Industrial research is acclaimed as the motor of contemporary American economic growth. This paper discusses several recent histories of corporate laboratories and industrial research by explicating common themes and assumptions. Alfred D. Chandler's work on business organization in late nineteenth-century America is the interpretative framework used in two recent and important histories - Leonard Reich's The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876-1926, and George Wise's Willis R. Whitney, General Electric, and the Origins of US Industrial Research. Both works provide rich accounts concerning the reasons why firms invested in research laboratories. Both also reveal the problems inherent in using Robert Merton's sociology of scientists in discussions of researchers working outside of the discipline-oriented university. The remainder of the paper replaces the normative sociological framework found in these recent histories with an analysis that locates the first corporate laboratories within the history of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American science.
The ArugmentThis essay answers a single question: what was Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's curator of experiments, doing in his well-known 1665 work, Micrographia? Hooke was articulating a “universal cure of the mind” capable of bringing about a “reformation in Philosophy,” a change in philosophy's interpretive practices and organization. The work explicated the interpretive and political foundations for a community of optical instrument users coextensive with the struggling Royal Society. Standard observational practices would overcome the problem of using nonstandard instruments, while inherent in representation – the interpretive practice championed in the text – were important theological and political meanings. Hooke's kind of experimental philosophy undermined the claims made by “atheists” and “enthusiasts” – the enemies of the restored church and state – while also producing useful knowledge. Equally important, Hooke modeled the community described in Micrographia upon the classical res publica, but his community made important concessions to Restoration political realities, especially the growing role of commercial or transactional relationships.
Radically different petroleum reserve estimates were made in the United States between 1921 and 1925. In 1921 a joint committee composed of representatives from the United States Geological Survey and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists claimed that the United States petroleum reserves would last for only eighteen to twenty years. Four years later the oil industry trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, announced that America possessed a nearly infinite supply of oil. Why were these estimates so different? This paper places each estimate in its institutional and economic context and argues that the great variance in the figures was caused by the different goals and interests of the groups that made the estimates.
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