Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 1 Entering the New Century The discoveries emerging from the European powerhouses of physics during the 1890s heralded the approach of the new century and helped set the stage for the future century of physics. Taking advantage of recent advances in electromagnetic theory and precision instrumentation, Cambridge University physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the first subatomic particle, the electron. In Paris, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, and soon Marie and Pierre Curie uncovered new radioactive elements that would win them and Becquerel Nobel Prizes. In the Netherlands, H. A. Lorentz developed a new theory of electromagnetism, and Pieter Zeeman discovered the Zeeman Effect, the magnetic separation of atomic spectroscopic lines. In 1900 Max Planck, working in Berlin, hypothesized the existence of tiny, indivisible quantities, or quanta, of energy. Five years later, Albert Einstein, an unknown clerk in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, introduced the theory of relativity, the quantum theory of light, the equivalence of mass and energy, and the theoretical basis for confirming the existence of atoms. In 1907 he presented a quantum theory of crystal Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Entering the New Century 7 solids, and he began work on a general theory of relativity designed to encompass gravitation. In 1909, in a brilliant series of experiments, Ernest Rutherford and his assistants at the University of Manchester in England first discovered the atomic nucleus. And in 1913 Danish physicist Niels Bohr published the first quantum theory of atomic structure. American contributions could not compare with those achievements. While Europeans produced the breakthroughs that helped launch the new twentieth-century disciplines of relativity theory and atomic and quantum physics, American researchers were at work during the early years of the century on such standard, “classical” topics as electromagnetism, optics, acoustics, and electrical and thermal properties of materials. During the first decade of the century, they produced such highlights as the first observation of the radiation pressure of light, the magnetic rotation of sodium vapor, and measurements of the heat developed in a material due to radioactivity. Of the fifty-four articles appearing in the ten issues of Physical Review published during 1900, the most popular category, accounting for nineteen of the articles, concerned the development of experimental apparatus for electrical research, teaching, and industry. The next most popular general topic, with sixteen articles, entailed the study of electromagnetic, thermal, and other properties of matter. Electricity and magnetism appeared as independent topics in only five papers. Thermodynamics and the physics of air and gases accounted for three articles each, while acoustics, optics, radioactivity, spectroscopy, the photoelectric effect, and units accounted for the rest.1 Despite the uneven comparison with Eu ropean research, the United States did produce several big-name physicists during the late nineteenth century whose work did rival that of their Eu ropean colleagues. J. Willard Gibbs at Yale University developed independently a statistical mechanics of heat and gases that was comparable to the great Austrian and German theories put forth at that time by Ludwig Boltzmann and Rudolf Clausius. Albert Michelson, together with Edward Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University, undertook precision optical interference experiments, which in 1887 yielded strong evidence against the electromagnetic ether, the hypothetical medium for light waves. Michelson received the first American Nobel Prize for this and related work in 1907. Henry Rowland, the first professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, was known internationally for his precision measurements of physical Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 8 Entering the New Century constants and for his invention of the widely used Rowland diffraction grating for optical research. But these outstanding figures were the exceptions, and their work did not spark many of their American colleagues to similar action at that time. Rowland died in 1901 and Gibbs in 1903. Neither was replaced by a successor of equal stature. Michelson, however, became professor of physics at the University of Chicago in 1892 where he helped establish a fi rst-rate research program. Four events at or near the turn of the century signaled the transformation in American physics that was about to occur. In 1893, three physicists at Cornell University founded the Physical Review, a journal that in the decades ahead would become the world’s leading physics research journal. In 1899, thirty-six physicists meeting at Columbia University founded the American Physical Society. In 1900 the General Electric Company established the nation’s fi rst major industrial research laboratory. And in 1901 the federal government created the National Bureau of Standards under the direction of a physicist. Its purpose was to set standards for industrial products and government regulations on the basis of fundamental research. These events indicated not only that American physicists were beginning to assume an independent professional identity within American science and society, but also that they were beginning to obtain through industry and government as well as academe the direct support for their work that they would need to bring their profession to world stature during the years ahead. It was still only a beginning, but these events were the culmination of a series of important developments reaching back to earlier decades and even to earlier centuries. T wo T e c h nol o gi e s Science and physics especially had always been prized fi xtures of American culture. Benjamin Franklin’s discoveries and inventions in electricity and other fields were only the most prominent of many others. Inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of government guided by reason, natural law, and the practical benefits of science, all of the Founding Fathers held science in high esteem, even if science was mainly accessible only to a few wealthy, white male aristocrats. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Entering the New Century 9 The Civil War proved a turning point in American social and science history. Following the devastation of the war, the population rapidly expanded as the surviving combatants returned to civilian life and as European immigrants began pouring into the United States to seek a better future. The nation badly needed workers for its rapidly expanding economy. The nation also needed more people trained in advanced agricultural methods to support the growing population, and in engineering to support the industrial revolution as it gained momentum during those decades. Federal funds began flowing through the Morrill Act of 1862 primarily to western and midwestern states for the establishment of practical training in the “agricultural and mechanic arts.” The new funds stimulated the founding of numerous public land-grant colleges, many of which are now prominent state universities, and those colleges began producing a new educated middle class. Two technological developments spurred the rise of the nation’s industrial economy and with it the nation’s science and engineering. The first was the harnessing of the steam engine to manufacturing and the railroad. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 opened up the American continent to commercial trade. This vastly increased the need for more trained mechanical engineers to design and build improved steam engines. The second development entailed the onset of the electric age following the invention of the electric motor in Eu rope in 1873. (The development of the generator, or dynamo, had occurred in 1830.) During the next twenty years, numerous inventions literally electrified the nation, driving the public demand for more electric power. Steam turbines, consuming vast quantities of fossil fuels, were harnessed to generate electricity; the Edison Lighting Company began selling Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb and the electric networks to run them; and the country finally settled on an electric standard of 110-volt alternating current (AC) running at 60 cycles per second. As with the steam engine, the electric age required trained experts, this time in the new and highly technical profession of the electrical engineer. The rise of chemistry during the nineteenth century and of the chemical and petroleum industries, along with other science-based industries, also required greater technical expertise and training in physical science. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 10 Entering the New Century Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. At the same time, midwestern states, eager to achieve industrial development, began requiring their land-grant colleges to offer, in additional to agricultural sciences, courses for future engineers. Many of those colleges gained closer ties with the railroad and electrical industries that employed the newly trained engineers. And at the base of every engineering student’s education lay a firm foundation in the fundamentals of physics— electricity, magnetism, thermodynamics, and mechanics.2 The increase in the number of students and courses drove an increasing demand for undergraduate physics professors. But physics was not yet an independent discipline. Usually, as at the land-grant college Purdue University in Indiana, which may be regarded as representative, the physics professors were located in the electrical engineering department. There they taught basic physics to the future designers of industrial-age machines. According to the Purdue course catalogue for 1895–1896, physics was divided into two subjects: general and practical physics. The annual courses in practical physics were “devoted to precise physical measurements” of various quantities using instruments common to engineering practice. The lectures in general physics covered mechanics, heat, and sound, with heavy emphasis in the senior year on electricity and magnetism. But, in a sign of awakening independence, attention was also given “to the recent advances in physical science,” and in their senior year students were even given “a subject for original investigation” that could serve as their senior thesis.3 However, most physics professors, burdened with heavy teaching loads, did not themselves perform any original research. During the 1890s, there were about 200 practicing physicists in the United States. Most of them held only a bachelor’s degree, even if teaching in a college. Unlike today, only about one-fourth of practicing physicists held a doctoral degree, usually from a European university. Purdue University’s professor of physics from 1899 to 1928 held a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, followed by a year of graduate study at Uppsala University in Sweden. In contrast, nearly all Eu ropean physics professors held doctorates (although the requirements were somewhat less demanding); most were working in dedicated university research laboratories staffed by graduate assistants; and they were in the classroom less and in the laboratory more than their American counterparts.4 Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Entering the New Century 11 The special success of the European graduate research system served for many years as an ideal for American scientists, and often as a source of envy. In 1876, American educators, eager to import the Eu ropean methods, founded Johns Hopkins University following the German model of the graduate research university. Graduate research programs in physics at Cornell, Harvard, Yale, and a few other universities eventually followed. They produced nearly all of the American-conferred doctorates in physics, and they helped to account for the fact that about 20 percent of American physicists did manage to find some time to perform research.5 Most of the research involved the empirical observations and problems of practical concern noted earlier in their publications of 1900, rather than involving the search for fundamental new concepts and discoveries. The discipline still lacked defi nition and the standards and mechanisms needed for ensuring quality research. