2 george wise science and technology

8/7/2019 2 george wise science and technology

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Science and TechnologyBy George Wise*

T HE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO TECHNOLOGYis not the stuff offront page news. But on 7 August 1984 it made the front page of the Sci-ence section of the New YorkTimes. "Does Genius or Technology Rule Sci-ence?" a headline read. The story beneath describeda "new school" of histor-ical thought that "lauds technology as an overlooked force in expandingthehorizons of scientificknowledge."It attributed he new view to the late historianDerek de Solla Price, who had, in his last lecture and paper, rejectedwhat hedescribed as the "remarkablywidespreadwrong idea that has afflictedgenera-tions of science policy students . . . that science can in some mysteriouswaybe applied to make technology." Instead, he had argued that technology, asembodied in scientific instrumentation, s "autonomousand did not arise fromthe cognitive core of science, but from other technologiesdevised for quite dif-ferent purposes. Much more often than is commonlybelieved, the experiment-er's craft is the force that moves science forward."The Timesarticle describeda wide rangeof other historians'reactionsto Price's views. WilliamBroad, thereporter, noted that the whole matter was of more than academic interest: atstake, he wrote, was "an ongoingdebate on how to spend billionsof dollarsoffederal funds."1 The purpose of spendingthe money was to generate techno-logical innovations (that is, inventions that are used). If science drives tech-nology, the money should be spent on science. If technology drives both itselfand science, then the money should be spent on technology.This review will examine two of the main issues raised in that newspaperarticle. Is technology dependenton science? And, if not, what is the relationshipbetween the two? It will focus on what two groups of people in the UnitedStates-science-policy makersand historians-have, since 1945,thoughtthe re-lationshipof science and technology to be. An implicitargument ook place inwhich the policymakersbased their policies on a simple but incorrect model,while the historiansbegan to gather the pieces for a new model not yet built.The oversimplifiedmodel favored by the policymakers depicts science andtechnology as an assembly line. The beginningof the line is an idea in the headof the scientist. At subsequentwork stationsalongthatassemblyline, operationslabeled applied research, invention, development, engineering,and marketingtransform hat idea into an innovation.A society seekinginnovationsshould, inthe assembly-line view, put money into pure science at the front end of theprocess. In due time, innovationwill come out of the other end.Historians of science and technology have not merely reversed the directionof the assembly line so that technology now generates science. Instead they

* General Electric Research and Development Center Schenectady, New York 12301.William Broad, "Does Genius or Technology Rule Science?" New York Times, 7 Aug. 1984, p.C-l; Derek J. de S. Price, "Of Sealing Wax and String," Natural History, Jan. 1984, 93(1):49-56.OSIRIS, 2nd series, 1985, 1: 229-246 229


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have rejected it, but not yet replacedit. They have created some of the piecesfor a new model. But ratherthanbuilding hat new model, they haveputforwardmetaphors depicting science and technology as mirror-imagewins, a marriedcouple, a lemon andlemonade,opposingarmies,opposing meteorological ronts,or sovereign states. The key idea behindall the metaphors s autonomy.Scienceand technology are viewed as autonomouswith regardto one another, thoughfar from autonomouswith regardto economics, politics, and ideologies. But nonew model for the way these two autonomousenterprisesact on each other hasyet emerged."Science" will be used in this review primarily o mean knowledgeabout na-ture, acquiredfor its own sake, and secondarilyto mean the institutionsandpeople who generate that knowledge. "Technology"will be used primarilytomean knowledgeabout the man-madeworld, generatedfor use, and secondarilythe community of people (including engineers, inventors, scientists, andcraftsmen)who contributeto this knowledgebase. This second definition, f gen-erally accepted, would make the assertion that science provides the knowledgebase for technology meaningless. But the definition is not generallyaccepted.More often, technology is used as a synonym for "tools" or as a synonym for"engineering"and science is used as synonymouswith knowledge.This reviewwill regard the knowledge behind the tools, not the tools, as the essence oftechnology.Instead of examiningthe alleged dependenceof technology on science, a re-view of the relation between science and technologymighthave emphasizedthecommunitieswhere technology and science have been generated,such as nine-teenth-centuryManchester,or twentieth-centuryPalo Alto; the interplayof sci-ence, technology, and ideology; or the view that distinctions between scienceand technology are mere reflections of struggles between people or betweengroupsfor status or supremacy.2The approachpresentedhere, however, avoidsdiffusingthe issue into those moregeneral questionsof geography, politics, eco-nomics, and ideology. The focus is on a relativelynarrow and unintendeddia-logue that has occurred over the past forty years between the championsof theassembly-line model and the champions of the various autonomy metaphors.That narrow dialogue discloses a major difference in the way two concernedgroups of Americans, policymakersand historians,have viewed the relation ofscience and technology in modern America.

SCIENCE-POLICY MAKERS VERSUS HISTORIANS, 1945-1960Looking back from the vantage point of 1960, historian John Beer recollectedwhateverybody had knownin 1945. It used to be commonlyaccepted, he wrote,

