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07.11
A Brief History
of the U.S. Federal
Government and Innovation (Part II):
From
World War I through World War II (1917 – 1945)
By Sheldon
Hochheiser, Ph.D., Archivist and Institutional
Historian, IEEE History Center
Radio
In
Part I, published last month,
we showed how the United States government
supported and encouraged innovation in a variety
of ways, from the drafting of the Constitution
in the late eighteenth century through the early
years of the twentieth century. This support and
encouragement continued through the first part
of the twentieth century, catalyzed in
particular by the needs of two World Wars.
World War I broke out in Europe in
1914. Although the United States was a neutral
nation until 1917, the war in Europe had a
substantial impact on the United States,
particularly for shipping and communications.
Wireless (i.e., radio)
telegraphy, first demonstrated by the
Italian-British inventor Guglielmo Marconi in
1901 had become by the 1910s an important
communications medium, especially for ships at
sea. It was the first technology that allowed
ships to communicate at distances greater than
line of sight. Its rapid widespread, but uneven,
adoption led Congress to enact the Wireless
Ship Act in 1910, which required that all
ships steaming in and out of U.S. ports,
carrying 50 passengers between ports greater
than 200 miles, have radio equipment and skilled
wireless telegraphy operators. Since this
required more ships to install equipment, it
increased the quantity of radio transmissions,
creating more interference and transmission
difficulties, in part because of the nature of
the spark transmitters then in use.
On 15 April 1912, the RMS
Titanic, likely the grandest ocean liner built
to date, struck an iceberg and sunk on its
maiden voyage. Because the Titanic had wireless
equipment and operators, it was able to put out
a distress call, which was received by operators
along the eastern seaboard, as well as the
operator on one nearby ship, the RMS Carpathia,
four hours away, which was able to rescue 705 of
the Titanic’s more than 2,000 passengers and
crew. In part, the loss of life was due to the
Titanic having insufficient lifeboats, but
partial blame can also be attributed to the fact
that the signal was never received by some other
nearby ships, either because their operators had
gone off duty, or because, being freighters,
they had no radio facilities. The sinking of the
Titanic is, of course, one of the most infamous
naval disasters in history, the subject of,
among other things, an Oscar-winning 1997 film.
But more to the point of our
story, the Titanic disaster led to the passage
of the Radio Act of 1912, which in addition to
requiring that all radio operators be licensed
by the government and that all ships have
wireless operators on duty at all times, gave
the Navy exclusive control of a large portion of
the radio spectrum, and required it to build a
string of land stations to communicate with both
naval and commercial vessels. These
installations were among the first to use
superior continuous wave transmitters. The Navy
became interested in promoting innovations in
wireless. Thus, in 1915, the Navy agreed to put
the antenna at its Arlington, Virginia, station
to use with AT&T’s experimental vacuum-tube
radio amplifier to accomplish the first
transoceanic transmission of the human voice
(rather than Morse Code). This success led to
the Navy working with AT&T to develop
ship-to-shore voice radio communications, which
bore fruit in the 1920s.
Once the U.S. entered the War in
1917, the Navy took over all radio facilities in
the United States for the duration, and funded a
variety of advances in continuous wave
technology, including design and construction of
a 200-kilowatt continuous wave transmitter
devised by Ernst Alexanderson. Overall, under
Navy custody, radio equipment became more
standardized, powerful and efficient. The Navy’s
needs for better communications led to many
incremental improvements in then-new vacuum tube
technology, producing more sensitive, rugged and
reliable devices for use as radio wave detectors
and generators. Both the Navy and the Army
supported research into air-to-ground radio
communications. When AT&T produced a successful
system in 1918, it came too late in the war to
be widely deployed.
The Navy supported innovations
in several other areas in the 1910s, including
the improvement of gyroscopes and gyrocompasses
by Elmer Sperry at his Sperry Gyroscope company.
Naval Research Comes Onboard
In 1915, at renowned inventor
Thomas Edison’s urging, Secretary of the Navy
Josephus Daniels established an Edison-led Naval
Consulting Board to harness technological
innovation for naval preparedness. The Board,
composed largely of leading industrial
researchers, had two charges: 1) to evaluate
inventions from the public, and 2) to sponsor
appropriate research. The former came to almost
nothing; while 110,000 suggestions came in from
across the country, the board only found 110
worthy of development, out of which but one was
put into production. The latter led to funding
several research projects, most prominently a
laboratory in Nahant, Massachusetts, devoted to
development of a sound detection device for
submarine detection. Willis Whitney, chief of
the General Electric Company laboratory, led
this facility, and staffed it with prominent
researchers from GE (including future Nobel
Laureate Irving Langmuir), AT&T and other
companies. This lab developed a detector known
as the “C tube.