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. T h e Rol e of F e de r a l L a bor at or i e s At the turn of the century, the heaviest concentration of research physicists was found not in universities but in the federally funded national research laboratories established in Washington, D.C.6 Federal research establishments also went back to the Founding Fathers, and to the immediately following century. Established in 1844 by an act of Congress with the initial funding of British scientist James Smithson, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., served for decades as the premier sponsor of research in botany, anthropology, and geographic exploration. When solar physicist Samuel Pierpont Langley became secretary of the Smithsonian in 1901, he built a renowned astrophysical observatory— one of the fi rst instances of the joining of physics with another discipline, astronomy, to form a new hybrid field of study: astrophysics. After the Wright brothers’ success, Langley became a leading proponent of aviation research. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the nation had become industrialized and urbanized. But there were as yet no industrial or academic research laboratories able to establish guidelines and standards for technologybased industries or for the management of a rapidly expanding population. These matters were left to the federal government which, in addition to Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 12 Entering the New Century Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. the National Bureau of Standards, established the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Mines, and the Office of Weights and Measures— all headed by research scientists. The Office of Weights and Measures, modeled after a German institute, worked to enable American industries to compete directly with their European counterparts in the sale of precision instruments and technology-based consumer products.7 One of the effects of the founding of government laboratories was the closer alliance of academic physicists with government and industry. The context for this, and one of the driving forces behind the government support of research, was the confluence of two social causes at that time: the progressive and conservation movements. Both of these coalesced during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909). But even before then, as the nation industrialized, newly middle-class families sought to maintain their status by placing their children in professional careers through higher education. College enrollments nearly doubled during the 1890s, and they continued to grow in the decades ahead, although the numbers still remained relatively small. The 82,000 registered college students in 1900 represented only about 2.4 percent of the total college-age population.8 Many of the colleges followed and promoted the Progressive Movement’s vision of science education inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment. According to this vision, a new generation of technical experts trained in the latest science and engineering would readily solve the nation’s problems by applying rational, scientific methods and results to their solution. This put scientists on a mission to serve the public and the nation by fi nding the best applications of science to such tasks as making more rational and efficient use of natural resources and the development of new technology-based consumer products and standards for industrial mass production. This in turn brought scientists into a closer collaboration with partners in both government and industry. Government officials believed that an enlightened, “progressive” government should utilize its scientists to the benefit of the nation, and that it should support them in their work through the establishment of national laboratories. For the conservation of natural resources, programs initiated by the Bureau of Land Management, the Coastal Survey, and the Smithsonian were already under way and more initiatives occurred through 1916, Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Entering the New Century 13 all looking to science for support and guidance. Before industries began founding their own laboratories, the federal government, through its various research units, took over the task of solving complex technology and standards problems for them, often with funding from industry. The government provided most of the research for the nascent aviation industry before World War I, and it researched and set many of the technical standards for the American electrical industry. Because of this, the federal government took a decisive role in the course of industrial and commercial development during that era and in fostering physics and other sciences in support of that goal.9 Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. U n i v e r si t i e s a n d Pu r e Sc i e nc e The fragile alliance of government, industry, and academe in scientific research grew more fragile as some corporations became uneasy about the government’s influence on applied research.10 As an alternative, beginning in the 1880s through the turn of the century, what became the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) received funds from its state, private sponsors, and industries to found a series of academic laboratories for electrical engineering, electrochemistry, and other industry-related fields. Unlike applied research, which seeks to turn physical concepts and laws into practical uses, engineering combines science, practical need, and industrial processes and design into a technology that can lead to useful products. The MIT laboratories became the basis for an undergraduate engineering program that trained its students in close collaboration with the needs of the institute’s industrial sponsors. Similar partnerships sprang up elsewhere, but they also raised questions about the role of industry in sponsoring academic research, including research in physics. In particular, in what ways might the aims of outside sources of funding exert an influence on the internal course and even the content of research? Other questions arose regarding research in government settings. In 1903 a federal committee appointed by the president, called the Committee of Organization of Government Scientific Work, struggled with the mission of government research. Should federal laboratories also engage in “problem oriented” research at the frontiers of knowledge, or should they limit themselves to practical applications of existing knowledge for the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 14 Entering the New Century Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. benefit of industry? It was a question that has occupied many agencies and scientists ever since. And it raises a larger question: what exactly is the relationship between fundamental, basic, or “pure” research and applied, practical, or useful research? More succinctly, what is the relationship between science and technology? As we will see, these questions were answered in different ways throughout the century. The 1903 committee decided that, because federal research is funded by Congress, it should focus on the solution of practical problems of direct benefit to the nation and to industry, whereas “disinterested pure science” should be left to the nonprofit universities.11 But universities already found themselves in a dilemma. On one side, industry was providing growing support of applied research in university laboratories, and it was demanding better preparation of students for engineering careers. On the other side, most universities were governed by administrators who adhered to ideals derived from the Progressive Movement of that era, especially the notion that research should be regarded as a public ser vice of benefit to everyone, independent of commercial interests and profits. It served the public by contributing to the nation’s culture and by providing potential practical benefits that could not yet be foreseen. Moreover, enhancing basic research would help bring the nation into closer competition with European nations for both prestige and competitive commercial applications. The dilemma opened a division regarding the aims and methods of physics education in the United States between the land-grant engineeringoriented colleges along with MIT on the one hand, and the universities offering graduate research degrees on the other. The division reflected a split over the aims and methods of the physics profession itself. Most physicists in technical colleges saw their work as a ser vice to the engineering professions through the teaching of elementary and applied physics to future engineers. In contrast with this, many of those in graduate universities saw their work as a ser vice to the nation and to humanity as well as to physics through the training of new generations of professional physicists able to advance our knowledge of nature through original “pure” research, even if this research was not yet up to Eu ropean standards. Training students in fundamental research required a professor adept in such research, which in turn required a rationale for the fi nancial support Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Entering the New Century 15 of work that might have no foreseeable practical benefit. One basis for this rationale was a definition of the work of the physicist as the pursuit of “pure” knowledge untainted by, and even superior to, practical and applied research. New pure knowledge was its own reward, it was argued, while the possibility always existed that others might eventually put that knowledge to practical use. This line of reasoning, motivated by the practical goal of achieving professional identity, became known as the ideology of “pure science,” the idea of research activity driven solely by curiosity and the hunt for the fundamental laws of nature, independent of the needs or demands of commercial, social, and political interests.12 It strongly influenced physicists’ attitudes toward academic science policy and toward their own research, as we shall see, whenever the profession needed strong self-definition, as in this period, or self-promotion in seeking partnerships with other sectors of society. In other words, it was as much an instrument for professional promotion as it was a standard of conduct for its practitioners. Its