2 On the study of communities and their role in science and technology, see, e.g., ArnoldThackray, "Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: the Manchester Model," American HistoricalReview, 1974, 79:672-710; and Robert Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise andExpertise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977). On science as the tool of a business elite,see David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism(New York: Knopf, 1977). On the history of science as a story of groups competing for status andresources, see Robert E. Kohler, "Foreword: the Interaction of Science and Technology in theIndustrial Age, "Technology and Culture, 1976, 17:621-623; and the development of the ideas inthat brief article in Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a BiomedicalDiscipline (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYthat technology was only applied science; that the rate of conversion of scienceand technology went in direct proportion to the money spent; and that, becausethe way to set up science-invention assembly lines, as exemplified by giant re-search laboratories, was now understood, the time between discovery and in-novation was rapidly diminishing.3But who had commonly accepted these views? Not Beer himself, who pre-sented them in order to refute them. Not the general public: it largely ignoreddifferences between science and technology. The "everyone" was a small eliteof leaders, mainly drawn from academic science departments or deans' offices,who made national science policy. In 1945, that small group wrote a report en-titled Science, the Endless Frontier, which proclaimed: "New products, newindustries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the lawsof nature .... This essential new knowledge can be obtained only through basicscientific research." "Only" is the key word.4Vannevar Bush, the report's principal author, was an MIT engineer withbroad experience: he had invented a computer, participated in the creation ofthe electronics company Raytheon, and headed the major United States militaryresearch and development organization during World War II, the Office of Sci-entific Research and Development. He is sometimes saddled with responsibilityfor the report's more drastic oversimplifications. But a recent history of the Na-tional Science Foundation (NSF) suggests that he permitted them reluctantly.He had hoped that the report would include under the title of research "pi-oneering efforts of a technical sort," as exemplified by the Wright Brothers. Buthe found to his annoyance that the panels drawing up the report did not thinkthat "a couple of bicycle mechanics working on a flying machine would . . . bedoing research." He hoped briefly that the panels might be enlarged to includemembers representing "the rugged type of thing that the Wright brothers ex-emplified," but he did not push his views, and no endorsement of that type ofresearch appeared in the report.5Most members of the science policy elite sided instead with a view expressedby such academic science leaders as James B. Conant. A student of the historyof science, Conant was willing to concede that "the cut and try empiricism ofpractical men" had been important back around 1850. But today, in the mid-twentieth century, "from the labors of those who were interested only in ad-vancing science have come the ideas, the discoveries, the new instrumentswhich have created new industries and transformed old ones." The applied sci-entist, in Conant's view, inevitably runs into a dead end. "Nine times out often," it is the pure scientist who provides the needed knowledge.6Bush's dream of a National Research Foundation supporting the work ofmodern-day counterparts of everyone from Einstein to the Wright brothers gaveway to a National Science Foundation aimed at supporting Einsteins only

3 John J. Beer, "The Historical Relations of Science and Technology" (introduction to papers readat the 7th Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, 29 Dec. 1964) Technol.Cult., 1965, 6:547-550.4Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C., 1945; rpt. NSF, 1960).5 J. Merton England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation's FormativeYears, 1945-57, (Washington, D.C.: NSF, 1982), p. 14.6 James B. Conant, Science and Common Sense (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 325-326.

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(thoughin practice, of course, it supportedmuchelse, even a little history).Thehead of that foundation for its first decade, Alan T. Waterman,hewed consis-tently to the assembly-line ideal. Reissuing Science, the Endless Frontier in1960,Watermanretreated not an inch from its advocacy of pure science. "Thegeneral public is still far from a true understandingof the nature of basic re-search and of the fundamental difference between science and technology."Whatis that true understanding?Speakingat the 1952 NSF budget hearings,heexplained: "Technologicaladvances are made possible only throughthe appli-cation of fundamentalknowledgealreadyknown." Again, the word "only."7Not much argumentwas needed to sell that "only"to a generationexposedsince the mid 1930s to nylon, radar,synthetic rubbber,the proximityfuse, theatomic bomb, television, and the transistor-all apparentlyapplicationsof basicscientific discoveries. Surely pure science was paying off. The assembly-linemodelwas soundpolitics, undertakennotjust for the aggrandizement f science,but for the public good.But was sound politics good history?The histories of science and technologywritten in this postwar periodgave at best limited supportto the assembly lineview. For example, the first AmericanPh.D. in history of science, I. BernardCohen, was commissionedby the science policy elite to educatethe publicaboutthe value of science. But his conclusion, as containedin his 1948book Science,Servant of Man, was somewhat less sweeping than those of Science, the EndlessFrontier. "Oneinescapableresult of studyingthe historyof science," he wrote,"is the conclusion that many practical innovationssuch as our electric powersystem, the new weed-killers,radio and radar,nylon, and even advances in thepracticalart of medicine have come about primarilyas the by products of thesearch for truth in the scientific laboratory" (italics in original).8 No "only" thistime; "many"instead.A pioneering1957study of an industrialresearchlaboratoryalso presentedamore cautious view of the power of pure science. Kendall Birr looked at thefirsthalf centuryof the GeneralElectricResearchLaboratoryand indeedfoundthat "perhaps the outstanding characteristic of the Laboratory . . . was the will-ingnessof both Laboratoryandcompany management o gambleon fundamentalresearch."He judged the gamblea success, but he hedgedthis conclusion withqualifications.Even in an industrial research laboratory,work was balancedamong fundamentalresearch, development, and troubleshooting.And GeneralElectric was unusual, "more a pioneer than a typical example";its broadtech-nical interests and strong financial status gave it an uncommoncapabilityofexploitingdiscoveries.9If those sympatheticto the pure-science ideal were cautious in their conclu-sions, those opposed to it were not. A trio of economists, JohnJewkes, DavidSawers, and RichardStillerman,compiled case studies of sixty-one importantinventions of the twentieth century, from acrylic fibers to zip fasteners. Theyconcluded that "the theory that technical innovationarises directlyout of, and

7 Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (1960), p. xxvi; England, A Patron for Pure Science, p. 152.8 I. Bernard Cohen, Science, Servant of Man: A Layman's Primerfor the Age of Science (Boston:Little, Brown, 1948).9 Kendall Birr, Pioneering in Inditstrial Research: The Story of the General Electric ResearchLaboratory, (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1957).

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYonly out of, advance in pure science does not provide a full and faithful storyof modern invention."10These examples show that the historians of the period 1945-1960 by no meansnaively accepted the views of the policymakers of their time. Careful readingby policymakers of this historical literature might have caused them to questionthe assembly-line model. There is no evidence, however, that those making sci-ence policy read that literature, carefully or otherwise.

