Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

Science and Technology 243

on engineering education, commonly called the Grinter report, after the
committee’s chair L. E. Grinter, dean of the graduate school at the Univer-
sity of Florida. The 1953 preliminary report addressed both research and
teaching in engineering science. “The leaders of the engineering profes-
sion 25 years hence must be engineers who are at no loss in interpreting
or themselves contributing to the extension of the fi elds of engineering
science.”^71 Following this statement of an engineering science ideal, the
report identifi ed nine engineering sciences (statics; dynamics; strength
of materials; fl uid fl ow; thermodynamics; electrical circuits, fi elds, and
electronics; heat transfer; engineering materials; and physical metallurgy)
that should be taught in the curriculum between the basic sciences and
engineering design. The interim and fi nal versions of the report, however,
eliminated this preamble and presented only a shorter list of “engineering
sciences” that should be taught. Many engineering educators climbed on
the engineering science bandwagon after the publication of the Grinter
report, especially when it formed the basis of accreditation changes.
Even though the NSF changed the name of its engineering program
to Engineering Sciences in fi scal year 1953, the defi nition of this term
was still problematical with many people at the agency. Raymond Seeger,
acting director of the Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences
Division, wrote in 1955:

[One could] emphasize the adjective engineering, in which case engineering

science is essentially a body of scientifi c knowledge useful for solving practi-

cal problems. On the other hand, one may stress the noun science so that

engineering science may be regarded as genuinely basic science involving

phenomena relating to engineering problems. In this sense, of course, physics

itself might well be designated an engineering science.

Seeger recalled electrical engineering Professor Ernst Weber’s defi nition of
“engineering science as those parts of chemistry, mathematics and phys-
ics that are no longer of primary interest to chemists, mathematicians,
and physicists.”^72 But Seeger disliked this defi nition because it neglected
the fact that more and more physicists were showing interest in the topic
(probably because of NSF funding).
Seeger’s ambivalence refl ects the fact that the NSF had just established
a committee to defi ne engineering science and basic research in engineer-
ing. Harold Work of New York University reported on the joint efforts
of the NSF and the Engineering College Research Association in this re-
gard in 1956. Work thought that part of the diffi culty facing the commit-
tee was due to the common belief that “basic research” was performed