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Presented by the

s-1971 Gift

THE BERKELEY SERIES IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Science and

the Emergence of

Modern America

1865-1916

Edited by

A. HUNTER DUPREE H

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY

RAND M9NALLY & COMPANY- CHICAGO

The Berkeley Series in American History

Charles Sellers, editor (KmiMmfy

Copyright © 1963 by Rand M9Nally & Company
All Rights Reserved

Printed in U.S.A. by Rand M9Nally & Company
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-8250
Third Printing, 1967

CONTENTS

Page

Introduction 1

I. The Problem: The Application of Science to Technology

— Alfred North Whitehead 3

II. The Rise of Science in Industry 5

A. The Bessemer Process 5

1. American Push — Robert W. Hunt 6

2. Engineering Science and Art — A. L. Holley 9

B. Edison, the Professional Inventor — George

Parsons Lathrop l*^)

C. Electrical Research in the Early Twentieth

Century — Irving Langmuir IS

D. Chemical Research in the Early Twentieth

Century — W. A. Hamor 21

E. Basic Science and Industrial Research: A 1916

View— J. J. Carty 24

III. The Rise of Science in Agriculture 30

A. An Early Demand for Agricultural Research —

J. D. B.DeBow 30

B. The Department in 1882 33

C. Theobald Smith and Texas Fever 35

D. The Shift to the Problem Approach —

Charles W. Dabney 36

E. A Mature Research Establishment for Agriculture 41

1. A Scientist's View — Eugene Davenport 41

2. A Politician's View — Carl Vrooman 45

IV. Climax: Sunny Progressivism and the Shadow of War 51

A. The Progressive's Credo — W. J. McGee 52

B. A Statesman's Foreboding — Elihu Root 56

FOR FURTHER READING ^^<r . r.T^>^ ^^

CHRONOLOGY

1851 Kelly process of steel manufacture.

1856 Bessemer process of steel manufacture.

1862 Act creating Department of Agriculture.

Morrill Land Grant Act.

1864 First Bessemer converter built in the United States.

1868 Open-hearth process brought to the United States.

1870 John D. Rockefeller organizes Standard Oil Co.

1871 American Institute of Alining and Metallurgical Engineers.

1874 First electrically powered streetcar, operated in New York City.

1875 Josiah Willard Gibbs, On the Eqiiilibrhim of Heterogeneous Sub-
stances.

1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents telephone.
American Chemical Society organized.

1878 Edison patents phonograph.

1879 Edison invents incandescent light bulb.

1880 American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
1884 American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Bureau of Animal Industr)% Department of Agriculture.

1886 Charles Martin Hall discovers electrolytic process of refining alu-
minum.

1887 Hatch Act for Agricultural Experiment Stations.
Interstate Commerce Act.

1889 Elevation of head of Department of Agriculture to cabinet rank.

1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

1892 People's (Populist) Party organized.

1894 Niagara Falls harnessed for commercial power.

1896 William Jennings Bryan defeated by William McKinley.

1897 Klondike gold rush.

1898 Spanish- American War.

1901 United States Steel Company organized.
Theodore Roosevelt becomes President.

1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

1908 W^hite House Conservation Conference.

1914 Smith-Lever Act authorizing extension work.

1916 National Research Council established.

1917 Entry into First World War.

INTRODUCTION

The United States in the mid-twentieth century is not the same
kind of country it was in the mid-nineteenth centuty; the one thing on
which all can agree, whether they look at politics, the economic system,
or the life of the mind, is change. How did this change come about?
Most people, in trying to describe the changes in American civilization
over the last century, sooner or later mention the rise of science. There
is hardly a more conspicuous factor in American civilization or a more
potent force on the world scene than science. How did this force which
affects all other forces get loose in American culture? This is not the
kind of historical problem that can be answered by analyzing a par-
ticular decisive battle, by counting the votes in one particular election,
or by matching the arguments in one particular debate. The change that
we are looking for did not occur at one place or at one time, nor was
it limited only to the actions of statesmen and generals. What we are
looking for is a change of relationship, one that took place almost un-
awares in obscure places as well as in the light of publicity.

Science itself is of course much older than 1865. As a tradition em-
bodying organized knowledge about nature, it had been widening its con-
trol of data and refining its methods of reasoning in a spectacular way
since at least the seventeenth century. And there were scientists in the
United States before 1865 who had developed institutions for communi-
cation and education.

Likewise, the industrial revolution was already far advanced in 1865.
The textile industry had converted to the factory system long before
the Civil War, the railroad network was rapidly covering the continent,
and the iron and steel industry was rapidly becoming a massive operation
at the base of a machine economy. Yet the innovations which made the
industrial revolution possible — the inventions of the pre-Civil War era —
did not in most cases originate with science. They sprang from a tradi-
tion of practical invention far removed from the scientists of the day.
Reorganization, rather than technological innovation, was the major tool
of the captains of industry such as Andrew Carnegie and John D.
Rockefeller. Why, then, when they look at the twentieth century, do
most observers see the hand of science at work? We are seeing here
neither science nor technology, but a changed relationship between them.

The documents in this collection were first written or spoken by

[i]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

men who were observing some facet of this subtle but fundamental change
in the relationship between science and technology which was destined to
change the tu^entieth-century world. In reading the documents you
should remember that the writers did not have your opportunity for
hindsight, that many of them were actors in the period in which we
are interested. Try to work out your own answers to questions sucn as:

(1) What is the difference between science and technology?

(2) What role does innovation play in American technology, and
where do innovations come from? Did they come from the same place
in the early years of the period 1865-1916 as they did in the later years?

(3) Do you see by 1916 the development of a relationship between
science and technology which has become more pronounced in the years
since then? Or do you feel that in the First World War the United
States had not discovered the potentialities of the application of science
to industry?

(4) What changes in American life in these years made the harness-
ing of science to industry possible?

[2]

^J' xVV" vVV" wv* wC*

I ^

THE PROBLEM: THE APPLICATION OF
SCIENCE TO TECHNOLOGY-
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

In its generality, the problem of the application of science to
practical life is far broader than the short span of American history. The
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was thinking of its full sweep
when he examined it in a famous series of lectures in the mid-1920's.
Notice the sense in which he uses the terms "science," "technology,"
and "invention." Also remember that Whitehead does not seem to be
thinking about the United States or about any particular country in the
Western World. He is talking about a period of time. And yet before
he finishes, when he has made clear the relationship he is looking for,
he does get down to a particular national case. To him, the leader in
establishing the new relationship is Germany. Is it possible to speak of
science in terms of nations? Can you justify Whitehead's doing so?
(Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [Cambridge.
England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1946], p. 120. Reprinted with permis-
sion of the Macmillan Company, New York.)

What is peculiar and new to the [nineteenth] century, differentiat-
ing it from all its predecessors, is its technology. It was not merely the
introduction of some great isolated inventions. It is impossible not to feel
that something more than that was involved. . . . The process of change
[had been] slow, unconscious, and unexpected. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the process became quick, conscious, and expected. . . .

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention
of the method of invention. A new method entered into life. In order to
understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as
railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must
concentrate on the method in itself; that is the real novelty, which has
broken up the foundations of the old civilisation. The prophecy of
Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of
himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the
servant and minister of nature. It still remains to be seen whether the
same actor can play both parts.

[3]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

The whole change has arisen from the new scientific information.
Science, conceived not so much in its principles as in its results, is an
obvious store-house of ideas for utilisation. But, if we are to understand
what happened during the century, the analogy of a mine is better than
that of a store-house. Also, it is a great mistake to think that the bare
scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has only to be picked
up and used. An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One
element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about
bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product.
It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.
The possibilities of modern technology were first in practice real-
ised in England, by the energy of a prosperous middle class. Accord-
ingly, the industrial revolution started there. But the Germans explicitly
realised the methods by which the deeper veins in the mine of science
could be reached. They abolished haphazard methods of scholarship. In
their technological schools and universities progress did not have to wait
for the occasional genius, or the occasional lucky thought. Their feats of
scholarship during the nineteenth century were the admiration of the
world. This discipline of knowledge applies beyond technology to pure
science, and beyond science to general scholarship. It represents the
change from amateurs to professionals.

There have always been people who devoted their lives to definite
regions of thought. In particular, lawyers and the clergy of the Chris-
tian churches form obvious examples of such specialism. But the full
self-conscious tjealisation of the power of professionalism in knowledge
in all its departments, and of the way to produce the professionals, and
the importance of knowledge to the advance of technology, and of the
methods by which abstract knowledge can be connected with technol-
ogy, and of the boundless possibilities of technological advance, — the
realisation of all these things was first completely attained in the nine-
teenth century; and among the various countries, chiefly in Germany.

[4]

•»)o»?»»:^

THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

Since England was the first to get the industrial revolution started,
and, if Germany was the country which first reahzed the full utilization
of science, observers such as Whitehead whose viewpoint is European
usually overlook the American experience. It is important to understand
that Americans were not unique in what they were doing to apply sci-
ence to technology, but it is more important to understand that in their
efforts they transformed American civilization itself. To try to bring
Whitehead's generalizations to earth, we can test them against the Amer-
ican setting.

A.

THE BESSEMER PROCESS

CThe great increase in steel as the basis of heavy industry after 1865
was dependent on two processes: the Bessemer and the open hearth. To
test the amount of science which was applied in the crucial innovation of
the Bessemer process, we shall look at two contemporary comments.
The process itself was known before the onset of our period, both
through the work of Henry Bessemer in England and William Kelly in
the United States. Hence our quest is not simply for an inventor, but
rather for those continuous subsidiary adaptations which change an idea
into an industrial reality. The real question is to determine how much
of the knowledge on which these innovations were based sprang from
the scientific tradition and how much was the product of cut-and-try
experiment by managers and mechanics. The man skilled in the art of
steel-making can do a great deal with his own native wit and with such
experimenting as he can do on an existing process in the midst of actual
production. But such a man, however shrewd, is not a professional in-
novator. Both of the following passages were written by 1877 and re-
flect the opinion of practical steel men in the very midst of the shift to
heavy industry.

The technological influence of the British example is also important
to note. Much information had to come from the British; tales of their
accomplishments hung over the American innovators. Yet we can also
see American practice rather quickly departing from the European

[5]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

model. Note also the amount of resistance which the innovators en-
countered, both from management and labor.

1. ^''Afnericmi Fiishy Our first commentator, Robert W. Hunt, was
General Superintendent of the Albany and Rensselaer Iron and Steel
Company, Troy, New York. (Robert W. Hunt, "A History of the
Bessemer Manufacture in America," Trajisactions of the American In-
stitute of Mining Engineers, V [1876-77], 201-16.)]

The memorable features of American history have been rapidly
emerging during the last century, and notably so since I860; and they are
by no means confined to political or to any one branch of scientific de-
velopment. Of all the industrial arts, none show a greater change or a
mightier progress than the Bessemer manufacture. And this year, while we
are celebrating the first centennial of our national life, we can also cele-
brate the first decennial of American Bessemer practice. While not for-
getting or undervaluing what has been done in other countries, I
have thought that a brief history of the introduction and develop-
ment of the Pneumatic or Bessemer process in America would be of
interest.

In 1863 the Kelly Pneumatic Process Company was formed and an
arrangement entered into with William Kelly, who had taken out letters-
patent. . , .

Previous to the application of William Kelly for a patent, Henry
Bessemer, of England, had taken out patents dated February 12th, 1856,
and August 25th, 1856, in this country. Kelly claimed priority in the
discovery of the principles of the process, and the Patent-office allowed
his claim by granting him his patents.

In the autumn of 1862 Mr. Alexander L. HoUey, while in England,
was impressed with the importance of Mr. Bessemer's inv^ention, and so
fully foresaw its future, that, upon his return to the United States, he in-
duced Messrs. John A. Griswold and John F. Winslow, of Troy, New
York, to join him in endeavoring to possess Bessemer's American
patents. ...

But, before entering into chronological details of subsequent works,
I must here state that, after building the first experimental plant at Troy,
Mr. Holley seems to have at once broken loose from the restraints of his
foreign experience, and to have been impressed with the capabilities of
the new process. The result is that mainly through his inventions and
modifications of the plant we, in America, are to-day enabled to stand
at the head of the world in respect of amount of product.

But to return to the detailed history. As before stated, there were,
in 1865, the two rival organizations claiming control of the process in
this country, — the Kelly Process Company, through their Kelly and
Mushet's patents, and Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley, through
their Bessemer and Holley American patents. Both parties felt strong in
their respective positions, and in possessing the necessary means to main-
tain them. But, after spending large sums of money in counsel fees, they
wisely concluded that their fight would at best be a "Kilkenny cat" af-
fair, and so, early in 1866, they combined their respective interests, the

[6]

11^ — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

Bessemer, or Winslow, Griswold & Holley, party taking 70 per cent.,
and the Kelly Process Company 30 per cent, of all royalties collected.
To this wise compromise may we attribute the subsequent establishment
of many works. . . .

But great difficulty was even vet experienced in inducing capitalists
and manufacturers to attempt the introduction of the new manufacture.
While the metal produced was wonderful in its qualities, still the neces-
sary first outlay was so large, and the details of the process were so un-
certain, and the time-honored prejudice against anything new, held such
powerful sway, that our people hesitated, doubted, and waited. Wonder-
ful tales came to us of what was being done abroad, and some venture-
some railway managers even dared to import and place in their tracks
trial lots of foreign Bessemer rails.

Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley had, from the very first erec-
tion of their works, wisely pursued the plan of extending every facilit\^ to
blast-furnace owners, in all parts of the country, to have their irons tried
for steel; and under this system many brands were tried, and most were
found wanting. These failures to obtain good results, of course, built up
still greater barriers against the spread of the process. In the light of our
present chemical knowledge of the manufacture, it is amusing to think
of firms sending a few tons of iron to Wyandotte, Troy, or even Eng-
land, to be tried in actual practice, when a few hours of laboratory work
would have settled the entire question. But still it was this very blind
using of unknown irons that first opened the eyes of steelmakers to the
possibility of making good products from metals pronounced unfit by
the then authorities. . . .

After building the original experimental plant at Troy, Mr. A. L.
Holley seems to have appreciated that the manufacture was capable of
a development far beyond that which had been attained in those coun-
tries in which it was already considered a success.

Even if his mind did not fully realize this conclusion, his mechanical
intuition was alive to the possibilities of improvement, and the result of
his thought gave us the present accepted type of American Bessemer
plant. He did away with the English deep pit and raised the vessels so
as to get working space under them on the ground floor; he substituted
top-supported hydraulic cranes for the more expensive counter-weighted
English ones, and put three ingot cranes around the pit instead of two,
and thereby obtained greater area of power. He changed the location of
the vessels as related to the pit and melting-house. He modified the ladle
crane, and worked all the cranes and the vessels from a single point; he
substituted cupolas for reverberatory furnaces, and last, but by no means
least, introduced the intermediate or accumulating ladle which is placed
on scales, and thus insures accuracy of operation by rendering possible
the weighing of each charge of melted iron, before pouring it into the
converter. These points cover the radical features of his innovations.
After building such a plant, he began to meet the difficulties of details
in manufacture, among the most serious of which was the short duration
of the vessel bottoms, and the time required to cool off the vessels to a
point at which it was possible for workmen to enter and make new bot-
toms. After many experiments, the result was the Holley Vessel Bottom,

[7]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

which, either in its form as patented, or in a modification of it as now
used in all American works, has rendered possible, as much as any other
one thing, the present immense production.

Then he tried many forms of cupolas at Troy, adopting in the
original plant a changeable bottom or section below the tuyeres, and
developing this idea still further in the first 5-ton works; then later, at
Harrisburg, assisting Mr. J. B. Pearse the furnace was improved to a
point which rendered these many bottoms unnecessary, chiefly by deep-
ening the bottom and enlarging the tuyere area. Upon his rebuilding the
Troy works after their destruction by fire, Mr. Holley put in the per-
fected cupolas. At this time the practice was to run a cupola for a turn's
melting, which had reached eight heats or forty tons of steel, and then
dropping its bottom. This was already an increase of one hundred per
cent, over his boast about the same amount in twenty-four hours.

The Cambria works were now running, and Mr. Holley had be-
come officially connected with them as consulting Bessemer engineer.
Many discussions and consultations took place between Mr. George Fritz,
Mr. Holley, and the writer, as to the possibility of increasing the prod-
uct of the works. Among other things, tapping cinder from the cupolas
was thought of, and decided upon. These works had already placed
their turn's work at nine instead of eight heats. The Pennsylvania works
under Mr. J. B. Pearse's management, followed with an increased pro-
duction. The Cambria works applied the cinder tap, and the production
went up to the unanticipated amount of thirty heats, or one hundred
and fifty tons in twenty-four hours. Grand as we thought this, it is only
about one-half of the present yield of each of several works. During all
this time many details were modified, and as the new ways proved suc-
cessful they were adopted in the regular practice. I think one thing
which had a strong bearing on the increased production was the labor
organization of the Cambria works. In compliance with the policy de-
cided upon, I started the converting works without a single man who
had ever seen even the outside of Bessemer works, and, with a very few
exceptions, they were not even skilled rolling-mill men, but on the con-
trary were selected from intelligent laborers. The result was that we had
willing pupils with no prejudices, and without any reminiscences of
what they had done in the old country or at any other works. Of course
when one works went ahead, the others had to follow. Mr. George
Fritz was the embodiment of push, and with such men to call on as
William R. Jones, J. E. Fry, Charles Kennedy, Alexander Hamilton, and
D. N. Jones, his efforts were ably seconded, and Cambria for a long
time maintained the lead. . . .

While I am not able to mention all of the very many good things
accomplished by the gentlemen at each and all the various works, I am,
at the same time, well aware they have all done their share toward
achieving the great end; and, fortunately, their mutual relations have
been so pleasant, that each one's experiences have been freely imparted
to the others. This has done wonders to advance the science. But with-
out one element, all skill and all mechanical talent would have been
wasted, and with it nearly all things have been possible. That element
has been, and is, "American push."

