Keywords

1 Introduction

Any attempt to write the history of ocean science requires an initial decision: which areas of study fall under the contemporary umbrella term “oceanography?” Oceanography, after all, is a science dedicated to studying three-fourths of our planet. Oceanographic sciences are now often divided into different subdisciplines: physical oceanography, chemical oceanography, biological oceanography, geological oceanography, geophysics, atmospheric science, as well as fisheries science. Like the branching of an evolutionary tree, these now distinct subdisciplines share common points of origin. In the nineteenth century they all might have fallen under the now defunct term of thalassography. Similarly, the term “hydrography” was commonly employed in the mid nineteenth century to denote the practice of measuring some of the physical features of the marine environment that later interested oceanographers, such as ocean depths and currents; however, the primary aim was to facilitate navigation rather than develop theories to explain the natural forces observed. The commonality linking practitioners of these subfields is that their subjects of study are all situated in the marine environment. They therefore tend to use the same instruments and platforms – most importantly, research vessels – though some branches of marine science are more dependent on the infrastructure of land-based laboratories near the coast.

In writing a historiography of the history of oceanography, I follow the advice of ocean sciences historian Eric Mills:

As historians of oceanography we can either confine ourselves to the past few decades, when a definable field of oceanography existed, or make the more daring and significant choice of looking back to earlier, more puzzling times. Definitions turn out to be cramping, inhibitory, and worst of all, an unadventurous aid to our scholarship. History of oceanography is what historians of oceanography write about. (Mills 1990, p. 2)

This broad definition has been embraced by those who now identify themselves as historians of oceanography. As the editors of the proceedings of the Fifth International Congress on the History of Oceanography wrote in 2002: “Oceanography is a hybrid, a mixed science – probably more so than any other branch of the natural sciences. […] [I]t is an aggregation of approaches, involving the full spectrum of the physical, biological and earth sciences, in their formal, empirical and applied manifestations, intended to yield an understanding of a portion of our particular planet” (Benson and Rehbock 2002, p. ix). The leadership of the International Commission for the History of Oceanography (ICHO) agreed in 2020 that a mission statement should define the organization as “a global body devoted to linking scholars, writers, and teachers interested in the history of the marine sciences, broadly defined.”Footnote 1 ICHO’s recent project to compile a shared online bibliography has thus far resulted in a catalogue of over nearly 1300 entries. An all-encompassing historical treatment of everything historians of oceanography consider to fall within the scope of the “history of oceanography” would be so broad as to resist coherence. However, historians’ embrace of such a broad field of scholarship is itself a recent historical development.

At the outset, I should acknowledge the necessary limitations of the present work. While there is now an established body of scholarship comparing the history of oceanography in different national contexts, much remains to be done. The majority of existing studies focus on developments in the anglophone world or on Western Europe. Very little has been published (in English) on the rich history of ocean sciences in Russia (Mikhailov et al. 2002). This absence is doubly notable given Russian scientists’ early entry into these fields. For example, Russia commissioned one of the earliest custom-built vessels for marine exploration, the Andrei Pervozvanny, launched in the 1899 (Lajus 2021). Even a transnational history of American and Soviet ocean sciences during the Cold War remains to be written. Similarly, with the notable exception of a few case studies which have explored the history of marine science in Japan (Ericson 2020) and China (Neushul and Wang 2000; Wang 2007; Luk 2020), the existent scholarship remains largely focused on developments in Europe and North America. Finally, I have chosen not to include as yet unpublished dissertations in this discussion.Footnote 2

In this short chapter, some histories of the ocean sciences must inevitably be touched upon more briefly than others. The history of fisheries science, for instance, deserves its own treatment (for useful histories of fisheries science see Smith 1994; Rozwadowski 2002; Hubbard 2006; Finley 2011; Bolster 2014, and most recently, Banoub 2021).Footnote 3 There have been a few other historiographies of oceanography to which the reader’s attention is called. The major foundational historiographical essay on this subject still remains Eric Mills’ “The Historian of Science and Oceanography After Twenty Years”, published in the journal Earth Science History (Mills 1993). Margaret Deacon provided a bibliographical introduction to the subject in the second edition of her book, Scientists and the Sea 1650–1900, published in 1997. Readers are also advised to consult Samantha Muka’s recent comprehensive historiography of the history of marine biology (Muka 2021). Some of the works discussed by Muka coincide with my own attempt in the present essay. Muka provides greater in-depth attention, however, to the history of marine stations and specifically to biological research. Painting with a broad brush, I trace what I see as the major currents that have shaped the development of the history of oceanography as currently practiced by historians of science.

2 First Systematic Frameworks

The first histories of oceanography were written by ocean scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These appeared as introductory chapters of scientific expedition narratives. Intended to contextualize the work of the expeditions, these historical overviews aimed at securing a place for their authors within an emerging discipline of oceanography by framing their reports as the leading edge of an accumulated body of knowledge. Thus, Scottish naturalist Wyville Thomson, who would go on to be chief scientist on the Challenger expedition, provided a summary of developments in physical and marine zoological science as prologue to his report on the cruises of the Lightening and Porcupine (Thomson et al. 1873). He explained the beginnings of scientific interest in the depths as resulting from the requirements of submarine telegraphy, and paid homage to the naturalist Edward Forbes, proponent of the methodology of sampling using a dredge: “every year adds enormously to our stock of data, and every new fact indicates more clearly the brilliant results which are to be obtained by following his methods” (Thomson et al. 1873, p. 6). Similarly, John Murray, who took over responsibility for the publication of the Challenger expedition reports after Thomson’s death, provided a comparable historical summary in the first volume, published in 1880. Murray subsequently repeated this account in the introduction to his co-authored report on the voyage of the Michael Sars (Murray et al. 1912).

