This dissertation examines how the practice of astronomical illustration changed and expanded over the course of the twentieth century Space Age. In the United States, the post-war period transformed outer space into a geopolitically significant environment, reorienting the authoritative picturing of space from a practice housed primarily within European astronomical observatories to one with commercial viability in American science and popular culture. In the absence of cameras capable of rendering the space environment, individual illustrators filled in pictorial gaps by hand. Between the years of 1944 and 1987, illustrators developed an aesthetic of neutrality that visually signaled the scientific accuracy of their work. This aesthetic privileged a style of representation that mirrored the technical impartiality of cameras, collapsing distinctions between “most realistic” looking with “most photographic.” The visual clarity of photographic resolution became the standard for the most successful illustrations, even though most subjects depicted required a degree of artistic license to be made visible at all. This dissertation examines the visual techniques developed to reproduce photographic-looking illustrations of unphotographable places. The status of these images as utilitarian was negotiated via a complex web of group consensus and proximity to places like NASA, educational programming at planetariums, and public television. Examining midcentury astronomical illustration as a cultural product instead of neutral technical output offers a new entry point into the visual culture of the Space Age in the United States. This study underscores the way in which socially constructed expectations about the space environment were coded into objective-looking images.

This dissertation is a comparative study of the American, British, and French efforts to exploit German science and technology following the Second World War, and through this, a transnational history of technology transfer, diplomacy, and science-state interaction in the postwar world. In the wake of the importance of science-based technologies in the Second World War, science became closely linked with diplomacy, scientific expertise took on new meanings and importance in government in each of these three nations, and the occupation of Germany created a perceived opportunity to simultaneously shape Germany's future and boost domestic industrial technology. Across the world, the relationships between science and the state changed rapidly in the postwar years, though with important national differences shaped by institutions and values.

The central argument of the dissertation is that different assumptions and beliefs about technology transfer, and in particular conceptions of the importance of 'know-how' or tacit knowledge, fundamentally shaped on-the-ground policy decisions in different ways in each of these nations; and that these decisions, in turn, had important consequences for international diplomacy and domestic science and industrial policy in each of these nations. This dissertation examines the ways in which science and technology fundamentally reshaped, and were fundamentally reshaped by, larger forces and trends in twentieth century history. More specifically, these attempts at scientific intelligence gathering on an unprecedented scale drew upon and shaped the national and international structures for communicating science; they tied together science, technology, and intelligence communities in new ways; and they brought the difficulties of technology transfer to the attention of business and legal communities at a crucial time in the development of multinational corporations and internationalization of business.

This dissertation describes how, in the decades after World War II, a new cohort of outside experts helped build confidence among their clients in particular visions of American democratic capitalism. This moment in American history is, as the historian Daniel Horowitz has called it, an era of the “cold war consensus” among social scientists, industry leaders, and policy makers, in the idea that mass affluence would bring social well-being to the many, especially vis-à-vis communism. I add, however, that especially among members of America’s business and financial establishments, there was a lack of confidence in how this particular future could be achieved. Thus, there was an ongoing need to build confidence to move America in new directions that to contemporaries seemed foreign and new, and with no certainty of their ultimate success. As discussed in the historiography section later in this introduction, although historians and other scholars have looked at how modernity, and American democratic capitalism specifically, came to be, including its social, cultural, economic, and political configurations, there has been little exploration into the role of for-profit professional services firms in this story. This dissertation also complicates our narratives of the Cold War military-industrial complex by adding new actors to a familiar casts of characters. This dissertation also describes the expansion of quantification and rationality in American social life, especially in the contexts of business, banking, and government. It is about the role and meaning of “economics” outside the halls of academia and government. Lastly, this provides insight into the meaning of objectivity over the 1950s through 1970s, and how that played out in the formation of new professional identities.

To explore these concerns, I look at several instances of constructing mass leisure in the United States. These include: the location and feasibility studies for Disneyland completed by Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1953 and 1954, discussed in Chapter 1; construction and operations planning completed by SRI and ERA for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, also known as the Century 21 Exposition, in Chapter 2; the use of outside advisors by the non-profit New York World's Fair 1964-65 Corporation in Chapter 3; ERA’s role in the development of Audio-Animatronics and other Disney attractions at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair in Chapter 4; and finally Miami’s never-built Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center (Interama), discussed in Chapter 5. Taken together, these instances cover the time period from the early 1950s until just before the 1970s energy crisis and Watergate began to corrode the nation’s confidence in the idea that mass affluence was sustainable.

