or its 10th annual conference in 1955, the Instrument Society of America highlighted the expanding role of industrial instrumentation in American life by crowning a Miss Automation. Posing in a Flash Gordon-like costume brimming with clocks, formulas, and antennae, Barbara Thomason, a former Miss Muscle Beach, helped draw attention to the spread of automation in the U.S. Her comic costume, however, belied the trade show's serious focus on the market for industrial instrumentation in the space race launched that year between the United States and the Soviet Union.