Changing Partners: The Mellon Institute, Private Industry, and the Federal Patron JOHN W. SERVOS In 1966, when plans were announced for the merger of the Mellon Institute and Carnegie Institute of Technology, architects of the merger forecast that “two plus two would equal five.” By joining the Mellon Institute’s facilities, endowment, and traditions of postdoctoral research to the faculty, plant, and graduate programs of neighboring Carnegie Tech, an institution would be created that would make Pittsburgh as famous for science as for steel and thereby restore that city to the forefront of technological innovation. Federal research dollars, at tracted by powerful science departments, would underwrite this renais sance. Predictably, publicists looked east and west to define the new Carnegie-Mellon University; it would soon be ready, wrote one editor, “to move into the Olympics of technical education with schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Tech nology.”1 The official rhetoric exemplified two assumptions shared by many scientists and science administrators in the postwar era: new technologies often flow from scientific research that is free of practical goals, and federal money is instrumental to scientific, institutional, and civic development. These assumptions were not shared by the founders of the Mellon Institute. Conceived on the eve ofWorld War I, the Mellon Institute had, during its first forty years, embodied many of the values of the generation that had made Pittsburgh a 20th-century workshop of the world. Although housed in a magnificently appointed and manycolumned temple, the Mellon Institute had been built, not to celebrate Dr. Servos is professor of history at Amherst College. He thanks Hugh Hawkins, John Carson, Robert Kohler, Joel Tarr, David Hounshell, William C. Summers, Gary Thomas, William M. Kaufman, and Guy Berry for comments on earlier versions of this article and Gabrielle Michalek and Rebecca Abromitis for their help at the archives of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Work on this project was facilitated by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities Travel to Collections Program and the National Science Foundation (grant BIR-8922464). 1Pittsburgh Press, September 16, 1966, p. 22. See also “Carnegie University: New Institu tion Emerging in Pittsburgh,” Science 155 (1967): 673-76.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3502-0005$01.00 221 222 John W. Servos disinterested research, but to solve the immediate problems of industry. It had valued patents over publications and product improvements over citations in scientific journals. Financed by the bankers who had underwritten Pittsburgh’s expansion, it was run by trustees and manag ers who believed in a kind of science that could both serve private enterprise and support itself by doing so. Although the name of the Mellon Institute survived the merger with Carnegie Tech, the institute’s program and values did not. Its dissolu tion, however, did not commence in 1966; rather, the decision to join the Mellon Institute to Carnegie Tech came at the end of more than a decade of erosion and soul-searching. This article traces the decline of the Mellon Institute during the postwar era. The story is worth recounting, not only because the institute was an important and influential experiment in the organization of industrial research, but also because its history affords us entry into debates that affected more than one institution in the postwar years: debates between proponents of applied research and basic research and between strategists who looked to government for the resources to finance science and those who looked to corporations. Most important, the history of the Mellon Institute offers us another perspective on the sea change that affected science and its institutions in postwar America. It has become a truism to say that federal patronage transformed the practice of science in the United States during and after World War II. Massive federal outlays for research and science education altered the expectations of scientists, the nature of their equipment, and the scale and character of their institutions. Recent historical scholarship has begun to give us some appreciation of the dimensions and significance of this revolution.2 As yet, however, we possess few studies of how scientific institutions that were built...