ABSTRACT
The instruments and technologies of science and their role in geography and exploration is by no means a new object of historical scholarship. Yet several recent edited collections on exploration pay little explicit attention to the technologies and instruments involved. One reason have to do with geographers greater reliance upon insights from the history of science in exploring geography's historical making, rather than upon the history of technology. Many narratives of exploration document just such matters. The units commonly taken for granted in studies of science and exploration, geography and technology are themselves matters of social and political authority. In this chapter on the UK's Linesman radar early warning system in the 1960s, Graham Spinardi's account is likewise of the complex workings and failure of a socio-technical system whose accuracy was finally measured in terms of political value.
