Science and Technology

views updated

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Scholars of science and technology increasingly recognize the mutual influence between science and technology. Scientific understanding is often a prerequisite for technological advance. Technology in turn provides important inputs to science, including, most obviously, scientific instruments, but also research questions about why certain technologies work or do not work. Sometimes the links between science and technology are temporally close: In the development of nylon, radios, and airplanes, for example, scientific and technological advances were mutually reinforcing. In other cases science answers technological questions that have been around for decades, or science sets the stage for new products and processes that are not yet imagined.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION

While economic analyses of the causes of the Great Depression have focused on a handful of aggregate economic variables, such as the money supply, there has always been a minority tradition that has argued that technology was largely responsible for the Great Depression. Two broad types of technological innovation can be distinguished. Product innovation involves the development of a new or improved product. Process innovation involves the development of lower-cost ways of producing an existing product. The line between these is generally clear, but it can be blurred, as when the same innovation both reduces the cost and increases the quality of a particular product.

The course of technological innovation during the interwar period was highly unusual. In terms of product innovation, the decade between 1925 and 1935 is by far the worst in the entire twentieth century. The electric refrigerator was the only major new product. In terms of process innovation, however, there was rapid growth in worker productivity, due primarily to key technological advances. Worker productivity in industry grew by at least 50 percent in the 1920s and another 25 percent in the 1930s.

The development of new products will generally encourage investment, consumption, and employment. Factories and machines will be constructed to build the new products, and workers hired for this purpose. Consumers in turn will be encouraged to spend a greater proportion of their income in order to obtain the new product—though they may decrease purchases of existing goods that serve similar purposes (as the advent of radio and talking movies during the 1920s served to destroy vaudeville and decrease attendance at live theatre in the 1930s). Process innovation means that fewer workers, buildings, and machines will be needed to produce the same quantity of goods, though some initial investment may be required. Lower prices for existing goods will generally result in lower levels of consumer expenditure. There are exceptions when decreased cost leads to a more than proportional increase in the number of goods purchased.

In the long run, a market economy should be able to adjust to the uneven time path of technological innovation. Many economic models suggest, however, that over a period of a few years product innovation will cause a decrease in unemployment, and process innovation will cause an increase. The unemployment experience of the 1930s was likely exacerbated by market saturation in some of the new consumer durables of the 1920s, notably automobiles, radios, and various appliances: Consumers who had recently bought one did not need another.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

To understand the technological experience of the Great Depression, it is useful to start with the second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century. During the 1870s and 1880s, important innovations occurred in three broad areas: chemicals, internal combustion engines, and the generation, transmission, and use of electricity. With the singular exception of the zipper, all major twentieth century innovations, whether product or process, can be traced to one or more of these developments. All three of these strands of technological innovation would generate new products in the early 1920s and late 1930s; they would also generate important process technologies that would have their major period of adoption during the interwar period. In each case the new products of the late 1930s were much more complex than those of the early 1920s; this may explain the paucity of new products in the decade after 1925.

The chemical industry developed continuous processing in place of the previous practice of producing one batch of chemicals at a time. This process technology was adopted by most factories producing a homogeneous output, whether paint or ketchup or oil, in the interwar period, and resulted in huge cost savings. In terms of new products, the major development of the early 1920s involved the semi-synthetic fiber rayon. The first fully synthetic fiber, nylon, would appear almost two decades later in 1939. Developments in plastics—including urea-formaldehyde, lucite, and vinyl—vitamins, and antihistamines are among other new products that would emerge in the late 1930s. The discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 had a limited economic impact until methods for increasing the rate of natural production in mold were developed in 1940, and synthetic penicillin in 1944. These advances set the stage for the development of a range of antibiotics. Better photographic film and cameras would make the camera a mass market good in the 1930s as well.

While invented long before World War I, it was only with the development of the assembly line in Henry Ford's River Rouge plant in 1913 that the automobile became a potential mass market good. Sales would take off in the 1920s, and almost half of American families would own an automobile by 1929. The assembly line would be adapted to virtually every assembled good in the United States during the 1920s. While sales, and thus employment, in the automobile sector increased as a result, in other sectors the assembly line soon led to decreases in employment.

The automobile and truck generated cost savings in the distribution of goods. In particular, small local stores were replaced by larger and lower-cost enterprises. In agriculture, tractor use expanded throughout the interwar period, as costs decreased and quality improved: There were 80,000 tractors in 1918; 920,000 in 1930; and 1,545,000 in 1940. As tractor use and power expanded, a host of farm implements were developed.

The airplane also predated World War I, but it would only become a mass produced good, capable of generating significant economic activity in production and use, in the mid-1930s. The Douglas DC-3 of 1936 was the biggest single advance, causing costs per passenger mile to drop to a quarter of their level in 1929.

The bulk of American industry would switch to electric power in the 1920s. By the end of the 1930s the victory of electricity was almost complete. This switch reflected both the drop in the cost of electricity (by 50 percent in the 1920s alone) due to improvements in generation and transmission, and the development of ever-better electric motors. Electrification allowed great improvements in factory layout because machines powered by their own small motor, rather than connected by belts to an external power source, could be situated as needed. Electrification also made it much easier to run machines at different speeds. Many processes previously performed by hand were mechanized because of electrification.

