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The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 (1978)

Chapter: 8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council

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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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Suggested Citation:"8 World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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8 World War ~ and the Creation of the J~ati()nal Rese,arcI', Council WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (1913—1917) It was George Ellery Hale's opinion, as he wrote Charles D. Walcott a year before the end of President Remsen's term of office, that the new President, who should live in Washington or its immediate vicinity, must be a man of an optimistic and progressive type, committed in advance to a strong forward policy. The position of Home Secretary is hardly less important.... EHe should also be] someone in Washington ... and my own choice would fall upon LArthur L.] Day, as I feel sure that he would possess the necessary qualifications. If you were elected President, I should like to see such a man as tHenry F.] Osborn made Vice-President.' The conservative members in the Academy, joined by "such progres- sive members as Conklin, Noyes, Osborn, Chittenden, and Day, to ~ George Ellery Hale to Charles D. Walcott, May ~7, ~9~2 (NAS Archives: NAS: Future of NAS). 200

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 20 William Henry Welch, Presi- dent of the Academy, ~9~3- ~9~7 (From the archives of the Academy). mention no others" that Hale spoke for, agreed instead a year later on a nationally prominent figure from nearby Baltimore. On the morning of the third day of the semicentennial celebration in ~9~3, with sixty-three members assembled, Dr. William Henry Welch, the foremost pathologist in the nation, received a majority of the votes for President on the formal ballot, and his election was at once made unanimous. The vote for Vice-President a few minutes later went for a second time to Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian. He asked that the office go to a younger man—both he and Welch were sixty-three but persuaded by Remsen and Hale, he accepted, and his election, too, was made unanimous. Arthur Day, Director of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution, was elected Home Secretary, and Hale and Whitman Cross continued in the offices of Foreign Secretary and Treasurer.2 These were the men who would lead the Academy during the World War I years that lay just ahead. 2 "Minutes of the Academy," April ~ 9 ~ 3, pp. ~ 64- ~ 65. In a rare personal observation in his diaries, Walcott wrote that day: "I was reelected Vice President although not wishing it. The Academy drifts along without any fixed policy" (Smithsonian Archives: C. D. Walcott Papers, Walcott Diaries, ~9~3-~927).

202 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (1913-1917) Welch was unquestionably the preeminent figure in American medicine. He had been born into a family of physicians, and, during his schooling in medicine and chemistry in the early 1870S, his interest centered on pathology, then largely confined in this country to lectures. In ~876-1878 he studied pathology in laboratories at Stras- bourg, Leipzig, and Breslau. Upon his return, Bellevue Hospital Medical College permitted him to organize a small pathology labora- tory, the first in the United States, and there he taught and practiced until ~ 884. He then went to Johns Hopkins, where Dr. John S. Billings, who was organizing the Hospital and Medical Department, had recommended him as Professor of Pathology and head of the new laboratory. As influential as Welch became in restructuring American pathol- ogy, he is far better remembered for his staffing of the Hopkins Medical School. When its first unit, the Hospital, opened in ~889, Sir William Osler was in medicine, William S. Halsted in surgery, and Howard A. Kelly in gynecology; and later Franklin P. Mall in anatomy, William Henry Howell in physiology, and John }. Abel in pharmacology and chemistry. Welch was elected to the Academy in ~ 895. In ~ go ~ he was appointed President of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Rocke- feller Institute for Medical Research, in ~ 906 a trustee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and three years later Chairman of its Executive Committee. "That most urbane gentleman and leader of the medical profession in this country," as A. G. Webster called him, had been a member of the Council of the Academy for nine years when he became President in ~9~3. Welch was a short portly figure but extraordinarily impressive with his high forehead, whitening mustache, and spade beard. In temper- ament he was hernial, outgoing, and an inveterate optimist. A lifelong bachelor, he found time outside his many professional commitments for a wide range of interests arid, above all, for travel. He was in Europe in the summer of ~9~4, headed for Carlsbad, where he planned to rest and take treatment for his gout. Arriving in Munich, he found the recht gemutlich city he knew well . In the midst of a great war excitement.... The streets, restaurants and cafes are crowded with people; the bands play only national airs, and the air everywhere echoes with the modest shouts of "Deutschland uber Alles." It is all quite thrilling, but a general European war is too horrible to contemplate, and it seems impossible that it will occur.3 ~ Simon Flexner and James Thomas Flexner, William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine (New York: Viking, ~94~), pp. 365-366.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / ~o3 Two weeks later "war developments shad] proceeded with such in- credible rapidity that we found ourselves trapped in Switzerland without immediate prospect of escape." Only with much difficulty did he manage to reach England for the trip home, arriving back in Washington on September 7.4 In the week after Welch reached home, the French and British forces drawn around Paris met the German armies converging on the city and, as the days passed, slowly brought the enemy's initial surge to a halt. It was the beginning of a struggle that marked the passing of an era. Government Requests to the Academy Welch had headed the Academy a full year before his trip abroad, handling with dispatch two requests from the government before his departure. In May ~9~3, the Secretary of Agriculture asked the Academy to recommend a number of names from which a new Chief of the Weather Bureau might be chosen. Aware of the opportunity "of establishing an important precedent," as Welch said, and eager for that scientific post to be removed "from the category of political appointments," as Robert S. Woodward, chairman of Welch's commit- tee, wrote in his report, the committee recommended a single name, Charles F. Marvin, Professor of Meteorology in the Weather Bureau.5 Professor Marvin became the Bureau Chief and held the post for the next twenty years. In February ~ 9 ~4 a request from President Woodrow Wilson arrived, signed with his characteristic complimentary close, "Cordially and sincerely yours," asking that an Academy member serve with representatives of the Department of Agriculture and the Smithso- nian on a special commission to survey the condition of the fur seal herd in the Pribilof Islands. The President asked the commission to provide "the fullest possible information respecting the seal herd" on the Islands, acquired by the purchase of Alaska from Russia in ~867, Add. 5 "Minutes of the Council," May 2 I, ~9~3, p. 95; "Minutes of the Academy," November ~8, ~9~3, pp. ~72-~75; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1913, p. 23. Upon Marvin's retirement in ~933, the Academy, through its Science Advisory Board, recommended his successor, Willis R. Gregg, and, upon the latter's death five years later, his successor, Frances W. Reichelderfer, as chief and C. G. Rossby as assistant chief [Science Advisory Board, Report for 1933 -34 (Washington, ~ 934), p. ~ 9; NAS Archives: NAS: Govt Rels & Sci Adv Com, Subcom on Weather Bureau, ~938-39].

204 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (1913—1917) and to recommend a policy for the administration and regulation of their numbers. The Academy named Harvard zoologist George H. Parker, who, with Edward A. Preble of the Biological Survey and Wilfred H. Osgood of the Field Museum of Natural History for the Smithsonian, left that summer for a stay of five weeks in the Islands.6 A recurring outcry had been raised again over the alleged destruc- tion of the herd under federal administration, bringing it close to extinction. The commission's findings denied it. Even though the ruinous pelagic sealing had been outlawed in ~9~, there was still a considerable imbalance in the revived herd, now numbering almost three hundred thousand, but with improved management, according to the report, it would fully recover in a year or two. Indeed, said the report, for the welfare of the herd, and with proper selection, there was good reason to resume some commercial sealing at once. A more serious problem was the human population, whose condition was by no means creditable to the government. The Islands represented a sound investment with good returns, but needed better government of the natives and qualified appointees for the management of the seals.7 The commission's judgment was correct. Through continued in- ternational cooperation and with careful management, the herd steadily increased until it numbered more than 3 million animals, the largest and most important fur seal herd in the world. Shortly after Welch's return from abroad, President Wilson again called on the Academy, asking for a report on the possibility of controlling the landslides seriously interfering with the use of the recently completed Panama Canal. The French had abandoned an attempt to build the Canal in ~889, after ten years of effort, defeated by the near futility of trying to construct a sea-level channel across the mountainous isthmus and by the toll among the workers in the disease-ridden terrain. In ~904 the project was taken over by an American task force. In ~907, Lt. Col. (later Maj. Gen.) George W. Goethals of the U.S. Army Engineers was appointed to head the task force. With the medical assistance pro- vided by Lt. Col. (later Brig. Gen. and Surg. Gen. of the Army) 6 NAS Annual Report for ~ 914, pp. ~ 3- ~ 5. F.or Joseph Henry's interest in the exploration of"Russian America," see Henry to Louis Agassiz, April 26, ~867; Henry to Hon. W. P. Fessenden, May ~8, ~867; Henry, "Diary," May 23, ~867 (Joseph Henry Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives). 7 Wilfred H. Osgood, Edward A. Preble, and George H. Parker, The Fur Seals and Other Life of the Pribilof Islands, Alaska, in 1914 (Washington: Government Printing Office, ~9~5), ~72 pp.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 205 Laborers excavating a ditch through the toe of Cucaracha slide, Panama Canal (Photograph courtesy the National Archives). William C. Gorgas, he successfully completed the project. The first ship crossed the isthmus in August 1914. In every year since construction had begun along a new course through the hills of Panama, the sliding of the canal banks had held up the work, the great slide in Culebra Cut late in ~9~3 delaying the opening of the 'canal for ten months. The engineers believed the sliding was mechanical, but its persistence had persuaded some among them that other forces might be at work, and the Academy was asked to investigate. The Academy committee of nine, made up largely of engineers and geologists headed by geologist Charles R.

