Isis 1994 Dennis

The History of Science Society
"Our First Line of Defense": Two University Laboratories in the Postwar American State Author(s): Michael Aaron Dennis Source: Isis, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 427-455 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/235462 Accessed: 11/03/2009 22:46
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"Our
First
Line
of
Defense"
Two University Laboratories in the Postwar American State

By Michael Aaron Dennis*
INTRODUCTION: RECONSTITUTING THE CIVILIAN
From the development of radarto the thundering atomic explosions that transformed the nature of global conflict, wartime laboratories and their products demonstrated the power of harnessing science and technology for military ends. As Secretary of War Robert Pattersonexplained in October 1945, "a nation that lags in the laboratory
will not only have no chance of victory in a future war . . . it will not survive."
The nation's laboratories became "our first line of defense."1 However, widespread agreement that research and development were essential for national security yielded little agreement on how to implement a permanentrelationship between the producers of technical knowledge and the armed services. In the absence of a general institutional solution to the problem of postwar military research, postwar survival became a problem in all the laboratories established during World War II. Some, like the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the preeminent American radarresearch organization, vanished from the postwar world voluntarily, as researchers returnedto their prewar institutions or entered the frenzied and lucrative postwar market for scientists and
* Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-2501. I am indebted to the many archivists who have graciously dealt with my requests: at the APL, Philip Albert and Carleen Jones; at Johns Hopkins, James Stimpert, Julia Morgan, and their helpful staff; at MIT, Kathy Marquis, Helen Samuels, and many other staff members; at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Caryl Browse, Joyce Gevirtzman, and Evelyn Woolsey; at the Hagley Museum and Library, Michael Nash; at the MIT Museum, Michael Yeates; and at the Library of Congress and the National Archives, many librarians and archivists, especially Marjorie Ciarlante, Barry Zerber, Ed Reese, and Will Mahoney. Special thanks to Michael Bernstein, David DeVorkin, Paul Forman, Tom Gieryn, Sheila Jasanoff, Bill Leslie, Judith Reppy, Lissa Roberts, Margaret Rossiter, Steven Shapin, Robert Smith, Robert Westman, and two anonymous Isis referees for critical readings of an earlier draft of this essay. For financial support during (re)writing, I am thankful for postdoctoral fellowships from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum; the Science Studies Program, University of California, San Diego; and the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University; and for the generous assistance of my parents. An earlier version of this essay won the 1990 Henry and Ida Schumann Prize. 'Robert Patterson, in U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings on S. Res. 107 and S. Res. 146, 79th Cong., 1st sess., 15-19 Oct. 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945), Pt. 2, p. 228. Isis, 1994, 85: 427-455 ?1994 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/94/8401-0001$01 .00
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"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"
engineers.2 As a response to war's end, institutional liquidation proclaimed that wartime institutions were unsuited for the coming peace. Prominent organizers of wartime science, like Vannevar Bush, declared that their institutions-the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)-were temporarycreations, intended to exist only for the course of the emergency, and indeed the OSRD closed its doors after World War II. But what of those laboratories that did not disappear? How did the surviving laboratories manage the transition from war to peace? University laboratoriesperforming weapons-relatedresearch and development were a fundamentally novel presence on the postwar American campus. Understanding their survival and growth during the postwar era demands that we focus on the intricate webs of relations in which each laboratory was embedded. Earlier in the century and throughout the interwar period, corporations had created a new source of patentable inventions and profits through the establishment of industrial research laboratories staffed with university-trained scientists and engineers.3 Conceivably, the continuation of wartime laboratories could provide the armed services with a similarly stable source of new and more powerful weapons. Industry and universities also had interests in preserving wartime laboratories. Private corporations would manufacturethe weapons developed in military-sponsored laboratories. Universities acquired monies for otherwise unaffordable research, staff, and equipment, while researchers found a rich new source of technically interesting problems within the penumbra of national security. Neither general institutional interests nor permanentpostwar mobilization, the traditional explanations offered by historians and participants for the survival of wartime institutions, can fully account for the continuing existence of these laboratories. Put simply, the war's end presented national leaders, as well as laboratory directors, with an unprecedented problem: redesigning a totally mobilized society. As Vannevar Bush, the director of the wartime OSRD, explained, "this was not just a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part." In a totally mobilized society the problem of peace was the problem of reconstituting the civilian and its inseparable twin, the military. Demobilization was not a passive process in which soldiers and scientists might simply return to their prewar pursuits, but an active process in which researchers, military officers, and, to some extent, politicians defined the possible worlds a newly reconstituted civilian might inhabit. As a growing number of historical studies attest, the task of reconstituting the civilian extended far beyond the laboratory. Through investigations as diverse as Barton Bernstein's studies of the conflicts engendered during planning for economic reconversion, David Noble's classic examination of technological choice and military control in the ma2 On the consensus concerning postwar military research and development see Michael Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: America's Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941-1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 120-158. Even someone like Harold Smith, director of the Bureau of the Budget, who disagreed with Vannevar Bush on the mechanics of organizing research and development, claimed "that scientific research is vital to the national security of the United States": quoted from U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Comitteee on Military Affairs, Hearings on S. Res. 107 and S. Res. 146, Pt. 1, p. 95. On the decision to liquidate the Rad Lab see M. A. Tuve to Lee Dubridge, 6 Nov. 1944, Box 87, "Dubridge," Merle A. Tuve Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 3 For a discussion of the history of industrial research laboratories see Michael A. Dennis, "Accounting for Research: New Histories of Corporate Laboratories and the Social History of American Science," Social Studies of Science, 1987, 17:479-518.
MICHAEL AARON DENNIS
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chine tool industry, Elaine Tyler May's interpretation of the nuclear family in the age of national security, and Peter Novick's insightful reading of cold war historiography and its retreat from relativism, we are beginning to understand the scale and scope of the transformationof American culture that took place after World War
II.4
It is possible to discern at least two distinctive, yet related, strategies employed by laboratorydirectors and researchers to manage the transition from war to peacethe pedagogical and the managerial. Though nowhere represented in pure form, each strategy brought forth different intellectual orientations and literary forms. The pedagogical hinged on the laboratory's connection with the university; training and discipline produced students who could carry the burden of the laboratory's future.5 At MIT, Charles Stark Draper, director of the postwar InstrumentationLaboratory (the I-Lab), successfully employed such a strategy to assure the laboratory's continued survival even as critics argued over the very possibility of the technology it was working to develop: inertial guidance. Draper and his students attempted to create a new field of academic investigation, instrument engineering, through the use of a new vocabulary and a textbook. The other strategy, the managerial, emerged clearly at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). Initially, laboratory leaders attempted to forge a strong relationship with the Hopkins campus, but organizational changes at war's end produced a political cauldron in which unresolved wartime questions about authority and responsibility erupted into a fierce controversy over the relationship between university-based research and development and industrial production. A managerial strategy turned the laboratory's concerns away from pedagogy and toward retaining its authority in the development and production of guided missiles, as researchersequated their new mission with other, more "traditional"academic pursuits like the publication of scientific papers. Each strategy marked points on an array of possible solutions to the problem of the relations between technical practice and the state's military branches. Undergirding all the solutions was the importance of production. A laboratory's products afforded continuing military patronage, industrial profits, and intellectual excitement. Postwar laboratorystrategiesreflected the centralityof production. At the APL, a managerial strategy made the laboratory an essential component in the design, development, and manufacture of guided missiles as well as in the dissemination of information about the new technology; at Draper's I-Lab, a pedagogical strategy created a cadre of military officers who shared a set of technical beliefs and practices.
4 Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 176:101-108, on p. 101. See Barton J. Bernstein, "The Removal of War Production Board on Business, 1944-1946," Business History Review, 1965, 39:243-260; Bernstein, "The Automobile Industry and the Coming of the Second World War," Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, June 1966, pp. 22-33; Bernstein, "The Debate on Industrial Reconversion: The Protection of Oligopoly and Military Control of the Economy," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1966/1967, 26:159-172; David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1984); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1988); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), esp. pp. 281-319. 5 For examples of the importance of pedagogy in other areas within the history of science see Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Modern Chemistry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975); and Kathryn M. Olesko, Physics as a Calling (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991). A different approach to a laboratory's history is articulated in Clayton Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1982).
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Through their products, the laboratories established themselves with respect to both the campus and their patrons. Understandinglocal laboratorystrategies, like the managerial and the pedagogical, offers historians of American science and technology another opportunity to integrate our work with other studies of postwar politics and culture. Histories of institutions like the APL and the I-Lab recount significant episodes in the postwar reconstruction of American science and technology, but they are also indicative of a more fundamental change in the form and function of the American state. Reconstituting the civilian entailed, in part, the task of creating and maintaining discernible boundaries between the civilian and the military. As strategies for achieving this separation, the managerial and the pedagogical were failures; that is, at neither the APL nor the I-Lab was a purely civilian space established and maintained. However, that does not imply that either lab was simply dominated by its patrons. On the contrary, the APL and the I-Lab emerged as neither purely military nor purely civilian institutions, but as fascinating hybrids blending the two spheres together, just as each institution constantly mixed the domains of the industrial and the academic. Hybrids have become the focus of attention in the recent work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, as the objects of study cross boundaries from the artificial to the natural, from humans to animals.6 In what follows here, we observe researchers at the APL and the I-Lab deploying their respective strategies to create new institutional spaces, permitting similarly novel forms of boundary crossing. The APL and the I-Lab were not only new presences on campus; they were novel, constitutive parts of the postwar American state as the technologies and officers produced at the two institutions became integral elements of that state's defense.
FROM FUZES TO MISSILES: MANAGING CHANGE AT THE APL
Established in March 1942, the Applied Physics Laboratory was originally part of Section T of the wartime OSRD. Under the direction of the physicist Merle Tuve, whose entire career had been spent with the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), Section T developed the radio-based proximity fuze for antiaircraft shells. Using specially designed miniature vacuum tubes, the radio proximity fuze emitted radio waves during flight; when the reflected intensity of these radio waves reached a predetermined level, the fuze detonated the shell's explosive charge. Enemy aircraft triggered their own destruction. The APL owed its existence to the immense technical and political problems involved in moving the fuze into mass production in late 1941 and early 1942. Technically, the problem confronting Tuve and his staff was one of the most difficult faced by wartime researchers. By late 1941 Section T had managed to produce an exquisitely crafted handmade device capable of withstanding the massive accelerations in an artillery shell as well as the rigors of everyday military handling. Built by physicists and engineers with Ph.D.'s, assembled from meticulously inspected components,
6 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); and Donna Haraway, "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics of Inappropriate/d Others," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 295-337. For another recognition of the hybrid character of certain postwar institutions see Dan Kevles, "Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1990, 20:239-264.
