Sabine Clarke

Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 19161950 Author(s): By Sabine Clarke
Reviewed work(s): Source: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 285-311 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653094 . Accessed: 05/05/2012 03:17
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Pure Science with a Practical Aim

The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916 1950
By Sabine Clarke*
ABSTRACT
Historians tell us that the term fundamental research entered the discourse of science in the interwar period as a synonym for pure science and that both terms referred to work concerned with the search for knowledge, without thought of application. The aim of this paper is to show that when the expression fundamental research was used in Britain during and after World War I, it had a particular status that was not equivalent to pure science. In the annual reports of the Department of Scientic and Industrial Research (DSIR) fundamental research was endowed with multiple meanings, including work that was orientated towards some practical goal. The uidity of the meaning of fundamental research in the reports of the DSIR can be understood as a strategy; fundamental research was a rhetorical term that served to persuade more than one audience of the legitimacy of the DSIR and its policies.
ISTORIANS AND SOCIOLOGISTS of science have urged us to consider the contingent nature of the meanings of the expressions science and technology, and the rhetorical and ideological use of these terms. The terms fundamental research and basic research, however, have largely been treated as xed concepts in histories of twentiethcentury science. Some recent literature has attempted to locate the rst use of these expressions in the period between 1930 and 1950, and has considered the reasons for their uptake by commentators on science during the course of the twentieth century. Fundamental research and basic research are said to have came into widespread use as alternatives to the older expression pure science. It is claimed that when used by scientists in the twentieth century, fundamental research, basic research, and pure
* Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, 45-47 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE, United Kingdom. I would like to thank David Edgerton, Waqar Zaidi, and the anonymous referees of Isis for the extremely helpful comments that were given on various drafts of this article. Isis, 2010, 101:285311 2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2010/1012-001$10.00 285
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science referred to the same thingwork concerned with the acquisition of scientic knowledge, without thought of application.1 This paper is concerned with the use of the expression fundamental research in Britain by the Department of Scientic and Industrial Research (DSIR), created in 1916. The term fundamental research had not been previously used by government bodies for research in Britain, such as the Development Commission or the Medical Research Committee, and it is difcult to know for certain where the expression had come from. One thing is certain, however; the term had been in use from an earlier period than that identied by Ronald Kline who suggests that discomfort with some of the connotations of the term pure science led to the introduction of the term fundamental research during the 1930s by industrial researchers in America. The journal Science used the phrases fundamental research and fundamental science in articles on the organization and funding of agricultural science in the United States as early as 1895.2 In Britain, fundamental research was a term that came into common use as part of a discourse that accompanied the creation of new state-funded research bodies, beginning with the DSIR. This discourse was not concerned with characterizations of the nature of science, but was concerned specically with dening the nature of research as this activity increasingly became the focus of attention by the state and industry. This paper considers the rhetorical nature of this research discourse as expressed in the ofcial publications of the DSIR. This discourse generally avoided invoking the ideal of pure science. Instead, the DSIR spoke of the need to support fundamental research, and did not treat that research as equivalent to pure science as scholars have claimed. In its focus on language this paper is a contribution to a body of scholarship that has sought to investigate the strategies employed in scientic discourse to construct and disseminate knowledge claims, demarcate science from non-science, and assert the cultural value of science. Literature of the last type, focused on Britain in the rst half of the twentieth century, has often been informed by the notion of public science proposed by Frank Turner; he has encouraged scholars to consider proclamations on the nature of science as a rhetoric concerned with gaining such things as nancial support and policy inuence for scientists.3 In addition, historians of medicine have produced increasingly
1 Otto Mayr, The Science-Technology Relationship as a Historiographical Problem, Technology and Culture, 1976, 17:663 672; Thomas Gieryn, Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from NonScience: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists, American Sociological Review, 1983, 48:781795; Walter G. Vincenti and David Bloor, Boundaries, Contingencies and Rigor: Thoughts on Mathematics Prompted by a Case Study in Transonic Aerodynamics, Social Studies of Science, 2003, 33:469 507, p. 488; and Peter Dear, What is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science, Isis, 2005, 96:390 406. On the terms fundamental research and basic research see Ronald Kline, Construing Technology as Applied Science: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880 1945, Isis, 1995, 86:194 221, pp. 216 and 217; Benot Godin, Measuring Science: Is There Basic Research Without Statistics? Social Science Information, 2003, 42:5790; and Jane Calvert, Whats Special about Basic Research? Science, Technology and Human Values, 2006, 31:199 220. In fact, Calvert claims that Kline states that basic research replaced the term pure science in public proclamations of industrial researchers during the 1930s, when his statement was about the term fundamental research. Godin writes, between 1930 and 1945 then, numerous labels were used for more or less the same concept: pure, fundamental, background and basic: Godin, Measuring Science, p. 62. 2 Kline relates how Frank Jewett complained to Vannevar Bush in 1945 that the term pure science implied that more applied kinds of work done by industrial researchers were impure: Kline, Construing Technology as Applied Science, p. 217. For an example of Science using fundamental research and fundamental science, see J. C. Arthur, Development of Vegetable Physiology, Science, 1895, 2:360 373. 3 On studies of strategies in scientic discourse see, for example, Steven Yearley, Textual Persuasion: The Role of Social Accounting in the Construction of Scientic Arguments, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1981, 11:409 435; G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, Opening Pandoras Box: A Sociological Analysis of
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ne-grained analyses of the rhetorical aspects of declarations about the relationship between the laboratory sciences and clinical practice around the time of World War I. This work has included examination of ways in which this rhetoric could embody broader anxieties about the state of the nation. It has also examined how rhetoric that claimed opposition or demarcation between science and the clinic was often belied by the existence of close working relationships between scientists and doctors in medical schools.4 In a similar vein, this paper shows that the ideal of pure science promoted by public scientists around the time of World War I exercised very little inuence on the character of policies that were being developed for the funding and organization of research. The fact that the DSIR did not claim a unidirectional ow of knowledge from pure science to applied science gives credence to the view recently expressed by David Edgerton in a discussion of the linear model; he warned that we should be careful of assuming that some supposed guiding principles of twentieth-century science policy were actually promulgated by actors in the past.5 A close examination of the texts of the DSIR reveals that actors had more nuanced understandings of the interplay between research and practice than they sometimes have been credited for, and that they also knew the difference between the rhetoric of ofcial documents and journals, and the nature of scientic work in practice. In this paper the annual reports of the DSIR are shown to be a key site for the production of a public rhetoric concerned with the status of this new department, state-scienceindustry relations, and the political economy of research in Britain. Faced with a potentially skeptical, even hostile, reception from industrialists and some quarters of the scientic community, the rhetoric discerned in the annual reports of the DSIR had the goal of persuading readers that public funding of research was desirable, that industry should invest in research, and that some organization of science by government was necessary. This rhetoric hinged on particular denitions of the term fundamental research. In the annual reports of the DSIR the term fundamental research had a mutable quality. Rather than attempting to distill a more stable meaning, I will argue in this paper that multiple
Scientists Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987); Anne Holmquest, The Rhetorical Strategy of Boundary-Work, Argumentation, 1990, 4:235258; and Charles Alan Taylor, Dening Science: A Rhetoric of Demarcation (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1996). On the notion of public science in Britain see Frank M. Turner, Public Science in Britain, 1880 1919, Isis, 1980, 71:589 608; Richard R. Yeo, Scientic Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain, 1830 1917, in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientic Method, ed. J. A. Schuster and Yeo (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 259 297; and Andrew J. Hull, Food for Thought? The Relations Between the Royal Society Food Committees and Government, 19151919, Annals of Science, 2002, 59:263298. 4 On the rhetoric of physicians in the interwar period see Christopher Lawrence, Still Incommunicable: Clinical Holists and Medical Knowledge in Interwar Britain, in Greater Than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920 1950, ed. C. Lawrence and G. Weisz (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 94 111; and especially David Cantor, The Name and the Word: Neo-Hippocratism and Language in Interwar Britain, in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. D. Cantor (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 280 301. For an increasingly nuanced understanding of the relationship between science and the clinic in practice see David Smith, The Use of Teamwork in the Practical Management of Research in the Inter-War Period: John Boyd Orr at the Rowett Research Institute, Minerva, 1999, 37:259 280; Andrew J. Hull, Teamwork, Clinical Research and the Development of Scientic Medicines in Interwar Britain: The Glasgow School Revisited, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2007, 81:569 593; and Steve Sturdy, Scientic Method for Medical Practitioners: The Case Method of Teaching Pathology in Early Twentieth-Century Edinburgh, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2007, 81:760 792. 5 For the claim of a unidirectional ow of knowledge see Tom Wilkie, British Science and Politics Since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 11. David Edgerton, The Linear Model Did Not Exist: Reections on the History and Historiography of Science and Research in Industry in the Twentieth Century, in The ScienceIndustry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications, ed. Karl Grandin and Nina Wormbs (New York: Watson, 2004), pp. 3157.
