20th-Century-Science Historiography – Page 2

Polemical Structures: Enthusiasm, Delay, and the Frustration of Bureaucracy

Enthusiast or gadfly? Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell in 1948; photograph by William J. Sumits, from the LIFE photo archive

In Paul Lucier’s article on science and the professions in 19th-century America, one point relating to the California oil controversy caught my eye. In discussing the controversy’s historiography, Lucier observed that one interpretation “popular among business historians and modern scientists” seemed to support a “delay” thesis. Since chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., working on a sizable capitalist contract, was ultimately proven correct that oil would be discovered in California, his science was “vindicated”. Meanwhile, Josiah Whitney, who criticized Silliman “with all the power of a government position behind him” had his “vindictiveness” revealed. As Lucier explains, Whitney’s attitude could thus be taken to explain “why California, with its rich oil fields, did not take off sooner.”

I do not think it’s inappropriate to retroactively judge whether one side or another was justified in their claims, either by contemporaneous or later standards, and regardless of later discoveries. I would, however, like to leave the issue aside here. (Personally, I have no idea who, if anyone, was justified in the Silliman-Whitney case.) I also don’t want to make a warmed-over point about the relationship between scientific credibility and political interests. Instead, I want to concentrate on just how common the polemics of obstruction and delay, and a counter-polemic of enthusiasm, are in history and historiography. To talk about the issue, I want to move to a territory I know a bit better: World War II.

In the years prior to his becoming Prime Minister in 1940, Winston Churchill positioned himself as a robust opponent of Nazism. His friend, adviser, and the director of Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, physicist Frederick Lindemann (1886-1957), was of like mind. Both were wary of bureaucratic mediocrity, and they understood it as their duty to awaken the state apparatus from its sloth in order to combat the Nazi threat. Churchill routinely inserted himself into the details of military planning, and both he and Lindemann were aggressive proponents of technological game-changers.

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The 20th-Century Problem: Gowing and “Big” History

A rare but exciting event in researching the history of 20th-century science is when one finds other historians as historical actors. In researching World War II and operations research, Henry Guerlac has turned up as the official historian of the MIT Rad Lab. More surprising, Martin Klein, who just passed away this year, served in the U. S. Navy’s Operations Research Group when he was a physics grad student. I also found that eminent British historian of science, Margaret Gowing—best known for her work on the British nuclear program—was an early contributor to the Operational Research Quarterly (now Journal of the OR Society) back when it was essentially a newsletter publicizing non-R&D modernization strategies and techniques in state and industrial work.

“Historical Writing: Some Problems of Material Selection,” OR Quarterly 4 (1953): 35-36 briefly discusses Gowing’s experience as an official war historian in the employ of the War Cabinet. I don’t think any reference to this article will make it into my book on the subject, so I thought I would share it as part of this post series, to which it is well-suited. For Gowing, facing up to what I am calling the “20th-century problem” required a distinctly 20th-century historiography.

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The 20th-Century Problem: Westwick and Classes of Institutions

For the sake of argument, let’s say that there are two kinds of well-written history books: barn-burners and bibles. A barn-burner could be evocatively written to rival the sensory experience of a museum exhibit or film, it might present a particularly important or intriguing historical episode, or it might make a provocative argument. Rarely a bible might manage to be a barn-burner, but more often it is a public service: something that is difficult to read straight through, but contains enough information or crucial analysis or both that one returns to it again and again, with the account usually growing richer as one gains more knowledge of a historical milieu.

Peter Westwick’s The National Labs (2003) is a bible. One might argue it is extraneous, as individual national labs have received their own historical treatments, some quite recently.

J. L. Heilbron, Robert Seidel, and Bruce R. Wheaton, Lawrence and His Laboratory: Nuclear Science at Berkeley, 1931-1961 (1981).

Leland Johnson and Daniel Schaffer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory: The First FiftyYears (1994).

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The 20th-Century Problem: Krige and National Narrative

In my last discussion of the challenges involved in writing about the history of science in the 20th century, I noted that local narratives can be taken to be revealing of broader issues, but that such narratives can also simply reflect back some larger narrative already understood to exist. In this post we take this consideration to the case of the national narrative.

