维持世界的神经系统: 1880-1940年的海底电缆环境史｜博士项目

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PhD position：Sustaining the Nervous System of the World: An Environmental History of Submarine Cable Telegraphy, circa 1880-1940

Our Collaborative Doctoral Awards allow you to contribute to the development of a research project that has already been outlined by a team of established researchers within our consortium and partner organisations.

Each CDA includes provision for specific skills training to support the research to be undertaken, and also for employability enhancement opportunities within and beyond academia. Your research proposal should explain the direction you propose to take the project, the expertise you bring to the project, and the particular career development opportunities you are most interested in capitalising upon.

Outlines of each of the CDA projects can be found below.

For more information on the CDA application process, please read the [SWW DTP2 Guidance for Applicants 2021-2022] and [SWW-DTP2-Application-FAQs-2021-22] documents.

Supervisors:

Cassie Newland, Bath Spa University, [e-mail]

Richard Noakes, University of Exeter, [e-mail]

Gareth Parry, PK Porthcurno Museum of Global Communications, [e-mail]

The HEI supervisors are historians of telecommunications with much experience supervising PhD students collaborating with heritage organisations on projects transforming understanding of our electrically-connected world. Noakes has published on the history of cable telegraphy and is currently supervising three AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral projects with BT Archives. In 2009-10 he was PI on the £289k AHRC-funded Connecting Cornwall: Telecommunications, Locality and Work in West Britain, 1870-1918, a collaborative research project with PK Porthcurno that produced a new exhibition, academic publications and online resources for specialist researchers and schools. Newland is an expert on industrial archaeology who worked on the AHRC-funded project Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary, 1857-1900, curated London Guildhall’s Victorians Decoded exhibition, and is currently finishing an academic monograph on submarine cables and environmentalism prior to the period of this project. The PK Porthcurno supervisor, Emeritus Professor Gareth Parry, combines experience supervising PhD students with public engagement work in science and engineering, and expertise in the history of submarine cable communication.

The project represents the latest of many collaborations between PK Porthcurno, Exeter and other HEI organisations that have led to the successful completion of PhD dissertations and major outputs for the museum.

Subject

‘Sustaining the Nervous System of the World’ is a systematic study of the environmental strategies, broadly conceived, of the world’s leading submarine telegraph cable manufacturers between 1880 and 1940, the period when the business peaked. First laid in the 1840s and extending to over half a million kilometres by the 1920s, submarine telegraphs were powerful drivers of nineteenth and twentieth century globalisation and laid the foundations of our information age. Cable making was dominated by a handful of British-based private firms, notably the Telegraphic Construction and Maintenance Company (later Telcon), W. T. Henley’s Telegraphic Works, and the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraphic Works Company, whose long-term success depended on tackling critical environmental issues affecting the supply of the materials used in cables. For example, cable manufacturers had to create plantations in South-East Asia for gutta-percha trees from which a critically important electrically-insulating plastic substance was extracted, develop synthetic plastic alternatives to the depleting gutta-percha stocks, and recycle materials from moribund cables. However, these business/environmental strategies have not received the attention they deserve from historians. Using the underexplored archives of cable makers at PK Porthcurno and elsewhere, this project will significantly enrich historical understanding of the way the telecommunications industry has coped with its environmental impacts and this will underpin new critical perspectives on modern problems of reducing cable waste in our oceans. We’re increasingly anxious about the problem of plastic waste, especially in our rivers and oceans, and this project is a powerful lens through which we can better understand the historical roots of the problem.

The outcomes of the project will be a doctoral dissertation (100,000 words) and significant contributions to PK Porthcurno’s archive and object catalogues, its website and its public engagement activities. It is also expected that the student’s research will inform new environment-related displays at the museum.

This project represents an exciting alignment of the research objectives of the HEI supervisors and PK Porthcurno. Located in what was for much of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the world’s largest cable station, PK Porthcurno is one of the largest museums of its kind and holds more archive materials and objects relating to submarine cable telegraphy than anywhere else. The project will help PK Porthcurno better understand and exhibit materials in its collections relating to cable making, including archival documents and objects from Telcon, Henley’s and similar British firms. It will also help PK Porthcurno develop public understanding of the environmental impacts of telecommunications, past and present (as demonstrated by its Planet PK programme and collaboration with Subsea Environmental Services on the recovery and recycling of co-axial cables).

