Two forces shaped the development of American science and technology: internal logic and external circumstance. The first, in the United States as elsewhere, led from individual, small-scale, amateur efforts to organized, large-scale, professional undertakings. The second, arising from the physical and social environment, gave a distinctive national character to those pursuits.
The environmental influence dominated at first. Seventeenth-century scientists, short of books, instruments, public support, and contacts with fellow workers, largely confined their endeavors to mining the New World's immense lode of raw material for natural history and sending their data to Europe for processing. Only Boston, encouraged by the Royal Society of London and benefited by New England's concern for general literacy, developed anything like a scientific community. After the 1720s, as rapid population growth gave rise to towns, libraries, colleges, and newspapers, other scientific centers formed at Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York. Intercolonial and transatlantic communication quickened. Americans began contributing ideas as well as data, starting with Cotton Mather and peaking with Benjamin Franklin. Nevertheless amateurs, chiefly physicians, predominated, depending on Europe for instruments and theoretical guidance.
Americans assumed that science would yield material benefits, but they added little to the English technology they imported, other than adapting it, as in ax design, to their abundance of wood. Their small, dispersed, largely self-sufficient farms held them to handicrafts, though this did foster an ingenious versatility.
Friction with England generated a cultural nationalism that quickened American scientific growth in the 1760s. The Revolution weakened ties with British scientists, disrupted colleges, subjected scientific centers to sporadic enemy occupation, and impoverished, distracted, or commandeered scientists. But the Revolution also broadened intellectual and cultural horizons and challenged Americans in the 1780s to prove that freedom nurtured science. New museums, journals, societies, and colleges sprang up. Although the initial postwar fervor soon cooled, the vision persisted. With little help from science, postwar technology flourished. England's Industrial Revolution pointed the way, and an elastic market freed from class inhibitions called for labor-saving machinery. Transplanted British engineers, mechanics, and artisans added a leaven. The patent system, economic expansion, and natural resources encouraged homegrown tinkerers, and American distances induced a transportation revolution that in turn brought forth native engineers and technical schools in the early years of the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, under the science-minded President Thomas Jefferson, the federal government entered the picture with the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Coast Survey. By 1830 states were sponsoring geological surveys, college teaching was providing livelihoods, and public interest was being kindled. Still, American science, concentrated in the Northeast, progressed slowly. Not until Joseph Henry's electrical researches in the 1830s did an American approach Franklin's scientific stature. Under army auspices, exploration of the vast western territories acquired during the 1840s prolonged the emphasis of American science on descriptive natural history and confirmed its tilt toward discrete, short-term, line-of-sight researches--targets of opportunity--a characteristic that would tincture it for at least another century.
Despite those persistent imbalances, modern American science took shape between the mid-1840s and the mid-1870s. Europe demonstrated the new ways of professionalism, specialization, graduate education, governmental and philanthropic support, and collective organization. Americans returning from European study and immigrants like Louis Agassiz carried the gospel back and preached it with nationalistic fervor. An inner circle of leading scientists, jokingly dubbing themselves "the Lazzaroni," or beggars, and including Agassiz, Alexander Dallas Bache of the Coast Survey, and Joseph Henry of the new Smithsonian Institution promoted the European ways and crusaded against amateurish and sloppy science. They strove for national organization and better communication, especially through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (aaas), which they helped found in 1847 and dominated for a decade, though the members eventually rebelled against them in the name of democracy.
A major Lazzaroni goal was support without strings, since science was growing too complex and expensive for part-time amateurs. Half of the leading midcentury scientists lived by teaching and a quarter by state or federal employment, but routine chores left them little time for research. Henry wanted his Smithsonian to be a pilot project for unfettered, full-time research, but natural history collections inescapably engrossed it. The Lazzaroni ardently promoted the new German concept of research as a proper function of college faculties. The growing need for advanced university training gave impetus to the idea, and by 1876, when The Johns Hopkins University was founded as a research-oriented school, several colleges were awarding the Ph.D. in science.
To rally public support, scientists artfully encouraged the notion that all technology came out of science, but in fact, most nineteenth-century technology developed on its own. Still, technologists were increasingly adopting the norms and tactics of scientific research and emulating the scientists' examples of higher education, professional associations, and professional journals.
The Civil War, by sweeping aside southern obstructionism, enabled farmers to win federal subsidies for agricultural and technological colleges and let the Lazzaroni wangle a charter for a National Academy of Sciences, ostensibly to advise the federal government. (The government, however, largely ignored the academy until the twentieth century.) Otherwise the Civil War, like the Revolution, sucked scientists into military service or war work, distracting them and diverting support for their projects to war purposes. The aaas was suspended for the duration, other societies died, and southern science, already weak before the war, was devastated physically and financially. The Civil War was the first major conflict to make significant use of a number of peacetime advances in military technology, but it did not mobilize science or technology to develop more. The South lacked the foundations; hence the North lacked the challenge. Belief that the war would be short, along with pressure for immediate production, discouraged technological research and development by both government and private industry.
