Speaker Series | Jennifer Tucker "Dangerous Exposures: Work and Waste in Victorian Photography and the Chemical Trades"

Dangerous Exposures: Work and Waste in Victorian Photography and the Chemical Trades
Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University)
 

Abstract: This paper discusses how the alkali industry transformed two towns in northwestern England and considers some of the complexities of environmental systems and stories that are still embedded in the landscape – long after many of the physical traces of the Victorian chemical industry have long since disappeared. The towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world’s first chemical factories and towns were created in open farmland during the nineteenth century, are especially important places to study historical responses to industrial pollution and its associated costs. Like modern-day alchemists, chemical industrialists transformed the rural landscape, their factories churning out base elements that were transformed into textile dyes, soap, and glass: materials that seemingly defined the Victorian era. Yet while many contemporary observers praised the alkali industry for providing materials that facilitated modern activities, others saw a different side to the new chemical industry. Not only did the process of generating salt cake from salt and sulfuric acid release hydrochloric acid gas into the atmosphere, it also produced an insoluble, smelly solid waste that became piled in heaps and spread on fields near the soda works. The chemical trade harmed not only the local air, water, and land, however, it also injured people: especially chemical workers. Drawing on newly recovered archival sources in northwest England as well as textual and visual collections at the University of Liverpool and the Wellcome Library, this paper will explore the nature and significance of the Victorian alkali industry in addressing a range of questions in environmental history, history and theory of photography, law, and public health. In my research, I have been examining how photography emerged in the nineteenth-century as both a new mode of documenting chemical pollution and a technological process that was itself the product of a chemical industry that produced chemical waste and photographic pollution. The paper offers new evidence of the importance of visual imagery (particularly news illustrations, photographs and lantern slides) in raising public awareness about the potential dangers of alkali waste products for local environments and chemical workers, and argues that an understanding of the language of visual imagery of alkali industry is useful for understanding the later transformations of public environmental law and policy in the region.

Bio: Jennifer Tucker is Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan University where she is also a member of the faculty of the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment, and currently serves as Interim Chair of the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She received her BA in Human Biology (Neuropsychology of Vision, Perception, and Memory) from Stanford University, MPhil in the Dept. of the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge (Marshall Scholarship, Gonville and Caius College), and Ph.D. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Johns Hopkins University. A historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British society, she specializes in the history of technology, science, art, visual and material culture. Tucker currently is working on two new book-length projects. One, titled  “Science Against Industry: Photographic Technologies and the Visual Politics of Pollution Reform,” traces the historical roots of the use of visual evidence in environmental science and pollution reform, and explores the visual representation in chemical climatology and the presentation of visual exhibits in Victorian courtroom debates over air and river pollution. The other, titled “Caught on Camera,” is a book-length study about the legal and cultural history of photographic detection and evasion, and is funded by a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She began work on both of these projects as a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra in 2015 and as a Senior Scholar at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2016.