SciTech? What Would Frederick Jackson Turner Think?

[x CHE, August 1, 2003]


SciTech: The Forces Are With Us

By DANIEL J. KEVLES

It is a commonplace that the United States is a scientific and technological society. SciTech has been as essential to American development as, for example, migration and settlement, industrialization and reform, the movements for civil rights and women's rights. It has wrought enormous changes in American life since the early days of the Republic -- notably in national security, transportation, communications, work, manufacturing, consumer habits, leisure, and medical care. When, in 1799, George Washington contracted the respiratory infection that killed him, his doctors could do no more than bleed him, soak his feet, swathe his throat with flannel and ointments, and assist his breathing with steam. Now he would be treated with antibiotics, temporarily placed on a respirator, and most likely saved.

Perhaps no group is as familiar with SciTech -- especially the Tech -- as today's college students. They behave like astonishing parallel processors, able effortlessly and simultaneously to watch TV, surf the Web, listen to music, and do their homework. At the same time -- witness recent laments -- they seem to know little about their historical roots and connection to the larger society. Putting the story of science and technology into the American narrative could help connect students to the past and encourage them to recognize history as relevant. Yet most contemporary college textbooks grant SciTech little more than perfunctory treatment. They give the impression that technological innovation just happened, without cause or reason. In so doing, they encourage students to think that SciTech is beyond control, that it condemns people to victimhood before some technical juggernaut. SciTech, of course, did not -- and does not -- just happen. Like, say, constitution making, it has been a product of human agency, whether it was Edison sweating to forge his electric-light and power system, physicists struggling to produce an atomic bomb, or biologists trying to devise a vaccine for polio. And, having arisen from human effort, it has been (and remains) within the reach of democratic regulation and decision.

Convinced that neglecting SciTech does injustice to the narrative and shortchanges students, my colleagues and I decided to write Inventing America, a textbook that integrates science and technology organically into the story of American history. We found that the integration came naturally, precisely because the innovations and uses of SciTech exemplify familiar themes in the development of the United States.

Both the innovations and uses have arisen from incentives of circumstance and policy -- public, private, and, to an important degree, some combination of the two. In the era of colonial dependency, Americans began importing knowledge, technology, plants, and animals from abroad, a process that mirrored the import of capital, people, and culture. Intellectual piracy in the form of designs for spinning jennies, which the British tried to keep secret, helped lay the foundation for the manufacture of textiles. But Americans also began accumulating their own intellectual capital. They gathered flora and fauna, contributed to knowledge of the physical world, and, like Benjamin Franklin with his lightning rod, exploited what they learned for practical purposes.

From the founding of the Republic, SciTech was encouraged by both state and federal governments for economic development and, in the federal case, for national defense as well. In the 19th century, the national interest in exploration and settlement led to the establishment of governmental surveys of the land and its resources. The Lewis and Clark expedition early in the century was followed in 1838-42 by the U.S. Navy's Wilkes Expedition, a flotilla of six small ships that sailed from Virginia around Cape Horn to the Fiji Islands, Hawaii, and on to Oregon and Washington, gathering some 160,000 zoological, ornithological, botanical, and ethnographic specimens. In the middle third of the century, some states mounted geological surveys to ascertain the location and extent of resources such as minerals and timber. After the Civil War, the federal government fostered a grand reconnaissance of the West to assess possible routes of the proposed transcontinental railroad.

Governmental encouragement of SciTech also took the form of legal, administrative, and financial incentives advanced directly or indirectly to private enterprise. Before 1787, the states enacted patent laws to foster invention, and the federal Constitution authorized Congress to do the same. Not long after the War of 1812, the U.S. Army collaborated with gun manufacturers to pioneer the development of interchangeable parts, an innovation that spread to other manufacturers and helped facilitate America's first industrial revolution, which depended upon mechanical invention and steam engines.

