Part 03: Governing Air
“An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768.
(Perhaps the first time the inventive combination between a living organism, a sealed chamber and mechanisms to manipulate air appeared in the records of History was in England, with Robert Boyle’s Air-pump experiments in the second-half of the seventeenth century. Boyle’s pneumatic-machine stands for a moment when air appeared to knowledge as a natural phenomena which immanent laws, although not controllable, could be investigate and systematically verified if in controlled and reproducible conditions. The expensive material technology of the pump allowed Boyle a certain degree of power over a very small portion of air isolated from the atmosphere by a tight glass globe wherein he could place objects and animals and conduct a series of experiments with them. Basically, the Air-pump mechanism enabled the creation of an artificial space without air, and by taking air out, Robert Boyle and his collaborators could observe and register the effects of its privation on anything inside the globe, and consequently, infer in some of the effects that the natural presence of air produces yet are not naturally perceived. Boyle’s experiments concentrated mainly on atmospheric pressure, trying to visualize inside the glass chamber the wage of air upon bodies by creating a vacuum around them. But he also conducted a series of experiments to investigate the effects of air on respiration, placing frogs, snakes, baby cats and birds inside the receiver and observing what would happen to them when air was pumped out. Being the chamber completely empty, every and each animal inevitably died after some violent convulsions, but Boyle realized that if air was withdrawn gradually and at the precise volume to live just a rarefied atmosphere inside the chamber, the animal would slowly faint as if dead, returning to life as soon as the technician had opened the valve to let the re-ingress of air into the globe. The process of extinction and resuscitation of an animal calibrated through the air-pump valve-system was comparable to what happened if a candle was placed inside the receiver; the fire would gradually extinguish, but if a spark was left at the end, one could then bring it back to full life by allowing the air to return inside. Whatever is in the air that keeps the fire burning sustains life as well.
The original scheme of the Air-pump designed by Boyle would from then on be employed in practically every situation when the nature of air and its effects would demand investigation. The fundamental idea that to study the atmosphere it is necessary to isolate air inside a controlled space where the outcomes of some artificial manipulations can be verified is possibly found in all different areas of scientific knowledge which one way or another have to deal with the matter of air, from the environmental chambers of toxicology to the wind-tunnels of aeronautic engineering, only varying the purpose, the mechanisms, and the scale of the apparatuses. Moreover, the Air-pump stands as a paradigm not only for the history of atmospheric technology. The historiography of sciences credit to this machine a special place in the history of scientific knowledge itself, being Boyle’s apparatuses one of the objects around which the practice of experimental research could be forged and latter on institutionalized as the only reliable source of knowledge to explain the immanent mechanisms of the natural world. There exist a sort of “epistemological model” inscribed in the mechanism of the Air-pump, so to speak, which basic principles can be identified scaled up to the space of modern laboratories, where contemporary science find a fully controllable chamber as the medium to reproduce, observe and represent natural processes.
In thinking Boyle’s air-pump as both a paradigmatic tool of air-technology and a model for scientific research, even more interesting is to speculate on the social consequences that the machine entails. At the same time the mechanism provided a medium to access the natural order, it gave the technological possibility of intervening on it. The experiments with animals revealed that, independently from the form, life was impossible without air. But Robert Boyle only came to this conclusion by carefully managing the vital forces of birds through the pump’s valves like they were candle flames. The counterpart of producing knowledge about nature meant a certain gain in power over life.)
 “Bird in the Air Pump”, director: Micky Conefrey, BBC documentary, MMVI.
 Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.