• Boilers. It is well known that boiler scale is deposited inside hot water boilers and pipes. The maintenance of boilers and pipes at sea was a major problem for the Navy.

• Metal fatigue. Little was known as to why metals became brittle with use and broke.

• Gaskets and glands. No one knew what were the best materials for sealing rotating shafts to the glands in the hull through which the shafts passed.

These problems were not solved during the war, but had to await the more leisurely approach possible during peacetime. The attack on these problems was made by Commodore Matthew C. Perry who, after serving in the Mexican War, became commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He persuaded the Navy to subsidize construction of six iron steamships, which were built for commercial services but could be converted to commerce raiders in the event of war. The ships were leased to a private shipping line, which proceeded to use them as packets in the North Atlantic service. In this way, many of the problems Perry encountered during the war were studied and solved. This represents one of the earliest examples of the transfer of technology from military to civilian applications.

The other major consequence of the Mexican War was that something was done about the dismal state of the ordnance. Guns were both inaccurate and dangerous. In 1844, for example, a gun burst and killed the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy as they were inspecting the frigate "Princeton." During the war, in 1847, a young lieutenant named John Dahlgren joined the staff of the Washington Naval Shipyard. Dahlgren was one of the most innovative of American engineers. He was the first to apply systematically important new scientific principles to the construction of guns. He successfully developed and constructed rifled cannons and built first-class foundries, laboratories, and test facilities. Without question, his work as Chief of the Ordnance Department of the Washington Naval Shipyard contributed greatly to the favorable position of the Union Navy during the Civil War. When he died in 1870, he had turned the Naval Shipyard from an institution that was primarily a shipbuilding establishment into a technology development center. As Dupree notes: "Thus the Navy in the Civil War came to terms with every important phase of the technological revolution that affected it. Under constant criticism from outside and riven by internal controversy, the department nevertheless managed to find officers well qualified to handle the new research technology and put them in positions where they were able to act. In no important way did they further the naval revolution, but to keep pace with it was a major accomplishment which hinted at government's potential ability to apply scientific procedures to technological problems." (ref. 23.)

The Civil War spawned three other important developments of a technological nature. The first was the encouragement of railroad technology, particularly the standardization of the gauge of American railroads at four feet eight inches (or 1.42 meters) and the devising of new methods for the rapid laying of tracks. The second was a concurrent improvement in civil engineering techniques. At the end of the Civil War, there were several institutions for technical education loosely modeled on the example of France's Ecole Polytechnique founded in 1794: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1802), which was also the nation's first engineering school; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (1824); the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute 1854); and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1865).

Yet the two most important structures of the immediate postwar period — the Eads (1867-1874) and Brooklyn Bridges (1869-1883) were designed by men who received their training elsewhere. James Buchanan Eads made his fortune by developing a method of salvaging boats that had gone to the bottom of the Mississippi; during the war he built a fleet of armor-plated boats to defend the waterways for the Union. His great bridge (fig. 7) over the Mississippi at St. Louis was unique in the number of innovations it embodied: It was the first large structure anywhere to use steel for the structural members; the first in America to use pneumatic caissons to found the piers; the first arch bridge to use cables to cantilever the arches out from the masonry in order to keep the channel open while the bridge was under construction; and finally, it was one of the first bridges in America where each part was manufactured and tested to the most rigorous specifications. John Roebling, on the other hand, had studied in Berlin under Hegel and after immigrating to the United States for political reasons, farmed before turning to engineering. The Brooklyn Bridge, which Roebling designed but did not live to build, embodied all of the basic elements of the modern suspension bridge. It was also, when it was completed, half again as long as the next longest span Roebling's bridge over the Ohio at Cincinnati.

But the single most significant event of the period, so far as it affected American technology, was the enactment of the Land Grant Act of 1862. This farsighted legislation, introduced by Congressman (later Senator) Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont, provided for Federal subsidies for the support "of at least one college (in each state) where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including Military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts in such manner as the Legislature of the states may prescribe . . ." The Morrill Act, as it is often known, accompanied the Homestead Act of 1862, which made it possible for many Civil War veterans to migrate westward and farm what had been public land. The institutions of learning constructed under the

Morrill Act concentrated on agriculture and engineering, those fields vital to the rapid development of the new lands. In 1890, Morrill secured an act which appropriated for each land-grant college an annual sum gradually increasing to $25 000; in 1900, this support became permanent.