The greatest public-private technological collaboration of the 19th century was the railroads, their development initially fostered by the states and, then, the federal government. The United States Military Academy at West Point, the nation's leading engineering college until after the Civil War, provided part of the technical expertise that enabled the construction of the railroads (as well as the industrial system). Most of the rest came from private machine shops, where young men learned to design, use, and maintain machine tools and steam engines. The railroads themselves enormously stimulated economic development, not only by providing a fast transportation system but also by creating a huge demand for iron, steel, coal, and the telegraph lines that followed the tracks.

The consequences of industrial technology were, of course, by no means uniformly beneficial. In the hands of the new industrial owners, technology could serve to subdue and control workers. The Lowell, Mass., textile mills, initially paternalistic, undercut the leverage of skilled spinners by adopting machinery that could be operated by relatively cheap, unskilled laborers, many of them young women. In the mid-1840s, a mill superintendent remarked, "I regard my work people just as I regard my machinery. So long as they can do my work for what I choose to pay them, I keep them, getting out of them all I can." Such uses of technological innovation foreshadowed innovations in production, like the assembly line, that would subordinate human beings to machinery.

Not surprisingly, an ambivalence toward SciTech came to pervade American culture. Romantics -- writers, painters, poets, and essayists -- celebrated untrammeled nature, and reformers sought ways to control or escape from machine civilization. But landscape painters like Thomas Cole depicted water mills and railroads, and the utopian communities established in the 1840s were more concerned with fleeing from the cash nexus than from technology as such. Indeed, technology inspired many reformers to think that, if machinery could be perfected, so could society. Groups like the Shakers embraced machine technology as a way of emancipating themselves from burdensome manual labor so that they could devote more time to spiritual fulfillment.

After the Civil War, health reformers were inspired by their day's scientific understanding to wage war on disease. Basing their actions on theories that disease derived from filthy miasmas, they persuaded cities to remove garbage, clear horse droppings, empty privies, and install clean-water systems. Their theories proved to be incorrect: It was not the filth as such that caused disease but the infectious organisms that thrived in it. But reform efforts benefited public health by reducing the breeding grounds for the organisms.

In the late 19th century, as the nation's physical frontier closed, inventors, entrepreneurs, and, then, corporations turned increasingly to a new frontier -- the laboratory. Between the nation's centennial and its sesquicentennial, entire new industries arose from the physical sciences. Chemistry yielded, for example, petroleum, petroleum jelly, photography, celluloid, plastics, and artificial fertilizers. Physics spun off the telephone, electric light and power, X-rays, movies, radio, and aircraft. Electricity lit up the night, enabled the development of streetcar suburbs, and eased daily life with conveniences such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and air conditioning.

Leading businessmen recognized the need to invest in innovation. Thomas Edison had shown the way by organizing what he called his "invention factory" at Menlo Park, N.J. After the turn of the century, several of the nation's new high-technology companies -- notably AT&T, General Electric, and DuPont -- established industrial-research laboratories. Going beyond Edison's model, those enterprises fostered not only invention but also the development of basic knowledge in areas relevant to their technologies.

Health also benefited from what biologists were learning in the laboratory. Beginning in the 1880s, with Robert Koch's discovery that bacteria were agents of disease, the miasmatic theory of contagion was replaced by the infectious theory. That was effectively applied during the construction of the Panama Canal to suppress water- and mosquito-borne diseases by spraying oil on streams and swamps and by digging drainage ditches. Through the 20th century, bacteriology and virology led the way in developing vaccines, antitoxins, and, then, antibiotics. More than 300 prescription drugs were available in 1961 that had not been 20 years earlier; by 1960, the average life expectancy at birth had risen to almost 70 from 63 in 1940.

Through the first third of the 20th century, much of the development in industrial technology and medicine was the product of private enterprise, but government patronage contributed to the changes wrought by laboratory SciTech. Scientists at state and federally supported agricultural experiment stations used disciplines such as genetics and bacteriology to improve plants and livestock. The federal government assisted the fledgling aircraft industry by, for example, awarding contracts for the carriage of airmail and the development of military aircraft. During the New Deal, the expanded federal welfare role led to the construction of the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority for flood control and power generation; to programs of soil conservation; and to the establishment of the National Cancer Institute.