[8]

II, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

[2. '''' Engineer if] g Science and Arty Another view of the relation
of science to technology is presented by A. L. Holley, who has already
been introduced as the hero of the preceding account. (A. L. Holley,
"The Inadequate Union of Engineering Science and Art," Transactions
of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, IV [1875-76], 191-207.)]

The application of scientific methods to the inv estigation of natural
laws and to the conduct of the useful arts which are founded upon them,
is year by year mitigating the asperity and enlarging the outcome of
human endeavor. More notably, perhaps, are these the facts in that sys-
tem of productive and constructive arts of which engineering is the
general name. In metallurgical engineering especially, within the period
of our own recollection, how rapid has been the rate and how wide the
scope of progress: the scientific discovery and mining of metalliferous
veins; the economical separation and reduction of ores of every grade;
the production and regulation of high temperatures; the varied improve-
ments in the manufacture of iron, in saved heat and work, in uniformity
and range of products; and, most important of all, the creation and the
utilization, to be counted by the million tons a year, of the cheap con-
structive steels.

Wonderful as this range and degree of development may appear to
the public eye, the close and thoughtful observer must, nevertheless, con-
clude that neither the profession nor the craft of engineering may con-
gratulate themselves too complaisantly, but that they should rather ac-
knowledge to each other the embarrassing incompleteness of the union
between engineering science and art.

There is a small school of philosophers whom we may designate as
original investigators, men who come close to nature, who search into
first principles, and who follow that scientific and therefore fruitful
method by which the relations of matter and force are discovered, classi-
fied, and brought within the reach of practice. These wonderful men
do not indeed create the laws of nature, as they sometimes almost seem
to, but they go up into the trembling mountain and the thick darkness
and bring down the tables upon which they are written.

There is a larger class of men whom we may designate as the school-
men; they are learned in the researches and conclusions of others, and
skilled in reasoning or speculating from these or from abstract data upon
the certain or probable results of physical and chemical combinations.

And there is the great army of practicians, almost infinite in its de-
grees of quality, ranging from the mere human mechanism by which
mind lays hold of matter and force, through all the grades of practical
judgment and power.

Let us first consider the matter from the "practical" man's stand-
point. Every day's experience teaches him that the men who speculate,
from secondhand data, upon the probable results of combinations of
forces and materials, are not the men who can best make these combina-
tions in practice, who intuitively know all the concealed pitfalls, such as
friction, that trick of nature which like the thousandth part of phos-
phorus, alters all the conditions of use in iron; nor are they the men who
can determine the completeness of these combinations, or read the rec-

[9]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

ord of their results, as in the character of a flame, in the feehng of a
refractory mixture, in the behavior of a metal under treatment; nor arc
they the men who, by familiarity with objects and phenomena, are best
fitted to pursue that original investigation which is the foundation of
even theoretical progress. The expert who delights to call himself "prac-
tical," is honestly amazed at the attempts of experts by school graduation,
who have not been graduated in works, to solve the engineering prob-
lems of the day. And from his standpoint there are numerous and con-
spicuous illustrations. While metallurgists are still disputing over the
nature and sequence of reactions in combustion and reduction, the
practical ironsmelter has felt his way from the barbarous practice
of a century ago, to the vast and economical production of to-day.
The attainment of powerful and sufficiently hot blast by means of
waste heat, the adaptation of shape and proportion of stack to differ-
ent fuels and ores, labor-saving appliances and arrangements, — all these
have grown out of the constant handling, not of books, but of
furnaces.

Proceeding upon a chemical knowledge little superior to that of the
average schoolboy, Bessemer developed his revolutionary process. Not
knowing for years that the combustion of silicon or of manganese are
the chief sources of the necessary heat; ignoring the fact that not alone
the reaction but the presence of manganese is a cause of soundness and
malleability in steel; magnifying the hypothesis that silicon should pro-
mote soundness; instructing his licensees to avoid all irons containing
aboV'C 0.02 per cent, of phosphorus; and sharing the ignorance of the
whole metallurgical profession as to the sequence of reactions in the
converter and the probability of changing their character, Bessemer and
his followers, during the first fifteen years of their practice, neverthe-
less brought this difficult art, which the metallurgical schools call a
chemical art, to a high degree of commercial success, and this in the
absence of any metallurgical change or chemical improvement whatever,
in the treatment of the metal. During all this time, there was almost no
literature of the Bessemer manufacture, and no instructor save that grim
sphinx the converter and the well-nigh inscrutable process. It was a
hand-to-hand fight, involving mechanical details, refractory linings, celer-
ity of operations, regularity of melting and conversion and economy of
labor. With every fact written in his book, the closeted scientist could
no more adequately prescribe the practical conditions of improvement,
than could the student in optics specify in words and formulae the glory
of an Italian sunset.

Here is a cupola-furnace, an old and exceedingly simple device;
but one may know all the laws of combustion and fluxing that are writ-
ten in the cyclopedias, and yet fail to change its working at will, or fail
to detect the coming change, until by long familiarity, the phenomena
reveal themselves as it were instinctively. One may have learned every
law of the reactions of oxides and fluxes upon a refractory material, yet
until his practiced hand and eye and ear can nicely detect its physical
qualities and measure the results of new ingredients and temperatures,
he may wander for years in a maze of uncertainties. Notwithstanding all
our previous knowledge about the inevitable combustion of carbon and

[loj

11^ — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

oxygen in the presence of heat enough to ignite them, the Siemens-
Martin process, both in its calorific and in its metallurgical aspects, was
as purely unpractical as the direct utilization of sun-heat is to-day, until
after years of patient observation, not chiefly by scientists but by men
unacquainted with books and knowing nothing at second-hand, innumer-
able small increments of improvement at last produced a sufficient tem-
perature in a durable furnace.

In the development of machinery, the same history is repeated. The
proportions of parts, in fact, the modern formulae themselves, are de-
rived from the study of innumerable experiments. The adaptation of
machinery can only be perfected by him who, as it were, enters into
it, making it an incarnation of himself. This enlargement of a man's
organism is most strikingly illustrated in the locomotive. Oliver Wendell
Holmes has happily described this putting of his life into his "shell" boat,
his every volition extending as perfectly into his oars as if his spinal
cord ran down the centre of its keel, and the nerves of his arms tingling
in the oar-blades. The thoughtful locomotive-driver is clothed upon, not
with the mere machinery of a larger organism, but with all the attributes
of a power superior to his own, except volition. Every faculty is stimu-
lated and every sense exalted. An unusual sound amid the roarinsf ex-
haust and the clattering wheels tells him instantly the place and degree
of danger, as would a pain in his own flesh. The consciousness of a cer-
tain jarring of the foot-plate, a chattering of a valve-stem, a halt in the
exhaust, a peculiar smell of burning, a sudden pounding of the piston,
an ominous wheeze of the blast, a hissing of a water-gauge — warning
him respectively of a broken spring-hanger, a cutting valve, a slipped
eccentric, a hot journal, the priming of the boiler, high water, low water,
or failing steam — these sensations, as it were, of his outer body, become
so intermingled with the sensations of his inner body, that this wheeled
and fire-feeding man feels rather than perceives the varying stresses upon
his mighty organism.

Mere familiarity with steam-engines is not, indeed, a cause of im-
proved steam-engineering, but it is a cojiditioji. The mechanical laws of
heat were not developed in an engine-house, yet without the mechanism
which the knowledge derived through this familiarity has created and
adapted, the study of heat would have been an ornamental rather than a
useful pursuit. So in other departments. When one can feel the comple-
tion of a Bessemer "blow" without looking at the flame, or number the
remaining minutes of a Martin steel charge from the bubbling of the
bath, or foretell the changes in the working of a blast-furnace by watch-
ing the colors and structure of the slag, or note the carburization of
steel by examining its fracture, or say what an ore will yield from its
appearance and weight in the hand, or predict the lifetime of a machine
by feeling its pulse; when one in any art can make a diagnosis by look-
ing the patient in the face rather than by reading about similar cases in
a book, then only may he hope to practically apply such improvements
as theory may suggest, or to lead in those original investigations upon
which successful theories shall be founded.

These are the conclusions of the "practical" man, and they are none
the less true because they are not the whole truth. That they are too

[ii]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

little considered by the schoolmen and the graduates of schools is also
true, but happily, less conspicuously so as the years advance.

The evil consequences of this mistake develop themselves in various
ways. The recent graduates of schools do not, indeed, expect immediate
positions of responsibility and authority, but they often demand them
after too short a term of object-teaching. Perhaps the greatest advantage
of their scientific training is that thev can learn from objects and phe-
nomena faster than can the mere workman, who, although full of the
elements of new and useful conclusions, lacks, if I may so say, the
scientific reagent which precipitates the rubbish and leaves a clear solu-
tion of the problem. It is however true — in the iron manufacture, per-
haps, especially true — that men of wide learning and of great mental
dexterity, unless they have studied at least as many years in the works
as they have in the school, do not successfully compete for the desirable
places with the men who have come up from the ranks. Narrow, un-
systematic, and fruitless of new results as his knowledge may be, he
who has grown up steadily from the position even of puddler's helper,
will be selected to take the manager's post in preference to him whose
reputation is founded solely on the school.

Nor does this prove, as the schoolmen too often believe, that the
owners and directors of metallurgical enterprises are generally unap-
preciative of scientific culture. It rather proves that the lowest func-
tions, as in the case of poor humanity, must first be considered; that the
conditions of maintenance and regular working, which constant familiar-
ity with objects and phenomena alone can provide, are earliest in order.
Conservation first and improvement afterwards.

Another consideration in this connection is that scientific aid ap-
pears to be more readily provided for the "practical" man than practical
aid for the "scientific" man. The trained scholar can the more readily
adapt himself to the situation. He should suggest many more improve-
ments than would ever crystallize in an equally good but undisciplined
mind. Yet his attempt, with mere scholastic aids, to carry these improve-
ments out, might disorganize a whole establishment. As there must be
one final authority, judgment founded on experience almost universally
ranks the wider and more fruitful culture of the school. And if we ask
those great masters whose experimental knowledge is as wide as their
scientific culture, they will tell us, that as the inert and clumsy flywheel,
that typical conservator, is more helpful to a steam-engine in the long
run, than a valve-gear so highly organized that it seems to know what it
ought to do, so in their own undertakings, plodding, practical economics
must sit in judgment upon theory and limit the reaches of imagination.

Another evil growing out of the inadequate regard of mere school-
men for practice, is the frequent failure of their works or their inability
to complete them. Inventions and constructions, designed after a scien-
tific method and under the light of organized facts and detailed history
as laid down in books, may fail simply in default of a practical knowl-
edge of how far the capital at hand will reach, or what the means at
hand will do, or what the materials at hand will stand, or \\ hat the labor
and assistance at hand can be relied on to accomplish. A vast number of
facts about the operation of forces in materials are so subtle, or so in-

[12]

II, — 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

completely disentangled from groups of phenomena, that they cannot be
defined in words, nor understood if they could be formulated. But after
long familiarity^ with the general behavior of materials under stress, a
practical expert can, by a process more like instinct than reason, judge
how far and in what directions he may safely push his new combina-
tions. Thus while the unschooled practician so usually .wastes his en-
ergies in unscientific methods and on impossible combinations, but
generally carries into successful use his comparatively few well-founded
attempts, the student merely of principles and abstract facts so usually
originates the ideas upon which progress is founded, and so rarely clothes
them with practical bodies. In this chasm between science and art, how
much effort and treasure, and even life, are swallowed up year by year.

These are not theoretical considerations. The blast-furnace, the con-
verter, and the open-hearth have already been referred to; let us observe
some other illustrations. A bridge-builder will tell us that few structures
in his department of engineering fail by reason of mistakes in calculating
the strain-sheet, but that the majority of failures arise from vibrations,
buckling, rapid wear of important parts, shapes that weaken the material,
inequalities in the material, and similar causes which are not stated in
books, which assume different aspects under every change of proportions
and dimensions, and which can only be inferred by means of a long
familiarity with the behavior of similar structures during varying periods
of service, and with the processes by which materials and members are
fabricated. The builder of a machine like a marine engine, or a loco-
motive, or a roll-train, or a steam-hammer, will tell us that, in designing
new adaptations, after every stress that can be distinctly analyzed is pro-
vided for, mass to resist vibration, changes of shape to insure sound cast-
ing, and various modifications which cannot be formulated for the want
of even approximately complete knowledge of their conditions, must still
be supplied, simply by judgment founded on long observation of phe-
nomena under similar conditions. And he will thus explain nine-tenths
of the failures. Who can imagine the volume of a book, or of an author,
which should adequately teach the principles of construction as affected
by the chiefest of all practical considerations — the economics of the
foundry, the forge, and the machine-shop? With the tools and facilities
at hand, what divisions of a particular structure, what shapes and sizes
and methods of joining can be made cheaply as well as strong and effi-
cient, in all the infinite forms of mechanism? Obtaining such facts from
any other source than personal practice, would be like an oarsman study-
ing a book to know when and how in the race he must husband his
power, or like a wrestler looking out in a cyclopedia the probable feints
of his antagonist. The successful constructor will assure us that no pos-
sible training in the school, nor any genius in invention can build eco-
nomically without such a knowledge of the shop as the athlete has of
the possibilities of muscular strength and agility.

These arts have been selected as examples, not because they chiefly
depend on skill, but because they so largely involve the highest formu-
lated mathematical knowledge. How much more important, then, is
practical training in those departments where physical laws are very in-
completely understood and formulated. How far short of practical sue-

1 13]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

cess will abstract science stop in sinking pneumatic piles through wrecks
and boulders, in tunnelling rocks traversed by subterranean streams and
beds of quicksand, in cheaply applying hoisting, ventilating and drain-
ing machinery to mines where the scene and conditions of operation are
constantly shifting, in firmly founding heavy and vibrating machinery
on treacherous ground, in handling and casting melted steel, in con-
structing refractory metallurgical vessels, in delivering bars red-hot and
crooked in infinite directions to a roll train, in fabricating durable breech-
loading cannon, in building boilers that shall provide for vaporization,
circulation, separation, cleaning and durability, in designing enginery like
the horseshoe machine to shape metals, in proportioning gas-furnaces, in
submarine warfare, in aerial navigation, in machine tools, in traction en-
gines, in scaffolding and erection, in railway running-gear, in forming
artificial stone under water, in permanent way, in coal-cutting, in dredg-
ing machinery, in moulding and casting, in brick machinery, in tube-
drawing, in coal-burning, in pavements? Limited or impossible as would
be the progress of engineering arts in the absence of that knowledge and
those methods which are imparted in schools, delay and failure would
hardly be less conspicuous if the schoolmen should stay in the schools
and thence attempt the application of abstract science, or expect mere
workmen to apply it by hearkening to their directions.

I hope it may not seem that the dignity of abstract scientific investi-
gation is undervalued by the utilizers of nature's powers and materials,
or that any considerations of profit obscure, even in the average com-
mercial mind, the splendor of those achievements made in the mere love
of truth, with thought of neither commercial application nor pecuniary
reward — achievements which distinguish such names as Faraday, Bunsen,
Leverrier, Mayer, Joule, Henry, Darwin, and Tyndall. Do not their suc-
cesses rather encourage us, in our lower sphere, to more persistently
pursue the method of these great discoverers — the original investigation
of Nature's truths? Not less literally than in the poet's fancy,

"To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language."

To the skilled artisan she reveals herself as truly though not as
widely as to the philosopher. In the aphorism of Goethe, "Mankind
dwell in her and she in them. With all men she plays a game for love,
and rejoices the more they win."

But the undervaluation of the study of objects and phenomena by
schoolmen, is not the principal hindrance to the complete union of sci-
ence and art. A greater obstacle is the combined misapprehension and
ignorance on the part of a large class of "practical" men, of what they
are pleased to call "theory," meaning by theory, something which is
likely to be discordant with fact — or possibly with the interests of the
craft. We can hardly complain that their objection is ill-grounded, as
far as it is grounded upon the practice of theoretical men; but the world
has a right to complain of their narrowness of observation, of their
stolid incomprehension of the results of science, of that pride of igno-
rance, of that bigotry, of that positive fear of the diffusion of knowledge,

['4]

11^ — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

which is the normal condition of those who range only within the
sphere of their own practice, and to whom analysis and generalization,
in their business affairs, as well as in morals and politics, are an un-
known thing. It is unfortunately true that a large number of managers
in metallurgical enterprises — men who are deemed indispensable, and
who probably, are indispensable, in the average state of practical science,
are thus not incorrectly characterized. Conscious of their power as con-
servators, ignorant of the elements of improvement, and not unfrequentlv
jealous and blindly fearful for the interests of their craft, they sit tri-
umphant on an eminence (the steady undermining of which they cannot
observe), and sneer at the too frequently condescending magniloquence
of recent graduates and book men. The best of this class are the work-
ful and painstaking men who come up from the ranks — men who are
plucky in emergencies and regulative of labor — men whose unconscious
reasoning or intuition covers the ordinary exigencies, and who, perhaps
for this very reason, never inform themselves outside of their own range
of observation, nor observe in a methodical or fruitful manner, . . .

In the enlargement ... of mutual respect and instruction, to a
certain extent lies the solution of the problem under consideration; but
it is a complex method, only actively operative under several important
conditions, such as:

1. A public opiiiion among schoolmen that a course of object and
phenomena study in w^orks is to be reckoned, not as a matter of mere
business sequence, but as a large and equal feature of that curriculum
which is essential to a degree of professional graduation.

