Tropicalizing the Portable Radio

Abstract

During the Second World War, the U.S. military found that fungal growth put its portable radio equipment out of use at an alarmingly fast rate in the tropics. This paper follows radio engineers and biologists as they made sense of “‘tropical deterioration” and devised techniques of “tropicalization” to counteract it. By tracking multiple materializations of air that carried not only radio signals, but also fungal spores, it shows how the categories of the portable radio and the tropics became recast in their encounter. If the portable radio was imagined to condition spatiotemporal experience so as to fold the tropical environment into the smooth space of military logistics, tropical deterioration ran counter to this imaginary. As air mixed radio and fungi, the decaying portable radio served as a trope around which these scientists and engineers pitched mechanical time of radio technology against organic time of fecund tropical nature, which ran faster than in the temperate zone. To protect the portable radio from dangerous tropical air, radio engineers came to see hermetic sealing as a preferred method for tropicalization—a choice that evinces their aspiration to keep technology and the environment apart.