As mentioned in the first
installment of this series, the late 19th
and early 20th centuries saw the
birth and growth of U.S. federal laboratories.
However, the early labs tended to be small in
scope and to concentrate on being clearinghouses
of research conducted in the private sector.
Therefore, despite the individual inventions
above, the most enduring achievement of the
Naval Consulting Board was its recommendation
that the Navy should have a significant in-house
research capability. Congress appropriated funds
for a standalone organization in 1916, but
construction did not begin until 1920. The Naval
Research Laboratory finally opened in 1923.
The Naval Consulting Board
deliberately excluded members of the National
Academy of Science; Edison preferred practical
men to academics. The Academy responded by
setting up its own research unit in 1916, the
National Research Council. Like the Consulting
Board, the NRC established a facility to attack
the problem of submarine detection. The NRC
facility, in New London, Connecticut, devised a
superior detector. The United States had
dispatched 110 wooden sub-chasers equipped with
the NRC equipment to the English Channel and the
Adriatic by July 1918. On 11 May 1918, President
Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order
transforming the NRC into a permanent research
arm of the Academy, with a charter to stimulate
research and development in science, promote
cooperative undertakings, and to disseminate
scientific knowledge. After the war, NRC
sponsored projects became less closely aligned
with government needs, and throughout the
following two decades relied chiefly on
foundation funds to sponsor the work authorized
under its government charter. Among the projects
it sponsored was Ernest O. Lawrence’s pioneering
development of the cyclotron.
Research Takes Flight
The airplane was another new
technological area in the early 20th
century that had significant implications for
both civil and military affairs. Largely
with military issues in mind, Congress established NACA, the National Advisory Committee on
Aeronautics, in 1915, as a rider to that year’s
Naval appropriation bill. NACA, a committee of
unpaid volunteers from both government and the
private sector, had a charter “to supervise and
direct the scientific study of the problem of
flight, with a view to their practical
solution.” In its first few years, it mainly
acted as a coordinator, arranging for research
in government or university laboratories. In
1920, NACA opened its own research and testing
facility, the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in
Virginia. Within five years, Langley had a staff
of 100, an active research program, and what
were widely considered the best wind tunnels in
the world. Among Langley’s projects in the late
1920s was the investigation of the drag caused
by fixed landing gear. This led to the rapid
rise of retractable landing gear. NACA worked on
projects for both military and civilian
aircraft, with increasing activity as the nation
rearmed in the late 1930s, investigating among
other things, airfoil shapes for wings and
propellers. NACA opened additional labs in
Sunnyvale, California, in 1940 and Cleveland,
Ohio, in 1941. NACA continued its work into the
post-war years, and was incorporated into the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) at the agency’s establishment in 1958.
Nonmilitary Research
The military was not the only
area in which federal research increased during
the early 20th century. Congress
established the Bureau of Mines within the
Department of the Interior in acts passed in
1910 and 1913. Part of the Bureau’s charter was
to establish mining experiment stations, built
on the model of state agricultural experiment
stations discussed last month, to conduct
research in this area. The first station opened
in Pittsburgh in 1913. By 1921, there were 13
regional stations, most associated with
universities, and each focusing on a different
research area. For example, the station in
Berkeley California focused on metallurgy, while
the station in Reno focused on rare and precious
metals. Among the many technological innovations
to come out of the Bureau of Mines over the
years were improvements in mine safety and
safety equipment, improved production processes
for titanium and zirconium, and lower-cost
methods to isolate radium for cancer treatment.
Congress closed the Bureau in 1995, and
transferred its functions to other agencies.
In 1930, Congress changed the
name of the Public Health Service’s Hygienic
Laboratory (discussed in the previous month’s
essay) to the National Institute of Health (NIH),
while expanding its mission to include
fellowships in biological sciences and medicine.
In 1937, Congress created the National Cancer
Institute (NCI) to award grants and fellowships
to non-federal scientists for research on
cancer. NCI soon constructed its own research
building on the NIH’s Bethesda campus, and in
1944, officially became a part of the NIH. The
NCI’s grant program also expanded to include all
of NIH.
