please do not cite or circulate, this is a work in ... · “uranium in south africa,” office of...

Please do not cite or circulate, this is a work in progress.

With his 2002 film Western Deep, the British video artist Steve McQueen became a kind of

dystopian tour guide, inviting audiences to come and see the world’s deepest gold mine, some 40

miles outside the city of Johannesburg. Once inside, viewers are sent down a narrow tramway,

following the tracks through a tunnel that is just wide enough for grown men to pass in single

file. We enter a stope where men are drilling, producing a thick, sticky dust and loop back

through the mine’s cooling system and its vertiginous cells, each one twisting and turning off

suddenly in pursuit of gold; the precious metal that has driven the city’s development across the

surface and below it. 1

Then we come to a curiously suspended site. The mine’s surface acclimatization chamber,

or climatic room: designed to extract the most extreme subterranean conditions and reproduce

them above ground, to prepare new and returning miners to work in an environment that features

high humidity and temperatures up to 90 F before they are cleared to go underground. Here, we 2

find two long rows of black men, who are facing each other, barefoot, and stripped down to some

kind of standard issue shorts, stepping up and down off of a raised platform in time to an ear-

splitting metronome. It’s difficult to say how long the men have been doing this, stepping up and

stepping down, but we learn very quickly that this exercise, in this space, causes pain.

While scientific sources will explain that this simple, repetitive task is designed to test the

miners’ physical capacity to manage heat stress, McQueen plays with the relationship between

!1

For further analysis of McQueen’s work, see T.J. Demos, “The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen,” 1

October 114 (Fall 2005): 61-89; “Life Full of Holes,” Grey Room 24 (Fall 2006): 72-88; Derek Conrad Murray, “Obscene Jouissance: The Visual Poetics of Labor Exploitation, Third Text 21 (2007): 31-39.

R. Kok and N. B. Strydom, “A Guide to Climatic Room Acclimatization,” Chamber of Mines of South 2

Africa Research Organization, Human Sciences Laboratory, Project No. 720/64/B, Research Report No. 41/70 (Amended), CSIR Library.


image and sound, so that the two begin to separate: the blaring signal hits our ears right after the

miners move. The asynchrony is disorienting, obscuring the fact that the metronome is slowly 3

accelerating until suddenly the audience is surrounded by relentless, harsh noise. Palpable relief

when the scene ends might alert us to the way physical and mental pressure feed off each other

on the mines. 4

Thanks to his aggressive use of cuts in the editing process, McQueen’s video obscures the

distance between the room and the stope; collapsing the distinction between the surface and the

underground, the architecture of extraction and the apparatus that produces miners. McQueen’s

approach promises to provide insight into the way it would feel to work on a deep-level mine,

where the rock itself can radiate heat at temperatures that exceed 130 F. Spaces blur together, 5

and we are overwhelmed by a desire to track the passage of time. How much longer can this be

endured? But if we turn our attention elsewhere, to study the design of the room itself, we might

begin to notice that the climatic room does not simply reproduce subterranean conditions above

ground. In fact, records held by the South African Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

indicate that the room was designed to help the industry plan the development of even deeper,

hotter, mines.

!2

Heat stress is a generic term used in occupational health to refer to the risk of illness or death related to 3

physical work under high temperatures. The most serious heat illness is heat stroke, which can be fatal; other illnesses including heat exhaustion, heat cramps, and heat rash might also be considered to be workplace hazards as the symptoms of headache, dizziness, thirst, nausea, irritability, and confusion can cause deadly accidents. See C.H. Wyndham and N.B. Strydom, “Acclimatizing Men to Heat in Climatic Rooms on Mines,” Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (October 1969): 60-64.

In an alternate reading of this scene, T.J. Demos argues that the increasingly irregular beat “releases 4

image and viewer from the slavish repetitions of routine.” The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen, 84-5.

D.H. Hillhouse and G. Lange, “Design Features of a Deep-Level Shaft,” Journal of the South African 5

Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, May 1973, p. 340.


Shaft Versus Klap: Acclimatization on Johannesburg’s Gold Mines 1950-1975

South Africa was uniquely positioned after World War II, because of a geological oddity

which ensured that gold and uranium could be extracted from the same mines. Because its gold

industry was already highly developed, leaders of the Apartheid state and foreign governments

alike speculated that, with minimal investments in new infrastructure, they could produce highly

enriched uranium quickly and at a relatively low cost. Fueled by global and national business and

security interests at the beginning of the cold war arms race, South Africa’s mining industry

expanded aggressively, forcing hundreds of thousands of miners to work faster and deeper than

ever before. By the mid 1950s, the country was home to the world’s first “ultra-deep” mine, 6

which was operating more than a mile underground. At these depths, the temperature of the air

rarely fell below 100 F, while working miners struck rock that radiates heat at an average of 115

F. Within two decades, South Africa's deepest mines were operating nearly two miles below the 7

earth’s surface.