John Krige’s 2006 book American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe is, I would say, an important step in the establishment of a historiography of post-1945 science on the European continent. Until recently, the history of scientific Europe in this period has not been systematically explored. 1999’s Science under Socialism, edited by Dieter Hoffmann and Kristie Macrakis (who just joined Krige at Georgia Tech this year), etched out a picture of science in East Germany. Cathryn Carson has written on science in West Germany (publications list here). In 1998’s The Radiance of France (out in a new edition this year), Gabrielle Hecht wrote on the development of the unusually important nuclear power industry in that country. The object here is not to put together a complete bibliography, but if anyone wants to add to the picture of this historiography, please do leave a comment.

Krige’s book covers a lot of important bases, looking at the Marshall Plan, NATO, the State Department and CIA, the activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the establishment of CERN (on which he has written more extensively elsewhere) as institutions linking American and European science and politics. (Here one should also make note of Ron Doel‘s ongoing project to study American science’s diplomatic uses.) Similar to Needell’s book on Lloyd Berkner, the emphasis here is on individual cases. In this case, different

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The 20th-Century Problem: Needell and Biography

In the history of science, the 20th century is unique in terms of the sheer scale, social importance, and intellectual diversity of the scientific enterprise, and the closeness of its relationship to the development and design of technology. This can create some intimidating historiographical challenges.

For example, as National Air and Space Museum historian Allan Needell observes in his 2000 book, Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals, “the Cold War relationships among scientists, politicians, the expanding national security bureaucracy, and advocates of more broadly based technocratic initiatives are extraordinarily complex” (3). It sounds obvious enough, but it resonates with me—I think it’s that “extraordinarily” that speaks to the sense of confusion following the sobering encounter with the archive, particularly a major one, such as the US National Archives here in College Park, Maryland. Having seen reams of committee minutes, reports, and correspondence documenting the (often painfully mundane) organizational details of a seemingly endless stream of institutions and initiatives, I know that the question inevitably arises: “What in the hell am I going to do with all this?”

Figuring out what is to be done demands a set of historiographical tools capable of analyzing scientific and engineering work in general ways: it can be extremely limiting to concentrate on singular narratives of significance (say, the history of DNA or elementary particle theory), because it would ignore entire categories of important work that can only be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the evolution of research programs or other general trends, instead of great breakthroughs. It can feel like—indeed, it is—a real accomplishment to reassemble even a single strand of narrative from the archival morass. But faced with the insignificance of any individual narrative, it can be depressing to consider the fact that hundreds of similar narratives are playing out at the same time.

A key strategy is to take hold of certain life preservers that pop out of the depths of the archival record, such as familiar players.

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Research, Design, Innovation, Knowledge

A little while ago, the University of Chicago Press kindly sent us a review copy of Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Life. It seemed to me like a good idea, given the possibilities of the blog format, to integrate a discussion of it into the overall trend of posts we’ve got going here, and to extend the discussion over several posts in our “book club” series.

The book looks primarily at how academic commentators and insiders regard industrial scientific research. Shapin frames his analysis as a “moral history of a late modern vocation,” which extends the themes from his prior work. Leviathan and the Air-Pump and The Social History of Truth looked at the social structure of “knowledge” production in the “early modern” Royal Society. Shapin begins this book by acknowledging that his previous speculations—that examining that milieu could tell us about the “way we live now”—are very speculative indeed. To make any really firm statements about the “Way We Live Now” (a phrase Shapin repeats throughout the book), we will require a much more substantial analysis, “so here I start with a sketch of some issues involved in describing aspects of how we live now, specifically how we think about the most powerful forms of knowledge and about those who make and manipulate that knowledge.”