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meaning was important if we consider the function of the annual reports produced by new government bodies for research created in the rst half of the twentieth century.6 The uidity of meaning of fundamental research in the reports of the DSIR can be understood as a strategy; fundamental research was a rhetorical term that served to persuade more than one audience of the legitimacy of the DSIR and its policies. The DSIR stated that it would support through grants the pure science activities of university scientists. Scientists were also to be reassured that the fundamental research the DSIR sought to promote at the laboratories of industrial research associations was work that examined the most in-depth, underlying, or indeed, fundamental issues; this was work that would contribute to scientic theory and lead to advances in knowledge. Importantly, this work was stated to be both scientically important and practically useful, and the starting point for this fundamental research was the need to address a practical issue. Unlike the term pure science, the term fundamental research was exible enough to convince readers associated with industry that researchers would not be receiving funds so that they might merely satisfy their scientic curiosity. Fundamental research was also dened at times as research into general issues, as distinguished from research that addressed discrete or more limited problems. Characterizing fundamental research as either broad, general, or as background research, was important for the negotiation of matters of political economy. General research explored issues common to a group of rms in a particular sector. It was contrasted with research into specic issues, the problems that were particular to an individual company. The DSIR stated that it would not be supporting the latter. In this way, the denition of fundamental research as research into general issues offered a route for state sponsorship of science that did not compromise the tenets of liberal political economy. While the DSIR investigated the broadest possible issues, it was left to private business to address the problems that arose in the context of its own local and particular needs. A similar rationale worked to justify the expenditure of funds on research by organizations such as the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and the Food Investigation Board (FIB). These organizations were said to explore issues that were so widespread and important that no business or industrial sector in Britain could reasonably be expected to deal with them. The justication for government funding of bodies such as the NPL and FIB was that the fundamental research these organizations carried out dealt with issues of such widespread and general importance to the prosperity of the nation that fundamental research was, in effect, national research. This research had, therefore, a strong claim on public funds. After World War I, the term fundamental research was used in the reports of other state bodies created in Britain to fund research such as the Medical Research Council, the Agricultural Research Council, and during the 1940s, the Colonial Research Committee. These bodies generally avoided invoking the concepts of pure and applied science. The meanings given in the reports of these government bodies to the expression fundamental research were not exactly those used by the DSIR, however. The meanings of this term were, to a degree, contingent; they were informed by the particular context in which the research bodies were established and operated.
6 In other words, following an approach advocated by Quentin Skinner, the question the historian can pose when reading the reports of the DSIR is not so much what do these reports mean? but rather, what was the DSIR doing? in writing these texts. See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), Vol. 1, p. 100.
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The Department of Scientic and Industrial Research was the product of Board of Education recommendations expressed in the Scheme for the Organisation and Development of Scientic and Industrial Research, published in 1915. The DSIR was created in 1916 as a government department staffed by civil service administrators, with an advisory council of scientists who guided the department in making decisions about personnel for new projects, terms of employment for researchers, and projects suitable for funding. The chairman of the advisory council was Sir William McCormick and the secretary of the department was Frank Heath, both non-scientists drawn from the Board of Education.7 The department was not headed by a minister but was overseen by a committee of the Privy Council. Heath reported to the lord president who represented the DSIR in parliament. The main focus of the DSIR was to ensure an adequate supply of scientic researchers for industry in the long term and to encourage some sectors of British industry to spend more on research. It also established research programs in areas considered to be important for national prosperity, such as food and fuel. To achieve its aims the department offered grants to university workers, initiated a scheme by which industrial research associations could receive grants for cooperative research, and oversaw the running of national research boards and laboratories. In the immediate term there was also a call for projects of pressing wartime importance, such as the work of Professor Herbert Jackson on optical glasses previously only available from Germany.8 Existing historical literature on the DSIR tends to be very narrow in focus, and is often concerned with discussions at the Board of Education immediately leading up to the creation of the department. There has been a tendency in some accounts to repeat uncritically the assertion that shortages of key imports with the outbreak of World War I forced reluctant politicians and civil servants to recognize the deciency of British science, and the backwardness of British industry, in comparison to that of Germany. In fact, while the war provided the opportunity to create new state machinery to fund and coordinate scientic research and scientic education, interest in supporting these objectives had long existed at the Board of Education and among some politicians and high-ranking civil servants, notably Christopher Addison and Lord Haldane. David Edgerton and Sally Horrocks have also shown the picture of absolute neglect of research by British industry to be misleading. British rms were conducting scientic research before World War I, notably the United Alkali Company, Cadbury, Noble, and Vickers, and it has proven difcult to substantiate the claim that British industry was far behind that of Germany in its spending on research. The more general problem with many accounts of the DSIR has been a tendency by scholars to focus on making an assessment of its success
7 Board of Education, Scheme for the Organisation and Development of Scientic and Industrial Research, Cd. 8005 (1915), British parliamentary paper (HMSO, London). The advisory council formed in May 1915 consisted of Sir George Beilby (industrial chemist and chairman of the Royal Technical College, Glasgow), Raphael Meldola (industrial chemist and head of Finsbury Technical College), Richard Threlfall (industrial chemist), William Duddell (consulting engineer), J. A. McClellan (chair of experimental physics at University College, Dublin), Bertram Hopkinson (engineer and professor of applied mechanics at University of Cambridge), and the mathematician and physicist, Lord Rayleigh. See Ian Varcoe, Scientists, Government and Organised Research in Great Britain, 1914 1916: The Early History of the DSIR, Minerva, 1970, 8: 192216, p. 207. 8 DSIR 2nd Annual Report, Cd. 7818 (1916 1917). Annual reports cited of the DSIR and other government organizations are command papers (Cd. or Cmd.) presented to the British Parliament, published by HMSO, London hereafter.
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or failure that reects the concerns of the particular writer, rather than focusing on any debates that occurred at the moment of the DSIRs establishment. In addition, evaluating the contribution of the DSIR to British science policy, or to state and science relations, misses the point that the DSIR was specically concerned with research, not science per se. The signicance of the department resides in its contribution to what can be called the rise of research during the rst half of the twentieth century. The challenge facing the department was the negotiation of greatly increased intervention in the organization of scientic research, and the negotiation of new areas of intervention by the state with respect to British industry. The DSIR looked for inspiration in a number of areas. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of these was the development of industrial research laboratories in some large American rms. Less obvious, and certainly not acknowledged in the existing literature, was the attention the DSIR paid to the rise of government-sponsored agricultural research in America.9 It is clear from the les and annual reports of the DSIR that the department faced problems in persuading British scientists and British industry that its establishment and its goals were necessary and legitimate. The situation of the DSIR was made particularly difcult by the hostile response to the formation of the department from a vocal lobby of scientists that expressed discontent in the pages of Nature, and directly to the department in letters. At the same time, the DSIR was concerned that industrial managers would need education and persuasion before they were willing to invest in cooperative research, and that British industry did not have a strong tradition of trade association. Also, spending of public funds on industrial research needed to be organized so as to avoid the accusation that the state was supporting work that should be paid for by business; state intervention in industrial affairs needed to be carefully delimited. Central to the purpose of the annual reports for the DSIR, therefore, was the need for this organization to legitimate its establishment and its mode of operation, and obtain the endorsement of scientists and industrialists. This need inuenced the ways in which the department dened the research it wished to support in its public statements. It was important, for example, to describe research in the annual reports as an activity susceptible to some degree of organization. The DSIR made frequent use of the expression fundamental research, and in order to understand fully the meanings of this term as used by the DSIR we need to consider in some detail how pure science was dened in this period. Here I am following Quentin Skinner who has suggested that in attempting to grasp the meanings of the texts of the past, we need to focus not merely on the particular text in which we are interested but on the prevailing conventions governing the treatment of the issues or themes with which the text is concerned.10 Andrew Hull has shown that the creation of the DSIR prompted a erce response from a lobby of scientists that included prominent gures such as Richard Gregory, the editor of Nature, and members of the National Union of Scientic Workers and the British
9 Varcoe, Scientists, Government and Organised Research (cit. n. 7); Peter Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain, 1850 1920 (Oxford: Berg, 1987), pp. 203204; R. MacLeod and E. K. Andrews, The Origins of the DSIR: Reections on Ideas and Men, 19151916, Public Administration, 1970, 48:23 45; D. E. H. Edgerton and S. M. Horrocks, British Industrial Research and Development Before 1945, Economic History Review, 1994, 47:213238; H. Frank Heath and A. L. Heatherington, Industrial Research and Development in the UK; A Survey (London: Faber and Faber, 1946); David Edgerton, Science, Technology and the British Industrial Decline, 1870 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). The DSIRs interest in American Agriculture is expressed in DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), p. 28. 10 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (cit. n. 6), p. 100.
