230 Kline
Many engineering leaders simplifi ed Thurston’s applied- science ideal
after the turn of the century. Calling the engineer an “applied scientist”
during a time of a growing prestige of science and a greater use of science
in industry provided the basis for an ideology that claimed the engineer
to be the agent of all technical change, a logical thinker free of bias, and
a socially responsible professional. Presidents, as well as several vice presi-
dents of the AAAS’s engineering section, ignored the autonomous usage of
“applied science” and moved its meaning toward the subservient end of
the spectrum favored by Rowland. In this vein, Gano Dunn, president of
the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1912, said that “engineer-
ing is not science, for in science there is no place for the conception of
utility... Engineering is Science’s handmaid following after her in honor
and affection, but doing the practical chores of life.”^18
Despite the criticism of engineering researchers and their creation of
broader meanings of the term “applied science,” the dominant ideology
among engineering leaders in the early twentieth century fell toward
Rowland’s end of the spectrum. These engineers, few of whom were re-
searchers, reduced Thurston’s complex ideal to the formulation that en-
gineering was (simply) the application of science to the useful arts. The
applied- science ideology was appealing as science began to amass a greater
cultural authority in the Progressive Era, a phenomenon evident in the
appeals to science by such new specialties as chemical engineering and
highway engineering. By World War I, status- conscious engineering lead-
ers had spent two decades promoting a simple applied- science interpreta-
tion of innovation that would probably not have displeased Rowland.
Our second area of discourse about pure and applied science centers
on the new fi eld of industrial research. Although some engineers had
carved out an autonomy based (mostly) on an epistemologically depen-
dent interpretation of the term “applied science,” the growing number of
industrial researchers in the early twentieth century blurred the boundar-
ies between pure and applied science in a way that modifi ed Rowland’s
pure- science ideal. The change in rhetoric is evident in debates about how
to promote science and industrial research during World War I, when it
became a matter of national defense.
The wartime discourse pitted those who preached the new gospel of
industrial research against adherents of the older gospel of high culture
and pure science. A vocal proponent of the latter ideal was astrophysi-
cist George Ellery Hale. During his campaigns to revitalize the National
Academy of Sciences and mobilize science during the war, Hale used the
traditional arguments and historical fi gures of the pure- science ideal. In
his efforts to bring industrial researchers into the academy to aid the war