The primacy of the Challenger expedition in many histories of oceanography stems in part from the intentional historical aggrandizement of the project by some of the scientists involved. No other oceanographic expedition has been the subject of so many histories. (To name but a few: Linklater 1972; Corfield 2003; Zuroski 2017; Lopes 2018; Macdougall 2019; Jones 2023). John Young Buchanan, the expedition chemist, for example, boldly claimed in 1919 that “the science of oceanography was born at sea in lat. 25° 45’ N., long. 20° 14’ W., on 15 February 1873”, when Challenger scientists conducted their first deep-sea dredging. Such claims did not go unchallenged, however, as even some contemporaries noted that scientific interest in the oceans had begun much earlier.Footnote 4

The first English-language monograph dedicated specifically to the history of oceanography was published in 1923, but again it was written by a marine scientist. Writing in the preface to his book, Founders of Oceanography and Their Work: An Introduction to the Science of the Sea, William Herdman informed his readers: “I have myself lived through the period that has seen the development of the Natural History of the Sea into the Science of Oceanography, and have known intimately most of the men who did the pioneer work” (Herdman 1923, p. v). The basis for this work was a series of twenty public lectures. Herdman could boast of a direct personal connection to the most famous of nineteenth-century oceanographic voyages. As a student he had worked as an assistant to Charles Wyville Thomson – lead scientist of the Challenger expedition. Shortly after graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 1879, Herdman joined the ‘Challenger Office’ under the direction of Sir John Murray and was given the task of organizing and studying the Tunicata collection returned by the Challenger expedition (his reports were then published between 1882 and 1888). As he went on to explain, the first half of his book provided biographies of “some of the leading men who have made our science”, with whom he claimed to have firsthand acquaintance. The second half discussed subjects in oceanography about which he was himself “most interested” (Herdman 1923, p. vi).

Despite Herdman’s autobiographical focus, Mills credits him for developing, what Mills described as “one of the first attempts to provide a systemic framework for the history of oceanography” (Mills 1983, p. 1). According to Herdman, the history of oceanography in the nineteenth century could be divided into three periods: “the period of Edward Forbes, the great Manx naturalist; the period of Wyville Thomson, ending with its climax, the ‘Challenger’ expedition; and the post-‘Challenger’ period of Sir John Murray and modern oceanography” (Herdman 1923, p. 8). Thus Herdman’s biographical chapters primarily discussed the works of Forbes, Thomson, Murray, but also described the contributions of the Swiss-born American naturalists Louis Agassiz and Alexander Agassiz, of Prince Albert 1st of Monaco, and finally, of the Prussian founder of the Naples Zoological station, Anton Dohrn. These scientists continue to figure prominently in subsequent overviews of the history of the marine sciences, with recent accounts contextualizing their work within the social and political environment of their times (Adler 2017).

Almost a half century elapsed before another attempt was made to devise a systematic framework for the history of oceanography. Public interest in ocean exploration surged during the 1960s. The development of technologies like saturation diving equipment and submersibles capable of exploring extreme depths seemed to presage humanity’s colonization of the oceans. This was also a period when oceanographers hoped to forge large-scale international cooperative programs for ocean exploration. For example, UNESCO organized an international oceanography conference in Copenhagen in July 1960; this led to the creation of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC). It was during this period, when ocean research was enjoying international government support and a newly vaunted science of oceanography was garnering widespread public interest, that marine scientists became more interested in documenting the history of what was increasingly presented as a single research field.

The next iteration of what Mills dubbed a “systemic framework” for understanding the history of ocean sciences was developed by German oceanographer Georg Wüst in 1964. Wüst foregrounded the importance of fieldwork as a central method in addressing research questions and developing theories in a burgeoning new science. “Progress,” in his view, had been the result of “great oceanic expeditions,” improvements in instrumentation and methodology, and the development of theory (Wüst 1964, p. 3). Wüst grouped “the most outstanding” deep-sea expeditions as falling within four eras: the era of exploration (1873–1914), the era of national systematic and dynamic ocean surveys (1925–1940), the period of new marine geological, geophysical biological and physical methods (1947–1956), and finally, the era of international research cooperation after 1957.