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and fitted together with great care, the fuzes were among the most sophisticated electronic devices of their time. Made in batches numbering in the hundreds, these devices "worked" in the laboratory and at the firing range. But how was one to move the device, and the ensemble of skills that made its manufacturepossible, into factories that would need to produce hundreds of thousands of fuzes with a workforce quite different from the members of Section T?7 In addition to this "technical" problem, there was a more profound political problem. In the view of Bush and the other leaders of the wartime research and development effort, Harvardpresident James B. Conant and MIT president Karl T. Compton, production was something contracted for by the military and done by industry. Tuve and the leaders of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd), on the other hand, envisioned Section T playing a vital role in the production process, breaking down the boundaries separatingthe academic researchersfrom their more powerful military and industrial partners-boundaries that were implicit in the very structure of the wartime research organizations, the NDRC and the OSRD.8 For Bush and Conant, the design and development of the fuze was the province of academic researchers, but the production and use of equipment were matters for corporations and the armed services, respectively. For Tuve, the value of research and development emerged only with the actual use of the device; following the fuze into the factory and onto the battlefield was simply a matter of completing the job. Tuve and the Navy BuOrd were ready to enter private factories and dictate orders to individual corporations, but the leaders of the OSRD were unpreparedfor such a move.9 After much deliberation in late 1941 and early 1942, and several attempts to force Tuve to conform, Bush and Conant decided upon a form of organizational quarantine in which the OSRD would establish a new institution, the APL, to deal with fuze production problems. As the new laboratory's director and head of Section T, Tuve would report to the OSRD director's office through Navy Commander W. S. Parsons. The transfer of $2 million from the navy to the OSRD in support of the section's fuze work made it clear that the new lab was more a ward of the navy than
7 On the existence of working proximity fuzes see Tuve to Richard Tolman, 4 Sept. 1941, Record Group (RG) 227: Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, OSRD Director's Office Correspondence, Box 66, "Section T," U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C.; and Tuve to Chief, Navy Bureau of Ordnance, 11 Jan. 1942, Box 48, "Correspondence to Navy," Tuve Papers. On the problem of shifting from "tubes hand-made by experts to the first hand-assembly line" see Tuve to Tolman, 18 Dec. 1941, p. 2, Box 89, "M. A. Tuve," Tuve Papers. The processes involved in scaling up production and moving from the laboratory to the factory resemble the problems associated with discussions of experiment and tacit knowledge in the history and social study of science. See Jerome Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971); and Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985). 8 On what Tuve envisioned see Tuve to J. A. Bearden, "Proposal of a Definite Plan for the Future Operation of Section T," 6 Dec. 1941, Box 89, "M. A. Tuve," Tuve Papers, where Tuve lays out his original ideas on the need for a new kind of laboratory. 9 See Tuve to Director of Naval Officer Procurement, 26 Oct. 1942, RG 227, Records of Section T, Box 1, "WSP APL Personnel." On what Tuve believed to be Bush and Conant's views on relations between researchers and mass production see "Notes for Discussion with Dr. Conant, Friday, February 20, 1942," 19 Feb. 1942, Box 89, "M. A. Tuve," Tuve Papers: "Are we in Section T to see this radio fuse [sic] through to an effective weapon in the quickest and most effective fashion possible? Or is it necessary to compromise, shifting parts of the job here and there, even at the expense of delays and poor results?" On the OSRD's views about Tuve's desire to enter into production see Vannevar Bush to James B. Conant, 6 Jan. 1942, RG 227, OSRD Director's Office Correspondence, Box 66, "Section T."
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of the OSRD.10 The scale of the planned operation made current DTM accommodations inadequate.Isaiah Bowman, presidentof the Johns Hopkins University, agreed to administer the new laboratory's contract with the OSRD, even though the APL was located far from the university's Baltimore campus. As for the nature of the relationship between the laboratory and the campus, Tuve explained that "the Applied Physics Laboratory is in a Washington suburb, not at the University in Baltimore, and has no connection with the peace-time activities of the University, and has nothing whatever to do with students." Because of the classified nature of the new laboratory's research, Bowman appointed one member of the university's board of trustees, David Luke Hopkins, a prominent Baltimore banker, to serve as the connection between the laboratoryand the university administration. Luke Hopkins's signature was essential for spending any of the government's money; he also became one of Tuve's closest advisors, playing a major role in the debates that would shape the laboratory's future at war's end.11 The APL's staff of nearly two hundred individuals took over the management of the fuze's production, coordinating the activities of other laboratories engaged in further fuze developments as well as factory assembly lines. To control production, Tuve engaged in a two-pronged strategy. First, the APL developed an extensive internal reporting system that kept the director informed about all aspects of research, development, and production. Such a system furthered the laboratory's mission, but it also allowed Tuve to exercise authority over a staff in which only a few people actually knew the scale and scope of the project. That is, the program was so compartmentalized that Tuve needed to develop bureaucraticmechanisms to reconstruct the laboratory's technical practices.12Security was not simply an additional layer of organization at the APL; security was constitutive of the laboratory's workings. Second, Tuve dispatched the fuze's designers to assembly lines across the country to transmit the skills necessary to build a working fuze. On the factory floor the former DTM physicists-including Lawrence Hafstad, R. B. Roberts, and others from universities and industry-attempted to recreate laboratory conditions at each worker's assembly-line position. Those who knew how to build fuzes taught those who would mass-produce the devices. Ph.D.'s taught workers how to recognize flawed vacuum tubes, as well as defects in the fuze's other components, while struggling to convey a sense of the delicate touch necessary to make a complete fuze. Finally, to ensure that troops used the new technology correctly, Tuve had several members of the
10 On the new organization see Bush to Members of NDRC, 10 Mar. 1942, RG 227, OSRD Director's Office Correspondence, Box 4, "Fuses-Proximity"; and Bush to Conant, 16 Mar. 1942, RG 227, OSRD Director's Office Correspondence, Box 66, "Organization-Section T." On Section T becoming a ward of the navy see Bush to Paul Foote, 31 Mar. 1942, ibid.: Bush comments that the new organization might prove temporary since the OSRD might turn "the whole matter over to the Navy." ' On the contract with Johns Hopkins see Irvin Stewart to Isaiah Bowman, 17 Apr. 1942, RG 227, Records of Section T, Box 4, "JHU-APL"; on the relationship between laboratory and campus see Tuve to Ivan Crawford, Dean of Engineering, University of Michigan, 8 Oct. 1942, RG 227, Records of Section T, Box 4, "WSP U of Michigan"; on David Luke Hopkins see Joseph Boyce, ed., New Weapons for Air Warfare (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), p. 134. 12 On secrecy in Section T see M. A. Tuve, "Secrecy Notice," 28 Mar. 1941, Box 28, "Office Memos," Tuve Papers; for published discussions of the issue see Boyce, ed., New Weapons for Air Warfare, pp. 113-114, 134; and Ralph Baldwin, The Deadly Fuze (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio, 1980), pp. 109-110. For examples of the reporting system see Tuve to J. A. Hynek, 24 Sept. 1942, which demanded that "a copy of every memorandum containing technical information, even though it is a letter from one man to another, is to go to the Reports Office"; and Hynek to Technical Staff, 29 Apr. 1943, RG 227, Records of Section T, Box 8, "WSP Reports Office."
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APL staff accept navy commissions. Once in uniform, these newly commissioned civilians spread the gospel of the fuze, patiently schooling other officers and sailors in the uses of the new weapon.l3 As early as 1943 Tuve and his colleagues, especially David Luke Hopkins, had begun discussing ways to preserve relations between researchers and the military after the cessation of hostilities. Hopkins and Charles Garland, another member of the university's board of trustees, proposed the formation of an independent National Institute of Ordnance Research, a proposal that was embraced by the armed services.14 And in June 1944 Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal appointed Tuve to the Wilson Committee, charged with developing a mechanism to provide for the military's postwar research and development needs. As Daniel J. Kevles has observed, Tuve dominated the early meetings of the Wilson Committee, presenting the assembled members with his plan for a new independent agency, a Research Board for National Security (RBNS). The ultimate failure of the RBNS is outside the scope of this essay, but several features of Tuve's vision are important for our story. Historians and contemporaries rightly made much of Tuve's emphasis on establishing an independent agency, but Tuve believed that the issue of funding was less important than the question of attitudes-the attitudes of the public, the Congress, the armed services, and researchers-toward military research and development. "Attitudes," explained Tuve, would "control the future opportunity and willingness to do this work, the quality of the ideas put into it, the initiative and vigor with which they are pushed, and even the funds which will be available for it." National security, Tuve maintained, was no longer the military's responsibility alone. Hence, when the committee's service members decided that the organization of research within the services was outside its jurisdiction, Tuve argued that the committee had been "pretty thoroughly torpedoed."'5 The military's unwillingness to countenance a discussion of its own research signaled that there would be no forthcoming attitude change. Tuve would get another opportunity to engineer the military's attitudes-in particular, the navy's-courtesy of Vannevar Bush. In September 1944 Bush announced that the OSRD would begin demobilizing once the European war ended. Only those projects essential for prosecuting the Pacific conflict would continue, preferably under the sponsorship of the military services with an interest in such research. With Bush's blessing, Tuve and Luke Hopkins began negotiating a contract between the Navy BuOrd and Johns Hopkins to continue the work of Section T. As Tuve saw it, the orderly transfer of the APL from OSRD to navy auspices would eliminate some of the uncertainty among the
13 see for On teachingworkershow to recognizedefectivecomponents "Suggestions VisualMechanical Inspectionof IncomingTubes by Unit Assemblers,"RG 227, Section T TechnicalReports,Box 10, M-5200-M-5294,p. 1; for an accountof workingin the factoriessee Tuve to BarkesTarzianof RCA, 27 Feb. 1943, RG 227, Recordsof Section T, Box 8, "WSPRCA";on sendingSectionT re26 into the field see Tuve to Directorof Naval Officer Procurement, Oct. 1942, RG 227, searchers Recordsof SectionT, Box 1, "WSPAPL Personnel." 14 On planningat the APL see "Meetingof Policy Group,"31 Aug. 1943, and untitleddocument betweenTuve andCapt.Moses, 11 Sept. 1943, Box 89, "Military a Research," describing conversation Tuve Papers.A copy of the Hopkinsand Garland plan can be found ibid.; see also Sherry,Preparing for the Next War (cit. n. 2), pp. 137-138. 15 See DanielJ. Kevles, "Scientists, the Military,and the Controlof PostwarDefense Research: The Boardfor NationalSecurity,1944-1946," Technology Culture,1975, 16:20and Case of the Research on for 47; andM. A. Tuve, "Notesfor FirstMeetingof Committee Planning ArmyandNavy Research," Tuve Papers. p. 4, Box 114, "BushReportand NationalResearchFoundation,"
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laboratory's staff that had been precipitated by Bush's demobilization plans; he further hoped that it might serve as a model for the transfer to the services of other projects of technical and strategic importance. For Bush, the transfer rid the OSRD of an "unusual and undesirable" organization.16In December 1944 Johns Hopkins formally accepted a $750,000 navy contract to manage the laboratory for the BuOrd through June 1946. In January 1945 the APL became the BuOrd center for guided missile research, charged with the development of a supersonic antiaircraftmissile for use in the current conflict. Work on what was called Project Bumblebee had begun in June 1944, but even a technology as potentially powerful as a guided missile could not create a stable postwar future for the laboratory.17 The Japanese surrender in August 1945 made postwar planning the laboratory's dominant activity, and this process brought out interesting differences among Tuve, his senior staff, and the university administrators. For Tuve, any specific plans for the future of Section T and the APL had to be guided by a more general set of beliefs about the proper relationships between military officers and civilian researchers. Outlined most forcefully in April 1945, his ideas embodied a conception I call "technological citizenship," which focused upon the need to "make civilians realize their obligations for defense and its vital importance, and give them the means for carrying out this obligation." Conversely, it was equally important to "make the Navy part of the U.S.A." Transforming the civil and military worlds through a continuous "pattern"of relationships was Tuve's goal. Section T and the APL, an "experiment in public administration," served as a wartime example of such close integration, exemplified by the contractual relation between Johns Hopkins and the BuOrd.18 How to establish and maintain relationships among researchers, military officers, and businessmen became the central postwar problem. National security would be the upshot of the reinvention of civil society, rather than a cause. Two weeks after the war's sudden end, Tuve convened two committees composed of laboratory staff members to map out the APL's future. Labeled the Young Turks and the Seniors for their generational differences, the committees began their tasks with a common set of questions and assumptions. Each was to consider the potential needs of the United States with respect to research and development in light of possible future enemies, possible BuOrd research and development activities, and the role that the APL as well as Bumblebee might play in their view of the nation's and the navy's future.19The two groups returned with similar plans that differed quite
