The study will examine the role of Neuchâtel Observatory in this global movement, tracing its contributions to the international scientific community and the dissemination of knowledge. The paradigm shift from celestial to atomic time not only transformed the scientific understanding of time but also had profound implications for various fields, from telecommunications to navigation. By combining archival research with an analysis of the technological advancements made during this period, the project will offer new insights into how atomic clocks shaped modern time measurements. Ultimately, this research seeks to contribute to the broader history of science and technology by documenting this pivotal moment in the development of precision timekeeping.

In 1951, the Australian-born neurophysiologist John C. Eccles and his physicist colleague John Coombs, working together at the Otago Medical School in New Zealand, constructed an electronic stimulating and recording unit for studying neural transmission in rabbits. They concluded that a chemical process was involved, and not strictly electrical impulses. Contemporary scientists obtained similar results, and Eccles would go on to share a Nobel Prize for his work. He – and the ESRU – did not stay in New Zealand indefinitely. Eccles, who had previously studied in Australia and in Great Britain, took the apparatus with him when he left New Zealand to return to Australia in 1952, then when he left Australia for the University of Chicago in 1966, and finally when he left Chicago for the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1968. When he retired from Buffalo in 1975 to go to Switzerland, he left the instrument behind – from there it came to the Smithsonian. The history of this instrument illustrates – quite literally – both the circulation of ideas and of scientists in mid-twentieth century neurophysiology.

In 1933, the physicist Bruno Rossi carried out an expedition to Eritrea (at the time an Italian colony) which allowed him to definitely prove that primary cosmic rays were mainly composed of positive particles. A few months before, Arthur Compton had asked Rossi to bring to Africa one of the ionization chambers involved in a worldwide series of experiments aimed to detecting a latitude effect for cosmic rays. A newly discovered archive about Rossi’s life has recently become available: letters, documents, notes and photographs were found in the house in Venice where he lived until 1938, when he left Italy due to the racial laws. Thanks to this, we are currently working to reconstruct the expedition: the way it was carried out and the contacts with the institutions; the project for a permanent laboratory in Eritrea; the travels of Compton’s chamber. The present talk will focus on the letters Rossi sent to his mother from Eritrea, where he described the way he worked, his insights about the experiments and his contacts with and impressions about the Eritrean people, who also helped the expedition. The aim of this presentation is also to highlight the newly discovered aspects of the complex international cooperation which led to such a memorable scientific expedition. Luckily, some instruments used in Eritrea are still on display at the “Giovanni Poleni” Museum in Padova, like Geiger counters or the “cosmic-ray telescope”. We are now acquiring from Venice new interesting information on other instruments by Rossi, preserved there too.

In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner discovered “super-pleasure” in the brain of a laboratory rat. The discovery of super-pleasure in the brain inaugurated a major transformation whose repercussions and off-shoots are very much still with us today, including the development of a neurophysiology of decision making, risk taking, addiction, affective neuroscience, and more

In my presentation, I will reconstruct the laboratory enactment and “technology” that constituted this new pleasure as “supramaximal,” instant, and insatiable. This laboratory enactment-technology was the looped rat. It entailed a simple and simplistic lever, which enabled the rat to insatiably self-stimulate its own "pleasure center" in the brain. I will examine how “pure” “supramaximal” “super-pleasure" was a product of this hybrid between rat and technology. I will also study the technologies for measuring-estimating the intensity of the rat’s pleasure. These latter technologies would sometimes break down or fail to measure an intensity that was off-the-grid, perpetual, and insatiable. These latter breakdowns and failures of technologies contributed to the constitution of the rat’s pleasure as beyond any known measure—a “supramaximal” pleasure.

My presentation focuses on developments in 1950s and 60s United States. It draws on primary and archival materials and on interviews with several of the individuals who participated in this revolution.