206 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (1913—1917) Van Hise, arrived in the Canal Zone in December 1915. Two months later, in "an informal forecast" to President Wilson, the committee reported that slides may be a considerable . . . maintenance charge upon the Canal for a number of years . . . and that trouble in the Culebra District may possibly again close the Canal. Nevertheless, the Committee firmly believes that, after the present difficulties have been overcome, navigation through the Canal is not likely to be seriously interrupted. There is absolutely no justification for the statement that traffic will be repeatedly interrupted during long periods for years to come. The final report, prepared by Whitman Cross and H. Fielding Reid, was submitted to the President in November ~9~.8 Four months before the formal opening of the Panama Canal the Academy established, through the efforts of its member George F. Becker, a medal—the only one of its kind at the disposal of the Academy then or later for "eminence in the application of science to the public welfare." Made possible by a trust fund set up in the name of industrialist Marcellus Hartley, the first awards, in April ~9~4, went to Goethals and Gorgas.9 The Academy, which had sought for four years to establish such an award, cordially welcomed the fund. As Elihu Thomson's medal committee explained, technical and scientific inventions usually earned their own rewards, but there were other applications of science not so recognized, and pointed to Spencer Baird's establish- ment in ~87~ of the Fish Commission, which, despite its vast impor- tance to the nation, would not have entitled him to membership in the Academy. In ~9~6 the Public Welfare Medal went for the first time to an Academy member, Cleveland Abbe, for his inauguration in ~869 of daily weather reports and his contributions in the service of the Signal Corps and the Weather Bureau since ~87 I. A second medal that year went to Gifford Pinchot, the organizer of the conservation movement and tireless crusader for systematic conservation of the nation's natural resources.~° In ~9~', the medal was awarded to the Director The preliminary report appeared in NAS, Proceedings 2:193-207 (April ~5, ~9~6); the final report, in NAS, Memoirs 18: I-135 (~924). 9 "Minutes of the Academy," November Tog, pp. 39-4~; NAS, Annual Report for 1913, p. 24; 1914, pp. TO-DO, 27. a "It was really Pinchot's candidacy that gave rise to this medal," George F. Becker wrote A. G. Webster, March ~5, ~9~3 (NAS Archives: NAS: Trust Funds: Hartley Fund: Public Welfare Medal). Pinchot had been nominated three times but never elected to Academy

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council 1 207 of the National Bureau of Standards, Samuel W. Stratton, for his "services in introducing standards into the practice of technologists." In that same year Stratton was elected to the Academy. The election in ~ 9 ~ ~ to the Academy's Physics Section of William F. Durand, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Leland Stanford University; John /. Carty, Chief Engineer at American Telephone and Telegraph; and Henry M. Howe, Professor of Metallurgy at Columbia University, did little to resolve a long-standing dilemma, namely, a place in the Academy for the applied sciences. At its founding, military and naval engineers prominent in the science or art of engineering had comprised almost a fifth of the incorporators, and during the Civil War years more engineers were added. But few were elected thereafter, and their numbers steadily declined. By ~ 9 ~ ~ Henry L. Abbot, who had been elected in 8, was the sole remain- ing representative of the Corps of Engineers. Despite the rise of industrial engineering late in the previous century, rarely had any of its representatives been elected to the Academy, and the Physics and Engineering Section became some- thing of a misnomer. The Council, which had been slow to resolve the problem, was pressed by Hale, who saw the election of industrial engineers as imperative to his plans for the Academy. In ~9~5 the Council recommended changing the Section of Physics and Engineer- ing to physics only, and a year later began planning a separate section of engineering. With the Engineering Division in the wartime Na- tional Research Council as something of a precedent, the new section in the Academy was formally established with nine members in ~9~9. Its chairman was Henry Abbot. membership ("Minutes of the Academy," April ~899, p. 576; April ~906, p. ~26; April Dog, p. 34; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1915, pp. 27-28). NAS, Annual Report for 1917, p. 20. For subsequent recipients, see medalists of the National Academy in the Academy's Annual Reports. See also Paul Brockett, "National Academy of Sciences Medal Awards," Sc'~ntif ic Monthly 59:428 (December ~ 944). ~2 Henry L. Abbot to Arthur L. Day, December 28, ~9~2 (Carnegie Institution of Washington and California Institute of Technology, George Ellery Hale Papers: Microfilm Edison, ~968, Roll 26, Frames ~89-~9~). ~, "Minutes of the Council," November ~9~5, p. ~68; correspondence in NAS Archives: NAS: Sections: Engineering; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1916, pp. 23-24, 30; "Minutes of the Council," December ~ 9, ~ 9 ~ 7, p. 339/4; November 9, ~ 9 ~ 9, p. 474; NAS, Annual Report for 1919, p. 32. For a later note on why "many of the most able engineers of the country [would] never be included in the membership of the Academy," see NRC Office Memorandum 470, February I, ~938 (NAS Archives: E&JR: Reorganization of Division, ~938).

208 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (~9~3—~9~7) The war in Europe had pushed everything else into the background. As the year ~9~4 ended, the German armies and the French and English forces opposing them stretched in an arc of improvised trenches from the Belgian coast to the border of Switzer- land, destined to be fixed there in deadlock for almost four years. The initial shock and the depression of spirits in this country had been alleviated by President Wilson's affirmation on August ~8 of a policy of strict neutrality. As the months passed and the battlefront stabilized, the first arms orders for resupply of the Allied armies began to arrive in the United States. Less than a year later American shipping plying the Atlantic confronted the menace of the recently developed German U-boat. When in May ~9~5 the British passenger linerLusitania, carrying a cargo of munitions, was sunk with heavy loss of lives, including a number of American citizens, the entry of the United States into the war seemed only a matter of time. In July ~9~5, George Ellery Hale wired Welch, then on his way to the Orient, "The Academy is under strong obligation to offer fits] services to the President in the event of war with . . . Germany," and asked Welch to learn the opinion of the Academy Council.'4 Welch continued to temporize after his return home in December, but when in the following spring the Essex was torpedoed and the Sussex sunk with the loss of American lives and cargoes, an aroused Hale acted. Upon his reelection as Foreign Secretary at the meeting on April ~9, ~9~6, Hale obtained Council and Academy assent to seek the cooperation of the engineering societies "in the work of the academy for the national welfare." With that, he presented a resolution to the Council urging that the President of the Academy be requested to inform the President of the United States that, in the event of a break in diplomatic relations with any other country, the Academy desires to place itself at the disposal of the Government for any services within its scope. The resolution carried, and, upon its unanimous approval by the Academy members present, Hale asked "that the Council be empow- ered to organize the Academy for the purpose of carrying out the resolution...." Later that day, at another meeting of the Council, id Telegram, July ~3, ~9~5 (Hale Microfilm, Roll 36, Frame 873); Hale to William H. Welch, July 3, ~9~5, and Welch to Hale, July ~4, ~9~5 (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Com on Organizing NRC); Helen Wright, Explorer of the Universe: A Biography of George Ellery Hale (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., ~966), pp. 286-287.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 209 Edwin G. Conklin requested, and President Welch agreed, to appoint a committee to wait upon the President.~5 On April z6, ~9~6, Welch, Hale, Walcott, Conklin, and Robert S. Woodward met with President Wilson at the White House. Hearing "in a general way methods and directions in which the Academy might be of service under the circumstances," the President suggested the formation at once of a committee "to undertake such work as the Academy might propose," but asked that his oral approval not be publicized. Upon Hale's appeal to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, the President's interdiction was subsequently withdrawn. Organization and Staffing of the National Research Council By June Hale and his Committee on the Organization of the Scientific Resources of the Country for National Service, comprising Conklin, Simon Flexner, Robert A. Millikan, and Arthur A. Noyes, had a plan that was to be accomplished through the formation by the Council of the Academy of a National Research Council, the purpose of which shall be to bring into co-operation existing governmental, educational, industrial and other re- search organizations with the object of encouraging the investigation of natural phenomena, the increased use of scientific research in the develop- ment of American industries, the employment of scientific methods in strengthening the national defense, and such other applications of science as will promote the national security and welfare. The members of the National Research Council (NRC) Hale had first called it the National Research Foundation were to comprise the "leading American investigators and engineers, representing Army, Navy, Smithsonian Institution, and various scientific bureaus of the Government, educational institutions and research endowments, and the research divisions of industrial and manufacturing establish- ments."~7 The approval of the plan, when presented to the Academy ~~ Minutes ot the (Jouncil," April ~ 9 ~ 6, p. ~ 75; "Minutes of the Academy," April ~ 9 ~ 6, pp. 203, 206; "Minutes of the Council," April ~9~6, p. 2 ~ i; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1916, pp. ~2, 22; correspondence in NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Com on Organizing NRC. ~6 Reported in "Minutes of the Council," June ~ 9 ~ 6, pp. 2 ~ 7-2 20. ~7 "Minutes of the Council,"June ~9~6, pp. 222-227; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1916, p. 32; Hale, "The National Research Council," Science 44:26~266 (August 25, ~9~6). (Continued overleap

210 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (~9~3—~9~) George Ellery Hale, Chairman of the National Research Council, ~9~6-~9~9, with the Foucault pendulum in the Great Hall of the Academy games Stokley photograph, courtesy Science Service). Council on June ~9, marked the inception of the National Research Council. ~8 The "explicit purposes" of the Research Council, as carefully That Hale had in mind the Royal Institution and its relationship with the Royal Society in planning the Research Council is affirmed in The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), pp. ~32-~34. 's President Welch in his introductory essay to the annual Reportfor 1916—resuming a

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 2 ~ ~ worded by Welch and Hale, were no more than to undertake a national inventory of available scientific equipment and men, estab- lish special committees to survey important problems for research, and promote cooperation between investigators in government bureaus, universities, research institutions, and industrial labora- tories.~9 The plan awaited only White House approval and the funds necessary to put it into operation. At the conclusion of the Hale committee presentation, President Welch announced the first Academy committee for the emergency, the Committee on Nitric Acid Supply. It had been proposed by A. A. Noyes to Secretary of War Baker and appointed at his request to investigate the critical shortage of nitric acid a substance no longer obtainable from Germany but basic in the making of propellants, high explosives, dyes, fertilizers, and other products. In a preliminary report to the Ordnance Department, the Noyes committee concluded "that the government could not construct and put into efficient operation an independent plant for the production of nitric acid . . . within a period of less than 1~/: years, and that therefore some other provision is essential if a large supply of nitric acid is to be made immediately available...." To ensure a large immediate supply the committee recommended both importing Chilean saltpeter in quantity and developing large-scale methods for converting readily available ammonia. Construction of the four great ordnance plants for nitric acid production, authorized by the War Department in June ~9~', began after months of study of synthetic processes by the Academy- Research Council committee, War Department, Department of Ag- riculture, and Bureau of Mines but was not completed until after the war.20 The United States continued to depend upon Chile. custom that had lapsed since Wolcott Gibbs's time said that it was President Wilson's request that the Academy "take the initiative in ascertaining and correlating the scientific resources of the country which might be depended upon for the solution of problems arising out of the movement for 'preparedness' against the possibility of war. The Council of the academy took immediate action upon the request and organized an independent body with power to act, which has been called the National Research Council" (p. ~ 2). The Research Council, of course, was not to be an independent body. ~9 NAS, Annual Report for 1916, p. ~ 2; Hale, "Preliminary Report of the Organizing Committee to the President of the Academy," NAS, Proceedings 2:507-510 (August ~9~6). 20 "Minutes of the Council," tune ~9~6, pp. 228-232; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1918, pp. 84-86; Grosvenor B. Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Lines, 1917-1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. ~923), pp. 389-39O.