In the home, the early twentieth century witnessed the electrification of simple goods like light-bulbs, toasters, and kettles. In the interwar period, a second stage of innovation, involving complex electronics, became evident. The technology of radio transmission and reception advanced to the point that the first commercial radio station was established by Westinghouse Corporation in Philadelphia in 1920. By 1929 virtually every American household owned at least one. The next major innovation in wireless communication would be the television. After a host of improvements in the 1920s and 1930s, the first regular broadcasts in the United States began in 1939.

The electric refrigerator only became a mass consumer good in 1931 after a series of improvements over the previous decades. Sales expanded until 1937, at which point half of wired homes possessed a refrigerator. The success of the only major new product innovation of the early 1930s suggests that consumption, investment, and employment would all have been higher if other new products had emerged.

While productivity advance continued in the 1930s, this required little investment. The major new process innovation of the 1930s was tungsten carbide cutting tools. These cutting tools could generally be fitted to existing machines, but allowed much greater speed and accuracy. There were also improvements in management techniques. The rolling mill for producing sheet metal was one process innovation that did require significant investment. This only became technically superior to labor-intensive methods in 1930; twenty-eight rolling mills were built during the 1930s.

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES

Developed by German chemical firms in the late nineteenth century, the industrial research laboratory was adopted in the United States first in electrical products but eventually across a wide range of industries. Although innovations still often came from isolated tinkerers before the interwar period, after that time most new technologies were developed, at least in part, in formal industrial research settings. These laboratories have played an important scientific role. The invention of nylon depended on research by DuPont for a better understanding of the chemical composition of polymers. The airplane depended on advances in aerodynamic theory (in this case financed largely by the military).

The earliest industrial research laboratories, however, shied away from the expense and risk associated with pursuing projects in basic science. They instead tended to focus on process innovation and minor product innovation. The profits earned by companies pioneering such products as television or nylon in the late 1930s would encourage many industrial research laboratories to pursue major product innovation in the postwar years. If this change had occurred earlier, the technological, and thus economic, experience of the Great Depression might have been quite different.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IN UNIVERSITIES

There were concerns during the 1930s that industrial research laboratories were not only absorbing those who might otherwise have been independent inventors, but attracting some of the best scientists away from universities. Yet industrial research laboratories also had a positive impact on university research: They provided direct funding to some researchers and also funded graduate fellowships.

The major source of funding of scientific research in the 1930s, though, was philanthropic foundations. Of these foundations, those tied to the Rockefeller or Carnegie names, and particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, provided some 90 percent of the funding. These foundations had, earlier in the century, tried to develop research facilities independent of universities. As the century unfolded universities came to see research as a key part of their mission. While professors now had the time and incentive to perform research, they also needed direct funding of research expenses. The foundations in the 1920s had provided funding to certain departments at key universities. In the 1930s the foundations moved toward supporting the research of individual professors. Determined to maximize the return on their funding, they insisted on evidence of publications before funding was renewed. This likely encouraged scientific effort, but raised concerns about scientific independence. Funding decisions were based on individual contacts between professors and foundation officers. Total foundation expenditures on research stagnated during the Depression; medical research was emphasized at the expense of basic science, and thus, for example, theoretical physicists seeking funding for particle accelerators spoke to the biological understanding that might result from these.

Governments, especially in the areas of military, health, and agricultural research, provided some limited funding in the 1930s. During World War II, expenditure on research would triple, with governments funding the increase. Postwar government funding of university research would soon eclipse foundation funding; governments would rely on a more bureaucratic process of official grant applications, and review by other experts in the area. Due largely to foundation encouragement the United States had become the most important country in the world of science by 1930; movement of refugee scientists to the United States would enhance this dominance over the next decade.

Science was not only primarily identified with universities by the 1930s, but also with distinct disciplines such as physics and chemistry. Nevertheless, both foundations and scientists appreciated the value of interdisciplinary interaction. Many of the major scientific discoveries of the Depression era reflect cross-disciplinary communication. While physics loomed large in these conversations, advances in, for example, quantum chemistry, did not just involve the application of quantum theory, but the convergence of quantum theory with theoretical and empirical trends within chemistry itself. Scientific advances during this period also reflected the development of a host of new scientific instruments, such as the particle accelerator, electron microscope, and ultracentrifuge.

The discovery of the neutron in 1932 allowed physicists for the first time to understand the stability of nuclear structure in terms of quantum theory. The positron was also discovered in 1932, and physicists began to enumerate the various forces that operate between different particles. By the end of the decade, scientists in both Germany and the United States had achieved nuclear fission.

Improved instruments for studying distant parts of the universe, in combination with the theory of general relativity, led to widespread consensus among astronomers in the 1930s that the universe was expanding, though there was little consensus on how the process might have begun. At the same time, advances in nuclear physics allowed a theoretical understanding of how stars could generate energy over billions of years.

By understanding the internal working of molecules chemists were better able to predict and control chemical reactions. Polymer science in particular advanced rapidly. Only in the early 1930s had chemists come to accept the existence of large complex polymer molecules. An understanding of the internal working of molecules was also useful in the study of living organisms: Major advances occurred in the analysis of proteins that would set the stage for the postwar discovery of DNA.

The 1930s was also the period of the "modern synthesis" in biology. Theoretical and empirical discoveries in the area of genetics were shown to be consistent with "natural history." That is, the shortterm genetic changes observed in the laboratory could be understood as generating the longer-term changes posited by evolutionary theories.

See Also: FORD, HENRY; RADIO.