!3

In 1953, the South African Office of the Atomic Energy Board announced an agreement with a 6

joint agency representing the British and American authorities, which ensured the production of uranium oxide at no less than 15 gold mines under the Atomic Energy Act. While the capital cost of the construction of the plant is likely to exceed 40 million pounds and the annual gross revenue when in full production is not likely to be less than 30 million pounds all the capital requirements of the mines participating in the uranium program were to be “obtained from overseas by arrangement with the purchasers of the uranium. “Uranium in South Africa,” Office of the Atomic Energy Board, Pretoria, 1953. For more on the geopolitics of uranium see: Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, MIT Press, 2012; Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, MIT Press, 2011.

D.H. Hillhouse and G. Lange, “Design Features of a Deep-Level Shaft,” Journal of the South 7

African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, May 1973, p. 340.


As they moved deeper underground, the industry was exposed to lethal forms of heat

stress. Miners engaged in strenuous physical work in high temperatures were vulnerable to

nausea, dizziness, and faintness— all of which could cause serious accidents, death, and the

destruction of critical infrastructure above and below ground. New and more powerful

ventilation and refrigeration systems were required, but threatened the profitability of the mines. 8

To limit both the cost and risk of operating deep mines, industry scientists turned to human

physiology. They sought to test the body’s absolute limits in order to determine the exact point at

which ventilation and cooling interventions were strictly necessary and to establish the

parameters in which such interventions would significantly improve miners’ productivity.

This paper analyzes the design, and subsequent circulation, of the climatic room as it was

constructed first within a scientific laboratory, and then as it was adopted and reproduced on a

national scale as a training facility for miners recruited to work inside the hottest mines.

Attending to design records and scientific studies that demonstrate significant dialogue between

U.S. research on survivalibility and the South African mining industry, I argue that the deep

space of the South African mine became a crucial site for the development of ‘the interface’ as an

architectural project after World War II.

I depart from recent studies of ergonomics, which conceive of the interface as an

instrument of mediation, which can physically remove the human body from extreme

environments in order to protect its integrity and extend its capacity to operate in potentially

lethal conditions in combat, and in the cold war space race. As architectural historians like John

!4

C.H. Wyndham, Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines Research Organization 8

Report on the Heat Stroke Position at the End of 1964, COM Ref Project No 720/64/D Research Report No. 18/65.


Harwood and Felicity Scott have noted, this concept of the interface must be understood as a

privileged, rather than universal, design bound up with constructions of a human species which

had its counterpart in notions of racial abnormality which could be subject to alternative and

ultimately cost-saving experiments to modify, rather than protect, the body of miner who would

be classified as Native, Bantu, African, and Black. 9

The slippery, and often contested, nature of these classifications should not obscure the

extent to which they made it possible to deny forms of bodily autonomy, and bodily integrity,

that were idealized in the design of the space suit, space ship, and space colony. In South Africa

designers were not asked to design a prophylactic against the increasingly inhospitable

environment. They were asked to systematically study the miner’s exposure. The interface is thus

best conceived of as an instrument of sensory deprivation, which promised to methodically

separate the miner’s capacity to feel from his capacity to make decisions about working

conditions in the extreme underground environment. It would limit the time of the architectural

intervention, which exposed the industry’s new recruits to an optimized worst case scenario

before they were cleared to work in an unstable and unpredictable environment.

As I track how the industry’s scientists shaped an architectural response to what they

called, somewhat euphemistically, “the heat problem” inside South Africa’s ultra-deep mines, I

focus on the way the design and calibration of the climatic room challenged scientific consensus,

and miners’ embodied knowledge, regarding the threshold beyond which heat and humidity

would be intolerable. It is alert to the physical and conceptual framework that made it possible to

!5

For more on the history of racial classification in the South African mining industry see Jeff Guy and 9

Motlatsi Thabane, Technology, Ethnicity and Ideology: Basotho Miners and Shaft-Sinking on the South African Gold Mines,” Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, Special Issue on Culture and Consciousness in Southern Africa (Jan., 1988), pp. 257-278.


separate the skin from its body— to set building standards, and train miners’ bodies to withstand

air conditions, according to increasingly abstract studies of the skin’s emissivity. The industry’s

experiments with skin, especially that which they removed from cadavers, reanimated

longstanding debates about the limits of the human body. Skin samples that were reduced to

smooth, transparent patches of colour were used studied to set universal standards for bodily

performance. While the systematic study of skin erased, or made illegible, its political and social

meanings, bodies were increasingly subject to a spatialized regime that sought to selectively

reinforce racial difference. In the process, bodies were treated as things that can be re-formed,

and repossessed.