GROWING DOUBTS AND ALTERNATE DEFENSES, 1960-1975In the 1960s, some policymakers nevertheless faced growing doubt in Wash-ington that the money spent since 1945 on science had paid off adequately. Onesenator publicly referred to fusion research, a pet of the scientific community,as a "dead horse." President Lyndon Johnson pointedly told the scientific com-munity that they had done plenty of research; it was time to start applying it.Harry Johnson, an economist asked by the National Academy of Sciences(NAS) to address the economics of pure research, wrote that the justificationfor pure science presented by the scientists "differs little from the historicallyearlier insistence on the obligation for society to support the pursuit of religioustruth, an obligation recompensed by a similarly unspecified and problematicalpayoff in the distant future."11One option open to the science policy elite was to abandon the assembly lineand switch to a justification of science on cultural grounds alone. But that toohad its dangers. "The basic difficulty with the cultural justification for pure sci-ence," physicist Harvey Brooks explained in the same NAS study, "is that itdoes not provide any basis for quantifying the amount of support required."12If science could claim credit for driving technology, and through it the economy,then levying an overhead charge for it on the gross national product was jus-tified. If not, then why spend more federal funds on an observatory than on anopera?Project Hindsight, sponsored by the Department of Defense in the 1960s,sought to answer that question by measuring "the payoff to Defense of its owninvestments in science and technology." The project team identified the"Events" that led to the development of twenty military systems. It found that"only 0.3 percent of the Events were classified as undirected science." As theteam's leaders recognized, this was not a denial of the value of undirected sci-ence; it was a denial that undirected science fed directly into invention in theshort term (less than twenty years). "It is clear that, on a 50 year or more timescale," the Hindsight team concluded, "undirected science has been of immensevalue." A subsequent study of civilian innovations, Project TRACES, ponsoredby the NSF, confirmed this longer-term impact of science and generally gaveresults much more supportive of the assembly-line view. A third study team,

10John Jewkes, David Sawers, and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (London: Mac-millan, 1963), p. 7.11Joan Lisa Bromberg, Fusion: Science, Politics and the Invention of a New Energy Source (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 117; Daniel S. Greenberg, "Basic Research: The Political Tidesare Shifting," Science (1966), 152:1724-1726; Harry P. Johnson, "Federal Support of Basic Re-search," in National Academy of Sciences, Basic Research and National Goals: A Report to theHouse Committee on Science and Astronautics, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1965), pp. 127-141.12 Harvey Brooks, in National Academy of Sciences, Basic Research and National Goals, p. 86.

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GEORGEWISEsponsored by the Materials Advisory Board, set out deliberately to fit casestudies to the assembly line sequence, but found this to be impossible.13 Withtheir widely varying conclusions, the exercises tended to deepen the suspicionthat the relation between science and technology was more complicated thanany simple model such as the assembly line would suggest. Historians of scienceand technology already doubted that technology was merely applied science. Asthat view came under increasing attack (though not necessarily because of theattacks), some historians began to explore alternatives. The essence of thosealternatives can be summed up in the phrase "technology is knowledge."In part, this argument emerged from detailed studies of specific relationshipsbetween areas of science and technology. Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgistturned historian, found that in the history of materials, science lagged ratherthan led technology, well into the twentieth century. Art, rather than science oreconomics, drove materials technology: "Almost all inorganic materials andtreatments to modify their structure and properties appear first in decorativeobjects rather than in tools or weapons." Only in very recent times, since about1950, has science begun answering some simple questions about materials: forexample, why you can see through a pane of glass, and why it shatters whendropped, while you can see your reflection in a sheet of metal, and it stays wholeand rings when dropped. Even answering these questions has rarely led to newtechnology. Instead it usually confirms the wisdom of cut-and-try predecessors.That wisdom was not written down, but it was nevertheless a form of knowl-edge.14Other fields showed similar characteristics. As Lynwood Bryant showed,when inventors tried to apply science to the internal combustion engine, theyfound surprises. For example, Rudolf Diesel's engine was intended to be sciencebased: an embodiment of the Carnot cycle, an ideal sequence of heating, ex-panding, cooling and contracting a gas aimed at maximizing efficiency. But theactual invention was shaped by technical realities, rather than a scientific ideal(specifically, Diesel found it necessary for technical reasons to add heat not atconstant temperature, as in a Carnot cycle, but at a temperature that first rose,then fell). Again, technology created its own knowledge base, rather than merelyapplying scientific knowledge.15Similarly, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century electrical technologyproved far more than a simple application of the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell.Thomas P. Hughes and James Brittain have depicted an engineering communitysophisticated in its theory as well as daring in its experimentation, epitomizedby such figures as Charles P. Steinmetz and Ernst F. W. Alexanderson, whooperated parallel to, and in important ways independently of, the scientific com-munity.16

13Chalmers W. Sherwin, and Raymond S. Isenson, "Project Hindsight," Science, 1967, 156:1571-1577; Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, Technology in Retrospect and CriticalEvents in Science (National Science Foundation contract NSF-C535), 2 vols. (Chicago: IIT ResearchInstitute, 1968); Materials Advisory Board, Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Principles of theResearch-Engineering Interaction (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1966).14Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).15Lynwood Bryant "The Role of Thermodynamics in the Evolution of Heat Engines," Technol.Cult. 1973, 14:152-165.16 James E. Brittain, "C. P. Steinmetz and E. F. Alexanderson: Creative Engineering in a Cor-

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYFinally, Joseph Schmookler, an economist, studied an importantexpressionof the knowledge base of technology: patents. His graphs of patents issued ina selection of technologies over extended periodsof time showed rises andfalls