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Science Guild. In a number of books, and articles and editorials in Nature, this lobby mobilized a rhetoric intended to ensure that scientists in Britain retained control of the research agenda in the face of what was perceived as increasing control of research by the state. The fact that the DSIR was a body administered by non-scientists prompted the claim that scientic research was passing out of the hands of scientists into the hands of bureaucrats and industrialists, and this would lead to the dominance of applied problems. The response to this supposed threat to the autonomy and status of researchers was the promotion of pure science by public scientists such as Richard Gregory.11 Drawing on the claims of many scientists and laymen since the nineteenth century, this rhetoric referred to the ideal of pure science as the search for knowledge for its own sake, to work done without thought of any commercial or practical gain.12 While pure science was said to be work that was done without thought of application, public scientists around the time of World War I nonetheless claimed pure science was the essential prerequisite for applied science. In some cases, the rhetoric produced by British scientists around the time of World War I took the form of a denial that scientic knowledge could be independently produced by applied science. This view was summed up in 1917 by the physicist William Bragg: There is no applied science distinct from pure science. There are applications of pure science, that is all. This was a comment that relied heavily for inspiration on the often repeated remark by Thomas Henry Huxley: What people called Applied Science is nothing but the application of Pure Science to particular classes of problems. Huxley is arguably the most famous individual to have claimed that only pure science actually existed and that everything else was merely the application of this knowledge, although the same point was made by the American physicist Henry Rowland in his 1883 essay, A Plea for Pure Science.13 Braggs comment appeared in the book, Science and the Nation, a series of essays written by eminent British scientists on the relations between pure and applied science. The book was inspired, according to the introduction by Lord Moulton, by fears among scientists that there would be neglect of pure science with state recognition
11 Andrew J. Hull, Passwords to Power: A Public Rationale for Expert Inuence on Central Government Policy-Making: British Scientists and Economists, c. 1900 1925 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Glasgow, 1994), pp. 107115 and 82 83. Hull uses the term public scientists as dened by Frank Turner. Turner referred to those individuals who consciously attempt to persuade the public or inuential sectors thereof that science both supports and nurtures broadly accepted social, political and religious goals and values, and that it is therefore worthy of receiving public attention, encouragement, and nancing. See Frank M. Turner, Public Science in Britain (cit. n. 3), p. 590. 12 Robert F. Bud and Gerrylynn K. Roberts state that the teaching of science was increasingly divided into pure and applied from the 1870s onwards in England, with the Devonshire Commission playing an important role in formally expressing what these categories might be: Science Versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 140 151. Similarly, Kline comments that American scientists did not regularly use the term pure science until the 1870s. In general, accounts tell us that as the distinction between pure science and applied science was drawn up in the nineteenth century, pure science was constructed as university science. The pursuit of pure science was presented as morally improving for students, in part because it was not inspired by the search for prot. See Ronald Kline, Construing Technology as Applied Science (cit. n. 1), p. 199; and Michael Aaron Dennis, Accounting for Research: New Histories of Corporate Laboratories and the Social History of American Science, Social Studies of Science, 1987, 17:479 518. On the rise of the idea of pure science as work done for its own sake see George H. Daniels, The Pure-Science Ideal and Democratic Culture, Science, 1967, 159:1699 1705. 13 William Bragg, Physical Research and the Way of Its Application, in Science and the Nation, ed. A. C. Seward (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1917), pp. 24 48, on p. 39; and T. H. Huxley, Science and Culture, Collected Essays (London: MacMillan, 1893). This particular remark of Huxleys appears at the beginning of Science and the Nation (p. 155), as well as in the text of the rst annual report of the DSIR (19151916). Ronald Kline quotes Rowlands as saying, to have the applications of science, the science itself must exist: Kline, Construing Technology as Applied Science (cit. n. 1), p. 199.
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of the need to fund industrial research. The book made it plain to the reader that pure science was essentially the driving force behind industrial prosperity and the betterment of the race. The essayists claimed that invention resulted from the application of discoveries in pure science, and illustrated this point with examples of famous scientic discoveries such as x-rays.14 A similar device was used by Gregory in his book of 1916, Discovery or The Spirit and Service of Science; Gregory listed seven inventions that had been voted by the readers of the American periodical Popular Mechanics as the seven wonders of the modern world, namely wireless telegraphy, the telephone, the airplane, radium, antiseptics and antitoxins, spectrum analysis, and x-rays. Gregory then stated, each one of these things had its foundations in purely scientic work and was not the result of deliberate intention to make something of service to humanity. He proceeded to take each invention in turn and chart its origins in pure science.15 The claim was that pure science was an activity that should not be directed to meet specic practical goals, but fortuitous discoveries in pure science meant it was this activity that was the origin of useful invention. The defense of pure science as the undirected quest for knowledge was an attempt to preserve the autonomy of scientic researchers and ensure that research did not just become an activity that worked towards goals established by the state or industry. When Gregory or Bragg made their case for pure science their goal was to ensure the professional standing of researchers in the light of the perceived threat presented by the DSIR.
PURE SCIENCE IN THE REPORTS OF THE DSIR
During the early years of its existence the DSIR made a number of allusions to the necessity of maintaining support for pure science that might at rst glance appear to be a thorough endorsement of the claims of the public science lobby of Gregory and others. Reference to pure science was made in the context of DSIR discussion of the individual grants it issued to university scientists. In its reports the DSIR described the universities as the natural homes of work in pure science, and attempted to assure the reader that the funds it offered would not mean university research would be orientated solely towards applied science as claimed by the public science lobby. The remarks made by the DSIR indicate that it was aware that its work was under scrutiny and that some scientists had made erce criticisms of the form in which it had been instituted, as well as its goals. It was important that the DSIR dene itself in ways that its scientic audience would endorse or it might forfeit the support of this particular group. The DSIR used a strategy of championing the ideal of pure science; this strategy included explicit reference to works produced by leading members of the lobby that had most forcefully rejected the DSIR on its formation.16 The DSIR repeated the claim of Gregory that useful inventions were the result of chance discoveries in pure science, and emphasized in their fourth report that the state cannot, and must not, attempt to organize pure science.17
Seward, ed., Science and the Nation, pp. viii, vi (quotations), 26, and 39. Wireless telegraphy has its origin in the work of Clerk Maxwell and Hertz; the telephone depends upon the principles of magneto-electric induction discovered by Faraday; Langleys investigations of the resistance of the air to moving bodies led him to construct the rst working model of an aeroplane: Richard A. Gregory, Discovery or The Spirit and Service of Science (London: MacMillan, 1916), p. 235. 16 DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), pp. 11 and 15. 17 Professor R. A. Gregory has shown conclusively that each one of the modern practical applications of
15
14
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While on the one hand the DSIR worked hard to indicate consensus with the prevailing rhetoric on the primacy of pure science, more detailed descriptions of how the DSIR intended to organize Britains scientic resources tended to obscure, and even negate, this apparent agreement. One issue noted by the DSIR was the difculty in practice of trying to categorize scientic work as either pure or applied. Until 1922, the DSIR classied the university grants it issued to researchers as pure or applied science with the majority of DSIR grants said to be falling within the realm of pure science. A brief explanation by the department of the rationale in operation when distinguishing between the two categories of science, however, suggests that the term pure science indicated a researcher working in a department of pure science, usually chemistry or physics. Accordingly, a grant labeled applied science referred to work undertaken in what was often called a technological department, including engineering, metallurgy, mining, brewing, and economic botany, usually at a redbrick university. The label of pure or applied science was not necessarily descriptive of the actual degree of practical relevance of the work undertaken.18 The DSIR stated that work in a eld such as engineering, which was not dened as a eld of pure science, could still make a contribution to scientic knowledge: The method of classifying researchers as pure and applied calls for a word of comment. In some cases a research which is primarily one in pure science may lead to results which can be applied to economic or industrial problems. On the other hand a research in an engineering subject may be of a fundamental character and unlikely to lead directly to results of immediate commercial value, though classied as applied.19 A remark of this kind confused the distinction between pure and applied science that was upheld by Gregory and others, and suggested that scientic knowledge could be derived from work in applied science. The conclusion nally arrived at by the DSIR was that attempts to distinguish between pure and applied science were misconceived.20 After 1922, grants were classied according to the subject area in which the work sponsored was considered to fall, with the vast majority falling in the eld of chemistry. If in its public proclamations the DSIR felt pressure to demonstrate its support for pure science in the university by showing that the larger proportion of its grants could be considered to fall within this category, that pressure did not translate into criteria for determining whether or not an individual received a grant. Decisions as to the funding of university researchers did not necessarily reside in a consideration of whether their work was pure or applied, or even in a consideration of the works subject. It would be wrong, for example, to assume that the DSIR issued grants for projects according to their potential relevance to industrial problems.21 The criteria that were used in the allocation of studentships and fellowships were summed up in the third annual report of 1918: In making these awards to students we have been guided primarily by our knowledge of the quality of the research work undertaken by the Professor or Head of the Department who recommends the student, by the opportunities which he has for engaging in research work,
science, from wireless telegraphy to antitoxins, had its foundations in purely scientic work, and was not the result of deliberate intention to make something of service to humanity: DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), pp. 3334. For the DSIRs emphasis that the state must not organize pure science see DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918 1919), p. 13. 18 DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918 1919). On the difculty of trying to categorize scientic work see DSIR 17/81, 10/4/18, p. 73, National Archives, London. 19 DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918 1919), p. 73. 20 Ibid. 21 A grant was given to Karl Pearson in 1918 1919 for work on statistics and eugenics: DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918 1919), p. 74.