212 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (1913 - 1917) The White House was slow to react to the Academy's plan for a National Research Council. It was election year, and President Wilson was seeking a second term on the platform that he had kept the country out of war. The creation of a national agency that even suggested defensive preparations or the possibility of war began to seem unlikely. Meanwhile, Hale had obtained the assurance of coop- eration from the major scientific societies, universities, technological and medical institutions, and industrial research laboratories, and with that support he saw first the President's personal representative in the White House, Col. Edward M. House, who promised to speak to the President, and then met with James R. Garfield, campaign manager of Charles Evans Hughes, who was running against Wilson. On July 24, ~9~6, President Wilson wrote Welch approving the preliminary plan for "the National Research Council, which was formed at my request under the National Academy of Sciences...." [T]he departments of the Government are ready to cooperate In every way that may be required, and . . . the heads of the departments most immediately concerned are now, at my request, actively engaged in considering the best methods of cooperation.... Representatives of Government bureaus will be appointed as members of the Research Council as the Council desires.22 The President also sent a confirming wire to Hale, who immediately telegraphed Gano Dunn, President of the I. G. White Engineering Corporation, President of the United Engineering Societies, and Chairman of the Engineering Foundation. Dunn and Michael Pupin, Academy member and Vice-Chairman of the Foundation, met with Hale in New York that night. The Engineering Foundation gener- ously provided Hale a New York office for the Research Council in the Engineering Societies' building; the services of Cary T. Hutchin- son, Secretary of the Foundation; and the entire income of the Foundation for a year.23 A week later, on August 5, President Wilson sent Welch the names of his appointments to the Research Council for the armed services and federal bureaus: Maj. Gen. William C. Gorgas, Surgeon General; Brig. Gen. William Crozier, Chief of Ordnance; Lt. Col. George O. Squier, Signal Corps, Aviation Section; Rear Adm. David W. Taylor, 2~ Wright, Explorer of the Universe, pp. 288-289. 22 Woodrow Wilson to Welch, luly 24, ~9~6 (NAS, Annual Reportfor 1916, p. 32). 25 NAS, Annual Report for 1916, p. 33. The following February, the Foundation again voted to devote its income, about $~3,ooo, to the NRC [Gang Dunn to Hale, March lo, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: FINANCE: Funds: Grants: Engineering Foundation)].

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 2 ~ 3 Chief of Construction; Mr. Van H. Manning, Director, Bureau of Mines; Professor Charles F. Marvin, Chief of the Weather Bureau; Dr. S. W. Stratton, Director, Bureau of Standards; Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution; and Dr. William H. Holmes, Chief Curator, National Museum. They were to join mem- bers from the Academy and from scientific and industrial associations appointed later that month.24 Thus for the first time in the history of this country [as Scientific American declared] science, education, industry and the federal government have joined hands in a plan for the promotion of research, as such, without stipulations or preoccupations as to immediate "practical" returns.25 With the Research Council in being and its initial cadre, twenty- eight in number, selected, Hale and Welch sailed for Europe, Hale to consult with scientists in England and France on the physical and chemical problems of the war confronting them and Welch to study the administration of military hospitals and medical problems created by the war.26 They returned together the first week in September to find the Research Council in jeopardy. President Wilson had earlier au- thorized a Council of National Defense (CND), headed by the Secre- tary of War and comprising the Secretaries of Navy, Interior, Agricul- ture, Commerce, and Labor, to make recommendations to the White 24 Wilson to Welch, August 5, ~9~6 (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Com on Organizing NRC). A brief estrangement arose that spring between Hale's organizing committee in the Academy and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, because the AAAS Committee of One Hundred on Scientific Research, set up under E. C. Pickering in the spring of ~9~4, with Cattell its major spokesman, was also intent on mobilizing science for the national emergency. Through the efforts of A. A. Noyes, the AAAS voted in December ~9~6 to cooperate with the NRC under a joint agreement providing for equal representation on NRC committees of nominees of the Academy, AAAS, and national societies representing specific branches of science [AAAS, Proceedings 62 -66 :645 (gongs); correspondence in NAS Archives: ORG: Relationships with Professional and Scientific Organizations: AAAS; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1916, pp. 33-34; Hale to Cary T. Hutchinson, December 5, ~ 9 ~ 6, and January 5, ~ 9 ~ 7 (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: General); "Minutes of the Council," December ~9~7, pp. 339/~20)]. On Hale, Cattell, and the AAAS, see Nathan Reingold, "National Aspirations and Local Progress," Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 71 :23~246 (Fall ~968). 25 Scientific American 115:256 (September ~6, ~9~6). Hale's first accounts of the NRC appeared in a letter in the New York Times, July 26, ~ 9 ~ 6 (copy in NRC Miscellaneous Papers, vol. I ); Science 44 :26~266 (August 25, ~ 9 ~ 6); NAS, Proceedings 2: 507-510 (August ~ 9 ~ 6). 26 NAs, Annual Report for 1916, p. 32, and for the cadre of forty-four at the end of the year, pp. 34-35; Flexner and Flexner, William Henry Welch, pp. 367-369.

214 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (~9~3—~9~7) House "for the coordination of industries and resources for the national security and welfare."27 The CND was thus initially established largely as a steering committee, but the Director of its Advisory Commission, Hollis Godfrey, engineer, President of Drexel Institute, and principal architect of CND, had announced plans for a rival scientific body within cND.28 The uncertainty hung over the Research Council for five months. The possible federal rival did not mar the meeting of the National Research Council in New York on September So, ~9~6, attended by nineteen of the thirty-four members appointed to the Research Council, among them members of the Academy, representatives of scientific societies, of federal agencies, of the Engineering Founda- tion, and of engineering societies. At that meeting the National Research Council was formally organized: Hale was named its per- manent Chairman; Charles Walcott and Gano Dunn its Vice- Chairmen; John I. Carty, representing the Engineering Societies, was made Chairman of its Executive Committee; and consulting engineer Cary T. Hutchinson, its Secretary. A month later the Executive Committee had been formed. Its members were: William H. Welch, President of the National Academy of Sciences; George E. Hale, Director of the Mt. Wilson Solar Observa- tory; Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Gano Dunn, President of the l. G. White Engineering Corporation; John l. Carty, Chief Engineer of the American Telephone and Tele- graph Company; Russell H. Chittenden, Director of the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University; Edwin G. Conklin, Professor of Zoology, Princeton University; Robert A. Millikan, Professor of Physics, University of Chicago; Arthur A. Noyes, Professor of Physical Chemis- try, MIT; Raymond Pearl, biologist at the Maine Agricultural Experi- 27 Walter S. Gifford, "Report from the Director of CND and its Advisory Commission, May 28, ~9~7" [L/C mimeograph subsequently reproduced as First Annual Report of CND (Washington: Government Printing Of lice, ~ 9 ~ 7), p. 6]. 28 Walcott to Hale, December 8, ~9~6, (Hale Microfilm, Roll 36, Frames To-do); Hale to Hutchinson, January ~3, ~9~7 (ibid., Roll 20, Frame ~44). Still another defense agency of brief concern was the War Committee of Technical Societies, largely engineering, organized in June ~9~7 to cooperate with government departments in the federal war program. That October it moved to Naval Consulting Board headquarters, and in December ~ 9 ~ 8 it was dissolved, its members transferred to the Board ["Minutes of the War Committee," December ~8, ~9~8, and D. W. Brunton to F. A. Scott, October 3, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: ORG: Relationships with Sci & Tech Orgs: Engineering Groups)].

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 2 ~ 5 ment Station; Michael I. Pupin, Professor of Electro-Mechanics, Columbia University; Samuel W. Stratton, Director of the National Bureau of Standards; and Victor C. Vaughan, Director of the Medical Research Laboratory, University of Michigan.29 Seventeen committees (expanding to twenty-eight before the end of ~9~6) initially comprised the National Research Council, their offices at the Smithsonian and at the Engineering Societies' Building in New York City. The committees and their chairmen were: Aero- nautics, C. D. Walcott; Agriculture, R. Pearl; Anthropology, W. H Holmes; Astronomy, E. C. Pickering; Botany, ]. M. Coulter; Census of Research, S. W. Stratton; Chemistry, M. T. Bogert; Geography, W. M Davis; Geology, j. M. Clarke; Medicine and Hygiene, V. C. Vaughan; Military Committee, C. D. Walcott; Nitrate Supply, A. A. Noyes; Physics, R. A. Millikan; Physiology, W. B. Cannon; Promotion of Industrial Re- search, ]. j. Carty; Research in Educational Institutions, G. E. Hale; and Zoology, E. G. Conklin. It was a tentative arrangement, organized around fields of science and little resembling a war research organization, but it represented a remarkable achievement for Hale and his colleagues. Frank B. Jewett, in ~9~6 thirty-seven years old and Chief Engineer of Western Electric, who served on several of the wartime committees (elected to the Academy in ~9~8; President of the Academy during World War II), recalled years later the founding of the Research Council as he heard it from his friends Carty and "the remarkable triumvirate of Hale, Millikan, and Noyes." The latter three were contemporaries, close friends, distinguished in their fields, and all highly articulate and persuasive. Hale as chief of staff, said Jewett, provided the imagination of the enterprise; Millikan was its dynamic commander, leader of the field forces; and Noyes its wise counselor. And from the beginning they envisioned a postwar role for the Research Council, as the instrument of the Academy for broadening the base "of its ability to serve the nation," and, under the aegis of the 29 "Report of the First Meeting . . . NRC," NAS, Proceedings 2 :602-608 (October ~ 9 ~ 6); NAS Archives: NRC: Meetings: First: Sept. ~9~6; NAS, Annual Report for 1916, p. 34; Cary T. Hutchinson, `'Report to the Engineering Foundation on the Origin, Founda- tion and Scope of the National Research Council," February 27, ~9~7 (NRC, Miscella- neous Papers, vol I, no. 7, ~9~8). 3° NAS, Annual Report for 1916, pp. 35-36. By November there were also committees on mathematics and psychology; paleon- tology had been added to geology, animal morphology to zoology, and medicine and hygiene had been separated. See NAS, Proceedings 2:740 (~9~6).

