Radioisotopes interrupted, the "Atoms for Peace" road trip in Latin America

During our research at the IAEA historical archives in Vienna, we
encountered a traffic disruption in the letters of Josef Obermayer, driver of a
truck carrying the Radioisotope Mobile Exhibition that traveled through five
Latin American countries between 1960 and 1965. To move the truck from
Brazil to the Bolivian border, the only available route involved the use of
trains. The travel faced many lumps and actual interruptions, including
uploading the truck into the train wagons, loading wooden logs into the
cauldron, and eventually, the accident damaging the truck’s stirring rods that
caught our attention. The variety of mundane obstacles faced by technical
assistance programs, provided us with a twist to problematize the received
ways in which the movement of knowledge has been conceptualized in the
literature of the history of science and technology. More than problems of
communication, our research is now focused on the materialities of travel.