that matched very well with the rises and falls of conventional economic indi-cators. This observation suggested that economic forces, not scientific dis-covery, drove invention.17 Advocates of the science-basedassemblyline could,however, point out that the fields Schmooklerstudied-railroads and textiles forexample-were hardlythe high-technologyareas with which the assembly linewas most concerned.)Thoughthe cases were selective and farfromcomprehensive,some historiansfelt sufficientlyemboldenedto try to generalize. Stop askinghow science shapedtechnology, they urged. Startasking, are science and technology separatecom-munities, and if so what is the relation of each to the other? The answers allcentered on the autonomy of technology's knowledgebase, thoughexpressingit in the form of many differentmetaphors.Melvin Kranzbergdepicted a marriedcouple, emergingin the twentieth cen-turyfrom a "longand indifferentcourtship" nto a marriageof convenience, nota love match. The complexityof the problemsthat arose in the twentiethcenturyforced the scientist to rely more on the technologist for apparatusand infor-mation, and the technologist to rely more on the scientist for knowledge andinsight. But the two communitiesremaineddistinct because their purposes re-mained distinct. The scientist aims to understandnature;the technologistaimsto make useful things. In makinguseful things he usually does not wait on thescientist for knowledge. "New technology grows mostly out of old technology,not out of science."18Edwin Layton explicitly asserted that technology is knowledge, and thenelaborated this insight by looking at one importantportion of technology, en-gineering. In perhaps the most widely quoted metaphor,he portrayedscienceand engineeringas mirror-imagewins. Engineering n the late nineteenthcen-turydid not become merelydependenton science. Instead, it developedits ownexplicit knowledge base, professional institutions, and publicationspractices.These were modeled on parallelsin science (hence the twin). But the emphasisplaced on elements in the knowledge base was reversed (hence the mirrorimage): design and hardwareoccupiedthe most important oles, withpublicationserving as a supportto professionalism,rather than its essence. The engineer'spurpose of creatinguseful objects, machines, or systems determinedthe struc-ture and method of acquisitionof his knowledge.19Muchof Layton's subsequentresearchhas exploreda field wheretechnology-as-knowledge is most evident: fluid flow and its applications. Subsequently,Terry Reynolds has traced the roots of water-power technology, and Bruceporate Setting," Proceedings of the IEEE, 1976, 64:1413-1417; Thomas P. Hughes, Networks ofPower: Electrification in Western Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983).17 Jacob Schmookler, Invention and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,1966).18 Melvin Kranzberg, "The Disunity of Science-Technology," American Scientist, 1968, 56:21-34;and Kranzberg, "The Unity of Science-Technology," ibid., 55:48-66.19Edwin Layton, "Mirror Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in 19thCentury America," Technol. Cult. 1971, 12:562-580; and Layton, "Technology as Knowledge,"Technol. Cult., 1974, 15:31-41.

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GEORGE WISESinclairhas described the generationof an engineering-knowledgease for thattechnology in the mid-nineteenth-centuryUnited States as partof his history ofthe FranklinInstitute. Among those carryingthe story into the twentieth cen-tury, Walter Vincenti has contrastedthe analyticalmethods used by engineersand physicists when each looked at the dynamicsof movingfluids.20Another generalizer chose a third and vaguer set of metaphors, featuringfronts of a militaryor meteorologicalnature.Derek Price asked, "Is technologyhistoricallyindependentof science?" and answered yes. Science is definedbya body of scientific literatureand is most active at the "researchfront," theleadingedge of that body, the new papers appearing oday. Technology is notinterested in knowledge committed to paper. It is a moving state of the art,drawingoccasionally on old science but mainlyon itself. In case science-policymakersmissed the point of all this, Price spelled it out. "Bewareof any claimsthat particularscientific research is needed for particular echnologicalpoten-tials, and vice versa. Both communities can only be supportedfor their ownseparateends."21By 1972 most historians of science and technology had accepted that tech-nology is knowledge, not merely applied science. This was most graphicallydemonstratedat a meeting held in that year at the Burndy Library,whose pro-ceedings were publishedin 1976in the journal Technologyand Culture. Osten-sibly on the topic "The Relationshipof Science and Technology,"the meetingwas in fact an extended funeralfor the old assembly-lineor technology-as-ap-plied-science view. Since 1972, historians have left that view behind.Has the historical consensus convinced the science-policy makers?The sig-nals differ. As recently as 1980,the director of the National Science FoundationreprintedScience, the Endless Frontier for a third time and included in hisintroduction the statements that "basic research . . . creates the fund from whichthe practicalapplicationsof knowledgemust be drawn. New productsand newprocesses do not appear full grown. They are founded on new principlesandnew conceptions, which in turn are painstakinglydeveloped by researchin thepurest realms of science." He concluded that "those statements are as truetoday as when they were writtenthirty-fiveyears ago." And the physicist LeonLederman, writing in the November 1984 issue of Scientific American, gaveargumentsbased on the assembly-linemodel that mighthave been taken fromScience, the Endless Frontier. Thoughconcedingthat he had not calculatedthedirect impact of pure science on technology, he was certain it would be astraightforwardmatterto show that it is large. Majorpartsof tomorrow'stech-nology will, in Lederman'sview, follow directlyfrom specificdiscoveries madein experimentalelementaryparticleresearch or pure theoreticalphysics.22

20 Terry Reynolds, Stronger Than A Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Bal-timore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983); Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia's Philosopher Mechanics: AHistory of the Franklin Institute, 1824-1865, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); WalterG. Vincenti, "Control-Volume Analysis: A Difference in Thinking Between Engineering andPhysics," Technol. Cult., 1982, 23:145-174.21 Derek J. de S. Price, "Is Technology Historically Independent of Science? A Study in StatisticalHistoriography," Technol. Cult., 1965, 6:553-568; and Price "A Theoretical Basis for Input-OutputAnalysis of National R & D Policies," in Research, Development, and Technological Innovation:Recent Perspectives on Management, ed. Devendra Sahal (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books,1980), pp. 251-260.22 Richard C. Atkinson, "Introduction," in Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (Wash-

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYBut other importantstatementsmade in 1984 ndicate that otherpolicymakersare less firmly committed to the assembly line. When the president's scienceadviser discussed the proposed federal governmentresearch and development

budgetfor fiscal year 1985,he still emphasizedthe "renewed-and considerablystrengthened-commitment to federal support for basic research." But in therationale for that research, trainingof scientists (those aimedat both basic andapplied research careers) got first priority. Challengingintellectual frontierscame next. The statement that basic research "providesnew knowledge thatdrives our economic growth, improvesour qualityof life, and underliesour na-tionaldefense" was tossed in as a supportingpoint. No claimfollowedthatbasicresearch was the only, or even the most importantsuch driverand improver.23An even biggershift came in an endorsementby the chairmanof the NationalScience Board (the board of directors of the NSF) that the NSF would nowtreatengineeringnot as a science discipline,or as an applicationof science, butas an area with a knowledgebase and researchneeds of its own. Thatchairmangave no indicationof havingreadthe historical iterature orknowingaboutVan-nevar Bush's plea for the Wrightbrothers).But his reasons echo the reasoningof Layton, Price, and Kranzberg.24FROM METAPHORS TO ALTERNATIVE MODELS

