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cause it will be diffi cult to win our battle for progress in engineering science
research with a house divided.^77By calling postwar engineers who held the applied science ideology
of engineering “traditionalists,” Nordby raises an important issue for this
period: the loss of status by some engineering educators to engineering
scientists during the early cold war when they fell behind in the race
to make engineering scientifi c in a more autonomous, research- oriented
manner than in the past. These changes in the ideology of engineering—
from a simple applied- science model to that of engineering science—are
closely related to changes in teaching and research associated with the
transformation of American engineering education in the cold war.CONCLUSION
From about 1880 to 1960, three key phrases, “pure and applied science,”
“science and technology,” and “engineering science,” were at the center
of boundary work conducted by physical scientists and engineers regard-
ing the relationship between systematic knowledge and the useful arts
that helped to defi ne their fi elds. The uses and meanings of these phrases
changed with the momentous social changes that occurred during this
eighty- year period: the incorporation of engineering inside large fi rms, the
growth of industrial research laboratories, the mobilization of science and
engineering for two world wars, the specter of technological unemploy-
ment during the Great Depression, and the demand for more science in
engineering education to help fi ght the cold war.
Some patterns are evident during this period. Scientists and engineers
subsumed their differences about the sources of technical knowledge un-
der the fl exible rubric of “applied science,” then “science and technol-
ogy,” to promote their complementary professional identities and to gain
status and fi nancial support. The move was made possible in regard to
“applied science” because of the wide spectrum in meanings given to the
term: from a pure- science ideal of applying scientifi c theories to the use-
ful arts to an engineering- research ideal of applying scientifi c methods
to produce technical knowledge. The spectrum was even wider for “sci-
ence and technology”—from fi elds of study to social forces—and thus the
epistemological debates over this term were not as intense. The intense
debates over the paradox of “engineering science” were settled during the
cold war, not by developing fl exible meanings for the term, but by reduc-
ing its meaning to that of old basic sciences no longer of interest to phys-