16 On Bush's OSRD demobilization order see Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 299-313, 317-319; and Tuve to Bush, 8 Sept. 1944, Box 87, "Stable Contracting Agency Plan," Tuve Papers. For Tuve's beliefs about the transfer see Tuve to Charles Wilson, 14 Oct. 1944, Box 63, "Correspondence, Postwar," Tuve Papers; for Bush's views see Bush to Carroll Wilson, 10 Apr. 1944, RG 227, OSRD Director's Office Correspondence, Box 66, "Organization-Section T." 17 On the transfer from OSRD to navy auspices see the materials located in Cabinet 6, Drawer 12, File: "APL Transfer," Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) Archives, Laurel, Maryland. In particular, this file contains a copy of the navy contract, as well as the internal Hopkins memoranda. On the university's sanguine views regarding a navy contract see David Luke Hopkins, "Memorandumof Several Situations in Connection with a Navy Contract," 13 Sept. 1944, ibid. On the origins of the APL missile program see Tuve to Bush, 19 July 1944, and Bush to Tuve, 1 Aug. 1944, RG 298, Box 44, "Jet Missiles, Vol. I." 18Tuve to Director's Office Files, 21 Apr. 1945, p. 4, Box 101, "Tuve Notes and Memos on Postwar," Tuve Papers. "Experiment in public administration" was a common locution; see "Post-war Research-Possible APL Participation," 7 June 1945, p. 3, ibid. 19See Tuve to Committee Members, 18 Aug. 1945, Box 114, "Tuve Administrative Files APL, September 1945," Tuve Papers.
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dramatically from Tuve's own conceptualization of the future. Each saw the APL's future as their future; war's end did not mean that the laboratory need disband. War with the Soviet Union was another shared prediction; the Young Turks entitled their planning memo "Post (Pre?) War Planning." The importance of the weapon under development for the coming conflict and the APL's wartime track record would insure the future, despite the recognized lack of any precedent for such an organization. This faith in the laboratory's future stood in stark contrast to Tuve's apparentbelief that the laboratory would "disintegrate"as people returned to their prewar pursuits, leaving the APL a hollow shell of its wartime self. "We are," explained Tuve, "endeavoring to preserve not a Johns Hopkins laboratory, but an over-all pattern of technical operations with a wide base, spread over a variety of agencies and groups in the nation."20This statement crystallized the gulf separating Tuve from his staff; it also captured some of the differences that would distinguish Tuve's reasoning from that of Hopkins president Isaiah Bowman. To assist in the retention of personnel for Bumblebee, Johns Hopkins acceded to a navy request to extend the university's contract an additional year, until June 1947. Bowman and the university's trustees wanted to preserve the APL as the nucleus for a long-planned industrial research contract laboratory;the technical skills of the APL staff would turn toward ventures more commercial than guided missiles. Even more important, affixing APL to the new industrial contract laboratory obviated the need to provide APL staff members with university appointments. Bowman and others on campus feared a sudden influx of tenured APL researchers should the navy abruptly cancel the laboratory's contract.21In turn, establishing a university connection allowed Bowman to define the category of activities "appropriate"to the university and, hence, to its affiliated laboratory. Bowman demanded that the APL find an industrial partner to handle Bumblebee prototype and production engineering. The stipulation contradicted the APL's wartime maxim that "only dirty hands can intelligently direct," but this division of responsibilities was the price Bowman exacted for continuing university sponsorship; the demand also demonstrated his belief that he and the trustees must decide the university's future.22 Tuve believed Bowman's scheme profoundly flawed for several reasons. First, Johns Hopkins had not offered professorships with tenure in the academic departments to any members of the senior staff. Nor had Bowman even stated how many
20 Tuve to Group Supervisors, 25 Sept. 1945, p. 2, Box 114, "TC Technical Planning and Programs," Tuve Papers. For the committee reports see "Summary of Conclusions, Senior Post War Planning Committee," 7 Sept. 1945, Box 114, "Tuve Administrative Files APL, September 1945"; and Young Turks Committee to Tuve, 7 Sept. 1945, Box 114, "Transition APL and BuOrd Postwar," Tuve Papers. On Tuve's apparent state of mind see Lawrence Hafstad to Tuve, 7 Sept. 1945, Box 114, "Tuve Administrative Files APL, September 1945," Tuve Papers. 21 On the contract extension see BuOrd to Johns Hopkins, 25 Sept. 1945, Box 114, "Tuve Administrative Files APL, September 1945," Tuve Papers; for details on the Hopkins plans for a contract research laboratory see Caryle Barton, President JHU Board of Trustees, to Bush, Box 57, Folder 1381, Vannevar Bush Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; for a later discussion of the status of APL researchers see "Memorandum of a Meeting of the Department of Physics at my [Bowman's] office, Monday, 8 April 1946," 8 Apr. 1946, Box 26, Folder 4, Office of the President Papers, Ferdinand Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. 22 For the quotation see Young Turks to Tuve, 7 Sept. 1945, Box 114, "Transition APL and BuOrd Postwar," Tuve Papers; on the need to separate research and development from production engineering and on delineating the tasks appropriate for a university see "IB [Isaiah Bowman] shows DLH memo of 16 November 1945," 3 Dec. 1945, Box 27, Folder 1, Office of the President Papers, Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University. This latter document also expresses Bowman's desire to insure recognition of his presidential power.
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offers might be made in the immediate future. It seemed clear, then, that the university wanted only a contractual relationship with the off-campus laboratory, rather than a substantive connection that would transform both institutions over time. Second, although Tuve agreed that the university should not participatein the production engineering of a specific missile, he was unsure about the firm the university wanted to attach to the APL, the Kellex Company, famous for its Manhattan Project work at Oak Ridge.23 Kellex and Johns Hopkins would share responsibility for the laboratory. Why not allow Kellex to contract directly with the navy instead of through the university; why hand "over to an aggressive group, new to BuOrd and to GM [guided missile] work, a central-lab-plus-contract-controlsystem for which the sky is the limit"? Despite these misgivings, Tuve negotiated a division of responsibilities in which Kellex would do the work of designing and engineering particularweapons for production, while the APL bore responsibility for the ideas and concepts embodied in specific missiles.24 Turmoil continued at the laboratory as Tuve's frustrationsmounted. The staff, led by Lawrence Hafstad, R. B. Roberts, and Wilbur Goss, still wanted the laboratory to continue its wartime pattern, causing an exasperated Tuve to declare, "Christ!The war's over!" In a draft letter of resignation, Tuve explained to Luke Hopkins that "a general hope has been sustained that this APL laboratory might continue on more or less of a large-scale wartime basis over a period of years. The entire situation here is now unrealistic to a point of absurdity." A crucial problem was the university's utter lack of involvement in the laboratory's daily operations; Tuve, Hafstad, and Roberts, three of the laboratory's leaders, had no Johns Hopkins connection but were on leave of absence from the DTM. Luke Hopkins-an administrator, not a researcher-was the only person from the Baltimore campus among the seven hundred people still employed at the Silver Spring laboratory. In Tuve's eyes, neither the university nor the staff was being realistic; rather than allow his continued presence to suggest the possibility of continuing the wartime pattern, Tuve tendered his resignation, effective by 15 February 1946.25 With Tuve's departure, Hafstad became APL director. Luke Hopkins retained his position as the link between the laboratory and the university administration.26The pressing problems now were the question of the laboratory's relationship to the university and the division of responsibilities with Kellex. The former problem was now an old one, but still unsolved. Bowman and Luke Hopkins believed that the creation of a new university division, the Institute for Cooperative Research (ICR), was the answer. The APL would become the new division's largest section, and staff memOn the connection with Kellex see R. B. Roberts to Tuve, 12 Dec. 1945, Box 114, "TC Technical Planning and Programs," Tuve Papers. For information on Kellex and the Manhattan Project see Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, The New World (1962; Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1990), p. 120. 24For the quotation, as well as other materials in this paragraph, see M. A. Tuve, "Personal position of MAT regarding APL/JHU as of January 1946" (handwritten document), 25 Dec. 1945, Box 114, "TC Technical Planning and Programs," and Tuve, "Notes on Proposed Division of Responsibilities between Johns Hopkins and Kellex," 28 Dec. 1945, Box 114, "APL Transition and BuOrd Postwar," Tuve Papers. 25 M. A. Tuve, "What is it reasonable to do?" (handwritten document), 21 Jan. 1946, Box 119, Blue/ Gray Notebook; Tuve to D. L. Hopkins, 28 Jan. 1946, Box 114, "Transition APL and BuOrd Postwar"; and Tuve to President and Board of Trustees, Johns Hopkins, 29 Jan. 1946, Box 113, "APL/JHU Resignation," Tuve Papers. 26 On the university's plan for the laboratory see Hopkins to APL Staff, Box 119, Blue Notebook, Tuve Papers.
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bers would receive academic appointments in the ICR rather than the traditional academic departments. These appointments allowed the APL staff to have academic titles while freeing the university's departments from the burden of absorbing them should the navy contract end abruptly.27Far from providing APL researchers with the benefits of academic life (i.e., tenure), these appointments allowed the university to insulate itself from the laboratory. Despite these political problems, work continued on Bumblebee. An outside evaluation committee commended the laboratory for the speed with which results had been obtained and expressed no reservations over the program's technical direction. Although the committee did ask about the appropriate relationship between a university laboratoryand weapons development in peacetime, it allowed that there could be different answers at different institutions. APL researchers joined in the discussion, producing memos addressing the question "What is APL?" and the nature of the relationship between Johns Hopkins and Kellex at the laboratory. Alexander Kossiakoff, one of the more outspoken members of the staff, declared that the APL was a unique "collection of individuals" as well as a "complete operational team" that should "retain full control of [Bumblebee's] engineering design and performance specifications." Statements such as these made clear the staff's inability to conceptualize a role for Kellex in the laboratory's daily operations.28 If institutional permanence was a problem for the APL, any proposed solution had to recognize the problems of location, classification, and patronage. Located in suburban Washington, D.C., the laboratory was quite a drive from the Johns Hopkins campus. The establishment of a laboratory newsletter, filled with information about the staff and the university, could not by itself ameliorate this problem. If education remained an important part of the university's mission, how did the laboratory fit in? Bumblebee was a classified research program, where results were the immediate goal. How would students fit into such an effort? Despite plans to import graduate students from Harvard, there appears to have been little effort to develop a graduate program in guided missile design that might tap the laboratory's talents. Instead, the laboratoryembarked on two pedagogical projects directed toward practitionersrather than students. The APL started producing a series of handbooks on supersonic aerodynamics. With articles written by leading experts in the field, including members of the staff, the handbooks were a way to control the flood of information emerging in this rapidly growing field while placing the laboratory at its center. In a related initiative, begun in 1947, the laboratory established the Solid Rocket Propellant Information Center, a clearinghouse for information about the topic for government contractors.29Both the handbooks and the information center were efforts in public relations, as was the only APL research program that attractedany outside academic interest-James Van Allen's use of captured German V-2 rockets for cosmic ray of Van Alinvestigations and solar spectroscopy. Another-unstated-dimension len's research was the design of a liquid-fueled rocket capable of reaching high alThis point is made explicitly in "Summary of Discussions Advisory Board for Cooperative Research," 13 Apr. 1946, RG 2, Box 28, Folder 5, Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University. 28 See Hugh Dryden to Hopkins, 15 Apr. 1946, Box 115, "Proximity Fuze," Tuve Papers; and Alexander Kossiakoff, untitled memorandum, 31 July 1946, "1946 APL/JHU Relationships," APL Archives. 29On the plan to import Harvard graduate students see Hopkins to Walter S. Gifford, 29 May 1946, RG 2, Box 27, Folder 4, Office of the President Papers; on the handbooks and the information center see RG 06.080, Subgroup 1, Series 2, File: "Applied Physics Laboratory 1946-54," Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University.
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titudes. Although it was developed for high-altitude research, the BuOrd seriously considered using Van Allen's rocket as a tactical weapon. Although Van Allen cooperated with the Hopkins physics department and even taught several courses, department members refused to consider granting him a permanent appointment.30 Van Allen's work took place in the newly designated Research Center, a part of the laboratory set aside for unclassified or basic research-but such work was basic to military, rather than researcher, goals. It was indicative of the status of such research that Van Allen's group was nicknamed the "five-percenters," a reference to their portion of the APL budget.31 "Basic" research, like Van Allen's, also highlighted the laboratory's other problem-sole-source patronage. If one could use only 5 percent of the budget from the BuOrd for such work, then why not get other contracts, from the other services and industry, to broaden the base of support? Kossiakoff and others mentioned just such a possibility, but they all realized the main difficulty with it: should the BuOrd believe that the APL was diluting its efforts on Bumblebee in pursuit of other contracts, then it might shop elsewhere for its technological developments. Freedom from the navy might bring the laboratory's history to an end. For their part, how would corporations feel about working with a laboratory that was jointly operated by a university and an industrial firm, Kellex, that might become a future competitor? Throughout 1947, these problems only deepened.32
In October 1947 Lawrence Hafstad left the directorship of the APL to become the executive secretary of the Joint Research and Development Board; Ralph Gibson, who was in charge of both the associated contractors and day-to-day Bumblebee development, became the laboratory's acting director. At nearly the same time, Gibson began negotiating with Rutgers for another position. By early 1948 the navy was "anxious to get some guided missiles on ships," even if that meant deploying experimental prototypes.33 The conjunction of these seemingly disconnected events produced a profound crisis at the laboratory, one that exposed the unresolved problems of the laboratory's connection to the university as well as the very basis for the collaboration with Kellex. In early spring Gibson received an offer from Rutgers, and the "scientific staff" feared for the laboratory's future; they also felt threatened as Bumblebee moved into the engineering and production phase of development. In a joint declaration, twenty-five of the thirty-three senior staff members explained
