240 Kline
technology as social forces, but ones that could be controlled through
research organizations.^61
During the war the phrase “science and technology” became common
in the public rhetoric of scientists and engineers in the United States.
It embraced a wide spectrum of meanings: fi elds of study; an epistemo-
logically dependent relationship between knowledge and the useful arts;
practices, artifacts, and systems; and a social force (or forces).^62 It thus had
a fl exibility similar to that of the older term “applied science”; as in the
past, the fl exibility enabled scientists and engineers to stake out boundar-
ies between their fi elds. But in this case, there was a general agreement
that measures had to be taken to address the new social force (or forces)
denoted by the phrase “science and technology.”ENGINEERING SCIENCE: A PARADOX OF THE COLD WAR
Although scientists and engineers submerged their different interpreta-
tions of the relationships between their fi elds under the general rubrics of
“applied science” and “science and technology,” these debates broke out
anew and in an intense manner when the phrase “engineering science”
came into national prominence. During the early years of the cold war, sci-
entists and engineering educators in the United States vigorously debated
whether the fi eld called engineering science, which the newly formed
National Science Foundation (NSF) was chartered to support, existed, and,
if it did, how should engineering colleges and the NSF support it?^63
How there could be research in an “applied science” confused physi-
cist Alan Waterman, the NSF’s fi rst director. In 1952 Waterman stated that
“the fact that the National Science Foundation is directed to support basic
research in engineering, which is specifi cally labeled as a science along
with the mathematical, physical, medical, and biological sciences, creates
what appears at fi rst glance to be a paradox” since engineers themselves
had defi ned engineering as “the art of the economic application of science
to social purposes.”^64 Waterman, his staff, and a number of prominent
engineering educators struggled to resolve this apparent paradox for over
a decade.
These debates were part of the cold war reconfi guration of engineer-
ing education in the United States. Guided by the belief that scientists
had outperformed engineers in wartime laboratories, leading educators
took advantage of a vast amount of federal funding to reform engineering
education by including more science in the curriculum and by emulat-
ing scientifi c methods in engineering research. The NSF’s use of the term