Initial Concerns

According to industry records, the design of the surface acclimatization chamber was first

proposed within a laboratory context in 1953. It was completed by a team of mechanical

engineers under contract at the newly formed Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Heat

Mechanics Research Department. Like their counterparts in the US space program, they initially

relied on wartime studies conducted with US Armed Forces trainees in order to establish research

facilities and research parameters concerning human physiology under extreme environmental

conditions. 10

!6

Citing a 1942 report published in the American Journal of Physiology, they posited that the average 10

miner should be able to work safely and efficiently for the duration of a 6 hour shift at a rate which requires a maximum heart rate of 180 beats/minute and approximately half his maximum oxygen intake. When their initial experiments revealed that miners’ heart rates maxed out at a lower rate under hot air conditions, they opted to use the maximum oxygen intake to set the work rate. Introduction, Physiological Limits to Rate of Work of Native Mine Labourers in Hot Air Conditions, A.L.P. Report No. 11/58, December 1958, p. 2.


While physiologists proposed several methods to establish ‘endurable’ or ‘tolerable’

limits, they struggled to control the relationship between mine air conditions, body temperature,

and work rate— which would need to be managed carefully in order to determine the effect that

heat has on miners’ capacity for work. 11

The problem was that the difference between the miner’s observed and potential

performance on a given task would depend on a complex interplay between what industry

scientists considered to be “inherent characteristics” that were “built in to the man by his nature

and nurture” and “extraneous factors” such as the quality of leadership, relations with

coworkers, or training, which could be redeveloped in order to improve the miner’s “will to

work.” Thermal stress, generated by hot air conditions, would further affect the interplay 12

between the miner’s physiological and psychological characteristics and the mine’s

environmental factors— but it did not increase in a linear fashion. Because heat stress, and its

impact on work performance, could peak suddenly, mine managers could not simply extrapolate

from miners’ previous experiences to plan the future development of hot and deep mines. 13

To test various ventilation systems, to develop a method to set the maximum safe levels

of shift work in various hot air conditions, and eventually to standardize air conditions and work

rates across the industry, the Applied Physiology Laboratory designed an experimental chamber

!7

C.H. Wyndham, N.B. Strydom, J.F. Morrison, F.D. du Toit and J.G. Kraan, Applied Physiology 11

Laboratory Report No. 1/53, p. 18.

“Guide to the Chamber of Mines Methods of Acclimatization” G.PC. Circular No. 72/59, June 1958, p. 12

2.

Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines Applied Physiology Laboratory, “Explanatory Note 13

on A.P.L. Report No. 11/58: The Effects of Heat on Work Capacity/Physiological Limits to Rate of Work of Native Mine Labourers in Hot Air Conditions, A.P.L. Report No. 11/58, Johannesburg, December 1958, p. 1


to model best worst case scenarios. This climatic room was calibrated to expose miners to high 14

heat and and surface temperatures at half degree intervals; to test and habituate work in higher

and higher temperatures, and set new industry-wide standards via a process of acclimatization. 15

While their studies approached the threshold of survivability, they sought to isolate

particular organs, and organ systems, that seemed to determine when and how heat limits the

miner’s work capacity. They relied on common medical devices to monitor heart rate, sweat rate,

and lung capacity, and core temperatures. Eventually, however, some of these organs failed to

respond to the established limits of human physiology. Miners kept working, when they should

have collapsed. As the body’s behavior became increasingly unfamiliar, industry scientists

became dependent on the appearance of the skin to define effective thermal regulation. 16

Physiological Discrepancies

Initial designs for the climatic room followed from international consensus about how to

establish “safe limits” in increasingly lethal environments, using the work rate that a man can

maintain effectively for a five hour shift. In the early 1950s, the Applied Physiology Laboratory

defined this work rate as the “highest level of oxygen intake” at which there is “a very small

probably” of a body overheating or collapsing at any given air condition1. There was nothing

particularly novel in the decision to measure oxygen intake to index heat stress. Thanks to the

!8

W.L. Grant, “The Design and Development of a Climatic Chamber for the Study of Human 14

Reactions Under Different Environmental Conditions,” Journal of the South African Institute of Mechanical Engineers, December 1954, p. 135.