effects can be felt even today. But, one may ask, could “disinterested pure science” really remain free of commercial and political interests, especially as those interests provided the funds necessary for research? One might ask further about the responsibilities that pure scientists, in their independence, should have to society and to the uses that society makes of their work.13 These were important questions that occupied scientists, policymakers, and the general public during the decades ahead, even as the idea of pure science served its purpose in this period by helping to defi ne and promote the nation’s physics discipline. The notion of pure science was articulated most clearly and forcefully in the United States by Henry Rowland. The American-born Rowland had studied physics in Germany with the famous Hermann von Helmholtz before becoming professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University. His experience in Germany had impressed upon him the lowly status of physics in his homeland and the debilitating concern of American physicists with practical applications rather than with advancing the forefront of knowledge. Returning to the United States, Rowland delivered an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1883 titled “A Plea for Pure Science.” “We are tired of mediocrity, the curse of our country,” he declared. “We are tired of seeing our Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 16 Entering the New Century Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. professors degrading their chairs by the pursuit of applied science instead of pure science; or sitting inactive while the whole world is open to investigation; lingering by the wayside while the problem of the universe remains unsolved . . . Nature calls to us to study her, and our better feelings urge us in the same direction.”14 The roots of pure science lay in the Progressive Movement, but they extended back further to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and even to ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato and his Academy of elite thinkers. But the most direct origins arose from nineteenth-century German professors. Rowland’s European sojourn was not uncommon for American physical scientists of the era. While immersing himself in German physics, he apparently also absorbed the professional tactics of his German colleagues. In promoting their social standing and professional support within the newly unified monarchy under Bismarck and the Kaiser, German professors had developed the highly successful argument that “apolitical” pure research was essential to advancing German national culture and prestige. Because of this, all academic work, including science, merited generous state funding, and all research professors deserved, and received, special social and economic status, placing them just below the landed aristocracy among the leading professions in Germany. To this day, German professors and teachers are accorded higher social status than is accorded their American counterparts.15 In a similar fashion, at a time when the poorly educated inventor Thomas A. Edison was considered the nation’s leading scientist, Rowland attempted to separate “pure science” and its academic practitioners from consumer products and their inventors. “American science is a thing of the future, and not of the present or past,” Rowland told the AAAS in his 1883 speech, “and the proper course of one in my position is to consider what must be done to create a science of physics in this country, rather than to call telegraphs, electric lights, and such conveniences, by the name of science.” In order to answer nature’s call to research, he continued, professors must place pure science above commercial pursuits, and they must find a way to engage in pure research, in addition to teaching, as do European professors. Moreover, universities must hire more physics professors who “choose a life which we consider higher” so that students, “looking forward into the world for something to do, see before them this Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Entering the New Century 17 high and noble life, and they see that there is something more honorable than the accumulation of wealth.”16 Like his German counterparts, Rowland used the idea of pure science as an ideology, as an instrument for the establishment and recognition of academic research physics as a recognized profession set apart from and above politics as well as above applied science and commercial technology. In the same speech, Rowland also set forth a program of practical steps for fostering the new elite profession and its institutions. The steps included, first, the tapping only of private donors for funds in order to avoid, as did his German colleagues, the taint of “political trickery” associated with government support; second, the channeling of these funds primarily to a few selected elite universities with first-class graduate research programs in physics, leaving the majority to languish in mediocrity. In addition, he called for the founding of research journals specifically for physics research and the establishment of a professional society of research physicists to promote themselves and pure science and to set standards of excellence—goals realized with the founding the Physical Review and the American Physical Society (APS). In 1899, Rowland was duly elected the fi rst president of the APS, an organization that was populated primarily by academic physicists until after World War II. In 1913 the APS took editorial control of the Physical Review. Despite competition from other journals publishing physics research, such as Science (AAAS), the Astrophysical Journal, and the Journal of Physical Chemistry, the Physical Review served for the next several decades as a vehicle for the physicists’ growing professional identity. Unlike today, during its first decades the Physical Review published not only research papers, but also reports and abstracts from APS meetings, book reviews, summaries of papers published elsewhere, obituaries, and advertisements. Yet, as Paul Hartman notes in his “memoir” of the journal, it was through the research published in its ever expanding volumes that the journal reflected and chronicled the growth of the American physics community over the next 100 years.17 APS president Rowland could not have been more pleased than to report to the society’s second meeting in 1899 the success of his elitist vision of pure science: “In a country where the doctrine of the equal rights of man has been distorted to mean the equality of men in other respects, Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 18 Entering the New Century we form a small and unique body of men, a new variety of the human race . . . whose views of what constitutes the greatest achievement in life are very different from those around us.” His German colleagues would have been proud as he continued: “In this respect we form an aristocracy, not of wealth, not of pedigree, but of intellect and of ideals, holding him in the highest respect who adds the most to our knowledge or who strives after it as the highest good.”18 Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. I n dus t r i a l L a bor at or i e s As Rowland pushed academic physics toward independent professional status, industry was moving toward the creation of its own more commercially oriented research laboratories.19 Several factors, again centering on the Progressive Movement, contributed to this trend. Progressivism encouraged young scientists entering the workforce to view industrial research as a contribution to advancing American economic and cultural stature. It did not hurt that scientists could earn much more in industry than in academe. Older scientists, however, imbued with notions of pure science, regarded this move as a sellout. Knowledge was for the benefit of all, they argued, not for the profits of a few. Frank Jewett, a physicist who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1902, recalled that his dissertation advisor, Albert Michelson, “thought that when I entered industrial life, which was a field where patents were a part, I was prostituting my training and my ideals.”20 New discoveries and processes possibly leading to new industrial applications constituted a second factor encouraging industrial research. Among these were breakthroughs in electrochemistry, electron physics, the conduction of electricity through gases, and surface phenomena, in addition to the properties of electromagnetic waves. These developments were potentially significant for two of the most actively developing technological industries at that time, the electric and telephone companies. A third factor also arose from the progressive outlook: the antitrust movement of that era. Progressives believed that by breaking up the large corporations and monopolies that had emerged during the industrial revolution the government would encourage competition and innovation and ensure a more rational and efficient organization of the economy. But in Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Entering the New Century 19 that technological age, much like the computer and digital ages of today, discoveries potentially leading to new technologies could be essential to the survival of a company. So, too, was the control of the pace of new discoveries and technologies and of the spread of innovations to one’s competitors, also similar to today. One way to control the pace of innovation and to keep new discoveries within the corporation, even if it was broken up into smaller companies, was to establish a semiautonomous central research laboratory at the forefront of pure research and to patent its discoveries as soon as they were made.21 Although the Standard Oil Company had opened a petroleum refi ning laboratory in 1882, in 1900 the General Electric Company (GE) established the nation’s first industrial laboratory engaging in research not directly related to the production process. Under the direction of Willis Whitney, a chemist who had received his doctorate under the famed Wilhelm Ostwald at the University of Leipzig, the GE Research Laboratory encompassed a wide range of electromechanical technologies, including locomotives, dynamos, and motors. But its main focus was the investigation of physical and chemical processes occurring in the electric lamps developed by one of its founders, Thomas A. Edison. In 1909 Irving Langmuir, having received his doctorate in physical chemistry under Walther Nernst in Göttingen, joined the GE laboratory where he studied electric discharges from fi laments in high-vacuum incandescent lamps. He later received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discoveries regarding surface chemistry. In 1902 the DuPont Company founded its first laboratory. Many other industrial laboratories soon followed. But Rowland would have been disheartened to learn that, although the membership of APS had risen by 1913 to 682 members (from 36 in 1899), roughly 10 percent of those members were industrial physicists. Moreover, many of the research papers now appearing in Physical Review originated from industrial laboratories.22 Not to be outdone by GE, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), part of the Bell System, established its own research laboratory in 1911 in order, writes historian Leonard Reich, to preserve its market dominance in telecommunications. “The new research laboratory worked to advance and control those technologies.”23 In 1925 AT&T greatly expanded the laboratory and renamed it Bell Telephone Laboratories. