Spoils of War
The universities that attracted and served the commercial interests of the state had no trouble mobilizing science for military purposes. World War I mingled the interests of science, industry, and government throughout the nation; but nowhere were the consequences of the mix more enduring and efficacious than in California. This privileged position derived in large measure from what no longer exists—the clean, clear air of the Los Angeles basin. The air had inspired George Ellery Hale, a physical astronomer often nominated for the Nobel prize and an accomplished autodidact in the promotional arts, to establish the Mount Wilson Observatory, with the world's largest reflecting telescope, in the hills above Pasadena. In 1916 Hale invented the National
[16] Forbes, Men , 97–120, 278–300; Wilson, California Yankee , 54, 101–2.
[17] Sinclair, Goose-step , 127–8, 136 (quote). Among the implicated regents were the vice presidents of PG&E and Southern California Edison, a director of the East Bay Water Company, and the president of the California Electrical Generating Company.
Research Council, which, after defeating several federal agencies, took charge of making allies of American science and technology and bringing them to war on the same side. The council came into existence under the auspices of the somnolent National Academy of Sciences and with the approval of President Wilson.[18]
In administering the council, Hale was seconded by A.A. Noyes, professor of chemistry at MIT and Caltech, and Robert A. Millikan, then suspended between Chicago and Pasadena, whose great powers of organization, oratory, and salesmanship would go to Southern California after the war. Caltech turned itself into a training camp when the United States joined the fighting in 1917 and boasted that it had "exceeded all other civil colleges in devotion to war work." Hale tied his stronghold, Mount Wilson, to the NRC; it contributed importantly to the provision of good optical glass for binoculars, range finders, and field telescopes, which previously had come almost exclusively from Germany.[19] California organized a State Council of Defense whose work, in the judgment of the NRC, "[stood] out conspicuously among the contributions of scientific men of the country during the war." California could act so quickly and effectively because isolation had already prompted its scientists to integrate their local societies and to form West Coast branches of national societies; the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in connection with the Panama-Pacific Exposition, advised the State Council of Defense on behalf of all these organizations.[20]
Under the State Council and the NRC, the University's engineering shops became "veritable war laboratories;" its Chemistry Department agreed, almost to a man, to "work on any problem assigned to them," and to give any patents that might result to the University's regents. They received commissions to hunt for sources of chemicals to replace German imports, to make California petroleum into TNT, and to counter poison gas. Their most notable contribution was an absorbent for carbon monoxide
[18] Kevles, Physicists , 109–16; Geiger, Knowledge , 95–8; Crawford, Heilbron, and Ullrich, Nobel population , s.v. "Hale."
[19] Scherer, Nation at war , 42–3.
[20] Henry S. Graves, chairman, Division of State Relations, NRC, in Goodspeed, NRC, Bull., 5:6 (1923), 2, and Goodspeed, ibid., 4–7.
and other noxious gases. "Had nothing additional been accomplished," says the official report of the State Committee on Scientific Research, "this result alone justifies the total expenditure made for chemical investigation by the State of California." Chemists who could outgas the Germans enjoyed something of the reputation at the Armistice that atomic physicists did on V-J Day. One of the best gas chemists was Gilbert Newton Lewis, already an influential member of the Berkeley faculty before he went to war; he came back as the dominant force for building up the University's research capacity in physical science.[21]
California electrotechnology contributed to the war effort in ways decisive for our story. Before the war the Federal Telegraph Company of Menlo Park, California, which had close ties to Stanford, acquired exclusive rights to market a system of wireless telegraphy invented by a Danish engineer, Vladimir Poulsen, in the United States and the Pacific. In 1912 Federal had won a contract from the U.S. Navy for a 100-kW installation at the Panama Canal, although the company had not then managed to get more than 30 kW from its largest Poulsen machine. A crash program under the direction of Leonard Fuller, an electrical engineer who had studied at Stanford and later taught at Berkeley, discovered and removed the impediment. The navy, now getting up steam for war, commissioned Federal to set up 200-kW plants in Puerto Rico and San Diego; the specification jumped to 350 kW for the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, to 500 kW for Annapolis, and, when the United States entered the European War, to 1,000 kW, to link Washington with American forces in France.[22]
The navy simultaneously supported development of another device, also improved at Federal, which soon subverted the Poulsen system. This was the vacuum tube oscillator, accidentally invented by Lee de Forest when, as an employee of Federal, he worked to perfect his audiotron for use as an amplifier on transcontinental telegraph lines. De Forest's audiotron enabled AT&T
[21] Quotes from, resp., U.C., Pres. rep. , 1917/18, 116, 93, and Goodspeed, NRC, Bull., 5:6 (1923), 13; ibid., 10–2, 32–3, and U.C., Pres. rep. , 1916/17, 25, 120; O'Neill, U.C. Chronicle, 20:1 (1918), 82–92.
