process capable of exploring Moholy-Nagy's fascination with space/time was proposed. The physicist and engineer Dennis Gabor calculated that combining light reflected from an object with light sent directly to a photographic emulsion would create interference patterns from which a fully three-dimensional image, a hologram, could be reconstructed.

Older methods of stereoscopic photography

Moholy-Nagy would have been fascinated

by holography. In The New Vision - 

Abstract of an Artist he wrote about 

neoplasticism and how constructivist artists 

had sprayed very thin, iridescent layers of

paint on polished surfaces, metals and

synthetic materials "..to which the reflecting

layer underneath gives an ethereal fluctuating

appearance..,.The surface becomes a part of

the atmosphere, of the atmospheric background;

it sucks up light phenomena produced outside

itself...." (Page 39) His description sounds rather

like the experience of viewing a hologram.

create the impression of depth but lack a sense of the roundness of objects. Confusingly, both stereoscopy and holography are often referred to as "3D" pictures. For holography to work it is necessary to use light of a single wavelength which was not fully available until the invention of the laser.​ After the first laser-based hologram was made in 1964 the medium's status as an art form was questioned. The invention of photography between 1825 and 1850 was followed by a similar period of speculation as to whether it could be considered art. For critics in the 20th century the issue of photography was resolved by modernism which valued characteristics that are unique to specific media. For painting, the qualities of flatness and colour were regarded as essential modernist qualities. Paradoxically, the mechanical aspects of photography (as opposed to eye/hand skills) that caused art critics to doubt that it was an art form in the 19th Century allowed the medium to claim a special position within modernism.

​Surrealism and abstraction were important developments in modernism but the ability of photography to record images outside human imagination was equally significant. Both the blurring of objects caused by motion in long exposures and the ultra-sharpness of high-speed photography exceed human perception. Similarly, holography initially only seemed to be a kind of photographic sculpture, but at the University of Nottingham the 1970s Margaret Benyon undertook a fellowship in fine art in the mechanical engineering department where she was able to establish a holography studio and explore a unique feature of the medium.

​

Margaret Benyon's 'hot air' hologram.
Column of rising air appears dark and
flat among rounded objects.

To make a successful hologram, the photographic emulsion must receive light directly from a laser as well as light reflected from the objects being recorded. As the interference pattern created in the emulsion is a very precise record of the interaction of the wavefront from the laser and the wavefront modified by the shapes of objects, nothing in the arrangement should move by more than a fraction of the wavelength of the light in use. Benyon discovered that movement as slight as the drying of bread would cause a loaf to appear as a flat, dark silhouette. Experiments confirmed that holograms can register time as well as three dimensions in a single image, as Moholy-Nagy desired half a century earlier. Benyon's most intriguing images recorded the movement of hot air from a cup as flat, dark plumes. Time compresses three dimensions into two. (6)

​Holography made little impact on the art world, either in the exclusive collectors' art market or the more socially orientated public art sector. Perhaps the exploitation of the ability to register tiny movements of objects as 'non-holograms' was one of the last throws of the dice for modernism. Many of the creative techniques of modernist photography can be thought of as qualified failures in that they are departures from the norms of Renaissance art. Blurring caused by motion, depth of field rendering backgrounds out of focus, the compression of perspective by telephoto lenses and the near spherical perspective of fish-eye lenses are all photographic tropes that make a virtue out of the unconventional. Depiction of movement as a black silhouette in an otherwise three- dimensional field is a uniquely holographic, and modernist, characteristic.

The set up for Margaret Benyon's hot air hologram.

The expectation that artists should use characteristics that are unique to the nature of a particular medium, creating artwork that is as much an expression of its physical properties as any subject, has not spread to popular culture. From the earliest days of cinema, painted backdrops were a common feature of filmed illusions. A current trend is towards the increasing use of computer-generated images in films. Additionally, postmodernism has produced an 'anything goes' culture which influences all media. For artists there is the challenge of deciding what not to include or generate, so great are the possibilities afforded by digital technology.

​Flatbed scanners are associated with digital editing of images and postmodern expectations. For anyone wanting to scan a photograph the software that enables the scanner to operate with a computer presents a preview image and offers the user an opportunity to adjust brightness, contrast and colour before the subsequent image is created. Further digital manipulation can contribute to the elision between photography and illustration, where any departure from visual accuracy is accepted if it is made with sincere and obvious intention. Maps and pictures made for manuals or textbooks are expected to dispense with surplus detail for the sake of clarity. Similarly, the routine surveillance of the Earth by satellites is increasingly undertaken by thematic mapping projects that concentrate of specific geophysical information such as ice-cover or vegetation types. The Earth rotates under them as they orbit from pole to pole, rather like the action of a flatbed scanner.