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 20 Entering the New Century Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Bell Labs quickly became one of the nation’s premier research laboratories, often performing pure research seemingly unrelated to the business of its sponsor. Many fundamental discoveries and theories, from transistors to cosmology, along with six Nobel Prize winners, emerged from Bell Labs during the course of the century. From the very start, the president of Bell Labs, Frank B. Jewett, had been one of the most creative and influential pioneers of AT&T research. Jewett is remembered as a stately gentleman with an intellect that was “cool, clear, and penetrating, never impassioned or combative.” Owing to a childhood illness, he was blind in one eye and seriously impaired in the other.24 Descended from a long line of New England ancestors, Jewett was born in 1879 in Pasadena, California, where his family had recently settled, having purchased a 25-acre ranch in the vicinity. While managing the ranch, Jewett’s father, a mechanical engineer trained at MIT, helped found the railroad line from Los Angeles to Pasadena. Young Frank attended a one-room school in Pasadena and grew understandably fascinated with railroads. He enrolled in the Throop Institute of Technology in the same town, which later became the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). After receiving his doctorate in physics with Michelson at the University of Chicago, Jewett taught for two years as a physics instructor at MIT. In 1904 he joined the Mechanical Department within the engineering section of AT&T in Boston, much to Michelson’s displeasure, and in 1906 Jewett became director of the transmission research group within the department. A year later, the Mechanical Department merged with the Engineering Department of Western Electric, another member of the Bell System, and Jewett moved to New York City, where in 1915 he led the research and development effort that resulted in the first transcontinental telephone line. By 1910, AT&T was eager to dominate wireless radio technology as well as wired long-distance telephone transmission. In order to do so and to achieve the crucial “repeater,” a device required to boost the signal for transcontinental telephone calls, Jewett argued that a new research laboratory was needed “to employ skilled physicists who are familiar with the recent advances in molecular physics and who are capable of appreciating such further advances as are continually being made.”25 In 1910 AT&T’s board of directors approved the establishment the following year of the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Entering the New Century 21 Research Branch within Western Electric’s Engineering Department, with Jewett and a colleague, John J. Carty, as co-directors. This became the core unit of Bell Labs in 1925. The Engineering Department stated in its annual report in 1911, “There is an increasing number of problems intimately associated with the development of the telephone business . . . In the past, development work has proceeded more or less blindly by cut and try [sic] experimental methods. While these methods have given reasonable good results, it is felt that the time is ripe for investigation covering the fundamental principles.”26 As co-director of the Research Branch, Jewett tapped his connections at Chicago, MIT, and other research universities to recruit a host of the best and brightest young physics doctorates for work in his new orga nization. Among them were Harold D. Arnold, Oliver E. Buckley, and H. W. Nichols. Not all succeeded in industrial research. Despite the higher pay, some regretted leaving the “pure science” of academe untainted by the drive for commercial profits. Apparently replying to this complaint, Jewett proclaimed, “The performance of industrial laboratories must be moneymaking . . . For this reason they cannot assemble a staff of investigators to each of whom is given a perfectly free hand.”27 However, as the United States entered the world war in 1917, Jewett argued in a speech that applied industrial research and pure science at universities must now grow together into a unification of science and technology. Each alone could not succeed. For the rest of his life, Jewett played a key role at Bell Labs and in government ser vice in helping to realize this goal. He died in Summit, New Jersey, in 1949. T h e Bu i l di ng Bo om The founding of independent departments of physics at most colleges and universities at the turn of the century paralleled the appearance of independent industrial laboratories. Together they reflected the physicists’ growing new professional identity. After a recession during the early 1890s, an economic boom filled the fi nancial coffers of most states and the bank accounts of wealthy individuals, while a sudden increase in the number of students flooded the existing facilities. Beginning with the University of Chicago in 1894, the economic and population booms led to a construction Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 22 Entering the New Century Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. boom of new university physics buildings funded by states and wealthy individuals through 1913 to house the new physics departments. Some of the new buildings were at private research universities, including Columbia (1897), Princeton (1909), and Yale (1912). Many others were at state land-grant colleges, including Minnesota (1902), Ohio State (1903), Purdue (1904), Michigan (1905, an extension), Illinois (1909), Iowa (1912), and Cornell (1905). (Cornell is both a private and a land-grant college, as well as a member of the Ivy League.) State support of public education brought physics to many of the students at state colleges, with or without “political trickery.” As private foundations and individuals funded buildings at the few graduate physics universities, Rowland’s hierarchy of undergraduate practical physics at colleges versus elite pure graduate research at select universities was emerging by default.28 Future engineers educated at a land-grant college did not require advanced graduate physics for their careers. Those who wanted to go into pure-physics research could head to Chicago or to one of the eastern graduate schools for advanced training. Those who did, such as Frank Jewett, were often able to do so only because their wealthy families could afford it. The aristocratic character of elite physics was still in place. Not until the 1920s did most land-grant colleges begin adding graduate physics programs to their curricula. Reflecting the two-tiered approach, physics in the newly constructed department buildings at state colleges still focused mainly on undergraduate courses for future engineers. But they now also included preparation of those intending to meet the rising demand for high-school physics teachers. For instance, Purdue University established an independent physics department with its own building in 1904. The building possessed advanced teaching laboratories for senior projects and, for the first time, laboratories for the special use of future teachers. Also a first, the department began offering a two-semester course titled “theoretical physics.” But the most popular courses were still those in “practical physics,” for which there were three dedicated laboratories: one each for heat studies for mechanical engineering, electrical measurements for electrical engineering, and acoustics for telephone technology.29 Meanwhile, on the upper tier, the graduate programs at just five elite schools—Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Harvard, Yale, and Chicago—were pro- Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Entering the New Century 23 ducing the majority of work in pure research and the majority of physics doctorates. The numbers were increasing rapidly. In 1900 the country possessed a total of only fifty-four PhDs in physics; by 1909, it was producing twenty-five new PhDs every year. But still, by one count, only one-eighth of American physicists were publishing more than one-half of the nation’s research in physics.30 Even below the top tier of researchers, most American physicists were aware of the burst of discoveries in experimental research occurring in Europe beginning in the 1890s. But few took much notice of the new theoretical developments surrounding the relativity and quantum theories. And few Europeans took note of American developments. Although in 1900 the United States had more physicists than did Germany, the quality of German research was much higher, and Germany did lead the world in one crucial area—it possessed sixteen theoretical physicists in 1900 compared with only three in the United States.31 While most American physicists were still focusing on elementary and practical physics, European physicists were producing the breakthroughs that would drive physics research during the century ahead. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European physicists were still far ahead of Americans in both experimental and theoretical work. But that was already slowly changing. In 1899, Albert Michelson had brought American physicist Robert A. Millikan back from Germany to a professorship at the University of Chicago. Michelson’s Nobel Prize for physics in 1907 was followed in 1909 at the University of Chicago by Millikan’s measurement of the charge on the electron. In a series of masterful experiments, known as the “oil drop” experiment, Millikan and his student Harvey Fletcher not only measured the electron charge, but they also showed that it is the smallest charge in nature and a fundamental unit of all electric charge. They achieved this by exposing a burst of microscopic oil drops to radioactivity. The radioactivity ionized atoms in the oil drops by removing electrons from them. The now charged oil drops, which normally fall to the ground under gravitation, were suspended in the apparatus by an upward electric force countering the gravitational force. From the strength of the electric force required to maintain the suspended drops, one could determine the amount of charge on the drops. Millikan and Fletcher discovered that the amount of charge is always an integral multiple Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. 24 Entering the New Century Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. of a unit charge, which they identified as the charge of the electron. For this and later work, Millikan (but not Fletcher) received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1923. The problems at the forefront of physics research as the world entered its first world war were also changing. They were rendering the hierarchical structure of the European research institute, and of Rowland’s ideal academy, less well-suited to advance than was the emerging group-oriented American physics department. It is not just methods, or knowledge, or numbers that ensures the quality of research produced by a community of scientists, but also, and more importantly, the creativity of the people involved and the presence of just the right conditions to foster their work at the forefront of research. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:38:58. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 2 American Physics Comes of Age The outbreak of war in Europe raised important new challenges and new opportunities for physicists on both sides of the confl ict. The introduction of poison gas warfare drew chemists into what became known as the chemists’ war. But physicists were soon involved as well. Although the United States did not enter the war until 1917, American physicists and chemists began preparations for war as soon as the first shots were fired. This brought physics into a closer alliance with industry, government, and the military. The physicists’ strategies for promoting their profession during the war carried over into the postwar decade of the 1920s. These alliances and strategies, forged in the cauldron of war by adept scientistmanagers, helped bring American physics rapidly to the forefront of research by the early 1930s. A Wor l d at Wa r On June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist fired a pistol into the horse carriage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, killing the designated heir to the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 26 American Physics Comes of Age Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Austro-Hungarian throne and igniting the powder keg of Europe. By August 4, Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Central Powers, were at war with Britain, France, and Russia, the Triple Entente or Allies. As the European nations bogged down in trench warfare at the end of the year, across the Atlantic Americans debated what to do. Many Americans still had family ties to Europe. Most supported President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of American neutrality. Many also ascribed to the progressive view of war that had brought Wilson to the presidency: that war represented a reversion to humanity’s barbaric past. War was unworthy of modern civilized nations enlightened by the force of reason, especially the force of scientific reason. For many educated people, the application of science to warfare was simply unthinkable. Germany’s introduction of poison gas created by German chemists and the use of science for the technologies of submarines, airplanes, mines, and enhanced artillery were regarded by many as moral violations of natural law. The leader of the progressive-minded Society for Ethical Culture in New York prophesied: “The time will come when the scientist will be considered and will consider himself a disgrace to the human race who prostitutes his knowledge of Nature’s forces for the destruction of his fellow men.”1 Despite Henry Rowland’s similar outlook, most American science leaders did not seem bothered by such thoughts, nor were they content to remain neutral. They saw the war as a chance for the country, if it entered the war, to become an influential world power; and they saw it as a chance for American science to rise with the nation to higher status and influence on the domestic and international stages. Leading figures such as Thomas Edison and astrophysicist George Ellery Hale lobbied the president to begin promoting war-related research as a contribution to “preparedness” for the nation’s likely entry into the war on the Allied side. The United States fi nally entered the war on April 6, 1917, with the blessing of most of the nation’s scientists. The chemistry department at Harvard “became practically a section of the War Department,” writes Harvard’s historian. Hale declared the war “the greatest chance we ever had to advance research in America.”2 By the end of the war two and a half years later, the result was a tighter integration of fundamental research into the nation’s economic and cul- Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 27 tural affairs and a positioning of physical science, especially physics, for acceleration onto the forefront of research in little over a decade. The war also brought forth a characteristic feature and driving force of American success in physics during most of the century: the appearance of a few powerful scientist-administrators, “scholar-politicians,” as one historian calls them, who made it all happen.3 Prepared for such a role through their experience as leaders of expensive, large-scale research projects, these managerial physicists applied their unique abilities in skilled diplomatic maneuvering and good business sense within and across the boundaries of physics and among their partners in government, business, the military, and philanthropy. It was a role that George Ellery Hale perfected and played to great advantage before and after the outbreak of war in 1914. A man of driven personality and unbounded ambition, George Ellery Hale was born into a wealthy family in the upscale Kenwood section of Chicago in 1868. After attending private schools in Chicago, he graduated from MIT in 1890 and performed research at the Harvard College Observatory. He received his doctorate in physics in 1894 at the University of Berlin, where he attended lectures by the future quantum theorist Max Planck. Hale’s interest in astronomy at an early age arose from his father, an amateur astronomer who built an astronomical observatory equipped with a 12-inch reflecting telescope at the family home in Kenwood. In 1890, the father appointed his son director of what he called the Kenwood Astrophysical Observatory. The combination of astronomy with physics to form the new discipline of astrophysics was at that time still a novelty. While at MIT, Hale invented the so-called spectroheliograph, a device for studying the sun’s physical properties through analyses of the spectrum of light it emitted. Hale used the reflecting telescope together with his heliograph, which now incorporated Rowland’s diffraction grating for creating the spectra, in a careful study of sunspots. His work led to the discovery of their unusual magnetic properties. In 1892, Hale became professor of physics at the University of Chicago. Following his European studies, he founded and for many years edited the Astrophysical Journal, still a leading journal in its field to this day.4 Much as did the Physical Review for physicists, Hale’s journal helped promote the professionalization of astrophysics, as noted earlier, one of the fi rst of the “hyphenated” physics disciplines to emerge during the century. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 28 American Physics Comes of Age The year 1897 marked the beginning of Hale’s career not as an astrophysicist per se but, presaging the big accelerator physicists of later decades, as the builder of big telescopes funded by big budgets provided by wealthy philanthropists. The rise of the oil, steel, and railroad industries over the past decades had produced a class of im mensely wealthy entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, as well as lesser known fi nanciers such as Hale’s father and Charles T. Yerkes, the founder of the Chicago mass-transit system. With funds provided by Yerkes, Hale completed the Yerkes Observatory in 1897, housing a 40-inch refracting telescope as well as laboratory space for physics and chemistry research. It is still the largest refracting telescope used in research. With the backing of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., which administered the Carnegie endowment, Hale began work in 1904 on the largest telescope at the time, the 60-inch reflecting telescope built on Mt. Wilson near Pasadena in Southern California. It used a mirror ground from a piece of glass that had been cast in 1896 as a gift to Hale from his father. This telescope was followed at Mt. Wilson in 1917 by the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, funded by John D. Hooker and the Carnegie Institution. It was with these telescopes during the 1920s that Edwin Hubble discovered not only the existence of other galaxies beyond our Milky Way galaxy, but also the surprising observation that the galaxies are moving away from Earth and each other, indicating that the universe is expanding. Using these telescopes, Albert Michelson, who had since joined Hale at Mt. Wilson, made the first measurements of the diameters of stars. Hale died in 1938, but not before setting in motion the construction of the world’s largest reflecting telescope until 1975: the 200-inch Hale Telescope completed on Mt. Palomar in 1948 under Hubble’s direction. Hale’s connections with the administrators of wealthy endowments, his managerial abilities, and his driven personality made him the premier managerial scientist-politician of the war years.5 Hale sought to adapt the large-scale project approach of his big observatories to the promotion of American science as a whole in an effort to promote and integrate science, especially physical research, into the power structure of American society. Hale was, in addition, the foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, an august advisory body to the government, which rendered him well attuned to the status of his nation and his science on the world stage. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 29 With the outbreak of war in Europe, the mobilization of physics in preparation of America’s possible entry into the war was a natural target for Hale’s ambitions. Except for the Army Signal Corps and the Naval Observatory, scientific research in the military was practically nonex istent. Moreover, there was no federal agency capable of enlivening it or of overseeing the mobilization of science in public and private venues. Because of the nation’s official neutrality, nothing could be done even to prepare for war until May 7, 1915. On that date, to the nation’s horror, a German submarine sank the unarmed British passenger ship Lusitania with the loss of nearly 2,000 civilian lives, among them 128 Americans. Preparedness now became official policy, opening the door to the centralized administration of the nation’s science for the future war effort. The navy established a Naval Consulting Board chaired by the nation’s foremost inventor, Thomas Edison. The board consisted mainly of inventors and engineers, to the exclusion of academic “pure” scientists. Leaving the purity of pure science far behind when it came to military matters (unlike political matters), the academic Hale swung into action, inducing the National Academy to offer its scientific ser vices directly to the president in the event of war. Upon Wilson’s reluctant agreement, Hale and colleagues, aided by a presidential mandate, established the National Research Council (NRC) in June 1916 as a subunit of the National Academy. Its purpose was to mobilize and coordinate scientific research for “national security and welfare.”6 It was to encompass scientists of all types and venues, working not just on military applications but on all forms of pure and applied research. Hale named himself permanent chair of the NRC, and he named his like-minded Chicago colleague Robert A. Millikan executive officer and chair of the NRC’s physics committee. Philanthropic foundations and industrial research laboratories hastened to join the new Research Council, while MIT and the Throop Polytechnic Institute in Pasadena, of which Hale was a board member, geared up for war research. The varied scientists of the Research Council joined together in Hale’s vision of promoting American physical science through dedication to the common cause. At the center of the NRC stood the physics committee. As physicists from