G.A.G. Bredell and N.B. Strydom, “A Provisional Guide to Surface Acclimatization,” February 1966.15

C.H. Wyndham, “Criteria for Physiological Limits for Work in Heat,” COMRO Project No. 720/64/D. 16


work of historians like Anson Rabinbach, we know that such respiratory experiments have been

critical to the development of the “science of work” since the eighteenth century. What made the

South African experiments significant, within the mining industry and among designers

concerned with the way the human body reacts to extreme environments, was the fact that they

demonstrated that there are important “discrepancies” between the human body’s physiological

response in hot and cool air conditions.

When working at their maximum oxygen intake, mines reached their maximum heart

rates more quickly at 34 C than they did at 27. And yet, early experiments demonstrated that, in

temperatures above 30 C, miners could work for a number of hours with heart rates in the range

of 160-180 beats/minute— while in lower temperatures they could only work for a number of

minutes at these heart rates before oxygen deprivation would cause muscles to fail, and bodies to

collapse. Miners could thus work at their maximum heart rate for a longer amount of time in hot

air conditions than in cooler ones.

What’s more, the factor which forces miners to stop working under hot conditions was

not acute muscle fatigue as it is in cool air. Instead, what causes miners to stop working under

hot conditions, even at relatively low levels of work, was circulatory collapse. While this would

manifest with signs and symptoms of heat stress including headache, dizziness, thirst, and

nausea, it would not cause muscular failure. Industry scientists drew two tentative conclusions

from these studies. First, they claimed, the models that the industry had developed to determine

miners’ potential work rate in cool air conditions would underestimate the miners potential work

rates in hot conditions. And second, if they could consistently improve cardiovascular fitness

among miners, mine managers should be able to push miners to work at their body’s maximum

!9


capacity in hot air conditions longer than they would be able to work in cool air conditions.

Although these conclusions were published in industry reports as early as 1958, the

laboratory was quick to qualify them. Speaking to mine managers that urgently needed “accurate

and reliable answers” regarding the relationship between the miners’ current and maximum

performances, in order to weigh the costs and benefits of ventilation procedures that could be

adopted to improve air conditions underground, the laboratory stressed that until studies with

“samples of the Native mine population which are fully representative of employees” could be

conducted, their conclusions would “NOT apply to Natives of other weights, ages, or tribal

characteristics.” 17

Initial experiments were conducted with a group “young, underweight Nyasas” precisely

because they represented “one of the predominant groups of Tropical Natives” working in the

Orange Free State goldfields— where concerns about heat stress were most concentrated in the

1950s. Their study operated according to the logic of colonial race science, which assumed that

any African man recruited from the ‘tropical zone’ north of South Africa would tolerate heat

better by virtue of his birthplace, when in fact the Mozambican men had been subject to “certain

standardization procedures,” which consisted of a three week acclimatization period in which

they trained at 36 C in dry heat and 33 C under humid conditions.

It is important to reflect on the logic of classification at work here. On one hand, the

laboratory reports that its aim was to test what could be an exceptionally capable group of miners

in order to determine the highest work rate that miners could maintain in high heat. The idea is

!10

C.H. Wyndham, et. al, “Criteria for Physiological Limits for Work in Heat,” HSL Research Report No. 17

47/64, p. 5.


that the industry could use miners who are most fit set climate standards and then see if others

could match it. There was, moreover, an expectation that others of same tribe, weight, and age

would perform at the same level.

Historians of the industry have long emphasized that managers often mobilized a “belief

in the existence of inherent tribal characteristics” and group stereotypes about the Zulu, the

Xhosa, the Basotho, the Mpondo, and the Shangaans to match specific African groups to specific

jobs. This strategy was critical in the rapid expansion of the industry in and beyond the

Witwatersrand after the Second World War. To open the dual stream gold/uranium mines in the

neighboring Orange Free State, companies relied almost exclusively on Basotho miners. The

process of opening a mine depended on labour-intensive breaking and cleaning crews— which

needed to be extremely well-coordinated to ensure that the speed of shoveling and volume of

rock being thrown did not lead to serious collisions. To safeguard speed, management used the

miners’ sense of group identity and superiority to motivate and organize them, while the miners

used their group reputation to obtain better pay and working conditions. 18

So expert has the Basuto become in the use of the shovel that, with the assistance of an iron shoe worn over his left boot, he can lever the blade into the broken rock, gather a full load, and hurl it fully into the skip, over the heads of an inner line of workers, bent down to raise their next load. The Natives forming the inner line stand close to the skip, and with their backs to it throw their loads over their shoulders: the outer line face the skip and throw their shovel-loads forward. 19

!11

Jeff Guy and Motlatsi Thabane, “Technology, Ethnicity and Ideology: Basotho Miners and 18

Shaft-Sinking on the South African Gold Mines, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1988, p. 274.

