Science and Technology 233on the basis of a simple applied- science view of innovation. E. P. Hyde, a
physicist- engineer in the audience remarked that the pure- science ideal he
had learned at Johns Hopkins created “a veritable hell” for him during his
early years at the National Bureau of Standards “because I was called upon
to do something that was of some use to somebody.”^25
While the pure- science ideal of Hale and Millikan resembled the ide-
ology of Rowland, the ideal was modifi ed as the educational goals of the
nineteenth century gave way to a growing utilitarianism associated with
the commercial and political value of industrial research. In this discourse,
“applied science” often referred to original research conducted in indus-
trial labs by university- trained scientists and engineers using “scientifi c”
methods. Motive was seen as a way to separate pure from applied in many
of these labs, and universities did not have a monopoly on pure science.
Yet the efforts to blur the boundaries between pure and applied and the
growing tendency to refer to applied science as semi- autonomous research
did not alter the pure- applied hierarchy, which was strengthened by the
success of chemists and physicists in applying their knowledge to the war
effort. By the end of the war, industrial scientists and engineers had (re)
created a central aspect of Thurston’s applied- science ideal in a new set-
ting, which, ironically, reinforced the applied- science view of innovation.
The “gospel of industrial research” had transformed, instead of replaced,
the “gospel of high culture and pure science.”
In our third area of discourse—science policy in the interwar years—
academic scientists, industrial researchers, and engineers expressed a wider
spectrum of beliefs about the relationship between what was increas-
ingly called “science and technology” (see p. 236 below). The spectrum
extended from a pure- science ideal that had been (slightly) transformed
during World War I to a nascent ideology of autonomous engineering
research. In these years, academic engineering research remained weak in
comparison to academic science, status- conscious engineers still felt the
need to identify their profession with science, and Hale’s NRC exerted a
wide infl uence in all of these fi elds.
Established on a permanent basis in 1918, the NRC was the major
source of pure- science rhetoric during the interwar years. Its inner circle
promoted an extreme version of this ideology mainly to lobby for fi nan-
cial support for pure science. In two addresses explaining the purpose of
the reorganized NRC in 1919, Hale quoted Carty’s wartime admonition
for engineers to forward the work of “pure scientists” since they were the
“advance guard of civilization.”^26 Millikan put the matter squarely to a
group of industrialists in 1929 when he claimed that “Pure science begat
modern industry.”^27 About as far from that position as the group strayed