Chapter 5 Forced Air: Environmental Control and Colonial Expansion in Eighteenth-Century Britain
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Abstract
This chapter explores how the early history of a seemingly mundane technology – designs for forced ventilation that appeared in Britain during the 1740s–was both produced by and productive of questions of scientific inquiry, environmental control, applied power, and the limits of artificial systems.
It revolves around Stephen Hales, a Newtonian natural philosopher, and his efforts to promote the machine he called a “Ventilator” – a word he coined in 1741 to describe the bellows-like pump he invented to force air into prisons, hospitals, sea-going ships, and other structures. As historians of science and medicine have explored, Hales’s machine – alongside other period designs for both forced and passive ventilation – was inspired by theories of medicine that considered air quality as the crucial determinant of human health. The chapter builds on that previous scholarship by considering a series of consequences that unfolded from the operation of these novel machines. Forced ventilation was not merely a medical instrument, that is, but also raised new questions about power and labor, as well as the problem of how far the compass of aerial control should extend.
Transforming structures into actively breathing bodies required the constant administration of power. Who or what would power forced ventilation, and whom would it serve? Hales’s contest with the brewer Samuel Sutton over which system would ventilate the ships of the British Navy brought this question into relief. Where Hales’s machine required manual labor, Sutton’s “Air-pipes” relied on the convective force of a coal fire to draw air through a ship’s hull, an apparently automatic operation that anticipated our modern building systems, which require constant inputs of fuel to operate. At the same time, forced ventilation also began to suggest a new relationship between human-made structures and their natural surroundings. By furnishing a mechanically fabricated internal atmosphere, these machines reflected a new belief that the environment was not something whose dangers and vicissitudes needed to be passively accepted, but rather that nature was now something that could be actively and deliberately controlled. As Hales’s device was deployed on ships forcibly transporting enslaved Africans in the 1740s and 1750s, some of these larger implications became evident. Forced ventilation, in this sense, can be understood as one piece of a much larger effort through which the British aimed to render space safe for colonial expansion through supposedly natural means. This unremarkable technology, in other words, unsettled crucial boundaries – between interior and exterior, open and closed, passive and active, artificial and natural.