“Basotho Shaft-Sinking on the Witwatersrand,” Mining Survey, II, I, 1949. 19


In the postwar period, however, resistance to this mode of enforcing a tiered workforce

was also becoming more powerful. While industry officials claimed that compulsory education

eroded “the old tribal system,” they had to respond to the fact that “tribal authorities have lost

authority (as a result) over team leaders, especially among better educated youngsters. While 20

they refused to acknowledge that all work in the deep mines requires skill, they recognized that

they had to establish “more effective means of identifying and attracting workers with records of

reliability and ways of excluding the inexperienced and the unreliable.”

Acclimatization and/as Standardization

In the early 1960s, industry scientists argued that the human body “constantly endeavors”

to maintain a state of balance between the heat generated in it and that rejected from it.

Physiologists explained that when environmental conditions rise or fall sharply, the miner would

be subject to thermal stress, as the mean body temperature and heart rate change, and the body’s

thermo-regulatory system attempts to maintain its previous status quo. At this point, the rate of

heat transfer between the human body and its surroundings would have a significant influence on

the miner’s ability to work.

Conceiving of the miner’s body as an ally, or at least an instrument with which to calibrate

underground air conditions, they tested the extent to which the exchange of heat between a man

and his environment can be altered without increasing air circulation or decreasing ambient

temperatures. They tested the four ways that heat is released from the body— by evaporation,

conduction, convection, and radiation.

!12

“Vaal Reefs Re-Organization and Accommodation of Black Employees,” Chamber of Mines 20

1973 Productivity Campaign, p. 5


Convection concerns the layers of air that are in contact with the exposed skin, and the way

these layers are heated and carried into the airstream. The rate at which heat is convected from

skin depends on air velocity, direction, and turbulence, as well as the temperature difference

between the contact surfaces and the air. Evaporation plays an important role at high temperature

when the body sweats, but its rate depends more on air conditions, and the difference between

the vapour pressure of the sweat on the body and clothes, than on the human body itself. The

study of conduction, whereby heat is transmitted from the inner tissues of the human body to the

skin and thus passed to the environment, presented more opportunities to study how changes to

the body itself could improve heat transfer. Early studies made clear that the “value” of

conductance depends on body dimensions, thickness of subcutaneous fat, blood flow, and the

proximity of patent blood vessels to the skin’s surface, as well as air temperature, and the

direction of local spatial temperature gradients near the surface. But the Applied Physiological

Laboratory focused its studies on radiation, which entails the transfer of heat from one object to

another without physical contact.

Although radiant heat exchange always occurs when the temperature difference between

the body and the environment has a gradient larger than zero, the amount of heat exchanged

depends on two factors. The first of these is the emissivities of the exposed parts of the body,

clothing, and surrounding solid surfaces. It depends on how effective each material is at emitting

energy as thermal radiation. The second is the temperature of those surfaces. The heat transfer

for a given temperature difference becomes greater as the temperature level increases. Industry

scientists were interested in radiation because it accounts for a significant portion of heat

exchange under the ‘comfortable conditions of everyday life’ where wind speeds are low and

!13


active sweating does not occur— and in environments where the wall and air temperatures are

markedly different— in boiler rooms, foundaries, as well as deep mines. Even more critically,

“the mechanism of the radiation of heat from the body” would uniquely enable scientists to study

skin temperature, and therefore proximity to dangerous heat stress, with a precision that had

never before been possible. While it was difficult to measure surface temperatures accurately,

since the existing physiological state is disturbed any time the thermometer is placed in contact

with the skin— radiative heat would allow researchers to bypass the difficulties of measuring

surface temperatures.

Skin By Comparison

Although climatic rooms had been developed to study physiological responses to extreme

heat during the Second World War, the earliest models were essentially air conditioned chambers

in which the air temperature and humidity could be controlled. To test the limits of the miners’

skin, the Applied Physiology Laboratory needed to design a room that consisted of

hypersensitive, hyper-responsive surfaces. The mean radiant temperature of each wall, floor, and

ceiling would need to be independently controlled within precise aerodynamic and

thermodynamic limits.