216 / WILLIAM HENRY WELCH (1913—1917) George E. Hale, Arthur A. Noyes, and Robert A. Millikan, three early leaders of the National Research Council (Photograph courtesy the archives, California Institute of Technology). Academy, to "make the Council a powerful instrument in advancing all fields of science." In the fall of 1916, with Hale in Pasadena preoccupied with his 1oo-inch telescope and Noyes within commuting distance in Cam- bridge, Millikan, upon being made Vice-Chairman of the Research Council and its Director of Research, obtained leave from the Univer- sity of Chicago and moved to Washington to oversee Council opera- tions on a full-time basis.32 3~ Frank B. Jewett, "The Genesis of the National Research Council and Millikan's World War I Work," Reviews of Modern Physics 20 :1-4 (January ~ 948). On that initial organiza- tion of science, see Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science, 1919- 1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, ~97~), pp. 20-6~. 32 The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, p. ~35

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 2 ~ 7 Resignation of Welch and Election of Walcott Though still in the seeming chaos of organization, the Research Council, with almost fifty members, was nevertheless well launched when, at the meeting of the Academy in November ~9~6, Dr. Welch announced his intention of resigning the presidency of the Academy. Welch was on the boards of half a dozen institutions calling on his energies, including the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, as well as the Medical Advisory Board of the President's Council of National Defense. As he neared his sixty-seventh birthday, he was also contemplating resign- ing his professorship of pathology at Johns Hopkins in order to give more time to the School of Hygiene and Public Health that was under construction there. His recent tour of the training camps and field hospitals abroad had greatly stirred him, and he was aware that, in the event of America's involvement in the war, he too would be involved. Any hesitancy Welch had about his resignation, in view of the uncertain future of the Academy's new Research Council, ended early the next year with word that Hollis Godfrey had lost favor in the Council of National Defense.34 In the meantime, Germany, feeling the effects of America's resup- ply of the Allies, proclaimed unrestricted submarine warfare on February I, ~ 9 ~ 7. Two days later, when Germany refused to exclude the United States from that policy, President Wilson broke off dip- lomatic relations. America's entry into the war was two months away. On April ~ 7, the second day of the annual meeting of the Academy, Welch presented his letter of resignation, noting in it his indebtedness to Home Secretary Day and Foreign Secretary Hale for carrying the burden of the conduct of Academy affairs during his term of office.35 Two months later, he was a major in the medical section of the Officers' Reserve Corps, attached to the Surgeon General's Office to 33 Welch to President Wilson, October 26, ~9~6, reported the successful launching of the Research Council (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Com on Organizing NRC). 4 For the removal of the "menace to the Research Council," see Walcott to Hale, January 9, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: General). For Godfrey's subsequent amends, see "Minutes of the First Meeting," Engineering Committee, NRC, May 3, ~ 9 ~ 7, p. 3 (NAS Archives: EX Com: Com on Engineering: General). At Welch's insistence, Godfrey was brought into the Research Council (Flexner and Flexner, William Henry Welch, p. 369). Also, see p. 2~4 regarding Godfrey. 85 "Minutes of the Academy," April ~9~7, pp. 292-293; NAS,Ann~l Repo~for 1917, pp. 16-17.

~ 18 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) provide liaison between civilian medical laboratories and the Army.36 He managed, however, to find time while in uniform to look after his School of Hygiene and Public Health, which opened in the fall of 8. The election of Charles Walcott as Welch's successor was highly satisfactory to George Ellery Hale. With no ambition of his own for the office of President—his bent was in planning and organizing programs, rather than operating them Hale was pleased when the unanimous vote of the seventy-three members present on April 1' went to Walcott.37 CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) At sixty-seven, Charles Doolittle Walcott was probably the most pres- tigious figure in scientific and social circles in Washington, and looked it. He carried his six-foot-two-inch frame with patrician ease and reflected the tireless stamina that an extraordinary career had called on repeatedly. Walcott had determined on a career in geology and paleontology at the age of seventeen; and six years later, in ~873, while studying with Louis Agassiz at Harvard, he had announced to his professor his intention of ascertaining the structure of the trilobite. He pursued this study intermittently for the next forty-five years, most actively while assistant to New York State Geologist lames Hall, and as geologist and paleontologist in the Geological Survey from ~ 879 to ~894. In the latter year he succeeded Powell as Director of the Survey, and between field research trips he continued to maintain that agency as the most prestigious of the scientific bureaus in the capital. In ~897, the year after his election to the Academy, he was ap- pointed Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian, succeeding Samuel P. Langley a decade later as its fourth Secretary. It was characteristic of 56 Flexner and Flexner, William Henry Welch, p. 370. `7 "Minutes of the Academy," April ~ 9 ~ 7, p. 306. 38 One of Walcott's first acts had been to assign a room at the Smithsonian "where all archives of the Academy could be stored and business transacted" ("Minutes of the Academy," April ~907, p. ~49).

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council 1 2 ~ 9 Charles Doolittle Walcott, Pres- ident of the Academy, ~9~7- ~923 (Photograph courtesy the Smithsonian Institution). Walcott's organizing talents that he should have foreseen, at such an early date, the need for a committee on aeronautics, which he set up at the Smithsonian in ~9~3 to carry on the work of Langley. That committee was the progenitor of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in ~9~5.39 During his first three years as President of the Academy, he was also Vice-Chairman of the National Research Council, Chairman of the Research Council's Military Committee, Chairman of the Execu- tive Committee of NACA, and chairman or an executive of almost thirty other wartime committees.40 Walcott was the last Academy President to serve the six-year term ot 39 For the involvement of Walcott and the Academy in the establishment and early years of NACA, seed. C. Hunsaker, "Forty Years of Aeronautical Research," Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report for 1955, pp. 243-247. See also Alice M. Quinlan, "World War I Aeronautical Research: A Comparison of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the National Research Council," NASA Historical Office Summer Seminar, ~974 (manuscript in NAS Archives). 4° Ellis L. Yochelson, NAS, Biographical Memoirs 39:474, 508 (~967); A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and 'activities to 1940 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ~957), pp. 285-287.

220 / CHARLES DOQLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) office established by the founders of the Academy.4~ With the grow- ing membership and expanding interests of the Academy, its adminis- trative duties had become increasingly time-consuming. As one famil- iar with the office, Ira Remsen, at the meeting at which President Welch announced his resignation, proposed an amendment to reduce the term of the President and Vice-President from six to four years. In the spring of ~9~8 the amendment, changed to include all officers of the Academy, was adopted.42 Although the Academy was almost wholly engaged for the next two years in the activities of the Research Council, it spoke for science on one occasion, in the matter of the classification of scientific men for war service. Informed in November ~9~' by the American Associa- tion of University Professors that an amendment to the draft act proposed by the Surgeon General would permit medical students to enlist in the Medical Service or the Medical Reserve Corps, the Academy at once interceded with the Secretary of War on behalf of the many scientific men in the universities and industry who had volunteered for or been inducted into the combat services. As the Academy declared: . . . the purpose of the establishment of the Academy by special Act of Congress . . . was to create an organization whose duty it should be to advise the Government on scientific matters. It would be recreant to this duty, therefore, if it failed tic point out the urgent need of . . . action . . . [on behalf of] our scientifically trained men.... It recommended to the Secretary that the same privilege of service accorded medical students be extended to graduate students in sci- ence in the universities and to junior and senior members of research institutions. Twenty-one scientific and engineering disciplines were named for that consideration.45 The Provost Marshal General replied a month later that the amended selective service law, designed "to disturb as little as possible consistent with the exigencies of the emergency the industrial, scien- tific, and economic interests of the Nation," excepted medical and engineering students, but that in view of"the present urgent need for young and healthy men for the Army, it manifestly would be unwise 4' For the return to a presidential term of up to six years, see Chapter ~7, p. 568. 42 "Minutes of the Academy," April ~ 9 ~ 7, p. 294; "Minutes of the Council," April ~ 9 ~ 7, p. 298; "Minutes of the Academy," November ~9~7, p. 334; "Minutes of the Council," November ~ 9 ~ 7, pp. 337-338; "Minutes of the Academy," April ~ 9 ~ 8, p. 389. 43"Minutes of the Council," November ~9~7, p. 320; "Minutes of the Academy," November ~9~7, pp. 326-33~; NAs,Ann2utl Reportfor 1917, pp. 25-26.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council 1 22 ~ to accord to all students the privilege of completing their courses." New regulations soon to be enacted would, however, put restraints on volunteers and "insure that scientific men actively engaged in indus- tries tof the utmost importance to the security and defense of our country] . . . will be placed in a deferred class."44 But America's patriotic zeal to make the world safe for democracy resulted in a high rate of volunteer enlistments, even among key people. By June ~9~7, 9 million men had registered for war service, including enlistments and first call-ups. As the war ended, At million were registered and 3 million were in uniform.45 Even before the United States entered the war, throngs of visitors and newcomers had begun pouring into the city of Washington, as they had a half century before. Again it became the war center of the nation, its population rising from 3so,ooo to more than s26,ooo in two short years.46 Orders issued from the capital in a steady stream; long rows of "tempos" went up on the Mall; and new and improvised factories rose across the nation. Within two months a token division in khaki had been hastily assembled and sent to France. By the end of that year, ~oo,ooo American soldiers were overseas and the nation was fully mobilized for war. The Academy and the Wartime Research Council On February 4, ~ 9 ~ 7, the day after this country severed diplomatic relations with Germany, Hale in Pasadena at once telegraphed Presi- dent Wilson offering the services of the National Research Council. More than two weeks passed, and an impatient Hale, anxious to start actual research, complained: "So far, unless it be in the Military and NAS, Annual Report for 1917, pp. 27-29, 47. 45 The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, p. ~65; George C. Reinhardt and William R. Kintner, The Haphazard Years; How America Has Gone to War (New York: Doubleday & Co., ~960), pp. 89-90. Dr. Welch enlisted in the Medical Corps as a major, accepting his commission from Major General Gorgas. The Signal Corps conferred the same rank on R. A. Millikan and C. E. Mendenhall. In the next year more than twenty members of the Academy went into uniform, including A. A. Michelson in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance and Augustus Trowbridge and Theodore Lyman in Army Ordnance. Millikan's wholly scientific group, in the Signal Corps before its transfer to the Bureau of Aircraft Production, comprised 22 officers, ~2~ enlisted men, and ~6 civilians. 46 Constance Green, Washington: Capital City, 1879-1950 (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, ~ 963), p. 237, passim.