The half century that followed the war, however, saw the United States rise to world leadership in technology. Independent inventors like Thomas A. Edison and Alexander Graham Bell became household words, their creations household necessities. Tools of great precision and speed permitted mass production on an unprecedented scale. Some inventors, from Edison to Henry Ford, created elaborate technological systems. The increasing sophistication and urgency of technology compelled the pooling of talents and expertise in industrial research laboratories. Foreshadowed by Edison's famous Menlo Park laboratory of 1876, these matured at the turn of the century under such corporate giants as General Electric and AT&T, overshadowing the independent inventors who had planted their seeds. The new scale and tempo of technology also increased the numbers, specialization, and professional consciousness of college-trained engineers, some of whom even dreamed of engineering a social utopia.
Although the Civil War had tended to centralize government, postwar American science moved toward pluralism. By 1900 the growing state universities were following private institutions in supporting research. Yale had already nurtured the greatest American physicist of the time, Josiah Willard Gibbs. The new universities improved geographic balance by stimulating science in the Midwest and Far West. The federal government remained another locus of support and power, although a congressional commission in the 1880s rejected a call for a consolidated Department of Science. The age of military and naval explorations ended, but the army sponsored notable western surveys in the seventies and won a famous victory over yellow fever in Cuba and Panama at the turn of the century. Beginning in the eighties, the Department of Agriculture conducted scientifically and economically rewarding researches on plants, animals, and insects. Even before the stimulus of the world wars, the burgeoning of government scientific bureaus raised the stature of Washington, D.C., as a major scientific center. Still other centers of scientific power emerged when the vast private fortunes of the Gilded Age underwrote research foundations like the Rockefeller Institute and the Carnegie Institution, both endowed in 1901. And within the scientific community itself polycentrism became the rule. The aaas reawakened and grew, the National Academy survived and eventually enlarged its role, and specialization gave rise to national associations like the American Chemical Society (1876).
As the twentieth century began, the inner logic of scientific development had superseded physical environment in shaping American science. To be sure, earlier influences had left their mark. The only two American Nobelists in science during the first twenty years of the prizes, Albert Michelson in physics (1907) and Theodore W. Richards in chemistry (1914), won for characteristically American feats of precision in measurement. The British and the Germans still outpaced the Americans, but the Americans were now in the running and bent on taking the lead. Many took up the rallying cries of the departed Lazzaroni: more basic theory, more long-range strategy, less insistence on quick payoffs, more autonomy in research, more balance in fields. The growing weight of university research and private foundations furthered those ends. The growing interdependence of science and technology in both theory and instrumentation made science's claims to public favor more persuasive. And the expansion and democratizing of higher education broadened the base of the scientific community.
Natural history no longer dominated. Chemistry remained strong, though still heavily weighted toward practical application. Astronomy kept its hold on the public's imagination and purse strings. Thanks in part to the rise of bacteriology and foundation-backed research, medicine became more scientific. Thomas H. Morgan brilliantly applied the American quantitative approach to revolutionize understanding of genetics. American physics, once a weak field, had come up to Europe's in quantity if not quality by 1900, though the shift from classical to modern physics subsequently handicapped the mathematically unsophisticated Americans.
World War I aroused public and governmental interest in the enlistment of science and technology, now ripe for the assignment. The resulting agencies had no time to achieve much, but the National Research Council (1916) survived to dispense postwar fellowships, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (1915) ultimately evolved into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) of 1958.
The 1920s saw private support of science at its relative peak. Foundations increased their funding, minor in dollars but significant as seed money for unconstrained research. Herbert Hoover's Commerce Department promoted industrial research, and academic physics developed strong ties with industry. American technology now captivated the mind of Western civilization. "Fordism" and Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" reverberated not only in art, architecture, and cinema but also in political doctrine from benevolent progressivism to the savage utopianism of Lenin and Stalin and the hideous visions of Hitler. (Ford was the only American Hitler admired.) American scientists still fretted about their international standing and social status at home and about professional elitism in a democratic society. But revolutionary developments in Europe excited the physicists, now braced by more advanced training in mathematics. The same excitement, dramatized by Albert Einstein, reached the public mind and kept support coming even through the depression of the 1930s. Ernest Lawrence moved physics toward "big science" with his cyclotron. Chemists also grew more confident in their theory, and astronomy, already big science, prospered further. And in the 1930s brilliant Europeans, fleeing the rising tide of tyranny, significantly enriched American science.