Wüst’s periodization, while useful for understanding broad developments in oceanography, is in some ways limited. His analysis focused on the history of the study of the open ocean and prioritized physical oceanography while ignoring other fields of marine science, despite crossovers in research interests, methods, and shared scientific instrumentation. Like many other early histories of oceanography, Wüst’s periodization took as its starting point the voyage of HMS Challenger, thus excluding earlier scientific work at sea. The end point of 1964 – when Wüst’s article was published – also proves confining from a retrospective twenty-first-century perspective. Government funding for oceanography, particularly in the United States, reached its apogee during the Cold War before a subsequent decline. From a more long-term perspective, the period Wüst regarded as the moment of maturation of the discipline, is better described as a temporary and historically contingent period. Yet, Wüst’s approach leaves little room for the possibility of historical contingency. The development of oceanography in different regions is presumed to have to follow a single necessary path. He accordingly argues that oceanography “in many parts of the world ocean, particularly the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific […], [had] not advanced beyond the second and third stages of research.” He predicted that the Indian Ocean would become “the next field of systematic international cooperation on a large scale” (Wüst 1964, p. 20). At the time of his writing, the International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE) was taking place and he was involved in advocating for this project. Thus his predictions for the development of oceanography illustrate the manner in which a scientist’s own scientific work may shape their historical outlook (Wüst 1960). Both Wüst and Herdman, taking a long view of the history of oceanography, find periods of constancy and points of change, but their accounts remain, on the whole, deterministic, assuming an unvarying path of scientific progress.

Only a few years after Wüst published his article, the first meeting of the international congress for the history of oceanography was organized in Monaco in 1966. Though the majority of attendees were oceanographers, the meeting marked the first organized attempt to bring together scholars interested in the history of ocean sciences. It was also notable for the inclusion of a paper by Harold Burstyn, “The Historian of Science and Oceanography” (Burstyn 1968). For his part, Burstyn does not recall the meeting favorably, remembering it as “dominated by superannuated oceanographers.”Footnote 5 He found them so hostile to his perspective that he limited his presentation to reading the abstract of his paper. Nevertheless, in his essay – published in 1968 in the congress proceedings – he argued that the history of oceanography was uniquely well suited for understanding the interplay of science and society.Footnote 6 As he wrote: “no other field […] has been so dependent for its development on the growth of the modern state, no other field has either been ‘big science’ or no science at all” (Burstyn 1968, p. 670). Accordingly, he argued, two tasks fall to the historian of science: tracing the history of theoretical and methodological developments in oceanography and tracing the impact of social, economic, and political forces upon those developments.

In his own work, Burstyn did just this by describing both the scientific and political influences which led to the creation of the Challenger expedition, interpreting it as an early form of “big science” characterized by “big money, large multi-disciplinary teams, a division of labour, team commitments, the building of coalitions, strong leadership, hierarchical organization, and the making of budgetary compromises with an eye on public opinion” (Burstyn 2001, p. 54). If the organization of early oceanographic expeditions was a precursor model for the organization of other forms of science in the mid-twentieth century, he urged, this was all the more reason for historians of science to give the history of oceanography greater attention. His 1966 congress paper – and subsequent writing – was a call to action for historians of science. Histories of oceanography might have been compiled by scientists, but the subject was ready for the attention of historians as a means to learn more about broader developments in the history of science. Thus, the history of oceanography, like other branches of the history of science, was to be transformed by the social constructivist turn of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the institutionalization of the history of science as an academic field.

3 Defining Subject and Scope

An initial problem for the history of oceanography, as an emerging subfield in the history of science, was to identify the scope of its subject matter. In aid of this, four important monographs, cataloguing research vessels and oceanographic instrumentation, were published in the 1980s and following decade. Stewart B. Nelson’s Oceanographic Ships: Fore and Aft (1982) covers American research vessels up to 1971, while Tony Rice’s British Oceanographic Vessels 1880–1950 does the same for the British fleet up to the period shortly after World War II. It is noteworthy that Rice explicitly states in his foreword that the chronology covered follows Wüst’s periodization (Rice 1986, p. 6). Two catalogues of oceanographic instrumentation were also published: Anita McConnell’s No Sea Too Deep: The history of Oceanographic Instruments (1982) and Christian Carpine’s La pratique de l’océanographie au temps du Prince Albert 1er (2002), a compilation of catalogues that first appeared in the Bulletin de l’Institut Océanographique de Monaco between 1987 and 1999.Footnote 7 Both McConnell’s and Carpine’s catalogues document the process by which sampling instrumentation gradually became more standardized and efficient. Scientists and professional instrument makers refined sampling instrumentation by adopting newly invented construction materials like brass, rubber, and celluloid. McConnell’s book, though primarily a chronological summary of developments in instrumentation, also offers an argument about the factors responsible for technological progress in oceanography. As she explained: “It is contended that significant improvements in underwater apparatus came at those times when: (a) a navy considered that its surface operations would be thereby advanced; or (b) commercial interests demanded it. These improvements depended for their execution on: (c) the availability of suitable materials, including ships and technological processes, and (d) adequate manpower to work intensively in the chosen region. Whereas (a) and (b) are alternatives, (c) and (a) are essential factors” (McConnell 1982, p. 148).

