Abstract Summary
There is no bright line between representing and intervening – even microscopes can be used to, for instance, fabricate atomically-precise devices. Yet materials scientists routinely make a rough distinction between tools associated with characterization and those associated with fabrication. In general, historians and philosophers have paid more attention to the latter, perhaps because they were more easily folded into debates about representation and reality. In the past few years that tide has slowly changed, with recent studies of (among others) experimental refrigeration by Joanna Radin and ion implantation and molecular beam epitaxy by David Brock and collaborators. In this paper I review the various fabrication techniques that our collection examines. I use that survey to argue that in the Cold War, policymakers and many materials researchers themselves focused on fabrication techniques relevant to four domains of application: missiles/space, nuclear weapons/energy, computing, and oil. I quickly review a representative fabrication apparatus – Rick Smalley’s AP2, which enabled the Nobel-winning discovery of buckminsterfullerene – and its links to all four of those domains. Researchers allied with these four domains were both producers and consumers of new fabrication techniques. Indeed, the desire to move new tools across interlinked domains was one of the hallmarks of postwar materials research. Since the end of the Cold War, a new domain has become increasingly prominent: life. Biological systems were never absent from materials research, but since the 1990s their importance has increased – both as parts of fabrication apparatus, and as drivers of innovation in fabrication apparatus.
