232 Kline
lines, conducted in Steinmetz’s engineering laboratory at GE, were en-
titled to be called “scientifi c.” Steinmetz was infuriated that chemists rec-
ognized Langmuir’s work on the lightbulb as “scientifi c” while physicists
did not regard Peek’s that way. Steinmetz also railed against scientifi c pub-
lications for not abstracting engineering research, particularly his earlier
papers on magnetic hysteresis:Amongst the worst offenders in this unjustifi ed exclusiveness are the physi-
cists, while the chemists make a recommendable exception... Possibly the
reason is, because applied chemistry is chemistry just as well as [is] theoretical
chemistry, while applied physics goes under the name of engineering, and
the average theoretical physicist is rather inclined not to recognize engineer-
ing as [being] scientifi c.Although Steinmetz defi ned engineering as applied science in two other
places in this speech, the above passages indicate that he used the term to
mean an area of research and practice, rather than simply the application
of scientifi c theories.^23
Another way to raise the status of engineering research was to follow
Thurston’s example and work to have it recognized as an autonomous
academic discipline, a path also taken by many European engineers at
this time. One advocate of that ideal was Vladimir Karapetoff, an electrical
engineering professor at Cornell. During a discussion at the American In-
stitute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in 1917, he asked, “Are there only two
kinds of research, industrial and pure scientifi c? Is there not an intermedi-
ate kind, which out of deference to my colleagues I will not call impure.”
This “semi- industrial research” was the “proper fi eld” of the electrical en-
gineering faculty. “We are not physicists nor mathematicians, so that pure
research is closed to us... we teachers are forced into the middle path of
work on the theory of electrical machines and other devices, a subject that
is neither pure physics nor industrial research.”^24
This fi eld, however, was often not given its due by key scientists. When
physicist Robert Millikan, Hale’s partner in mobilizing wartime science,
gave a talk to the AIEE in 1918, he was at fi rst deferential to engineer-
ing research. His experience coordinating the research of engineers and
physicists on submarine detection during the war compelled him to say
that the “distinctions between the man whom you commonly call the
pure scientist and the man whom you call the applied scientist have ab-
solutely disappeared.” Yet when he got to the main purpose of his talk
and asked engineers to provide more support for the NRC, he drew a
sharp boundary between pure and applied science and made his pitch