The National Academy of Sciences The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 (1978) / Chapter Skim
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10. The Twenties: New Horizons in Science
10. The Twenties: New Horizons in Science
Pages 281-316
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I, . an Sconce ALBERT ABRAHAM MICHELSON (1923 - 1927)
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Four years later he received the Nobel Prize, the first awarded to an American scientist, in recognition of his methods of precision measurement and his investigations in spectroscopy.2 At the annual meeting of the Academy in ~9~3, Michelson, who had been Vice-President under Walcott since ~9~7, was elected Presi2 Chemist Theodore W Richards, awarded the Nobel Prize in ~9~4 for his determination of atomic weights, was the second American to be so honored; the third was Millikan, in ~924, for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect.
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He always said just what he thought...."4 In ~9~6 Thomas Alva Edison, who, fifty years before, at the last meeting over which Joseph Henry presided, had demonstrated his phonograph and carbon telephone before the Academy? "Minutes of the Academy," April ~923, pp.
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Edison demostrating his tin-foil phonograph at the National Academy of Sciences meeting in April ~ 878 (Mathew Brady photograph, courtesy the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation, Inc.)
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The lack of knowledge in the Academy of the activities of the Research Council was partly owing to the fact that the Academy Council and the Executive Board of the Research Council had ceased to meet together several years before.7 Michelson at once made clear his determination to reassert that leadership. As he said in his first Annual Report, "Ethel growth in influence, scope of activities, and actual volume of work accomplished by the Research Council naturally increases the administrative responsibility of the Council of the academy and is receiving greater attention from the latter...."8 He wrote Gano Dunn a month later, however, "I may as well confess that I have had serious doubts as to ~925)
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. now find themselves allied and almost in partnership with industry and business."~° A fortnight later, on April 27, the day before the dedication of the new Academy building, Michelson appointed a Committee on the Relationship between the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, headed by Gano Dunn, the new Research 9 Albert A
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Most significant was the creation of a seven-member Executive Committee of the Academy Council, composed chiefly of members within commuting distance of Washington, who would be able to hold frequent meetings for consideration of proposals for new Research Council projects. The members of the Executive Committee were, in addition, made ex officio members of the Research Council's Executive Board.
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meeting of the Academy isn't a directors' meeting. It is more like our old fashioned New England Town Meeting." And as he observed in another letter, "What the critical members of the Academy do not recognize is that of the ego members of the Research Council, 69 are members of the Academy and more would be drafted if they would accept appointment." Moreover, another 47 Academy members were involved in the Research Council projects, making in all ~ lo, or almost half of the Academy membership.~7 Engineering and Andes trial Research Michelson's assumption of office and his reassertion of the Academy's role came just as the Research Council was extricating itself from an IS NAS, Annual Report for 1924-25, p.
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Its original designations as "industrial relai~ons" and then "industrial research" conflicted with primary concerns of the Division of Engineering. Research Extension was intended particularly to encourage industrialists to broaden their research activities and to persuade smaller industries having common interests to join forces in establishing research laboratories.
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Rand, President of the Foundation, was appointed an ex officio member of the Research Council's Executive Board.22 Nevertheless, the first close ties between the Foundation and the Research Council had been weakened and remained so for the next three decades. The question in the Research Council, of the increasingly overlapping activities of its Research Extension and Engineering Divisions in their promotion of industrial research, was resolved in January ~924 with the consolidation of Research Extension in a new Division of Engineering and Industrial Research.23 Jewett and Holland set about revitalizing the division.
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For Vannevar Bush's estimate of the magnitude of industrial research in the Ages, see NAS, Annual Report for 1938-39, p.
