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06.11
A Brief History
of the U.S. Federal
Government and Innovation (Part I):
From
Independence to World War I (1787 – 1917)
By
IEEE History Center
StaffIntroduction
In recent years, a time of tight
budgets, there has been great debate in the
United States about the role of federal
government investment in the economy. Some
political thinkers suggest that the private
sector is always better than the central
government in directing resources, and that when
government involvement is necessary, it is
preferable at the state level (with perhaps the
exception of defense). The followers of this
school of thought single out technology as an
area where clearly the free market is better at
picking winners and allocating funds than any
centralized bureaucracy. Others, of course,
disagree. We therefore thought that it would be
interesting to briefly outline the history of
U.S. government involvement in technological
innovation, which turns out to be long, broad
and deep.
These sorts of political
arguments go back to the founding of the
republic. The United States Constitution of 1787
represents a brilliant compromise between those
who favored a strong central government with
broad powers (who came to be known as the
Federalist Party), and those whose favored
states rights and a narrow central government
(who came to be known as the Democratic
Republicans). Part of the compromise rests in
what is not said in the Constitution: it remains
a framework on which subsequent generations can
build a democratic government. For example, the
Constitution gives to the President the right to
appoint (with the advice and consent of the
Senate) “principle Officers in each of the
executive Departments,” but does not name the
departments. Originally, there were four
departments (the equivalents of what today are
called State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice);
now there are 16 such departments (not counting
a number of “cabinet-level” organizations).
With all of the arguments about
the scope of federal power, and the tendency
toward non-specificity, it is interesting to
note that the at the Constitutional Convention,
on 5 September 1787, based on earlier
discussions, the Committee of Detail proposed
that Congress have the power to “promote the
Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing
for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
Discoveries.” Despite all the months of
bickering in other areas, less than two weeks
later (17 September) this intellectual property
clause passed unanimously. In his very
first Presidential message, in January 1790,
George Washington, who was considered above
party politics, urged Congress to make as one of
its top priorities the passage of a patent law
that would bring the clause into practice and
“give effectual encouragement…to the
introduction of new and useful inventions.” The
law was passed within weeks, and the first
patent was issued by August. There is no doubt
that the consensus of America’s founders was
that the government should promote innovation.
As the examples in the rest of this article and
the two other articles in the series will show,
this consensus was to last for the 200 years
from 1787 – 1987 (25 years ago being a good
cut-off an analysis meant to be historical and
not political; that is the criterion for IEEE
Milestones) and contribute greatly to the
welfare of America and the world.
Armory Practice
One could, of course, argue that
patent law, like corporate law, exists only so
that the government can be a fair referee on a
neutral playing field, and the impetus for
invention is still held in the private sector.
The government, however, did not stay in that
position for long. First of all, there was broad
political agreement that a strong defense was
necessary for the young country, and in those
days (as today) military success depended on
advanced engineering. Originally, engineering
meant what we would today call civil engineering
— designing and building of roads, bridges,
tunnels and fortifications — plus the science of
attacking such works with artillery and other
siege devices. So, in 1802 President Thomas
Jefferson established the U.S. Military Academy
at West Point, New York, so that military
officers would not need to rely on foreign
training in these matters. The Army Corps of
Engineers was considered the most elite unit in
the U.S. military.
Of course, increasingly military
success in the 19th century came to
rely on weapons technology. As early as 1794,
President Washington asked Congress to designate
two armories that previously only stored
munitions — one in Springfield, Massachusetts,
the other at Harpers Ferry, Virginia — to
manufacture weapons so that the U.S. would not
have its defense depend on foreign trade.
Although part of the War department, Congress
established civilian positions at the armories
that had the ability to hire subcontractors on
site. Initially Congress gave in parallel grants
to private entrepreneurs to develop weapons
factories to improve production, most notably
the $5,000 advance given to the famous inventor
Eli Whitney in 1798 to build a gun factory at
Hamden, Connecticut.
Beginning with Col. Roswell Lee
at Springfield in 1815, however, the
Superintendents of the armories realized that by
giving employment to inventors they could not
just produce arms within the government, but
push the envelope of weapons technology. In 1819
Lee brought in Thomas Blanchard, who was just
beginning to establish himself as one of the
great inventors of the day. Blanchard soon
invented a lathe that could reliably produce
interchangeable gun barrels, followed by a
number of other devices that speeded up and
regularized production, and enabled semi-skilled
laborers to do the work of artisans. His
counterpart at Harpers Ferry, John H. Hall was
involved in similar work, and Lee developed
management techniques to oversee the new modes
of production. This “armory practice” not only
gave a boost to the young country’s defense, but
before long spread to other industries such as
New England clockmakers, accelerating the
industrial revolution. By 1854, British
parliament sent a delegation to its former
colony to investigate reports of new
manufacturing techniques that surpassed anything
in Europe. The delegation reported back that
there was indeed a new “American System of
Manufacture,” a name that stuck and a method
that then spread to Britain and around the
globe. This radical transformation in the global
mode of production was the direct result of U.S.
government funding and management, and it
illustrates two key points that will be seen
throughout the examples of government
innovation. First, the government can be most
effective when it intervenes in areas where
innovation is needed but the risk for any
individual entrepreneur to invest in the
research and development would be too great.