Historian Margaret Deacon (daughter of the celebrated British oceanographer George Deacon) deserves credit for greatly expanding the chronological scope of the history of the marine sciences.Footnote 8 In a 1965 paper she demonstrated that members of the Royal Society took up questions related to oceans as early as the late seventeenth century (Deacon 1965). She subsequently expanded this study in Scientists and the Sea 1650–1900 (Deacon 1997). Not only did Deacon reject the mythology of a single nineteenth-century point of origin for oceanography, she also provided a broader geographical scope by including French, German, and Scandinavian scientists in her account.Footnote 9 Most importantly, Deacon’s book offers a history that traces multiple and diverse motives driving ocean research over time. To see the Challenger expedition as the origin point for marine science, she argues, is “to misjudge its significance,” to neglect “the work of earlier scientists,” and to underestimate “the strength of the parallel movement in other countries” (Deacon 1971, p. 369). Deacon later even asserted that the international success of the Challenger expedition was in some ways counterproductive for marine biology in Britain: “[Challenger’s] very success made life more difficult for would-be oceanographers in Britain, by giving the impression that everything necessary had already been done” (Deacon 1993 p. 24). She also showed that while the British government was generous in its funding of the Challenger expedition, it was considerably less generous in funding deep-water research in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Though her focus remains on Europe, Deacon’s work provides important historical contextualization, highlighting the connection of tidal science with navigation, the crossovers between terrestrial and marine biological research questions, and the early internationalization of ocean science.

One of the first comprehensive histories of oceanography can be found in The Edge of an Unfamiliar World: A History of Oceanography (Schlee 1973), by historian Susan Schlee. Schlee calls attention to the parallel development of large-scale government-sponsored research programs in Britain and the United States. Curiously, there are no references to Deacon’s work in Schlee’s book, though in many ways the works complement one another. Perhaps the omission was due to the limited circulation of the first edition of Deacon’s book. While Deacon examined the causes that led to increased scientific interest in oceans in the seventeenth century, Schlee’s narrative begins in the late 1800s and explores the development of the American Coast and Geodetic Survey and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy. Deacon and Schlee’s works together provide a helpful foundation upon which subsequent scholarship continues to build.

Some of the topics covered by Deacon and Schlee are revisited in Helen Rozwadowski’s (2005) Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea. Reflecting the methodological and focal shifts in the history of science since the publication of these earlier works, Rozwadowski’s account of the history of British and American oceanography does far more to embed the history of scientific discoveries in social and cultural history. Rozwadowski highlights multifaceted aspects of Victorians’ discovery of the sea and re-examines the oceanographic research vessel as a negotiated social space. Seagoing scientists of the nineteenth century were not only devising a new science, she argues, they were also “forging a functional workplace” (Rozwadowski 2005, p. 195).

Historian Michael Reidy too expanded earlier accounts of the history of ocean sciences while focusing on the British context; like Rozwadowski, he shows that a multiplicity of actors were involved in the diffusion of scientific knowledge about the seas. Observing that oceanography and empire grew in tandem, he argues for greater attention to the intersection of science and statecraft. As Reidy explains, “the British Admiralty, maritime community, and scientific elite collaborated to bring order to the world’s seas, estuaries, and rivers. These experts transformed the vast emptiness of the oceans into an ordered bounded grid, inscribed with isolines of all kinds – tidal, magnetic, thermal and barometric – in areas uncharted and on coasts unseen” (Reidy 2008, p. 6).

Transnational comparison has been a feature of histories of oceanography since the early 1980s. The oceanic turn in various fields of scholarship over the past several decades has encouraged historians to focus on transnational connections across oceanic spaces. Stimulated by Fernand Braudel’s multi-volume history of the Mediterranean world (1949), maritime historians increasingly turned their attention to the movement of peoples, commodities, and ideas across ocean spaces. This interpretive framework, first applied to the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, has since been applied to the Indian Ocean and to the Pacific Ocean (Pearson 2007; Matsuda 2012). Following this trend, and recognizing the transnational character of much oceanographic science, historians have brought an increasingly transnational perspective to their work.

In his foundational work on the history of biological and physical oceanography, Eric Mills compares developments in England, Germany, France, and the United States. This approach allows him to highlight distinctive national characteristics in the development of the marine sciences. His history of biological oceanography largely focused on the development of quantitative plankton studies in Germany, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Mills 2012). His history of physical oceanography, The Fluid Envelope of Our planet. How the Study of Ocean Currents Became a Science, points to what Mills terms the “paradox of French marine science”, the apparent absence of scientific interest in physical oceanography in France in the late nineteenth century at a time when dynamic oceanography was taking off in Scandinavia, Germany, and the United States (Mills 2011, p. 163). Mills shows that physical oceanography research was prompted first by concerns about the decline of commercial fisheries and then, in the second half of the twentieth century, by the requirements of submarine warfare. While Mills reveals different national styles of oceanography, he also highlights the emergence of a transnational scientific community interested in the same research problems and exchanging methods and theories.

Attention to the shaping of oceanography by different national contexts remains an important feature of much scholarship to this day. While most of the English-language corpus has focused on the history of oceanography in the anglophone world, there are exceptions. To give but a few examples: Bo Poulson wrote about Danish oceanographer Johannes Schmidt and his work with the Carlsberg Foundation (Poulsen 2016); Vera Schwach described the development of marine science in Norway (Schwach 2013); Franziska Torma examined popular interest in marine biology in Germany in the early twentieth century (Torma 2012); and Colin Summerhayes and Cornelia Lüdecke detailed the history of German undersea mapping in the South Atlantic during the 1930s (Summerhayes and Lüdecke 2012).Footnote 10

4 Technology, Place, and Space

The International Congress for the History of Oceanography held several international conferences after the initial meeting in Monaco in 1966. Subsequent meetings took place in Edinburgh, Scotland (1972); Woods Hole, Massachusetts (1980); Hamburg, Germany (1990); La Jolla, California (1993); Quindao, China (1999); Kaliningrad, Russia (2003); and Naples, Italy (2008).Footnote 11 Over time these congress meetings became more international and aimed to encourage the application of historical methods to the study of oceanography. A scan of the countries represented in the early history of oceanography congress meetings is informative. Some regions were better represented at the first three congress meetings than others (initially France, the U.K., and the United States). This weighting can be partially explained by the meeting locations. To be noted: attendees at these first meetings were almost exclusively affiliated with science departments or oceanographic institutions. Attendees did span the Cold War divide. There were eight attendees from the United States at the 1966 congress and five from the U.S.S.R. Four contributors to the third congress proceedings were from the U.S.S.R.