One reason that the battle against the assembly line has not been completelywon is that its rivals remainmetaphorsrather than models, and metaphorsaregood stimulantsto thinkingbut unreliable ools for answeringquestions. So far,historians such as Layton, Kranzberg,and Hughes who have put forward theview that technology is more than a stepchildof science have not providedanalternativemodel that is just as clear as the assembly line and gives a morerealistic depiction of the way science and technology influence each other andthe society that supports them. They and many other historians have shapedsome of the pieces out of which such a model might be made. Those piecesoperate on different levels, and are sometimes far more opaque than the onesthat go to make up the transparent, f incorrect,assembly-linemodel. But theyseem to point the way toward a future synthesis.The pieces include one that was well defined by 1972, the concept of tech-nology-as-knowledge,andthree others thathave emergedsince: the presumptiveanomaly;the balance of momentum and external pressure;and the role of theresearch entrepreneur.Science, Technology, and the Origins of Innovation: The Presumptive Anomaly.In the assembly-linetradition,linearmodels explainthe originsof innovationbya pull from society at one end of the line, or a push from science at the other.But the concept of technology as autonomoussuggests that both of these ap-proaches are inadequate.Edward Constant's study of the invention of the jet engine provides a newington, D.C.: NSF, 1980), p. xii; Leon M. Lederman, "The Value of Fundamental Science," Sci-entific American (Nov. 1984), 251(11):40-47.23George Keyworth, "Four Years of Reagan Science Policy," Science, 1984, 224:9-13.24 Lewis M. Branscomb, "Engineering and the National Science Foundation," Science, 1984,224:10.

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GEORGE WISEapproach.He describes a communityof technologists,those concernedwith air-craftengines, makinga technologicalrevolutionin muchthe same way that sci-entists, in one popular view of the history of science, make scientific revo-lutions. They begin with an old way of looking at things: in this case, thatpropellersdriveairplanes.Withinthatway of lookingat things,a few visionariessee anomalies, or problems that cannot be solved within the old framework.These anomalies do not block current development. They are, instead, "pre-sumptive anomalies":they represent problemsthat will emerge if the currentway of doing things is extended into the future. Here the presumptiveanomalyis a limit to the speed of airplanes. A creative inventor able to look beyondtoday's successes and stare that presumptiveanomalyin the face will gain theinsightneeded to make the jump to the jet engine.25Wheredoes science fit in?It is not, as in the assembly-lineview, the source of all change;instead, it is aresource to be drawn on by the perceiverof the presumptiveanomaly.But nota merepassive resource, for recognitionof the possibilityof innovationcan spurresearch-particularly engineering research, the acquisition of the knowledgethat engineers need to get on with theirjobs.Other studies have taken similar views. Robert Bruce and David Hounshellhave looked at the invention of the telephone and have found its origins in apresumptiveanomaly. Manyinventorsin the 1870senvisionedthe eventual needfor putting many, rather thanjust one, two or four, telegraph signals onto asingle telegraphline. But only two of them, Alexander GrahamBell and ElishaGray, envisionedthe limitsof coded pulses as compared o a voice as a messageform, and conceived the telephone.26HughAitken, studyingthe originsof radio,draws on similar deas in depictingthe origins of both the initial "syntony and spark"radio systems and the later"continuouswave" radio systems in terms of the relations of communities ofscientists, technologists, businessmen, and governmentofficials. Radio is morethan a classic assembly-line invention (Maxwell begat Hertz who begat Mar-coni): there were important eedbacks from one communityto another.Science,in the formof Maxwell's theoryof electromagnetism,becomes not the beginningof a process but a resource to be drawnon by people who perceivedthe ultimatelimitationsof wired telegraphy. Long before any crisis in communicationsca-pacity had actuallyoccurred, they created sparktelegraphy.And long before itspotential was exhausted, a few other visionariesperceived the need for a newtechnology based on continuous waves. This change would later draw in sci-ence, in the form of the physics behindthe ultimatelymost successful generatorof continuous waves-the vacuum tube.27The most prominent embodiment of twentieth-century"high technology,"microelectronics, seems superficiallyto be an ideal case of the assembly line:curiosity-drivendiscovery in an esoteric scientific field (the quantumtheory ofsolids) spawns an industry. But, as studies by Ernest Braun and Stuart

25 Edward Constant, Origins of the Turbojet Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,1980).26 Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston: Little,Brown, 1973); David Hounshell, "Elisha Gray and the Telephone," Technol. Cult., 1975, 16:133-161.27 Hugh Aitken, Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio (N.Y.: Wiley Interscience, 1976); andAitken, The Continuous Wave (Princeton, N.J., Princeton Univ. Press, 1985).

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Capitalizing on a presumptive anomaly. Members of the Bell Laboratories team thatinvented the transistor: William Shockley, seated; John Bardeen, standing left; andWalter Brattain. A T & T Bell Laboratories, Archives/Record Management Services.Printed with permission.MacDonald,LillianHoddeson, andothers have shown, technologywas involvedfrom the first. Scientificinsight may have helpedthe Bell Laboratories eampickthe rightarea in which to look for a solid-statetelephone amplifier.But the factthat they were looking for one at all owed much to the technological insightofa Bell research manager,MervinKelly. As early as 1936, more than a decadebefore the invention of the transistor, he pointed out long-runlimitationstovacuum tube switching and the desirabilityof a solid-state substitute. Othergroups, motivatedby more purely scientificconsiderations,looked at the samescience but did not find the transistor.28

Finally, Joan Bromberg's history of the effort to develop magneticallycon-tainedfusion as an energy source shows that some people who see the limitsofexisting technology may greatlyunderestimate he time it will take them to pro-vide an alternative. (In the case of fusion, that time may prove to be infinite.)The historyof fusion also shows how ambitious nnovationeffortsproceedundershiftingrationales and call forthnew types of knowledge.The knowledgeneededfor invention may not be in the form previously produced by scientists. Fusion

28ErnestBraunandStuartMacDonald,Revolution n Miniature:TheHistoryandImpact of Semi-conductor ElectronicsRe-explored(2nd ed.; Cambridge:CambridgeUniv. Press, 1982); LillianHoddeson, "TheDiscoveryof the Point-ContactTransistor,"HistoricalStudies in thePhysicalSci-ences, 1981,12:41-76.