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One example came out of the work of naturalist and taxidermist Charles Ethan Akeley, whose museum exhibits and movies of mountain gorillas in the Cong~the first motion pictures of wild gorillas in their natural surroundings led King Albert of Belgium to set aside a reserve for their permanent protection in March ~9~5. Following a request that April from the Belgian government, a Committee on the Parc National Albert under Robert Yerkes was appointed, initially to further the cooperation of American scientists in the use of the sanctuary and, later, to encourage the development of management policies for the park that would both preserve natural conditions and permit continuing scientific research.28 A second committee was that on the Scientific Problems of National Parks (earlier, on the Grand Canyon)
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was of meteoric rather than volcanic origin, and recommended that the area be designated a national park.~° In the Research Council, Isaiah Bowman's three-year Committee on Studies of Pioneer Belts, a joint project with the Social Science Research Council, made a worldwide survey of sparsely settled areas where proper use of environmental resources had been neglected. The resulting planning report and program were turned over to the Social Science Research Council and the American Geographical Society for their use.
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, William Welch, Thomas H Morgan, and Vernon Kellogg, Hale presented a modified plan, an Academy proposal for a National Research Endowment, its purpose to redress the imbalance between industrial research and its source, basic science.
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The Twenties: New Horizons in Science 1 295 Madame Marie Curie, co-discoverer of radium, with President Herbert Hoover at the Academy building, October 30, ~929 (Photograph courtesy Wide World Photos)
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protested the premise of the fund. 88 Brochure, National Research Endowment: A National Fundfor the Support of Research in Pure Science (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: NRE: Brochure: ~925)
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Blakeslee, botanist and Director of the Department of Genetics of the Carnegie Institution, persuaded Frank R Lillie, then President of the Academy, to seek a new broad-based science fund for the stimulation and support of fundamental research and for general purposes of the Academy.
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serve as the foundation for future research in forestry," Merriam suggested that the government might be interested in the Academy's "helping to lay the foundations for study of other great national problems."43 The committee members under Merriam included President Michelson and Vice-President Fred E Wright, the chairmen of the ten sections of the Academy, Gano Dunn as Chairman of the National Research Council, and Walcott, Chairman of the Research Council's Divison of Federal Relations.
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can be asked" to give its advice on matters of national policy. After two hours of discussion, no solutions emerged, only the recommendation that "the whole matter go back to the Sections with the request that they give it consideration."45 At the meeting, the anthropologist Franz Boas had expressed much concern over the government's misguided handling of American Indians, both in the national parks and on the reservations the result of federal officials' ignorance of the Indians' cultural heritage.
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Muller in Research Council radiation biology research, see p. 3~4 and Chapter ~6, pp.
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Wright of the Carnegie Institution of Washthings running smoothly again."52 ington, "Morgan got In retrospect, Morgan's election, following Michelson's term, had in it elements of timeliness and portent. It was during Michelson's presidency that American physicists, furnished with the first reports from abroad of quantum mechanics and its equations for atomic and molecular structure, began to prepare themselves for "one of the greatest revolutions of all time in the history of physics.''55 The biologists, during Morgan's term, were creating a revolution of their own, no less momentous.
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B Bigelow bearing the formidable title, "Report on the Scope, Problems, and Economic Importance of Oceanography, on the Present Situation in America, and on the Handicaps to Development, with Suggested Remedies." A second, or "worldwide," element of the report, with which committee member Thomas Wayland Vaughan had been charged, was delayed until ~937.56 As a consequence of the first report, in November ~929 the Rockefeller Foundation agreed to the construction and support of a central Atlantic oceanographic station, to be incorporated as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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Vaughan.59 Systematic weather forecasting as a science and as a national service was then less than seventy years old. The first weather forecasting service, made possible by the invention of the telegraph, began in this country under Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian.
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A strong competitor appeared shortly before war broke out in ~9~4, when the International Chamber of Commerce proposed instead a World Calendar of twelve months of equal quarters, based on a perpetual calendar devised by the Astronomical Society of France in ~88~.63 Since both calendars were highly susceptible to modification and their adherents agreed only on the need for reform, adjudication became necessary. 62 NAS, Annual Report for 1927-28, p.