Vannevar Bush and the Lead-up
to War
By 1938, engineer (and AIEE
member) Dr. Vannevar Bush was Vice President of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a
position he had arrived at after being a
professor of power engineering there. Bush was
also the inventor of the differential analyzer,
an advanced analog computing machine. Convinced
that war was coming, he accepted a position in
1939 as head of the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, a major philanthropic funder of
scientific research, so that he would be in a
position to influence events in Washington. By
early 1940, he had become convinced that the
coming war would be “a highly technological
struggle” that would require not just the armed
forces, but the active involvement of civilian
researchers to develop and produce the
technological advances that victory would
require. In 1939, Bush became first co-chair and
then chair of NACA. On 12 June 1940, Bush
convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
establish the National Defense Research
Committee (NDRC) as a new agency, along the lines of NACA and the National Academy, but devoted to
more broadly coordinating and sponsoring
civilian research on technologies of potential
use to the military. Two days later, Roosevelt
announced the NDRC’s creation, with Bush as the
agency’s first chair. Bush formed a
distinguished committee that included academics,
such as Harvard President James Conant and MIT
President Karl Compton; industrial researchers,
such as Bell Labs President Frank Jewett; and
senior government officials, including the
Commissioner of Patents and senior officers from
the Army and the Navy. The NDRC would coordinate
research on the mechanism and devices of
warfare, and finance that research through
grants to existing civilian institutions. Bush
asked the military for guidance on what projects
were needed, and began awarding contracts to
leading civilian institutions, chiefly top
universities like MIT, Cal Tech and John
Hopkins, top industrial research labs like
AT&T’s Bell Labs, RCA and GE, and a few top
non-profit independent institutions like the
Battelle Institute and the Rand Corporation.
In May 1941, Roosevelt
established the Office of Scientific Research
and Development (OSRD), with the NDRC as its main
operating unit and a Committee on Medical
Research as a second unit. Bush became head of
the OSRD. The OSRD, which reported directly to
Roosevelt, was set up to receive congressional
appropriations, and given additional authority
for development — it could fund the manufacture of
small batches of arms or other equipment based
on the research it funded. By the end of the war
in 1945, the NDRC/OSRD had channeled more than
$450 million (around 5 billion in 2011 dollars)
in hundreds of contracts to dozens of
institutions on a wide range of innovative
projects. This pattern of government funding of
civilian sector research continued and spread
after the war. The NDRC was reconstituted as the
National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950.
NDRC-funded researchproduced
innovations in many areas, from proximity fuses
to anti-submarine measures to innovative
vehicles and pioneering work in operations
research. But the largest and best-known project
(after wartime secrecy was lifted, of course)
was the application of the new British
discoveries in radar to the problem of aircraft
detection.
Large-Scale Projects
In September 1940, British
chemist Henry Tizard led a mission to the United
States to secure American cooperation in
development and production of a number of
British innovations of potential military value,
most notably in radar — the use of radio waves
to detect and track enemy aircraft. He brought
with him a key British innovation — the cavity
magnetron, a microwave generating device that
was both smaller and more powerful than anything
previously known, and thus ideal for radar use.
In Bush and the NDRC, he found a receptive
audience, as the NDRC had already set up a
subcommittee on microwaves. This subcommittee
selected MIT as the location for the development
of microwave radar technology. Nuclear Physicist
Lee Du Bridge of the University of Rochester was
chosen to direct the new lab, with Isadore Rabi
of Columbia as his associate director. The name
Radiation Laboratory was chosen to be
deliberately misleading, to imply that the lab
was working on Nuclear Physics. An impressive
number of physicists, engineers and other
technical professionals came from around the
country to work at the Rad Lab. At its peak, the
Rad Lab had 3,500 employees and a budget of $4
million per month.
Over the course of the war, the
Rad Lab produced more than a hundred valuable
microwave radar products of vital importance for
the war effort. Two of the most critical
contributions were microwave early-warning
(MEW) radars, which effectively nullified the
V-1 bomb threat to London, and air-to-surface
vessel (ASV) radars, which turned the tide on
the U-boat threat to Allied shipping. Industrial
production of Rad Lab innovations totaled over
$1.5 billion. The Rad Lab closed on 31 December
1945, and its staff dispersed, many returning to
their pre-war institutions. The Rad Lab became a
model for large-scale government support of
university-affiliated government-supported
research laboratories. The technologies
developed by the Rad Lab led to many civilian
applications in the post war years, including
radar for weather forecasting and air traffic
control.
In 1991, in conjunction with a
reunion organized by the IEEE Microwave Theory
and Techniques Society on the occasion of the
Rad Lab’s 50th anniversary, The IEEE
History Center undertook a major oral history
project to interview a cross-section of Rad Lab
staff. Forty one interviews were recorded over
the course of reunion.
These interviews are available on the IEEE
Global History Network.
