228 Kline
Although William Rogers used the term “applied science” in 1846
when he drew up the plans for the institution that became MIT, Ameri-
can scientists did not employ it regularly until the 1870s, when they fre-
quently yoked it to “pure science,” generally to mean purity of motive
rather than purity of subject matter. At that time, prominent scientists
transformed the prescription that science should be applied to the use-
ful arts into a timeless, universal statement that all useful arts—past and
present—were based on the application of science. By 1880, this inter-
pretation had become part of the rhetorical arsenal of presidents and vice
presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), who employed the terms “pure science” and “applied science” to
defi ne and promote their profession.^11
In three areas of discourse—engineering, industrial research, and sci-
ence policy—scientists and engineers expressed a wide spectrum of opin-
ions about the relationship between science and innovation between
1880 and 1945. These extended from the idea that science is a necessary
and suffi cient source of knowledge for technical innovation on one end
of the spectrum, to a complete independence of innovation from science
on the other end.
The fi rst area of discourse concerns the response of leading engineers
to a pure- science ideal promoted by physicist Henry Rowland of The
Johns Hopkins University. In a famous speech delivered before the AAAS
in 1883, “A Plea for Pure Science,” Rowland criticized newspapers for call-
ing electrical innovation by the name of physics, was “tired of seeing our
professors degrading their chairs by the pursuit of applied science instead
of pure science,” and upheld pure science as a pedagogical ideal that cul-
tivated moral character. He objected to physics professors profi ting from
doing applied science instead of cultivating their proper fi eld of pure sci-
ence, which he held to be the source of all technical innovations.^12
Rowland expanded on these themes the following year at the National
Conference of Electricians, where he decided to show practical electricians
how to apply science correctly by presenting a theory of the dynamo. Al-
though electrical engineers later recognized the theory as fundamental to
their fi eld, most electricians at the conference, including Elihu Thomson,
founder of an electrical fi rm, and Silvanus Thompson, a British professor
of physics and electrical engineering, did not welcome the theory nor the
condescending attitude of its author. Both men criticized Rowland for the
better part of an afternoon, based on their considerable experience design-
ing, building, operating, and writing about dynamos. At the start of the
next day’s session, Rowland replied that “every law of electricity necessary
to be known is already known; it is only a question of the brain that has