On Van Allen's research program see David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992), pp. 83-87, 204-214; on the navy's interest in the rocket, called Aerobee, see R. E. Gibson to Files, 17 Apr. 1946, "R. E. Gibson Chron Files, 1946," APL Archives. See also L. R. Hafstad and G. R. Tatum, "Report of the Director of Research to the Subcommittee on Cooperative Research," 3 Oct. 1946, Box 27, Folder 6, Office of the President Papers, Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University. 31 On the research center see Hafstad to Policy Committee, 1 Apr. 1947, Cabinet 22, "Research Center," APL Archives. The nickname comes from an oral history interview with James Van Allen, conducted by David H. DeVorkin and Allan Needell; a transcript of the interview is available from the Space Astronomy Oral History Project, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. My thanks to the members of the project for permission to quote from their interview. 32 p. Stewart Macaulay to Bowman, 8 Oct. 1947, RG 03.001, Series 1, Subseries 3, Box 8, File 10, Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University. 33On Hafstad's departure see "Summary of Discussions Advisory Board for Cooperative Research," 20 Oct. 1947, RG 2, Box 28, 47.1, Folder 5, Hamburger Archives, Johns Hopkins University; on Gibson's offer from Rutgers see Gibson to Robert Clothier, 22 Oct. 1947, "R. E. Gibson Chron Files, 1947," APL Archives; on the navy's "anxiety" see Gibson to H. H. Porter, 14 Jan. 1948, Cabinet 6, Drawer 5, "R. E. Gibson Chron Files, 1948," APL Archives.
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that the current crisis was the upshot of running a laboratory "by a partnershipwith overlapping responsibilities."34The APL's responsibilities to the navy could not be shared with Kellex, for only the university and the researchers possessed the skills to bring the project to a successful completion. Despite the efforts to make the joint operation work, divorce was the only effective answer. Kellex had to go. The upshot was the separation of Kellex and the APL, with Gibson remaining as director; most importantly, the removal of Kellex meant that the laboratory would regain responsibility for continuing Bumblebee development as well as a role in production engineering. The latter was especially important since it allowed for a return to wartime practices; the researchers (re)gained control of the missile development program from design through production. The division of responsibility had carriedwith it a division of authority;the joint agreementbegged the question, Whose missile was it? For Gibson and the APL technical staff, the missile was more than another product; it was as importantas any traditional scientific text. As researchers, Gibson and his associates would not allow others to rewrite their work; as missile designers, they would not permit Kellex to transform their work for production. Control of the new "text" demanded that the APL staff play a role in the missile's production as well as its design. When Bowman acceded to Gibson's demand, he violated his own decision to separate the university from any involvement with missile production. But Bowman had little choice. Losing the APL would destroy the Institute for Cooperative Research, undermining the university's various attempts to acquire other military and industrialcontracts. The APL reverted to its wartime status in function as well as name, but with an important difference: in 1948 Bowman made the APL a division of the university, on a par with the Medical School, the UndergraduateCollege, and the GraduateSchool. Gibson had done what Tuve found impossible; he had created a place for the APL on campus, by emphasizing the very functions Tuve sought to drop from the laboratory's mission. Gibson also replaced Tuve's vision of technological citizenship with an alternative philosophy-systems management. When, in 1957, the Wall Street Journal hailed Ramo-Woolridge for its "unique" supervisory role in the production of air force bombers and missiles, Gibson dashed off a letter to the editor asserting the APL's priority in the development of the new managerial strategy. For Tuve, technological citizenship was a vision of a radically different form of civil society; for Gibson, systems management was an apologetic legitimizing the APL's position in the weapons development and production process.35 Arguing that the entire research, development, and production process was a complex and interconnected system allowed the APL to claim that the laboratory was all that stood between a working weapon for the navy and chaos. This was also another dimension of the reconstitution of the
34Research Council to Director, APL, 9 Mar. 1948, RG 03.001, Series 1, Subseries 3, Box 8, File 10, HamburgerArchives, Johns Hopkins University. Lawrence Hafstad made the point about staff uneasiness quite clearly at a meeting in Bowman's office on 26 Mar. 1948; see "Informal Memorandum on Conference Concerning the Future of APL," ibid. 35See Gibson to W. H. Grimes, Editor, Wall Street Journal, 11 Apr. 1957, "R. E. Gibson Chron Files, April-June 1957," APL Archives. For a later version of Gibson's systems rhetoric see Gibson, "A Systems Approach to Research Management," 23 Aug. 1961, APL Archives. Systems analysis and operations research were more than apologetics; they were among the new political languages of the postwar era that made it possible for scientists, engineers, and policy analysts to speak not only for themselves but for their nonhuman subjects. In other words, a postwar analogue to Anthony Padgen, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), would have to include discussions of systems analysis and operations research.
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civilian, a way in which university-based researchers appeared and acted like industrial contractors as well as academics. Gaining control of the Bumblebee program from design through production secured the APL's institutional position, but it did so by reconstituting the civilian within very narrow institutional limits. At the APL only the Research Center, separate from the rest of the laboratory, was an island of unclassified research in a large, classified weapons program. Without the need for advanced missile technology, there would have been no need for the Research Center as a site for both knowledge production and staff recruitment. In Baltimore, an initial attempt to keep some of the APL's wartime functions at arm's length failed. Faced with a crisis precipitated by the threatened departureof an acting director who had the respect and admiration of his staff, as well as the navy's new demands to move guided missiles onto ships, the university administrationended its attempt to separate academic from industrial work. Despite its blurred internal boundaries, the laboratory became an integral part of the university's organizationalstructure.Money alone did not determine the course of events at Hopkins, but military funds were a serious incentive, as was the belief that the APL missile program was essential for national security. Reconstituting the civilian at both the laboratory and the university demonstratedthe porous boundaries separating the civilian from the military.
PEDAGOGICAL POWER: CHARLES STARK DRAPER AT MIT
In January 1947 MIT executive vice president J. R. Killian asked Thomas Sherwood, the dean of engineering, to review a recent APL report with an eye to MIT's own postwar practices. Sherwood found the report difficult, observing that is and fromthe report it seemsthattheirsituation complicated it is not easy to understand is that just whattheirorganization since it is so complex. I gathered theirproblemis to a with the academic integrate large and going concernset up for munitiondevelopment and the otherdirection expanding developingthe academicactivitiesto handlea large by the effectivenessand prodevelopment program.Ourproblemis to approach maximum Theirproblemis how to get backafteralreadyfalling ductivitywithoutgoing overboard. overboard. MIT officials had found Johns Hopkins lacking in administrativejudgment in January 1945, when Killian turned down a navy contract identical to one signed by Bowman. Administrative insight was not the cause of the different responses; indeed, it is probable that neither Sherwood nor Killian fully understood what was happening at either Johns Hopkins or MIT. Neither man was actually in charge at MIT. The architect of postwar MIT was the omnipresent Nathaniel Sage, head of the institute's Department of IndustrialCooperation.36Sage and MIT president Karl Compton were the apparentauthors of an October 1944 MIT pamphlet on government contracts that
36 See Thomas Sherwood to J. R. Killian, 4 Jan. 1947, AC12, Box 10, "Killian," and G. F. Hussey to Killian, 2 Jan. 1945, AC4 [Office of the President Papers], Box 38, Folder 6, MIT Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts. For other discussions of postwar MIT see Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992); and Christophe Lecuyer, "The Making of a Science Based Technological University: Karl Compton, James Killian, and the Reform of MIT, 1930-1957," Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci., 1992, 23: 153-180.
activities of the university. . . . Our problem is to approach the proper balance from
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contained a most important idea-indirect overhead.37 Wartime contracts had operated on the principle of "no-gain, no-loss," but Sage and Compton believed that such a policy could not be maintained in the future. Explaining that MIT "had had to sell income-bearing securities to provide cash capital" for several government projects during the war, the authors now argued that the institute needed to raise money to pay for the "exceptional" staff, teaching, and fundamental research that had originally attractedthe government to MIT. The institute had risked its finances during the national emergency; now, in peacetime, the government would help MIT to "strengthenand develop scholarship and fundamental research." In all future contracts, MIT would simply take a specified percentage "off the top." Indirect overhead was a revealing invention. As Larry Owens has argued, the contract was the instrument through which the federal government and the university created their postwar relationship. Ideally, it allowed them to bargain as equals. But indirect overhead was a devastating admission about the nature of the university's relationship with the federal government and, in particular, the military. Military patronage was a new source of revenue for the university and weapons-related research one of the university's new missions. How did this relate to the traditional mission of teaching and research? The logic of indirect costs implied that such goals merited only crumbs from the military table.38This hierarchical relationship was not simply metaphorical; it was contractual. Far from their being equal partners, every contract reinforced the university's secondary status by emphasizing that academic pursuits were worth only a few percent of its value. Regardless of its political implications, indirect overhead was a source of funds. Even Sage found the volume of postwar government contracts staggering. In November 1947, a "typical" postwar year, there was an unexpended balance of nearly $13 million on MIT's government contracts. Interestingly, one laboratory had the largest single balance, nearly $2 million-Charles Stark Draper's Instrumentation Laboratory (I-Lab), with a single contract from the army air force's Wright Field Armament Laboratoryfor $2.975 million. As Sage, one of Draper's closest friends, observed in 1950, "the size of [Draper's] program is largely determined by the availability of manpower. If we need more money, we could probably get the present Air Force $2,200,000 increased by a million and a half dollars."39If Draper could only spend faster, Wright Field would readily dispense more money. Draper epitomized postwar MIT's relationship with the military. He was expanding his academic program to meet the needs of the intensive weapons development program under way; in fact, this pattern of work was closely related to Draper's prewar projects at MIT.
37A draft of this document, dated 5 Oct. 1944, is attached to Compton to Bush, 6 Oct. 1944, Box 26, Folder 609, Bush Papers. The final version is MIT Special Bulletin: Policy Relating to Governmental Contracts at the Institute (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, Nov. 1944); a copy can be found in Box 84, "Postwar Articles and Clippings," Tuve Papers. On the question of university finances in general during this period see Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 30-61 and, on MIT, pp. 63-72. 38 Policy Relating to Governmental Contracts at the Institute, pp. 7, 9; and Larry Owens, "MIT and the Federal 'Angel': Academic R&D and Federal-Private Cooperation before World War II," Isis, 1990, 81:189-213. For a clear statement of the use of indirect overhead on government contracts to boost general institute revenues see abstract of minutes of Corporation meeting, 8 Oct. 1945, p. 5, Collection 89-9, Box 4, MIT Archives. 39Nathaniel Sage to J. A. Stratton, 19 Oct. 1950, AC132, Box 2, Folder "Division of Sponsored Research," MIT Archives. On the government contract monies see the accounting information in AC4, File: "DIC/Overhead," MIT Archives.
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Before World War II, Draper's career exemplified the complex social relations of the university researcher. After receiving an MIT undergraduate degree in 1926, washing out of the army air corps, and working in a private research laboratory for six months, Draper returned to MIT to pursue a doctorate in physics while working in Charles Taylor's Internal Combustion Laboratory. His plans for the doctorate derailed with the arrival of Karl Compton as institute president in 1930; among Compton's first moves was the "quantization"of the physics department. Compton, himself a Princeton physicist, sought to make MIT a center for modern physics by hiring John Slater, Philip Morse, and others.40 After reading Draper's transcript, Morse suggested that he simply drop out; none of his previous courses would count under the new regime. Luckily, Taylor continued to employ Draper as a research assistant while also hiring him to teach the aeronautical engineering program's one-semester course in aircraft instruments. By 1934 Draper had established the Instruments Laboratory in which he developed both his pedagogical and technical styles through a series of contracts for research on engine knock and vibration with the navy and the Sperry Gyroscope Company. Pedagogy forms the baseline for any understandingof Draper's career. The prewar Instruments Laboratory was a case study in disciplinary as well as technical innovation. Once the province of industry and government, aircraft instruments became part of the aeronautical engineering curriculum. Pedagogically, Draper's innovation was twofold. First, he constructed apparatusto demonstrate the behavior of aircraft instruments during moments of rapid change. Second, he developed a unique way to describe the behavior of instruments, consisting of a set of equations, a particular notation, and words whose meaning was rooted in the pedagogical apparatusDraper used to demonstrate his theories. It is not surprising that throughout the 1930s and early 1940s Draper's papers were read with a combination of awe and incomprehension. At several meetings members of the audience announced that Draper's paper required a translationinto English before it would make sense. Draper's response to such comments was always the same: the language of his paper was the language of the Instruments Laboratory; his success as a teacher would have to serve as a demonstration of his language's appropriateness.41 Twenty-two students (twelve B.S., eight M.S., two Sc.D.) received degrees based upon work done in the Instruments Laboratory during the 1930s; Draper supervised doctoraldissertationsbefore completing his own. Draper'ssuccess as a teacherstemmed from his personal style and his ability to get his students jobs based upon his government and commercial contracts. Appearing in class wearing a green eyeshade and a lab smock that had once been white, Draper looked as if he had been up all night,