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and by his personal recommendation of the student as one who shows promise of becoming a competent research worker after a suitable training.22 The concern was to create greater numbers of individuals who had been trained in the methods of research; the most important criteria were aptitude for research shown by the researcher, and the quality of the training they would receive. The DSIR believed its role as a body that organized science for the benet of the country meant it had a duty to consider the provision of scientic manpower for the future. If industry, for example, was to make good use of scientists then there needed to be an adequate supply, and the best preparation for these workers was training in research methods.23 Elsewhere in its reports the DSIR made comments that undermined its erstwhile promotion of the ideal of pure science as the undirected search for knowledge for its own sake. The DSIR was charged with the organization of the scientic resources of the nation and had a stated goal of bringing science and industry into a closer relationship. Reconciling the need to ensure that industry beneted from Britains scientic resources with the need to ensure the cooperation of scientists was considered potentially difcult. One issue was summarized in 1916 as being a question of how to establish a connection between individual manufacturers and a University in a manner which will bring the advanced student, the University organization and the individual rm into co-operation for research without hampering the academic freedom of the University professor or endangering the property in any results which may belong to the manufacturer.24 The view was expressed that greater cooperation between science and industry could be achieved if university departments concerned with elds such as engineering, mining, or metallurgy, made efforts to assist industries with the research needed for the solution of particular problems facing them. The problems that faced manufacturing would, at times, be the inspiration for research. This had implications for the DSIRs denition of pure science:
Pure science has in the past owed much to observations, suggestions and difculties which have come from activities external to the laboratory or the study. So will it be again; and it is our desire so to order the relations of workers in pure science to the industries going on around them that they may receive the stimulus of a wider outlook than is always attainable under the limitations of an academic system of syllabus and examination.25
Pure science, it seems, could sometimes be undertaken with a specic end in view.26 The notion that pure science could be driven by something other than just the curiosity of the scientist was a signicant departure from the rhetoric of the public science lobby. By the time the fourth annual report was issued in 1919, the idea that it was dangerous and even fatal to attempt to organise pure science was qualied by the statement, on the other hand it is necessary for a modern State to organise research. Perhaps one of the DSIRs strongest proclamations on its own role in the organization of Britains scientic resources was made in 1920: One of the most obvious lessons of the war for peoples like our own, whose organisation is weak, was that rapid progress in the use of science with
22 23 24 25 26
DSIR 3rd Annual Report, Cd. 9144 (19171918), p. 39. DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), p. 33. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid, p. 16. DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918 1919), p. 13.
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a view to defence or to increased production is not to be expected in any country which depends simply upon the undirected genius of its people.27 Concessions were made to university scientists however. During wartime the DSIR had insisted on vetting the results of all work prosecuted with its help to determine if it provided any commercial advantage to foreign rms. This requirement was suspended for university grants after the end of the war despite the reservations expressed by Heath that Britain ran the risk of foreign rms capitalizing on the results of British research if it was freely published. Free publication had to be allowed, however, because of the mental outlook of English men of science. In other words, English scientists would not tolerate measures that appeared to restrict freedom of publication.28 On more practical grounds, the conditions placed on publication by the DSIR were ammunition for its critics: It is the more difcult for us to retain these conditions in peace because they are not attached to similar grants made by the Medical Research Committee to research workers in Physiology and the allied sciences. The difference in procedure between the two bodies is naturally discussed at the Universities and the bureaucratic tendencies of this Department emphasised.29 The references by the DSIR in its public statements to a prevailing rhetoric on the primacy of pure science were an attempt to demonstrate to a scientic readership that the interventions of the DSIR in the eld of university research would not mean that researchers would be forced to undertake work directed to ends determined either by a government department or by industry. In its public declarations, he DSIR upheld the notion that universities were places for pure science. However, the DSIR did not adhere to the claims about the nature of pure science that had been made by the lobby headed by individuals such as Gregory. The DSIR claimed that research in the university could be inspired by the need to resolve practical problems in industry, and that some university departments should work harder to develop a close relationship with local manufacturing. The result was a confused and inconsistent series of declarations on the nature of pure science that reected a conict between the need to reassure scientists that the department would not be dictating the nature of their research, and a belief that science in Britain must be better organized to benet the nation.
FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH IN THE ANNUAL REPORTS OF THE DSIR
The DSIR did not use the term pure science when discussing the work done by the research associations that had been created with the aim of encouraging scientic research by British industry. Some of the rst associations included the British Iron Manufacturers Research Association, the British Photographic Research Association, and the British Research Association for the Woollen and Worsted Industry. In order to encourage the formation of these research associations, the British government created a Million Fund through which it would contribute a pound for every pound paid to fund scientic work by industry, up to a limit of 1 million. By the time the Million Fund had been depleted in 1932, there were twenty research associations, and most of these were given further funds by the state. Many of these associations acquired their own laboratories, as well as funding work done at universities and colleges. The DSIR expressed its conviction that the
27 28 29
Ibid.; and DSIR 5th Annual Report, Cmd. 905 (1919 1920), p. 13. DSIR 17/70, 4/3/21, National Archives, London. DSIR 17/81, 2/6/19, National Archives, London.
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joint funding of industrial research by the state and industry would be an important means of demonstrating the value of research to British industry. The view of Heath and McCormick in 1916 was that industrial managers would need to be persuaded of the merits of spending on scientic research. Despite the claims made that the outbreak of war had demonstrated the defects of British industry and the absolute necessity of British rms becoming as scientic as it was said they were in Germany, it seems that many British rms simply did not feel they were in crisis as their plants were fully occupied. As McCormick expressed it, so long as an industry is prosperous it is very apt to take short views and feel little enthusiasm for systematic research. At the same time, it was said that some rms were suspicious of government attempts to encourage them to form associations among themselves, believing that cooperation in the funding of research would diminish the advantage held by individual companies.30 Even if rms within a particular sector could be persuaded of the value of science, the DSIR believed that industrialists could be quite ignorant of what constituted research. The DSIR thought industrialists would have to receive some education in order to understand that an easily resolvable technical manufacturing problem was not actually research as the DSIR dened it. The DSIR referred to loose use of industrialists and company promoters of the word research to describe experiment by trial and error.31 The DSIR reports of the rst seven years of its existence devoted much space to the elaboration of the type of work the new research associations should aspire to do. In setting out a vision of industrial research, the DSIR made it clear that it expected manufacturing interests to move beyond a concern with the solution of mere practical problems and should focus more on fundamental research:
The particular difculties encountered in the day-to-day routine of manufacture, the possibility of improving a process, of diminishing cost of working, enlarging output or enhancing the quality of a product, are matters which we may expect the individual rm to attack directly it begins to believe at all in the application of science to its own trade. But this is not enough. We are looking for a growth of a demand for fundamental research, and fundamental research, as we have seen, requires a very large expenditure on brains and equipment. It also requires continuous effort. The rm that starts out upon this quest must either be very powerful or it must nd the necessary strength in association with others.32
In its rst annual report, published during the war in 1916, the DSIR declared that the urgent nature of the problems facing Britain, coupled with shortages of manpower and equipment, meant that the priority of the department in the short term would be the application of science to industrys most pressing issues. An initial focus on technical issues that would furnish quick results was considered a useful way to convince industrialists to invest more in fundamental research. The DSIR stated that a precedent existed showing that businessmen impressed with quick returns from practical problem solving by scientists could then be persuaded to support research of a more in-depth and long-term character: It was in this way that the Universities of the middle states of America convinced the farmers that science was useful to agriculture.33
30 31 32 33
DSIR 17/5, 11/4/16, National Archives, London; and DSIR 2nd Annual Report, Cd. 8718 (1916 1917), p. 14. DSIR 7th Annual Report, Cmd. 1735 (19211922), p. 30. DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), p. 41. DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), p. 28.
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In the period between 1895 and 1913, American agricultural scientists wrote articles in Science, often reprinted in Nature in Britain, arguing for an increase in fundamental research at agricultural experiment stations. The experiment stations were considered to spend most of their time on routine work and investigations intended primarily to meet the immediate needs of farmers and orchardists. According to Henry Prentiss Armsby (professor at Pennsylvania State College) in a 1906 article in Science, it was time for agricultural investigations to be shifted to work of a broad and fundamental character with scientic investigation into the underlying principles of agriculture.34 Armsbys article and others evoked the need for fundamental research and described this as work that was more in depth than the investigations that had previously been done at the experimental stations; it was work that moved beyond routine fertilizer analysis, for example. Fundamental research was described as work that would expose the underlying principles that governed everyday phenomena. It was also research that had a wider value than the specic and discrete inquiries related to the needs of local farmers; it was broad and it established principles. The reasons why American researchers did not describe this work as pure science may have been related to the fact that it was not research that was located in the universities. Perhaps more importantly, these articles were intended to persuade potentially skeptical state and national authorities to provide additional funds for research activities in agriculture.35 Calling this work pure science may have removed these investigations too far from agricultural practice to secure extra money for the experimental stations. The DSIR dened the fundamental research needed by British industry along very similar lines to those used in discussions of agricultural research in the United States. The term fundamental research was used in discussions of the work of the research associations with the intention of differentiating between proper research and other activities carried out by rms using technical staff. If the latter work dealt with supercial or practical issues, then research that was fundamental moved from ad hoc problem solving to a consideration of the underlying qualities and behavior of industrial materials or processes. The DSIR attempted to clarify its point by describing how the various scientic activities undertaken by industry required a range of different sites. The modern rm that had embraced this type of organization was likely to be found in the United States and the DSIR provided a description of the ideal company by Charles Kenneth Mees, the British chemist who headed the research laboratories of Eastman Kodak in New York State. Mees, it reported, had described three types of industrial laboratory: the works laboratory involved in routine testing and quality control, the efciency laboratory that rened and improved the products and processes of the rm, and the true research laboratory.