Their experimental room was not just equipped to maintain air temperatures up to 130 F,

although air temperatures were controlled within a half a degree at all times. The surface

temperature of every plane was made to operate in a temperature range between 35 and 140 F.

Each panel could be further controlled within a half degree of its own set point. Engineers

designed vertical as well as horizontal air flow in order to regulate air velocity with greater

!14


precision. Initial tests with the room suggested that velocity could be controlled within 1% of the

mean air speed, while air turbulence would be kept below 6%. Permeable walls were constructed

to verify that heat flow would be evenly distributed throughout the room, and that the

temperature gradient would not exceed 2 F.

The research team began with a long, narrow chamber. This minimized the distance

between the two opposite side walls, and made it easier to attain uniform velocity distribution in

the chamber. Air would flow through humidity and temperature control sections before it entered

the test chambers. It entered and left the chamber through 25 mm gaps between horizontal bar-

grid panels which comprised opposite walls. Water was circulated through a series of bar-grid

panels to further regulate temperature; each bar-grid panel was provided with a separate

temperature control system. Similar facilities were provided for the independent temperature

control of the floor, roof and each of the side panels of the test chamber.

The interior of the room was dominated by long adjustable benches and a metronome.

There were low ceilings, florescent lights, no windows. Equipped with a resistance thermometer

and an electrical hygrometer the walls delivered constant feedback on the room’s temperature

and relative humidity. Human access to the test chamber was provided by a single door which

was built into one of the walls. It was of hollow construction, which ensured that the fluid

circulating through the adjoining panel would also circulate through the door when it was closed,

to control temperature.

At the time of the chamber’s construction, the wall, rather than the door, was the focus of

much analysis. It raised questions about the miner’s capacity to feel the differences between the

uniformly heated and permeable surfaces. The issue, according to design reports, was whether

!15


the sensation of warmth felt by a person as a result of radiation from the bar-grid wall was like

that felt due to the uniform heated wall of the same mean radiant temperature. Designers asked:

“is the human body sensitive to both the wave length of radiation and to radiant heat transfer”

and “can the radiation from the hot and cold surfaces be felt individually when spaced fairly

close together?” Soon however, the research that the room facilitated rendered questions about

the body’s capacity to sense, feel, and evaluate environmental conditions irrelevant. Industry

studies stressed skin by comparison. Their efforts to establish a formula with which to predict the

skin’s capacity to emit thermal energy at different temperatures, drove industry scientists to

compare human skin to other, less complicated, materials.

Skin as Blackbody

The human body poses a unique problem to scientists that study its skin. It has an irregular

surface with concave portions, which makes its surface area, and thus its radiation area, difficult

to measure accurately. Scientists working for the Chamber of Mines explained that although

physiologists often tried to measure the “actual physical area of the human body” the methods

they had developed were so time consuming that most researchers simply estimated the body’s

surface area using a height-weight relation developed in the early twentieth century. But, they

contended, the effectiveness of any radiating surface can effectively be determined by measuring

how well it absorbs energy— since, mathematically speaking, the geometrical relationships in

the equation for emission are identical to the relationships in the equation for absorption. In

practice, this allowed the Applied Physiology Laboratory to develop a series of experiments

which made it possible to study skin without a body, and to set industry-wide standards for

!16


ventilation and cooling based on this most carefully managed threshold between the miner and

the environment. The scientific study of skin systematically removed, or made illegible, its

political and social meanings, as well as the individual’s embodied experience, as well as

evidence of learning and expertise. 21

While the climatic chamber was still being tested, the Applied Physiology Laboratory

developed something they called a photodermoplanimeter— an experimental apparatus which

would allow scientists to use a light array to “see” the body’s surface area by monitoring the

radiation flux in energy in the visible range of wavelengths before and after the miner stepping in

front of the light-tight box. They could avoid lengthy calculations by making use of the principle

of substitution— inserting a body of known surface area, which by its geometry has a radiation

area equal to its physical area, is used as a substitution standard and the energy loss produced by

this body is compared directly with the energy loss produced by the experimental body. Both are

made to have a very high emittance as they are painted with the same black paint. The miners’

skin is domesticated, at least for a minute. “It was found that the black stainer which is used for

modern polymer water paints for house decoration made an ideal coating.” 22

Before the radiation flux observed with the photodermoplanimeter could be used as a

measure of skin temperature, the skin’s actual emissivity— its capacity to emit thermal energy—

had to determined. To do so, scientists employed a commercial radiometer, a device which

!17

On “pit sense” and the development of the embodied knowledge that miners use to navigate 21

and assess risk underground see Jean Leger and Monyaola Mothibeli, “‘Talking Rocks— Pit Sense Amongst South African Miners,” Labout Capital and Society 21:2, November 1988, pp. 222-37; Ken Kamoche and Kevin Maguire, “Pit Sense: Appropriation of Practice-Based Knowledge in a UK Coalmine,” Human Relations, Vol. 64: 5, December 2010, pp. 725-44.