40No Draper biography currently exists; the best published sources are the essays in Sidney Lees, ed., Air, Space, and Instruments (New York: McGraw Hill, 1962). The following discussion of Draper's prewar career draws upon the first chapter of my dissertation: "Student, Teacher, Instrument-maker, Engineer: Charles Stark Draper and the Political Economy of Technical Practice at MIT during the 1930s," in Michael Aaron Dennis, "A Change of State" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins Univ., 1991), pp. 23-133. On Compton's "quantization"of physics at MIT see Robert Kargon and Elizabeth Hodes, "Karl Compton, Isaiah Bowman, and the Politics of Science in the Great Depression," Isis, 1985, 76:301318. Draper's laboratory was known as the Instruments Laboratory before the war and as the Instrumentation Laboratory afterward. 41 For an example of this type of comment see C. S. Draper and G. P. Bentley, "Design Factors Controlling the Dynamic Performance of Instruments," Transactions of the ASME, 1940, 62:421-432, on p. 430.
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either working in the laboratory or playing poker; sometimes he had done both.42 More importantthan appearancewas Draper's habit of involving the students directly in the design of pedagogical apparatusor his own research for industry and government. Such experience, coupled with intensive immersion in the laboratory's private language, produced individuals who understood Draper's technical style. Undergirding all of Draper's inventions, from 1930 on, was a basic design that I have called selfreferential because such devices generate standards of measure through their very operation. A watch or clock is the most obvious and easily understood self-referential device. Through the workings of its mechanism, the clock produces the standard units of time-seconds, minutes, and hours. Assuming the watch's mechanism is working correctly, we calibrate it against another time-keeping source, set the correct time, and assume thereafter that it displays the correct time. In theory, once the watch is set, it will require no further calibration against another time-keeping device. Now, consider a Draper device called the MIT Knockmeter. Other techniques existed to measure engine knock, but Draper's required no calibration; it contained within its design a standardmeasure of knock. Draper embedded knock in the device itself. Other InstrumentsLaboratorydevices shared this self-referential characteristic. Nor was it insignificant that when Draper planned on leaving MIT in 1939, he intended to work at the Waltham Watch Company.43 An importantcomponent of Draper's prewar success was the relationship between the InstrumentsLaboratoryand the Sperry Gyroscope Company. As part of one contractsupportingDraper'sresearch, the Instruments Laboratory performedquality control on Sperry's devices. At least six Draper students, including both his doctoral students, worked for Sperry after completing their degrees. Walter Wrigley, Draper's intellectual pride and joy, received his degree for work done on a Sperry-MIT contract, writing in the abstract to his 1941 thesis: "this thesis was carried out in conjunction with a research program for a commercial company. In view of this fact, the present international situation, and the subject matter of the thesis, the results that were considered to be of military or commercial value were not included. For this reason, the section dealing with the practical aspects of the vertical that contain a gyroscope is rather sketchy."44
42 For Draper's students see the annual degree books in the MIT Archives. I am grateful to Kathy Marquis for her assistance in using these volumes. For the description see James R. Killian, The Education of a College President: A Memoir (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 36; see also the oral history interview with Robert Seamens, National Air and Space Museum Oral History Collection, Washington, D.C. I am grateful to Martin Collins for allowing me to examine a draft of this interview. 43 See C. F. Taylor, C. S. Draper, E. S. Taylor, and G. L. Williams, "A New Instrument Devised for the Study of Combustion," Transactions of the Society of Automotive Engineering, 1934, 34:59-62; for more analysis see Dennis, "Change of State" (cit. n. 40). By the word knock I am referring to a noise that is familiar to all automobile drivers; it is a loud noise that sounds like someone is literally "knocking" your engine apart. Details on Draper's relationship with the Waltham Watch Company come from Box 40, Folder "Waltham," Charles Stark Draper Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. 44Walter Wrigley, "An Investigation of Methods Available for Indicating the Direction of the Vertical from Moving Bases" (Sc.D. diss., MIT, 1941), p. A-8. Other devices included equipment for the measurement of detonation and vibration in flight. Sperry's importance in the political economy of academic research during the 1930s is only beginning to be appreciated; Sperry was to the interwar period what IBM was to much of the postwar period-a large, wealthy company able to afford in-house research and to support university-based research in areas of commercial interest. On the importance of Sperry in another pre-World War II university see Peter Galison, Bruce Hevly, and Rebecca Lowen, "Controlling the Monster: Stanford and the Growth of Physics Research, 1935-1962," in Big Science: The
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Draper's close relationship with Sperry continued as the nation mobilized for war. Sperry put up some of the money for Draper's research on a new kind of "leadcomputing" gunsight, one that would determine how far in front of a plane a gunner needed to aim to be likely to score a hit. Ironically, after Draper succeeded in developing such a sight, Sperry hesitated to put the device into production since it would take away the market for the company's preexisting gunsights, all of which were dramatically more complex to operate.45A chance visit by several Royal Navy officers to Draper's class on fire control for U.S. Navy officers brought the sight out of the closet to which it had been relegated; Draper's students demanded that the Navy Bureau of Ordnapce examine the device. Only when faced with a massive navy order did Sperry agree to produce the sight, later known as the Mark 14.46 Sperry's agreement to produce Draper's sight marked the beginning of the end of his close relationship with the company. During the war, the navy and the army air force displaced Sperry as the dominant consumers of Draper's inventions and students. Furthermore, the military was interested in Draper's role as a teacher; both services wanted him to train their officers. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Draper gave a lecture at West Point on the design of engine indicators. In the audience was a young air force officer, Leighton Davis, who immediately requested a transfer to MIT. After earning a two-year masters degree in less than a year, he returnedto the air force. By war's end, Draper's speedy student had become Col. Leighton Davis, Chief of the Wright Field Armament Laboratory. Draper's association with Davis was conceivably the most important relationship of his career.47During the war, Davis contracted with Draper for the development of airbornegun and bomb sights. More important,Davis wanted to maintain his relationship with Draper after the war. What would Draper work on? How the exact nature of Draper's postwar research emerged is difficult to follow, but in September 1945 Davis awarded Draper a contract worth $3 million for the development of SIBS, the Stellar Inertial Bombing System-a device that would allow a bomber to reach its target with only one external input, celestial coordinates. The contract called for the "robotization" of the system and the ultimate elimination of celestial
Growth of Large Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 46-77. For another discussion of Sperry at MIT see Leslie, Cold War and American Science (cit. n. 36), pp. 19-21, 80-82. 45 On Draper's relationship with Sperry with respect to financing the gunsight see P. R. Bassett (of Sperry) to C. S. Draper, 7 Feb. 1941, Box 39, Folder "Sperry," Draper Papers. On Sperry fire control see Preston Bassett, "Fire Control Development," 27 Dec. 1939, Sperry Collection, Fire Control Files, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. On Sperry's reaction to Draper's development see Compton to Harvey Bundy, 24 Feb. 1942, AC4, Box 230, File 11, MIT Archives. 46 This is a very schematic account of a complex process. There are three basic sources for the gunsight's development: Bentley and Draper, "History of the Development of Gunsight Mark 14," attached to Ed Bentley to 0. B. Whiter, Sperry Gyroscope, 29 July 1942, Draper (P), Box 1, "Gunsight," Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Historical Collection, MIT Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; F. R. House, "The Navy Mark 14 Gunsight to July 1943" (prepared for Sperry Management), 15 Aug. 1943, Sperry Collection, Box "Public Affairs Dept, FLI-GUN," File: "Gunsight, Navy," Hagley Museum and Library; and Bentley to Captain N. N. Herrmann (BuOrd), 9 Feb. 1944, ibid. The royalties from the gunsight patent produced a financial windfall for the institute. Upon learning that the navy would order the sight Killian telegrammed Karl Compton to say that "Sage has just come dancing down corridor to report Draper equipment accepted by Navy": Killian to Compton, 31 Oct. 1941, AC4, "Draper," MIT Archives. 47On Draper and Davis see L. I. Davis, "Military Significance of Draper's Work for the Air Force," in Air, Space, and Instruments, ed. Lees (cit. n. 40), pp. 5-10.
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inputs, if possible.48 That is, Draper would ultimately build Davis a device that could measure the changing position of an aircraft so accurately that it would be unnecessary to use traditionalcelestial navigation to assist in guiding the craft. For Davis, such a device solved several problems. First, a purely inertial system would be unjammable. The sheer size of the new enemy, the USSR, made it unlikely that traditional radio navigation or loran would work as they had in World War II. It was also unlikely that the Soviet Union would allow the United States to plant radio beacons near importanttargets. Second, inertial navigation would make the air force even more independent of the other services, always an importantpoint. Finally, the word robotization in Draper's contracts hints at another reason for Davis's interest: navigators were expensive to train. Building a machine to replace or partially supplant a skilled individual would cut down on costs; machines were easier to replace than people.49 Davis also provided Draper with something unavailable to him before the war, the ability to compel others to learn the language of the InstrumentationLaboratory. What became known, somewhat infamously, as the Draper notation emerged from the Wright Field contracts. While presented as a "neutral"language for the discussion of complex geometric and physical concepts, it was a version of the ensemble of intellectual practices Draper developed before the war. To facilitate the dissemination of reports via that primitive pre-Xerox technology, the carbon, the notation used only symbols appearing on the typewriter. More important, Draper shaped the notation to reflect I-Lab interests; special symbols represented performance conditions associated with I-Lab devices. The notation was part of a disciplinary strategy, but it was also the language of a technology under development. In a special report meant to explain the notation to those outside the laboratory, the author concluded that the symbols provided more than "expressions of a number of operational conditions"; the new language yielded "complete statements of the physical phenomena which they represent," even when the technologies in question were still being designed. Sometimes, the "Draper symbols served to indicate the desired course of mathematical action." As the report concluded, once an individual learned the notation, he had a "key" to any field to which the symbols had been "applied." And as was the case before the war, the new language played a role in the success of the laboratory, since Draper used the notation "to coordinate all of the phases of the development program."50Using Draper's symbols allowed for the concise framing
48For a use of the word robotization see HQ USAF AF Technical Committee, "R&D Periodic Technical Progress Report, Volume 1, Armament Subcommittee, Stellar Inertial Bombing System, Project # 556-336," 3 Feb. 1948, RG 330, Entry 341, Box 76, U.S. National Archives. This document is unpaginated. It is important to note that while the document uses the word robotization to refer to the ultimate use of Draper's system within a guided missile, SIBS was a contract for an aircraft guidance system. 49Draper was not unfamiliar with such concerns. During the war he chaired a National Research Council program "for the development of instruments to be used in pilot training." See Compton to Under Secretary of War, 30 Dec. 1941, AC4, Box 220, Folder 11, MIT Archives. Clearly the interest in robotization carried over to other spheres. One reason for the air force's push to develop numerical control machine tools was that the technology could eliminate the need for skilled machinists. See Noble, Forces of Production (cit. n. 4), p. 81, and passim. 50On the Draper notation see Albert D. Ehrenfried, The Draper Notation: A Convenient System of Self-Defining Symbols, Oct. 1948, Draper (P), Box 12, Folder "Mathematical Publications, 1940-50," Draper Laboratory Historical Collection, MIT Museum; the quotation is from p. 12. As the booklet explained, it was "a notation for representing geometrical and physical concepts which is systematic ratherthan arbitrary.This notation is a form of abbreviated, symbolic writing (not unlike that of tensors) wherein each symbol denotes its own specific meaning by its form and its modifiers" (p. 1).
446 SYMBOL
R-
MEANING
RoiO2 A (L-L2) Vabor (tVb)a
LOCATION VECTOR from reference point Ot to located point 02. ANGLE measured from line Li to line L2.
RELATIVE VECTOR VELOCITY of b with respect to
a. Same notation used for vector angular velocity-W.