In 1939, President Roosevelt
received a letter signed by Albert Einstein
warning that it might be possible to use uranium
chain reactions to construct a new type of
extremely powerful bomb. Roosevelt set up a
committee to investigate, which in 1940
recommended that this could be feasible, and
that in addition, German work suggested that
nuclear fission was possible. The committee
recommended that the NDRC pursue the question
with an eye towards producing a nuclear weapon.
The NDRC S-1 Uranium Committee sponsored
research at several universities, which in turn
concluded that there were several possible
routes to separating the fissionable uranium
isotope 238 needed for nuclear fission from
isotope 235, and that a nuclear pile might be
sustained that could produce the newly
discovered element plutonium for use in a bomb.
In May 1942, Bush concluded that it was time to
move from research to the design and operation
of production facilities, and that that would best
be done under the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps assumed control of
initially most, and eventually the entire
project, which it named the Manhattan
Engineering District. Led by Brigadier General
Leslie Groves, it became better known as the
Manhattan Project. From this point, the largest
part of the atomic bomb effort was development
and construction, with scientists playing an
important role. The Corps undertook the
construction of an entirely new city — Oak
Ridge, Tennessee — to house both the facilities
for three different uranium enrichment
processes, and ultimately 40,000 workers; a
second facility, in Hanford Washington, for the
nuclear pile (or reactor) to produce Plutonium;
and a third facility, in Los Alamos, New Mexico,
led by Physicist Robert Oppeheimer, to house the
scientists and engineers who would design and
produce the bombs to be made from the resulting
material. Overall, the project employed 130,000
people at a cost of more than $2 billion (more
than $22 billion in 2011 dollars.) The Manhattan
Project, as is well known, succeeded. Uranium
238, produced by a combination of multiple
processes at Oak Ridge, was used to make a bomb,
designed at Oak Ridge, and dropped on Hiroshima,
Japan on 6 August 1945. Plutonium, produced at
Hanford, was used to make two bombs, one tested
in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, and
the second dropped on Nagasaki Japan on 9 August
(three days after the first nuclear bomb, Little
Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima). Japan
surrendered on 14 August, ending World War II.
In 1947, the civilian Atomic
Energy Commission succeeded the military
Manhattan Engineering District.
One major task faced by the U.
S. Army Department of Ordnance was the
calculation of ballistic tables. In order to
shoot a gun at a moving target, such as an enemy
aircraft, one had to aim at where the target
would be, rather than where it was. This was
accomplished through the calculation and
publication of ballistic tables for use by gun
operators. The calculations were laboriously
made, one at a time, by large numbers of
generally female computers working at mechanical
calculators, sometime with the help of one more
advanced device, the differential analyzer. One
of the sites contracted to do this work during
the war was the Moore School of Engineering at
the University of Pennsylvania. Two staff
members there, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly
produced a proposal for a much more advanced
device, and Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer (ENIAC) that held the promise, if
successful, of doing calculations orders of
magnitude faster, and with greater operational
flexibility. The Ballistics Research Laboratory
signed the first of several contracts on 5 July
1943 to underwrite ENIAC’s development.
Development work began in secret on the massive
machine. The many component units were installed
at the Moore School one at a time as they were
completed. After the installation of thirty
separate units, final assembly began in October
1945, although the war was by then over. On 14
February 1946, the Army and the University of
Pennsylvania announced ENIAC to the public. On
the following day, the university officially
turned ENIAC over to the Aberdeen Proving
Grounds of the Ordnance Department. The Ordnance
Department moved it to Aberdeen in 1947, and
operated it until 1955. ENIAC was an enormous,
and in retrospect crude and awkward machine. It
contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes,
measured eight feet high, three feet wide and
almost 100 feet long, filled a 30-by-50 foot
room, and weighed thirty tons. ENIAC was also
the first general-purpose electronic digital
computer, and thus strongly influenced the
development of the modern, stored-program,
general-purpose computer.
During World War I and World War
II, the United States government sponsored more
innovations than can be mentioned in a short
essay. Perhaps most significantly, this
turbulent period in our nation’s history was
marked by the government’s investment in
innovation in venues beyond government
laboratories. The federal government built upon
the means and techniques employed in World War
II in a further expansion of its established
role of support and encouragement for innovation
in the Cold-War environment of the post-World
War II years, a period that will be discussed in
the final part of this series next month.
Sheldon
Hochheiser, Ph.D., is archivist and
institutional historian at the IEEE History
Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
N.J.
Visit the IEEE History
Center's Web page at:
www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center.
Comments may be submitted to
todaysengineer@ieee.org.
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