Second, under proper conditions the results of
this government investment can benefit society
well beyond its original narrow goals.
The Morse Telegraph
While weapons are of course of
paramount importance for defense, both the
military and mercantile sectors of the country
also needed to rely on efficient transportation
and communication. In the nineteenth century,
roads and canals were generally in the hands of
the States, which used a mixture of granting
private monopolies and providing public funding
to create a transportation network that also led
to improved technologies. Thus, technological
innovation stayed in private hands or in the
hands of the states. The building of the New
York State-owned Erie Canal served as a hands-on
classroom for many of the great civil engineers
of the age. So, for example, when the thrust of
the transportation system moved to the steam
locomotive, the advances were encouraged by a
mixture of private and state funding. John
Jervis, who designed the nation’s first
operating railroad for the Delaware and Hudson
canal system, had been trained on the Erie
Canal.
Increasingly, however,
interstate commerce meant that the federal
government needed to also get involved in the
transportation network. The high-tech (for the
day) invention and spread of the steamship led
to the development of law that allowed the
federal government to regulate both
transportation lanes, but also the public safety
of devices (i.e., steam engines). However, as
with patents, the government was protecting
public interest and serving as a referee, but
not directly influencing invention. The role of
“sparking” innovation, begun in the armories,
was to be next enhanced by a new invention — the
first to harness electricity — the electric
telegraph.
In 1832 the young American
artist Samuel F. B. Morse, along with his
partners Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, was one
of several inventors around the world trying to
develop electric telegraphy. He convinced the
U.S. Congress that it was in the interest of
this nation that this technology be perfected,
and Congress allotted $30,000 (a great sum of
money in those days) to build a demonstration
line between Washington, DC, and Baltimore,
Maryland. Many of the technological innovations
that would be incorporated into the ultimately
vast national telegraph grid were developed on
that initial government project — including
something as basic as using telegraph poles and
suspended wires rather than burying wires
underground. Various other government funding,
culminating in the Pacific Telegraph Act of
1860, led to the spread and improvement of
telegraphy.
Congress acted similarly in the
case of the major in-land transportation
technology, the railroad. Although railroads
were private affairs, the government wanted to
insure that they were interconnected into a
national transportation grid. The Pacific
Railroad Acts of the 1860s authorized the
issuance of government bonds, gave away federal
land and established standards for the industry.
On the eve of the Civil War that
temporarily divided a still young country on
political lines, technology — in the form of the
telegraph and the railroad — had joined it
culturally and economically. After the hiatus
caused by the war, the work was finished. On 10
May 1869, a ceremonial spike was driven in a
track in Utah to show that a transcontinental
railway system was complete and — in what some
have called the first nationwide media event —
the word “done” was telegraphed around the
country.
Such transportation and
communication systems were vital for a
continent-sized nation state (unlike many
smaller European countries), and this union was
the direct result of the investment by the
central government.
The Hollerith Machine
Another area where the U.S.
government had unusual needs was in counting its
citizens. The idea of counting citizens goes
back to ancient times, and several European
states pioneered the modern census in the 18th
century. The representative democracy of the
United States, however, required constant and
accurate counting at an unprecedented scale.
Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution called
for a full enumeration every 10 years, with the
first to be held within three years of the
seating of the first Congress; the first census
was conducted in 1790. The rapid growth of the
young country posed increasing challenges, and
the Census Bureau — the department charged with
carrying out the count and publishing the data —
had an active research arm, and developed a
series of advanced techniques and devices. Then,
following the 1880 census, a Census Bureau
employee named Herman Hollerith, who was
specifically given the task of improving
mechanization, had an idea for a new way to
automate the tallying based on what he had
learned at the Bureau. After four more years
doing development directly for the Bureau, he
left the bureau and developed and patented an
electric tabulating machine based on punched
cards (the use of punched cards to encode data
goes back to automated looms at the beginning of
that century). He was then able to establish a
firm to produce his machines and lease them back
to his former employer, where they were
successfully employed for the 1890 census. By
1891 Canada, Norway and Austria were also
leasing Hollerith machines for their census
activities. The technology spread to other
sectors of the economy, such as railroad fare
tabulation.
The government was not through,
however. The expense of the Hollerith leases in
1890 and 1900 led the Bureau’s research and
development arm to devise their own machines
that were improvements on those of Hollerith
while not infringing his patents. These Powers
machines were employed in 1910 (James Powers
later left the Bureau to form his own
company). Meanwhile, Hollerith’s company
struggled even as it expanded into new markets.
In 1918, Thomas J. Watson joined the firm —
which was to become known as IBM — and developed
important new business models. Those business
models plus the technology developed for the
U.S. census began the march toward a
technological revolution as important as the
American System of Manufacture — the computer
revolution!