2. A diffusion, among the class which we have termed the "prac-
tical" class, of a real appreciation of an organized system of informa-
tion and of the scientific method of making this information useful to all
classes of men and noxious or unimportant to none; such a general ex-
planation to that vast, preponderating class of workmen and of fore-
men and managers, who are foremen and managers simply because they
have been efficient workmen, as wull ever prevent their indiscriminate
and contemptuous application of the term "theory" to whatever a
schoolman proposes.

3. An understanding among the owners, directors and commercial
managers of engineering enterprises, that it is not a matter of favor, but
a matter of as much interest to themselves as to any class, that young
men of suitable ability and of suitable preliminary culture, however ac-
quired, should have opportunity and encouragement to master the prac-
tical features of technical education in works, not as mere apprentices,
but under reasonable facilities for economy of time and completeness of
research.

But these conditions do not largely exist, and are only growing with
general civilization. They must be hastened and magnified by some bet-
ter means than merely stating the case again and again, as some of us, I
confess, are too fond of doing; than perpetually repeating, in a manner
more sentimental than efficient, that scientists should appreciate practice,
and practicians should appreciate science, and capital should join the
hands of science and practice, saying: "Bless you, my children," in the
expectation that this will prove a fruitful union. Let us rather inquire if

[■5]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

some new order of procedure in technical education, some revolutionary
innovation, if need be, will not put the coming race of engineers on a
plane which is lifted above the embarrassments from which we are
slowly emerging.

B.
EDISON, THE PROFESSIONAL INVENTOR-
GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP

CAlthough Thomas A. Edison is easily the most famous technolog-
ical innovator in American history, placing him in the proper perspective
in the application of science to technology is not easy. He differed in
important ways both from the old-style inventor and the new-style sci-
entist in industry. In this passage he uses the words "discovery" and "in-
vention" in a very special way which probably do not fit with the other
definitions which you may be able to formulate. You should even enter-
tain the possibility that Edison has interchanged the usual definitions of
these words. (George Parsons Lathrop, "Talks with Edison," Harper's
New Monthly Magazine, LXXX [1890], 432-34.)

How do Edison's ideas about discovery and invention fit into the
definitions of science and technology as indicated in the Bessemer story
where the innovation was done, not by specialists in innovating, but by
practical men on the job?]

Edison has often been spoken of as a discoverer; and in one sense
he may appear to have discovered things by reaching out into the realm
of what to other persons was the unknown. But he himself dislikes the
term as applied to himself. "Discovery is not invention," he once said to
me, "and I dislike to see the two words confounded. A discovery is
more or less in the nature of an accident. A man walks along the road,
say from the laboratory here to Orange station, intending to catch the
train. On the way his foot kicks against something, and looking down to
see what he has hit, he sees a gold bracelet imbedded in the dust. He
has discovered that, certainly not invented it. He did not set out to find
a bracelet, yet the value of it is just as great to him at the moment as if,
after long years of study, he had invented a machine for making gold
bracelets out of common road-metal.

"Goodyear discovered the way to make hard rubber. He was at
work experimenting with India-rubber, and quite by chance he hit upon
a process which hardened it — the last result in the world that he wished
or expected to attain. Bell's telephone was a discovery too, not an inven-
tion. He was engaged with the possibilities of sending sound waves over
a telegraph wire, and filed an invention by which this could be done.
Then, by accident, it was discovered that articulate speech could be sent
over the wire — and there was the telephone. But Bell did not set out to
make an instrument by which talk could be transmitted, and therefore I
say he discovered instead of inventing the telephone. In a discovery there
must be an element of the accidental, and an important one too; while
an invention is purely deductive. An abstract idea or a natural law, I
maintain, may be invented; for, in my opinion, Newton invented but did

[i6]

II, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

not discover the theory of gravitation. He had been at work on the
problem for years, and had no doubt invented theory after theory to
which he found it impossible to fit his facts. Then he constructed the
theory to which all facts corresponded, and thus invented it by deduc-
tive reasoning. Of course the old story of the apple dropping from a
tree, and Newton's jumping up with a species of 'Eureka,' I reject
absolutely.

"It is too much the fashion to attribute all inventions to accident,
and a great deal of nonsense is talked on that score.

"In my own case but few, and those the least important, of my in-
ventions owed anything to accident. Most of them have been hammered
out after long and patient labor, and are the result of countless ex-
periments, all directed toward attaining some well-defined object. All
mechanical improvements may safely be said to be inventions and not
discoveries. The sewing-machine was an invention. So were the steam-
engine and the typewriter. Speaking of this latter, did I ever tell you
that I made the first twelve t\^pewriters, at my old factory in Railroad
Avenue, Newark? This was in 1869 or 1870; and I myself had worked at
a machine of similar character, but never found time to develop it
fully." . . .

Not long ago I asked Mr. Edison which of his inventions had caused
him the greatest amount of study, and required the most elaborate
experiments.

He replied, promptly: "The electric light. For, although I was never
myself discouraged, or inclined to be hopeless of success, I cannot say
the same for all of my associates. And yet, through all those years of
experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. All my
work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention
pure and simple. I would construct a theor\^ and work on its lines until
I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once, and an-
other theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work
out the problem, for the conditions under which the incandescent elec-
tric light exists are peculiar and unsatisfactory for close investigation.
Just consider this: we have an almost infinitesimal filament heated to a
degree which it is difficult for us to comprehend, and it is in a vacuum,
under conditions of which we are wholly ignorant. You cannot use your
eyes to help you in the investigation, and you really know nothing of
what is going on in that tiny bulb. I speak without exaggeration when
I sav that I have constructed three thoiisajid different theories in connec-
tion with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently
likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the
truth of my theory. My chief difficulty, as perhaps you know, was in
constructing the carbon filament, the incandescence of which is the
source of the light. Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my
agents, and all sorts of the queerest of materials were used, until finally
the shred of bamboo now utilized by us was settled upon. Even now,"
Mr. Edison continued, "I am still at work nearly every day on the lamp,
and quite lately I have devised a method of supplying sufficient current
to fifteen lamps with one horse-power. Formerly ten lamps per horse-
power was the extreme limit." . . .

[■7]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

In boyhood he was a diligent and omnivorous reader, and to some
extent he keeps up this habit. He has not confined himself, however, to
scientific works; and often, when some book entirely literary in char-
acter is mentioned, he will surprise the listener by speaking of it with
evident familiarity. As for the scientific works, he has collected a large
library of them, and does not affect disdain for their accumulations of
knowledge. "Yet, somehow," he says, "I don't seem to find what I want
in books." I once asked him, also, how he made his calculations. The
answer was: "I don't know exactly; but I can't do them on paper. I have
to be moving around." That he does them efficiently, however, is shown
by the results. I have also in mind at this moment the incident of a- well-
known physicist of my acquaintance, a man of high scientific rank and
rare mathematical attainments, who had done an immense amount of
figuring on some point which he mentioned to Edison, without being
able to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Edison at once, though having
only a few minutes for consideration, gave him the result and convinced
him of its accuracy, much to his surprise and admiration.

C.

ELECTRICAL RESEARCH IN THE EARLY
TWENTIETH CENTURY— IRVING LANGMUIR

CEdison lost control of his electric light in the early 1890's, and out
of the merger of his interests with those of several others came the
General Electric Company. By early in the new century. General Elec-
tric was pioneering in the development of the institution which was to
become the major vehicle of science in industry — the industrial research
laboratory. Because the whole domain of electricity was largely inacces-
sible to man before basic scientific research revealed it, the electrical
industry in all its forms was more a congenial home for science than
those industries, such as steel, which were based on centuries of empirical
practice. Compare the attitude of Irving Langmuir, one of the bright
stars of the early General Electric laboratory, with that of Edison when
he talks of basic science. But consider also that Langmuir does not find
that basic science is an automatic cure for industrial problems and that
the conversion of theory into practice — the heart of the new relation-
ship between science and technology — is by no means a simple process.
What is the professional connection of the men doing the innovating in
the early General Electric laboratory as compared to those connected
with the Bessemer process? (Irving Langmuir, "Fundamental Research
and Its Human Value," Scientific Monthly, XL VI [1938], 358-62.)]

Until the beginning of the present century, applications of science
had almost always been made by inventors and engineers who had uti-
lized the stock of scientific knowledge available to them and who did
not themselves contribute to fundamental science. Pure science was
mainly the outgrowth of work carried on in universities by those who
were not primarily interested in the applications. Newton, the great
French mathematicians and physicists Laplace, Ampere, Poisson, the

[i8]

II, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

chemical pioneer Lavoisier, the great English scientists Faraday and
Maxwell, are names selected at random of those who laid the founda-
tions for present science. Engineers and inventors, men like Edison, Elihu
Thomson, Marconi and Bessemer, have applied science to meet human
need, but not manv of them made great contributions to science itself.
Pasteur is perhaps the most important exception. He was one of the
greatest of scientists, and at the same time he made applications of sci-
ence having the utmost direct value to mankind.

Beginning about 1900, many industries established research labora-
tories whose object was primarily to apply existing scientific knowledge
to the solution of industrial problems. Only a small fraction of this total
knowledge had received industrial application, and it must have seemed
to the leaders of industry as though the supply of available unused
knowledge was almost inexhaustible. The industries felt no need or
obligation either to contribute to or to extend the fundamental knowl-
edge; it was only necessary to develop the applications to their partic-
ular needs. The age, after all, was one of unscrupulous exploitation of
natural resources. . . .

In the year 1900, Mr. E. W. Rice, Jr., established within the General
Electric Company at Schenectady an organized industrial research labo-
ratory for the purpose of carrying on fundamental industrial research.
It was planned that this laboratory should be devoted exclusively to
original research or to the study of natural phenomena in search for
new facts and principles. Mr. Rice was thus not content to draw from
the storehouse of scientific knowledge built up in universities but wished
to have a laboratory in which scientific progress could be accelerated
and the frontiers of knowledge extended in directions which would be
likely to prove useful to the industry. Such research can not usually be
directed toward definite goals, for it involves unknown factors. Success
in such research, if attained, is often reached by wholly unexpected
methods, and the problem which is finally solved is not the problem
which is foreseen.

As this laboratory developed it was soon recognized that it was not
practicable nor desirable that such a laboratory should be engaged
wholly in fundamental scientific research. It was found that at least 75
per cent, of the laboratory must be devoted to the development of the
practical applications. It is stimulating to the men engaged in fundamental
science to be in contact with those primarily interested in the practical
applications. It is also important that the engineers in the organization
should be in close contact with those having the broader scientific
outlook.

Let me give an example of the useful interaction of the two groups
of men. Let us suppose that through the discovery of a new scientific
principle or fact the possibility of some new application is opened up.
The men trained in pure science are usually not the men to make most
rapid progress in the applications; on the other hand, it is not possible
to turn the work over immediately to a separate engineering research
laboratory. The growing idea, like a child, must not be weaned from its
mother too soon. Before the continued development of the idea can be
assured in the hands of an engineering staff, it is necessary for a rela-

1 19]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

tively large amount of engineering research to be carried out by the
originators of the idea or those closely associated with them, for only
these have the necessary familiarity with the subject and the deep per-
sonal interest required for success.

If, however, some provision is not made for a separate engineering
research department there is great danger that the engineering research
may grow to such proportions as to undermine the spirit of fundamental
research which should dominate the research laboratory if its proper
functions are to survive. In the General Electric Company we have been
fortunate in having several such engineering departments which are capa-
ble of taking over any problem from the research laboratory as soon as
its ultimate success seems assured.

I will give you some examples from my own personal experience to
illustrate how fundamental scientific work undertaken without definite
applications in view can result in discoveries that are of direct benefit to
mankind. I want to show you how, . . . the practical result could hardly
have been reached in a laboratory in which the workers were assigned
definite work directed towards a goal. There was no one who had the
vision to see the goal until we had nearly reached it.

When I started to work in our research laboratory. Dr. Whitney,
who was then director, instead of assigning me to a definite problem,
suggested that I spend several days in the various rooms of the laboratory
becoming familiar with the work that was being done by the different
men. He asked me to let him know what I found of most interest as a
problem to work on.

I was particularly interested in the work that was going on in the
laboratory with tungsten-filament lamps of the high-vacuum type. Much
work had shown that the higher the vacuum the better was the lamp —
that is, the less rapidly the bulb blackened. What interested me most,
however, were the wonderful possibilities opened up to the scientist by
having a material like tungsten, which could be heated to temperatures
over 3400 C. If residual gases produced harmful effects in a lamp, it
seemed to me that it was a fascinating field for investigation to study
the effects produced bv each different gas separately introduced into the
bulb. This work was not undertaken with a definite idea that it would
lead to an improvement in the lamp; it was merely done to satisfy my
own curiosity as to the interactions between gases at low pressures with
filaments at high temperatures, a field of study which, I believe, never
had been undertaken before. From Dr. Whitney's point of view it was
a useful line of research for the General Electric Company because it
would give us increased knowledge of the type of phenomena that are
presumably occurring in lamps. The whole consensus of opinion in the
laboratory, however, was that the direction that should be followed in
seeking to improve the lamp was to obtain a far better vacuum than
had previously been possible.

I worked for about three years studying these chemical reactions
at low pressures with filaments at high temperatures, and published sev-
eral scientific papers giving the results of this work. I was particularly
interested in the results obtained by introducing hydrogen into the lamp,
for this gas caused a very great heat loss from the filament. I was able

[20]

II, — 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

to show that this was caused by the dissociation of hydrogen molecules
into atoms. In order to make sure of the correctness of this explanation,
I was led to experiment with nitrogen and with mercur)^ vapor over a
wide range of temperatures and pressures up to and including atmos-
pheric pressure. At this time no one in the laboratory had any idea that
any benefits could result from such gases. . . .

I want to call your attention particularly to the fact that there were
many separate lines of pure scientific work which contributed to this
successful result. There was nothing from the prior knowledge that sug-
gested that any benefit would result from the addition of gas to the
lamp; in fact, there was no lamp made in 1911 which would have been
given an improved life or efficiency by the introduction of nitrogen. It
required the construction of an entirely new type of lamp based on new-
scientific principles before this benefit could be obtained.

As soon as we received positive indications that an improved effi-
ciency of the lamp would be possible through the use of argon and
nitrogen, a large group of men in the laboratory worked on the develop-
ment of this type of lamp. It took about six months of intensive work
on the part of about twenty-five men before their results could be
turned over to the development laboratories of the incandescent lamp
factories, and it was about a year before these lamps were ready for
manufacture.

D.

CHEMICAL RESEARCH IN THE EARLY
TWENTIETH CENTURY— W. A. HAMOR

Cin the late nineteenth century, Germany had built her technolog-
ical power, which so impressed A. N. Whitehead, largely on chemical
research. German hegemony was still unassailable in 1915 when W. A.
Hamor assayed the role of chemistry in American industry and dis-
cussed some of the barriers to a fuller utilization of chemical research.
What institutions does he see as the main alternatives for the support of
industrial research? Significantly, Mr. Hamor's affiliation was with the
Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in Pittsburgh, which, although
endowed from the profits of the aluminum industry, was attached to a
university rather than to a single corporation. Do you see any similarity
between the institutional coupling of science and technology in chem-
icals with that in electricity? (W. A. Hamor, "The Value of Industrial
Research," Scientific Monthly, I [1915], 86-90.)]

The aim of all industrial operations is toward perfection, both in
process and mechanical equipment, and every development in manufac-
turing creates new problems. It is only to be expected, therefore, that
the industrial researcher is becoming less and less regarded as a burden
unwarranted by returns. Industrialists have, in fact, learned to recognize
chemistry as the intelligence department of industry, and manufacturing
is accordingly becoming more and more a system of scientific processes.

[2.]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

The accruement of technical improvements in particularly the great
chemical industry is primarily dependent upon systematic industrial re-
search, and this is being increasingly fostered by American manu-
facturers.

Ten thousand American chemists are at present engaged in pursuits
which affect over 1,000,000 wage-earners and produce over $5,000,000,000
worth of manufactured products each year. These trained men have
actively and effectively collaborated in bringing about stupendous results
in American industry. There are, in fact, at least nineteen American in-
dustries in which the chemist has been of great assistance, either in
founding the industry, in developing it, or in refining the methods of
control or of manufacture, thus ensuring profits, lower costs and uniform
outputs. . . .

Without the chemist the corn-products industry would never have arisen
and in 1914 this industry consumed as much corn as was grown in that
year by the nine states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massa-
chusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Dela-
ware combined; this amount is equal to the entire production of the state
of North Carolina and about 80 per cent, of the production of each of
the states of Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin; the chemist has pro-
duced over 100 useful commercial products from corn, which, without
him, would never have been produced. In the asphalt industry the chem-
ist has taught how to lay a road surface that will always be good, and
he has learned and taught how to construct a suitable road surface for
different conditions of service. In the cottonseed oil industry, the chem-
ist standardized methods of production, reduced losses, increased yields,
made new use of wastes and by-products, and has added somewhere be-
tween $10 and $12 to the value of each bale of cotton grown. In the
cement industry, the chemist has ascertained new ingredients, has utilized
theretofore waste products for this purpose, has reduced the waste heaps
of many industries and made them his starting material; he has standard-
ized methods of manufacture, introduced methods of chemical control
and has insured constancy and permanency of quality and quantity of
output. In the sugar industry, the chemist has been active for so long
a time that "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." The sugar
industry without the chemist is unthinkable. The Welsbach mantle is
distinctly a chemist's invention and its successful and economical manu-
facture depends largely upon chemical methods. It would be difficult to
give a just estimate of the economic effect of this device upon illumina-
tion, so great and valuable is it. In the textile industry, he has substituted
uniform, rational, well-thought out and simple methods of treatment of
all the various textile fabrics and fibers where mystery, empiricism, "rule-
of-thumb" and their accompanying uncertainties reigned. In the fertilizer
industry, it was the chemist who learned and who taught how to make
our immense beds of phosphate rock useful and serviceable to man in
the enrichment of the soil; he has taught how to make waste products of
other industries useful and available for fertilization and he has shown
how to make the gas works contribute to the fertility of the soil. In the
soda industry, the chemist can successfully claim that he has founded it,
developed it and brought it to its present state of perfection and utility,

[22]

11^ — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

but not without the help of other technical men; the fundamental ideas
were and are chemical. . . .