Harvard, Cornell, Chicago, and elsewhere joined the common cause, the insistence on “disinterested pure science” quickly succumbed to the war effort. John J. Carty of AT&T Research Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 30 American Physics Comes of Age Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. declared an end to the “confl ict of pure and applied science,” according to the minutes of the NRC’s first meeting, “pointing out that they do not differ in kind but merely in the objects to be accomplished.”7 But aspects of Rowland’s ideal of pure science lived on. Hale and Millikan conceived of the NRC as an elite organization of private academics, although now with the public goal of organizing and promoting programs in military research. Still in sympathy with Rowland’s aversion to any political or social involvement, the science managers sought to render the NRC independent of any government influence or direction by relying solely on the august National Academy of Sciences for authority and on Carnegie, Rockefeller, and similar private foundations for funding. The political naïveté of their position became evident after the United States entered the war in 1917. As a civilian organization, the NRC could not sponsor any military research without military approval. Military authorities were naturally reluctant to accept the directives of an outside agency funded by private philanthropists, and the military was prohibited from providing funds to a civilian organization. In addition, military officers worried that civilian pure scientists would stray from military goals by pursuing research “for the future benefit of the human race.”8 General George O. Squier of the Army Signal Corps had received a doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University. He was eager to tap the expertise offered by Millikan’s NRC physics committee for research on improving fighter aviation, then under the Signal Corps. Squier hit upon a simple solution that eventually became widespread. The solution was to absorb Millikan and his physicists directly into the army as commissioned officers. Millikan readily accepted a commission as a major in the army reserve, as did Theodore Lyman and Augustus Trowbridge at Harvard, Albert Michelson at Chicago, and Charles Mendenhall at the University of Wisconsin. Even the president of the National Academy of Sciences received an army commission. As A. Hunter Dupree writes in his classic history, “With this beginning, Squier put virtually the whole physics committee into uniform and hence under orders. By capturing the executive officer himself, he acquired a certain military control over the whole NRC.”9 However eager they were to avoid government political influence, Millikan and his colleagues expressed no regrets at their sudden subordination to military authority. Millikan’s only concern—which proved Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 31 groundless—was that, as an army officer, he might be hindered from working on naval research. When Millikan’s physics unit was transferred from the Signal Corps to the newly established Air Corps, Millikan simply exchanged his old insignia for a set of wings. Even though independent pure research and the training of students suffered as a result, the physicists eagerly embraced their new roles as military researchers, apparently because, as Millikan recalled about the NRC, it promoted the status of his profession and supported, he wrote, “what I regarded as America’s responsibility in the war.”10 The ideological instrument of independent pure science was, under the circumstances, not needed. It was a pattern that repeated itself in remarkably similar terms during and after the next world war. In addition to aviation, two new areas of research especially required the physicists’ ser vices. One concerned the detection of hidden enemy artillery batteries by sound ranging. The other entailed the detection of enemy submarines, also by sound, an especially urgent need after Germany unleashed devastating unlimited U-boat warfare.11 Millikan and his committee, working with British and French physicists, induced the navy to establish a submarine detection center at New London, Connecticut, under the direction of Willis Whitney, still director of General Electric (GE) Research. By the end of the war, the center employed thirty-two physicists, many drawn from the best physics schools in the nation: Yale, Chicago, Cornell, Harvard, and Wisconsin. Hale noted that the war had “forced science to the front” (with plenty of help from Hale), and not only in government and industrial laboratories. By the end of the war, the army and navy (the only military branches at that time) were sponsoring research for the first time in academic laboratories at forty American colleges. Along with this support, military security regulations appeared for the first time, apparently again without objection, in the havens of pure research, the university laboratories.12 Even though most physicists and chemists immediately returned to civilian life at the end of the war, the pattern was set and the lessons learned for the rapid integration of scientific research into the war effort. Despite the contributions of the physicists to submarine detection, radio, and aviation, World War I had been the chemists’ war, the introduction of poisongas warfare being their most well-known contribution. Nevertheless, chemistry and chemical engineering had shown that future wars would Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 32 American Physics Comes of Age require the utilization of advanced technologies relying on results gained at the very forefront of fundamental research. The technology and the science required could not be achieved by lone inventors or by a few brilliant geniuses, but only by the coordinated efforts of large groups of wellfunded researchers working together on a grand scale for a common cause and across disciplines and venues—from industry and government to academic research laboratories. After Hale and colleagues had shown themselves to be able partners in the common cause, fundamental physics could no longer be ignored by any sector of society, even in peacetime. Those lessons came in handy the next time the nation found itself at war. And, the next time, a new group of scientist-politicians was ready to guide physics once again into a secure position within the military chain of command. But as the nation entered the postwar world of the 1920s, the status of American physics as an equal partner was hampered by its obvious secondrate position on the international stage behind Europe, and especially behind the nation’s number-one wartime enemy— Germany. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Se t t i ng t h e S tage At the stroke of 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent across the Western Front. The peeling of church bells rang out the Armistice across the United States. The war to end all wars had suddenly reached an end. Within a month, now Lt. Col. Millikan dutifully unpinned his wings and exchanged his army uniform for the white shirt, tie, and suit of a physics professor. The shooting war was over with a victory for the Allies, but, for him, the battle to bring American physics to the top of world research, then occupied by Eu ropeans, had only just begun. American participation in the war had been so brief that industrial production and the work of the NRC were still accelerating when the war abruptly ended. Industrial production continued at a high rate after the war as the nation became more business friendly under the three republican presidents who succeeded Wilson through 1933: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Following industry’s positive experiences with physics and chemistry during the war, research became an integral part of the postwar corporate economy. According to one count, the number of industrial laboratories grew from 300 in 1920 to 1,625 in 1930, employing some 34,000 researchers.13 Such an expansion required an increased supply of Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 33 new graduates and doctorates in physics and chemistry, which required in turn an increase in the number of academic research jobs for the physics professors to teach them. By 1920 a doctorate had become almost a prerequisite for entering the field. According to data compiled by Margaret Rossiter, in 1921 roughly 80 percent of all male physicists (864) but only 63 percent (15) of the 24 female physicists held a doctorate in physics. As a result of the increased demand, the annual U.S. production of physics PhDs nearly doubled during the 1920s to 90 in 1930, then it doubled again during the 1930s, reaching 181 per year by 1940.14 As shown in Table 1 in the Appendix, by 1938 the number of male physicists had more than doubled from 1921, while the number of female physicists, though still relatively low, had nearly tripled to sixty-three. Although the number of female physicists badly lagged their male counterparts (to be discussed further in this chapter), the overall increase of interest in physics was reflected not only in the quantity of physicists but also in the quality of their work, as measured on the scale of international recognition and influence. In addition to the demands of industrial laboratories, the main driving force behind this growth was a deliberate strategy pursued from the very start of the postwar period by the NRC and its physics committee under the able and ambitious direction of Professor Robert A. Millikan. “In a few years,” Millikan rightly prophesied in 1919, “we shall be in a new place as a scientific nation and shall see men coming from the ends of the earth to catch the inspiration of our leaders and to share in the results which have come from our developments in science.”15 Born in 1868 in Morrison, Illinois, Robert A. Millikan was descended from a New England family that traced its roots to colonial times. His grandparents had settled in the Midwest as pioneers, and his father was a minister. Millikan grew up on an Iowa farm. He attended Oberlin College and Columbia University where he received his doctorate in physics. After a year of postdoctoral study in Germany, he settled at the University of Chicago where he did his most important experimental work. Following his famous “oil-drop experiment,” Millikan undertook a series of experiments in which he hoped to disprove Einstein’s revolutionary hypothesis of 1905 that, under some circumstances, light behaves as if it consists not of waves as was commonly held, but of minuscule bundles or quantities— quanta—of energy. Einstein had argued that these light quanta (singular: quantum) could account for the puzzling photoelectric effect, the ejection Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 34 American Physics Comes of Age Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. of electrons from metals when they are irradiated with light of sufficiently high frequencies. Einstein predicted that the energies of the ejected electrons were directly related to the energies of the individual light quanta. Instead of disproving this relationship, to his surprise Millikan confirmed it in 1916 and, along with it, Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect based upon the quantum hypothesis. These works led to Nobel Prizes in physics for Einstein in 1922 (for 1921) and, as noted earlier, for Millikan