[22] Howeth, Communications , 143–7, 182–5, 253; Fuller, interview, 50, 100, and letter to Haradan Pratt, 19 May 1965 (TBL); Crenshaw, IRE, Proc., 4 (1916), 35–40; Aitken, Continuous wave , 131–61.
to fulfill its promise to the Panama-Pacific Exposition; his oscillator made possible commercial radio broadcasting, which Federal inaugurated in San Jose in 1919; and it became the heart of long-distance wireless after the war. We shall return to Fuller and Federal, to West Coast electronics, and to the big Poulsen machines, several of which were cannibalized for cyclotrons.[23]
In founding the NRC, Hale was no doubt inspired by what he took to be a civic duty. He also saw, as he put it, "the greatest chance we ever had to advance research in America." The success of the mobilization of science for the production of optical glass, for the location of artillery and submarines, for defense and offense in chemical warfare, for improvements in airplanes, radio, gunnery, and a thousand other things—all this helped to vanquish not only the enemy, but also the idea that academic physical scientists were impractical dreamers or incompetent pedagogues. As Millikan and Hale liked to put the point in a neat double entendre, the war had "forced science to the front."[24] The physicist found himself in the unusual, but portentous, condition of enjoying the attention of the press. "That he 'made good' from the beginning is one of the commonplaces of the history of our war. He took hold of a situation as unacademic as the most sceptical of his critics could have imagined, and proceeded as if the war were nothing more baffling than a particularly unruly set of sophomores." "It was a revelation to the country."[25]
The practical payoff of this demonstration of practicality was the enlistment in the support of academic physics of some foundations, businesses, and industries that previously had not thought it worth their notice. An official of the National Bureau of Standards, which had passed through precarious times, now could augur that never again "would anybody question the . . . economic value of scientific investigation," or, as the Saturday Evening Post added, its place in the "bedrock of business." And of labor. Forgetting in the general enthusiasm the menace of unemployment
[23] Aitken, Continous wave , 233–9; Morgan, Electronics in the West ; infra, § 3.3.
[24] Hale, quoted by Kevles, Physicists , 112; Millikan, ibid., 138, and Hale, NRC, Bull., 1 (1919), 2.
[25] Resp., New York Evening Post , as quoted in Science, 51 (1920), 415, and St. John, PR, 16 (1920), 372–4.
forced by technological advance, the American Federation of Labor declared in 1920 that "a broad program of scientific and technical research is of major importance to the national welfare and should be fostered in every way by the federal government."[26] With all this implied support, Millikan said, American physicists would soon outdistance the Europeans, whom they had trailed for too long. "In a very few years we shall be in a new place as a scientific nation and shall see men coming from the ends of the earth to catch the inspiration of our leaders and to share in the results which have come from our developments in science."[27]
The NRC took as its postwar purposes the strengthening of science in the universities and technical schools and the mingling of scientists with engineers and businessmen in industrial research laboratories. Its watchwords were cooperation and organization, the lessons of the war. Had not the Germans managed to struggle so long, and the allies finally to beat them, because both sides learned to mobilize their scientific manpower? As the chairman of the Carnegie Institution of Washington put it in the NRC's first Bulletin , "competency for defense against military aggression requires highly organized scientific preparedness." The same would be true of the coming commercial struggle: the fruits of industry would go to the nation that "organizes its forces most effectively."[28] The NRC divided itself into interdisciplinary task forces and laid siege simultaneously to nature and the foundations under the cry of "the national essentiality of science." Nor was the home front forgotten. The council and the American Association for the Advancement of Science saw to it that accounts of their activities and of all American "discoveries" appeared in newspapers and magazines.[29] The entrepreneurs of California physical science—Hale, Millikan, and their successor, Lawrence—discovered the uses of the popular press, and, when it became available, the radio.
