The Scientific Tradition in American Industrial Research

Abstract

Review Essay THE SCIENTIFIC TRADITION IN AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH JOHN KENLY SMITH, JR. In the past decade industrial research has been a focus of activity in the history of technology. This new generation of scholarship distin­ guishes itself from earlier work in a number of ways.1 First, it is based on documentation that provides an inside view of the evolution of industrial research. Second, it has benefited from numerous detailed case studies that demonstrate that innovation is not synonymous with invention.2 Finally, the organizational approach to understanding big business developed by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has given historians a framework within which to place the research laboratory.3 Companies develop strategies and create organizational structures to carry them out. Research laboratories, however, once in place, develop their own organizational identities and research agendas, seeking direction from science as much as from business. A long-standing, science-based research tradition is the key factor uniting the histories of the companies that have been extensively Dr. Smith is assistant professor in the Department of History at Lehigh University and coauthor of Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont iiCrJ). 1902— 1980. 'Many thirty-year-old studies are still useful. These include John J. Beer, “Coal Tar Dye Manufacture and the Origins of the Modern Industrial Research Laboratory,” Isis 49 (1958): 123—31; Kendall Birr, Pioneering in Industrial Research: The Story oj the General Electric Research Laboratory (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1957); Richard R. Nelson, “The Economics of Invention: A Survey of the Literature,"Journal of Business 32 (April 1959): 101-27. 2On the relationship between invention and innovation, see Neil Wasserman, Prom Invention to Innovation: Long Distance Telephony at the Turn of the Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), and John K. Smith, “The Ten-Year Invention: Neoprene and Du Pont Research, 1930-1939,” Technology and Culture 26 (January 1985): 34-55. ’Chandler’s concepts are developed in Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961); The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977); and Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).©1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3101 -0006$01.00 121 122 John Kenly Smith, Jr. studied. We now know a great deal about R&D at General Electric, AT&T, Du Pont, RCA, and Alcoa, and the outline of the story at Kodak and Westinghouse.1 David Mowery has pointed out that industrial research before World War II was centered primarily around chemistry and chemical technology and to a lesser extent the application of engineering and physics to mechanical and electrical phenomena.5 Once established, a science-based research tradition evolved in the laboratories, which achieved a degree of autonomy by the 1920s because it had shown that investment in science could pay large dividends. Having secured its position, the research laboratory often set its own goals, which sometimes conflicted with those of the corporation. Occasionally, however, the tension between science and business proved to be creative and led to important new technologies such as those of polymers and semiconductors. The popular image of industrial research at mid-century was that of scientists inventing new technologies in a systematic and predict­ able fashion. Through the medium of science, invention had ceased to be the concern of wild-eyed individualists.6 This interpretation was challenged in the late 1950s byJohnJewkes and others, who concluded that the sources of invention were diverse and that corporations fre­ quently prospered on the basis of technology that had been invented elsewhere.7Jewkes’s work led the next generation ofhistorians to a new interpretation of industrial research. ’General Motors is omitted from this list because we do not know much about the development of research as an institution within the corporation. I suspect that the development of R&D at GM followed a very different path than that of the sciencebased laboratories because there is no strong correlation between automobile manu­ facturing and a scientific discipline. Stuart W. Leslie shows how research at GM was dominated by Charles Kettering for decades, but we do not know' what traditions of...