Sufficient has been presented to show that certain industries of the
United States have been elevated by an infusion of scientific spirit
through the medium of the chemist, and that manufacturing, at one time
entirely a matter of empirical judgment and individual skill, is more and
more becoming a system of scientific processes. The result is that Amer-
ican manufacturers are growing increasingly appreciative of scientific re-
search, and are depending upon industrial researchers — "those who cata-
lyze raw materials by brains" — as their pathfinders. It is now appropriate
to consider just how industrialists are taking advantage of the univer-
sities and the products of these.

When an industry has problems requiring solution, these prob-
lems can be attacked either inside or outside of the plant. If the pol-
icy of the industrialist is that all problems are to be investigated only
within the establishment, a research laboratory must be provided for
the plant or for the company. At present, in the United States, prob-
ably not more than one hundred chemical manufacturing establish-
ments have research laboratories or employ research chemists, although
at least five companies are spending over $100,000 per year in research.
In Germany, and perhaps also in England, such research laboratories in
connection with chemical industries have been much more common. The
great laboratories of the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik and of the
Elberfeld Company are striking examples of the importance attached to
such research work in Germany, and it would be difficult to adduce any
stronger argument in support of its value than the marvelous achieve-
ments of these great firms.

A frequent difficulty encountered in the employment of researchers
or in the establishment of a research laboratory, is that many manufac-
turers have been unable to grasp the importance of such work, or know
how to treat the men in charge so as to secure the best results. The
industrialist may not even fully understand iust what is the cause of his

• * '

manufacturing losses or to whom to turn for aid. If he eventually en-
gages a researcher, he is sometimes likely to regard him as a sort of
master of mysteries who should be able to accomplish wonders, and, if
he can not see definite results in the course of a few months, is occa-
sionally apt to consider the investment a bad one and to regard research-
ers, as a class, as a useless lot. It has not been unusual for the chemist to
be told to remain in his laboratory, and not to go in or about the works,
and he must also face the natural opposition of workmen to any inno-
vations, and reckon with the jealousies of foremen and of various officials.

From the standpoint of the manufacturer, one decided advantage of
the policy of having all problems worked out within the plant is that the
results secured are not divulged, but are stored away in the laboratory
archives and become part of the assets and working capital of the cor-
poration which has paid for them; and it is usually not until patent
applications are filed that this knowledge, generally only partially and
imperfectly, becomes publicly known. When it is not deemed necessary
to take out patents, such knowledge is often permanently buried.

In this matter of the dissemination of knowledge concerning indus-

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

trial practise, it must be evident to all that there is but little cooperation
between manufacturers and the universities. Manufacturers, and espe-
cially chemical manufacturers, have been quite naturally opposed to
publishing any discoveries made in their plants, since "knowledge is
power" in manufacturing as elsewhere, and new knowledge gained in the
laboratories of a company may often very properly be regarded as
among the most valuable assets of the concern. The universities and the
scientific societies, on the other hand, exist for the diffusion of knowl-
edge, and from their standpoint the great disadvantage of the above
policy is this concealment of knowledge, for it results in a serious re-
tardation of the general growth and development of science in its broader
aspects, and renders it much more difficult for the universities to train
men properly for such industries, since all the text-books and general
knowledge available would in all probability be far behind the actual
manufacturing practise. Fortunately, the policy of industrial secrecy is
becoming more generally regarded in the light of reason, and there is
a growing inclination among manufacturers to disclose the details of in-
vestigations, which, according to tradition, would be carefully guarded.
These manufacturers appreciate the facts that public interest in chemical
achievements is stimulating to further fruitful research, that helpful sug-
gestions and information may come from other investigators upon the
publication of any results, and that the exchange of knowledge prevents
many costly repetitions.

E.

BASIC SCIENCE AND INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH:
A 1916 VIEW— J. J. CARTY

CThe year 1916 gave unusual pause to the observer of the rise of
science in American industry. The grisly drama of the world's most
highly developed industrial nations hurling efficient destruction at one
another in Europe made Americans look on their own research with
new eyes. At the same time, the consolidation of American business
enterprises into giant corporations had called forth not only the gestures
of Theodore Roosevelt but the efforts of Woodrow Wilson to combat
the curse of bigness with the enforced competition of the Clayton Act.
Advocacy of small business and unbridled competition did not rest com-
fortably with advocacy of science in industry. For only large concerns
could afford research establishments of their own, and for small business
the only hope was some form of cooperation among competitors. J. J.
Carty, one of the pioneers of telephone research, whose career spanned
the whole period from lone inventor to highly organized laboratory,
managed to comment on both the impact of the W^ar and the advantages
of bigness in his 1916 presidential address to the American Institute of Elec-
trical Engineers. Compare his version of the relation of basic science to
industrial research with that of Langmuir. Also compare his ideas on
the organization of industrial research with those of Hamor. (J.J. Carty,
"The Relation of Pure Science to Industrial Research," Science, N. S.
XLIV [1916], 511-16.)]

[24]

II, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IX INDUSTRY

It is not strange that many years ago Huxley, with his remarkable
precision of thought and his admirable command of language, should
have indicated his dissatisfaction with the terms "pure science" and "ap-
plied science," pointing out at the same time that what people call "ap-
plied science" is nothing but the application of pure science to particular
classes of problems. The terms are still employed, possibly because, after
all, thev may be the best ones to use, or perhaps our ideas, to which
these expressions are supposed to conform, have not yet become suffi-
ciently definite to have called forth the right words.

It is not the purpose of this address, however, to suggest better
words or expressions, but rather to direct attention to certain important
relations between purely scientific research and industrial scientific re-
search which are not yet sufficiently understood.

Because of the stupendous upheaval of the European war with its
startling agencies of destruction — the product of both science and the
industries — and because of the deplorable unpreparedness of our own
country to defend itself against attack, there has begun a great awaken-
ing of people. By bringing to their minds the brilliant achievements of
the membership of this institute in electric lighting and power and com-
munications and by calling their attention to the manifold achievements
of the members of our sister societies in mechanical and mining and civil
engineering, and the accomplishments of our fellow-workers, the indus-
trial chemists, thev^ are being aroused to the vital importance of the
products of science in the national defense.

Arising out of this agitation comes a growing appreciation of the
importance of industrial scientific research, not only as an aid to military
defense but as an essential part of every industry in time of peace.

Industrial research, conducted in accordance with the principles of
science, is no new^ thing in America. The department which is under
my charge, founded nearly forty years ago to develop, with the aid of
scientific men, the telephone art, has grown from small beginnings with
but a few workers to a great institution employing hundreds of scientists
and engineers, and it is generally acknowledged that it is largely owing
to the industrial research thus conducted that the telephone achievements
and developments in America have so greatly exceeded those of other
countries.

With the development of electric lighting and electric power and
electric traction which came after the invention of the telephone, indus-
trial scientific research laboratories were founded by some of the larger
electrical manufacturing concerns and these have attained a world-wide
reputation. While vast sums are spent annually upon industrial research
in these laboratories, I can say with authority that they return to the
industries each year improvements in the art which, taken all together,
have a value many times greater than the total cost of their production.
Money expended in properly directed industrial research, conducted on
scientific principles, is sure to bring to the industries a most generous
return.

While many concerns in America now have well organized indus-
trial research laboratories, particularly those engaged in metallurgy and
dependent upon chemical processes, the manufacturers of our country

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OE iMODERN AMERICA

as a whole have not vet learned of the benefits of industrial scientific
research and how to avail themselves of it.

I consider that it is the high duty of our institute and of every
member composing it, and that a similar duty rests upon all other engi-
neering and scientific bodies in America, to impress upon the manufac-
turers of the United States the wonderful possibilities of economies in
their processes and improvements in their products which are opened
up by the discoveries in science. The way to realize these possibilities is
through the medium of industrial research conducted in accordance with
scientific principles. Once it is made clear to our manufacturers that
industrial research pays, they will be sure to call to their aid men of
scientific training to investigate their technical problems and to improve
their processes. Those who are the first to avail themselves of the bene-
fits of industrial research will obtain such a lead over their competitors
that we may look forward to the time when the advantages of industrial
research will be recognized by all.

Industrial scientific research departments can reach their highest de-
velopment in those concerns doing the largest amount of business. While
instances are not wanting where the large growth of the institution is
the direct result of the care which is bestowed upon industrial research
at a time when it was but a small concern, nevertheless conditions to-
day are such that. without cooperation among themselves the small con-
cerns can not have the full benefits of industrial research, for no one
among them is sufficiently strong to maintain the necessary staff and
laboratories. Once the vital importance of this subject is appreciated by
the small manufacturers many solutions of the problem will promptly
appear. One of these is for the manufacturer to take his problem to one
of the industrial research laboratories already established for the purpose
of serving those who can not afford a laboratory of their own. Other
manufacturers doing the same, the financial encouragement received
would enable the laboratories to extend and improve their facilities so
that each of the small manufacturers who patronizes them w^ould in
course of time have the benefit of an institution similar to those main-
tained by our largest industrial concerns.

Thus, in accordance with the law of supply and demand, the small
manufacturer may obtain the benefits of industrial research in the high-
est degree and the burden upon each manufacturer would be only in
accordance with the use he made of it, and the entire cost of the labora-
tories would thus be borne by the industries as a whole, where the charge
properly belongs. Many other projects are now being considered for the
establishment of industrial research laboratories for those concerns which
can not afford laboratories of their own, and in some of these cases the
possible relation of these laboratories to our technical and engineering
schools is being earnestly studied.

Until the manufacturers themselves are aroused to the necessity of
action in the matter of industrial research there is no plan which can be
devised that will result in the general establishment of research labora-
tories for the industries. But once their need is felt and their value ap-
preciated and the demand for research facilities is put forth by the
manufacturers themselves, research laboratories will spring up in all our

U6]

II, 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IX INDUSTRY

great centers of industrial activity. Their number and character and size,
and their method of operation and their relation to the technical and
engineering schools, and the method of their working with the different
industries, are all matters which involve many interesting problems —
problems which I am sure will be solved as they present themselves and
when their nature has been clearly apprehended.

In the present state of the world's development there is nothing
which can do more to advance American industries than the adoption
bv our manufacturers generally of industrial research conducted on
scientific principles. I am sure that if they can be made to appreciate the
force of this statement, our manufacturers will rise to the occasion with
all that energy and enterprise so characteristic of America.

So much has already been said and so much remains to be said urg-
ing upon us the importance of scientific research conducted for the sake
of utility and for increasing the convenience and comfort of mankind,
that there is danger of losing sight of another form of research which
has for its primary object none of these things, I refer to pure scientific
research.

In the minds of many there is confusion between industrial scientific
research and this purely scientific research, particularly as the industrial
research involves the use of advanced scientific methods and calls for
the highest degree of scientific attainment. The confusion is worse
because the same scientific principles and methods of investigation are
frequently employed in each case and even the subject-matter under in-
vestigation may sometimes be identical.

The misunderstanding arises from considering only the subject-
matter of the two classes of research. The distinction is to be found not
in the subject-matter of the research, but in the motive. The electrical
engineer, let us say, finding a new and unexplained difficulty in the
working of electric lamps, subjects the phenomenon observed to a proc-
ess of inquiry employing scientific methods, with a view to removing
from the lamps an objectionable characteristic. The pure scientist at the
same time investigates in precisely the same manner the same phenome-
non, but with the purpose of obtaining an explanation of a physical oc-
currence, the nature of which can not be explained by known facts.
Although these two researches are conducted in exactly the same man-
ner, the one nevertheless comes under the head of industrial research
and the other belongs to the domain of pure science. In the last analysis
the distinction between pure scientific research and industrial scientific
research is one of motive. Industrial research is always conducted with
the purpose of accomplishing some utilitarian end. Pure scientific re-
search is conducted with a philosophic purpose, for the discovery of
truth, and for the advancement of tfie boundaries of human knowledge.

The investigator in pure science may be likened to the explorer
who discovers new continents or islands or hitherto unknown ter-
ritory. He is continually seeking to extend the boundaries of knowl-
edge.

The investigator in industrial research may be compared to the pio-
neers who survey the newly discovered territory in the endeavor to
locate its mineral resources, determine the extent of its forests, and the

[27]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

location of its arable land, and who in other ways precede the settlers
and prepare for their occupation of the new country.

The work of the pure scientists is conducted without any utilitarian
motive, for, as Huxley says, "that which stirs their pulses is the love of
knowledge and the joy of discovery of the causes of things sung by the
old poet — the supreme delight of extending the realm of law and order
ever farther towards the unattainable goals of the infinitely great and the
infinitely small, between which our little race of life is run." While a
single discovery in pure science when considered with reference to any
particular branch of industry may not appear to be of appreciable ben-
efit, yet when interpreted by the industrial scientist, with whom I class
the engineer and the industrial chemist, and when adapted to practical
uses by them, the contributions of pure science as a whole become of
incalculable value to all the industries.

I do not say this because a new incentive is necessary for the pure
scientist, for in him there must be some of the divine spark and for him
there is no higher motive than the search for the truth itself. But surely
this motive must be intensified by the knowledge that when the search
is rewarded there is sure to be found, sooner or later, in the truth which
has been discovered, the seeds of future great inventions which will in-
crease the comfort and convenience and alleviate the sufferings of mankind.

By all who study the subject, it will be found that while the dis-
coveries of the pure scientist are of the greatest importance to the higher
interests of mankind, their practical benefits, though certain, are usually
indirect, intangible or remote. Pure scientific research unlike industrial
scientific research can not support itself by direct pecuniary returns from
its discoveries.

The practical benefits which may be immediately and directly
traced to industrial research, when it is properly conducted, are so great
that when their importance is more generally recognized industrial re-
search will not lack the most generous encouragement and support. In-
deed, unless industrial research abundantly supports itself it will have
failed of its purpose.

But who is to support the researches of the pure scientist, and who
is to furnish him with encouragement and assistance to pursue his self-
sacrificing and arduous quest for that truth which is certain as time goes
on to bring in its train so many blessings to mankind? Who is to furnish
the laboratories, the funds for apparatus and for traveling and for for-
eign study?

Because of the extraordinary practical results which have been at-
tained by scientifically trained men working in the industrial laborato-
ries and because of the limited and narrow conditions under which many
scientific investigators have sometimes been compelled to work in uni-
versities, it has been suggested that perhaps the theater of scientific re-
search might be shifted from the university to the great industrial
laboratories which have already grown up or to the even greater ones
which the future is bound to bring forth. But we can dismiss this sug-
gestion as being unworthy.

Organizations and institutions of many kinds are engaged in pure
scientific research and they should receive every encouragement, but

[28]

II. — 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY

the natural home of pure science and of pure scientific research is to be
found in the university, from which it can not pass. It is a high func-
tion of the universities to make advances in science, to test new scientific
discoveries and to place their stamp of truth upon those which are found
to be pure. In this way only can they determine what shall be taught as
scientific truth to those who, relying upon their authority, come to
them for knowledge and believe what they teach.

Instead of abdicating in their favor, may not our universities, stimu -
lated by the wonderful achievements of these industrial laboratories,
find a way to advance the conduct of their own pure scientific research,
the grand responsibility for which rests upon them. This responsibility
should now be felt more heavily than ever by our American universities,
not only because the tragedy of the great war has caused the destruction
of European institutions of learning, but because even a worse thing has
happened. So great have been the fatalities of the war that the universi-
ties of the old world hardly dare to count their dead.

But what can the American universities do, for they, like the pure
scientists, are not engaged in a lucrative occupation. Universities are not
money-making institutions, and what can be done without money?

There is much that can be done without money. The most impor-
tant and most fundamental factor in scientific research is the mind of a
man suitably endowed by nature. Unless the scientific investigator has
the proper genius for his work, no amount of financial assistance, no
apparatus or laboratories, however complete, and no foreign travel and
study, however extensive, will enable such a mind to discover new truths
or to inspire others to do so. Judgment and appreciation and insight into
character on the part of the responsible university authorities must be
applied to the problem, so that when the man with the required mental
attributes does appear he may be appreciated as early in his career as
possible. This is a very difficult thing to do indeed. Any one can recog-
nize such a man after his great achievements have become known to all
the world, but I sometimes think that one who can select early a man
who has within him the making of the scientific discoverer must have
been himself fired with a little of the divine spark. Such surely was the
case with Sir Humphry Davy, himself a great discoverer, who, realizing
the fundamental importance of the man in scientific discovery, once said
that Michael Faraday, whose genius he was prompt to recognize, con-
stituted his greatest discovery.

I can furnish no formula for the identification of budding genius
and I have no ready-made plan to lay before the universities for the
advancement of pure scientific research. But as a representative of engi-
neering and industrial research, having testified to the great value of
pure scientific research, I venture to suggest that the university author-
ities themselves might well consider the immense debt which engineer-
ing and the industries and transportation and communications and com-
merce owe to pure science, and to express the hope that the importance
of pure scientific research will be more fully appreciated both within the
university and without, for then will come — and then only — that sym-
pathetic appreciation and generous financial support so much needed for
the advancement of pure scientific research in America.