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research created demands for new knowledge about hydrodynamic instabilities,for example. Much the same thing happened in other fields. The aerodynamicsused in inventing better aircraft engines and the electron physics used byvacuum tube inventors was not necessarily the aerodynamics or electron physicsalready available from the physics laboratory.29Inventions have themselves helped to shape scientific advance. Many exam-ples can be put forward, from the microscope to the laser. But they ought tobe accompanied by two warnings: the effects of technology on science varywidely across different scientific fields; and, again and again, from the air pumpto the particle accelerator, scientists have conceived and built their own tech-nology, rather than simply learning from the engineers.The best studies of the influence of technology on science have concerned afield particularly dependent on technology: astronomy. Books by Martin Harwit,Richard Hirsh, and David Edge and Michael Mulkay describe how a series ofinventions, from telescopes and diffraction gratings to radio antennas androckets, opened up new channels for observing the universe, and how surprisingmessages coming in over these channels have reshaped the thinking of astron-omers. In the most general of these books, Harwit concludes that the typicalmode of discovery in astronomy is the seizure of a new technology by astron-omers, or by outsiders with an interest in astronomy, and its quick exploitationto skim the observational cream off a new field. Technology becomes a resource.Scientists often exploit forefront technology faster than technologists exploitforefront science.30It would be premature to extrapolate this conclusion from astronomy to sci-ence as a whole. Astronomy is an observational science, especially dependenton ways of seeing. Other sciences may be more theory-driven and as a resultmay generate their own technologies more actively. In other cases the resultswill be mixed, as in high-energy physics, where both theoretical goals and themoving horizon of technological possibilities drive the development of appa-ratus.31Science, Technology, and the Growth of Systems and Institutions: Momentum,Salients, and Pressures. Once initiated, why does an innovation, a system, aprofession, or an institution grow as it does? Why is growth not faster or slower?Why is the form hierarchical or decentralized, anarchic or autocratic? Expla-nations picturing progressive evolution fueled by science have given way to ex-planations involving internal momentum, uneven growth, and the opposition ofexternal forces.The outstanding recent study of growth and form, Thomas P. Hughes's Net-works of Power, takes just this approach. It traces the growth and organization

29 Bromberg, Fusion (cit. n. 11), pp. 248-256.30 David 0. Edge and Michael Mulkay, Astronomy Transformed: The Emergence of Radio As-tronomy in Britain (New York: Wiley, 1976); Richard Hirsh, Glimpsing an Invisible Universe: TheEmergence of X-Ray Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Martin Harwit, CosmicDiscovery: The Search, Scope, and Heritage of Astronomy (New York: Basic Books, 1981).31 Arthur Norberg, "Cross-Fertilization of Innovations in Science and Technology: Radio-Fre-quency Circuits and Particle Accelerators in the 1930s," paper read at the XVth International Con-gress of the History of Science, Edinburgh, 1977; John L. Heilbron, Robert W. Seidel, and BruceWheaton, Lawrence and his Laboratory: Nuclear Science at Berkeley, 1931-1961 (Berkeley: Law-rence Berkeley Laboratory and Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. California,1981).

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYof electric power systems in terms of first technological and then business com-munities solving their immediate problems. Inventors with a vision of systemsget the jump on inventors who see only components. Those inventors and theirbusiness partners transfer technology across oceans; the modern light bulbmoves east, the transformer moves west. The systems grow unevenly, until thebypassed areas (or reverse salients, as Hughes calls them)-the difficulty ofsending direct current over long distances, or the difficulty of running a largemotor on alternating current-become critical problems that help shape the re-search efforts of engineers. The systems' growth has now attained a momentumthat enables them to overcome or compromise with outside political or economicpressures. Finally, with technological maturity, the technological problem ofcreating systems gives way to the mainly economic problem of creating regionalnetworks.32

The scientist is little in evidence. Maxwell's laws may make a system possible,but they have less to do with its growth and form than does a more modestconceptual invention, load factor (a measure of how much of the electricity gen-erating capacity of a system is actually used). The role of science in the growthphase is a supporting one. The main influence of science on electrical technologywas a transient one, in education, for physicists, not engineers, were the firstto perceive the possibilities of educating electrical engineers. The first generationof true electrical engineers came out of the physics laboratories. Then they re-warded the profession that spawned them by creating a discipline of their ownindependent of physics.33Other studies of the growth and form of innovations and systems echo theseconclusions. Martha Trescott's study of electrochemistry has shown how thatindustry also developed its own internal knowledge base and technical institu-tions, rather than relying on direct imports from science. No doubt the work ofchemical researchers provided the basic ideas for the electrochemical industry.But the influence of science was, again, supporting and transient rather thancentral. Similarly, John Servos has traced the way the growth in demand forphysical chemists was not a direct but an indirect result of industrial growth.That is, the industries did not at first hire physical chemists with Ph.D.s.; theyhired engineering graduates who had taken chemistry courses, and the collegeshired the Ph.D. physical chemists to teach those courses.34More recently, in the evolution of computers, the pacemaker of technologyhas been not science but practical needs, especially national defense. Scientificneeds may have inspired such pioneers as John Atasanoff and John Mauchly,but the most successful innovators were the ones who coped most successfullywith nonscientific issues: engineering design, patents, funding, project targets,and marketing. Only when computers became established did a discipline ofcomputer science-a branch of engineering research-begin to emerge.35

32 Hughes, Networks of Power (cit. n. 16), pp. 140-174.33Robert Rosenberg, "American Physics and the Origins of Electrical Engineering," PhysicsToday, 1983, 36:48-53.34Martha M. Trescott, The Rise of the American Electrochemical Industry, 1880-1910: Studiesin the American Technological Environment (Contributions in Economics and Economic History,38) (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981); John W. Servos, "The Industrial Relations of Science:Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900-1939," Isis, 1980, 71:531-549.35Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith, Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Com-puter, (Bedford, Mass.: Digital, 1980); Nancy Stern, From Eniac to Univac: An Appraisal of theEckert-Mauchly Computers (Bedford, Mass.: Digital, 1981).