In our next post on this book I’ll get into the details of the book, but crucial to Shapin’s approach is his extension of his prior interest in

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A Fluid Taxonomy of 20c. Sciences

One of my ongoing concerns is the problem of writing a coherent history of 20th-century science and technology. As I’ve been working on assembling names for my web project on notable post-1945 American physicists (on which Christopher is assisting me), I’ve been trolling through the National Academy of Sciences’ database of deceased members. Living members are helpfully grouped by section, and we’ve simply taken members of the “physics” and “applied physical sciences” sections. Deceased members, on the other hand, are not so grouped, so I have to look everyone up and sort out the physicists from the psychologists, anthropologists, chemists, geneticists, and so forth.

Predictably, this has resulted in some problematic category issues. What to do with physical chemists, electrical engineers (especially those who won Nobel Prizes in physics)?; what separates an astronomer from an astrophysicist? when is mathematics physics-y enough to include mathematicians?

Another interesting problem that I’ve run into is that certain fields seem to have stopped being physics. Ballistics research becomes more statistical than physical. Thermodynamics, one of the great products of

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20th century science and technology

I’d like to jump back to the 20th century historiography problem for a bit, one of the biggest ongoing problems seems to be how to integrate the histories of science and technology in this period. Telling a history of R&D is a part of this, but, the more I try and think about this, the more it seems to me that you either have to tell a story about science or technological research. I was talking to Tom Lassman about this a few weeks ago–he used to do contract history for the Army, and is now at the Nat’l Air and Space Museum–and he felt that the business and technology historiographies presented the most rigorous approach, which may well be true. I need to do more reading there. But I thought it might be useful to try and run through a few quick preliminary (and likely incomprehensible) thoughts on how these historiographies might come together.

The reason I’ve always leaned more toward science history than technology history is because it’s always seemed to get at deeper issues. Where else can you turn without blinking between political, intellectual, legal, technological, art, and philosophical histories? Whereas the technology and business histories have always seemed a bit more dry: “first there was this kind of rocket, and then another kind of rocket, and then a third kind of rocket was canceled because of budget cutbacks or because it proved infeasible, but, in reaction to Sputnik, a fourth kind of rocket was approved”. It doesn’t have to be rockets, but you get the idea. The most conceptually problematic issues seem to revolve around the introduction of political considerations, or maybe the technology benefited some, but not others.

This view is, of course, unfair, but it’s just a perception. The converse perspective on the history of science is that we are so preoccupied with problematizing everything and demonstrating the integration of such a diverse scope of activities that we actually forget to tell a history.

But, as I’ve been working on our new AIP web project (this is moving forward; more soon), it’s clear that it is unexceptional for the technology history to be a very recognizable part of scientists’ everyday experience. In assembling a list of physicists to include in our project, we get a lot of “science of the atmosphere”; or “science of circuits”; or “science of solar energy” which makes separating the physicists from engineers seem tedious and somewhat fruitless. (This speaks to the “problem of the problem” as well). What stance to take? Are we all technology historians now? I like to think there’s an alternate route than resorting to actors’ narrative perceptions of “well, first we worked on this technology, and it worked pretty well, but then there was a big controversy, etc.” but what is it?

My concern is that it would be easy to simply write an endless series of histories detailing the emergence of different problems on which scientists worked. Besides, emergence is only half the story. Are things really so uninteresting after things have emerged and stabilized? Surely this is when things are at their most important (see Edgerton’s Shock of the Old). Traditionally, there’s been a lot of writing on the tensions between basic vs. applied science (stuff like Forman’s “Behind Quantum Electronics”), but that seems too macroscopic for a history that deserves a finer point. The fact that most science is, in some sense or another, “applied” is the nature of 20th century science. The challenge is to find histories within that reality.

Here’s a little speculation: I think the way forward will come by nailing down in what ways science matters in engineering. What is interesting about various kinds of technologies for sciences, and in what ways does science contribute to engineering practices that would otherwise be constrained? I imagine that the organization of different kinds of expertise, and people with different motivation will offer clues, as will a deeper understanding of what it takes to develop a company- or laboratory-level science policy. Odds are good that the history of biology and medicine has useful things to say here, but I’m not well-versed in that.

As I said, I’m just trying to get my head around this at this point, so none of this makes much sense, but expect more in future posts.