E. C. Halliday and T.J. Hugo, “The Photodermoplanimeter,” Journal of Applied Physiology, 22

Vol. 18:6, 1963, p. 1288.


measures the radiant flux of electromagnetic radiation. As long as no temperature difference

between 2 surfaces other than incoming radiation, the radiometer will produce output voltage

that is directly proportional to rate at which radiant energy fell on it. Each time emissivity was

measured, scientists compared the numbers to a reference “black body”— a material

approximation for a theoretical object that is a) an ideal emitter: at every frequency, it produces

and diffuses as much or more thermal radiative energy as any other body at the same temperature

and b) a diffuse emitter: the energy is radiated independent of direction. Their tests found the

total normal emissivity of human skin to be .995 irrespective of its visible color. In view of the

relatively high emissivity of human skin, the scientists concluded, it could itself be regarded as a

black body.

These experiments confirm studies conducted in the United States in the 1930s, which

first demonstrated that white skin could be treated as a black body. Previous experiments made 23

it possible for researchers to develop a constant in equations which would describe the

relationship between metabolic rate, surface temperature, and radiation. Here, however, in the

effort to establish the limits of what the skin can do, the body became a confounding variable

which had to be eliminated. As the scientists explained, to test the extreme end of tolerance, the

target temperate had to be constant for a period long enough to allow for step adjustments to be

made in the temperature. Since it was unlikely that a skin site on the living body could be kept at

a constant temperature for more than a few minutes” they worked to develop a second apparatus

which could hold a skin sample better than the human body. This “skin holder” was designed to

!18

James D. Hardy, “The Radiation of Heat from the Human Body,” Journal of Climatical 23

Investigation, 13:4, 1934, pp. 593-604.


hold 1.5 inch circular skin samples, cut from cadavers and laid in a horizontal plane, with the

epidermal side exposed and the dermal side kept at a controlled but variable temperature. The

dermal temperature was maintained using a heating liquid, rather than a heating coil, to simulate

the way the skin in its living state is heated by the blood. It was, they concluded, far easier to

manage the temperature of the skin sample constant using the climatic chamber’s constant-

temperature environments. Once the maximum threshold was set, the miner’s body had to be 24

trained to endure the skin.

Industrial Rites

As early as 1965, the Chamber of Mines began to recommend that the acclimatization

procedure developed inside the climatic room be replicated at mines across the country.

Guidelines for designing, constructing, and using the climatic room were printed in industry

journals, by the early 70s, discussed in productivity campaigns. The earliest surface

acclimatization processes were designed to be completed in 9 days. In the first days, supervisors

would monitor heart rate, sweat rate, and temperature, to ensure that new recruits had the

physical capacity to withstand high heat. As acclimatization progressed, they were subject to

more intense intervals of physical conditioning. 25

To explain why the chamber’s air temperature was set at 93 degrees rather than 96, industry

scientists said: With this combination of work rate and environmental heat, the number of high

!19

Mitchell, et al, p. 363.24

G.A.G. Bredell and N.B. Strydom, “A Provisional Guide to Surface Acclimatization,” Transvaal and 25

Orange Free State Chamber of Mines Research Organization, Human Sciences Laboratory, Research Report no. 16/66, February 1966.


temperature cases [that is, overheated individual bodies] in the first few days of acclimatization

would be relatively high. This would put a great strain upon acclimatization supervisors [their

ability to monitor all miners effectively] and might lead to their missing cases with excessively

high temperatures— thus increasing the risks of heat stroke during the procedure. 26

Acclimatization in climatic rooms was rapidly and extensively adopted in the gold mining

industry. By 1969, approximately 250,000 (or 85% of all new miners) were acclimatized under

this new system. 26 climatic rooms were built on different mines in order to investigate problems

“in situ” and eliminate the need to transport test subjects over long distances. In 1973, the