​Scanners use LEDs for illumination combined with multiple detectors arranged together on a single moving bar that sweeps the underside of a glass platen on which documents or objects can be placed. Scanners were not designed to record objects, so their traveling perspective produces distortions caused by parallel projections in the resultant image. Depth of field is about one centimetre and unreflected light creates dark backgrounds. The darkness is similar to 'flash falloff' seen in photographs taken by the light of an electronic flashgun. Photograms, holography and scanners record distance as darkness because they project light in a dynamic way without relying on ambient illumination.

​Unlike human vision, the photogram process, holograms and scanners bombard their subjects with photons. The phrase "suffocating darkness" is revealing because light feels like it belongs to the air that we breathe. Looking up at a blue sky, there is no apparent difference between atmosphere and light. When a cloud uncovers the sun, light enters a room like fine dust falling from the air. The disparity between the searchlight of technology and how we see, influences how our attention to nature becomes divided between science and art. 1970s Land Art (originally called Earth Art) came close to reconciling this difference.

Land Art projects, mostly in remote areas of the United States, were 

Double Negative was excavated by Michael
Heizer in 1969. 240,000 tons of rock was
bulldozed from two sides of a valley wall.
The sculpture is a void that demonstrates
the imposition of geometry on the
landscape,and by implication, the whole
of nature.

created in the 1960s and 1970s. The Earth artists individually embarked on a series of diverse sculptural projects, on the scale of civil engineering, using the material of the landscape itself. One of Robert Smithson's early works exhibited mirrors, rock, gravel and sand in an art gallery. The materials were removed from a distant site where mirrors had also been placed and photographed. The methodology resembled a museum exhibit that had resulted from geology fieldwork. Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) almost functions as a science experiment. At a high-altitude site in New Mexico in the United States, De Maria created a one kilometre by one mile array of polished metal poles placed vertically in the ground 67 metres apart. Lightning is said to "sense" the poles when it is within 61 metres of them. (7)

​Land Art seems to have signified an end to the development of landscape art, but it is possible to consider a return of nature to a central position in contemporary art. Imagine a Venn diagram with nature in art at the centre, surrounded by four circles. Firstly, nature that is revealed by science. Secondly, the tradition of landscape art that represents nature as beautiful, sublime or picturesque. Thirdly, climate change, a new mass extinction period and the expansion of the technosphere (the built environment, mining spoil, farming, solar power collectors etc). Fourthly, ambitious plans such as altering plant genomes to enable them to use more atmospheric carbon dioxide, producing 'meat' protein in bioreactors and the duplication of the energy of the sun in thermonuclear power stations. 

(1) Strip mining (2) Contour ploughing (3) The Palm Jumeirah, Dubai - 5.6 square kilometre land reclamation development. 

The expansion of human activity to encompass the majority of the Earth has supported a massive increase in population. This means that there is no simple way back to a pre-industrial world that existed before the Anthropocene. Behind the concept of 'sustainability' lie complicated choices around the degree of artificial management of biological and Earth systems. 

​​The Anthropocene epoch is so called because humans are now a geological force. We cause global climate change, move more material than river erosion, control three quarters of land not under ice and are also influencing the course of evolution. The image of a self-consistent nature depicted in traditional landscape art is not true in the Anthropocene. Some of the Land Art projects of the last century presaged this new situation. A new direction for art as metaphor for the complicated and problematic interface between nature and technology in the 21st century is available. Rather than attempting to create visual equivalents to the complexity of all environmental issues art could be a sensitised surface that provides opportunities for contemplation of artificiality itself.

Wooded Landscape with Figures Walking by a Sandy Bank. 

This painting by Jan Wijnants (active 1643 - 1684)  shows 

the remains of an original coastline resulting from the 

reclamation of land from the sea in Holland. This 

picturesque depiction of one aspect of the technosphere 

may appear to be anachronistic, but the type of cultivated 

landscape familiar from landscape painting is equally 

artificial.

 

(1) Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

​(2) (3) (4) Moholy-Nagy, László, Hans Maria. Wingler, and Janet. Seligman. Painting, Photography, Film. London: Lund Humphries, 1967.

(5) Moholy-Nagy, László The New Vision ; and, Abstract of an Artist. New York: Wittenborn, 1947.

(6) Benthall, Jonathan. Science and Technology in Art Today. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972.

(7) Kastner, Jeffrey., and Brian. Wallis. Land and Environmental Art : Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon, 1998.Page 109.

 

Link to SCANS book on blurb