Science and Technology 231effort, he described a hierarchical, sharp, and rather condescending divi-
sion of labor between pure and applied science when he appealed for help
in this matter to his former MIT classmate, Willis Whitney, in 1915.
Fifteen years as head of industrial research at the General Electric Com-
pany had prepared Whitney to disagree with his friend. In a speech before
the American Chemical Society in 1916, Whitney deplored the tendency
of “some American scientists” to believe “that making a utility of the God-
given discoveries of the truly beautiful phenomena of Nature was a pros-
titution to be deprecated, and that research could only be pure when it
was sterile.” In another speech given that year, he said “there are no sharp
lines to be drawn through research to separate pure from applied, scien-
tifi c from practical, useful from useless.”^19 Charles Skinner, head of re-
search at the Westinghouse Electric Company agreed with Whitney, while
engineer John Carty, head of research at American Telephone & Telegraph
(now a subsidiary of the modern- day AT&T), drew a distinction based on
motive, rather than on method, in 1916. Several lab directors agreed with
physicist Frank Jewett, Carty’s replacement at AT&T, who said in 1917 that
industrial labs should occasionally perform “pure scientifi c research.”^20
Both of these aspects of the gospel of industrial research—the blurring
of boundaries between pure and applied science inside the lab and the
recognition that these labs could do some pure research—weakened Hale’s
pure- science ideal (in much the same way that Thurston’s applied- science
ideal challenged Rowland). Yet many tenets of the pure- science ideal were
not replaced by the gospel of industrial research.
Carty, for example, said in 1916 that the “natural home of pure science
and of pure scientifi c research is to be found in the university,” mainly
because industrial labs would be compelled to keep its “pure science” se-
cret.^21 Skinner initially agreed that a new lab at Westinghouse should per-
form fundamental research, but disagreement between him and the lab’s
director, physicist Perley Nutting, on its overall mission apparently led to
Nutting’s departure after the war.^22 Whitney also thought the universities
were the natural home of pure science, yet he did not mention that, in his
own lab, Irving Langmuir had performed fundamental research that had
led to major improvements in electric lamps. After joining the National
Research Council (NRC), Whitney adopted a pure- science rhetoric similar
to Hale’s and dropped his earlier statements about the closeness of pure
and applied science in the laboratory.
During this period engineering researchers in industry and academia
also took advantage of the increased prestige of research to argue for more
recognition for their fi eld. One way was to classify it as science. In 1916
Charles Steinmetz argued that F. W. Peek Jr.’s experiments on high- voltage