Science and Technology 245engineering sciences,” the committee was chaired by prominent electrical
engineers—W. L. Everitt, B. R. Teare, and Ernst Weber. These leaders from
a “science- based” branch of engineering stated that “engineering science
has its roots in basic science, but carries knowledge further toward ap-
plicability” through research based on scientifi c methods. The autonomy
implied in this defi nition was weakened when the committee said that
engineering science needed to follow developments in the basic sciences,
yet wait until enough maturity had been reached in them to “permit the
translation into applications.”^76 More importantly for the practical needs
of educators, the committee said the Grinter report should not be inter-
preted to mean that students had to take six individual courses on engi-
neering science.
Some closure seems to have occurred on the question of engineering
science at the end of this period. From 1958 onward, engineering edu-
cators and, increasingly, historians of technology recognized engineer-
ing science as a fairly well- defi ned set of research areas, formerly in the
domain of physics, which were required courses for the accreditation of
engineering colleges. Universities established programs in Engineering
Science, the Society of Engineering Science was founded in 1961, and a
handbook of engineering sciences was published in 1967.
Yet this closure may have precluded the wider usage of “engineering
science” to mean systematic knowledge used by engineers (analogous to
the term medical science) by restricting the fi eld of engineering science
to the epistemologically safe one of fi elds abandoned by leading- edge
physicists and chemists. That is, this closure may have been appealing to
both scientists and engineers because it did not signifi cantly challenge the
pure- applied hierarchy of the (commonly accepted) relationship between
science and engineering.
Some texts, like those by Nordby and Work, also have traces of an
opposition to the engineering science ideal by scientists and engineers
that does not seem to have been as well represented in the engineering
journals as the ideal of engineering science. In 1959, Nordby, no longer
an NSF program director, complained:
Members of the physical sciences—well reinforced by the traditionalists in
the engineering ranks—defi ne engineering as an applied science and say it is
not concerned with “basic” research. Of course if this is the case, the physical
scientists have placed a “halo” around their heads and are merely protect-
ing their own bailiwick, usually because of their lack of understanding of the
present trends of the engineering sciences. Nevertheless the other faction of
our opposition [i.e., traditional engineers] is of more vital concern to me be-