The Royal Society's War Committee on Engineering 1914–19

Abstract

The outbreak of World War I severely curtailed several international activities of the Royal Society, including the production of the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature and involvement in the International Association of Academies. Some of the administrative slack was taken up by the 1914‐18 War Committee and its several subgroups focusing on scientific and technical issues in the prosecution of military efforts. Ordering and cataloguing of the archival resources left by this group of committees and held in the Society’s Library began in 2006 with file-level descriptions of the Engineering Sub-committee papers. It has continued into 2007‐08 with more detailed work on these and on the equivalent Food, Physiology and Chemistry Sub-committees. 1 Although such administrative material may appear fairly routine, the correspondence surrounding specialist groups of the War Committee is actually very engaging. It shows the Royal Society’s scientists grappling with practical problems of war, but also interacting with the civilian population on scientific matters. The War Committee’s terms of reference were noted in Council’s report to the Fellowship of 1915. It was instructed ‘to organize assistance to the Government in conducting or suggesting scientific investigations in relation to the war, the Committee to have power to add to their number; and to appoint Sub-Committees not necessarily restricted to Fellows of the Society’. 2 In fact, the first War Committee was quickly replaced by Council as a coordinating body, with original subcommittees reconstituted as sectional committees. The process included one subcommittee on war industries becoming incorporated into the Sectional Committee on Chemistry. These subject-based war committees were therefore organized around Physics, Chemistry, Physiology and Engineering. There were later additions, most importantly a Food Committee from 1916. However, the fourth of these is remarkable in that it seems to have been the first time that the Society had a dedicated general engineering committee since an original seventeenth-century group. Chairmanship was given to the mechanical engineer Dugald Clerk FRS (1854‐1932), who proved an inspired choice. Clerk would go on to become director of engineering research for the Admiralty from 1916 and was knighted in 1917 for his contributions to the war effort. 3