History 138 - Class 16

History 138: Science in the U.S.

Class 16 (9/30)
Engineering and industrial research

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Outline

Defining the engineer's job
Technical and scientific knowledge
New fields of cooperation, and their consequences
Professionalization
Contests: shop culture vs. school culture

Industrial research laboratories

Origins
American adaptations

The transformation of business organization
    The rise of the corporation
    Laboratories within large firms
    The patent system

Science in the industrial setting
Goals and orientation
Pleas for pure science, and the ambivalent relation to the university

Names and Terms

Primary	Secondary
Second Industrial Revolution Thomas Edison (1847-1931) dyes Eastman Kodak AT&T (with Bell Labs as a component) General Electric horizontal integration, vertical integration Willis R. Whitney (1868-1958) Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) Henry Rowland (1848-1901)	Boston Tech (fd. 1865), Throop Polytechnic (fd. 1896) MIT, Caltech Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) U.S. Patent Office (fd. 1836) Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)

Assignment

Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A History of the American Genius for Invention (New York: Penguin, 1989), introduction, ch. 1, ch. 4.

[Lots of details here — don't get bogged down. This holds for all Hughes readings. In ch. 1 you may focus on Edison; in ch. 4, on one of AT&T, GE, or DuPont, as you choose.]
How did nineteenth-century independent inventors work? What characteristics does Hughes identify in them?
What was Edison's relation to science?
What does Hughes see as the important transformations that accompanied the rise of the industrial research laboratories?
How did the industrial laboratory change the relationship between science and corporations?