A meeting held in 1993 at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla marked a turning point, being organized by two historians of science: Keith Benson and Philip Rehbock. “It was our specific goal to facilitate this transition by encouraging the participation of greater numbers of non-oceanographers, without reducing in the slightest the opportunities for oceanographers to participate as fully, and as valuably, as they always have. Thus, without diminishing the legitimacy and importance of the motives of the oceanographer-historian – reminiscence, chronology, precedence, acknowledgement, public recognition – we wish also to stimulate an analysis of the history of oceanography that gives full credit to its scientific complexity and social relationships” (Benson and Rehbock 2002, p. x). Nevertheless, despite this declaration of purpose, the papers assembled in the ICHO congress proceedings are so wide- ranging that it is not possible to discern a specific historiographical thread running through them. In his forward to the proceedings of an eighth and final congress held in 2008, Keith Benson, then-president of ICHO, lamented that attendance had greatly diminished from previous meetings. He attributed this to an international decline in funding for oceanography. In tandem with the decline in funding for marine science, he argued, “support for ancillary social science research, such as the history of oceanography” had also declined (Benson 2013, p. 9).

More united in approach than the ICHO congress papers were some of the proceedings produced in conjunction with the Maury Conferences for the History of Oceanography – a series of meetings sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. These included at least one book which provides thematic framing for the collected essays: The Machine in Neptune’s Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment. Borrowing its title from a classic work of environmental history by Leo Marx,Footnote 12 the collection highlights the various ways in which technological developments have been integral to the process of gaining knowledge about the oceans. The editors also situate the papers in historiographical context, placing the history of oceanography at the intersection of environmental history and the history of science and technology. As the editors explain in their introduction: “The history of science and technology attends to the intellectual, political, and social contexts in which instruments were developed and deployed, so telling the history of the ocean floor, or any other part of the sea, must involve sophisticated consideration of science and technology to understand how knowledge of the marine environment was created” (Benson et al. 2004, p. xiv). It is critical, they argue, that historians incorporate attention to the history of technology in their histories of oceanography because “oceanographers’ reliance upon the machine to define and construct knowledge of the marine world has created oceanography’s interdisciplinary nature” (Benson et al. 2004, p. xxii). This approach focused historians’ attention on the ways technology mediates scientists’ data gathering in the ocean environment; “instruments” may take the form of sampling devices, but can also include everything from radioactive isotope tracers to mathematical models.

Tony Rice has shown that technological limitations and innovations are key to understanding the revolution in oceanography that occurred in the late nineteenth century. Whereas vessels under sail had difficulty hauling a dredge or remaining in position for an instrument deployment, steam engines provided greater maneuverability. This was imperative for the deployment of instruments to greater depths. Rice explains that in the case of HMS Challenger, “without the donkey engine mounted on the main deck it would have been quite impossible to achieve the plethora of net hauls, soundings and thermometer and water bottle deployments that were made at the 362 official stations worked during the voyage” (Rice 2009, p. 30). Attention to the history of technology and instrumentation also reveals the transfer of techniques, methodologies, and research questions from one scientific discipline to another. The history of marine microbiology, for instance, reveals that sterilization techniques developed in land-based laboratories and applied to the study of terrestrial microbiology were deployed on oceanographic expeditions at the end of the nineteenth century to address questions about the prevalence of microbes in the deep sea (Adler and Dücker 2018; Dolan 2020).

However, in addition to the vessel itself, understood as an instrument, different technologies require platforms from which they can be deployed. Science always takes place somewhere specific (Adler 2014). Beginning in the late 1980s, historians and sociologists of science became increasingly interested in understanding the physical spaces in which scientific work is conducted – most importantly the laboratory. Attention to laboratory settings thus came to shape the work of scholars of the marine sciences. Work on the history of marine biological stations is expansive (and still growing), having developed in tandem with shifting attention by historians of science to both the role of the laboratory in generating scientific knowledge and to the unique characteristics of science conducted in the field (see, for example, Pauly 1988; Benson 1988; de Bont 2015; Adler 2016; Matlin et al. 2020). Some of these studies have looked primarily at the development of biology, or marine ecology (Egerton 2014), but others have explored the histories of these spaces for what they reveal about the social and gendered dynamics of scientific knowledge-making (Muka 2014; Steiner 2018; Kohlstedt 2022).

