General Electric Company, Schenectady, New York FIGURE 9.-Charles P. Steinmetz, founder of the General Electric Company's Laboratory and the man responsible for much of the technology development in the early days of the electrical industry.

theoretical research. Team-work dominated Bell Labs, most projects required prior approval by the laboratory director, and very few scientists enjoyed Davison's liberty to follow his research wherever it led him (ref. 26). The industrial laboratory was oriented, overwhelmingly, toward goals set by corporate management.

Where government collaborated with industry, the former tended to become a service agency responding to specific problems set by the latter. A classic example of this relationship was the history of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. In contrast to electrical technology, aviation was something that began in the United States. The U.S. military saw advantages in aviation and in 1908 awarded the Wright brothers their first military contract. However, this did not represent continuing sponsorship of aeronautical research. The United States did not create an aeronautical technical organization until the First World War, when the major European powers quickly developed a number of sophisticated combat aircraft. This event did not go unnoticed in the United States, and in the 1915 Naval Appropriations Act a rider was attached establishing the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).

The NACA was empowered to conduct research and development in aviation, as well as to advise the President on how best to develop

General Electric Company, Schenectady, New York FIGURE 10.-Irving Langmuir, one of the distinguished scientists who worked at General Electric Laboratory. He received a Nobel Prize in 1932.

aviation technology. The Langley Memorial Laboratory was established in 1917, followed by the Ames and Lewis Laboratories in 1939 and 1940. After dropping its advisory role in 1926, NACA concentrated on conducting aeronautical research, with emphasis on the needs of industry and the services. Yet the relationships engendered made it difficult, if not impossible, for NACA to do the kind of long-range research implied by its charter. In certain critical areas, like boundary layer research, NACA took no official interest until research had been underway in Europe for almost twenty years. In effect, NACA ended by becoming captive to the interests of its sponsors. "Pressed by the need to get the next generation of fighter aircraft into operation or the next prototype into production, both the services and industry tended to focus. . . on immediate problems, on incremental advances in the state of the art, on refinement of the equipment at hand." (ref. 27.)

Conclusions

By 1939, the organization of Federally-sponsored research and development had taken on many of the features it still retains. The system was strongly pluralistic and decentralized, with no central department for science confronting some nonprofit organization representing a united scientific community. The government operated through a network of research bureaus, laboratories, and research stations, down to the level of the county extension agent. In contrast to what was soon to follow, the role of the government contractor was mostly limited to supplying specific kinds of equipment; the Federal Government had not reached the point where it would delegate to industry the management of entire installations, supervision of huge R&D projects, and responsibility for monitoring thousands of subcontractors. The work of the pre-1939 research bureaus, whether it involved setting product standards, testing airplane models in wind tunnels, or mapping the United States, was either repetitive or so long-term in effect that it never would come to a definite end.

Yet the system, such as it was, was exceedingly flexible. From the modest beginnings of the Washington Naval Shipyard and the Coast Survey, the Federal Government had gradually assumed responsibility in many other areas impinging on the general welfare. What was more, there was no hard and fast division between basic and applied research, between the university and industry, or between the scientist employed by the Federal Government and one whose research was subsidized by a land-grant college. Competition was the order of the day: state universities competing with private universities, and Federal research bureaus competing with each other for funds. Finally, within the constraints of a Federal bureaucracy, most of the requirements for research in government service conditions formulated by Ferdinand Hassler (the first director of the Coast Survey) as far back as 1842 were partially met: need for long-term support, need for flexibility in objectives, freedom to publish, access to the international scientific community (ref. 28), and improvements in the position of the professional scientist. How the system was transformed under the stress of war into the nodes of mission-oriented scientific agencies, depending heavily on the private sector for contract services, is the theme of our next chapter.

CHAPTER III

The Technology Development Laboratory From the Second World War to the Early

1970s

The United States' entry into war after Pearl Harbor did much to shape the organization of science and technology development. Put simply, because of the exigencies of war, the government was now prepared to spend almost unlimited amounts to achieve a single technological objective. Where scientists in and out of government had had little political influence, their chief spokesmen now had direct access to the President; and where the government contract had been at best a clumsy device for procuring research and technology development, it now became a flexible instrument, once freed from the restraints of competitive bidding. Much depended on the timeliness of the principal administrative decisions. The entry into war was preceded by more than a year-and-a-half of careful planning, based on the knowledge that: The United States was being drawn into war on the side of Britain; that, lacking some mechanism to coordinate relations between government and scientists, the United States would be ill-equipped to use the most advanced military technology; and that Germany had the potential to develop a nuclear bomb far more powerful than any conventional weapon.

The prime mover in the creation of a wartime scientific organization was Dr. Vannevar Bush (fig. 11). In 1940, he was President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and a former Vice President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Bush numbered among his friends some of the most influential scientists in the country, including Frank Jewett, President of the National Academy of Sciences, Karl Compton, President of MIT, and James B. Conant, President of Harvard. All of them were disturbed at the United States' lack of military preparedness, especially since they believed that the next war would be highly technological (ref. 29). They also believed that to mobilize science and technology a new Federal agency, rather than a reconstituted National Research Council, was needed. Bush eventually met with President Roosevelt, who (on June 27, 1940) approved the establishment

FIGURE 11. Vannevar Bush. An early pioneer in computer research, he later became one of the great organizers of technology development during the Second World War when he headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

of the National Defense Research Committee, with Bush as chairman. One year later this was expanded by executive order into the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), again with Bush as head.

The establishment of the OSRD marked a radical break with earlier science-based agencies. It operated no laboratories and did not take over projects already underway. Rather, it sponsored whatever research and development from theoretical work to development of weapon systems was deemed necessary to the war. The contract was the OSRD's favorite instrument. Between 1940 and 1941, most of the obstacles to procuring research and technology development were removed. The National Defense Expediting Act of 1940 authorized the