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GEORGE WISEReconciling Technological and Scientific Goals with the Immediate Needs of Pa-trons: The Role of the Research Entrepreneur. In rejecting science as the pace-maker of technology, historians have begun to suggest that the particular balanceof scientific and technological efforts undertaken by an institution may dependmore on the needs of patrons than on the direct influence of science and tech-nology on each other. This interpretation puts emphasis on a new role, the "re-search entrepreneur": an individual dedicated to creating new science or newtechnology, but realistic enough to recognize that he must strike bargains withpeople who have very different interests if he hopes to accomplish his goals.The role is not new. Joseph Henry provides a nineteenth-century example.The publication of the Henry papers, edited by Nathan Reingold and colleagues,and studies based on those papers have as one theme Henry's attempts to rec-oncile science and technology by viewing science as making technology pos-sible, though by no means as the head of an assembly line. Social conditionscall invention forth. The inventive genius is needed as well as the scientific.Henry's role in developing the telegraph and discouraging the electric motor wasconsistent with what he saw as the scientist's proper social and intellectual rolein the creation of new technology. Other nineteenth-century figures madeuneasier adjustments. Robert Post depicts the physicist-inventor Charles Pageas seeking to vindicate his position as a true scientist, even as he got moredeeply enmeshed in questionable government-funded schemes to develop a prac-tical electric motor. And David Hounshell has described how even ThomasEdison identified himself as a "scientific man" when he needed scientists' ap-proval of his electric lighting system, then broke with them when their pure-science ideal (and their occasional kind words about rivals' lighting systems)proved incompatible with his further needs for allegiance and support.36Looking at a later part of the nineteenth century, Charles Rosenberg and Mar-garet Rossiter have shown how the directors of the federal government's agri-cultural experiment stations exemplified the research entrepreneur role. Theburden of requests for advice and technology from farmers dampened the ide-alism of station scientists. But successful laboratory directors found a way tocompromise their ideals in a way that looked a lot like surrender, but did even-tually make possible important research (for example, on hybrid corn).37Research entrepreneurs also created major twentieth-century industrial re-search laboratories. The successful laboratory directors were team players, notrugged individualists. Stuart Leslie has shown how even as individualistic aleader as General Motors' research director Charles Kettering learned the needto make institutional compromises-especially after an innovative air-cooled au-tomobile engine his team developed failed commercially, as much because oforganizational problems within GM as because of technical flaws in the engine.

36 Arthur P. Mollella, "The Electric Motor, the Telegraph, and Joseph Henry's Theory of Tech-nological Progress," Proc. IEEE (1976), 64:1273-1278; Joseph Henry, The Papers of Joseph Henry,ed. Nathan Reingold (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972-present), 4 vols. todate; Robert Post, Physics, Patents, and Politics: A Biography of Charles Grafton Page (New York:Science History, 1976); David Hounshell, "Edison and the Pure Science Ideal in 19th CenturyAmerica," Science, 1980, 207:612-617.37Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976) Chs. 8-12; Margaret Rossiter, "The Organization of the Agri-cultural Sciences," in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. Alex-andra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 211-248.

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYLeonard Reich's studies of Bell Laboratories provide major new insights intothe business pressures shaping industrial research, and his work and otherstudies of General Electric's laboratory show how that organization's director,Willis R. Whitney, extended the role of research entrepreneur. By first provingthe laboratory's value as a defender of established company businesses, heearned for a few of his researchers the right to wander into more remote fieldsof science and technology.38Clayton Koppes's history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows that in theabsence of such a research entrepreneur, scientists and technologists can allowexternal patrons to set priorities. The laboratory's two patrons, California In-stitute of Technology and the federal government (the Department of Defenseand NASA) agreed, Koppes argues, that the laboratory's primary purpose wouldbe service to the "warfare state," not science or technology. "Lacking a stronginstitutional ethic, the science and research-engineering communities allowed theorganization and agenda of research to be determined disproportionately by mil-itary funding."39 But the laboratory's federal patrons also sponsored a remark-able series of planetary explorations. The JPL's history must be seen as a com-promise of scientific and nonscientific goals, not merely a surrender. Peopleinterested in space exploration as technology, and space scientists interested inknowledge about the solar system, achieved many of their own goals in theprocess of supporting the government in achieving its goals.Two studies of twentieth-century science and technology suggest that the me-diating role of research entrepreneurs has been eliminated by capitalist managerswho dictate the roles of both science and engineering. David Noble's study ofthe behavior of important science and engineering educators and organizers ar-gues that any idealistic rhetoric from them is only a smoke screen masking theirtotal surrender to capitalist managerial hierarchies. David Dickson, in a surveyof science policy since World War II, gives essentially the same message.40

Others have found more impressive the amount of autonomy scientists at-tained, and how well they have insulated themselves from their patrons. JohnServos has described how an apparent victory at MIT of applied, industry-alliedchemical engineering over "purer" forms of that discipline and of chemistryproved in fact only temporary. After 1930, the verdict was reversed; science

38 Hoddeson, "The Discovery of the Point Contact Transistor" (cit. n. 28); Lillian Hoddeson, "TheEmergence of Basic Research in the Bell Telephone System, 1875-1915," Technol. Cult., 1981,22:512-544; John J. Beer and W. David Lewis, "Aspects of the Professionalization of Science," inThe Professions in America, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); Beer, "CoalTar Dye Manufacture and the Origins of the Modern Industrial Research Laboratory," Isis, 1958,49:123-131; Birr, Pioneering in Industrial Research (cit. n. 9); Kendall Birr, "Industrial ResearchLaboratories," in The Sciences in the American Context: New Perspectives, ed. Nathan Reingold(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979); Stuart Leslie, "Charles A. Kettering andthe Copper Cooled Engine," Technol. Cult., 1979 20:752-778, Leslie, Boss Kettering (New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1983),;Leonard Reich, "Industrial Research and the Pursuit of CorporateSecurity: The Early Years of Bell Labs," Business History Review, 1980, 54:504-529; Reich, "IrvingLangmuir: Engineer and Scientist," Technol. Cult., 1983, 24:199-221; George Wise, "A New Rolefor Professional Scientists in Industry: Industrial Research at General Electric, 1900-1916," Technol.Cult., 1980, 21:408-429; and Wise "Ionists in Industry: Physical Chemistry at General Electric,1900-1915," Isis, 1983, 74:7-21.39Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet PropulsionLaboratory, (New Haven: Yale, 1982), p. 247.40 Noble, America by Design (cit. n. 2); David Dickson, The New Politics of Science (New York:Pantheon, 1984).