222 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) Nitrate Committees, we have done little more than to erect a for- midable group of committees."47 On March 1, ending Hale's anxiety, word arrived of a statement adopted by the President's Council of National Defense the day before: Resolved, That the Council of National Defense, recognizing that the Na- tional Research Council, at the request of the President of the United States, has organized the scientific forces of the country in the interest of national defense and national welfare, requests that the National Research Council cooperate with it in matters pertaining to scientific research for national defense and to this end the Council of National Defense suggests that the National Research Council appoint a committee of not more than three, at least one of whom shall be located in Washington, for the purpose of maintaining active relations with the Director of the Council of National Defense.48 The absence of any reference to the Academy in the resolution. conferring by implication an element of autonomy on the Research Council, apparently met with no objection.49 Hale, however, noted the omission in the Defense Council resolution and wrote Arthur Day the week it was received: AS a matter of fact, the National Research Council is really a committee of the Academy, and it will . . . hold a meeting Eduring the annual meeting of the Academy] . . . as any other committee of the Academy might do.50 47 Hale to Hutchinson, February 20, ~9~7, quoting night letter of February 4 (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: General). 48 Secretary, CND, to Hutchinson, Secretary, NRC, March I, ~9~7; Hutchinson to Hale, March I, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: General). For Welch's intercession on behalf of the NRC with members of the CND, see Flexner and Flexner, William Henry Welch, p. 369, and correspondence in NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: General. On February ~5 CND also brought into its sphere the Naval Consulting Board headed by Thomas A. Edison. It had been appointed originally by the Secretary of the Navy in ~9~5 as a central research organization, but members of the Board were unable to agree on the location of laboratories for which Congress had appropriated funds. It was screening thousands of inventions submitted to the government by the public when it was appointed by CND as its Board of Inventions. See Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, pp. 306-308; L. N. Scott, Naval Consulting Board of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, ~920). 49 The subscript title of the Research Council, "Acting as the Department of Science and Research of the Council of National Defense," was first considered at the meeting of the Research Council's Executive Committee on May 24, ~9~7, and acknowledged in the First Annual Report of the CND, pp. 48-52. 50 Hale to Day, March 5, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: EX Com: General). As Millikan said, "the

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 223 Nevertheless, President Welch had called the Research Council "an independent body."5~ The ambiguity in the relationship was long debated in Academy councils.52 The sudden conjunction with the Council of National Defense, and the wording of its resolution, created another kind of ambiguity for Hale. He had intended the Research Council to be as concerned with basic research as with applied research, saying in the Annual Report that year: It was recognized from the outset that the work to be undertaken should not be confined to the promotion of researches bearing upon military problems, but that true preparedness would best result from the encouragement of every form of investigation, whether for military and industrial application or for the advancement of knowledge without regard to its immediate practical bearing.53 For that reason he had offered a resolution at the first meeting of the Executive Committee of the Research Council on September ~ I: . . . that the efforts of the Research Council shall be uniformly directed to the encouragement of individual initiative in research work, and that co- operation and initiative, as understood by the Research Council, shall not be deemed to involve restrictions or limitations of any kind to be placed upon research workers.54 The action of the CND ended any thought of basic research. As Hale wrote Hutchinson, tW]e must devote practically our entire attention to national defense work for some time to come. We must also take the whole matter out of the academic state, and put it on a business basis. Research Council was organized as an adjunct to, or better, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences" (The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, p. ~37). 5~ See note ~S in this chapter. 52 The letterhead reflecting this relationship was used until dissolution of the NRC-CND relationship on June 30, ~9~9 (NAS Archives: EX Bd: Com on Letterheads for NRC: 1919; NAS, Annual Report for 1919, p. 65). 53 NAS, Annual Reportfor 1916, p. 32, quoted in Scientific American 115:256 (September ~6, ~9~6). As Hale wrote to an inquirer: "our work is by no means to be confined solely to practical applications of science for public welfare and national security . . . [since] we believe that the most fundamental form of preparedness lies in the promotion of research in pure science . . ." [Hale to lohn M. Clarke, January 25, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: EX Com: Com on Geology & Paleontology)]. 54 NAS, Proceedings 2: 605-606 (October ~ 9 ~ 6).

224 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (~9~7—~923) . . . a_ .. .. . ... Members of the National Research Council staff during World War I. Robert A. NIillikan is second from left (Photograph courtesy the archives, California Institute of Technology). It meant, he said, establishing an office in Washington and appoint- ment of a Director of Research for National Defense.55 It would also give added impetus to his plans for the future of the Research Council. 55 Hale to Hutchinson, March 5, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: ORG: NRC: Officers: Vice- Chairman & Director of Research: R. A. Millikan). The same letter reported Haleis effort to bring metallurgist and mining engineer Herbert Hoover into the Research Council. Hoover later became a member, as well as the wartime U.S. Commissioner of Food.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 225 Three weeks after the CND resolution, Hale set up offices in the Munsey Building on E Street, where the Council of National Defense had its headquarters; asked Millikan to take charge of the offices; and appointed a committee of three: Walcott, Chairman of the Military Committee; Stratton, Secretary of that committee; and Millikan, as Director of Research, to serve as liaison with the CND.56 At once Hale began making plans to send a scientific committee to Europe and dispatched telegrams to the London, Paris, Rome, and Moscow academies offering cooperation. Research Council committees on antisubmarine and gas warfare had just been set up when the United States declared war on Germany. Two months later the Research Council submitted its first report to the Council of National Defense.57 Several early requests were related to reorganization problems. The U.S. Patent Office asked the Research Council for a study of its operations and the patent system in order to make them more effective and more useful to industry. A key recommendation, made in the final report of W. F. Durand's committee a year later, was that the Patent Office be separated from the Department of the Interior. This was not accomplished until ~9~5, however, when it was trans- ferred to the Department of Commerce.58 Durand's committee con- tinued to serve as counselor to the Patent Office to the end of the war. In July ~9~7 Brig. Gen. George O. Squier, Chief of the Signal Corps and in charge of military aviation, asked the Council for assistance in organizing a Science and Research Division in the Corps. Millikan and Wisconsin physicist Charles E. Mendenhall were at once commissioned in the Signal Corps to set up the new division.59 Almost as important to the operations of the Research Council as its 56 Hale to Walter S. Gifford, March ~3, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: General). 57 File in NAS Archives: ORG: NRC: Reports: Monthly Reports to CND: ~9~7; W. S. Gifford to Millikan, June 27, ~ 9 ~ 7 (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: General); NAS, Annual Report for 1917, p. 19. The first report of the NRC appeared in NAS, Annual Report for 1916, pp. 31-36; its Second Annual Report (so designated) appeared as a Government Printing Office publication and also in NRC, Miscellaneous Papers, vol I, no. 21, and in NAS, Annual Report for 1917, pp. 4~70. Although NRC reports were published separately through 1942, they were also published in the Annual Reports of the Academy. All references here, and hereafter, will be to pagination in the Academy report. 58 NAS, Annual Report for 1918, pp. 58-59; L. H. Baekeland, "Report of the Patent Committee . . . [ ~ 9 ~ 9]," 24 pp. NRC, Reprint and Circular Series, vol. I ( ~ 9 ~ 9- ~ 92 ~ ). For a subsequent note on Research Council patent policy and its relations with the U.S. Patent Office, see NAS, Annual Reportfor 1933-34, p. 55, and 1936-37, p. 35. 59 NAS, Annual Report for 1917, p. 47; Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, pp. 3 ~ 3-3 ~4. The work under Millikan and Trowbridge in meteorology and sound-

226 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) relationship with the Signal Corps was the Research Information Committee proposed to the Council of National Defense and shortly after authorized by the Secretaries of War and Navy. Through its members in the Washington office and at the branches set up in London, Paris, and Rome, the Research Information Committee was able to secure and exchange a large quantity of Allied and U.S. scientific, technical, and industrial information, "especially relating to war problems." The potentiality for the future of the committee's ties with international science made it a prized element in the Research Council.60 In the late fall of ~9~', with every unit organized and fully en- gaged, as Millikan reported, Hale returned from California with his family to an apartment in Washington. To house the Research Coun- cil's activities, he had rented a twenty-two-room building at Sixteenth and L Streets, and there he completely reorganized the original Research Council, realigning its committees in eight divisions. The committees and their chairmen were: Administrative, A. A. Noyes; Agriculture, Botany, Forestry, Fisheries, and Zoology, V. L. Kellogg; Chem- ~stry and Chemical Technology, ]. Johnston; Engineering, H. M. Howe; Geology and Geography, ]. C. Merriam; Medicine and Related Sciences, R. M. Pearce; Military, C. D. Walcott: and Physic M`7.th~m,7';rc Ac tronom~y, and Geophysics, R. A. Millikan. , , . wee - ~ . . - ~vv~v' ~ ,v Their chairmen and vice- chairmen presided over a total of eight sections, twenty-three com- mittees, and forty-one subcommittees.63 Although the Academy as such was not adaptable to assuming the task of organizing the nation's scientific capabilities for the wartime ranging is recounted in Robert M. Yerkes (ed.), The New World of Science: Its Development during the War (New York: Century Co., Ago), pp. 49-88. For the preparation of this volume, see ibid., p. vi; NAS Archives: File and letter box, New World of Science, ~9~9-~92 I. 60 NAS, Annual Report for 1917, pp. 48-50; 1918, pp. 4~-43; correspondence in NAS Archives: RESEARCH Information Service; The New World of Science, p. 35. See pp. 238-239 in this chapter. 6~ Millikan to Hutchinson, September 7, ~9~7, pepsin (NAS Archives: ORG: NRC: Reor- ganization); for NAS Council approval of the reorganization, see "Minutes of the Council," January ~ 9 ~ 8, pp. 339/65-66. For the NRC building on Sixteenth Street and another in midblock rented in March ~9~8, see The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, pp. ~39, ~67-~68. 62 For this division see "Minutes of Third Meeting, NRC," April ~ 9, ~ 9 ~ 7, pp. 50-53 (NAS Archives: ORG: Relationships . . . Engineering Groups). 6s NAS, Annual Report for 1917, pp. 57-62; for the work of the committees, ibid., pp. 5°-55 Engineering Grounsi.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 227 emergency, nevertheless it alone had the authority and the access to the White House and to federal agencies necessary to bring into operation such an organization as the Research Council. Nor was there any bar to its participation in the Research Council it had created. The extent of that involvement was clearly visible in the successive organizational charts of the Research Council. In the final wartime organization, four of the eight officers of the Research Council were members of the Academy, as were the Chairman and four of the six elected members of its Executive Board, seven of the eleven members of the Interim Committee, which conducted NRC business between meetings of the board, and five of the eight division chairmen. Academy members were also represented on the executive commit- tees of the divisions, in some instances in the majority, and headed many of the sections, committees, and subcommittees within the . . . c .lvlslons. A number of nonmembers who were directing the Research Coun- cil's operations in industry, the universities, and the military services as the war ended, later became Academy members.64 In the final reorganization in October ~9~8, the Administrative Division, still under A. A. Noyes, was renamed the Division of General Relations. The other seven NRC divisions, their titles unchanged, then operated through a total of nine sections, thirty-two committees, twenty-six subcommittees, and fourteen special committees. In addi- tion, the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, where most of the special committees were located, also had twelve special consultants.65 The Research Information Committee had become the Research Information Service, with a full complement of Army, Navy, and federal bureau representatives. Of the executive committees and advisory committees established for almost every division, none perhaps was more innovative or of more importance to Hale than the advisory committee to the Indus- trial Research Section. Encouraged by his good friends l. }. Carty, Willis R. Whitney, and Ambrose Swasey, and as intent as they were on promoting the application of science to industry, he organized that section as part of the Division of General Relations. As the Council of National Defense, closely quoting from Hale's annual report, noted, 64 Of the boy members on the war organization staff of the Research Council in late ~ 9 ~8, 46 were members of the Academy. Eleven became members in the years after the war ["NRC War Organization," in NRC, M?scellaneo2ts Papers, vol. I (~9~6-~9~8)]. 65 NAS, Annual Reportfor 1918, pp. ~o~-~og; for the work of the sections and commit- tees, see pp. 229 ff.