34 H. J. Webber, A Plan for Publication for Agricultural Experiment Station Investigations, Science, 1907, 26:509 512. On lobbying for increased government funding for agricultural research during the 1880s see Charles E. Rosenberg, Science, Technology and Economic Growth: The Case of the Agricultural Experiment Station Scientist, Agricultural History, 1971, 45:120; Margaret W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840 1880 (New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 1975); Paolo Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientic Careers in North America 18851985 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), p. 31; and Henry Prentiss Armsby, The Promotion of Agricultural Science, Science, 1906, 24:673 681. 35 On the campaign that led to the passing of the Adams Act see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Adams Act: Politics and the Cause of Scientic Research, Agricultural History, 1964, 38:312.
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This last venue was concerned with work directed not towards the supercial processes of industry but towards the fundamental and underlying theory of the subject.36 In discussions of the work of the research associations, examples were given of suitable projects in fundamental research that included the determination of the constitution of cotton bers, the composition of rubber and resins, and the relationship between chemical composition and mechanical properties in alloys. At the same time, fundamental research investigated processes of manufacture, such as the determination of the most effective methods of stirring or melting to protect optical glass from furnace gases.37 In this usage, long-term fundamental research into the underlying principles that governed an industrial process or that produced knowledge about the nature of materials, was contrasted with short-term work that produced early commercial results or looked to the solution of immediate practical problems. The fact that fundamental research was presented as desirable because of the power over industrial methods and materials it would afford to those who invested in it, rather than because it helped achieve some more esoteric goal of progress within a particular scientic discipline, suggests that it was a term the DSIR employed specically to address the industrialist. Fundamental research was dened as work that considered the most basic materials utilized by industry, or the key processes that industry depended upon, and it was not, for example, dened primarily as work in chemistry or physics. In stating that its objective was the encouragement of more fundamental research, rather than pure science, the DSIR was able to claim that the activities prosecuted under its aegis were done with practical goals in mind, and not merely to satisfy the whim of scientic researchers. The need to reassure industrial managers that the science they supported nancially was aimed, rst and foremost, at bringing benets to the rm is shown by a comment made in 1925. In a discussion of ceramics research undertaken on behalf of the British Refractories Research Association, it was stated that better explanation of this work in lay terms should be distributed to rms comprising the research association to convince members that they are not subsidising a corps of scientic dreamers.38 The importance of making a distinction between pure science, and fundamental research furnishing useful results, is also shown in an address given in 1921 to the Royal Society by its president, Charles Scott Sherrington. Sherrington praised the system of research that had developed in Britain due to the dovetailing of all the different components of professional and scientic societies, universities, and government-funded institutions. When discussing the Development Commission, created in 1909, which provided research funds for agriculture, sheries, and forestry, Sherrington wrote: Its programme of shery research, avoiding the terms pure research and applied research in view of the possible implication that pure research does not lead to practical results, directs research not alone to the solving of particular economic problems. It supports more
DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), p. 29. DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916); and DSIR 2nd Annual Report, Cd. 8718 (1916 1917). The British Photographic Research Association was credited in 1921 with having devoted its attention to researches of a fundamental character that included the derivation of a fundamental law for the true photographic rendering of contrast: DSIR 6th Annual Report, Cmd. 1491 (1920 1921), p. 30. 38 DSIR 10/6, Report of the committee appointed to inspect the British Refractories Research Association, National Archives, London.
37
36
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especially what it terms free research, investigations in this case of the fundamental science of the sea and marine life.39 In the DSIRs report of 1922, a subtle distinction was made between fundamental research and pure science in a brief meditation under a heading referring to the industrial research associations (Nature of Research Undertaken by the Associations). Here the DSIR stated that the key difference between pure and fundamental research was that of the stimulus for the work in the rst place:
The general tendency in pure research is to follow the train of thought of greatest scientic interest by pursuing the problem initially selected through all the ramications which may present themselves, or at least through all those which interest the investigator. The phenomena investigated and the taste of the research worker are, in most cases, the only directive forces. In industrial research, on the other hand, the aim is more denitely objective; the work has a distinct purpose in view which the investigator must bear in mind constantly. He cannot afford to follow attractive by-paths unless he believes they will lead him to a relevant destination. The problems of industry draw attention to gaps in scientic knowledge which it is the duty of the industrial researcher to ll. The acquisition of such knowledge may be called fundamental research as applied to industry for, without it, far-reaching changes and improvements in industry are almost impossible.40
While the DSIR drew a distinction between pure science and its programs of fundamental research, it dened the latter in relation to pure science. As with pure science, fundamental research was work that was intended to secure greater knowledge, but this time the search was inspired by the need to address a practical problem. Fundamental research, here equated with industrial research, was presented as a utilitarian form of pure science. So while the DSIR wished to convince the reader that the work it sponsored through the research associations would be useful, it did not deny the existence of pure science, and it claimed some correlation between the concepts of pure science and fundamental research. Fundamental research was pure science organized to meet some practical objective. Why did the DSIR feel the need to relate its denition of fundamental research to pure science in this way? Was it because the notion of pure science conferred a certain prestige upon the scientic worker? At a time in which the concepts of pure science and applied science were particularly charged, perhaps the DSIR felt it important to reassure its scientic audience that autonomy and status would not be compromised through work with the DSIR. At the same time, the DSIR carved out a denition of fundamental research intended to persuade industry that long-term, laboratory-based research undertaken by professional scientists would be prosecuted with the aim of solving important practical problems, and not merely to satisfy scientic curiosity. Fundamental research was a term exible enough to work with two different groups of readers.
FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH AS GENERAL RESEARCH
If denitions of fundamental research in the reports of the DSIR indicated that this work was done with a practical goal in mind, in ways that prevalent denitions of pure science did not, then we might ask what relationship the DSIR thought should develop between
39 C. S. Sherrington, The Maintenance of Scientic Research, Nature, 1921, 108:470 471, p. 470 (quotation). 40 DSIR 7th Annual Report, Cmd. 1735 (19211922), p. 30.
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fundamental research and short-term, practical problem solving. Applied science was said to be nothing but the application of knowledge gained through pure science, and therefore pure science was the essential prerequisite for problem solving. In contrast, fundamental research was said by the DSIR to be a method for understanding widespread underlying phenomena in contrast to the solution of discrete problems. The relationship between fundamental research and other types of investigation presented most often by the DSIR was one in which fundamental research established knowledge about the materials and processes common to a group of rms, leaving individual companies to deal with problems that were specic to that particular business. Fundamental research was work that established universal theories or laws that remained constant from company to company within a particular sector of industry; it was general research. The more fundamental a piece of research was, the more widespread were the phenomena under investigation, and by the same token, the more potentially important its results. In this arrangement, there was supposedly plenty of room for research by the scientist employed by the individual company. When rms were brought together in the research associations to fund research into common problems, this research would necessarily be fundamental since it investigated universals. It was up to the individual rm to address the particular problems that arose within its work. By proclaiming that the work of the DSIR was to encourage fundamental work in industrial research, the DSIR could avoid the suggestion that public grants favored the interests of one individual rm over another:
Research undertaken exclusively for the benet of one among a number of competing rms either by a public institution or at the cost of the State is indeed always likely to give rise to difculties. Universities and public Research Institutes are maintained by endowments and public funds for the common good, and any arrangement which gives exclusive rights or benets to a single rm as against others in the same industry is not easy to reconcile with the public advantage.41
Similarly, the Development Commission had stated that when it came to issuing research funds for agriculture, forestry, and sheries, it was important to ensure that money shall not go into the pockets of private individuals.42 The sponsorship of fundamental research through the DSIR provided a means for the state to take action to encourage the use of science by British industry without interfering in, or directing, the business of the rm. The denition of fundamental research as work that was general and broad in its scope, and furthest from the specic issues faced by any individual company, allowed government to take some role in the development of industry, but at arms length. As the DSIR wrote in 1916, when co-operation has done all that is possible in the common interest, there still remain a mass of research work to be done by individual rms in their own interests, which will amply repay the cost and effort. If fundamental research was cooperative research, the DSIR claimed that, on the other hand, pure science was not necessarily work that was best prosecuted cooperatively and the existence of different schools of thought and the independent attacks which result from them are positive advantages. Interestingly, the department did not seem to think that association between rms for the sake of research would result in collusion such as
41 42
DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), p. 31. First Report of the Proceedings of the Development Commissioners for 19111912, No. 305, p. 5 (British Parliamentary paper).
