Abstract
More than fifty years ago, economic historians John U. Nef and Werner Sombart debated whether military initiatives were the primary impetus for scientific and technological innovation. Sombart argued that war provided a forcing ground for technological advance, while Nef held that peacetime conditions spurred the production of innovations. Nef countered Sombart’s arguments with the observation that many inventions made in peacetime were subsequently put to military use in wartime, giving the appearance that conflict had called forth their development. This theoretical discussion took place in the context of the emergence of Nazi Germany, and Nef’s position represented a humanistic response to the rise of militarism. World War II interrupted the academic debate between Sombart and Nef, leaving it unresolved (1).
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Notes
J. U. Nef, The Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958 ).
J. Irvine and B. Martin, Foresight in Science: Picking the Winners ( Wolfboro, N.H.: Longwood, 1984 ).
S. Melman, Profits without Production ( New York: Knopf, 1983 ).
R. Storr, The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953 ).
S. Prescott, When MIT Was Boston Tech ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1954 ).
W. Rogers, “A Plan for a Polytechnic School in Boston” (1846), in Prescott, op. cit.,1954 (5), pp. 331–336.
J. Servos, “The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900–1939,” Isis 71 (1980), 531–549.
J. Servos, “The Knowledge Corporation: A. A. Noyes and Chemistry at Cal-Tech, 1915–1930,” Ambix 23 (1970), 175–186.
Technology Review 6 (1904), 198.
This is developed in greater detail in a forthcoming paper, tentatively entitled “Normative Change among Scientists: MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science.”
See J. Parrott, “Technological and Institutional Innovation in Massachusetts Electronics” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1985 ), p. 130.
Indeed, Bush later stated that “there were those who protested that the action of setting up the N.D.R.C. [National Defense Research Committee] was an end run, a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers, acting outside established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons. That, in fact, is exactly what it was” (V. Bush, Pieces of the Action [New York: Morrow, 1970 ], pp. 31–32 ).
O. Scott, The Creative Ordeal: The Story of Raytheon ( New York: Atheneum, 1974 ).
J. Baxter, Scientists against Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946 ).
See H. Etzkowitz, “Entrepreneurial Scientists and Entrepreneurial Universities in American Academic Science,” Minerva 21 (1983), 198–233, for a discussion of the emergence of group research in academia.
H. Pearson, Richard Cockburn MacLaurin ( New York: Macmillan, 1937 ).
P. Morse, In at the Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).
Compton, Bush, and Ford were the key members of a small circle of MIT administrators who strategized on issues concerning the Institute during the thirties (interview with James Killian, Cambridge, Mass., June 1985 ).
National Defense Research Committee Minutes, October 25, 1940, cited in H. Guerlac, “History of the Radiation Laboratory,” 1946, unpublished manuscript, MIT Archives, B-II, p. 81 (since published as Radar in World War II,vol. 8 of The History of Modern Physics 1800–1950 [New York: American Institute of Physics, 1987], in 2 vols.: A-C, D-E). While this conclusion is certainly true if the arena of comparison is limited to academic institutions, it is not necessarily the case if industrial research labs such as those that existed at AT&T, Dupont, and General Electric are considered.
J. Burchard, MIT in World War II ( New York: Tech Press/Wiley, 1948 ).
L. Foster, “Sponsored Research at MIT,” 1984, unpublished manuscript, MIT Division of Industrial Cooperation (85–33), Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, p. 45.
Burchard, op. cit.,1948 (20), p. 126.
Foster, op. cit.,1984 (21).
Ibid.,p. 25.
Ibid.,p. 28.
Ibid.
K. Compton in Burchard, op. cit.,1948 (20), p. vii.
See R. Clark, Tizard ( London: Methuen, 1965 ).
Guerlac, op. cit.,1946 (19), B-I, p. 24.
Ibid.,B-II, p. 75.
Ibid.,D-IV, p. 1.
Ibid.,D-IV, p. 2.
Ibid.,B-II, p. 61.
MIT Commission on MIT Education (AC 124), “Report of the Committee on Educational Survey to the Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” 1949, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries.
See B. O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983 ).
Interview with H. Edgerton, Cambridge, July 1984.
D. Nelkin, The University and Military Research: Moral Politics at MIT ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972 ).
A. Lanier, “The Strategic Defense Initiative and the Universities” (Ph.D. dissertation in progress, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder).
W. Aguren, “Large Nonfinancial Corporations as Venture Capital Sources” ( S.M. thesis, MIT Sloan School of Management, 1965 ).
Interview with William Congleton, August 1986.
Aguren, op. cit.,1965 (39), p. 33.
Ibid.,p.10.
W. Armitage, “The Role of the Venture Capitalist in New Ventures” ( M.S. thesis, Sloan School of Management, 1979 ).
N. Dorfman, Massachusetts High Technology Boom in Perspective ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Center for Policy Alternatives, 1983 ), p. 299.
David Noble, America by Design (New York: Knopf, 1977); Servos, op. cit.,1980 (7).
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Etzkowitz, H. (1988). The Making of an Entrepreneurial University: The Traffic Among MIT, Industry, and the Military, 1860–1960. In: Mendelsohn, E., Smith, M.R., Weingart, P. (eds) Science, Technology and the Military. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 12/1/2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2958-1_10
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