Chamber of Mines and the seven mining houses operated 13 research and development

laboratories, with a combined staff of 800 to 900 people and spend annually approximately R12

million to R13 million on research and development. 27

And yet, laboratory experts soon found many cases, climatic chambers were being designed

with “little understanding of the factors involved and with a simplicity in outlook which can only

be described as naive.” They stressed that in order to obtain reliable, realistic and accurate results

about work rate the design of the climatic room must be subjected to the same level of scrutiny

as the experiments that the management planned to conduct inside of it. “Unless this is done, the

experiments themselves may lack both the accuracy of design and results, and economy of time,

materials and labour which are the hallmarks of good experimentation.” If internal evaluations 28

!20

C.H. Wyndham and N.B. Strydom, “Acclimatizing Men to Heat in Climatic Rooms on Mines,” Journal 26

of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, October 1969, p. 63.

Productivity Campaign Overview, p. 32.27

Ibid.28


suggest that mine managers were not constructing rigorous laboratories, they also make it clear

that the room was used to test management concerns.

By way of conclusion, let us compare the way industry portrayed Basotho labor at the

beginning of the 1950s and how it introduced new miners at the end of the 1960s. The point is to

emphasize the reconstruction of bodies according to changing industrial demands. Where “the

Basuto” describes the model body as a group body, the new model miner’s body was industrial.

That is, it would be constructed inside the chamber, which aggressively enforces the boundary

between home and work, and obscures the skill that is transferred from other work experience. A

video made to introduce new miners to the climatic chamber stresses that the miners will lose

their acclimatization if they miss work—further underscoring that the acclimatized body is a

product of the industry.

It opens with various shots of men working in the stopes, showing the new recruits what

they should anticipate doing with their training. The video then introduces us to three men: one is

heavy and tall, another is short and thin, the third is in between. We follow all three of the men

through the acclimatization process, to see how it is adapted to the needs of these three body

types. We move quickly to “change rooms” which we learn are heated, serving as a transitional

space which prepares the new recruits for the hot room. The first task for the new miners is to sit

in the change rooms for 20 minutes when they arrive. The video assures us that a team leader

will be with them to answer questions about the acclimatization process.

Once they have adjusted to the heat of the change room, they are weighed and then sorted

accordingly. The largest, heaviest miners are assigned a brown skirt, the smallest, lightest miners

are issued a yellow skirt, and those in the middle receive a blue one. Multiple shots show the

!21


three men receiving their uniforms. Moments later, the video shows the men standing together, to

re-enforce the relationship between body type and uniform color. Once the men have been

sorted, they line up to have their temperature taken. The group is then supplied vitamin C tablets.

This pill, they are told “helps your body get used to the head more quickly.” As if it anticipates

resistance, the video continues, “The pill is good for you. If you did not take this pill, you would

have to work longer before your body got used to the heat.”

The video also introduces us to spaces of contingency. It moves outdoors, to show new

recruits an outdoor toilet, before returning to the hot room, to show that it is only equipped with

urinals. It explains that miners must use the toilet outside before they enter the hot room. If a

miner must leave the room to use the toilet before he has worked 4 hours, he will have to repeat

the session. If the miner becomes dizzy, and cannot hold the thermometer properly, a privacy

screen will be placed around him and his rectal temperature will be taken. It also shows us a

home scene, the space that the miner is supposed to return to when his contract at the mine is

complete.

It alerts us to the temporary status achieved by the miner’s conditioning and the recursive

nature of his labor: “When you come back from home, you will again have to come to this

room.” The video warns new miners that it only takes a week for the body to lose its training for

heat in the hot room. The industry has determined that miners that do not work underground for

seven days will need to come back to the hot room for retraining. Cut to the hot room. “You will

have to train your body again for heat for a few days. The number of days you must spend

working in the hot room will depend on how long you have been absent from underground.” Is

this a threat? Punishment? Or simply a precaution. The video assures us: “You may not spend as

!22


many days in the hot room as the first time, because your body may still remember a little bit of

its training for heat.”

The program outlined by the orientation video dramatizes a very particular attempt to

cleave Black labor; to establish and maintain a space that can be governed by the inarguable laws

of physiology, which is insulated from the vicissitudes of life. The video script claims that it will

“teach your bodies,” as though they might be detached from the miners themselves, “to get used

to working in the heat underground”. This strange possessive form is used again to assure new

miners that there are emergency procedures that will be followed at the first signs of heat stress.

“If your body becomes too hot, the team leader will tell you to rest. He will put a red disc around

your neck and watch to make sure that you do not become ill” The opening sequence contains a

promise and a threat: “To be happy in your work, your body must be strong.”

!23


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