PERFORMANCE OPERATOR of system at component a2, having input q in and oput qout , and being further identified by .a. Same subscripts used with {D}, (S), and S. TIME DERIVATIVES first, second,third,etc. derivatives of range (as an example). VECTORS of velocity, angle,performance (as examples). operator,etc.
IPlIa a2(q. qou)a 3
'*'
.A ,p) 1,AP],... 1
Definition of common symbol patterns.
ACTUATING INPUT
qin
MODIFYING INPUT
OPERATING COMPONENT 02
OUTPUT
OF
SYSTEM 01
q (in)(mod)
qout -=
P}aa,qinQ
q out!
in
component.
Fig. 5. Block diagram of an operating
The equation of operation of the generalized component of Fig. 5 is

= qout Pala2(qinout) qin
Figure 1. Examples of the Drapernotation.
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OF VELOCITY TARGET RELATIVETO GUN STATION
V(GS)T VET
-_.E\GEL -V E(GS) t TARGETT OF NEGATIVE OF VELOCITY GUN STATION RELATIVE TO EARTH
VELOCITYOF TARGET RELATIVE TO EARTH
GS
GUN STATION
VELOCITY
, VE(GS) VELOCIY O OF
GUN STATION TO RELATIVE EARTH
V(GS)T =
VET
VE(GS)
The representation of relative velocities.

