Science and Technology 241“engineering science” encouraged colleges to develop research and teach-
ing programs in this fi eld in order to garner federal funds and to improve
their status by substituting the ideal of engineering science for the ideal of
engineering as applied science in the ideology of American engineering.
These debates are evident in the testimony of engineering groups dur-
ing Senate hearings in 1945 on the proposed establishment of what be-
came the NSF. The Engineering College Research Association, representing
academia, and the Engineers Joint Council, representing the professional
societies, complained that the congressional bills had not recognized that
engineering research in such fi elds as aerodynamics, thermodynamics, hy-
drodynamics, and electronics could be “basic research” and thus eligible
for funding by the proposed agency. The joint council statement, read by
hydraulics expert Boris Bakhmeteff, defi ned engineering science as “fun-
damental knowledge of the laws of nature which permit the mastery of
the resources and powers of nature.” He recommended that “engineering
scientists” be appointed to the foundation’s board to ensure that “funda-
mental research in engineering science” was funded.^65
Signed into law in mid- 1950, the NSF Act authorized the new agency to
“initiate and support basic scientifi c research in the mathematical, physi-
cal, medical, biological, engineering, and other sciences.”^66 Bakhmeteff’s
panel took credit for the inclusion of engineering research in the act, and
the NSF established the Division of Mathematical, Physical, and Engineer-
ing Sciences in 1951.
As mentioned above, Bakhmeteff drew on a long- standing, though
minor, tradition of using “engineering science” to mean a science distinct
to engineering that often originated in physics. This usage—which en-
compassed such fi elds as applied mechanics, strength of materials, fl uid
dynamics, thermodynamics, and aerodynamics—was popular with many
engineering researchers, such as Bakhmeteff, Stephen Timoshenko, and
Theodore von Karman, who emigrated to the United States from Russia
and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and began teaching engineering sci-
ences in American colleges. Several of these men had studied or taught at
the University of Göttingen, where Felix Klein encouraged the research of
Ludwig Prandtl and others in fi elds the Germans had called Ingenieurwis-
senschaft since the 1850s. The equivalent English phrase, “engineering sci-
ence,” had been used in British engineering education to mean a branch
of study since the early 1860s. By the start of World War II, talk of engi-
neering science as a relatively autonomous discipline was common among
an elite group of educators in America, both European and native born.
In a 1948 booklet on engineering education, James Kip Finch, a col-
league of Bakhmeteff’s at Columbia University, quoted Bakhmeteff’s Sen-