The 1940s: Science and Technology: Overview

THE 1940s: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: OVERVIEW

Wartime Science

During World War II most scientific research served military imperatives as the U.S. government harnessed science and technology to win the war. The demands of wartime served to speed up scientific innovations—including not only new arms but also new intelligence and transportation technology—which in turn transformed the way the military waged war. World War II transformed science as well, linking science and politics. National-security interests required secrecy of scientists, contradicting the American ideal of free scientific exchange. The Cold War ideology of the postwar period involved science in the arms race and the race into space. With the development of the first atom bomb, American scientists ushered in the atomic age, as the public expressed a mixture of admiration and fear at this tremendous scientific achievement.

Government and Science

Helped by government subsidy and coordination of the private and public sectors, technological advancement in the 1940s proceeded at a pace paralleled only by the rapid rate of change during the industrial revolution of the mid nineteenth century. In 1941, the federal government established the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to oversee all wartime scientific and technical research. The OSRD brought together scientists, industrialists, engineers, and military personnel to develop new technology to serve the war effort. War-related research resulted in scientific innovations that were widely put to civilian use immediately after the war, resulting in enormous changes in the way most Americans lived: synthetic rubber, radar, DDT, penicillin, jet-powered aircraft, helicopters, atomic energy, and the electronic computer were all wartime innovations.

Physicists Make the Atomic Bomb

Developments in nuclear physics in the late 1930s set the stage for the development of the atomic bomb in the early 1940s. German physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn coined the term nuclear fission in 1939 to describe the new nuclear reactions they observed in their experiments with uranium: they discovered that the U-235 isotope of uranium could be split into smaller atoms when its nucleus was bombarded with slow-speed neutrons, making possible a chain reaction in which huge amounts of energy were produced. American scientists soon applied this discovery to their own research. By 1940 physicists in the United States had some twenty cyclotrons and at least a dozen other types of nuclear accelerators of different types. Many accelerators were employed for medical purposes, especially for the production of radioactive isotopes, but almost all were used some of the time for nuclear research related to the bomb. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941 many politically liberal scientists were pacifists and opposed the war on moral grounds. As Nazi atrocities became widely known, however, most of these scientists changed their positions on the war.

The European Brain Drain

The rise and spread of fascism and anti-Semitism during the 1930s triggered a massive wave of emigration among European intellectuals. Many came to the United States, where they made a major impact on all aspects of American life, especially science and technology. Among the twenty-two thousand to twenty-six thousand professional people who emigrated from Europe to the United States between 1933 and 1944 were some of the best European scientists and mathematicians. The largest number of émigré scientists came from Germany, but among the first were scientists from Hungary, where fascist dictator Miklós Horthy had enacted anti-Semitic laws in the 1920s. Others came from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Low Countries, and France as Hitler's armies swept through those nations in 1938-1940. Still others fled from Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The general brilliance of the émigré scientists is suggested by the number of Nobel Prize winners in their midst. Physicists Albert Einstein of Germany, Enrico Fermi of Italy, and Victor Hess of Austria—as well as physical chemist Peter Joseph Debye of the Netherlands, physiologist Otto Loewi of Germany, and biochemist Otto Meyerhof of Germany—had all won Nobel Prizes before they immigrated to the United States. An equally impressive number of European-born scientists became Nobel laureates after settling in this country; they include physicists Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Maria Goeppert Mayer, and Otto Stern—all from Germany—as well as Emilio Segrè from Italy and Eugene Wigner from Hungary; biochemists Konrad Bloch and Fritz Lipmann from Germany and Severo Ochoa from Spain; and biophysicist Georg von Békésy from Hungary.

Contributions to American Science

The émigrés' most important contribution to wartime science was their work on the Manhattan Project. Among the physicists and physical chemists involved in various aspects of this project to develop the atomic bomb were Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, and James Franck from Germany; Enrico Fermi, Sergio de Benedetti, and Bruno Rossi from Italy; Eugene Rabinowitch from Russia; Marcel Schein from Czechoslovakia; Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner from Hungary; Stanislaw Ulam from Poland; and Victor Weisskopf from Austria. Mathematician John Von Neumann from Hungary, a colleague of Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, also worked on the Manhattan Project, as well as making important contributions to the development of modern computers and game theory, now widely used to analyze economic and political situations. During the same decade German astronomers Walter Baade and Rudolph Minkowski did important work at the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar Observatories in California, while Russian émigré George Gamow at Columbia formulated his "Big Bang" theory to explain the origin of the universe. In genetics Erwin Chargaff from Austria, Max Delbrück and Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat from Germany, Salvador Luria from Italy, and Severo Ochoa from Spain did research on nucleic acids that contributed to James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s. After the war the United States and the Soviet Union began competing for the German rocket scientists who had developed the V-2. Some twenty—including Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, Herbert Axter, and Hans Lindenberg—came to the United States, where they made important contributions to the American missile and space programs.

The Case of Albert Einstein

German physicist Albert Einstein was a socialist and pacifist who urged scientists to refuse their expertise to the military. Yet in 1933, after fleeing Nazi Germany and settling in the United States, he publicly declared that he "saw no alternative to the rearmament of the western democracies." In 1939, at the request of physicists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointing out the dangerous military potential presented by nuclear fission but also warning Roosevelt that Germany might be developing atomic weaponry. The letter helped initiate American efforts to build an atomic bomb. Einstein neither participated in nor had any knowledge of that secret project until the results became public knowledge. Roosevelt authorized the secret research effort known as the Manhattan Project, in late December 1941. After the war Einstein campaigned for the establishment of a world government and the abolition of war.

Pure and Applied Scientific Research in Wartime

So-called pure science involves the pursuit of fundamental answers to theoretical questions without regard to the practical or moral implications of the outcome. Discoveries made in pure scientific research may later be applied to solve practical problems, as in the development of new medical treatments. Wartime imperatives in the 1940s forged an unusually tight link between pure scientific research and its applications, as major discoveries in theoretical physics were pressed into use in developing the atomic bomb. Innovations in engineering and chemistry, such as radar technology or synthetic rubber, were also directed primarily toward application in the war effort.

Biological Research

Unlike scientists in many other fields, most biologists managed to carry on their own theoretical agenda in the 1940s as they pursued the answers to basic questions relating to metabolism, neurophysiology, and, perhaps most significant, genetic processes. Scientific researchers rest on each other's shoulders: they function as a community, building on each new discovery to reach the next. An excellent illustration of this building process is the 1944 discovery by biologists Colin MacCleod, Oswald Avery, and Maclyn McCarty that nucleic acids and not proteins are responsible for the transfer of hereditary traits. This discovery was a major building block for Watson and Crick, who mapped the structure of the nucleic acid DNA in the early 1950s, one of the most phenomenal breakthroughs in twentieth-century science.