Apologia pro Vita Sua

Abstract

I HEN PRINCETON offered a graduate student at Harvard with the same name as mine an instructorship in 1947, no one in the History Department had the slightest idea that it was hiring a historian of science. My own sense of any such prospect was vagueness itself. That it so fell out is owing in the first instance to the liberality of my undergraduate alma mater, Wesleyan. Brought up during the Depression in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I rather thought that companies like Dupont looked to be a better bet than the steel company in which my father made his career, and I decided to major in chemistry. Even as a child, however, my favorite reading was history, or perhaps legend, starting with Howard Pyle's quadrilogy telling of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Wesleyan had not only a fine chemistry department but an inspiring history department. Chemistry was my duty. I could do my duty and did. History was my joy, however, and I was allowed to write a senior thesis in that field, on Lloyd George of all people, and graduated A.B. in chemistry with distinction in history in 1940. As it happened, Gerald Holton was also at Wesleyan, class of 1941, but the science in which he graduated was physics, and in those days our paths seldom crossed. (See Figure 1.) A stint of chemical engineering at MIT in 1940-41 convinced me that it would be better to do what was pleasing, and I got in a semester of graduate study in history at Harvard before the draft reached down to me in 1942. The army in its wisdom was more impressed with my chemical background than with my sense of history. It put me straight into the Chemical Warfare Service and packed me off to Officer Candidate School after a period of basic training. Nothing could have been less pertinent than knowledge of chemistry to my duties as an officer in the 94th 4.2 Inch Chemical Mortar Battalion, wherein I served, first as a platoon leader, then as a company commander, in the XV Corps, 3rd Army. The weapons were designed to fire gas shells, of course, but they could also be served with ordinary explosive ammunition for bombardment or with white phosphorus for smoke screens and incendiary effect. The atomic bomb ended all that, to the inexpressible relief of those of us facing the prospect of another invasion. That was enough of duty for one lifetime, and happiness was finding myself back at Harvard just in time for the spring semester, 1946, there to luxuriate in the freedom afforded by the G.I. Bill. (In my admittedly biased view, the only comparably constructive piece of legislation enacted by Congress in the twentieth century was the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps.) It seemed to me, even then, that it would be sensible and interesting to work out some combination of a background in science with an interest in history, but I had never read, or even heard of, a single work in history of science, and I