Federal Research Begins
Private nonprofit organizations
for the advancement of science and engineering,
such as the American Philosophical Society and
the American Academy of Arts and sciences, had
existed for some time (the former from before
the founding of the Republic!). In 1836, the
U.S. Government accepted a bequest from a
wealthy British scientist, and, supplying some
additional resources, established a national
museum, the Smithsonian Institution, that also
carried out research in the natural sciences.
Something was still missing from the national
scene, however.
The U.S. Civil war was one of
the earliest conflicts in which inventors
consciously thought that innovative technology
could sway the tide of battle. The Gatling gun,
surveillance balloons, the Henry repeating
rifle, and the ironclad ship all came into use.
The conditions enabled a group of scientists and
engineers to successfully lobby Congress to
fulfill one of their long-time dreams, the
establishment of a national body for advising
the government on “any subject of science or
art,” with a broader mandate than the machine
shops of the armories. On 3 March 1863,
President Abraham Lincoln signed the National
Academy of Sciences into being. The NAS did not
receive direct funding, but any of the branches
or departments of government could supply it
with appropriations to carry out specific
projects. Over the years the NAS was involved in
various activities, growing to the point where
it spun off the National Research Council (1916)
and the National Academy of Engineering (1964).
War was not the only human
activity becoming increasingly technologized in
the late 19th century. As many areas
of basic production — including agriculture, the
most basic production of all — became
increasingly mechanized, the U.S. government was
concerned that not enough citizens were
sufficiently versed in science and engineering
to carry out the activities that were needed. In
a unique nod to the republican system, the
Congress, in the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890,
offered free federal land to states that would
then establish schools for teaching “such
branches of learning as are related to
agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The results
of these acts came to be known as “land-grant
colleges” (or “land-grant universities” or “land
grant institutions”). Immediately after the
passage of the first Morrill Act in 1862, the
state of Iowa accepted the Morrill provisions to
expand and better fund the already existing Iowa
State Agricultural College (now Iowa State
University). Other states with existing
agricultural and mechanical colleges followed
suit. In 1863, Kansas established Kansas State
University as the first institution made from
scratch under the act.
States soon recognized that
teaching of the practical arts had to go
hand-in-hand with cutting edge research in those
fields. Several states established agricultural
experiment stations to advance the frontiers of
science-based farming, often giving grants to
private colleges (the first was at Wesleyan
University in Connecticut). Congress realized
that greater investment was needed. The Hatch
Act of 1887 provided federal funding to states
to establish and run agricultural experiment
stations at their land-grant institutions. As of
2008, there were 76 land-grant institutions in
every U.S. state and territory (and the District
of Columbia). Over the years the research at
these public universities, funded by a
combination of federal, state and private
resources, has been responsible for countless
discoveries, inventions, innovations, and
patents in every field of agriculture,
engineering and science.
Medical Advances
It was not just a question of
swords vs. ploughshares, however. Even the
military had interest in soldiers extended
beyond simply supplying weapons. A key concern
was supplying medical care when they served and
afterwards when they were veterans. Way back in
1798, Congress established a Marine Hospital
Fund to provide health care for merchant seamen
by contracting to various hospitals; in 1871
this became centralized into the Marine Hospital
Service. In 1887, recognizing that science was
revolutionizing medical care, the Marine
Hospital Service established a “Hygienic
Laboratory.” Within months its first staff
member, Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun, identified
microscopically the bacillus that causes
cholera, putting American medical science on the
road to parity with that of Europe.
In 1902, Congress expanded the
scope of the Marine Hospital Service in response
to growing issues of public health, spinning it
off from the military and renaming it the Public
Health and Marine Hospital Service. This change
gave the Service jurisdiction over testing and
regulating vaccines; this is part of the
government’s public safety and level-playing
field roles. It also gave it broader funding and
license to do basic medical and biological
research, resulting in a great number of medical
discoveries. For example, in 1914, Joseph
Goldberger identified the cause of a then
prevalent disease, pellagra, as being a lack of
niacin and therefore was able to determine an
inexpensive and widely available cure. The
Public Health and Marine Hospital Service
eventually evolved into the National Institutes
of Health, probably the greatest medical
research operation in the world today.
The physical sciences and
engineering were not ignored in this period
either. Led by Thomas Edison, private
entrepreneurs established research and
development laboratories to deal with the ever
increasing complexity of technological systems.
There remained, however, an issue over which
standards these technological systems could use,
and the risks if multiple systems were not
compatible. Private, nonprofit associations had
tied to fill the void, notable the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE,
predecessor to the IEEE). The AIEE, founded in
1884, issued its first electrical standards (for
copper wire) in 1893. Congress decided that the
federal government needed to be involved, at
least, again as guarantor of a level playing
field, and in 1901 established the National
Bureau of Standards (NBS; today known as the
National Institute of Standards and Technology).
The research at NBS soon moved beyond mere
refereeing, however, and resulted in a great
many innovations. For example, much of the work
on early aviation instrumentation was conducted
at NBS.
Thus a network of federal
laboratories in a wide range of fields was in
place on the eve of what many consider the first
modern technological war.
Next Up: The World at War!
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