[29]

cc<cco«c«c-

THE RISE OF SCIENCE
IN AGRICULTURE

One of the great themes of American history from 1865 to 1916 is
the clash of the hitherto dominant agrarian interest with the rising power
of mass industry and the growing urbanization which accompanied it.
After viewing the Populist revolt and the crusade of William Jennings
Bryan in the election of 1896, most observers are content to award the
palm of victory to the forces of industrialism. An easy consequence of
this judgment is the assumption that the rise of science in industry,
which the comments above have chronicled, somehow caused the con-
quest of the agrarian interest by a mechanical and mechanized industrial
system. However, we should ask the question: Did the coupling of sci-
ence to technology occur in agriculture as well as in industry? An
abundance of evidence indicates not only that the coupling did take
place, but also that it took place as early as in industry and that the results
were more thoroughgoing if not more spectacular. The difference lies in
a completely diverse institutional pattern with the Federal government
instead of the modern corporation providing the decisive support for the
experiment stations and laboratories for agriculture research. The year
1896 which marked the defeat of the farmer's last bid for political domi-
nation was the end of an era. At almost precisely the same time, the
Federal government was molding itself into a research agency for the
benefit of the American farmer, who by 1916 had the services of science
in a way not possessed either by industry or by the farmers of most
other countries.

A.
AN EARLY DEMAND FOR AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH

CEven before the Civil War the possible usefulness of chemistry in
agriculture was a commonplace in agricultural literature. At that early

[30]

Ill, — 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

time some conception of the institutional arrangements needed to apply
research to agriculture appeared in the widespread discussion. Only after
the South seceded, however, was it possible to get action in Congress
in the form of the act creating the Department of Agriculture and the
Morrill Land Grant Act assisting the states to create agricultural and
mechanical colleges. The following passage shows the kind of idea which
lay behind the action of Congress and the expectation, even then, that
the government was the agency best fitted to mount the program. Note,
too, that even in the 1850's — thirtv-five years before Frederick Jackson
Turner published his first important essay on the frontier — an observer
could see that science was the most promising alternative to unoccupied
land as an antidote to soil exhaustion. Yet, is there any similarity in the
use of chemistry in technology as envisaged here with that described
previously by Hamor? ("Necessity of Agricultural Reform," De Boiv's
Revieiv, XXV [1858], 158-63.)]

We have a numerous, increasing, and industrious farming popula-
tion; we rejoice in a comparatively rich soil; our agricultural machinery
and implements are eminently practical, time and labor-saving ones. Let
us add theoretical knowledge, science, system to skill, experience, and
inventive mood, and we shall not only be safe, but may reach the climax.

But while yet surrounded by favorable circumstances, while yet liv-
ing in a country, the area of which is blessed to a great extent with a
most productive soil, requiring comparatively little toil and skill to make
it yield abundant crops, experience as well as scientific research, do
forewarn and admonish us, not to trust too implicitly to this apparently
most prosperous state of things, for rapid are the changes that may come
over us, while we are dreaming or boasting of our prodigious condition.
The happiest, wealthiest land may become poor and miserable, and the
most prolific soil exhausted in the lapse of time, "if not certain constitu-
ent elements are returned to it in proportion to the extent to which they
have been carried away by successful crops."

The restitution of the continually disturbed equilibrium alone se-
cures fertility m infiJiitum; and wherever nature does not supply means
to that end, human industry and human skill must take its place. We
have striking examples for either relation. Thus in China and certain
parts of Europe, it is chiefly manure, and to a great extent artificial
manure, by means of which the soil is kept productive; in Hungary and
[a] few other regions, it is owing to the quick disintegration of peculiarly
adapted sub-soils or rocks, that a constant supply of nourishment for
certain crops is furnished; in the Nile valley and certain river bottoms
of the United States the yearly inundations secure fertility; and in the
Netherlands the same result is chiefly due to a regular system of irriga-
tion. But most of these examples do not form the rule, but rather the
exception, and the majority of agricultural regions are wont to im-
itate China, if the yield of their soils shall not gradually decrease.

That the latter course is not more generally, and more timely
adopted in the United States, that there, some of the most fecund tracts
have been suffered to be laid waste, is easily explained. The immense

[3']

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

area of unoccupied and unimproved land in the great West, together
with the many other inducements to a settlement in those splendid,
rising regions, make part of our people indifferent to the fate of the
Atlantic States, and dazzle others to such an extent, that they see no
danger in the exhaustion and final abandonment of their former homes;
at least they see no danger for them and that is about all they mean to
care for. To look to posterity is none of their business, neither do they
dream that retribution may ever visit them in their new abodes; and
perhaps it will not during their lifetime.

But wherein does consist the gain, if the annexation of a new agri-
cultural district is analogous to the exhaustion and partial desertion of
another? What have Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, &c., gained by
the access and development of new Territories and States? Has the proc-
ess of exhaustion been retarded or checked in consequence? The popula-
tion, the fertility, produce, wealth, and general prosperity increased in
the ratio of her original capability? Not at all. The acquisition and oc-
cupation of new Territory has only tempted and enabled people to be
the more regardless of the mother State, and to quit it at the first signs
of its receding prosperity, or its slower progress. . . .

That our great confederacy cannot, without serious, vital injury to
its imposing and still growing agricultural industrial and commercial in-
terests, long remain behind other countries in nursing that branch of the
natural sciences, which is the teacher, guide and benefactor of almost
every trade and craft, requires no argumentation in this place, nor do
we think to have failed to make it manifest, that no species of human
pursuit is more depending and more indebted to chemistry than the agri-
culture. Chemistry does not only give instruction to the farmer on every-
thing that there is, but it teaches him what is wanting, and how it can
be got. It makes known unto him the constituents in the composition of
the surface soil, its fertility in general, and its adaptability to certain
plants. It makes him acquainted with the proportiojis in which certain
constituent and fertilizing elements are contained in the soil; and with
the extent to which they are withdrawn from it, by each succeeding
crop, when he subjects the ashes to an analytical inquiry. It tells him
how far, and in which time a subsoil can be made capable of replacing
the withdrawn minerals, earths, and alkalies, and gives him the informa-
tion, whether this is to be effected by deep-ploughing, rotation, fallow,
irrigation, manuring, or any other contrivances or applications. It gives
him certain knowledge of the capability of a soil to absorb and to retain
moisture, and discloses unto him its power of capillary attraction. It
points out to him all the sources from which fertilizers or manures can
be drawn, and suggests the most practical and efficient modes as to the
quantities, forms and combinations, in which such fertilizers have to be
brought upon the field in order to restore it either to its former produc-
tivity or to increase the same, &c.

These are but a few of the advantages and benefits to be derived
from an appeal to science, from an application of chemistry to the art
of [agrijculture.

[32]

Ill, 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

. . . The establishment of Agricultural Laboratories is the great
desideratum for any successful initial step towards material improve-
ments in the state of our agriculture. Single, solitary investigations of
soil and ashes, and subsequent devices to turn them to account, will
benefit locally or individually, and should be more frequently resorted
to than heretofore; but the whole object, the national aim, cannot be at-
tained by this means. To accomplish that desirable and great end, a per-
fect chemical survey is wanting.

If but a single series of such investigations would be undertaken on
the part of the Federal or a State Government, we do not for one mo-
ment doubt but that its results would be looked at with astonishment,
and hailed with delight by either legislators, statesmen, and practical
agriculturists.

B.
THE DEPARTMENT IN 1882

Cin the first twenty years of its existence (1862 to 1882), the De-
partment of Agriculture struggled along modestly, convincing few^ that it
had much to offer the American farmer. Tw o issues especially w ere still
undecided. The first was whether or not that part of the Federal govern-
ment closely associated with party politics could be trusted to administer
an agricultural research program which could command the respect of
scientists in general. The second issue was how to organize the Depart-
ment. For the first two decades, the Department had general-purpose
divisions which corresponded roughly to academic disciplines in the uni-
versities w hich were developing largely as a result of the stimulus of the
Morrill Land Grant Act. The following review of a biennial report of
the Commissioner of Agriculture renders a negative judgment on both
of these issues. Note that it appeared in a new journal founded as a
spokesman for the university scientists. ("The Government Agricultural
Report," Science, I [1883], 142-43.) Is it always true that science appUed
to technology yields answers which are worth the effort?]

Inasmuch as the present commissioner, when he entered upon his
duties, "found the work for the season, both regular and special, elabo-
rately laid out by my [his] successor," his report not unnaturally bears
a strong resemblance to the reports of preceding years. It contains the
usual reports of the entomologist, the superintendent of grounds, the
botanist, the chemist, and the statistician, besides special reports relating
to the diseases of animals and to the boring of artesian wells on the arid
lands of the west. The tone and matter of the special reports and of the
reports of special character compare so favorably w ith most of those of
the old-style 'regulars,' that the thought suggests itself, that a much
larger proportion of the work of the department than has hitherto been
customary could best be done by special commissioners outside of Wash-
ington and far away from its influences. From the very nature of the

[33]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

situation and surroundings of the Department of Agriculture; the irregu-
larity of its income; and its dependence for support upon the favor of
political parties, — let alone the merciful dispensation that the tenure of
office of its chief is short, — it cannot be accounted competent to carry
on continuous scientific researches; and it is in no sense desirable that it
should do so. Works of longiie halehie such as must necessarily run on
consecutively from year to year are beyond its powers; and it will be
well for Commissioners of agriculture, present and future, to accept the
fact. Rather than try to grasp the unattainable, it will assuredly be wiser
to study special finite questions as they present themselves; and to this
end the best means is the employment of special scientific men of ap-
proved competency, each one to grapple with his own particular ques-
tion in such place and manner as he may deem fit.

One commendable feature of the present volume is the comparative
brevity of the reports of the superintendent of grounds and the botanist
(of the report of the entomologist we shall speak at another time). The
report of the chemist, on the other hand, is extended, and it has some-
what the effect of a twice-told tale. It was interesting and important to
prove that the proportion of true sugar in sorghum-stalks increases con-
tinually until the plant is well advanced toward maturity; but the evi-
dence of this fact presented in previous reports seemed convincing, and
many of the results recorded in the present volume have the effect of
being little more than refinements upon good work. The reader is in-
clined to ask whether it is not about time for the department to let its
scientific corps drop sorghum, and to relegate the subject to the arts-
men proper; that is to say, to those fanners and manufacturers who are
specially interested in this line of business.

From a letter of the 'commissioners for locating artesian wells upon
arid and waste lands,' as well as from the statements of the commissioner
of agriculture himself, it appears that in their opinion the first trial-well
at Fort Lyon in Colorado was not a success. The onus of this 'failure'
is made to rest, of course, on the shoulders of a preceding administra-
tion; but the lesson it teaches is none the less instructive. It suggests the
reflection, that while one important function of the Department of agri-
culture has been to show the American people 'how not to do it,' there
are various ways in which the lesson is enforced. Impracticable borings
in Colorado undoubtedly represent one mode of tuition, but in the ap-
pointing and changing of employes for political reasons we have an-
other; and to the same end must inevitably work all changes of base
which are hasty, spasmodic, and inconsequent. It will be of interest to
notice how far down the next borings will be permitted to reach before
a new incumbent says, 'Hold, enough!'

From a couple of modestly printed tables on pp. 25 and 692, it ap-
pears that the Department of agriculture disbursed $256,129.68 during
the year ending June 30, 1881, and $353,748.60 during the year ending
June 30, 1882. It will convey no new information, either to scientific
men or to the agricultural community, when we say that the results
obtained by this class of expenditures have hitherto been, out of all pro-
portion, small.

[34]

Ill, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

c.

THEOBALD SMITH AND TEXAS FEVER

CDespite the gloomy predictions of practical men and scientists alike
in the early 1880's, agricultural research began to pay off. Just as the
development of bacteriology in Europe had its agricultural side, Amer-
ican scientists in the Department of Agriculture eventually demonstrated
that a fruitful attempt to solve a practical problem could result in a
basic contribution to knowledge. The most conspicuous early accom-
plishment of the Department came when a team of scientists of various
specialties working in the Bureau of Animal Industry under the direc-
tion of Theobald Smith solved a problem of pressing importance to the
post-Civil War cattle empire and at the same time proved the role of
the secondary host in the transmission of disease. The colorful open-
range cattle industry with its long drive of millions of animals from the
fever-infected South to the susceptible North was quite as close to the
scientific frontier as it was to the geographic frontier. For instance, com-
pare the pattern of organization and the relation of science to practical
results as shown in the following example to the pattern described in
industry by Langmuir. (Hans Zinsser, "Biographical Memoir of Theo-
bald Smith, 1859-1934," National Academy of Sciences, Biographical
Memoirs, XVII [1937], 261-303.)]

When Smith, in association with Kilborne, first approached the
problem experimentally (1889), there was already some information
about this disease and interest in it was stimulated by its great economic
importance.

There had been, for a long time, an impression among cattle ranch-
ers, vague but persistent, that ticks were in some manner related to the
infection. In 1885, the geographical distribution of the disease had been
approximately established by Salmon and its northern limits defined. In
1889, Curtice, the entomologist of the Bureau of Animal Industry (4th
and 5th Annual Reports, Bureau Animal Industry, p. 436) spoke of an
experiment carried out in the Chicago Stockyards, in which five cows
were placed into a pen in which Texas cows had been held, with the
result that four of them died of the cattle fever. This experiment had
been suggested by the "oft repeated experiment of allowing native cattle
to live in the trail of Texas cattle." A similar experiment was reported
in the same year by Kilborne but, in this attempt, northern cattle were
mixed, in one pen, with southern cattle rendered free of ticks — while
in another pen the ticks were left on the infected animals. The result
was no infection in the former, death of the animals in the latter. Again,
in the same year. Smith, undoubtedly working in close association with
his colleagues, described (Medical News, Philadelphia) the little bodies
in the red cells of infected cattle which he later (1891) recognized as
protozoa and eventually named Prioplasma Bigeminum. In announcing
this discovery. Smith with the fairness and generosity of character to
which "priority" squabbles were abhorrent suggests that these bodies were

[35]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

probably identical with those seen by Stiles in 1869, but probably unlike
those of Babes (1888) because the latter claimed to have succeeded in
cultivating the organism he had observed. In the longer report of 1891
Smith, with Kilborne, reported on a more extensive and thorough series
of transmission experiments in which four animals were infected by the
direct application of ticks. Further, they had placed southern cattle in
pens with northern stock — in some cases after the removal of ticks,
while in other enclosures the ticks were left on the infected animals.
Also, native cattle were kept in fields in which infected ticks had been
scattered on the ground. The report which is one of the classics of medi-
cal literature, established beyond question the role of the tick as the car-
rier of the disease. And not the least of the achievements of these
experiments was the observation that the infection could pass, in ticks
from mother to offspring, a new and extraordinary phenomenon of
parasitism which has found its analogy in tick infection with the Rickett-
sia of Spotted Fever. It is certainly not a disparagement of Smith's
greatness to correct the erroneous impression created in some popular
accounts which belittle the merits of his associates, by stating that these
fundamental discoveries were in fact collaborations between a group of
well-trained and intelligent men, rather than entirely the work of Smith
alone. In doing so it is quite certain that we are stating the case in the
manner in which he would have wanted it told. Moreover, from what
we know of him and his experimental acumen, it seems more than likely
that his was the leading spirit in this collaboration by which, for the
first time, the complete cycle of transmission of disease by insects was
established. It is true, of course, that as early as 1877, Manson had dis-
covered that embryo filaria, taken up from the blood of infected men
by mosquitoes, developed in the insects into the final larval stages. But
Manson's studies did not show how the filaria again reached man. . . .
The investigations of Smith and his collaborators were, therefore, the
first to establish the complete cycle of transmission by arthropod vectors
— a discovery which represents one of those fundamental steps forward
that alter the entire course of a science, and which has practical conse-
quences of inestimable and permanent importance. We have presented
this particular work with a certain degree of emphasis upon the parts
played by others than Smith and upon the significance of earlier dis-
coveries which undoubtedly helped to shape Smith's thoughts and ex-
periments.

D.

THE SHIFT TO THE PROBLEM APPROACH-
CHARLES W. DABNEY

CDuring the 1880's and 1890's the Department of Agriculture went
through a distinct evolution in its organization. In place of the divisions
representing academic scientific disciplines, the Department developed
new bureaus around distinct problems. Scientists of more than one dis-

[36]

Ill, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

cipline were grouped around particular problems of importance to Amer-
ican farmers. You may feel that this evolution was one which was away
from basic science in the direction of narrow practicality. But consider
also that the reorganization may possibly have led not only to the prac-
tical results with their consequent political support, but also to an in-
creased specialization which meant higher scientific standards in the
Department. Note that the following account, touching on the shift to
the problem approach, was written in 1895, fairly early in this reorgani-
zation. This politician-spokesman for science in the Department had to
be particularly careful to defend the Department against the charge of
extravagance in the early 1890's, and he represents one commentary on
the events of that stormy decade in the general history of the American
farmer. (Charles W. Dabney, "The Scientific Work of the Department
of Agriculture," Bidletm No. 24 [Washington: Department of Agricul-
ture, Office of Experiment Stations, 1895], pp. 63-67.) Do you see any-
thing emerging here which is comparable to the industrial research
laboratories?]

One of the Western newspapers made a remarkable announcement
last March, to the effect that the Department of Agriculture had just
"elected a professor of astrology." We have long known that the moon
was supposed to have a great influence on some departments of agri-
culture, but we had never heard it suggested before that the stars had
anything to do with crops. It did not take us long, however, to find out
that the usually infallible editor referred to our new officer, the "agros-
tologist" — a title that the country newspapers have been struggling with
ever since.

The Department of Agriculture has always recognized the im-
portance of the investigation of our forage resources, and through its
Division of Botany it has made many valuable contributions to our
knowledge of them. In view of the growing importance of grasses and
forage plants at the present time, when the methods and objects of
farming in many sections of our country are undergoing a radical
change, the honorable Secretary of Agriculture recently decided that
this subject required more attention than the Department was able to
give it with the present force of the Division of Botany. He therefore
employed a special agent to prosecute investigations upon grasses and
forage plants.