Figure 2. The Drapernotationin action.
of fire-control and self-referential device development problems, but such a language did not eliminate the problem of persuading people that particulartechnologies would work. (See Figures 1 and 2.) In 1948 questions emerged regarding the very possibility of inertial guidance. Working as a consultant for the APL, the physicist George Gamow had been studying various means of long-range navigation, especially for aircraft and guided missiles that would travel from the continental United States to deep within the Soviet Union. In a memorandum entitled "Vertical, Vertical, Who's Got the Vertical?" Gamow argued that a particular kind of inertial system was impossible because it would have to work flawlessly, knowing the weapon's initial position and velocity with perfect accuracy. Laced with vivid caricatures, a Gamow trademark, the memo was designed to provoke discussion. Gamow performed a series of thought experiments to argue against the practical possibility of inertial guidance. Never entirely distinct, the conception of theory and practice in Gamow's piece implied that work with pencil and paper might actively undermine a multimillion dollar research and development effort. As he explained, "an aircraft's position is completely undetermined, unless its initial position and velocity are known exactly and the integration
448
/j
d stY nce
I'
caricature. Figure3. Gamow's [of velocity] is carried on faultlessly all the way through" (emphasis in original). Gamow reserved his strongest criticisms for "a lot of conversation going around" about "the possibility of determining or correcting the position of the vehicle on the basis of observations made within a certain comparatively short period (several minutes?) during the flight."51 Gamow issued a sharp judgment at this juncture, explaining that "the situation here [with respect to corrections] is entirely hopeless." Put simply, in-flight corrections would introduce errors that would make determination of the "truecourse" and location impossible. Gamow illustrated his point with a wicked caricature of an officer befuddled by a chart with three equally "true" courses (Figure 3). Without flawless integration of the vehicle's velocity throughout the entire flight, choosing among the three courses was impossible. In his insightfulhistorical sociology of inertialguidance, InventingAccuracy, Donald MacKenzie argued that because Gamow, like Draper, served on the Air Force Science Advisory Board, his challenge demanded a response. According to MacKenzie and his sources, Draper responded by organizing a classified seminar, under the aegis of the advisory board, for all the groups working on inertial guidance. Although invited, Gamow did not attend; his absence, plus the presentations made at the seminar, convinced Draper's patrons that inertial guidance was possible and that Draper's group could develop the technology.52 We can usefully supplement MacKenzie's account by observing that Draper's response to Gamow's criticism was part of his larger pedagogical strategy. By attacking inertial guidance, Gamow attacked not only Draper but also his student and patron, Leighton Davis. In 1948, the air force funded fifty-two differentguidance projects,
51 See George Gamow to Gibson, memo dated "Black Friday, 1948," which appears to mean 13 Feb. 1948, Cabinet 5, Drawer 4, File: "Gamow," APL Archives; quotations from pp. 4, 2. For more on Gamow, especially his personal style, see R. A. Alpher and R. Herman, "Memories of Gamow," in Cosmology, Fusion, and Other Matters: George Gamow Memorial Volume, ed. Frederick Reines (Boulder: Colorado Associated Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 304-313. 52 Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 66-68. MacKenzie's account is especially impressive because he did not have access to a copy of Gamow's memorandum. Also of interest is Donald MacKenzie, "Stellar-InertialGuidance: A Study in the Sociology of Military Technology," in Science, Technology, and the Military, ed. Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart (Boston: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 187-242.
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but only three aimed at the development of inertial systems.53 Davis's Armament Laboratorywas not a traditional source of research monies for guidance work; Draper's contract was the only guidance contract issued by that lab. Clearly, Armament Laboratorypatronage lay behind the original name of Draper's program: the Stellar Inertial Bombing System. The fact that air force money was being spent for stellar inertial research had something to do with Gamow's memorandum, which originated within a navy laboratory. Look closely at Figure 3, which reproduces a key caricature in Gamow's text. It is not just any officer who is confused; it is an officer wearing very visible wings, the mark of the aviator, of the air force. Furthermore, the text specifically refers to an airplane and a cockpit; Gamow was criticizing aircraft, rather than missile, inertial guidance. The reasons were rooted in the politics of postwar weapons systems and the struggle between proponentsof manned bombers and guided missiles as to which technology would deliver nuclear weapons to Moscow when the time came. For the air force, the manned bomber was the weapon of choice; the army and navy advocated the use of long-range guided missiles. By 1947 APL researchers, with the encouragement of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, had extended Project Bumblebee to include the development of a submarine-launched, long-range (2,000-plus miles) guided missile, code-named Triton. By suggesting that aircraft inertial guidance was technically difficult, if not impossible, Gamow legitimized the APL's decision to study other means of long-range guidance for Triton as well as the Bureau of Ordnance's faith in the superiority of guided missiles to aircraft.54 Draper addressed the practical basis of Gamow's critique in his introductory remarks at the February 1949 seminar on inertial guidance. Observing that satisfactory results would emerge only with "close-to-ultimate performance from the operating components and complete systems," Draper explained that the
inaccuracies of guidance systems that are due to interfering inputs can be reduced by designing for proper smoothing action, but the amount of smoothing that can be used is limited by the fact that any increase in smoothing always brings with it an increase in the time required for a system to solve its guidance problem. This conflict between smoothing and solution time must inevitably be a theme of primary importance in discussions of guidance systems. It has a prominent place in the papers in this seminar.
"Interferinginputs" included imperfections in the devices measuring velocity, which could produce errors unless corrected by the process that Draper referred to as "smoothing." Here was the core of Gamow's challenge-the possibility of in-flight corrections of the guidance system. No wonder the problem occupied a "prominent place" at the seminar. The published proceedings clearly reflected a concern to answer Gamow's practical challenge; one indication is that the published papers by I-Lab researchers were not identical to those presented at the seminar. As the foreword disclosed,
at the time of the Seminar, the InstrumentationLaboratorywas in a critical experimental phase of Project Febe, as a consequence of which, much of their presentation at the
53These numbers come from a reading of records in R&D Board Resources Division, Reports and Statistics Branch, Progress Reports, December 1946-1954, RG 330, Entry 341, Box 93, U.S. National Archives. 54On the struggle over the ballistic missile see MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy (cit. n. 52), pp. 95164; and Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976). For a very brief description of Triton see The First Forty Years (Baltimore: APL, 1983), p. 47.
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FIRST "OUR LINE DEFENSE" OF conclusions.Forthis reason,the paperspresented members covereduntested Seminar by as of the Instrumentation herein, includeresultsobtainedsince Laboratory, reproduced the end of the seminar,althoughneitherthe scope nor the subjectmatterof the original papershas been changed.55
What had changed was that the I-Lab papers became demonstrations of the practical possibility of inertial guidance with midcourse corrections; Project Febe was the new name for SIBS, Draper's original stellar inertial project. Draper replaced Gamow's thought experiments with the apparatusof experiment and demonstration. With these papers, Draper successfully demonstrated his ability to build a device that others might consider impossible. In turn, the papers from the classified MIT seminar provided Davis with the resources to demonstrate to his superiors the power of Draper's approach. Convinced of the new technology's possibility, the air force placed production contracts with AC Spark Plug for NORBS, a modification of SIBS and Febe that would allow American bombers to fly to targets deep in the Soviet Union. The production contracts were as much a sign of U.S. fears as signals of the beginnings of intercontinental warfare. Here was a real source of power for Draper-the True, (re)producibilityof his technology in places ostensibly outside the laboratory.56 Draper and his students would play close, even vital, roles in the production of the new machines, but the new technologies would fly far from the I-Lab. At the classified seminar Draper and his students presented papers alongside the industrial contractors who would build Draper's devices. What was novel here was not the interaction with commercial firms, but the simple fact that the I-Lab was engaged in a research and development program in which an academic laboratory competed with industrial firms. Draper had made his career before the war through his commercial connections; during the postwar period he would compete with industrial firms for military contracts.57 Military projects were not Draper's only interest after World War II. As early as 1946, he sought to develop civilian applications for self-referential instruments;MIT actually funded this work out of internal funds, but no commercial firm expressed an interest in any such development. Even Sperry, Draper's longtime corporate companion, wanted to build only military apparatus. The demand for civilian graduates of Draper's instrumentationcourses grew as contractors sought to tap the lucrative munitions market, but Draper's most importantpostwar pedagogical innovation was the establishment of the Weapons System Engineering Course in 1952.58 A formal55See C. S. Draper, "Introductory Remarks," in Science Advisory Board, Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force, Seminar on Automatic Celestial and Inertial Long Range Guidance Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 1, 2, 3, 1949, 3 vols., Vol. 1, p. 6; a copy of the proceedings is located in Box 24, Draper Papers. For an explanation of the differences in the published papers see "Foreword," Vol. 1, or Vol. 2, p. 2. 56 I use the word ostensibly for a very simple reason. To make inertial devices work, one had to make the factories where they were manufactured more like the I-Lab. MacKenzie makes this point nicely; see MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy (cit. n. 52), pp. 85-88. For some information on NORBS (I do not know what the acronym stands for) see Richard Emberson to William Webster and Eric Walker, 17 Oct. 1950, RG 330, Entry 341, Box 40, File 110 "Navigation." I suspect that the photograph on page 77 of Inventing Accuracy is one of the actual NORBS devices. 57 This competition would lead to friction and complaints about the laboratory's privileged status. For a later example of this see Phillip J. Klass, "Apollo Guidance Bidders Protest NASA Choice of NonProfit Firm," Aviation Week and Space Technology, 8 Jan. 1962, pp. 23-24. 58See the materials in AC4, File: "I-Lab," MIT Archives. For details on the program's origins see Leslie, Cold War and American Science (cit. n. 36), pp. 95-96.
451
ization of courses given to military officers during and after World War II, the program secured Draper's future in the classified world of which he was a major architect by anchoringthe development of classified military technologies within MIT's traditionaleducationalframework. Officers and civilians studied together in the I-Lab, absorbing the Draper notation and the host of intellectual and practical assumptions that made inertial guidance a possibility. Of course, the officers learned something more than the "unclassified" civilian students; only those with security clearances could actually work on developing the devices that embodied the self-referentialideal. In addition to the new degree program, Draper and two of his prize students published a three-volume textbook, entitled Instrument Engineering, in 1952. While seemingly complete and authoritative, there was much that the textbook could not discuss, whether because of classification or a fundamental inability to articulate the array of practices that made the I-Lab such a unique institution. On the first page the authorsdescribed instrumentengineering as "artand science." Word order counted here; the authors could explain Draper's mathematics and vocabulary, the "science" of instrumentengineering, but words could not explicate the art. In the 1930s Draper had explained to baffled audiences that his success as a teacher would have to serve as the validation for his vocabulary; in 1952 his textbook opened with a discussion of its pedagogical origins at MIT. To learn instrument engineering required more than reading the textbook; the student had to breathe the culture of the I-Lab. Yet, like the APL, the culture of the I-Lab was classified. Acknowledging the largely classified natureof his researchin a 1977 memoir, Draperexplained that only through the notes of his students had he reached a wider audience. The textbook failed as a means of securing his intellectual and political position within the field of aeronautical engineering; what succeeded were the students. As Air Force Chief of Staff N. F. Twining explained in 1956, Draper's contribution to the "superiorityof United States weapons ranks with any in the history of arms," but "of possibly greater significance is the value received by the many Air Force officers who have worked under your leadership and guidance while undergoing graduate training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."59 This is an important point. Officers entered the laboratory with a variety of beliefs and backgrounds; they left thinking about instruments with the Draper notation and believing that self-referential instruments were always the best devices. These same officers became the infrastructure of American military research and development. Draper's pedagogical strategy did not originate in an attempt to remake civil society, like Merle Tuve's plans for postwar research and development, but it had a far more radical impact than Tuve's unrealized vision. Through his pedagogical practices, Draper played a role in transformingthe military, creating a new kind of officer for whom science and technology were integral and essential parts of the armed services. Those who had once been criticized for their technological conservatism were now at the vanguard of technological experimentation and, in some cases, en59N. F. Twining to Draper, 6 Dec. 1956, Draper (P), Box 19, U.S. Armed Forces Air Force R&D Command, Draper Laboratory Historical Collection, MIT Museum. For the textbook see C. S. Draper, Walter McKay, and Sidney Lees, Instrument Engineering (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952). For Draper's later remarks on his influence through his students see Draper, "The Evolution of Aerospace Guidance Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1935-51: A Memoir," in Essays on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics: Proceedings of the Third through the Sixth History Symposia of the International Academy of Astronautics, ed. R. Cargill Hall (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1977), pp. 219-252, esp. p. 250.
