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ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 96 tury and, more particularly, on the ways in which the Continental model of engineering in the service of the state informed one subculture in the history of American engineering. An awareness of the cultural differences within engineering may be of some help to those who are seeking to open the professions to under- represented segments of the American population. Indeed there are some indications that certain cultural groups are differentially attracted to the various subcultures within engineering. Whether or not women should be seen as a distinct cultural group in this sense is open to question, but as Robert Saunders has observed, they have entered the profession in great numbers recently and they are apparently gaining acceptance as a result of their abilities as engineers. He believes that within 20 years women will constitute 40 percent of the engineering work force. Asian-Americans have also moved strongly into engineering and those who have recently emigrated from Southeast Asia are continuing this tradition. The story is very different with blacks and chicanos, however, for the serious efforts that have been made to attract them to careers in engineering have been largely disappointing. As engineers and others continue the struggle to meet the nation's commitment to affirmative action to achieve equal opportunity, they may find it worthwhile to attempt a more precise fit between the subcultures of engineering and the cultural characteristics of the peoples they seek to attract. PATTERNS OF ADAPTATION Science and Engineering Most attempts to describe the complex relations between science and engineering are compromised at the outset by partisan preconceptions. Scientists, eager to demonstrate the utility of their increasingly expensive research, emphasize useful ''spinoffs,'' and indeed they can cite enough cases to make the argument plausible. Engineers can reply, however, that the same discoveries, or equally satisfactory solutions to the problems solved by these discoveries, well might have been found more quickly and at considerably less expense had the problems been attacked directly. Even within the realm of science itself engineers can point to the crucial role of technology. Melvin Kranzberg, developing an argument first advanced by the late Derek Price, has suggested that much of modern science, especially in those fields that depend on elaborate instrumentation, should be seen as applied, or perhaps theo
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 97 rized, technology. All such arguments assert that either science or engineering is the more fundamental of the two activities, the other being essentially dependent. It should be evident, however, that while this either/or interpretation of the relationship between science and technology may enable us to understand certain special cases, it is completely incapable of providing an account of how these two human enterprises relate in general. And since we have no adequate general theory of their relationship, it seems best to return to the study of cases, but without bringing to that study prior partisan commitments. It would be easier to distinguish between science and engineering if they did not have so much in common. Perhaps the best way to highlight their differences is to see them as separate cultures, in the sense of having different systems of values for the determination of significance. The use of a common language is no bar to the formation of distinct subcultures within a nation or of different cultures among nations. Science and engineering shared a common mathematical and methodological language, but they differ culturally in the meanings they attached to the uses of that language. Their distinctive systems of meaning are not, of course, completely self-enclosed, for intercultural communication is both necessary and commonplace. What we do find when we turn to history, however, is that in some cases this communication between the cultures of science and engineering has been relatively easily effected and has worked to the mutual benefit of both parties, whereas in other cases it has led to confrontation and breakdown. Jeffrey Sturchio's description of the American chemical community's response to the crisis created by the cutoff of German synthetic organic chemicals during World War I is a case study in the successful mediation of the differences between science and engineering, whereas James Hansen's account of the troubled career of the aeronautical engineer Max Munk at the Langley Research Station can be read as a case in which science and engineering failed to adapt to one another. Both stories should be instructive for those concerned with making the best use of the resources of both science and engineering. Although the United States had a well-developed chemical industry before World War I, the world market in the important area of synthetic organic chemicals was dominated by German chemical firms. The German firms had several important advantages, including an outstanding tradition of chemical research, the ability to secure product patents in America, and extremely low U.S. tariffs. These advantages enabled them to maintain a near monopoly, even in the United States, on such chemicals as coal-tar dyes and intermediates, certain medicinals, and synthetic nitrogen compounds and other synthetics. When
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 98 war broke out in 1914, the Germans threatened to embargo all exports of synthetic organic chemicals and the British began to blockade German shipping. The crisis these actions created in the American chemical community generated a response that was so well grounded and successful that 10 years later U.S. production of synthetic organic chemicals had been increased tenfold and long-term control of the market in these chemicals was firmly in the hands of the U.S. industry. Here then is a story of the successful harnessing of scientific and engineering resources in a time of national crisis. It was crucial to the success of this response that the challenge was perceived to be national and not just a problem for a particular industry. While any downturn in the chemical industry would have had implications for the economy as a whole, synthetic organics were essential for the production of explosives and certain medicines, and hence they were judged to be crucial for national defense. Federal officials therefore assumed responsibility for coordinating the response to this shortage. The recommendations of a committee of prominent chemists convened by the New York section of the American Chemical Society were accepted, and a protective tariff was imposed to encourage investment in the research laboratories and production facilities that would be needed to make America independent in the area of synthetic organics. By the time the United States entered the war in April 1917, the