The third chapter utilizes soldiers’ writings to indicate that, contrary to the developers’ view of the gas mask as a life-saving device, combatants were more frequently frightened of both the appearance of the gas mask on others and the physical feeling of the mask against their own skin. While German tacticians hoped to craft chemically resistant soldiers through gas mask training, these newly envisioned “chemical subjects” continued to ruminate on the many ways in which masks could malfunction. Sitting in the trenches, soldiers largely feared both the uncoordinated and creeping nature of gas and the smothering feeling of their affixed gas mask. By examining the sensorial and metaphorical language in a wide array of soldier diaries, trench journals, and troop reports, this chapter seeks to construct the emotive experience of German World War I soldiers as they came to recognize their precarious role in a modern world now seemingly steeped in gas.

While 1945 clearly demarcates an important curtailment of Germany’s unique ties to chemical weapons, it certainly did not signify the nation’s final confrontation with harmful chemicals or even chemical weapons. The Germans remained within a broader “Chemical Modernity” into which the world had been increasingly plunged since the first industrial production of chemical gases. Indeed, in this longue durée formulation of a Chemical Modernity, it is important to note the extent to which Europeans struggled with environmental concerns such as industrial smoke abatement and arsenic dye poisoning in the nineteenth century.

While the modern military gas mask was first designed by scientists such as Richard Willstätter in order to save German soldiers from chemical death, it ultimately contributed to the escalation of chemical warfare in World War I. New military tactics and advances in chemical weaponry such as gas shells and mustard gas were developed with the express purpose of “breaking the mask.” Thus, the gas mask was part and parcel of both the war of sheer material production and the chemical nightmare on the battlefield that helped precipitate the German defeat in 1918. By intertwining the historical development of gas with that of the gas mask, this chapter highlights moments in which a specifically German “chemical modernity” began to be conceptualized.

Intense bursts of solar radio emission were first recognized by Second World War British and Australian coastal radar systems as well as by German and Japanese radar systems. Due to wartime security, these discoveries were not declassified until after the end of hostilities but, before declassification, Grote Reber, working alone in his mother’s backyard, reported receiving surprising strong radio emission from the Sun, well in excess of the expected emission from the 5,000 K solar surface. In 1946, while demonstrating his equipment to government representatives, Reber rediscovered solar radio storms when his chart recorder went off scale. Following World War II, with rapidly improving instrumentation, the Sun became a major target in the emerging field of radio astronomy. Observations with instruments of increasing sophistication have traced the complex time, frequency, and spatial dependence of the solar radio emission which corresponded to a wide variety of emission mechanisms. Later, following a false start due to using incorrect positions, radio emission was also detected from a variety of stars in our Galaxy, opening up the new field of stellar radio astronomy.

The history of radio astronomy has been a series of discoveries, mostly serendipitous, using a new instrument, or using an old instrument in a new unintended way. Theoretical predictions have had little influence, and in some cases actually delayed the discovery by discouraging observers. Many of the key transformational discoveries were made while investigating other areas of astronomy; others came as a result of commercial and military pursuits unrelated to astronomy. We discuss how the transformational serendipitous discoveries in radio astronomy depended on luck, age, education, and the institutional affiliation of the scientists involved, and we comment on the effect of peer review in the selection of research grants, observing time, and the funding of new telescopes, and speculate on its constraint to new discoveries. We discuss the decrease in the rate of new discoveries since the Golden Years of the 1960s and 1970s and the evolution of radio astronomy to a big science user oriented discipline. We conclude with a discussion of the impact of computers in radio astronomy and speculations on the potential for future discoveries in radio astronomy – the unknown unknowns.

The realization that radio astronomers could detect radio galaxies that were well beyond the limits of even the most powerful optical telescopes suggested that radio observations might be able to distinguish between the two competing cosmological models. The commonly accepted big-bang model required that, since the Universe continued to evolve with time, so the distant (younger) Universe should appear different than the nearby modern Universe. By contrast, the steady-state theory required that the Universe is, and always was, everywhere the same, so distant galaxies should look the same as more nearby galaxies. An intense controversy developed between radio astronomers in Sydney, Australia and Cambridge, UK over the distribution of radio sources and their implication for theories of cosmology. The Australian radio astronomers, who had better data than the Cambridge research workers, found no evidence of cosmic evolution. The Cambridge group, led by Martin Ryle, misunderstood the effects of their instrumental errors and used an incorrect analysis – but got the right answer, arguing that the Universe is evolving with time, contrary to the expectations of the steady state-theory.

Some celestial objects, later recognized as quasars, were catalogued back in 1887, and their extragalactic nature was discussed as early as 1960. However, the large measured redshift of 3C 48 was rejected, largely because it implied an unrealistically high radio and optical luminosity. Instead it was assumed to be a relatively nearby, less luminous galactic radio star. Following the 1962 observations of lunar occultations of the strong radio source 3C 273 at the Parkes radio telescope and the subsequent identification with an apparent stellar object, Martin Schmidt recognized that 3C 273 had an unmistakable redshift of 0.16. Due to an error in the calculation of the radio position, the occultation position actually played no direct role in the identification of 3C 273, although it was the existence of a claimed accurate occultation position that motivated Schmidt’s 200 inch telescope investigation and his determination of the redshift. Later radio and optical measurements quickly led to the identification of other quasars with increasingly large redshifts, although the nature of the quasar redshifts remained controversial for decades.