228 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) The National Research Council . . . considers that cooperation between capi- tal, labor, science, and management constitutes the best general means of financing and directing the extended laboratory investigations and the large scale experimental and developmental work required for adequate industrial research.... LIt] has inaugurated accordingly an industrial research section, which shall consider the best methods of achieving such organization of research within an industry or group of industries . . . [and to that end] is forming an advisory committee, composed of strong men with the imagina- tion to foresee the general benefits which would certainly follow from the further progress of science and from a more general and more thorough application of science to industry.66 That prestigious Advisory Committee, chaired by Theodore N. Vail, President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, comprised Cleveland H. Dodge, George Eastman, Elbert H. Gary, Andrew W. Mellon, Pierre S. Du Pont, Henry S. Pritchett, Edwin W. Rice, ir., Elihu Root, and Ambrose Swasey. The committee ceased to function with the death of its Chairman in ~920.67 But the fledgling Industrial Research Section, renamed "re- search extension," and with changes suggested by industry, developed into a dynamic unit in the postwar Research Council.68 Funding of the Academy's War Effort Amid reorganization and plans for the future, the wartime work of the Research Council pressed on. Its operating expenses in the first eighteen months were initially met through the funds provided by the Engineering Foundation, private contributions to the Academy, arid donations of the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation, totaling $74,~oo. Later government funds from the Council of Na- tional Defense, the President's emergency fund, and the War De- partment's Bureau of Ordnance and Signal Corps, amounting to $~95,650, were provided, with almost three-quarters of that sum 66 Second Annual Report of the CND . . . for FY 1917-1918 (Washington: Government Printing Office, ~9~8), p. 63; NAS, Annual Report for 1918, pp. 6~6~, 64, 102; correspondence in NAS Archives: GENERAL Relations: Section on Industrial Research: Advisory Committee: ~9~8-~922. 67 NAS, Annual Report for 1920, p. 3 ~ . For plans to make the committee advisory to the Research Council as a whole, see Robert M. Yerkes to Gano Dunn, December A, ~9~9 (NAS Archives: GENERAL Relations: Section on Industrial Research: Advisory Committee). Also Dunn to Albert Barrows, June 12, 1922 (Hale Microfilm, Roll 12, Frame 677). 68 NAS, Annual Report for 1919, p p. 74-75.

World War ~ and the Creation of the National Research Council / 22g going for the offices of the Research Information Committee.69 In the last half of ~9~8, additional funds made available from most of these same sources amounted to approximately $77,200, making the total income through the war period $347,550.7° Military Research Problems Among the remarkable accomplishments in the brief nineteen months of American participation in the war matching the national feat of equipping and transporting 2 million troops to the battlefields of Europe and reorganizing American industry for war production- was the Research Council's organization of science and scientists, and the range of their achievements.7~ In May ~9~7, two months after a group of scientists organized by Hale under Joseph S. Ames, Director of the Johns Hopkins Physics Laboratory, visited laboratories of the Allies to arrange for participa- tion in their efforts, a joint scientific mission of the French, English, and Italian governments arrived in this country, bringing with them instruments and equipment under development and the problems that would be essentially those of the Research Council for the next year and a half.72 The most immediate necessity was the countering of the German U-boat activity. A depth charge had been invented but not the means of locating a submerged submarine. The Research Council called more than forty leading physicists to a series of conferences in Washington to probe for a solution. Within a year almost a score of 69 NAN, Annual Report for 1917, pp. 55-57, 69-70. William F. Willoughby, Government Organization in War Time and After (New York: Appleton, ~9~9), p. 28, reported NRC funds of $75,750, exclusive of the President's emergency fund of $~95,650. Millikan in Yerkes, The New World of Science (p. 35), said $~so,ooo of the President's fund was for the offices of the Research Information Committee, and in his Autobiography (pp. gong) itemized wartime sums totaling approximately $290,000. 70 NAS, Annual Report for 1918, pp. 6 ~ -62, 98- ~ o ~ . Memorandum, Vernon Kellogg to Gano Dunn, April 4, ~925, said that about $270,000 was made available to the Research Council between September ~9~6 and March I, ~9~8, with additional funds of approximately the same amount during the remainder of ~9~8 (NAS Archives: ORG: NRC: Activities: ~9~925: Summary: Kellogg V L). 7~ The range of effort and accomplishments of the NRC divisions are described in their final reports in NAS, Annual Report for 1918, pp. 63-98. 72 Hale and Millikan in Yerkes, The New World of Science, pp. ~g-20, 37-38; The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, pp. ~ 39- ~40, ~ 52- ~ 55.

230 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) Eighteen-foot horns for locating invisible aircraft devised by a subcommittee of the National Research Council's Committee on Physics during World War I (From the archives of the Academy). joint projects were under way, one of which, in the Navy antisub- marine laboratories at New London, Connecticut, developed a variant on a French device that proved capable of locating underwater vessels from one to ten miles away, depending upon their speed and on weather conditions. Although not perfected until after the introduc- tion of the convoy system began to reduce the loss of ships, it proved its worth in the last months of sub-hunting. American teams also did important work on development of a device, pioneered by Paul Langevin, that used high frequency sound waves to detect a motion- less submarine a mile or more away.73 Instrumented weather balloons providing weather data every two hours, upon which the aviation, artillery, and sound-ranging services in France came to depend, were developed for the Signal Corps' Meteorology Division. Other advances came in the new art of aerial photography, in infrared signaling devices, and in the airplane com- pass, as well as the production of helium (previously a laboratory 7S Millikan in Yerkes, The New World of Science, pp. 38-42.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council 1 23 ~ curiosity) in quantities sufficient for dirigibles, and of optical glass, until then available only from Germany.74 The innovations of World War I were the airplane, the tank, the machine gun, the weapons carrier, and poison gas, the last of which Augustus Trowbridge, Princeton physicist, included among the most important of the applications of pure science which were a wholly new product of land warfare...: the use of cloud and shell gas, the extremely brilliant application of chemistry in the construction of gas-masks, airplane photography, the scientific aids to accuracy in gunnery and bombing from airplanes, sound-ranging, searchlight and listening devices for anti- aircraft defense, directional wireless, and camouflage.75 Participating American scientists saw many of these products of research put into production and in many instances made available to the forces in the field. Some of them had great significance for the postwar years. Such, for example, were the advances made in high-grade optical glass for military instruments; the impact on the chemical industry of the large-scale nitrogen-fixation plants designed for the production of nitric acid; and the new chemistry devised for the Chemical Warfare Service through the joint research of physical, biological, organic, and analytical chemists. The brief wartime association of American, British, and French geographers and geologists; metallurgists; com- munication and radio engineers; and sanitary engineers had far- reaching benefits. So, too, did the approach to the problems of food supply and nutrition, recognized as never before as both national and world concerns.76 74 Millikan in Yerkes, The New World of Science, pp. 46-48, and The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, pp. ~79-~80; I. Bernard Cohen, "American Physicists at War: From the First World War to ~g42,"American/ournal of Physics 13:337-338 (~945). Millikan and the Research Council were plagued by one major frustration. This was the time spent on a centrifugal gun, the design for which was submitted to the War Department and turned over to the NRC Divisions of Physics and Engineering late in ~ 9 ~ 7. The gun, proposed by E. L. Rice, was designed to use the engine power of combat planes to fire a charge of loo half-inch steel balls before recharging for another burst. Both the engineering of the gun and the negotiations with Rice and the government, lasting three years, proved beyond resolution (NAS, Annual Reportfor 1918, pp. 78, 99; NAS Archives: PS: Projects: Centrifugal Gun). 7S Yerkes, The New World of Science, p. 65; D. 1. Kevles, "Flash and Sound in the AEF; The History of a Technical Service," Military Affairs XXXIII: 37~383 (~969). 76 Harrison E. Howe in Yerkes, The New World of Science, pp. dog 95.; A. A. Noyes, ibid., pp. ~30- ~33; Clarence J. West, ibid., pp. ~73- ~74.