No country in the world possesses such vast forage resources as
ours, and in none are the plants which compose that forage more vari-
ous. Our botanist informs us that there are over 3,500 different kinds of
grasses in the world, of which over 700 are known to grow within our
territory. There are, besides, many useful forage plants — not grasses —
such as the clovers and alfalfa. The annual hay crop of the country has
an estimated value of $600,000,000 and more than 14,000,000 head of
cattle are supported upon our grazing lands. The maintenance and im-
provement of these resources is a matter of importance to every citizen
of the United States, and of direct and vital interest to every American
family. Upon it depend the vast meat and dairy interests, and to a great

[37]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

extent the more important methods of maintaining the fertihty of our
agricultural lands.

In our great territory, including lands of many different elevations
and climates, much exploratory work yet remains to be done upon our
native grasses, and by continued examinations it can not be doubted that
useful species new to agriculture will from time to time be found. In the
arid regions of the West and Southwest are nutritious grasses and other
native forage plants whose introduction into culture, if carefully under-
taken, could not fail to greatly benefit these sections. The importation of
the native or improved forage plants of other countries has in some
cases resulted in much benefit to our agriculture, and doubtless many
other plants can be found and tested with regard to their adaptability to
our climate and soils. The study of grasses for special purposes, as for
example, for binding the drifting sands along our ocean and lake shores;
for holding the embankments of our great rivers, which frequently over-
flow and sweep away farms, while they cover others with destructive
debris, materially broadens the interest in grasses and makes this work
of practical importance to many other classes of citizens.

Considerations like these have induced the Secretary of Agriculture
to recommend to Congress the establishment of a separate Division of
Agrostology for investigating grasses and forage plants, with special ref-
erence to their use in those sections of our country where they are at
present little known. The establishment of such a division would demon-
strate to the citizens of this and other countries that our National Gov-
ernment fully recognizes the primary importance of the grasses in the
rural economy of the nation. It will be the function of the new division
to instruct our people in the habits and uses of these plants; to examine
their natural history and adaptability to our different soils and conditions;
to import, test, and introduce foreign kinds into cultivation; to identify
the plants sent in by correspondents; and to prepare circulars, bulletins,
and manuals for distribution. I am pleased to be able to tell you that we
have reason to believe that Congress will give us the authority and the
means with which to carry on this work.

The Division of Botany, which has been so prolific in giving birth
to new divisions — the Division of Forestry and the Division of Vege-
table Pathology, as well as Agrostology, are its children — has recently
developed several other new lines of work. It has, for example, devoted
a great deal of attention recently to a more systematic study of weeds.
Among others, that czar of weeds, the Russian thistle, which some of
our Congressmen think to be worth its million, has received much care-
ful attention. The Department has done all that it could do in investigat-
ing the natural history and methods of distribution of this weed, and in
publishing circulars and bulletins relative thereto. There are other weeds
which are almost if not quite as dangerous as this, and they will all be
studied as rapidly as the means available will permit.

A special expert has been engaged and a laboratory fitted up for the
systematic study of seeds with reference to their purity, germinating
power, etc. This is an important matter, especially in connection with
our studies of grasses, forage plants, and weeds, since our grass seed and

[38]

Ill, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

seed grain are always liable to be contaminated with the seed of weeds.
It is our desire to establish standards of purity and of germinating power
for all the chief American seeds, and in this way promote the trade in
these seeds and especially the demand for them abroad. Our exports of
clover seed are already very considerable, and many seeds of commerce
demand the oversight of this Department.

I speak this morning to many agricultural chemists, so that I need
not take time to explain the disappointments that we have all felt with
regard to the results of the chemical analyses of soils. We must acknowl-
edge now that we can not tell the practical farmer all that he wants to
know by a single analysis of his soil; that it often requires many analyses
to learn, even approximately, the chemical nature of the soil of a given
section and that, even when we have made these, we are unable to ex-
plain why one soil is productive while another fails entirely. We all
know cases where soils having almost identically the same chemical com-
position yet differ greatly in the uses to which they can be put. In short,
the chemical analysis of the soil does not tell us the w hole story. A great
deal more is to be learned about it before we can tell the farmer how to
make it productive or why he should put one particular crop upon it
and not another. Our Department has decided, therefore, to attack this
old problem from two different sides; first, from the physical side, by
studying its relation to heat, moisture, etc.; and second, from the bio-
logical side, by studying its nitrifying organisms, etc. This we hope to
do without neglecting the old lines of chemical investigation.

A new division has been created in the Department to be known as
the "Division of Agricultural Soils," whose duty it will be to study the
rainfall and temperature after they have entered the soil and to keep a
continuous record of them in the most important types of soil in our
country. Our Weather Bureau keeps a record of the temperature and
of the moisture in the air and of the rainfall until it reaches the surface
of the soil. It is proposed in this new division to continue the study of
the rainfall after it enters the soil. The actual conditions of air, moisture,
and temperature which soils are able to maintain largely determine what
classes of plants are adapted to them. These things depend in turn upon
the texture of the soil. Even with the same rainfall and exposure to heat
it is well known that different soils maintain very different conditions.
This difference in the meteorological conditions under the surface has
an important bearing upon the adaptability of soils to crops, because of
the influence on their development, yield, texture, quality, vitality, and
time of ripening.

Soils adapted to early truck and small fruits, for example, are sandy,
open, and warm, allowing the rain to pass through them very readily
and maintaining only a small amount of moisture. This dry condition
gives them their peculiar value for forcing vegetation to an early ma-
turity. The tobacco soils of Pennsylvania owe their peculiar value to
their close texture and to the fact that they maintain an abundance of
moisture for the crop. This produces a large, heavy type of wrapper
which competes with the Cuban tobacco. The tobacco of the Connecti-
cut Valley, on the other hand, is grown on a very light textured, sandy

[39]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

loam, and the soil being much drier the crop is much lighter in color
and finer in texture. It competes with the Sumatra wrapper.

The work of this new division is to be confined to the study, prin-
cipally, of the texture of the soils adapted to these different interests. It
will be one of the purposes of this division to develop the methods of
these investigations and to encourage an extensive study of the soils of
the country by State stations and colleges. There is a pioneer work to
be done here which you can scarcely be expected to do. This work is
based upon geological formations which may cover a number of States
and may be found in widely separated parts of the country. Samples
from the same formation or the same class of agricultural soils must be
collected from all over the country and carefully examined and com-
pared. In many cases it will doubtless be necessary to get samples of soils
from foreign countries for the purpose of comparing them with our own.

Congress has also been asked to provide, in connection with our
Chemical Division, for the investigation of the chemical characteristics
of the various typical soils of the United States, especially in relation to
the nature of the nitrifying organisms contained therein and the best
condition for the growth of the same. This work has already been begun
and promises to be most interesting.

I am in danger, however, of using too much of your time, and must
hasten to a conclusion. You will be interested to know that the Depart-
ment of Agriculture, which is, in part, a great experiment station itself,
is pushing its scientific work ahead of everything else. We have made a
little table showing the actual expenditures of the Department during
the years 1892, 1893, and 1894 for all of its different purposes, and have
classified these expenditures so as to throw all money used in the strictly
scientific work in one column and all that expended for administrative
purposes, for publishing and distributing documents, for distributing
seeds, for purely business or strictly educational work, in another col-
umn. I will not burden your proceedings with this table, but merely give
you the results.

The Department of Agriculture expended for the fiscal year 1892
$2,271,312.72, and 46.2 per cent of that sum was expended in scientific
research. For the fiscal year 1893 the expenditures were $2,354,809.56,
and out of it 45.6 per cent was expended in the application of science to
agriculture. For the year ending June 30, 1894, out of a total expenditure
of $1,990,530.70, the Department applied 51.8 to scientific work and in-
vestigation. While economy has been practiced in the administration of
the Department, this economy has not impaired its scientific work. Com-
paring the expenditures for the fiscal years 1893 and 1894, respectively, I
note that the total expenditures for 1894 are, roughly, $364,000 less than
the total for 1893; but the per cent of the total amount paid out for scien-
tific work, as distinguished from the administrative and general business,
is 5.6 per cent more, in proportion to the total expenditures during the
year 1894, than it was in 1892, and 6.2 per cent more than it was in 1893.
It was during this same time that we commenced the new work in agri-
cultural soils, agrostology, and seed investigations, and still further de-
veloped that in weeds and many other older scientific lines.

[40]

Ill, — 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

E.

A MATURE RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT FOR

AGRICULTURE

CBy the time of the outbreak of the First World War, the Depart-
ment of Agriculture had won a secure place in the government. The
unique combination of the Department, the state experiment stations, and
the land-grant colleges gave the American farmer superb research sup-
port. Yet this generally fortunate state of affairs opened up new chal-
lenges and problems for those concerned with the application of science
to agriculture. What some of them were is suggested by the following
selections.

1. A Scientists Vieiv. One of the scientists who worked in the
elaborate system of government supported agricultural services com-
ments on the difficulties of guarding the interests of true scientific re-
search in the environment of a political organization beholden to a
strong and self-conscious economic group. (Eugene Davenport, "The
Outlook for Agricultural Science," Sciejice, N.S. XLV [1917], 149-60.)]

Without wasting time in discussing the question whether there is
such a thing as agricultural science, I desire to proceed at once to a
brief review of the conditions both favorable and unfavorable to the
progress of those scientific activities necessary to the improvement of
American agriculture and the welfare of country people upon whom we
all depend for our food supply, for the proper employment and treat-
ment of our lands, and for certain human qualities best propagated and
preserved in the life of the open country.

No thinking man can fail to be deeply impressed with the magnitude
and the far-reaching consequences of what might be called the American
program for agricultural advancement.

This program took definite form in 1862 in the establishment of a
national Department of Agriculture, and in the passage of the Land
Grant Act, whereby a college of agriculture was established in every
state of the union. It was characterized and vitalized a quarter of a cen-
tury later by subsequent acts providing for an experiment station in con-
nection with every agricultural college; and mightily advanced by state
appropriations, in some instances multiplying many times the federal
subsidy. So generous indeed were these appropriations that the $30,000
of federal funds have been supplemented until the total revenues of cer-
tain institutions for agricultural research amount to no less than $200,000
annually.

This combined federal and state program aims directly at an ade-
quate and a permanent food-supply, and with equal directness it pro-
poses to retain upon the land, if possible, a fair share of the intelligence,
the learning, and the culture of the American people. This latter purpose
may be called Utopian, but a little reflection will convince even the most
skeptical that in no other way can our lands be properly handled,

[4']

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

for farming is after all and in the last analysis an individual affair.

The incidental effect upon citizenship of such a systematic effort,
especially in a democracy, is an interesting sociological and economic
question, but it is quite aside from the present purpose, which is to
analyze the agencies that have been awakened in the name of agricul-
tural science and to distinguish as clearly as possible between those that
are really helpful and others that by accident or otherwise have become
attached like barnacles to the ship and whose load is even less serious
than their resistance.

The sudden establishment of a national system of fifty institutions
under combined federal and state support, and the engaging upon this
extensive scale in both education and research in a hitherto neglected, if
not despised, field was certain to be followed by results both desirable
and undesirable. The combination is still further complicated by the
fact that the new field has suddenly become popular, drawing into its
vortex amounts of money never before equaled, and engaging the atten-
tion of all sorts and conditions of men, some seeking opportunity for
real service, others attracted by the loaves and fishes, even by the crumbs.

It was as inevitable that certain results should follow^ the agencies
here invoked as that other effects should follow causes.

For example, it is impossible to launch so pretentious a program
without a vast amount of good resulting, and in this respect the most
sanguine enthusiasts have not been disappointed. It is impossible to ac-
complish a public service of this character and magnitude without de-
veloping a body of earnest, capable and devoted scientists who work, not
for reward, but for the good that they can do, and it is my desire here
and now to pay tribute of respect to the hundreds, yes thousands of
men and women who labor both day and night, who expose and often
destroy their health in carrying forward this great work. They shall
have their reward.

But it is also impossible to suddenly engage upon an extensive scale
in a new and undeveloped field without drawing into the service both
inadequately trained and mediocre men. It is impossible that a field
should be popular without attracting the sensationally minded, and it is
equally unlikely that so large an amount of public money could be ex-
pended without the creation of a vast and complicated administrative
machinery. . . .

A heavy w^eight of responsibility rests upon the young man now
preparing for a career in agricultural research. It is not enough that he
have some special knowledge and skill in a narrow field such as soil
analysis, genetics or vegetable pathology. He must have scholarship,
breadth of knowledge and vision enough to know the relation of his
specialty to other branches of science, and the bearing of it all upon the
business and the practise of food production, that is, farming.

For the purposes of the investigator a real knowledge of and sym-
pathy with the actual operation of the farm and the problems of the
farmer is not only desirable, but essential. Farming is a productive, not
a speculative industry, and the problems of agriculture are those of pro-
duction and distribution, not those of special opportunity.

[42]

Ill, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

Moreover, farming is a private business upon which the welfare of
families depends — not a few scattered people, but a full third at least of
all the population and constituting entire communities. This fraction
of the race must not be disregarded or the earth will avenge herself not
only upon the unsuccessful farmer, but upon the people as a whole,
whose heritage, after all, the land is.

The agricultural scientist, therefore, must not make mistakes, or he
will lead a whole people to disaster. Our philosophies may be wrong;
they can be readjusted. Our conceptions of the solar system may be in-
complete or wholly erroneous; but everyday life will go on about the
same. However, if we entertain wrong conceptions about the serious
business of food production, the consequences are swift and merciless.

If we get too little out of the earth, population is unduly restricted
or unutterably miserable; and if we win our sustenance by methods de-
structive rather than permanent, then our successors, if not we ourselves,
will pay the penalty of our error or of our piracy. Science is our only
reliance, but the agricultural engineer must make no mistakes. He must
be no blind leader of the blind. Therefore he must know the business of
farming.

Now this is easier said than realized. The college student has lived
all his life in school. Learning has been his occupation. Moreover, we
shall tell him that if he expects to be really valuable, he must not stop
with the bachelor's degree, out he must do so much in addition and do
it so well that he will inevitably and in good time achieve the doctorate.

How then can this young man know by experience the business of
farming? He can not know^ it as the farmer knows it after fifty years of
earning a living and of clothing and educating the family he has raised.
This prospective scientist will work for a salary, which means an as-
sured living while he studies and attempts to solve the problems of those
who live by production. . . .

The experiment stations are new, and fortunately whatever else may
be said they have now the confidence of the fanners, who have come
generally to feel that a new force is in affairs and that a new help to
farming has appeared in that indefinite thing we call service.

Now there is always a temptation to put sacred things to ungodly
uses, and the experiment stations have not escaped the operation of the
general law. Science has shown that a certain disease or pest can be
controlled, and it has pointed out the method of doing it. What more
natural than that the public should take the stations at their word, and
say "Very well, here is an appropriation; go ahead, make your serums
and your rules to put the thing into practise; hale citizens into court;
fine or imprison them if necessary, but make it work"?

Now this is hasty logic and bad practise. The experiment stations
are organized for research, not for administration. Again, it is unseemly
that a creature of the public like a scientific institution should appear
against citizens in the courts and fine or commit them to jail. Besides,
the experiment stations have no militia with which to suppress resistance,
which in such cases as foot and mouth disease is as ever present as time
and as explosive as a volcano.

[43]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

Besides, the object of the scientist is research, and how shall the ex-
periment station carry on further investigation after new truth if it
must stop short and enforce the accumulating mass of revised practise.
It will soon be so cluttered up under such a policy that new work is
impossible and most of its funds and laboratory space will be used for
the purpose of "regulatory work," when further progress is practically
impossible, a condition that has already overtaken certain of the experi-
ment stations and is all too rapidly threatening others.

The only safety either to the research worker, the station or the
public is for the investigator to verify his discoveries, point out the
method of their practical use, and go on after other truths, leaving
the public to make such use of the new knowledge as it deems wise and
relying upon the usual police power of the state for its enforcement, if
enforcement is necessary. In no other way can research be protected; in
no other way can the stations discharge the public service for which they
were organized; and in no other way can the confidence of the public be
indefinitely enjoyed.

The rate and the intensity with which administration under one pre-
text or another is coming to dominate research in this country, especially
along agricultural lines, is little short of appalling to any candid observer
who takes stock of the situation and who has the courage of his con-
victions. . . .

All this is done in the name of one or the other of two agencies —
the administration of public funds, or the demands of efficiency.

Officers connected with federal and state administration seem to be
unable to distinguish between the business of auditing and that of super-
vision. They reason that if they are in any way to certify funds they
must also approve the work. In this way has ordinary auditing developed
within twenty-five years into what was at first inspection of work and
at last a kind of "cooperation" in which the one to be held responsible
for results is under the dominance of authority entirely outside the insti-
tution which he serves. In this way an outside individual, even a minor
officer, is able to overrule a university and its entire administrative
machinery.

Efficiency is more insidious, for it works under the guise of service
and proves by figures that scientists, teachers and others in the public
service must be standardized in order to be made efficient. . . .

Modern efficiency standards are developed from the manufacture of
shoes, clothes-pins, overalls, etc., and are expressed in motions per hour.
These standards are not applicable to research. Aloney put into research
is bread cast upon the waters. In the serious business of searching after
new truth, no man knows in advance the road that shall be traveled be-
fore he may stand upon the heights. He may be held down, but he can
not be pushed up. No power on earth is so impelling as his own initi-
ative and determination to achieve.

Under what project did Darwin work? Did Faraday report regu-
larly upon the progress of his mental wanderings after firm resting
places? Could the searchers after the principle of radioactivity report
progress from time to time? How shall we, even in the interest of effi-

[44]

Ill, — 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

ciency, record the Sermon on the Mount or the Gettysburg address in
terms of laboratory hours? Go to, we are deahng with strange gods at
this point. Let us be forgiven and return to the worship of the true
Deity which is ready to recognize the individual as the source of all
real discovery and which is willing to accredit him with as much of
honesty of purpose, and of faithfulness to the public as the political ap-
pointee, also an hireling. Above all let us not set up to rule over us
machinery that is manned by those individuals who could not themselves
do the work they attempt to supervise. And above all I protest against
the present temper of the public mind which has been tampered with
by professional exploiters until it is unwilling to trust its business in the
hands of boards or other deliberative bodies even when composed of
reputable citizens busy for the most part about their own affairs, but
overrules their judgment by exalting individuals who have no occupa-
tion of their own but whose profession it is to multiply and to fill ad-
ministrative positions, that render no service but that hinder mightily
the progress of the true scientist whose one occupation is research.

