School of Social and Political Science

Description

Abstract: In March of 1953, Allan Astin, Director of the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS), lost his job. Sinclair Weeks, the newly confirmed Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration, demanded Astin’s resignation after the NBS published a report concluding that a product marketed as AD-X2, which was advertised as extending the life of automotive batteries, was ineffective. Weeks, an admirer of the product’s developer and chief promoter, Jess Ritchie, regard the NBS’s verdict on AD-X2 as an attack on small business and sought to install a friendlier regime at the bureau. American scientists were outraged. Astin, a career NBS scientist who had been with the organisation for over two decade and was previously well known mostly in a few specialist circles, but his ouster became an instant cause célèbre of the scientific community. His removal sparked a frenetic mobilization, which quickly organized censures by the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, Science magazine, the Federation of American Scientists, among other organizations, and succeeded in forcing Weeks to back down. Astin was reinstated and remained at the head of the NBS until his retirement in 1969. 

Through the AD-X2 affair, this talk argues for the importance of studying boring science. Battery electrochemistry and routine testing were not flashy enterprises in the Atomic Age, but they nonetheless proved crucial to shaping the political fortunes of American science. Exploring the origins and nature of the AD-X2 controversy alongside the way American scientists organized to exert political pressure clarifies how the American scientific community translated the political relevance nuclear weapons brought into concrete political influence. They did so not through leveraging the power of the bomb, but by brandishing their apolitical credentials to exert control over key institutions and by emphasizing the centrality of routine scientific practice to national priorities.