Carrer del Carme, 47
Barcelona
Conferència “Under Water in the Park. Cultures of Oceanography in Vienna’s Prater, ca. 1900”, a càrrec de Christina Wessely, de la Universitat de Lüneburg (Alemanya), dins del cicle “Natura i ciència al parc: continuïtats i discontinuïtats de les ciències naturals a la Ciutadella”.
Until well into the nineteenth century the ocean was a widely uncharted space and as such object of both scientific interest and popular imagination. From 1850 onwards, zoological and marine biological field stations and research institutes were founded. Aquaria opened in the European cities to present the “wonders of the deep sea” to a large public. Countless urban amusements played with the underwater-theme.
In Vienna’s Prater, the former hunting ground of the Austrian emperors, a part of which became one of the world’s largest amusement parks in the course of the nineteenth century, many different cultures of oceanographic and marine biological knowledge were present around 1900. In my talk I will trace the histories of the public aquarium, the Biologische Versuchsanstalt (Institute for Experimental Biology) and fun fair attractions like the “Prater-diver”, which were only a few hundred meters away from each other.
I will thus show that nineteenth and early twentieth century knowledge of marine environments was co-produced in extremely diverse cultural fields by many different actors: biologists and businessmen, pleasure-seekers and amateur zoologists, showmen and science popularizers. The park was the ideal (and probably the city’s only) place were all these people and ideas came together. It was thus the ideal milieu for new knowledge to be generated and to spread.
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