Here have come together the working scientist and the professional
officeholder. They face in opposite directions. At present the office man
has the upper hand. He assumes the r(51e of critic and the public has
accorded him all he asks. The time will come, however, and may it not
be long delayed, when the scientist will again come into his own and the
institution to which he belongs will recognize no overlord, except the
auditor, who will be an auditor, not an autocrat in technical science.

So thoroughly has chemistry taken the lead as a science fundamental
to all improvement in agriculture that the terms are sometime^ used
synonymously. However, the outlook for the development of other sci-
ences in their relation to agriculture is extremely suggestive. Physics, for
example, has never consciously served farming. I know of but two gradu-
ate students in agriculture who have specialized in physics, and it was
the experience of both that physicists were somewhat surprised to learn
that their science could be of the slightest use in agriculture, whereas
the facts are, it is of fundamental importance at many points.

Both botany and zoology possess undeveloped opportunities little
dreamed of. They have in the past served agriculture mainly in the field
of genetics or of animal and plant diseases. We are only beginning to
study crop production from the standpoint of the physiology of the
plant, its sensitive periods and the conditions essential to successful
growth.

As a whole we have only scratched the surface of science in its rela-
tion to the practise of farming. The outlook is nothing short of a pan-
orama to him who has an adequate vision of the future and the ability to
work in any one of the great fields of science, distinguishing clearly be-
tween science per se and its application to the arts of man.

[2. A Foliticiaifs View. Even as the Department of Agriculture
proved itself as a research organization, it ran up against two major
problems which were insoluble in the chemical laboratory. The first
problem, which was reaching crisis proportions by 1915, was how to get

[45]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

the results of research into the hands of dirt farmers and convince them
that science was superior to inherited lore. The second problem was how
to convert the increased productivity brought on by science into eco-
nomic gains for the individual farmer. To the extent that the average
farmer could see science bettering his lot, research could substitute for
the Populist crusade. Carl Vrooman, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture
under Woodrow Wilson, addressed himself to these problems rather
thaa to the details of how to administer a research establishment. What
was the essential difference between industry and agriculture in this
period when an individual tried to introduce the results of science into
the stream of technological practice? (Carl Vrooman, "The Agricultural
Revolution," Century Magazine, XCIII [1916], 111-23.)]

Agriculture, though one of the oldest of the arts, is the youngest
of the sciences. Less than two years ago, for the first time, the American
Academy for the Advancement of Science admitted agriculture into the
family circle by giving it a place on its program and in its organization.
Thus agriculture has become a sort of modern Cinderella. For thousands
of years the servant and drudge of civilization, at last she has found the
magic slipper and is making her debut as a veritable and acknowledged
princess, a royal dispenser of bounty and happiness. . . .

It is indeed highly important that the farmer learn the agronomic
lesson of how to increase his yields and the economic and business lesson
of how to buy and sell to advantage, but in a larger sense these mat-
ters are important only as stepping-stones to a realization of the higher
possibilities of life. A scientific success has little importance to the farmer
unless it can be made the basis for a business success, and a business suc-
cess in turn has little real significance unless it can be translated into
terms of life. I know farmers who have broad fields, great herds, huge
barns, and large bank-accounts, but whose successes end right there; who
live narrow, dull, purposeless lives — lives devoid of aspiration, happiness,
or public spirit. The wealth of such men is like much of the fertility in
our soil: it is not available. These men need instruction in the art of
living as much as their less-prosperous neighbors need instruction in the
art of growing and marketing crops. For, after all, it is only the wealth
that we dominate and dedicate to some useful or noble purpose that we
can be said actually to possess. All other wealth that stands to our credit
is either inert or actively sinister, and in the latter event it often gains
the upper hand and finally comes actually to possess us.

The agricultural possibilities that open out before the American
farmer in bewildering profusion are for the most part yet unrealized.
The lot of the up-to-date, scientific, and businesslike farmer has im-
proved greatly during the last few years, but the lot of the average
farmer still leaves much to be desired, still lacks much that has been
chronically lacking to the tiller of the soil for thousands of years. On a
western Iowa farm there was a young boy who plowed corn and did
diverse other things from dawn to dusk. When asked what he got for
all his hard work, a momentary fire of revolt flared up in his brain, and
he said: "Get? Get? Nothin' if I do, and hell if I don't."

That boy summed up in one terse phrase the annals of husbandry

[46]

Ill, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

for all the centuries before the advent of the science of agriculture. He
is Millet's "Man with the Hoe" before he grew up. From time immemo-
rial civilization has rested on the broad shoulders of the agricultural
workers of the world, but before their eyes has opened up no vista of
opportunity or of hope for them or for their children. Theirs has been
the bitter choice between a life of unending drudgery on the one hand
and the hell of starvation on the other.

In the last half-century the Department of Agriculture has spent
some two hundred and fifty million dollars largely in research and ex-
periment, to the end that American agriculture might be put on a high
plane of efficiency. The results of this research and experiment have
been agronomy and animal industry, a vast, but largely undigested and
uncoordinated, mass of information about how to grow crops and "crit-
ters." During this entire period the department has been accumulating
and hoarding a vast store of facts about how to increase production.

Thus during the first fifty years of its existence the department was
chiefly a bureau of scientific research that gave the farmer from time to
time an assortment of miscellaneous scientific information that he might
or might not be able to utilize to his financial advantage. Unfortunately,
a world of practical problems that destroy the farmer's peace of mind
and involve the success or failure of his business — namely, his business
and economic problems — were virtually ignored. In other words, for the
first fiftv^ years of its life the department hopped along on one leg, the
scientific leg. Happily, during the last three years a miraculous thing has
happened: the department has grown another leg, the leg of business and
economic efficiency. Now it begins to walk, and we confidently expect
in the near future to see it going forward with giant strides.

During the last three years, for the first time in its history, the De-
partment of Agriculture has had at its head an economist. Under the
direction of Secretary Houston it has achieved a new point of view and
a new conception of its mission. For half a century the department has
used its utmost endeavors to show^ the farmer how to fight the chinch-
bug and the army-worm, the cattle tick and the Hessian fly and other
insect pests, but had not even so much as attempted to show him how
to protect himself from the yearly toll levied upon the fruits of his toil
by such human pests as the usurer, commercial pirates posing as legiti-
mate middlemen, and the other business parasites of the agricultural
world.

The farmer who makes two blades of grass grow where only one
grew before may be a good agronomist, but if he cannot sell his second
blades at a profit, he is a poor farmer. In other words, farming is pri-
marily a business. Very few practical farmers till the soil to demonstrate
principles of agronomy. They produce crops to live rather than live to
produce crops. Even more than large production they want profitable
production. Upon the realization of this fundamental fact is founded the
agricultural renaissance which recently has been begun. . . .

[A] recent achievement of prime importance has been the working
out of a system of direct retail distribution to the farmer of the accumu-
lated results of the scientific research of the last half-century. While
each of the older bureaus of the department has many years of honest

[47]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

and invaluable research work to its credit, in the main little has been
done until recently toward putting the results of the work of the de-
partment's scientific men before the farmer properly condensed, cor-
related, and couched in terms easily understood. Fewer than a dozen
years ago the Department of Agriculture was almost as far removed
from actual contact with the masses of our farmers as the State Depart-
ment or the Coast and Geodetic Survey. No wide-spread, continuous,
and systematic effort has yet been made to carry agricultural education
to the farmer by word of mouth or by demonstration; the Office of
Farm Management was a minor appendage of one of the older bureaus;
the publications of the department were lucky if they escaped being
still-born, so little was the effort made to popularize them and to interest
the farmers in them by means of the press. It is difficult to realize that
a major government department, established for the specific purpose of
informing the people, spending millions of dollars of the people's money
every year for research work, could ever have been so indifferent to the
practical application of the results of its research as the Department of
Agriculture seemed to be until a few years ago. Yet one has only to
glance over the current list of farmers' bulletins to find evidence of that
seeming indifference.

Many of the so-called farmers' bulletins are really technical papers.
Much of the information published on vitally important practical prob-
lems is scattered about in so many bulletins as to be entirely un-get-at-
able by the average farmer. The teachings of the department with
regard to a number of the most vital farm problems have not been prop-
erly differentiated regionally and special bulletins prepared for the dif-
ferent important agricultural regions in the United States. Some of the
most fundamental features of everyday farming have been almost en-
tirely ignored. . . .

It is obvious that in the near future the farmers are going to do co-
operatively a number of things which to-day are done for them by the
business men of the towns. The movement in this direction is inevitable
and irresistible. It is every day gaining in momentum. The wise business
man will recognize this fact and trim his sails accordingly. If he is en-
gaged in an elevator business or a creamery business, and it becomes
apparent that the farmers of the neighborhood are about to assume that
function of the community, he will do well to say frankly to them: "If
you think you can handle this business better and more economically
than I can, I will sell it to you in a friendly way. There are plenty of
other places where I can utilize my capital and trained business ability
advantageously." That will be good business, for it is folly to fight the
inevitable.

If the business men will take this attitude, they and the farmers will
prosper in the future as neither of them has prospered in the past, and
the entire nation will prosper with them. I have spoken to bodies of
business men in a number of our States, and I find that more and more
this reasonable and sympathetic spirit is gaining headway among them.
They recognize that if the American people pull together, there will be
prosperity enough to go around; but that if we squabble and squirm, each

[48]

Ill, — 'THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE

one striving for a mean personal advantage at the expense of his fellows
and the community in general, there will be very little real and abiding
prosperity for anybody.

There has been circulated a deal of eloquent misinformation as to
the supposed identity of interest beuveen various commercial and indus-
trial groups — between the farmer and the railroads, for example, or the
farmer and the banks, the stockyards and various other corporate inter-
ests with which of necessity he must do business. That there is a com-
miniity of interest between the farmer and these interests does not admit
of a doubt, but that there is an identity of interest does not follow. After
the farmer, the railroad, the bank, the commission man, the storekeeper,
have worked together for their common advantage as far as they know
how in the light of the old ideals, there is still left a twilight zone of
opportunity where some men by stealth or craft can still profit at the
expense of others. It is this commercial war zone that the spirit of co-
operation is gradually encroaching upon.

The supposition that natural economic law will prevent all illegiti-
mate profits is one of the strangest delusions ever harbored in the minds
of intelligent men. Despite economic laws, reinforced by man-made
laws, the cunning and unscrupulous sometimes gain larger profits than
do men who conduct their business in a strictly legitimate way. If a
man's controlling ambition in life is to pile up unearned millions regard-
less alike of private rights and public welfare, one could not truthfully
tell him that the quickest way to the realization of this sordid dream
always lies along the paths of legitimate business enterprise. We may as
well recognize frankly and fully the wide gulf that yawns between men
who are trying to earn money and men who are trying by hook or
crook to possess themselves of money that other men have earned.

The paramount issue before the American people to-day is not the
tariflF or corporation control or any of those other political or economic
problems which newspapers and politicians discuss glibly; the real issue
is not political or even economic. It is moral.

Is the individual citizen willing to produce all the wealth he acquires
and to work and vote to render it impossible henceforth for any one,
by any financial hocus-pocus, to acquire wealth that others have pro-
duced? That's the issue. . . .

Regulated competition is unquestionably better than irresponsible
and uncontrolled competition. Moreover, by the slow, sure means of ex-
perience. Federal and state control of business is becoming at once more
elastic and more effective. But no perfecting of the mechanism of such
control can ever overcome the inherent limitations of this method of
promoting social and economic justice. To realize the higher possibilities
of civilization fuller recourse must be had to the principle of co-
operation.

As far back as history goes we find civilization developing as fast
as and no faster than men have developed the capacity to work together
with their fellow-men to a common end. The day of hybrid, involuntary
cooperation by means of slavery, serfdom, or economic exploitation is
past. As President Wilson has indicated, the time is ripe for a coopera-

[49]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

tion that is not exclusive or oppressive, but rather inclusive and benefi-
cent, founded on the principle of the open door, and dispensing its
profits among all who participate in its activities according to the meas-
ure of such participation.

Manifestly, one of the best ways to develop this spirit of cooperation
during our present transition period is for the business man and the farmer
to get together in spirit and in purpose, to forget old antagonisms, and,
as far as possible, to infuse into the present era something of the cre-
ative, beneficent spirit of the future. Thus the business man who is on
the square and anxious for better things should not only refuse to make
common cause with business men who stand for the ethics of the jungle,
but should line up actively with like-minded men among all classes of
his fellow-citizens in an endeavor to bring about a general realization of
the fact that our maximum of national efficiency and prosperity can come
only when every citizen, business man as well as farmer or wage-earner,
is able to feel that his success will be in proportion not to his craft and
Machiavellian ability to outwit and spoil his fellow-men, but rather in
proportion to the intelligence, determination, and industry that he puts
into productive work.

[50]

i

CLIMAX: SUNNY PROGRESSIVISM
AND THE SHADOW OF WAR

Doubtless the rise of science put much of the concept of "progress"
into the progressive faith. Theodore Roosevelt was the first president
after John Quincy Adams to show overt personal enthusiasm for science.
The conservationists of the early 1900's saw science as a substitute for
power politics, a means of determining the public interest in a truer
sense than the balancing of rival interests. Yet if science meant progress,
it also meant national power. The application of science to industry and
agriculture meant that it was becoming an essential factor in the strength
of the nation. Germany, which had led the way in the application of
science to industry and had been the admiration and model of scientifi-
cally ambitious Americans for half a century, now emerged as a threat
to the balance of power among nations partly because of her industrial
pre-eminence. When the British blockade cut off supplies of German
optical glass and German dyes, the products which depended on German
industrial research, Americans awakened to the importance of their re-
search establishment with a sense of shock. When Germany became the
enemy in 1917, Americans found themselves in a war of science as well
as a war of industry. The thoughtful statesman of 1918 could share with
the progressive of 1900 a feeling for the importance of science, but he
could less easily share the innocent belief in progress.

Had the application of science to practical life revolutionized Amer-
ican life by 1918 or had the United States retained its colonial back-
wardness in organizing its scientific brainpower? Had Americans mas-
tered the art of organized innovation which could break the conservative
hold of tradition in technology which had reigned through most of
history? Had American democracy provided in its own fashion the insti-
tutions necessary to couple science and technology? Or was democracy
at a fatal disadvantage when pitted against an autocracy which could
pour resources into science without consulting an electorate ignorant of
the practical potentialities in the life of the mind? Clearly, two lines of
answers can be developed for each of these questions depending on your

[5']

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

point of view. Americans in 1918 were puzzling over these issues as had
the generation of John Quincy Adams a century before or as men now
do.

THE PROGRESSIVE S CREDO— W J McGEE

CW J McGee shared with Gifford Pinchot a prominent place in
the conservation movement during the administration of Theodore
Roosevelt. In addition, he was for many years head of the Bureau of
American Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution. In the selection that
follows he engages in a favorite end-of-the-century sport: measuring
fifty years of scientific progress and incidentally revealing his faith in
the all-pervading beneficent influence of science. Remember the distinc-
tion between science and technology and see if McGee is able to gain
an advantage in his argument by ignoring it. (W J McGee, "Fifty Years
of American Science," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXII [1898], 307-20.)]

Scientific progress, especially in a land of free institutions, is so
closely interwoven with industrial and social progress that the advance
of one cannot be traced without constant reference to the other. In-
deed, the statement of our national progress during the past half-century
is little more than a summary of results and practical applications of
scientific research. Fifty years ago our population was hardly more than
twenty millions, now it is seventy millions; then our wealth was less than
seven billion dollars, now it is eighty billions. At the beginning of the
year 1848 there were fifty-two hundred and five miles of railway in the
United States, now there are two hundred thousand, — far more than any
other country has, more than all Europe; nearly as many miles, indeed,
as all the rest of the world put together. Some of those who attended
the first meeting of the [American] Association [for the Advancement
of Science] made their journey, or part of it, by stagecoach or in the
saddle. They met many a boy riding to the neighborhood mill with a
bag of corn as grist and saddle, and the itinerant doctor or minister on
horseback, with his wife on a pillion behind; they passed by fanners
swinging the back-breaking cradle or wielding the tedious hoe, while
lusty horses grew fat in idleness; they caught glimpses of housewives
spinning and dyeing and weaving with infinite pains the fabrics required
to clothe their families; they followed trails so rough that the transpor-
tation of produce to market multiplied its cost, and carrying back family
supplies was a burden: everywhere they saw hard human toil, enlivened
only by the cheer of political freedom, and they did not even dream of
devices whereby nature should be made to furnish the means for her
own subjugation. Most of the mails were carried slowly by coaches and
postboys; the telegraph was little more than a tov; the telephone, the
trolley-car, and the typewriter had not begun to shorten time and
lengthen life; and steel was regularly imported from Sheffield, and iron
from Norway. The slow and uncertain commerce of interior navigation

[5^

IV, — ^SUNNY PROGRESSIVISM AND THE SHADOW OF WAR

was the pride of publicists, and Chicago boasted a population of twenty-
five thousand; a shallow wave of settlement was flowing over the vast
interior to break against the bluffs of the Missouri, though the pioneers
still feared to pitch tents on the broad prairielands, and chose rather
the rugged and rocky woodlands skirting the waterways as sites for
homesteads; the fertile subhumid plains, with ten million buffalo feed-
ing on their nutritious grasses, were still mapped as "the great Amer-
ican desert;" the Rocky Mountain region beyond was a mystical land,
yielding the wildest and weirdest of travelers' tales; California was an
Ultima Thule more remote in thought and interest than are Hawaii or
even the Philippines to-day. . . .