Thus invigorated, American science in the late 1930s began a half century of preeminence in Nobel Prizes. Not coincidentally, those were the years of World War II and the cold war, an external influence as powerful as that of the natural environment had once been. Scientists were mustered in force for World War II, mainly under government contract at universities or in affiliated establishments like mit's Radiation Lab. The Office of Scientific Research and Development (osrd; 1941) overshadowed the older federal agencies. Although the osrd gave scientists much say in conceiving and developing new weapons, the old issue of scientific self-rule still troubled them, as well as new issues of secrecy and the ethics of mass destruction. The most notable new weapons--radar, the proximity fuse, the atom bomb--sprang from prewar breakthroughs. And it was not basic research nor even applied science but applied technology, the stupendous production of existing weapons and matériel, that decided World War II. Nevertheless the awesome revelation of the atom bomb project at war's end convinced the nation that science could win the next war--or better yet, prevent it.
So a massive, government-sponsored, postwar research and development (R&D) program gathered force from Soviet-American rivalry, fired up periodically by the Korean conflict (1950-1953), the shock of the first Soviet earth satellite, Sputnik (1957), and the Vietnam War (1964-1973). The Sputnik scare inspired the National Defense Education Act (1958), strengthening the educational underpinnings of science, and led to nasa and the triumphant moon landing of 1969. Serving the cold war arms race, longer-lived government R&D agencies succeeded the wartime osrd, and the new federal activism extended beyond military concerns to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Federal wealth supported a new age of big science, not only in high-energy physics but also in astronomy and biomedicine, culminating in the nineties with the Hubble Space Telescope, the human genome mapping project, and the superconducting supercollider, as grandiose in scale as in name. And big technology armed science with space vehicles, computers, lasers, and other wonders. Although big science made headlines, smaller-scale science, even in physics, also flourished. In the late eighties Americans produced more than a third of the world's scientific papers.
Not least, Americans led in the postwar computer revolution, springing from a marriage of science and technology and offering each of its progenitors a tool of epochal versatility and power. Although the computer's early theoretical development owed much to European mathematicians from Blaise Pascal through Charles Babbage to William Thomson (Baron Kelvin), Americans dominated the crucial transition from mechanical analog machines to electronic digital machines in the 1940s. The first large-scale automatic digital computer was conceived by Howard Aiken of Harvard in 1937 and completed in 1944. An army team, including J. Presper Eckert, John W. Mauchly, Herman H. Goldstine, and John G. Brainerd, developed the first all-electronic, general-purpose computer, eniac (1943-1945). In those years also the eniac group, joined by John von Neumann, formulated objectives basic to further development, such as stored programs, random-access memories, and conditional branching. And Americans led in the practical realization of those concepts.
By 1951 Eckert and Mauchly had developed a commercially available line of computers. Industry assumed a major role in extending computer speed and power. American advances in solid-state technology, notably the transistor, and integrated circuits in the fifties and sixties greatly reduced size and cost and increased reliability and speed. Microminiaturization in the seventies and eighties carried those trends to astounding lengths. The new instruments themselves gave new scope and power to both science and technology. Not only in storing, processing, and interpreting immense quantities of numerical data in astronomy, meteorology, physics, chemistry, genetics, and other sciences, but also in furnishing tools for scientific observation, such as space-probe guidance systems, image transmission and enhancement, and noninvasive medical scanning, computers became indispensable. In industry, computers gave new scope to automation, industrial design, business transactions, quality control, air and rail traffic control, stock market operations, and economic modeling. They entered the home in personal computers, word processors, video games, and household appliances. And these lists are far from exhaustive.
Yet all was not glory, gold, and gloating. Although still pluralistic, American science had become a tighter web of universities, government, foundations, industry, and the military; and the weight of government tended to warp that web, tilting university research away from the earth sciences toward microbiology, physics, and other fields. Worse, it herded much of American science and technology into the barrens of weapons development. It also raised fears of political constraints and stultifying secrecy. Polls showed scientists second only to physicians in public esteem, yet much of the public was ambivalent. Creationists, pacifists, environmentalists, antiabortionists, antinuclear protesters, antielitists, and believers in the supernatural pelted scientists and technologists from all sides. The scientists' long-standing ambition to rank first in the world had been realized in absolute terms. Yet the nation ranked fifth in percentage of gross national product spent on civilian R&D, and its students lagged behind those of other nations in math and science. In some areas the technological efficiency and quality of the Japanese, Germans, and others put Americans to shame. The space program, a symbol of big science and technological prowess, suffered a series of humiliating failures and hitches attributable to faulty management and human error, most notably the tragic destruction of the space shuttle Challenger with its crew of seven in 1986 and the error in grinding a mirror that crippled the Hubble Telescope in 1990. American science and technology both approached the third millennium uneasily looking over their shoulders.
Bibliography:
Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876 (1987); Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis (1989); Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, eds., Historical Writing on American Science (1985).
Author:
Robert V. Bruce
See also Automobiles; Aviation; Cotton Gin; Education; Industrial Revolution; Lewis and Clark Expedition; Medicine; Nuclear Power; Smithsonian Institution; Space Program; Taylorism; Transportation Revolution; and entries for individual scientists, inventors.