As marine stations rose to prominence, work in these locations came to be seen as a rite of passage for aspiring marine scientists. This was certainly the case for the Naples Marine Station in Italy and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA. The first histories of these institutions were produced by people connected with them either professionally or through family connections. Susan Schlee, for instance, who chronicled the history of the Woods Hole Institute’s first research vessel Atlantis (1978), was married to a marine geologist living in Woods Hole. As Helen Raitt and Beatrice Moulton, co-authors of the first history of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, write in their introduction:

[I]t is the rare scientist who will take time to write more than journal articles or research papers. The lure of the laboratory and the undiscovered is always stronger than the lure of past history and dusty archives, so that it falls to wives and observers like us to dust off the scrapbooks and attempt to write some of it down. (Raitt and Moulton 1967)Footnote 13

In the twentieth century, as ocean sciences fissured into more narrowly defined subdisciplines, the institutions that supported oceanographic work also became more specialized. Scientists increasingly regarded marine biology as a separate branch of study from physical oceanography or marine geology. In the United States, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on the East Coast and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on the West Coast became the two most important institutional centers for oceanographic research. The ascendency of these two institutions is closely tied to the types of marine research they hosted – physical oceanography, acoustics, and marine geology. The importance of these forms of oceanographic data to the U.S. Navy was made starkly evident by their utility for battle strategy during the Second World War and the Cold War. As a result, the United States Navy became the primary source of funding for oceanographic research in the postwar era. Funding was dispersed through the Office of Naval Research. This partnership lasted throughout the Cold War, but with the relaxing of tensions after the fall of the Soviet Union, funding declined.

Declines in government funding starting in the 1970s led both oceanographers and historians to look back upon the preceding period as a “golden age of global oceanography” (Shor 1978, p. 35). For historians interested in the development of oceanography, the Cold War became a topic of particular fascination. Examination of the relationship between scientists and the navy gave rise to many questions of interest to historians of science: what is the relationship between science and the state? How have military concerns shaped developments in science? What is the relationship between science and diplomacy? When and how do institutional bureaucracies and scientific ideals of objectivity collide? Answers to these questions have varied, as we will see in the next section.

5 The Cold War: Scientists and the State

The partnership between government agencies, military, and scientific communities in the second half of the twentieth century has been the subject of much investigation by historians science. The relationship between civilian scientific institutions and state agencies was not easily established; historians have long debated whether scientific research was distorted or aided by this influence.Footnote 14 In the immediate postwar period, scientists and university administrators were wary of political censorship and restrictions on freedom of inquiry (Sapolsky 2014, p. 40). Cold War-era government funding had the greatest influence on those branches of science that had been most closely enrolled in the war effort during World War II – physics, engineering, and the earth sciences. Among these, ocean sciences – particularly in the United States – were the most indelibly impacted. After the war, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) with its responsibility for marine affairs was the first federal agency to support academic science until supplemented by the National Science Foundation in 1950 (Knauss 2000). Historians of oceanography, like historians of developments in other scientific disciplines during the Cold War have grappled with the question of how geopolitics and military priorities shaped, or were shaped by, the marine sciences.Footnote 15 The following section outlines some of the conclusions that scholars have taken in their analysis of this period in the development of the oceanography.

Gary Weir, in An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment, traces the relationship between civilian oceanographers and military officers largely from the perspective of the Navy. He shows that Navy officers attempted to partner with oceanographers as early as the 1920s. However, it was World War II that gave civilian scientists the opportunity to establish themselves as cross-cultural brokers between Naval officers and scientific institutions. As Weir explains: “After four years of war and frequent interaction with the navy, many pivotal wartime translators and their apostles easily crossed the cultural divide into senior civil service jobs as research scientists or administrators. […] [M]any of oceanography’s translators became permanent insiders, living simultaneously and comfortably in two cultures” (Weir 2001, pp. 271–272). Weir shows how this relationship was sustained, first through the Naval Research Laboratory, then the United States Navy Hydrographic Office, and finally through the Office of Naval Research. He shows how this new partnership led to the development of instrumentation of import to both naval strategists and ocean scientists – the most famous being the bathythermograph, an instrument for measuring water temperature variation at depth. Such instrumentation was not only important for ocean circulation modeling, it was also vital to the Navy for sonar deployment and submarine detection (Weir 2001, pp. 126–144).

While Weir examined the Cold War history of oceanography in the United States by looking at how this civilian-military partnership was established, Jacob Hamblin observed how this partnership overlapped with efforts in international diplomacy. A seeming paradox of Cold War oceanography is that while the Western bloc competed with the Soviet Union for global military supremacy – particularly in the realm of undersea warfare – scientists frequently sought international collaboration in support of their efforts to explore the oceans. These efforts led to the First International Congress of Oceanography held in New York in 1959. In Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science, Hamblin traces the increasing bureaucratization of oceanography in the second half of the twentieth century. While the stated benefit of cooperation in marine science was the “easing of tensions,” international collaboration also allowed scientists to “maintain their international reputations” while continuing to carry out classified research for the military. Hamblin argues that scientists’ efforts of international cooperation posed no impediment to their military work. Both served the interests of oceanographers (Hamblin 2005, p. 261).

In a follow-up book, Hamblin examined the history of debates surrounding the disposal of radioactive waste in the oceans during the same period (Hamblin 2008). Many ocean scientists had concerns over the safety of ocean disposal that conflicted with the more sanguine views of other government advisors. Efforts to win the scientists’ approval eventually led to the creation of new patronage opportunities with research funding offered through the Atomic Energy Commission. However, the issue of ocean dumping did not recede, becoming a matter of international diplomacy when the Soviets, while denying their own radioactive waste disposal, accused Western powers (particularly Britain and the United States) of poisoning the oceans.

