234 Kline
was when Gano Dunn defi ned engineering in 1930 as the “art of the
economic application of science to the purposes of man.”^28 By calling the
engineer’s creativity “art,” the traditional defi nition of engineering, Dunn
allowed his profession some autonomy within a hierarchical relationship
to science.
Comments by the NRC inner circle’s main contact with industry, Frank
Jewett, show the continued infl uence of the gospel of industrial research on
this pure- science ideal. Jewett recalled that his dissertation advisor, physi-
cist Albert Michelson, complained that “I was prostituting my training and
my ideals” by joining AT&T.^29 He told the Mellon Institute in 1937:Once the trail is blazed [by “fundamental science research”] there follow in
succession the eras of development, fi rst by other inventors, then by engi-
neers who know more of science than the inventors but who rarely create
essentially new knowledge, and fi nally the era in which development is
mainly in the hands of research men and engineers working in intimate
cooperation.^30Leaders of industrial research at GE advocated the NRC’s pure- science
ideal even more strongly than Jewett. It is not surprising that Irving
Langmuir, the fi rst industrial scientist to win a Nobel Prize, called his re-
search on the lightbulb “purely scientifi c” four years before receiving the
award. In 1937 Langmuir drew a sharp boundary between “fundamental
research” and “engineering research” on the basis of a pure- applied hierar-
chy. Like Whitney, Langmuir recognized original research in the “applied”
area of the GE lab but not in the company’s engineering labs.^31 Industrial
researchers at the Radio Corporation of America, the Mellon Institute,
and AT&T took a more moderate position by acknowledging the diffi cult
and fruitful work of “applied” science in their interwar speeches, but they
all paid homage to research in “pure” or “fundamental” science, either in
universities or in their own laboratories, as the basis of their success.
Engineering leaders also upheld the NRC’s pure- science ideal, often to
keep the engineer above the growing number of technicians in industry.
Robert Ridgway, chief engineer of the board of transportation in New York
City, told civil engineers in 1925 that “The pure scientist... discovers
the fact and thus enables the engineer to apply it to a defi nite and useful
purpose.”^32 Vice presidents of the engineering section of the AAAS made
similar statements. In 1928 Charles Richards, former dean of engineering
at two Midwestern universities, repeated Thomas Huxley’s argument from
nearly fi fty years before when he said that engineering “can not be classed
as a fundamental science... It has often been classifi ed as an applied