But with World War II, the federal government became the dominant patron of scientific research and technological development in the United States. The wartime mobilization produced microwave radar, electronic computers, jet aircraft, penicillin, and, of course, the atomic bomb. In the postwar decades, federal patronage of research for defense and for health stimulated comparable innovations, providing knowledge and trained people that were spun out into the civilian economy, where established corporations and entrepreneurial start-ups created, most notably, the computer industry, the biotechnology industry, and the Internet.

Through most of the postwar period, SciTech contributed to increases in productivity, as industries invested heavily in labor-saving technology, so that, for example, between 1945 and 1960, the number of hours required to produce a car dropped by half. But, just as in the early days of the textile industry, the introduction of labor-saving machinery could cut two ways. Agribusiness responded to federal policies designed to raise farm wages by replacing workers with machines. In the South, the increasing demands of African-Americans, including sharecroppers, for decent jobs, housing, education, and voting rights led farmers to adopt mechanization as a means of driving complainants off the land and out of the region.

Yet technologies could also be liberating. Portable radios, especially the transistorized variety, emancipated teenagers from the parentally controlled listening environment of the large radio console; along with tape players and CD players, radios contributed to the creation of an autonomous teen culture. Margaret Sanger had long encouraged work on a contraceptive pill that would allow women sexual lives free from the fear of pregnancy. The pill arrived in the early 1960s, its development having been made possible in part by the research into the physiology of reproduction that was financed by Sanger's wealthy ally, Katherine McCormick, a graduate of MIT and an heir of the reaper fortune.

SciTech also figured significantly in the creation of the regulatory state. In the early 1850s, the federal government had stepped in to regulate the safety of steamboats plying interstate waterways, an intervention that foreshadowed the establishment of federal regulation of the railroads, food and drugs, communications, the airwaves, and air transport. In some cases, science-based regulation for a perceived public good led to curtailments of individual freedom that later generations would deplore. One such instance was the eugenic sterilization laws passed by numerous states and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. Later advances in human genetics, however, contributed to the enlargement of reproductive freedom. For example, among the arguments advanced in Roe v. Wade in favor of the right to abortion was that amniocentesis might reveal that the fetus is doomed to suffer a genetic disease or disability.

The more SciTech pervaded American life, however, the more people regarded it with ambivalence, especially as they grew more sensitive to environmental preservation and the protection of minority rights. Dams might generate the electric power needed for economic development in the West, but they also inundated raw nature and forced residents, often Native Americans, from their homes. Nuclear-power plants might have been hailed as providing electricity too cheap to meter; as the accidents at Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl made clear, they posed their own hazards.

The chemical and plastics industries supplied people with advantages ranging from microwaveable dishes to lighter automobile components, but they also contributed to pollution and destruction of wildlife. Personal computers gave millions convenient access to an infinite world of information; they also afforded public and private agencies unprecedented opportunities for surveillance and the invasion of privacy. High-tech medicine extended health and life; it also assisted in depersonalizing medical care, vastly increasing its cost, and creating dire life-and-death choices. Americans have lived for more than half a century with the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Now their sense of security is bedeviled by fears of chemical and biological weapons.

All those ambivalences highlight the fact that the direction of SciTech has never been more crucially a matter for public policy and democratic decision. The contemporary role of SciTech in maintaining the nation's security, economy, environment, health, and intellectual vitality is indisputable. Exploration of the forces that have shaped its impact on the United States can equip people to deal with similar forces at work now. Not to examine them historically is to impair understanding of our nation's past and to menace its future.

Daniel J. Kevles is a professor of history at Yale University. He is co-author, with Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, and Alexander Keyssar, of the textbook Inventing America: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton, 2002).

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education