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price xing: The result of research being available to all members of the industry would tend to induce competition and to restrict prices.43 In addition to the cooperative research done by the research associations, the DSIR claimed a further category of research in which it should take an interest. This work was described as sufciently fundamental to affect a range of interests wider than a single trade while also having a direct bearing on the health, well-being, or the safety of the whole population. Described as the most fundamental of all the research sponsored by the DSIR, the work included food preservation research, fuel research, research into building materials, operating the Geological Survey and Museum, and the work of the National Physical Laboratory.44 There was a clear sense in which this work was classied as fundamental because it examined some of the basic necessities of all domestic and industrial life such as food, coal, and precise electrical and physical standards. It was research that was of the widest possible use and because so many national activities depended on these things, it was important. Again, the very fundamental quality of this work, which made it both extremely important and of such a scale that it was beyond the scope of an individual companys responsibility, provided a rationale for state intervention and support. The general nature of fundamental research meant that it could be done at the expense of the taxpayer. This fundamental research was work that was so general that plenty of room was left for the individual rm to investigate particular implications. In the case of fuel research, which involved a survey of the characteristics of the nations coals, the following was stated in 1919: The investigations of the Fuel Research Board, however successful they might be, will only establish fundamental data and broad generalisations as a basis for particular applications. And these applications must be worked out by the industries themselves.45
FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH AT THE FOOD INVESTIGATION BOARD AND THE NATIONAL PHYSICAL LABORATORY
While the DSIR described the work of its research organizations and laboratories as fundamental on the basis that their investigations were wide in scope and potential importance, the organizations themselves could emphasis other aspects of the term fundamental research. The Food Investigation Board (FIB) was established in 1918, and was concerned with food preservation, the freezing of sh, the putrefaction of meat, and the storage of fruit.46 The FIB version of fundamental research was academic work in
43 DSIR 1st Annual Report, Cd. 8336 (19151916), pp. 14 and 16; and DSIR 16/2, Memorandum to serve as a basis for discussion of the question of the associations for research, 15/12/16, National Archives, London. 44 DSIR 2nd Annual Report, Cd. 8718 (1916 1917), p. 17; DSIR 5th Annual Report, Cmd. 905 (1919 1920), p. 18; DSIR 5th Annual Report, Cmd. 905 (1919 1920); and DSIR 7th Annual Report, Cmd. 173 (19211922), p. 12. The DSIR took over the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) from the Royal Society in 1918. The NPLs work was initially concerned with the elucidation of physical standards, and research into optical glass, metallurgy, aeronautics, and radio. As well as devising its own research programs, during the 1920s and 1930s the NPL carried out work through the coordinating boards on behalf of industry, the DSIRs research boards, and other government departments (very often including service departments such as the Admiralty). 45 DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918 1919), p. 65. The Fuel Research Board was involved in the classication of coal throughout the country, with analysis of its constituents and carbonization. The aim was to generate data to be used by business. At the same time, the Board investigated the machine cutting of peat, the efciency of grates, and air pollution: DSIR 5th Annual Report, Cmd. 905 (1919 1920). 46 On the Food Investigation Board see Sally M. Horrocks, Consuming Science: Science, Technology and Food in Britain, 1870 1939 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Manchester, 1993), pp. 223263; and Hull, Food for Thought? (cit. n. 3).
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physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics. For example, the FIB wrote in 1919: Results cannot be looked for quickly. They will be attained the more certainly and speedily by intensive study of those branches of science which need strengthening. In another example a year later, the board wrote, the fundamental scientic problems underlying the preservation of food is, in the present critical state of world supply, a clear national necessity . . . everything should be done to hasten the development of the new sciences of biochemistry and biophysics and the application of the results to national practice. The FIB constructed a relationship between fundamental research and other elds of investigation in which the only route to practical results was through research in the biological sciences. The rst director of the FIB, William Hardy, was reported as saying in an address to the British Association of Refrigeration: The industry is essentially a biological industry. Biological thought and biological research x the conditions necessary for successful storage, and to the cold-storage engineer is left the duty of realizing those conditions in practice. Logically, biology has precedence. For a body such as the FIB that attempted to fashion an academic identity, it was important that readers were persuaded that its researchers worked on scientic problems rather than practical ones; fundamental research was dened accordingly. It also seems possible that Hardy wished to ensure that when it came to determining the nature of new food technologies the balance of power lay with the biochemists and physiologists he favored, and not engineers.47 Interestingly, the FIB never attempted to introduce the term pure science into discussions of its work. As with the FIB, the National Physical Laboratory was described in 1920 as one of a number of bodies that dealt with problems of such wide application that no single industry, however intelligent or highly organised, could hope to grapple with effectively. In the case of the NPL, the study of materials in their physical characteristics and the establishment of accurate methods of measuring them and testing them and the products made from them, are as important to industry and to the progress of science as they are impossible of achievement by private effort.48 (See Figure 1, Figure 2, and Frontispiece.) Hence, the work of the NPL was described by the DSIR as fundamental in the sense that it dealt with issues that occurred on such a scale that it was not reasonable to expect business to fund and prosecute this research. This sense of fundamental meant that the NPL was able to refer regularly to its fundamental standardisation work, the work that was done at the laboratory to determine, and then disseminate, accurate physical and electrical standards. This work was fundamental in that it was work of the widest potential application that produced results underpinning many industrial and academic projects. However, within the body of its reports the NPL used fundamental research as a way of differentiating between its more practical projects and research work. In fact, we could argue that for the image the NPL attempted to project within its reports after World War I, it was the research element of the term fundamental research that was most important. While the work of the NPL consisted of plenty of practical investigations such as the testing of laboratory glassware and clinical thermometers, and the rating of cables for the Admiralty, the laboratorys general board was clear that the NPL was a place of
47 DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918 1919), p. 40; DSIR 5th Annual Report, Cmd. 905 (1919 1920), p. 23; and DSIR 23rd Annual Report, Cmd. 5927 (19371938), p. 11. Hardy died in 1934 and therefore was quoted in the twenty-third report. Hardy was keen to use his position with committees such as the Royal Society Food (War) Committee to exert control of food policy in Britain and it could be that that his claim as director of the FIB that biological research would provide solutions to national problems was also part of his lobbying for wider political inuence. See Hull, Food for thought? (cit. n. 3). 48 DSIR 5th Annual Report, Cmd. 905 (1919 1920), pp. 18 and 24.
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Figure 1. The fty meter corridor for testing surveying tapes and wires at the National Physical Laboratory, United Kingdom. The National Physical Laboratory: A Short Account of its Work and Organisation (London: HMSO, 1924). Permission given by the National Physical Laboratory, Queens Printer and Controller of HMSO.
research. When it was suggested that the NPL take on the role of a national body for testing electrical appliances, for example, this suggestion was rejected on the grounds that routine work of this order was not an appropriate function for the laboratory.49 Sir William Ellis reportedly told the general board in 1919:
The question of commercial testing has always been one which it is somewhat difcult for the Executive Committee precisely to dene, for it is obvious that the primary object of the NPL for Research purposes would be largely interfered with if commercial testing, which can be efciently done by professional bodies existing in the country for the purpose, were carried out extensively at the Laboratory. It is certainly more the province of the Laboratory to investigate scientic problems of a research character than to carry out any large volume of work on a commercial basis, in view of the country possessing professional men ready to undertake such work.50
49 DSIR 2nd Annual Report, Cd. 8718 (1916 1917); and DSIR 7th Annual Report, Cmd. 1735 (19211922). Within the body of its reports (published in the DSIR annual reports), the NPL distinguished between test work and research. In DSIR 7th Annual Report, Cmd. 1735 (19211922), p. 47, it was said, the volume of test work for shipbuilding rms carried out in the William Froude National Tank has decreased somewhat, no doubt largely owing to the fall in production, but good progress has in consequence been made with the programme of research approved by the Tank Advisory Committee. This program was concerned with the resistance of ships in waves, and ship maneuvering. See DSIR 4th Annual Report, Cmd. 320 (1918-1919), p. 31. 50 DSIR 10/2, Meeting of the General Board of the NPL, 19/12/19, National Archives, London.
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Figure 2. Column testing machine at the National Physical Laboratory, United Kingdom. The National Physical Laboratory: A Short Account of its Work and Organisation (London: HMSO, 1924). Permission given by the National Physical Laboratory, Queens Printer and Controller of HMSO.
A comment such as this has to be considered in the light of an issue that had resulted in an enquiry, headed by Gerald Balfour, into the work of the laboratory in 1908. Complaints had been made, chiey by the Institute of Chemistry, that the commercial testing work of the laboratory amounted to unfair competition. The NPL was accused of undermining the work of professional chemists in the eld of materials testing by providing the same service at a lower rate. The NPL offer of cheaper services, and the cachet attached to results issued by a government laboratory, was said to potentially undermine the private testing business of some chemists and possibly engineers. In the views of some, routine testing of materials was not the province of the NPL which should instead restrict itself
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to general research of the most widespread utility.51 Fundamental research, as general research, was the appropriate activity for a state-funded body in contrast to routine testing since fundamental research did not encroach on the commercial activities of chemists and engineers. For the scientists of the NPL, the pursuit of programs of fundamental research, or merely research, was important in order to maintain the standing of the laboratory as a national institution for physics. With the end of the war, the board of the NPL was keen to see many of its departments return to the pursuit of the fundamental scientic work that was considered part of its natural role. In November 1922, the NPL established a new research committee with a view to making the fullest use, for the purposes of fundamental research, of the resources of the Laboratory. This committee consisted of the eminent physicists J. J. Thomson, William Bragg, and Ernest Rutherford, and it began by devising programs of research in modern physics.52 A designated Physics Building was built at Teddington, Middlesex, for these new research programs. Within the context of the reports of the NPL, then, fundamental research could refer to academic or theoretical studies, the pursuit of which bestowed status on the laboratory.
FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH DURING THE 1930S AND 1940S
The 1930s saw a decline in the use of the expression fundamental research by the DSIR in its annual reports. At the same time, there was very little evidence of the rhetoric that described bodies such as the NPL, the Fuel Research Board, or the Food Investigation Board as organizations primarily involved in this type of work. The reports show a broadening of the terms involved to describe the projects and investigations done under the auspices of the DSIR and its associations. Within this diversity, we can nd expressions such as comprehensive investigations, investigations into basic problems, and on one occasion, the term foundational research. Many investigations were not classied at all within the reports of the DSIR, with just the presentation of specic details of the completed work and the results. The 1948 report of the DSIR saw the rst widespread use of the term basic research as a synonym for fundamental research.53 As had been the case with fundamental research, basic research referred to investigations that were thorough and time-consuming in comparison to short-term projects that addressed urgent specic enquiries, or in the post-war language of the DSIR, long range strategic investigations versus immediate tactical investigations. As with fundamental research, basic research also referred to general investigations as a broad background for local and specic enquiries. A decline in the exposition of the importance of fundamental research during the
51 Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Committee Appointed by the Treasury to Enquire Generally into the Work Performed by the National Physical Laboratory, Cd. 3927, pp. 3, 18, 23, 19, 27 (British Parliamentary paper). 52 DSIR 10/2, Meeting of the General Board of the NPL, 19/12/19, National Archives, London. The director J. E. Petavel was reported to say, the Laboratory hopes to return in many of its departments to the fundamental scientic work which is naturally one of the features of a national institution. On the establishment of the new research committee see DSIR 8th Annual Report, Cmd. 1937 (19221923), p. 56 (quotation). 53 For the use of broadened terms for research see annual reports of the DSIR for the 1930s. The DSIR wrote in 1948, the Committee in their report, invited attention to the comparatively small amount of civil engineering research being done in the universities, and emphasized the desirability of increasing the contribution of the universities to basic or fundamental civil engineering research to scale more in consonance with the national importance of the subject: DSIR 33rd Annual Report, Cmd. 7761 (19471948), p. 40.
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interwar period may have reected a sense among ofcials at the DSIR that the standing of the department was more assured. Not all the research associations had actually been engaged in the pursuit of fundamental research, despite the discussion of its importance in the reports of the DSIR, and this may have been one reason why the phrase was not routinely used about their work beyond the early years. The Research Association of British Rubber and Tyre Manufacturers, for example, stated the following as early as 1921:
Those responsible for the founding of this Association have realised that the importance of research to industry lies not so much in the possibility of very occasional discoveries of a revolutionary nature as in the sure benets which are the abundant fruit yielded by the application of science to the improvement of existing methods. The functions of the Association, while not excluding the study of fundamental problems, include more prosaic considerations such as improvement in the control of manufacturing operations and the testing of raw materials and nal products.54
This tendency of research associations to focus on the solution of practical problems appears to have been acknowledged in the DSIR annual report of 1931: A noticeable feature during the past year has been a wide recognition by research associations of the necessity to give increasing attention to the day-to-day problems encountered by rms in their ordinary processes of manufacture. Privately, Heath had stated at an early stage that the DSIR was not, in fact, willing to insist that research associations conform to any denition of fundamental research when it came to their research plans. He wrote in a letter to a cotton manufacturer in 1918 that the government had no intention of limiting the work of the Associations to pure or fundamental or direct research because in practice it was impossible to draw the line.55 This comment conrmed that the term fundamental research was used more for its rhetorical value than for any real attempt at classication of scientic work. Categories of pure science or fundamental research were of little importance in determining the allocation of funds by the DSIR but they were very important in its representation of goals during its early years. During the interwar period and after World War II, the term fundamental research was found in a variety of additional locations, one of which was the reports of other research bodies that were government-funded. Fundamental research was used in discussions of state-funded medical and agricultural research from the 1920s onwards, and in the organization of colonial research during the 1940s. The Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) did not often use the term pure science, thus indicating that an activity dened in terms of its great distance from utility was not considered an appropriate description for work receiving state funding that was intended to benet human health and national prosperity. However, while sometimes using the expression fundamental research, neither the MRC or the ARC undertook the type of lengthy discussion regarding its nature and importance found in the DSIRs annual reports. This was probably related to the fact that neither body faced the same degree of criticism as the DSIR on its creation. When they were made, calls for fundamental research in medicine were for scientists to pursue laboratory investigation that was not principally dened in the MRC reports as disinterested science. Edward Mellanby,
D. F. T., The Research Association of British Rubber and Tyre Manufacturers, Nature, 1922, 110:297. DSIR 16th Annual Report, Cmd. 3989 (1930 1931), p. 14; and DSIR 17/81, letter from Heath to Mr. Abbott, 10/4/18, National Archives, London.
55
54
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secretary of the Medical Research Council from 1933, referred in 1938 to debate over the direction in which medical research should proceed. Should there be a focus on clinical research or should the MRC concentrate on supporting research in biochemistry, biophysics, and physiology? In line with the policy rst established by his predecessor Walter Morley Fletcher, Mellanby advocated an emphasis on the latter, which he referred to as fundamental research.56 The term also made an appearance in reports of the Agricultural Research Council during the 1930s in reference to work in the scientic elds of agricultural engineering and virology. In a similar way to the DSIR, the concern of these state bodies during the early years of their establishment was often to distinguish research from other more routine types of laboratory investigation such as standardization and testing. The MRC did not deny that a focus on immediate practical problems could generate important knowledge about the body and disease, rather the concern it expressed was that some scientists were subject to undue pressure to devote their time to routine tasks. In 1919, the MRC reported that distinguishing between research and routine work, and the need for the MRC to spend funds on the former, were important because pathologists at British universities and hospitals felt compelled to take on the commercial testing of milk, water, or clinical material for physicians. This work was necessary for pathologists to earn a livelihood but left them without time to undertake research. The point made was that the provision of public funds by the MRC would allow these men to forsake this commercial testing work and concentrate on research.57 The interwar years saw a proliferation of terms to describe the work of scientists, prompted in part by dissatisfaction with the ideal of pure science promoted in the pages of Nature. The assertions of Richard Gregory and others were subject to direct criticism by British scientists on the Left, such as the mathematician Hyman Levy, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, and the crystallographer J. D. Bernal.58 For these socialist scientists, scientic advances were not the result of a quest for truth, as the pure science ideal suggested, but were inspired and shaped by the economic and social conditions in which the scientist lived. When Julian Huxley suggested to Hyman Levy in 1933 that a form of science existed in which individuals worked without reference to practical objectives, Levys response was to deny any real distinction between pure and applied science in real life; he referred to a false emphasis on pure science. Levys point was that all research activities were related to practical goals in some way and they differed only in their
56 Sabine Clarke, A Technocratic Imperial State? The Colonial Ofce and Scientic Research, 1940 1960, Twentieth Century British History, 2007, 18:453 480; Christopher Booth, Clinical Research, in Historical Perspectives on the Role of the MRC: Essays in the History of the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom and its Predecessor, the Medical Research Committee, 19131953, ed. J. Austoker and L. Bryder (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 205241; and MRC Annual Report, Cmd. 7335 (1939 1945). On Walter Morley Fletcher see Joan Austoker, Walter Morley Fletcher and the Origins of a Basic Biomedical Research Policy, in Historical Perspectives, ed. Austoker and Bryder, pp. 2331. 57 ARC Annual Report, Cmd. 4718 (19311933); and ARC Annual Report, Cmd. 5768 (19371938). The ARC did not use the term pure science although some historians have used this expression interchangeably with fundamental research when describing the work of the ARC. See Timothy DeJager, Pure Science and Practical Interests: the Origins of the Agricultural Research Council, 1930 1937, Minerva, 1993, 31:129 140. For the information from the MRC les, see FD 2/1, and FD 2/5, National Archives, London. 58 Hyman Levy: University of Edinburgh; University of Gttingen; Aerodynamic Research Department, National Physical Laboratory, 1916 1920; professor of mathematics at Imperial College, 19231954. Lancelot Hogben: Cambridge University; University of Cape Town 1926 1930; London School of Economics, 1930 1936; professor of physiology, University of Aberdeen, 1936 41; University of Birmingham 19421961; John Desmond (J. D.) Bernal: Davy Faraday Laboratory, 192327; University of Cambridge, 1934 37; Birkbeck College, University of London, 1937 63. For a collective biography of Levy, Hogben, Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, and Joseph Needham see Gary Werskey, The Visible College (London: Free Association Books, 1988).
