Inventions and Discoveries in Letters to Perón

Abstract

This chapter examines the dialogue initiated by the Argentine government of Juan Domingo Perón with the popular technical imagination, at a time when both state policies and a nascent mass culture sought to adapt to the novelties and scientific and technological challenges of the second postwar period. Far from offering a passive reception to developments originating in local and foreign scientific centers, members of the popular classes (workers, students, retirees, hobbyists, inventors and self-taught thinkers) developed their own projects and sought to express them through an exchange of letters with Perón. This created a file of more than five hundred letters with inventions, projects and recommendations of a scientific-technological nature, which offer the historian a privileged opportunity to analyze ways of thinking, representing and experimenting with “the scientific” that characterized a social sector that cannot be considered alien to the problems they were attempting to solve.