The progress of the nation during the half-century is beyond par-
allel. By normal growth and peaceful absorption without foreign con-
quest the population has trebled, and the national wealth has increased
tenfold. The subjugation of natural forces has proceeded at a higher
rate, and the extension of knowledge and the diffusion of intelligence
have gone forward more rapidly still. This advance, so great as to be
grasped by few minds, is the marvel of human history. The world has
moved forward as it never did before. Yet fully half of the progress of
the world, during the last fifty years, has been wrought through the
unprecedented energy of American enterprise and genius, guided by
American science. . . .

The genius of American astronomers has brought appreciation from
laymen as well as investigators, and their labors have been rewarded by
increased facilities; x\merica is better endowed today with observatories
and apparatus than any other country, — nearly as well as all the rest of
the world. Most of our rapidly growing universities have their own
observatories. A dozen years ago the installation of Lick Observatory
was an event in the scientific world, and attracted such public attention
as to leave little for the two observatories installed within the year, —
Flower Observatory in Pennsylvania, and Yerkes Observatory, an ad-
junct of the University of Chicago. Fifty years ago astronomy was a
sober and sluggish science, far removed from practical every-day inter-
ests, cultivated respectably in Europe and beginning to attract serious
attention in this countrv. To-day its data are doubled and its activity is
tripled; it touches industry and the public welfare at many points, and
advances more rapidly than ever before; and a full share of this progress
is due to American genius and industry. . . .

The formula of physical science came to America as a mariner's
compass to a crew of maroons. Already a nation of inventors inspired
by intellectual freedom, Americans were still blind leaders of the blind;
for invention is impossible without at least intuitive recognition of the
unifomiity of nature, while without conscious recognition of this law
the inventor drifts in a sea of uncertainties, making port only by chance.
The newly formulated doctrine was seized and assimilated with such
avidity that within a decade it was more generally understood and
adopted in this country than in all Europe. Under its stimulus invention
throve and manufacturing grew apace: the crude reaper was made a
self-raker, next a harvester or header, then a self-binder or field-thresher,

[53]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

according to local needs; the hoe gave way to the horse-cultivator, and
the flail to the horse-power thresher, the neighborhood water-mill to the
steam-driven roller-mill grinding for all the people of a whole state; and
the farmer learned to live by the strength of his beasts and the craft of
his machines merely guided by his own intelligence. The mechanic arts
were regenerated; steam was harnessed more effectively than before, and
our railway-making and locomotive-building became and remains a revela-
tion to the world; for within this year, 1898, European engineers have
been compelled to swallow incredulity as to the rapidity of American
bridge-building, while British promoters hastening to supply Egypt with
locomotives have saved half the time required for delivery, despite the
doubling of distance, by ordering from American builders. The tide of
foreign importation was soon stayed, and then turned, and now Amer-
ican steel tools are sold in Sheffield and fine American hardware in Nor-
way, while products of American machines in the form of foodstuffs and
fabrics are carried into ev^ery quarter of the globe. The characteristic of
American inventiveness is its diffusion. Invention is as free as the fran-
chise, and open competition gives life to genius no less than to trade.
American devices (temporarily protected by patents) are so diffused that
every citizen is in contact with the products of physical science and
mechanical skill: everv^body may have a machine-made watch better than
the average hand-made product of Geneva, nearly equal to the tested
Swiss chronometer; every family may have its sewing-machine and tele-
phone; and every man, woman, and child wears machine-made buttons,
pins, hats, and textile fabrics.

A typical American device is the bicycle. Invented in France, it long
remained a toy or a vain luxury. Redevised in this country, it inspired
inventors and captivated manufacturers, and native genius made it a
practical machine for the multitude; now its users number millions, and
it is sold in every country. Typical, too, is the bicycle in its effect on
national character. It first aroused invention, next stimulated commerce,
and then developed individuality, judgment, and prompt decision on the
part of its users more rapidly and completely than any other device;
for although association with machines of any kind (absolutely straight-
forward and honest as they are all) develops character, the bicycle is
the easy leader of other machines in shaping the mind of its rider, and
transforming itself and its rider into a single thing. Better than other re-
sults is this: that the bicycle has broken the barrier of pernicious differ-
entiation of the sexes and rent the bonds of fashion, and is daily impress-
ing Spartan strength and grace, and more than Spartan intelligence, on
the mothers of coming generations. So, weighed by its effect on body
and mind as well as on material progress, this device must be classed as
one of the world's great inventions.

With the advance of the half -century in simply applied mechanics,
there have been still greater advances in the knowledge of the more
obscure powers of nature, manifested in electricity and magnetism, in
sun and wind and storm, even in vitality and mental action. Some of
these have been made in Europe, but more in America. Fifty years ago
Morse and Henry were doing the final work required to transform the

[54]

IV, — 'SUNNY PROGRESSIVISM AND THE SHADOW OF WAR

electric telegraph from a physical experiment to a commercial agency,
and soon nerves of steel and copper, throbbing with intelligence, were
follow ing the pioneer into the remotest recesses and pushing beneath the
ocean; Faradav, the Siemens brothers, Helmholtz, and later Sir William
Thomson (Lord Kelvin) freely gave genius and toil; then came Edison
with an eruption of brilliant inventions; and to-dav time and space are
as if thev were not, and from sea to sea our subjects of thought are as
one. It was but yesterday that half our world knew not how the other
half lived; now both halves read the same items at breakfast.

Themselves harvesters after the experimentalists in physics, the early
telegraphers were planters for Graham Bell, and the telephone came to
carr\' the word of man afar, and the graphophone to perpetuate it for-
ever, and thus to complete the annihilation of space and time as obstacles
to the diffusion and unification of intelligence. Inspired by success in
conveying thought, inventors sought to convey grosser powers, and
dynamos were invented to furnish light better and cheaper than the
world had known before; devices for warming and even for cooking,
and for lowering temperature by fans and refrigerant pipes, quickly fol-
lowed; and now the lightning is harnessed in our houses as the thunder
is subdued in telephone and graphophone. Meantime, motors and trans-
mitters were perfected, and electric transportation came into successful
competition with steam locomotion, w hile the power derived from water-
falls and central plants was made divisible, so that units of power are
now sold as freely as pounds of tea or sugar were fifty years ago: and a
way has been found to counteract the concentration of artisans in fac-
tories located by w aterfall or engine. The conquest of nature by electric
power, gained through controlling an infinitesimal part of the vibrant
atomic energy of our corner of the cosmos, has come rapidly, and so
steadily as almost to escape notice; yet it is a marvel beside which the
magical lamp of Aladdin and all other figments of Oriental fancy are as
nothing. . . .

Such have been a few of the advances in science of the half-century;
the discovery of the persistence of motion, the invention of spectroscopy,
the control of electricity, the discovery of the periodic law, the recogni-
tion of evolution, and the culture classification of mankind may be con-
sidered the first half-dozen. If summed in a single term, the half-century's
advance in science may be expressed as recognition of the unifomiity
and potentiality of nature; while the applications are invention on the
practical side, and kinetic interpretation (or interpretation in terms of
motion and sequence) on the philosophic side. Most of the advances
began in Europe, to be hastened in America, and a full half of the prog-
ress must be credited to cisatlantic genius and enterprise.

In truth, America has become a nation of science. There is no in-
dustry, from agriculture to architecture, that is not shaped by research
and its results; there is not one of our fifteen millions of families that
does not enjoy the benefits of scientific advancement; there is no law in
our statutes, no motive in our conduct, that has not been made juster by
the straightforward and unselfish habit of thought fostered by scientific
methods. A nation of free minds will not be selfish or cruel; and the

[55]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

sense of uniformity in nature finds expression in national character, — in
commercial honesty, in personal probity, in unparalleled patriotism, as
well as in the unequaled workmanship which is the simplest expression
of straight thinking. Every step in our national progress has been guided
by the steadfast knowledge born of assimilated experience. The trebling
of population in a half-century, raising the republic from an experiment
in state-making to a leading place among the nations, is the wonder of
history; the thrice-trebled wealth and educational facilities gained
through application of new knowledge are a marvel, before which most
men stand dazzled at home, and wholly blinded abroad; the three times
thrice-trebled knowledge itself, hitting the nation high in enlightenment
and making way for still more rapid progress, is a modern miracle
wrought by scientific work; but greatest of all in present potency and
future promise is the elevation of moral character attained by that sense
of right thinking which flows only from consciously assimilated experi-
ence,— and this is the essence of science now diffused among our people.

B,

A statesman's foreboding— elihu root

CElihu Root had served under Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of
State and Secretary of War. Better than most Americans he knew the
ingredients of national power, and better than most politicians and diplo-
mats he had an awareness of the nature of science. Root delivered this
statement on Mav 29, 1918, just as the war effort was reaching its climax.
Does he view Germany's use of science ia the same way as Whitehead
did in the first selection? (Elihu Root, "Industrial Research and National
Welfare," Science, N.S. XLVIII [1918], 532-34.)]

I HAVE no justification for expressing views about scientific and in-
dustrial research except the sympathetic interest of an observer for many
years at rather close range. One looking on comes to realize two things.
One is the conquest of practical life by science; there seems to be no
department of human activit\^ in which the rule of thumb man has not
come to realize that science which he formerly despised is useful beyond
the scope of his own individual experience. The other is that science like
charity should begin at home, and has done so ven^ imperfectly. Science
has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying everything ex-
cept itself. It has made possible the tremendous modem development of
the power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of
human effort so as to make the differences from the past seem to be of
kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself very imperfectly.
Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply
to success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general
staff work apply to them; that the difference between a mob and an
army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human na-
ture; that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may
be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great num-
ber of laborers may be increased by military discipline,

[56]

IV, — ^ SUNNY PROGRESSIVISM AND THE SHADOW OF WAR

This attitude follows naturally from the demand of true scientific
work for individual concentration and isolation. The sequence, however,
is not necessary or laudable. Your isolated and concentrated scientist
must know what has gone before, or he will waste his life in doing
what has already been done, or in repeating past failures. He must know
something about what his contemporaries are trying to do, or he will
waste his life in duplicating effort. The history of science is so vast and
contemporary effort is so active that if he undertakes to acquire this
knowledge by himself alone his life is largely wasted in doing that his
initiative and creative power are gone before he is ready to use them.
Occasionally a man appears who has the instinct to reject the negligible.
A very great mind goes directly to the decisive fact, the determining
symptom, and can afford not to burden itself with a great mass of un-
important facts; but there are few such minds even among those capable
of real scientific work. All other minds need to be guided away from
the useless and towards the useful. That can be done only by the appli-
cation of scientific method to science itself through the purely scientific
process of organizing effort. It is a wearisome thing to think of the mil-
lions of facts that are being laboriously collected to no purpose what-
ever, and the thousands of tons of printed matter stored in basements
never to be read — all the product of unorganized and undirected scien-
tific spirit. . . . The solitary scientist . . . needs chart and compass, sug-
gestion, direction, and the external stimulus which comes from a con-
sciousness that his work is part of great things that are being done.

This relation of the scientific worker to scientific work as a whole
can be furnished only by organization. It is a very interesting circum-
stance that while the long history of science exhibits a continual protest
against limitations upon individual freedom, the impulse which has
called in the power of organization to multiply the effectiveness of scien-
tific and industrial research to the highest degree is the German desire
for military world dominion, supported by a system of education strictly
controlled by government. All the world realizes now the immense value
in preparing for the present war, of the German system of research ap-
plied at Charlottenburg and Grosslichterfelde. That realization is plainly
giving a tremendous impetus to movements for effective organization of
scientific power both in England and in the United States, — countries
whose whole development has rested upon individual enterprise. It re-
mains to be seen whether peoples thoroughly imbued with the ideas and
accustomed to the traditions of separate private initiative are capable of
organizing scientific research for practical ends as effectively as an
autocratic government giving direction to a docile and submissive people.
I have no doubt about it myself, and I think the process has been well
begun in England under the Advisory Council of the Committee of the
Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and in the United
States under the National Research Council. I venture to say two things
about it. One is that the work can not be done by men who make it an
incident to other occupations. It can be encouraged of course by men
who are doing other things, but the real work of organization and re-
search must be done by men who make it the whole business of their

[57]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

lives. It can not be successful if parcelled out among a lot of universities
and colleges to be done by teachers however eminent and students how-
ever zealous in their leisure hours. The other thing is that while the
solution of specific industrial problems and the attainment of specific
industrial objects will be of immense value, the whole system will dry
up and fail unless research in pure science be included with its scope.
That is the source and the chief source of the vision which incidentally
solves the practical problems.

We are thinking now mainly of science as applied to war; but prac-
tically the entire industrial force of mankind is being applied to war, so
that our special point of view takes in the whole field. It is quite certain
that if the nations on either side in this war had been without a great
fund of scientific knowledge which they could direct towards the ac-
complishment of specific things in the way of attack and defense, trans-
portation and supply of armies, that side in the war would long since have
been defeated. Germany had the advantage at the start, because she had
long been consciously making this kind of preparation with a settled
purpose to bring on the war when she was ready. It would be the
height of folly for the peaceable law-abiding nations of the earth ever
to permit themselves to be left again at a disadvantage in that kind of
preparation. Competency for defense against military aggression requires
highly developed organized scientific preparation. Without it, the most
civilized nation will be as helpless as the Aztecs were against Cortez.

We are not limited, however, to a military objective, for when the
war is over the international competitions of peace will be resumed. No
treaties or leagues will prevent that, and it is not desirable that they
should, for no nation can afford to be without the stimulus of com-
petition.

In that race the same power of science which has so amazingly in-
creased the productive capacity of mankind during the past century
will be applied again, and the prizes of industrial and commercial leader-
ship will fall to the nation which organizes its scientific forces most
effectively.

FOR FURTHER READING

A history of industrial research in the United States is nonexistent. The
only account worth consulting which deals directly with it is the rela-
tively brief Howard R. Bartlett, "The Development of Industrial Re-
search in the United States," Research — A NaiioJml Resource: II —
Industrial Research, Report of the National Research Council to the
National Resources Planning Board (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1941), pp. 19-77. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Gov-
ernment: A History of Policies a?id Activities to 1940 (Cambridge: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1957) gives a connected analysis of those phases which
touch the Federal government. Three volumes of economic history —
Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier: 1860-1891 (New York:
Farrar, 1945); E. C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor

[5«]

SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA

ajid Public Policy, 1860-1891 (New York: Holt, 1961); and H. U.
Faulkner, The Decline of Laissez Faire, 1819-1911 (New York: Rinehart,
1951) — pay some passing attention to research and provide copious gen-
eral background.

Special studies of high quality exist only for the electrical industry.
Harold C. Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers 1815-1900: A Study in
Co??7petition, Entrepreneurship, Technical Change, and Economic Growth
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953) is a model study. Kendall Birr,
Pioneering in Inditstrial Research: The Story of the General Electric
Research Laboratory (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1957) is a good
study of an important laboratory. Matthew Josephson, Edison (New
York: McGraw, 1959) stands by itself as a biography, not only of Edi-
son, but of any figure in the history of technology of the period.

[59]

2 65

ii->"-*"-: - ^■■.■','>-7;j"-: *^i-'ji,-*''ir

'■^""i"' ,"'-■■/-■ -"^■"' -t'VV^f- v-*yfc^

Jbe Berkeley Series in American History

Sigmund Diamond, THE CREATION OF SOCIETY IN THE NEW WORLD
Robert Middlekauff, BACON'S REBELLION

Wilbur R. Jacobs, THE PAXTON RIOTS AND THE FRONTIER THEORY
Jackson T. Main, REBEL VERSUS TORY: THE CRISES

OF THE REVOLUTION, 1773-1776

David Levin, THE PURITAN IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
FRANKLIN AND EDWARDS

Adrienne Koch, ADAMS AND JEFFERSON: "POSTERITY MUST JUDGE"

Alfred Young, THE DEBATE OVER THE CONSTITUTION, 1787-1789

Charles Sellers, ANDREW JACKSON, NULLIFICATION,
AND THE STATE-RIGHTS TRADITION
Frank O. Gatell, THE JACKSONIANS AND

THE MONEY POWER, 1 829- 1 840
Bernard A. Weisberger, ABOLITIONISM: DISRUPTER OF THE

DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM OR AGENT OF PROGRESS?
Armin Rappaport, THE WAR WITH MEXICO: WHY DID IT HAPPEN?
P. J. Staudenraus, THE SECESSION CRISIS, 1860-1861
Grady McWhiney, RECONSTRUCTION AND THE FREEDMEN
Ari Hoogenboom, SPOILSMEN AND REFORMERS
A. Hunter Dupree, SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE

OF MODERN AMERICA, 1865-1916

Irwin Unger, POPULISM: NOSTALGIC OR PROGRESSIVE?
Richard Abrams, THE ISSUE OF FEDERAL REGULATION

IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
Ernest R. May, THE COMING OF WAR, 1917

Henry May, THE DISCONTENT OF THE INTELLECTUALS:

A PROBLEM OF THE TWENTIES
E. David Cronon, LABOR AND THE NEW DEAL

Paul Sothe Holbo, ISOLATIONISM AND INTERVENTIONISM, 1932-1941
Gushing Strout, CONSCIENCE, SCIENCE, AND SECURITY: THE CASE

OF DR. J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
Richard Lowitt, THE TRUMAN-MACARTHUR i^^^^^^^efe^

CONTROVERSY ,^^^^^^!^^

HughRoss, THE COLD WAR: S ^//^^CO

CONTAINMENT AND ITS CRITICS i\^ ^~^i

Charles Sellers and Henry May,
A SYNOPSIS OF AMERICAN HISTORY