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Five years later, in September 1927, the League, with 195 proposals from fifty-four countries, asked those nations to appoint national committees to study and report on calendar reform. (Cotsworth, meanwhile, had come to the United States, where he found in George Eastman an enthusiastic supporter for his calendar.
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Although the Conference found the thirteen-month Fixed Calendar theoretically more perfect, and the twelve-month World Calendar least disruptive of acquired habits, it made no choice, concluding that the year ~93~ was not a favorable time for reform.68 During the next eight years, ascendancy passed from the adherents of the International Fixed Calendar League to those of the World Calendar Association; and when in ~936 the latter sought Academy Bureau of Standards Director George K Burgess, had among its members Vernon Kellogg, Elmer A
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Kennelly that resolution might be nearer were the Church to abandon the lunar portion of its calendar, reducing it to a purely solar phenomenon: "The disturbing influence of the vagrant moon," Kennelly said, "has been a burden on the Christian world for more than sixteen centuries."7~ The movement for calendar reform persisted, but at the annual meeting of the Academy in ~947, Fred Wright formally discharged his committee. Except for the loss of Dr.
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The exposition theme, international in scope, was "the contribution of pure and applied science to industrial development during the last one hundred years"; and the Research Council was asked to assist in its formulation and staging. In a letter to George K
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Prominently displayed, too, were the exhibits from the Academy building brought in six crates from Washington.75 Committees on Drug Addiction In ~9~9 the Bureau of Social Hygiene transferred the work of its Committee on Drug Addiction, together with supporting funds, to the Research Council's Division of Medical Sciences. It proved to be one of the Council's longest-lived endeavors, for the problem continued to grow.
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; Lyndon F Small et al., Studies on Drug Addiction, Supplement 138 to U.S.
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A decade later the research had produced a number of new synthetic drugs, the work on morphine yielding a promising derivative, Metapon, with high analgesic action and significantly decreased addictive characteristics, as well as several new compounds approximating the effectiveness of codeine.79 The work was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation until ~ 94 I, but, upon the establishment of a unit of chemotherapy in the National Institute of Health that year, the direct research functions of the committee were transferred to the Institute. The Research Council's committee became the Advisory Committee on Drug Addiction, serving the Institute, the Armed Services, the Veterans Administration, and other federal agencies dealing with narcotic addiction.
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An early application of"the new science," as Charles S Peirce called it, was made by the geologists in a Committee on the Measurement of Geological Time by Atomic Disintegration, who undertook to calculate the age of the earth by the rate of atomic disintegration of radioactive materials in rocks of different geologic ages.82 The research in geological time was begun in ~9~4, in cooperation with the Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory, Harvard, MET, federal and state geological and mining bureaus, and the assistance of atomic chemist Theodore W
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The committee was organized in ~9~6 to provide systematic data, in nine fields comprising the principal matter of geophysics, which were much needed then by scientists engaged in exploring oil and mineral properties.85 The publication of its studies "Volcanology," "The Figure of the Earth," "Meteorology," "The Age of the Earth" (all in ~ 93 ~ ) ; the 58 ~ -page survey "Oceanography" In ~ 932; "Seismology" in ~ 933; "Internal Construction of the Earth" and "Terrestrial Magnetism" in ~939; and "Hydrology" in ~942 completed the work of the committee.
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~csu gave the unions a larger and more active role in the parent body and freedom to accept as members national committees from nonmembers of the Council, particularly Germany and the Soviet Union, both of whom participated in several of the unions.90 Over the next decade, Use, legally established in Brussels with its administrative headquarters in Cambridge, England, became a "united nations" of science, with members from the research councils of twenty-six countries and thirteen others represented through their governments or designated government bureaus.9~ ~csu was affected only incidentally by the Depression. Its meetings 88 Cf.
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As Roger Adams, a long-time member of Research Council committees, of the Research Council itself, and then of the Academy, recalled: The ineffectiveness of the National Research Council during the ten to fifteen years following World War I was due in large measure to the frequent changes in those administering the Council and its Divisions .
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