Like Hamblin, Samuel Robinson urged that developments in international diplomacy were crucial to understanding the history of twentieth-century oceanography. An important complement to U.S.-centric accounts of this period, Robinson’s book traces the growth of oceanographic science in Britain, focusing on the expansion of the National Institute of Oceanography under the direction of physical oceanographer George Deacon (Robinson 2018). While in many ways the story of scientific and military collaboration in Britain parallels developments in the Unites States, Robinson also points to important differences. He shows that the history of British twentieth-century oceanography, entwined with the history of military surveillance and intelligence gathering, must be understood in connection to Cold War strategic collaboration between Britain and the United States. However, whereas U.S. surveillance planners prioritized global-scale reconnaissance, British military planners were preoccupied with the threat of conventional attacks against home bases. Tensions arose between British physical oceanographers and British fisheries scientists. Fisheries scientists had worked in collaboration with Soviet scientists under the auspices of ICES (the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas), while oceanographic surveys of the North Sea operated by NATO gathered data of strategic military value that were not to be shared. Yet, by the 1960s, British oceanographers were beginning to shift from military to civilian sources of patronage. The rise of the environmental movement defined new problems and offered new opportunities, with the National Institute of Oceanography eventually reframing its research mission as aiding restoration ecology.

Naomi Oreskes has an extensive publication record spanning a wide range of topics. She has written about the history of the theory of plate tectonics, climate change denial, and the nature of scientific consensus. Additionally, Oreskes has dedicated considerable attention to describing how military funding influenced the trajectory of oceanographic research in the twentieth century. With Ronald Rainger she co-authored an essay which described how individual animosities and intellectual disagreements led Harald Sverdrup, then-director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, being denied security clearance at the outbreak of World War II. This study demonstrated the emerging impact of military funding on American science in the twentieth century (Oreskes and Rainger 2000). She also published a study examining the division of scientific labor in oceanography during World War II. The invention of the bathythermograph launched a major data collection project. While oceanographers identified their work as an inherently masculine endeavor, analyzing bathythermograph records became women’s work. Oreskes argued that this research focus can be attributed to the practical value of ocean temperature data for anti-submarine warfare and oceanographers’ desire to secure patronage from the navy. She explains that while “measuring the temperature of ocean water was considered fundamental science, at the end of World War II it had greater value for maintaining ties with the U.S. Navy than for producing scientific novelties” (Oreskes 2000, p. 375). Fields like marine acoustics and ocean circulation modeling flourished from the late 1940s onward because they promised to have a direct application to submarine warfare and undersea communication. While Navy funding sometimes shaped the questions oceanographers sought to explore, it was nevertheless regarded by the scientists as a good patron, Oreskes argues, as it made no attempt to determine the outcome of investigations it sponsored (Oreskes 2021).

In sum, oceanography played a crucial role in Cold War military strategy for the United States, other NATO member states (Turchetti 2012), and the Soviet Union. Extensive research on underwater acoustics, ocean currents, and other ocean phenomena was carried out to enhance submarine warfare capabilities, sonar systems, and anti-submarine warfare techniques. Concurrently, significant technological advancements emerged, including deep-sea submersibles, bathymetric mapping systems, and underwater communication technologies. Historians of Cold War oceanography have studied the interplay between military funding, scientific research, and the development of these technologies (Doel et al. 2006). These studies examined the role of military patronage in accelerating scientific discovery and its influence in shaping the direction of research. Historians have highlighted the importance of studying the histories of marine institutions and the careers of individual scientists in the context of the Cold War, exploring institutional frameworks and career trajectories of specific researchers to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics, motivations, and impact of scientific endeavors during this period.

6 Where Do we Go Next?

What are some possible future directions for the history of oceanography? This account suggests the field is now quite expansive. While opportunities for future work still include the telling of unrecorded events in the development of oceanographic science, there is also a need to reexamine some of the established narratives of our field. As with other topics in the history of science, many early histories of oceanography were written by individuals who began their careers as scientists. These works are sometimes especially valuable because they inform those not trained in marine science of the discoveries and the scientists deemed most important by their contemporary colleagues. Yet, these histories often foregrounded developments in theory and focused on giving credit for first discovery. The quintessential example is the essay by Wüst (1964) previously discussed.Footnote 16 Historians can still do more to reexamine established narratives of the history of oceanography by bringing to bear perspectives informed by the social sciences and the humanities.

A paper by historians Penelope Hardy and Helen Rozwadowski highlights the continued relevance of the past to the present. In their 2020 article, prompted by debates over the removal of Confederate statues in the United States and by ongoing efforts of scholars to grapple with the legacies of racism in American history, Hardy and Rozwadowski call for a critical reexamination of Matthew Fontaine Maury. Sometimes labeled the “father” of oceanography in early hagiographic biographies, Maury fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War and praise of his legacy can be read as aiding the rehabilitation of the Confederacy: “Celebrating [Maury’s] scientific contributions supported Lost Cause ideology by eliding his role in the Confederacy and support for the institution of slavery” (Hardy and Rozwadowski 2020, p. 11). This example illustrates how historians of oceanography can break away from uncritically deployed tropes or constrained accounts of developments in theory or discovery. Hardy’s and Rozwadowski’s study reminds us that the history of science – oceanography included – is demonstrably entwined with power and politics, with implications for social relationships in our present society.