452
thusiasm. Tuve had wanted to make the navy part of the country; Draper made the officers who went through the I-Lab part of something other than the military-he made them part of the laboratory.
AFFAIRS OF STATE/CLASSIFIED MATTERS
The managerial and the pedagogical were more than strategies, they were cultures rooted in different understandings of the relationships between individuals and organizations. At the APL, Tuve and Gibson succeeded in creating an institution whose members believed in the laboratory, first and foremost. APL veterans never speak of "APL"; they refer to something called "8621," the street address of the original laboratory. Identifying with the laboratory's first address was more than nostalgia; it was an acknowledgment of the primacy of the laboratory over its leaders, as well as a reminder of the laboratory's problematic relationship with the university in Baltimore. Draper's pedagogical culture fostered an entirely different set of relations, rooted in the practices of the I-Lab, Draper's practices. To put it simply, Draper was the laboratory, an identification that MIT administratorsfound disconcerting. While Draper had many students, none seemed capable of taking his place; succession was a problem. At the I-Lab, students owed their loyalty to Draper, not to the laboratory itself. Within this pedagogical culture Draper could secure his future, but he could not guarantee the future of his laboratory. Despite his success as a teacher, MIT divested itself of Draper's laboratory, which moved off campus, in 1970.60 Nowhere is the difference between the two cultures more apparent than in the texts each institution produced to commemorate its past. To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, the APL produced a pictorial history; at the I-Lab, Draper's students celebrated their teacher's sixtieth birthday with a Festschrift. Entitled The First Forty Years, the APL volume was not so much a history as a celebration, complete with photographs of the founders, the weapons, and the people who made the laboratory a workplace. Although there is a fair amount of text, much of the work is simply pictures and captions. What the volume most resembles is a school yearbook in which everyone's picture appears at least once. There are the obligatory group portraits, as well as variants of the "Wow, look what we did!" picture. Nonetheless, the volume makes no claims to be a complete or definitive story. The volume's yearbook-like character was reinforced by the decision to have it privately printed. Finally, the volume has no single author but was produced by a committee. It is as if the laboratory authored the text for itself, managing not only the development of weapons, but the presentation of the past itself. Draper's Festschrift, entitled Air, Space, and Instruments, was a very different enterprise. The Festschrift is a traditional academic genre in which students pay homage to their teacher-the work may include reminiscences as well as papers devoted to explicating or extending the professor's work. Perhaps more than any other academic genre, a Festschrift is a genuine labor of love and affection. On that
60On the problem of succession and the identification of Draper and the laboratory see Julius Stratton, "Memorandumfor File-September 5, 1956," AC132, Box 1, "Aero Engineering," MIT Archives. On divestment see Leslie, Cold War and American Science (cit. n. 36), pp. 235-240; and Dorothy Nelkin, The University and Military Research (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972). Clearly each laboratory's political culture will affect how it responds to the rapidly changing political environment. It remains to be seen whether both the APL and the Draper Laboratory can redefine themselves for a "post cold war" order.
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score, the Draper volume is typical. However, in its contents the volume reveals not only the success of the pedagogical strategy but also something about the new state that Draper played a role in creating. I suspect that no other Festschrift has an essay entitled "Influence of the Guidance Designer on Warfare"in which human evolution and the development of guidance systems are linked to produce a new kind of human. As the author, Hubert Weiss, explained, "in the long run, one may imagine the 'interface' between man and machine to substantially disappear, with many of the machine functions in complete 'symbiosis' with the man. The first indications of this development are beginning to appear."6' Draper was engineering men and machines; this was a profound acknowledgment of the I-Lab's power. The volume's historicalessays emphasized Draper's contributionsto both the navy and the air force, while the technical contributionsreinforced the power of the Draper notation to solve all problems-past, present, and future. Perhaps the most interesting words in the volume appear in its front matter. There, printed under Draper's biography, is a facsimile of a telegram sent from Draper's Soviet counterpart-Alexander Ishlinskiy. CongratulatingDraper on his sixtieth birthday, the Soviet engineer exclaimed: "I respect you as one of the most remarkable engineers and scientists of our time. Your brilliant research and work have in a material sense determined the successes of moder astronautical science."62 The devices that Draper and Ishlinskiy designed waited for the order to rise from their subterraneanand submerged silos and vaporize their targets; Ishlinskiy paid his respects to the man whose technologies might kill him. In the midst of a celebration of the pedagogical, the new state and its incredible powers appeared.
POSTSCRIPT: IN THE ARCHIPELAGO
Understanding the texts discussed here demands a confrontation with a fundamental issue related to the program of reconstituting the civilian-the problem of classification. Classification plays an importantrole in the materials presented in this essay. Like so much else at each of these laboratories, much of the archives are inaccessible. The documents and published texts I examined are outtakes, considered too frivolous or unimportantto warrant classification, or materials declassified because they no longer possessed any apparenttechnical value. Nonetheless, they were classified as unclassified. We are approaching a central problem for the historian of postwar American science and technology: How are we to understand institutions whose very existence and functions were cloaked in secrecy? An example from Draper's career might illustrate the problem. In March 1958 Draper flew cross-country with Eric Sevareid, a veteran CBS reporter, in an air force plane outfitted with the latest inertial device. In surviving still photographs we see Draper and Sevareid leaning over the gray sphere that contained the guidance equipment. Draper is trying to explain how his device works, but he cannot be too explicit, nor can he reveal the exact latitude and longitude of their
61 See Herbert Weiss, "Influence of the Guidance Designer on Warfare," in Air, Space, and Instruments, ed. Lees (cit. n. 40), pp. 32-74, on p. 69. The refashioning of the human body is a central element of Donna Haraway's recent work on the cyborg; for more on this topic see Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149182. 62 See Lees, ed., Air, Space, and Instruments, p. vi.
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starting point or their destination. Here, the classified world is partially exposing itself to the outside world, but something else is happening as well. Draper is displaying the most sophisticated apparatusavailable, equipment whose expensiveness and precision is difficult to imagine even now, as we have become jaded in an age of ever-faster computers. Draper showed Sevareid what the professor and his students had spent over a decade perfecting. Yet, back at the laboratory, administrators reenacted a familiar scene, one whose origins lay in the war and the arrival of military money at MIT, as well as in the first public announcement of Draper's research in March 1957. Circulated among laboratory staff members was a telegram from the air force: "To again reiterate AF [air force] policy on the matter of safeguarding classified information the following should be brought to the attention of all personnel: 1. The fact that articles and information will be reviewed by this HQ and DOD [Department of Defense] does not relieve each individual of his responsibility to safeguard classified information and further will not serve as a bar in processing violations of security regulations."63What was visible on television remained unspeakable outside the I-Lab. To date, historians have dealt with the problem of classification by concentrating on access to materials. With such an agenda, declassification, the use of the Freedom of Information Act, and the problems inherent in oral histories become major practical issues, as does the problem of dependence for documentation on the very institutions one is studying. Unfortunately, the question of access obscures the historical problem of classification because unless we possess security clearances, we use only declassified or unclassified materials. Reconstructing the classified cultures of university laboratories after World War II is one of the tasks that historians of science and technology must undertake, especially as we begin to understand the process through which laboratories incorporated conceptions of security and classification into their internal structure and practices. Far from being an imposition, security was a constitutive component of the postwar technical order. Classification played a role in constructing the hybrid civilians and officers at both the APL and the I-Lab. At the APL, the civilian existed as part of a larger classified research project: witness Van Allen's high-altitude rocket research. At the I-Lab, the civilian could exist only when the air force allowed Draper to reveal to the world what took place behind the laboratory's locked doors. While the phrases "Secret," "Top Secret," and "Restricted" appear to keep unwarrantedreaders away from documents and institutions, these very phrases are one set of keys for understanding postwar American political culture. In these words, we can begin to see that the visible, public aspects of intellectual life are inseparable from a web of institutions and ideas to which access is barred. To understandthe military's new role in postwar America is to begin to understandthe ways in which the very concept of the civilian was designed to fit a new kind of state. The binary logic of civil-military relations is inadequate to the task of understanding the new institutions that were representative of our recent past. Is it too much to claim that looking at the civilian in postwar America is much like looking at a map of an archipelago composed of discrete islands of civilian life connected by a larger, largely invisible, military framework? While the ocean obscures the connection among the island archipelago's disparate
63 L. E. Beckley to I-Lab Personnel, 23 Apr. 1957, Draper (P), Box 4, Folder "Draper Laboratory General," Draper Laboratory Historical Collection, MIT Museum.
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parts, the classification system performs a similar function in our political archipelago. Yet, if classification obscures our view of the military's role in society, especially in laboratories, then it is also through the classification system that the civilian and the military were connected in postwar America in novel, and still largely unexamined, ways.

Isis 1994 Dennis

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The History of Science Society

Two University Laboratories in the Postwar American State

INTRODUCTION: RECONSTITUTING THE CIVILIAN

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

RoiO2 A (L-L2) Vabor (tVb)a

RELATIVE VECTOR VELOCITY of b with respect to

a. Same notation used for vector angular velocity-W.

IPlIa a2(q. qou)a 3

Definition of common symbol patterns.

Fig. 5. Block diagram of an operating

The equation of operation of the generalized component of Fig. 5 is

Figure 1. Examples of the Drapernotation.

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

OF VELOCITY TARGET RELATIVETO GUN STATION

VELOCITYOF TARGET RELATIVE TO EARTH

GUN STATION TO RELATIVE EARTH

The representation of relative velocities.

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

"OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE"

MICHAEL AARON DENNIS

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