Ursula Franklin

Ursula Martius Franklin CC OOnt FRSC (16 September 1921 – 22 July 2016) was a Canadian metallurgist, activist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes. She wrote and spoke extensively about the futility of war and the connection between peace and social justice. Franklin received numerous honours and awards, including the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case for promoting the equality of girls and women in Canada and the Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in advancing human rights. In 2012, she was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. A Toronto high school, Ursula Franklin Academy, as well as Ursula Franklin Street on the University of Toronto campus, have been named in her honor.

For Franklin, technology was much more than machines, gadgets or electronic transmitters. It was a comprehensive system that includes methods, procedures, organization, "and most of all, a mindset". She distinguished between holistic technologies used by craft workers or artisans and prescriptive ones associated with a division of labour in large-scale production. Holistic technologies allow artisans to control their own work from start to finish. Prescriptive technologies organize work as a sequence of steps requiring supervision by bosses or managers. Franklin argued that the dominance of prescriptive technologies in modern society discourages critical thinking and promotes "a culture of compliance".

For some, Franklin belongs in the intellectual tradition of Harold Innis and Jacques Ellul who warn about technology's tendency to suppress freedom and endanger civilization. Franklin herself acknowledged her debt to Ellul as well as to several other thinkers including Lewis Mumford, C. B. Macpherson, E. F. Schumacher, and Vandana Shiva. She recognized that this list had few women. In addition to the philosophy of technology, she believed that science was "severely impoverished because women are discouraged from taking part in the exploration of knowledge".

Ursula Maria Martius was born in Munich, Germany on 16 September 1921. Her mother Ilse Maria Martius (née Sperling), an art historian, was Jewish, and her father, Albrecht Martius, an ethnographer, came from an old German Protestant family. Franklin once stated that her father was an "Africanist." Because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, her parents tried to send their only child to school in Britain when World War II broke out, but the British refused to issue a student visa to anyone under 18. Ursula studied chemistry and physics at Berlin University until she was expelled by the Nazis. Her parents were interned in concentration camps while Franklin herself was sent to a forced labour camp and repaired bombed buildings. The family survived The Holocaust and was reunited in Berlin after the war.

Franklin decided to study science because she went to school during a time when the teaching of history was censored. "I remember a real subversive pleasure," she told an interviewer many years later, "that there was no word of authority that could change either the laws of physics or the conduct of mathematics." In 1948, Franklin received her PhD in experimental physics at Technische Universität Berlin. She began to look for opportunities to leave Germany after realizing there was no place there for someone fundamentally opposed to militarism and oppression. Franklin moved to Canada after being offered the Lady Davis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in 1949. She then worked for 15 years (from 1952 to 1967) as first a research fellow and then as a senior research scientist at the Ontario Research Foundation. In 1967, Franklin became a researcher and associate professor at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science, situated in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Engineering where she was an expert in metallurgy and materials science. She was the first female professor in the Materials science and Engineering department at the University of Toronto. She was promoted to full professor in 1973 and was given the designation of University Professor in 1984, becoming the first female professor to receive the university's highest honour. She was appointed professor emerita in 1987, a title she retained until her death. She served as director of the university's Museum Studies Program from 1987 to 1989, was named a Fellow of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1988, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 1989.

Franklin was a pioneer in the field of archaeometry, which applies modern materials analysis to archaeology. She worked for example, on the dating of prehistoric bronze, copper and ceramic artifacts. One small example of her work in this field regards what was a standing question on the nature of shiny black Chinese mirrors found in high quantities in ancient tombs. Franklin's use of microscopic, etching, electron microprobe and x-ray fluorescence analyses produced evidence that what was thought by some to be a corrosive effect was in fact present in these ancient mirrors (and weapons) at their inception, in dark iron oxides intentionally added near the objects' surfaces. Franklin additionally pulled from historic and literary accounts of black mirrors in Chinese literature to support these findings. Franklin's expertise was also instrumental to dating glass; she guided a study on the remains of blue glass beads in North America remaining from early trade relationships between American Indian tribes and Europe.

In the early 1960s Franklin was one of a number of scientists who participated in the Baby Tooth Survey, a project founded by Eric and Louise Reiss along with other scientists such as Barry Commoner, which investigated levels of strontium-90—a radioactive isotope in fallout from nuclear weapons testing—in children's teeth. This research contributed to the cessation of atmospheric weapons testing. Franklin published more than a hundred scientific papers and contributions to books on the structure and properties of metals and alloys as well as on the history and social effects of technology.

As a member of the Science Council of Canada during the 1970s, Franklin chaired an influential study on conserving resources and protecting nature. The study's 1977 report, Canada as a Conserver Society, recommended a wide range of steps aimed at reducing wasteful consumption and the environmental degradation that goes with it. The work on that study helped shape Franklin's ideas about the complexities of modern technological society.