Research questions and methods

This project requires the student to closely study a wide range of published and unpublished source material, including business records, company magazines, technical reports, maps and objects. The interpretations and critical approaches to this material will draw on the recent historiography of technology, economics, imperialism and colonialism, and environmentalism, as well as Science and Technology Studies. The research questions focus on issues relating to cable making and environmentalism and might include the following:

• How did Telcon and other cable manufacturers manage the flow and depletion of gutta-percha and other natural materials used in submarine telegraph cables?
• To what extent did plantation-building, recycling and research into alternative natural and synthetic materials feature in their business strategies?
• What were the attitudes of cable manufacturers towards their environmental impacts, both above and under the sea?
• What can the study of recovered cable fragments tell us about their environmental impacts?
• How can the study of cable manufacturers help PK enhance public understanding of telecommunications and environmental issues?

There will be ample scope for the student to develop, in consultation with the supervisors, questions and approaches based on their own research strengths and interests. For example, they could focus more on questions of recycling than plantations or synthetic plastics; they could explore the impact of cables on marine life; or they could examine a period later than 1940 when, owing partly to the development of submarine cable telephony, environmental questions about synthetic plastics used in cables become more important than in earlier periods.

Research context

Academic historical studies of submarine cable telegraphy have been dominated by analyses of its technical development and of its significance in national/global politics, commerce, media and in the exact sciences. Typically, these studies have focused on cable operation, whereas historiographically more sophisticated studies of cable manufacturing, are thin on the ground. Helen Godfrey, Cassie Newland, John Tully are among several scholars who have recently begun to plug this gap by analysing the devastating environmental impacts of the late nineteenth-century global trade in gutta-percha and other natural materials used in cables. This project builds on and moves well beyond this literature in two significant ways. First, it focuses much more on the cable manufacturers rather than indigenous peoples involved in extracting cable materials (well covered in Helen Godfrey’s Submarine Telegraphy and the Hunt for Gutta-Percha: Challenge and Opportunity in a Global Trade (2018)) and second, it covers a later (mainly twentieth century) period when cable-making faced new environmental challenges with the use of synthetic plastic insulators, magnetic alloys and other new materials in cable designs. Revisionist historical perspectives on submarine cable making have never been more urgent given the rising awareness of today’s communication and power cable makers of their environmental responsibilities (see, for example, the work of the British Approvals Service for Cables).

Main resources/collections in this area

This project will exploit a wealth of untapped source materials for making a highly original contribution to a topic with considerable historical and contemporary significances. These include Telcon’s engineering and scientific research reports, minutes of business meetings, financial records, company magazines, photographs, maps and private diaries at PK Porthcurno, the National Maritime Museum and Merseyside Maritime Museum; technical reports and company literature of Henley’s at PK Porthcurno; and scientific and engineering periodicals held in the University of Exeter, the British Library, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. The student’s interpretations of this material will be shaped by their critical study of the relevant secondary literature, the major contributions to which are available in Exeter and Bath Spa. The student will have full access to PK Porthcurno’s collection catalogue which will help them locate relevant documents and objects. Discussions with PK Porthcurno’s curators and volunteers will also help them locate research materials and open up new directions for enquiry. They will have ample opportunities to create new and update existing electronic/online records which will enrich the publicly available PK Online Collections, and much of this work could be undertaken remotely from PK Porthcurno.

Skills developed by student and employability enhancement

In researching and writing the doctoral dissertation the student will develop their skills in academic historical research and writing. The HEI supervisors will provide guidance on research materials and methods, feedback on written work, and support for personal and professional needs. The University of Exeter’s Doctoral College and Bath Spa University’s Researcher Development Programme will also provide personal and professional development opportunities via workshops, courses, careers guidance and funding to help plug students’ skills gap and research needs. The PK Porthcurno collections team will provide the student with first-hand experience of managing a museum collection, training in handling, preserving organising and cataloguing materials, as well as supervision in such generic transferable skills as time-management, teamwork and the communication of research to expert and lay audiences (e.g. on the PK Porthcurno website, social media and museum-based talks).