in 1923.16 In 1921 Millikan left Chicago for Pasadena as the board chairman of what had been the old Throop Institute but what was now the newly named California Institute of Technology, Caltech for short. Millikan’s managerial colleague George Ellery Hale had served since 1904 as a trustee of Throop and had recently obtained a private grant for founding the Norman Bridge Laboratory for Physics at the new Caltech. Millikan could not resist the opportunity to build up the new laboratory as its director and the new institution as its board chairman to first-class status at what he called “the westernmost outpost of Nordic Civilization.”17 As with the nation’s physics as a whole, Millikan’s ambitious aim for the privately funded, all-male institution was no less than to create “as outstanding a center of research in the field of all the sciences as the world possesses” (his emphasis).18 Once again seeking to avoid the taint of “political trickery,” he refused to accept any public funds for his institution. Equally at home in the boardroom and the laboratory, Millikan saw himself as what we would call the CEO of Caltech. In the business-friendly environment of the 1920s, he too epitomized the managerial approach to the administration of American science that helped make it what it became. But some were not impressed. Physicist Hans Bethe later recalled of the man, “Millikan was very much convinced of his own importance. I thought he was very pompous.”19 A number of broader developments, both in the United States and in Europe, were coming together after the war to enable the success that Millikan and a few other physicist-politicians managed to achieve in so short a time. These included, on the domestic front, a postwar increase in the number of students seeking careers in science in concert with a rapid growth in the total number of students. In 1900 there were about 82,000 college students in the United States; by 1930 there were 1.1 million, Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 35 amounting to 7.2 percent of the college-age population. Many had received a greatly improved preparation in high-school mathematics, chemistry, and physics.20 Other favorable factors for American physics included a fading of task-oriented military research (although the navy opened the Naval Research Laboratory in 1923 at Edison’s urging); a new concern in business and philanthropy for the support of academic pure research; and, especially, new breakthroughs in relativity theory and quantum mechanics occurring abroad that opened new fields of research into understanding old and new phenomena.21 In 1919 British astronomers astonished the world by confirming Einstein’s prediction, based on his general theory of relativity, that the paths of starlight passing close to the sun during a total solar eclipse would appear to be bent as they passed the sun. Overnight, Einstein became an international celebrity. According to Einstein’s theory, the massive sun slightly curves the space around it, thus causing the beams of starlight to bend toward the sun as they pass near it on their way to Earth. General relativity soon became an important component of astrophysical research, especially after Edwin Hubble’s startling discoveries at the Mt. Wilson observatory regarding the existence of other galaxies and the expanding universe. Six years after Einstein’s triumph with the confirmation of his theory in 1919, German and other European theorists, including Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Bohr, Dirac, and Born, astonished the world once again with the second of the two great revolutions in twentieth-century physics—the breakthrough to quantum mechanics. The new theoretical physics of the atom has proved indispensable ever since in understanding the behavior of atoms, molecules, solids, stars, and subatomic particles. Push i ng t h e Pe a k s H igh e r Some of the nation’s leading physicists populated Millikan’s postwar NRC physics committee. In addition to astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, they included experimentalists Percy W. Bridgman and George Washington Pierce at Harvard, Harrison M. Randall at Michigan, and the brothers Karl T. Compton at Princeton and Arthur H. Compton at Washington University, St. Louis, and the University of Chicago (beginning in 1923). Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 36 American Physics Comes of Age Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Even as nontheorists, they were fully aware of the latest theories coming out of Europe, and all were aware that the United States would have to compete directly with Germany and other European nations in the field of theoretical physics, in addition to experimental research, if it were to compete in the international arena and maintain the vitality of its research. Since the early nineteenth century, physics had been defined in most nations as experimental physics—the acquisition and analysis of laboratory data about the workings of physical phenomena. Theoretical physics, the mathematical investigation and expression of the laws of nature as epitomized by James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism or by the statistical mechanics of gases developed by Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and others, was usually considered inferior to the direct encounter with nature in the laboratory. Even in Germany, with its strong traditions of mathematics and, now, theoretical physics, the discipline was held in low regard until the experimental confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the breakthrough to quantum mechanics.22 Einstein’s wellpublicized visit to the United States in 1921, during which Princeton University conferred on him an honorary doctorate, only highlighted American deficiency in theoretical work. By the 1920s experimental research in the United States was focusing more directly upon such highly technical areas as electromagnetic fields, atomic and molecular spectroscopy, and the atomic structure of matter. Some of this work exerted a direct impact on electrical engineering and the physics of solids and gases, of interest to industry. With the new developments in quantum theory, these areas of research were requiring sophisticated mathematical and analytical skills beyond the means of many experimentalists. Theoretical physicists adept in the new theories yet closely attuned to experimental research were becoming essential to the future progress and competitive ability of American physics. In 1919 Harvard physics professor Percy W. Bridgman induced his university to begin offering graduate courses in theoretical physics. He wrote to Edwin C. Kemble, newly recruited to teach the courses: “If we can get the courses well given, it ought to put Harvard pretty near the top in this country. What is more, it is a good beginning to putting this country on the map in Theoretical Physics.”23 Drawing upon the NRC’s war time policies and Rowland’s purescience elitism, Bridgman, Millikan, and the other NRC experimentalists Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 37 introduced a strategy for institution building aimed at catching up with the Europeans as quickly as possible. They called it “making the peaks higher.”24 The strategy was to utilize the generosity of the private Rockefeller and Carnegie endowments to push a few of the best American research universities to even greater heights through targeted research grants, rather than to bring a large number of the nation’s universities up to a somewhat lower level of excellence. As in Rowland’s day, this left the other colleges and universities to languish in the lower tier. Among the peak universities chosen were, of course, those represented on the NRC physics committee: Caltech, Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, Princeton, MIT, and a few others. The formula succeeded. By the early 1930s these institutions were among the top twenty research universities in the country, and they were producing work that drew increasing international attention. Throughout the 1920s these institutions housed the majority of the nation’s academic physicists, produced more than 75 percent of the papers published in the Physical Review, and produced 90 percent of American doctorates in physics.25 They are still among the nation’s top research universities in physics and other sciences. In order to cultivate a new generation of physicists equipped to work at the rarefied level of the peak universities and especially in theoretical physics, as early as 1919 Millikan and his managers began funneling Rockefeller funds into postdoctoral research fellowships granted to roughly the top 15 percent of graduates in physics (followed later by chemistry, medicine, and biology). The fellows could work at a university of their choosing or perform research abroad under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Education Board (IEB). The aim was to spark research in the departments they visited, to enable young physicists to learn the latest research abroad, and to prepare the fellows for careers devoted to research and to the training of the next generation of first-class physicists. Most fellows chose to work at the select American universities or at one of the leading European research institutes. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the funding; the NRC made the selections and administered the program. At the top of the NRC’s wish list for fellows were those eager to learn the new quantum mechanics at its source in Europe or to train under prominent domestic researchers or European theorists invited to teach the new physics in the United States as visiting or permanent professors. The effects were soon evident. In 1925 one-eighth of the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 38 American Physics Comes of Age Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. papers by American authors published in the Physical Review acknowledged support from a NRC fellowship.26 Millikan’s and Hale’s Caltech was naturally at the center of this strategy, hosting fully half of the NRC fellows and receiving nearly every visiting Eu ropean theorist for periods from a brief sojourn to a year. Among the visitors passing through Pasadena during the late 1920s were four of the founders of quantum mechanics: Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Niels Bohr. Heisenberg arrived in Pasadena from the University of Chicago, where his lectures on quantum mechanics during the spring of 1929 became a popu lar textbook. Together with Dirac’s lectures, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930), they served as the first introductions to the new physics for many American physicists.27 In 1925 Millikan brought Swiss cosmologist Fritz Zwicky to Caltech as a permanent faculty member through the IEB. With the Mt. Wilson observatory at hand and the arrival in Pasadena of general relativity theorist Richard Tolman, Caltech became a leading center for astrophysics research. For quantum atomic theory, German physicist Paul Epstein, who had worked with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich, accepted a permanent position at Caltech in 1921. But Millikan turned down the opportunity to hire another outstanding mathematical physicist who was Jewish because he believed that Caltech could not tolerate a second Jewish faculty member. Nor, he believed, would a new Jewish faculty member