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GEORGE WISEand engineering research goals set by faculty members, rather than by externalpatrons, got priority. In The Physicists Daniel Kevles studies a discipline par-ticularly susceptible to clashes between its pure and applied wings. But Kevlesdenies that business or technology shaped physics. Indeed, he downplays therole technology played in the growth and organization of the discipline. Suchtechnological episodes as the invention of the transistor are left out of the ac-count altogether. Technology is principally mentioned as something people wholacked understanding confused with science. The major treatment of the inter-action of science and technology, the discussion of how the modern interdis-ciplinary research lab was created, appears in a chapter entitled "The Searchfor New Patrons." In the twentieth century, Kevles concludes, the physicistsdid not suffer domination by the capitalists. Instead, during and after World WarII, the physicists, the capitalists and the politicians sat down around the tableand came up with a compromise that satisfied all of them. They institutionalizedthe role played by research entrepreneurs within a science policy system underwhich the government would allow scientists to dictate their own government-supported research programs, and the scientists would help meet the technologyneeds of the government, particularly in the area of national defense. Under thatcompromise, the physicists enjoyed, until the 1970s, a remarkable degree of au-tonomy. A major idea that both reflected this privileged position and provideda justification for it is the rationale for pure research with which we began: thescience-technology assembly line.41

CONCLUSIONRefuting the assembly-line model stands as a main contribution of the historiansto the discussion of the relation of science and technology in modern America.In its place, most historians have asserted the autonomy of technology in re-lation to science (at the same time as they have been emphasizing that tech-nology itself is not autonomous in relation to economics, politics, and interna-tional relations). All knowledge is not science; technology is knowledge, too.Science is invented, not revealed, and the tools of technology can help scientistsinvent it.

Treating science and technology as separate spheres of knowledge, both man-made, appears to fit the historical record better than treating science as revealedknowledge and technology as a collection of artifacts once constructed by trialand error but now constructed by applying science. The presumptive anomalyis a big improvement on tired debates about demand-pull versus technology-push. The balance between a technology's momentum and the realities, bothscientific and social, that constrain it, offers a more realistic way of tracing thegrowth of systems and institutions than does the picture of technology as anirresistable juggernaut. And the figure of the research-entrepreneur is a key tounderstanding the past century's innovations in organizing research.These pieces do not yet constitute a model. But the shape of such a modelappears to be emerging. It will depict technology as an autonomous body ofknowledge enriched but not driven by science. Major innovation emerges when41 Servos, "Industrial Relations" (cit. n. 34); Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The Histor? of aScientific Community in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1978).

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYcreative individuals understandmarketneeds, envision the future limits of cur-rent ways of meeting those needs, and acquire insight into new ways of over-coming the limits. Once innovationcreates a new field of technology, that fieldgenerates its own internal ogic of momentum,reverse salients, and response toexternal pressures. Research entrepreneurs ind ways of drawingidealistic sci-entists and engineers into attacks on the field's practical problems. Eventuallythose ways become frozen into institutionsand policies.This model is not universallyaccepted. Some of its critics argue that it un-derestimates the domination of both science and technology by capitalism.Others deny that it makes any sense to distinguishscience intellectuallyfromtechnology. Yet others have even dismissed the relationbetween the two as adying issue.42An indication of that issue's vitality, however, is the recent undertakingofseveral majorhistoricalprojects that depend heavily on it. Science-basedcom-panies such as DuPont and Rohm and Haas have commissionedbooks aboutthemselves by historiansof science and technology (David Hounshell and JohnK. Smith of the University of Delaware and the Hagley Museum, and SheldonHochheiser, an employee of Rohm and Haas, respectively). In these books thecompatibilityof science and technology with each other and with business willbe importantissues. The SmithsonianInstitution's publicationof the JosephHenry Papers continues, and the initial volumes of the Thomas A. EdisonPapers,jointly sponsored by Rutgers University, the state of New Jersey, theNational Park Service, and a numberof private individuals,foundations,andcorporations, head for publication. Both Henry and Edison repeatedly foundthemselves dealing with actual or potential conflicts or compromisesbetweenscientificand technologicalgoals.Two recent innovationsin the way history is done also focus on relatingsci-ence and technology. One is the jointly fundedprojecton the originsof a par-ticularscience or technology. Examplesare the Projectfor the History of SolidState Physics, with many public and private sponsors, carriedout by an inter-nationalteam under the auspices of the AmericanInstitute of Physics; the LaserHistory Project, largely sponsored by companies that make lasers; and thePolymer Project, under the auspices of the Center for History of Chemistry.These projects have explicitly set out to deal with the science-technologyre-lation as a majortheme.The second major innovation is the permanentcenter for the study of thehistory of a discipline or profession. The Centerfor History of Physics, oper-ating out of the headquartersof the American Institute of Physics, has dem-onstratedthe value of this approachfor purposesranging romarchivalservicesto originalresearch, through the outstandingwork of Charles Weiner, LillianHoddeson, SpencerWeart,JoanWarnow,andothers. Its examplehas now beenfollowed by the History Centerof the Instituteof Electricaland ElectronicEn-gineers (IEEE), under the direction of Ronald Klein and operatingout of theIEEE's headquarters n New York City; the Centerfor History of Chemistry,directed by Arnold Thackrayand associated with the AmericanChemicalSo-ciety, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the University of

42 Thomas P. Hughes, "Emerging Themes in the History of Technology," Technol. Cult., 1979,20:697-711.

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246 GEORGEWISEPennsylvania; and the Charles Babbage Institute for the History of InformationProcessing, directed by Arthur Norberg, sponsored by the American Federationof Information Processing Societies and various corporations and individuals in-volved with information processing, and located at the University of Minnesota.Each of the directors mentioned is a professional historian of science or tech-nology.The challenge these initiatives present to historians mirrors the major themeof this review. Historical studies have shown that the relations between scienceand technology need not be those of domination and subordination. Each hasmaintained its distinctive knowledge base and methods while contributing to theother and to its patrons as well. History must now show that it too can be anautonomous discipline capable of contributing value to other disciplines and tocorporate, public, or technical-society patrons without becoming their creatureor mouthpiece. In pursuing that goal, the study of the historical relations ofscience and technology can provide both a theme for investigation and a sourceof guidance.

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