Boyd Ruamcharoen from Harvard University won the 2025 Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize awarded by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) for his paper “Tropicalizing the Portable Radio: Electronics and the U.S. Military’s Battle Against Fungi in the Pacific War,” Technology and Culture 65, no. 2 (2024): 497–529.
During World War II, the U.S. military confronted an unexpected problem: “tropical deterioration.” In the hot, humid conditions of the Pacific Theater, portable radios and electronic equipment rapidly decayed and became overgrown with fungi. “Tropicalizing the Portable Radio” tells a history of U.S. scientists and engineers’ attempts to understand and mitigate tropical deterioration—and how their divergent solutions reveal competing ideas about how electronic technology should relate to the environment. This history demonstrates that weatherproofing is a crucial yet overlooked environmental dimension of electronics miniaturization and portability, enabling these devices to function in diverse and challenging environments. This piece forms part of a developing book project, Empire of Rot, which uses the science of material decay and weatherability as a lens to tell a history of U.S. global power in the twentieth century.
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The Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize is given annually for the best paper published in the history of electrotechnology during the previous year.