232 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917 - 1923) Without precedent in medical experience was the gas war in France. Begun by German troops in April 1915 to break the deadlock of trench warfare, the use first of chlorine, then the lethal phosgenes, and, in July ~9~7, incapacitating mustard gas, all proved exceedingly effective—but in no instance as decisive as anticipated. Although the war gases produced far fewer fatalities than other weapons, they accounted for more than a quarter of the battle casualties among American forces.77 A Committee on Noxious Gases, set up within the NRC in April ~9~7, supported the Bureau of Mines in its request for appropriations for research on both the defensive and offensive aspects of gas warfare. The resulting work, in a laboratory the Bureau established at American University in Washington, as well as in a number of universities and medical institutions, was transferred to the newly created Army Chemical Warfare Service in June ~9~8.78 The high incidence of "war neurosis" and shell shock, of trench foot and trench mouth, gas gangrene, pneumonia, and, above all, epidemic and pandemic influenza taxed the medical services in France as well as the medical research institutions at home. The estimate that the respiratory diseases accounted for 8z percent of all Army deaths caused by disease suggested promising directions for future research.79 A related field of medicine was the application of psychology to war problems. Viewed at the time with considerable suspicion by the military, it won acceptance in the Medical Department of the Army through the intercession of Col. V. C. Vaughan, Col. William Welch, and Sur. Gen. William C. Gorgas. A group under Robert M. Yerkes, pioneer in the use of intelligence tests, began to work out methods of psychological testing that would be specifically applicable to the armed forces. The group developed first the famous alpha and beta tests for literates and illiterates and demonstrated for the first time on a large scale what appeared to be remarkable differences in intelligence among various army groups. The Research Council team then went on to consider the psychologi- 77 Frederick F. Russell in Yerkes, The New World of Science, p. 286. 78 NAS Archives: Com on Noxious Gases (later, Com on Gases Used in Warfare); Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, p. 3zo. The Chemical Warfare Service administered the Bureau's research work as well as the Gas Service in France, which was organized on Gen. John I. Pershing's orders in September ~9 ~ 7. 79 Russell in Yerkes, The New World of Science, pp. 386, Rio; Victor C. Vaughan, ibid., p. 33~.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council 1 233 cat problems of aviation. It developed batteries of special aptitude tests, made studies of problems of vision, of military training and discipline, of shell shock reeducation, and of methods of influencing enemy morale.~° Like that in every other divisor of the Research Council, the work of the psychologists had scarcely more than begun when the war ended. The end of the war found American industry with a vastly ex- panded capacity for production, and American science, as repre- sented by the Academy-Research Council, with an enormous re- search program still for the most part in its early stages; and in the case of basic science, to Hale's dismay, with relatively little even attempted. However, neither science nor industry had any intention of losing the momentum that had been generated. From the beginning, Hale had seen the Research Council not just as a temporary organization for a national emergency but as the vehicle for realizing "the future of the National Academy" he had projected in ~9~3. At the meeting of the Academy committee with Woodrow Wilson in April ~ 9 ~ 6, the President, he said, had "emphasized the fact that the chief national advantage of such cooperation and coordina- tion fas the Research Council proposed] would come after the war, and that its most lasting effect would be seen in scientific and industrial progress." Postwar Plans The Research Council had been launched less than a year when in August ~ 9 ~ 7 Hale wrote Millikan, "I am now at work on a plan for the permanent organization of the Research Council."82 In a statement, "The Future of the National Research Council," in the Academy's Annual Report that year, he announced: The results already accomplished by the National Research Council and the increasing requests for its assistance seem to leave no doubt as to the need for a centralizing body of this character.... The organization of the research 80 Yerkes, The New World of Science, pp. 35 ~-354; D. I. Kevles, "Testing the Army's Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World War I," Journal of American History 55 :565-581 ( ~ 968). 8~ This statement appears in NAS, Annual Reportfor 1917, p. 46. So Hale had said in his letter to the New York Times in July ~9~6 (NRC, Miscellaneous Papers): "The work of the research council will . . . relate to public welfare in time of peace even more truly than to national security in the event of war." Cf. p. 223 in this chapter. 82 Hale to Millikan, August SO, ~9~7 (NAS Archives: EX Com: General).

234 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (~9~7—~9~3) council under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences is undoubt- edly sound. It provides the necessary connection with the Government and eliminates all political influence from the appointment of its members. . . . The wide-spread cooperation already secured and the experience gained in connection with the war will afford a useful guide for the develop- ment of a sound and effective plan. Hale's "Plan for the Promotion of Scientific and Industrial Re- search by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Re- search Council," which he was proposing for the postwar period, emerged in the fall of aged. The fifty-four-page prospectus was first presented to the trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, from whom he sought the building and endowment the program would require, then laid before the Council of the Academy at its meeting, to which Millikan was invited, on December ~9, ~9~7. It called for a Research Council organized in divisions and staffed by members of scientific and technical societies, heads of scientific bureaus of the government, and members at large, all formally appointed by the Academy to the Research Council. Stressing that the chief advantage of the wartime cooperation of government, educa- tional, and industrial research agencies would come after the war, and that since ~9~4 every Allied nation had created new research organi- zations similar to the Research Council, Hale described the current wide-ranging operations of the Research Council and, based on that experience, the future opportunities of the Academy and Council. The realization of the opportunities that he described at length would require an appropriate building and staff, a clearinghouse for scien- tific and technical information, and support for a projected Interna- tional Research Council to promote worldwide cooperation in scien- tific and industrial research.84 Even with the assent of the Council of the Academy, Hale was well aware that the plan was not enough, that the Research Council 8` NAS, Annual Report for 1917, p. 69. The clause, "It provides the necessary connection with the Government," was changed a year later by Hale to read "It would serve a useful purpose to perpetuate the National Research Council and thus be permanently assured of the cooperation of the various Departments of the Government" (NAS, Annual Reportfor 1918, p. 4o). And with the Research Council launched, he wrote, "We shall continue our contacts with the Government" (NAS, Annual Report for 1919, p. 65). 84 First presented in "Minutes of the Council," November ~9, ~9~7, p. 320, the complete prospectus appears in "Minutes of the Council," December ~ 9, ~ 9 ~ 7, pp. 339/6, ~ o, 2 7, passim.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council 1 235 required a stronger foundation than the endorsement of President Wilson's letter of July ~9~6 and recognition by the Council of Na- tional Defense. On March s6, ~9~8, Hale addressed a letter to the White House requesting the President to "issue an Executive Order, defining and authorizing the specific duties of the National Research Council, for the purpose of summarizing and giving added effect to previous orders and requests underlying the work of the Council." He enclosed with the letter a suggested draft of the order he sought and docu- ments supporting his contention that the Research Council was "in effect a federation of the research agencies of the Nation" and that there were precedents for it in similar councils abroad.85 In full sympathy with Hale's request, yet mindful of objections of the Council of National Defense, which he had consulted,86 President Wilson in reply expressed some concern about "just exactly what it is that you shave] in mind." At his suggestion Hale accepted revision of the draft to remove any possible implication that the Research Coun- cil sought a supervisory role in the work of the scientific bureaus of the government. And in acknowledgment of the Academy's private status, he changed the phrase "The National Academy of Sciences is . . . directed to perpetuate the National Research Council . . ." to read ". . . requested to perpetuate the National Research Council...."87 The Executive Order of 1918 . Accordingly, in the President's Executive Order, dated May ~ I, ~ 9 ~ 8, the National Academy of Sciences was "requested to perpetuate the National Research Council," whose functions would be 85 Hale to President Wilson, March 26, ~9~8, and enclosures (copies in NAS Archives: EXEC: Executive Orders & Directives: EO ~859: NRC). As Hale explained his action: ". . . as the work of the Research Council progressed, it became evident that a definite formulation of its objects by the President, and an expression of his desire that it be perpetuated by the Academy and permanently assured of the cooperation of the various departments of the Government, would serve a useful purpose" (NAS, Annual Report for 1918, p. 40). 86 "Minutes of Meeting, CND," April ~ 5, ~ 9 ~ 8 (L/C, Josephus Daniels MSS, Box 45 ~ ), cited in Daniel l. Kevles, "George Ellery Hale, the First World War, and the Advance- ment of Science in America," Isis 59:433_434 (Winter ~968); Wright, Explorer of the Universe, pp. 296-297. 87 Wilson to Hale, April ~ 9, ~ 9 ~ 8, in "Minutes of the Council," April 2 I, ~ 9 ~ 8, pp. 348 - 35~; documents of January—May ~9~8 in NAS Archives: EXEC . . . EO z859: NRC. (Canned overleaf)

236 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) To stimulate research in the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences, and in the application of these sciences to engineering, agriculture, medicine, and other useful arts. To survey the larger possibilities of science, to formulate comprehensive projects of research, and to develop effective means of utilizing the scientific and technical resources of the country.... To promote cooperation in research, at home and abroad.... To serve as a means of bringing American and foreign investigators into active cooperation with the scientific and technical services of the War and Navy Departments and with those of the civil branches of the Government. To direct the attention of scientific and technical investigators to the present importance of military and industrial problems in connection with the war.... [and] To gather and collate scientific and technical information at home and abroad, in cooperation with governmental and other agencies.... The concluding paragraph of the President's Order offered "the cordial collaboration of the scientific and technical branches of the Government, both military and civil." Their representatives, upon the nomination of the Academy, would be designated by the President as members of the Council "as heretofore, and the heads of the depart- ments immediately concerned will continue to cooperate in every way that may be required." "The Order," Hale wrote President Wilson of the advance copy he received, "is entirely satisfactory to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council."89 In the Annual Report that year he spoke of it "as supplementing . . . the charter of the Academy." Millikan said that he, Walcott, Noyes, Merriam, Carty, and Dunn helped with the formulation of the order that made the Research Council "a permanent subcommittee of the Academy and operating under its congressional charter" (The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, pp. ~84-~85). 88 It was this clause apparently that led Willoughby in Government Organization in War Time and After (p. 25) to say that as a consequence of the Order, the Research Council "had its function as an organization for coordinating the scientific work of the Government more distinctly emphasized." Indeed, in an early draft of the Order this paragraph had read: "To serve as a correlating and centralizing agency for the research work of the Government." 89 Hale to Wilson, May lo, ~9~8 (NAS Archives: EXEC . . . EO 2859: NRC); NAS, Annual Report for 1918, pp. 40-4 ~ . At the meeting that November, Walcott formally presented the President's Executive Order to the Academy ("Minutes of the Council," November ~ 7, ~ 9 ~ 8, p. 407). For the Executive Order, see Appendix F. It remained unchanged until ~956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower revised the Order, principally to remove minor anachronisms in its text and to transfer the designation of government members in the Research Council from the President of the

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 237 The Carnegie Corporation Grant Nine days after issuance of the Executive Order, Hale, accompanied by Carty, Millikan, and Walcott, appeared before the Board of the Carnegie Corporation to discuss support for the now permanent Research Council. Although the Board deferred consideration of an endowment or a building fund, a grant of $~oo,ooo was immediately made for operating expenses. The President of the Board, Elihu Root, saw, as Hale did, the coming revolution in industry after the war and in industrial research the principal means for meeting "the international competitions of peace." As Root said, . . . the same power of science which has so amazingly increased the produc- tive capacity of mankind during the past century will be applied again, and the prizes of industrial and commercial leadership will fall to the nation which organizes its scientific forces most effectively.90 Less than a year later, in March ~9~9, the single most significant event since the founding of the Academy occurred, when the Board of the Carnegie Corporation voted a gift of $5 million to be placed at the disposal of the National Academy-of Sciences, for the purposes of the Academy and the National Research Council.... A part of this sum . . . shall be devoted to the erection of a building suitable for the needs of the Academy and the Research Council, but the greater part of the sum . . . shall constitute a permanent endowment in the hands of the Academy for the purposes of the Research Council. As a condition precedent to the appropriation . . . for building purposes, a suitable site shall be provided from other sources. . . . such portion of the $s,ooo,ooo remaining [after the building is paid for and ready for use shall be] for the gradual development and permanent support of the work of the Research Council....9t United States to the heads of departments (NAS Archives: EXEC . . . EO ~o668: Revision of EO 2859 re NRC: ~955-~956). For the revised Executive Order, see Appendix F. 90 Secretary, Carnegie Corporation, to Hale, June 7, ~9~8 (NAS Archives: FINANCE: Funds: Grants: Carnegie Corp of NY: Building & Endowment Fund); NAS, Annual Report for 1918, pp. 60-6~. See Elihu Root, "Industrial Research and National Wel- fare," Science 48 :532-534 ( ~ 9 ~ 8). Millikan described Root in retrospect as "the most potent mind that was behind all our activity . . . the navigator of the ship" launched by the Academy [Millikan to Lewis Strauss, May 3, ~945 (NAS Archives: Hewett file 50.82 . . . RBNS); The Autobiography of Robert A. M~ll~kan, pp. ~34, ~48]. 9~ Resolution of March 28, ~9~9, attached to letter, Secretary of the Carnegie Corpora- tion to President Walcott, June At, ~9~9 (NAS Archives: FINANCE: Funds: Grants: Carnegie Corp of NY: Building & Endowment Fund). For a modification of the resolution in ~924, see Chapter lo, pp. 287-288.