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remoteness from application. This was a point echoed by Lancelot Hogben in his book Science for the Citizen where he commented, the only valid distinction between pure and applied science in natural sciences lies between inquiries concerned with issues which may eventually and issues which already do arise in the social practice of mankind.59 Science for the Citizen gave a portrait of science as an activity that had been inspired in the past by the need to solve practical problems. It was a history of scientic and technological development that contrasted sharply with earlier volumes such as Science and the Nation and Richard Gregorys Discovery in which it had been claimed that certain technologies were the application of fortuitous scientic discovery, made in the pursuit of science for its own sake and with no thought of application. Hogben, on the other hand, told his reader:
What we call pure science only thrives when the contemporary social structure is capable of making full use of its teaching, furnishing it with new problems for solution and equipping it with new instruments for solving them. Without printing there would have been little demand for spectacles; without spectacles neither telescope nor microscope; without these the nite velocity of light, the annual parallax of the stars, and the micro-organisms of fermentation processes and disease would never have been known to science. Without the pendulum clock and the projectile there would have been no dynamics nor theory of sound. Without the dynamics of the pendulum and projectile, no Principia.60
In The Social Function of Science, J. D. Bernal was critical of the ideal of pure science because it tended to deny any practical objective for science, making research an activity that merely operated to gratify the individual scientist. Bernal commented scathingly that with pure science, its ultimate justication is that it is quite an amusing pastime. In the view of Bernal, and also Hogben, the notion that the interests of the researcher should solely determine the direction of a research project, was simply not good enough. It was the duty of the scientist to use his skills to address the problems that arose in elds such as agriculture, medicine, and industry. At the same time, Bernal asked, what government or industry would pay scientists merely to exercise their curiosity.61 Bernal used the term fundamental research in The Social Function of Science and the expression was also used by Julian Huxley in his book of 1933, Scientic Research and Social Needs. The term was not used in these books, however, as part of a critique of the pure science ideal. Indeed, fundamental research was used interchangeably with pure science in both books. Bernal, who referred to universities as places concerned on the whole with pure science, then proceeded to write of the fundamental research that dominated in university laboratories. He did not use the phrase when talking of the work of the DSIR, except when referring to the grants given to individual workers at British universities. In discussion with Levy and Patrick M. S. Blackett, Huxley conceded that the term pure science was not an accurate reection of the work that scientists actually did. Huxley then proposed an alternative set of four categories that described work related to
59 Werskey, The Visible College, pp. 138 149; Julian Huxley, Scientic Research and Social Needs (London: Watts, 1934), p. 15; and Lancelot Hogben, Science for the Citizen (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 107. 60 Hogben, Science for the Citizen, p. 17. 61 John Desmond (J. D.) Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: Routledge, 1939), pp. 9597, 98. Hogben wrote: To get the fullest opportunities for doing the kind of work which is worth while to themselves scientic workers must participate in their responsibilities as citizens. Among other things this includes refraining from the arrogant pretence that their own preferences are a sufcient justication for the support which they need: Science for the Citizen (cit. n. 59), p. 736.
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some practical goal, but differed in their distance from that objective. These categories of research were background, basic, ad hoc, and development. Basic research was a species of pure science, but one that had some distant practical objective.62 The fact that Huxley felt he had to create a new set of categories describing all research activities in relation to practical goals, suggests that for him the expression fundamental research did not denote work that was inspired by the need to address particular problems. It seems that the distinction between pure science and fundamental research that was made by the DSIR was not necessarily observed when this phrase was used in other quarters. Of course, we could argue that the denition of fundamental research as work to advance scientic knowledge, prosecuted in response to a specic objective, was not always prominent within the DSIRs annual reports themselves. Ambiguity in meaning within the reports, along with a tendency to align fundamental research with aspects of pure science, render the loss of the utilitarian connotations of this phrase unsurprising when it was used by other institutions and individuals. If beyond the DSIR reports fundamental research was used to mean work that was driven by the search for knowledge or truth, than this was also testament to the enduring power of the claim by academic researchers that abstract and disinterested investigation was the real nature of science. It seems that in some quarters, the expression fundamental research had become subsumed into an ongoing rhetoric. In its strongest form this rhetoric rejected the notion that research could be directed towards specic goals, because planning in this way was the enemy of creativity and the scientic spirit. The organization that did most to actively promote this view during and after World War II was the Society for Freedom in Science, established by John Randall Baker and Michael Polanyi in 1940.63 For Baker and Polanyi, a category of pure science as the search for truth, in contrast to applied science, was a central tenet. The argument they promoted was that the preservation of freedom from the dictates of planners was an essential precondition for research if science, taken to be pure science, was to thrive. The material produced by the Society for Freedom in Science, including their many pamphlets, was largely concerned with mounting a challenge to the writings of socialists such as Bernal and the journalist and author, James Gerald Crowther, for their attacks on the ideal of pure science, for their calls for organized research, and for what was seen to be a dangerous veneration of the methods of the Soviet Union. Polanyi and Baker sometimes substituted the term fundamental science (not fundamental research) for pure science, but their preferred terminology was science and technology where the expression science referred to pure science. In Britain, the promotion of pure science as the undirected search for knowledge that was particularly marked around the time of World War I, was accompanied by, and even directly inspired the production of other terms to describe the activities of scientists. British scientists on the Left rejected the notion of a pure, nonutilitarian science because of their belief that all science was, or should be, inspired by the need to address technical and social problems. Less politically committed scientists such as Julian Huxley were also persuaded that the idea of pure science as work done without regard to its practical value bore little relation to the reality of scientic investigation. By 1938, the British biologist E. Barton Worthington represented the views of many when he commented, scientists in
62 Bernal, The Social Function of Science, pp. 3536, 43 48; and Huxley, Scientic Research and Social Needs (cit. n. 59), p. 253. 63 William McGucken, On Freedom and Planning in Science: The Society for Freedom in Science, 1940 1946, Minerva, 1978, 16:4272; and Werskey, The Visible College (cit. n. 58).
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general are coming to agree that no valid distinction can be drawn between pure and applied science.64 While these particular terms may have become less common during the interwar period, scientists and commentators were then concerned with the need to dene research and to differentiate some forms of investigation from others. The wider context here was the rise of research itself. The substantial growth in funding for research by the state and industry during the early twentieth century was accompanied by debate about the best way to organize science and the appropriate relationship between scientic researchers, government, and the needs of industry or human welfare.
CONCLUSION
A supercial examination of the reports of the DSIR might lead the reader to conclude that in the eld of government-sponsored industrial research, fundamental research had replaced the expression pure science. Within the context of the reports of the DSIR, however, this was rarely the case. The DSIR dened fundamental research as an activity that operated in relation to a practical goal, in contrast to pure science that was driven by the initiative and curiosity of the researcher. Fundamental research was work that examined the general processes and principles that governed the everyday problems and phenomena occurring in industry. At the same time, fundamental research could indicate the status of a problem, but in terms of its national importance or the scale of its occurrence, rather than in reference to its theoretical or abstract nature. There were occasional exceptions to this tendency within the reports of the Food Investigation Board and the National Physical Laboratory, where the theoretical or academic credentials of fundamental research could be emphasized as a means of bestowing an academic status upon the work done by these institutions. The choice of the expression fundamental research by the DSIR, and the meanings afforded to this term, can be understood as having a rhetorical function. The term pure science was not deemed appropriate in the context of discussions of research related to industrial development since it suggested work done for the benet of the scientist, rst and foremost. It was unlikely that British manufacturers and the public would be easily convinced that these kinds of scientic projects could benet industry. The term fundamental research, however, while referring to work that operated in relation to practical goals, could still manage to retain some of the cachet of pure science in the DSIR reports. The exible and multifaceted nature of this expression meant that it could function to convince scientists that research sponsored by the DSIR would not be dominated by mundane problem solving tasks set by government and industry. Fundamental research was described as comprehensive, in-depth, and time-consuming, and the industrial manager was warned not to demand quick answers to supercial problems. The suggestion that researchers must be given ample time and space in order to pursue their investigations seems gauged to reassure scientists engaged in industrial research that they would be awarded freedom and autonomy in their work. The equation of fundamental research with general or generic research is perhaps one of the most interesting ways in which the DSIR attempted to describe the work it supported. If the DSIR undertook research into the most widespread and reoccurring phenomena, then rms would investigate specic or singular issues related to their
64 E. Barton Worthington, Science in Africa: A Review of Scientic Research Relating to Tropical and Southern Africa (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), p. 17.
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particular business. There is nothing novel in the notion that science establishes universal truths. Here, however, in the eld of government-sponsored science, the claim that fundamental research was general research was politically pertinent. While the state was willing to take responsibility for encouraging and supporting broad programs of scientic research, it was left to individual businesses to capitalize on that work as they saw t. This paper has been a call to historians of science and technology to pay greater attention to the ways in which terms such as fundamental research were used by actors in the past. By engaging with the contingent nature of discussion about research we are able to avoid the implication that there exists a timeless and unchanging pursuit that has been merely re-labeled at various times. Advocacy of fundamental research by actors in the rst half of the twentieth century was not necessarily the promotion of the free and undirected research that is often claimed to be the nature of this activity today. The goals of the DSIR, as well as the constraints to which it was subject, are revealed through careful examination of such key terms. A consideration of the expression fundamental research in its context reveals to us the sophisticated negotiations that occurred in order to achieve the rise of research funded by the state in Britain during the rst half of the twentieth century.

Sabine Clarke

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Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 19161950 Author(s): By Sabine Clarke

Pure Science with a Practical Aim

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

SABINE CLARKE THE DEPARTMENT OF SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

PURE SCIENCE WITH A PRACTICAL AIM

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