More recent interdisciplinary works in social sciences and humanities have looked at the ways in which engagement with the ocean as a space set apart from terrestrial environments has encouraged new forms of human imagination. Some of these works have taken an ethnographic approach to explore how contemporary oceanographers conceptualize their subjects of interest and co-produce representations of nature through the mediation of scientific instruments (Helmreich 2009; Lehman 2018). Others have focused on the history of human perception into the depths, while outlining the history of technologies that made watery spaces visible via diving equipment, photography, or aquaria (Cohen 2022; Elias 2019; Muka 2023). I situate my own contribution to the history of oceanography here as well. Adopting the Science and Technology Studies concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries,” my book Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea (2019) details the international development of oceanography, with attention to ways that the ocean sciences shaped – and were shaped by – anticipated futures for humanity. From the nineteenth century to the present, hopes about resources the ocean might offer to sustain humanity, and fears about civilizational collapse via conflict or environmental disaster, have played an important role in determining the research topics that gain government support and the research questions that become matters of public interest (Adler 2019).

The most promising future approach may come from embracing greater interdisciplinarity. Some contemporary historians of oceanography, Rozwadowski in particular, have called for an all-encompassing attention to “ocean history,” approaching the ocean as a geographically varied, three-dimensional, biologically diverse, and culturally conceived environment (Rozwadowski 2013). Many have sought to blend analytical approaches from the history of science and environmental history. While historians of oceanography have treated the history of ocean science as shaped by requirements of “the field”, they have been slower to acknowledge the heterogeneous character of the marine environment. In advocating for a more inclusive approach, Rozwadowski writes: “ocean history does seem to be rather naturally oriented toward consideration of categories of space. While history traditionally addresses a particular geographic location, a specific time period, and finite groups of historical actors, environments such as oceans seem to require a different approach. Perhaps history of gyres, or trade-wind belts, or seamounts, or the deep sea, or tides might produce insights that histories of specific places such as Long Island Sound or the Grand Banks cannot” (Rozwadowski 2013, p. 138).

A more encompassing view of the spaces in which marine scientists have operated encourages historians of oceanography to borrow approaches from geography – such as attention to verticality (Adler 2020, 2022). As historian Christopher Pastore has recently demonstrated, using geography as a framework for analysis can offer a corrective to long-established tropes, helping to avoid oversights brought about by simply following the scientists. Pastore shows that the great voyages of exploration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – held up as points of origin for the history of marine science – “overshadow the less heroic ways that scientific knowledge about the sea was produced closer to shore, informally, and in many cases centuries earlier.” Instead of looking so exclusively at expedition vessels for the origins of marine science, we should investigate the “tidal pools, shallow bays, and coral reefs” that garnered the interest of seventeenth-century practitioners of natural history (Pastore 2021, p. 123). The “science of shallow waters” thus pushes back the established chronology of marine science and reveals a more diverse group of actors as central to the production of early marine scientific knowledge. Efforts to broaden our scope might also include identifying historical agents in the non-human world. The potential of this approach is demonstrated in a recent essay that examines the manner in which marine creatures shaped the economic and cultural worlds of the pearl fishery in the Gulf of Mannar (Fernando 2022).

Writing in 2008, Eric Mills addressed the then-current state of the field in an editorial published in the newsletter of the International Commission for the History of Oceanography. According to Mills, historians of the marine sciences still found their work frequently overlooked by historians of science and the discipline of history continued to be dominated by political history. At the same time, Mills expressed optimism that the history of oceanography would continue to develop and that younger historians would study the “interfaces between the marine sciences and public policy, military establishments, exploration and the environment” (Mills 2008, p. 3). Surveying the state of the field in 2022, I think Mills’ optimism remains warranted. The era of large international history of oceanography congresses dominated by practicing ocean scientists is over, but in the early 2020s historians of ocean sciences are well represented (often in ICHO-sponsored panels) at history of science, history of technology, and environmental history conferences alike.

As it matures as a subdiscipline of the history of science, the history of oceanography is benefitting from the willingness of scholars to embrace interdisciplinarity. Historians of oceanography are not as concerned with the divisions in ocean science important to biological oceanographers, physical oceanographers, or chemical oceanographers. In fact, informed by the social sciences and humanities, they are increasingly interested in more encompassing approaches to knowledge-making, including formal, informal, and tacit knowledge. They recognize that not all scientific knowledge about the sea has been produced by scientists. And that historical research need not be focused on a geographically confined marine ecosystem. We can examine the ocean sciences as practiced across a variety of environments. Histories of twentieth-century oceanography would now be regarded as incomplete if they failed to give attention to the role played by the marine sciences in international diplomacy or the efforts of private industry in underwater exploration (Martínez-Rius 2020).

Increasingly, historians of the marine sciences conceptualize their work as part of a broader project to historicize oceans – spaces long imagined to be timeless and unchanging. Collapsing fisheries, plastics pollution, and the global effects of climate change have eroded misconceptions of the ocean as immune to human activity (Rozwadowski 2019). Developing a richer understanding of the history of oceanography becomes ever more imperative as an aid to an ocean literacy now essential in shaping the human and planetary future.