The actors in this dissertation are both familiar and unfamiliar. Few have not heard of Walt Disney, but the role of Harrison Price and his firm ERA in the story of Disney’s theme parks are rarely found outside of histories documenting particular aspects of the Disney enterprise. Both ERA and PRC were founded by alumni from non-profit research and development firms and other think tanks. But their main line of work straddled to a far greater extent the public/private division than that of their peers at RAND or the federal departments of the executive branch. Arthur D. Little, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a key actor in the story of industrial research & development in the United States and the history of operations research, but the firm’s work on projects of mass leisure (including the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair and Miami’s Interama) is little known. The significance of this work in mass leisure is not simply that it is outside of the area explored by scholars. Besides Price, many of these men went on to become key figures in domestic and international development. Some of the very first projects they worked on were in mass leisure, and in very real ways this early work shaped their later careers. Disneyland, Century 21, and New York’s “Olympics of Progress” (as Robert Moses called the 1964-1965 New York World Fair) were the crucibles in which these consultants learned how to apply their trades.

This dissertation takes the perspective that what mattered the most to their clients was in the ability of these outside advisors to act as prognosticators of the future. While their successes in these efforts did matter (or at the very least, how they presented and explained their past successes and failures), it was their abilities to perform as virtuosos in quantitative methods and to mediate between the worlds of banking, government, industry, and the design professions which mattered the most. They performed as objective counsel, and used a range of methods from statistics to operations research and systems analysis. Some called themselves industrial engineers. Others identified as industrial economists, land economists, or recreational economists. There was never one fixed professional identity among them. They were on the whole, however, not academic economists concerned with theory. The trade of these men was entirely in applied research. Methods they used ran the gamut from statistical analysis to linear programming to computer simulations. What drove demand for their services among their clients in mass leisure was the need to build confidence in the postwar’s highly capitalized, financially risky, and otherwise unproven ventures among a diverse set of interests, both public and private. The value of consultants such as Price to clients lay chiefly in their role as depoliticized actors, and it was their public performances of objectivity which made them appear neutral. Indeed, objectivity was one of the chief products they sold, packaged as a service.

The history of math education reform is fragmented and must be placed in conversation with the history of science education reform, as both are better understood when considered in parallel rather than historically conflated. The early coherency of the math education community permitted it to capitalize on post-Sputnik funds--mainly supplied by the National Science Foundation (NSF)--in a wholly different manner than that in science education. Over time, the NSF's role in education was curtailed by changing federal administrations, competing agency, rising internationalism, and unsettled questions of democracy. By directly comparing the histories of math and science education reform I question the general narrative of educational reform in modern American history and replace it with a more focused examination of their individual rhetorical strategies, thus providing a more suitable historical context for ongoing discussions of reform efforts.

Syncing time and clime endure as pursuits of empire. In Time and Clime, I offer one of the first critical and capacious histories of science, technology, and environment for early modern India by incisively examining the philosophies and practices of temporality and climatology in the Mughal and early British empires. Critically, early modern India boasted a population of 150 million, a complex bureaucracy and economic prosperity. Yet the history of science, technology and the environment is occluded from view. I contend that as the magnitudinal military science, astronomy was the bedrock of early modern empire controlling multiple temporalities, crafting narratives of cosmic truth, and configuring conceptions of the environment. I reveal that the utility of the exact sciences and their impact on environment and empire transformed from time-telling and astrology to meteorology and navigation in the transition from the Mughal to British empire.

The development of computing after the Second World War involved a fundamental reassessment of information, communication, knowledge -- and work. No merely technical project, it was prompted in part by the challenges of industrial automation and the shift toward white-collar work in mid-century America. This dissertation therefore seeks out the connections between technical research projects and organization-theory analyses of industrial management in the Cold War years. Rather than positing either a model of technological determinism or one of social construction, it gives a more nuanced description by treating the dynamics as one of constant social and technological co-evolution.

This dissertation charts the historical development of what it has meant to work with computers by examining the deep connections between technologists and mid-century organization theorists from the height of managerialism in the 1940s through the decline of the "liberal consensus" in the 1970s. Computing was enmeshed in ongoing debates concerning automation and the relationship between human labor and that of machines. The work that would become known as "artificial intelligence" grew out of studies of mental work in an attempt to automate the process of making routine decisions within large organizations. Likewise, the technical content of operating systems and programs reinforced ideas about what constituted meaningful labor, even as they created a new basis for assessing the value of mental work. The development of these technologies occurred in a direct relationship with ongoing conversations about American economic development in the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-1960s, large computer systems were viewed through the prism of the Great Society, while smaller minicomputers were associated with a libertarian backlash. The direct experiences of working with different machines provided a foundation for rethinking the organization of the American office and the place of mental work within an "Information Age."