Smithsonian Institute, Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

FIGURE 7.- The bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis built by James B. Eads, 1867-74. An example of "high technology" in the nineteenth century.

Great as the impact of the two Morrill Acts has been on American education, their impact on science policy has been greater still. The 1862 act, as well as the creation of a Department of Agriculture the same year, marked the first time that Congress implicitly recognized that its constitutional duty to provide for the general welfare included sponsoring some scientific research. When the Hatch Act was passed in 1887 as an addition to the Land Grant Act, it required the establishment by each of the land-grant colleges of agricultural and engineering experiment stations which were to "acquire and diffuse useful and practical information on subjects connected with agriculture." At a stroke, the Hatch Act (in Dupree's words) changed the Department of Agriculture "from a single central agency into a nexus of a system of semiautonomous research institutions permanently established in every state." (ref. 24.) This system, supported since 1934 by the Agricultural Research Center at

Beltsville, Maryland, has done much to give the United States the preeminent position in agriculture it enjoys.

Yet it must be conceded that until the Second World War, scientific research was a rather peripheral activity of the Federal Government. In addition to its arsenals and shipyards, the government had several bureaus engaged in scientific research. Beginning with the Coast Survey, founded in 1807, the most important included the Public Health Service (1818), the Naval Observatory (1842), the Geological Survey (1879), the National Bureau of Standards (1901), and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (1915), as well as the Smithsonian Institution, chartered by Congress in 1846 as an independent establishment which, nevertheless, received congressional appropriations. When we consider that such early Presidents as Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy Adams followed the progress of science with the keenest interest, it seems surprising that they and their successors did so little to promote scientific research. Don Price, in his Scientific Estate, has provided a clue: “One half of Jefferson's theory defeated the other half. Jacksonian democrats were quite willing to follow Jefferson in opposing establishments and class privilege, and relying on applied rather than theoretical science. But they were not interested . . . in building up . . . scientific institutions that would bring America up among the leaders of science." (ref. 25.)

There was, then, no possibility of a centralized scientific establishment, no Department of Science, such as the National Academy of Sciences advocated. Indeed, until the First World War the Academy's role as science advisor to the government was negligible. Not until 1916, when the National Research Council (NRC) was created to serve as the Academy's operating arm (the NRC was made permanent by executive order of the President in 1918) did the Academy have the mechanism to stimulate research contributing to the national welfare.

In the post-Civil War period, there was a notable growth of "private" research institutions those sponsored by industry, universities (especially those, like Johns Hopkins, modeled on the German graduate school), and the great foundations. It is important here to distinguish technology development from product development. The point is that private investment without government sponsorship (directly or through subsidies and tax credits) had insignificant impact on technology development before 1900. In product development almost all investment has been private, and there it has been exceedingly important. The great

Although the Public Health Service was not formally established until 1912, 1818 marks the establishment of the Surgeon General's Office and the Army Medical Department, with authority to prevent and treat disease. See Appendix II for details.

research establishments of E.I. DuPont de Nemours in the Brandywine Valley of Delaware, those of General Electric in Schenectady, New York (fig. 8), and the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey (founded in 1925) dominated applied product-oriented research in the United States well beyond the Second World War.

FIGURE 8.- The Corporate Research Laboratory of the General Electric Company at Schenectady, New York.

Consider the development of electrical technology in the United States. American entry into electrical technology came relatively late. The Americans Morse, Bell, Edison, Westinghouse, and others tended to be brilliant amateurs, while the Europeans (for example, the Siemens brothers) were professionals. A generation later, rationalization, sustained by a supply of newly-minted engineers and Ph.D.s (most of whom got their degrees in Germany), set in. Charles P. Steinmetz, founder of GE's Laboratory, is shown in figure 9. GE played a prominent role in advancing radio technology, with Alexanderson's work on the alternator and Langmuir's (fig. 10) on the vacuum tube and the feedback circuit. At Bell Labs there was Davison's work demonstrating the wave nature of electron beams, which led to L.H. Germer's method of studying the crystal structure of surface films, Harold Black's principle of negative feedback as applied to amplifiers and, in 1947, the work of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley in developing the transistor. Yet neither GE's Schenectady laboratory nor Bell Labs were by any means centers for