government had, by contracting with several leading chemical companies, built several major plants to produce these scarce chemicals. Once at war with Germany, the U.S. government provided even more support for the chemical industry. German dominance of the U. S. market depended heavily on patent protection for specific products such as aspirin. This was a type of technical knowledge that could be immediately and directly expropriated. It should be noted, however, that this is not always the case, for technical knowledge frequently resides in the experiential skills of small groups of practitioners, a form of knowledge that cannot be easily expropriated. In 1917 the United States sequestered German property in America, including over 4,500 chemical patents, and assigned it to the newly established Office of the Alien Property Custodian for management. Two years later the Chemical Foundation was established and the licensing of the sequestered chemical patents was assigned to it. The Chemical Foundation used the fees it received to provide public relations and research support for the American chemical industry. After the war had ended the chemical community and the federal government continued to cooperate. A protective tariff was maintained while the industry adapted to peacetime markets and positioned itself
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 99 to maintain control of the synthetic organic chemical sector. By the mid-1920s the industry had developed the institutional structures it still has today, including its close ties with the government and research universities. Jeffrey Sturchio has emphasized a number of interesting aspects of this case. For example, the number of professional chemical engineers grew very rapidly during this period: "From less than 900 students in 1910, there were on the order of 5,000 students in chemical engineering programs in the U.S. during the late 1920s." It was also an era in which the agenda for chemical research in the universities was set largely by the needs of industry: "In the 1920s those departments, such as Columbia University's Department of Chemical Engineering and the University of Illinois' Department of Chemistry, that had very close ties with industry through consultancies, fellowships and other mechanisms, found themselves prospering in ways that other departments did not." This was also the era in which chemical engineering achieved a position of distinction and prominence within American higher education. The crisis in synthetic organic chemicals, and the rapid professional and institutional growth it helped stimulate, occurred just as Arthur D. Little's famous concept of unit operations was gaining acceptance as the distinctive method of chemical engineering. Chemical engineers, Little asserted, should analyze chemical processes into the unit actions, such as pulverizing, mixing, and heating, that are the elementary steps in the production of industrial chemicals. Chemical engineering quickly became identified with the use of this method and in this way distinguished itself from scientific chemistry. But the separation of the two subcultures of chemistry was not complete, for both were closely allied with industry. As Sturchio also points out, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers tried to match the number of chemical engineers being trained to the needs of industry, but without notable success. Setting up programs to train chemical engineers inevitably involved a considerable lag time and there was no way to predict whether demand would still be high when the schools were finally operating at full capacity. In fact, early demand estimates included a considerable backlog, so that an overshoot developed fairly rapidly, and by the mid-1920s there were more chemical engineers available than the industry could employ. Since the demand for engineers was strongly linked to overall economic activity, downturns in the economy in the 1920s exacerbated the difficulties of matching supply and demand. James Hansen's study of Max Munk at Langley presents us with a case in which the differences between diverse subcultures were so great
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 100 that they could not be bridged either by dedication to a common purpose or forebearance. Munk, a prominent aeronautical engineer born in 1890, was educated in his native Germany. Highly gifted in both mathematics and science, he received two doctoral degrees, one in engineering at the Hanover Polytechnic Institute and one in physics at Goettingen. His mentor at Goettingen, Ludwig Prandtl, considered Munk his most talented student, even when compared with Prandtl's more famous pupil Theodore von Karman. Munk came to America shortly after World War I and began working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). For six years he was stationed in Washington, where he designed experimental equipment and worked on theoretical problems for the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory at Hampton, Virginia. In 1926 he was appointed chief of the Aeronautical Division and moved to Langley. Within a year the engineers in his division were in full revolt and Munk was forced to resign. Why were the engineers at Langley and this highly talented individual unable to work together? The case is complex yet revealing. The easiest way to explain the rupture would be to emphasize Munk's inability to conform to the established expectations and patterns of conduct of the Langley engineers. But we should be wary about going too far in this direction, for Munk was a very talented engineer, and since engineers are supposed to be receptive to all forms of useful knowledge, whatever their sources, it will not flatter the Langley engineers to say that they were unable to make use of Munk's undeniable talent. Hansen has therefore looked more deeply into the nature and origin of Munk's attitudes and behavior, which appeared so eccentric in the Langley setting. For our purposes, this perception of eccentricity can be characterized as a cultural dissonance that arose when Munk's approach to engineering came into conflict with the practice of the Langley engineers. Munk's ideas about the nature and values of engineering were those of the German university system in which he had been educated. Broadly stated, the highest value within this system, at least with regard to natural knowledge, was attached to theoretical knowledge of the sort exemplified by the exact physical sciences. Mathematicization, theoretical innovation, and individual creativity, values normally associated with the pursuit of pure science, were, in the German universities, also the governing values in engineering. Munk, like Charles Steinmetz, whose views on the primacy of creativity were discussed above, had internalized these ideals and attempted to honor them in his work at Langley. He had also internalized the hierarchical social attitudes of the German university system, where each department was