[26] E.B. Rosa, 1921, and Saturday Evening Post , 1922, quoted in Kevles, Physicists , 148, 173; AFL resolution reported in Herrick, Science, 52 (1920), 94.
[27] Millikan, Science, 50 , (1919), 297.
[28] Root, NRC, Bull., 1 (1919), 10.
[29] Tobey, American ideology , 62–71; Kevles, Physicists , 174; Carter, Am. scholar, 45 (1975/6), 786–7. The cry is that of A.W. Mellon, president of the Mellon National Bank, in NRC, Bull., 1 (1919), 17.
Perhaps the most important instrument of the NRC for the improvement of university physics after the war was a fellowship program for postdoctoral training paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. The first installment, half a million dollars, was repeated, until by 1940 no fewer than 883 National Research Fellows had had their horizons broadened at a cost of $2.7 million. The first physics fellows took their awards in Europe, whence they imported and domesticated quantum physics; their students tended to take their fellowships in the United States; by 1928 National Research Fellows in physics preferred Caltech to any other American institution.[30] In the 1930s Berkeley became a center of choice. The Radiation Laboratory could not have grown so quickly or so well without the contributions of such National Research Fellows as Franz Kurie and Edwin McMillan.
In keeping with its fellowship program, the NRC urged, and the foundations followed, an elitist policy in their awards: the good American research universities should be made even better, while the rest slid deeper into mediocrity.[31] Regional, ethnic, and financial balance, the preoccupations of the era of federal funding, then scarcely came into consideration. The twenty schools that housed one-third of the professional physicists of the nation produced three-quarters of the American doctorates in physics earned between the wars and three-quarters of the papers published in the leading American journal, the Physical Review . The same schools received almost all the NRC's physics fellows.[32] To sustain the "surcharged atmosphere of the great university graduate school," and to enhance its capacity to fulfill its duty to multiply research and researchers, the NRC agitated to remove impediments to uninterrupted investigation and graduate instruction by the most able professors. The greatest of these obstacles was the plague of undergraduates indifferent to science who infested the universities in the great swelling of student bodies after the war. "[We] feel
[30] St. John, PR, 16 (1920), 372–4; NRC, National research fellowships (1939); reports by F.K. Richtmeyer, NRC secretary, 9 Mar 1931, and W. Weaver, 13 Nov 1939 (RF, 200/171/2079); Rand, Sci. monthly, 73:8 (1951), 71–80; Seidel, Physics research , 82; Geiger, Knowledge , 188, 203.
[31] Kevles, Physicists , 150–1, 197–8, 219–20; Geiger, Knowledge , 99–100, 107, 161–2.
[32] Weart in Reingold, Context , 322–5; Kevles, Physicists , 197.
sick," said the NRC, "when we face the facts." Undergraduates, or the teaching thrown away on them, set "the most serious limitation of research productivity."[33] The NRC strove to bring the administrations of major universities to understand that the main business of their professors was research, not teaching. With its help and foundation support, faculty pressure groups did succeed in shifting the balance of professorial obligation toward research. By 1930 physicists led the academic pack in research time: 36 percent of their total academic effort, as against 26 percent for humanists and 30 percent for biologists.[34] Lawrence was a beneficiary of this secondary consequence of the Great War.