238 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917—1923) National Research Fellowships The Rockefeller Foundation was also aware of the pivotal position science would hold in the postwar order. A letter from George E. Vincent, President of the Foundation, to Robert A. Millikan on February 5, 1918, had provided additional impetus for action on the Executive Order. Vincent wrote that the establishment and endowment of a research institute for physics and chemistry, similar to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, had been suggested to the Foundation to meet the industrial competition of Europe after the war. Industry could be relied upon to provide the practical research, but only an endowed institution could undertake the necessary basic research: An institution . . . devoted to pure research, unhampered by obligations to teach and uninfluenced by commercial considerations is needed for leader- ship in American progress in the physical sciences.... and he asked: Is the National Research Council, which has been created out of the war emergency, likely to take permanent form? Is the Federal Government in a position to create a separate institution on the analogy of certain research units in the Department of Agriculture and in the Geological Survey? Is the Bureau of Standards capable of extension into a national research Institu- tion?92 Millikan was strongly opposed to a centralized research institute and believed that the long-term benefits would be greater if the funds were spent for training in existing institutions. This was the proposal he presented to the group of sixteen scientists that was convened to consider Vincent's plan. Following considerable discussion, it was agreed that a program of postdoctoral research fellowships for young Ph.D.'s was preferable to the "institute" scheme. In addition to the obvious benefits to the fellows, their presence in the universities would have an equally salutary effect on the research atmosphere of the schools.93 In March ~9~9, the Academy and Research Council submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation a formal proposal for a "project for 92 George F. Vincent to Millikan, February 5, ~9~8 (NAS Archives: FELLOWSHIPS: Re- search Fellowship Board: Physics & Chemistry: Beginning of Program). 95 M. .1. Rand, "The National Research Fellowships," The Scientific Monthly 73:71-80 (August ~95~).

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council / 23g promoting fundamental research in physics and chemistry in educa- tional institutions in the United States," which would establish post- doctoral fellowships supported by foundation funds and awarded by the Research Council. Vincent's query as to the most appropriate organization to oversee the program had been effectively answered in the meantime by the Executive Order.94 On April 9, ~9~9, the Rockefeller Foundation approved an ap- propriation of $so,ooo for the first year's operations and pledged $500,000 for fellowships for the first five years. In anticipation, the Research Council had set up a Research Fellowship Board, headed by Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, with Hale, Millikan, and Noyes among its members, to administer the funds. The National Research Fellowships, administered by the NRC over the next thirty years, were possibly the single most enduring and intrinsically important program to come out of the wartime Research Council.95 International Research Council A second far-reaching proposal was made by Hale as Foreign Secre- tary of the Academy and leader of the six Academy delegates to the Inter-Allied Conference on International Scientific Organizations in October ~9~8.96 Since June, when the Royal Society called the Con- ference, he had been working on a plan that would satisfy the immediate needs of the Allies for effective cooperation during the war. Hale hoped it would also serve the postwar needs of the entire scientific community for a cooperative mechanism to replace the 94 Walcott and Hale to Vincent, March 22, 1919 (NAS Archives: FELLOWSHIPS: Research Fellowship Board: Physics & Chemistry: Beginning of Program). 95 Rand, "The National Research Fellowships," p. 73. The question of more and better training of men for research, raised by Noyes and Stratton at the first meeting of the NRC in September ~9~6, had resulted a month later in action by the Research Council to persuade colleges and universities to establish research fellowships with stipends of at least a thousand dollars for training beyond the doctoral degree [Hale to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, November ~8, ~9~6, p. 8 (NAS Archives: FELLOWSHIPS); The Autobiography of Robert A. MilliMn, pp. ~80-~84, ~89]. On Hale's earlier plan for university-supported fellowships, see NAS, Proceed- ings 3 :223-227 ( ~ 9 ~ 7). 96 This had been preceded, upon America's entry into the war, by Hale's messages to the academies of the Allied countries offering Academy-Research Council cooperation in research for the solution of military or industrial problems ("Minutes of the Council," April ~ 6, ~ 9 ~ 7, pp. z73-274; NAS, Annual Report for 1917, pp. ~ 8- ~ 9).

240 / CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT (1917 - 1923) German-dominated International Association of Academies, which had been crippled by the war and the deep animosities generated by the war and therefore could never be expected to resume its former functions. Hale's proposal, adopted unanimously, called for the crea- tion of an International Research Council, a federation of the national research councils, or similar bodies, of the Allied nations. As hostilities ended, the membership could be extended "indefinitely" to include other countries. On November s6, ~9~8, at the second Inter-Allied Conference in Paris, the International Research Council was provi- sionally organized, with plans to take over at a later date the work of the international agencies on solar research, astronomy, and geo- physics set up before the war.97 Interallied exchange of scientific data during the war was effected through the Research Information Service, now a major unit of the NRC, with its scientific attaches in London, Paris, and Rome. Hale saw that they too would have important functions in his postwar plans: Properly regarded the wrote], this Information Service may be considered as the pioneer corps of the Council, surveying the progress of research in various parts of the world, selecting and reporting upon many activities of interest and importance, reducing the information thus collected to such a form as to render it most accessible and useful, and disseminating it to scientific and technical men and to institutions which can use it to advan- tage.... It therefore goes without saying that the position of scientific attache at our principal embassies . . . should undoubtedly be continued in times of peace . . . [to] serve as the general representative of American scientific and technical interests in the country to which he may be accredited; attend scientific meetings and keep in touch with the progress of research, reporting frequently to Washington; maintain his office as a center for American scientific and technical men and missions desiring to maintain contact with the scientific men or institutions of the country; undertake special tasks and make particular reports on questions submitted by properly accredited indi- viduals or institutions; and contribute in other ways toward international cooperation in research.98 97 "Minutes of the Council," December ~9~8, pp. 420-423; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1918, pp. 50-58; Hale in Yerkes, The New World of Science, pp. 405-4~6; NAS Archives: FR: IRC: Beginning of Program: ~9~9; Daniel j. Kevles, "'Into Hostile Political Camps': The Reorganization of International Science in World War I," Isis 62:47-60 (Spring 1971). For Hale's initial proposal for an "international organization of science and re- search," see "Minutes of the Council," December ~9~7, pp. 339/35-38; April ~9~8, pp. 353-360. 98 NAS, Annual Report for 1918, pp. 4 I, 42-43.

World War I and the Creation of the National Research Council 1 24 ~ The government, which had adopted the work of the Research Information Service during the war and accredited the attaches to the Allied governments, lost interest in their possibilities after the war, and the Service's foreign offices were closed. It was not until the "Berkner Report" in the aftermath of World War II that their functions were resumed.99 When America entered the war in April ~9~', military strategists were convinced that the stalemate that had frozen the battleline across Europe with little change in over two and a half years would continue through ~9~9, until American aid and arms could shift the balance, and that the war would end in Ago. By late October ~9~8, however, the Germans were unable to withstand the pressure of the Allied forces, increased by hundreds of thousands of fresh American troops. On November I, the German armies, inflicting high casualties, began their long-planned Kriegsmarsch, the withdrawal to shorten their front that would take them to the previously constructed Antwerp-Meuse line, where they intended to hold through the winter. Ten days later, in the fifty-second month of the war, as French and American troops crossed the Meuse, Germany asked for an armistice.~°° Amid week-long celebrations in the United States, the war pro- grams of the Academy-Research Council began to wind down. But not the invincible Hale and his plans for the future. He was a frail man with an iron spirit, and, as he saw it, the war had prepared the way for the continuing promotion of research. His vision of the Research Council, representing the government, the major research agencies in the country, and the chief national scientific, technical, and engineering societies joined in the years ahead in a collective assault on scientific problems, was contagious. "We have only begun a task of unlimited possibilities," he said.~°~ 99 For the "Berkner Report," see Chapter is, pp. so-so I. "Report of General Pershing," War Department, Annual Report for 1918, p. 82. 01 NAS Annual Reportfor 1918, p. 98

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The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 Get This Book
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Among the oldest and most enduring of American institutions are those that have been devoted to the encouragement of the arts and the sciences. During the nineteenth century, a great many scientific societies came and went, and a few in individual disciplines achieved permanence. But the century also witnessed the founding of three major organizations with broadly interdisciplinary interests: the Smithsonian Institution in 1846; the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists, which in 1848 became the American Association for the Promotion (later, Advancement) of Science; and the National Academy of Sciences in 1863.

The founding of the National Academy of Sciences represented a momentous event in the history of science in the United States. Its establishment in the midst of a great civil war was fortuitous, perhaps, and its early existence precarious; and in this it mirrored the state of science at that time. The antecedents of the new organization in American science were the national academies in Great Britain and on the Continent, whose membership included the principal men of science of the realm. The chartering of academies under the auspices of a sovereign lent the prestige and elements of support and permanence the scientists sought, and in return they made their scientific talents and counsel available to the state.

The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 describes the National Academies from inception through the beginning of the space age. The book describes the Academies' work through different periods in history, including the Postbellum years, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.

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