be compatible with the overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon population of Southern California, some of whose members provided Caltech’s financial support.28 Apparently, however, fame trumped prejudice, for Millikan persuaded Einstein to return annually to Caltech as a visiting professor from 1930 to 1932. His visits showcased the international prominence that Caltech had achieved by then in physics, and they served, more practically, as a good argument for gaining private donations. In 1927 Harrison Randall and the University of Michigan hosted the first of the annual Ann Arbor summer schools for theoretical physics. During these events, which ran through the late 1930s, American students and faculty gathered to learn the latest theoretical and experimental research from top foreign and domestic physicists. After speaking at the first summer school, Dutch theorists George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 39 joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1927. German quantum theorist Alfred Landé landed at Ohio State in 1931. During an invited sojourn at MIT in the winter of 1925–1926, German physicist Max Born, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, reported to his dean at the University of Göttingen that he had already received two job offers. “While in the United States the experimental physics is in high blossom,” he explained, “the theoretical physics is entirely undeveloped. Eu rope’s lead must be recognized for the moment; but at the same time the ambition of the Americans is directed toward the goal of fi lling this gap, initially by attracting European assistance.”29 Although experimentalists far outnumbered theorists in the United States, all eagerly utilized the new physics in a variety of areas. Eu ropean physicists began to take note. Even before quantum mechanics, John H. Van Vleck’s quantum theory of the structure of the helium atom and Kemble’s efforts to unravel the infrared band spectra of diatomic molecules had drawn the interest of German quantum mechanicians. As Europeans in Bohr’s circle considered whether or not the puzzling light quanta really do exist, A. H. Compton’s confirmation in 1922 of their existence in his classic experiment at Washington University, St. Louis, on the scattering of X-rays by free electrons immediately caught their attention. His subsequent experiment with Alfred W. Simon on the directed scattering of light quanta, published in 1925 in the Physical Review, refuted a controversial statistical theory put forth in 1924 by Bohr, H. A. Kramers, and Harvard physicist John Slater in an effort to avoid the problematic existence of light quanta. Suddenly, references to papers published in the Physical Review began to appear in the papers and private letters of Pauli, Heisenberg, and Bohr.30 In 1927 Compton received the Nobel Prize for his work. Following Heisenberg’s breakthrough to the matrix version of quantum mechanics in 1925 and Schrödinger’s alternative wave mechanics in 1926, American physicists jumped into quantum research, producing valuable applications of the new physics and becoming an audience the Eu ropeans could not longer ignore. Perhaps because he was in competition with Heisenberg over which of the two versions of quantum mechanics was preferable (they were soon proved equivalent), Schrödinger thought it valuable in 1926 to publish an English account of his new theory in the Physical Review for American readers. His widely read paper, “An Undulatory Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 40 American Physics Comes of Age Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules,” appeared in volume 28 of the journal.31 Altogether, the components of the American strategy—inviting foreign specialists as lecturers and professors, funding the best American postdoctoral researchers to work at the best American universities, sending top young physicists abroad to learn the new physics at the source, and funneling philanthropic funds into building up research programs at the best universities to even higher quality—began to have an accelerating effect. “Quite suddenly,” writes historian Spencer Weart, “the spirit of European theoretical physics flowed into America.”32 According to data compiled by Yves Gingras, beginning in 1926 the annual number of physics papers published in the United States rose sharply from about 350 per year to 1,200 per year by 1938. During the same period, the annual number of such papers decreased in the United Kingdom from 800 to under 700, while those in Germany increased briefly from about 350 in 1926 to 450 in 1931, then sank back to about 325 in 1938 as the Nazi regime tightened its grip on the country.33 As Americans began to compete more directly with Europeans at the forefront of research, the Physical Review began to appear biweekly in 1929 and with a new section of “Letters to the Editor” that quickly announced new research results ahead of foreign competitors. In 1958 the section became an essential independent publication, Physical Review Letters. According to one assessment, by 1930 the theoretical physics faculties at four universities— Caltech, Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, and Princeton—were comparable in quality to the great Eu ropean institutes, and six other faculties were close behind: Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Cornell, and Wisconsin.34 A year later, the tide had turned. “In that year 1931,” writes Weart, “the Physical Review, for the first time, was cited more often in the physics literature than its chief rival, the German Zeitschrift für Physik.”35 E nc ou n t e r i ng H u r dl e s With the advent of general relativity theory and quantum mechanics, new frontiers of research were opening in physics during the 1920s as perhaps never before, and American physicists seized the opportunities available to them. Nevertheless, despite their brilliant strategy for success Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. American Physics Comes of Age 41 and the large numbers of new, first-rate students available to help achieve that success, an ugly facet of American academic policy worked against this achievement. As in other nations at the time, discrimination against women and ethnic, racial, and religious minorities hindered and, in many cases, prevented large numbers of potential future scientists from contributing to the nation’s success and making it even grander. The discrimination against these groups was even greater in an era when pushing the peaks higher also meant pushing the barriers to entrance higher as well. Millikan’s all-male college at the edge of “Nordic civilization,” yet at the center of the drive for excellence, certainly did not help matters. Discrimination in the United States and in science in particular has a long and complicated history. Margaret Rossiter’s now classic two-volume study, Women Scientists in America, offers a wealth of information and insight regarding the “struggles and strategies” of women scientists through 1972.36 The number of women physicists in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s was far below the number of their male counterparts. This held, of course, for other sciences as well. Table 1 in the Appendix summarizes some of Rossiter’s data obtained from the annual listings in American Men of Science for the years 1921 and 1938. Although only a fraction of the total number of physicists and scientists, presumably the most successful, were selected for this publication, the data do suggest several causes for the general trends. First, it is remarkable that in both sample years physics drew only single-digit percentages of the total numbers of men and women scientists. The percentages, in fact, declined for both genders from 1921 to 1938, even though the number of physicists more than doubled. This may have been because by 1938 physics was no longer a newly developing field in the United States, while more women had since found other fields more accommodating. According to Rossiter’s data for the other sciences, in both 1921 and 1938 chemistry, the medical sciences, and engineering were far more popular with men, while botany, zoology, and psychology were most popular with women scientists. A recent study has shown that discouraging stereotypes as well as subtle bias and not-sosubtle discrimination can have significant impacts on women’s choices for future careers today, and surely did so then.37 Although World War I had brought many women scientists into new jobs in industry, government, and academe, they lost many of those jobs after the war as the male scientists returned from their war work with the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-11 20:39:38. 42 American Physics Comes of Age Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. nearly all-male NRC and military branches. Despite the momentum generated by the passage of universal suffrage in 1919, the prewar segregation of women into “women’s work” in science returned after the war. Many men considered women mentally unsuited for scientific thinking, a view apparently held even by the New York Times. In an unsigned editorial appearing on June 4, 1921, the paper stated: “That women can be efficient in laboratories . . . needs no proof at this late day. It is still true, however, that the majority of women are still to develop either the scientific or the mechanical mind.” The Times explained that it is not that women are inferior to men, “but that more men than women have latent capabilities in those directions . . . [capabilities] of viewing facts abstractly rather than relationally, without overestimating them because they harmonize with previously accepted theories or justify established tastes and proprieties, and without hating and rejecting them because they have the opposite tendencies.”38 The numbers of PhDs by gender reveal more of the story (see Table 1 in the Appendix). Prewar discrimination in doctorates was less virulent than in employment. As noted earlier, in 1921 roughly 63 percent of women physicists held PhDs, while 80 percent of men physicists did so. By 1938 the percentages, if not the numbers, were nearly equal, 73 percent of women, 75 percent of men. But when one looks at the numbers of all science PhDs in American Men of Science by gender, the picture is just the reverse! In 1921, 72 percent of all women scientists held doctorates, compared with only 58 percent of all male scientists. In 1938 it was 83 percent of the women scientists and 70 percent of the men. What was different about physics? And why were women scientists as a whole more likely to hold doctorates? The answer to the fi rst question apparently lies in the circumstance that in 1921 a doctorate was strongly preferred but not required for academic physics. In a study of the twentyfour women physicists listed in the first three editions of American Men Science (1906, 1910, 1920) and still employed in 1921, Rossiter found that nineteen of the twenty-four women were employed at ten women’s colleges. (However, only twenty-one appeared in AMS in 1921.) The remainder included high-school teachers, a high-school science director, and physicists at the National Bureau of Standards and at the H.C. Keith Company. Fifteen of the twenty-four women physicists were listed as professors, Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrie...
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