William B. Allison left his imprimatur on science policy through the congressional commission he led from 1884 to 1886. Independently wealthy and a political striver, he had reached the top rung of Senate Republicans by 1901. At the time, the current positions of Senate majority and minority leader did not exist, but Allison and his Rhode Island colleague, Nelson W. Aldrich, effectively ran their party from positions as leaders of the Republican Steering Committee.¹

The Senate had always been a club, and at the turn of the century, its 90 members, representing 45 states, adhered to the well-worn tradition. The more raucous House had 357 members, on average one for every 214,000 U.S. residents.² To conduct their daily affairs, all 447 lawmakers had to be content to use their chamber desks or temporarily ensconce themselves in committee rooms that were not in use. For many of them, renting space elsewhere near the Capitol was an unaffordable option.

The cramped mode of doing the people’s business changed in 1908 when the Cannon House Office Building opened on the south side of the Capitol, and a year later when the Russell Senate Office Building opened on the north side. Allison and his colleagues would barely recognize the Capitol campus today. Members of the House occupy quarters in three buildings³ along Independence Avenue; their Senate counterparts have offices in three buildings⁴ on Constitution Avenue. On the east side of the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the Capitol Visitor Center all contribute to the sizable federal footprint.

The “Hill” looked very different in 1901. Most of the land around the Capitol was either vacant or not associated with federal functions. One exception was a small area along C Street, now partially occupied by the Longworth House Office Building. A small set of buildings on both sides of the street housed the Office of Weights and Measures.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 5 of the Constitution specifically granted Congress the authority to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures,” but until 1828, lawmakers had shown little appetite for exercising their authority.⁵ Different states had different standards, and adherents of states’ rights were loath to cede such power to the federal government, even though it was constitutionally mandated. But by 1828, matters had come to a head. The Philadelphia Mint urgently needed direction on the quantity of gold a gold coin should have. On May19, Congress acted, declaring “…the brass troy pound weight procured by the minister of the United States at London, in the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, for the use of the mint, and now in the custody of the director thereof, shall be the standard troy pound of the mint of the United States, conformably to which the coinage thereof shall be regulated.”

A weight is one thing; a measuring device is quite another matter. The Philadelphia Mint had a precision standard, but it lacked a precision balance, which it needed to measure a quantity of gold precisely. The task of designing and constructing such a device fell to Joseph Saxton, a gifted instrument maker, who became an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, despite having no formal education beyond the age of 12. Saxton finished his work in 1838, and the mint had its standards of weights and measures.

The Philadelphia Mint was not the only federal enterprise in need of standards. Customs houses had similar requirements, and 8 years before Saxton completed his work for the mint, Levi Woodbury, a New Hampshire senator, had called on the Treasury Department to conduct a study of the standards customs houses were using around the country. Ferdinand Hassler, who had been relieved of his duties as head of the Survey of the Coast in 1818, was tapped for the position of Superintendent of the Office Weights and Measures, and from 1830 to 1832, he set about carefully selecting a set of standards. All that remained was supplying them to the customs houses. If that had been his only task, he might have carried it out with alacrity.

But in 1832, after a 14-year hiatus, Hassler was reappointed Superintendent of the Survey—at the same time retaining his leadership post at Weights and Measures—and his standards activities slowed to a crawl. Once again, Congress found itself losing patience with him—as it had when it had relieved him of his Survey duties in 1818—and made its annoyance clear in 1835 with a sharply worded communication to the Treasury Secretary, who by that time, was Levi Woodbury. Hassler got the message and, with his son assisting him, stepped up the pace sufficiently to satisfy his congressional overseers, at least for the time being.

Until that point, he had been satisfied with shared working quarters at the U.S. Arsenal. But now, he apparently recognized the importance of having a site dedicated to his weights and measures assignment. He chose a set of row houses on C Street south of the Capitol for the standards activities, and that’s where the Office of Weights and Measures remained for almost seven decades. Neither Saxton, who took over from Hassler in 1844, nor any of the other 19th century superintendents saw any need to move the office to larger quarters.

The dawn of the new century brought with it not only a dramatic total solar eclipse that was visible on May 28, 1900 across the southern United States,⁶ but also an array of technological innovations that would propel the American economy for decades to come. Nothing was more transformative than electricity. The 1893 Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, gave visitors a preview of how the new technology was about to alter the American landscape.

Thomas Edison, almost every grade school student is taught, was the father of electricity. But on May 1, 1893 it was Nikolai Tesla and George Westinghouse who commanded center stage in Chicago when the exposition opened. For half a dozen years, Edison and Tesla had been fighting over the relative advantages of AC (alternating current) power and DC (direct current) power. The “War of the Currents,” as the rivalry is known, was bitter, personal, filled with misinformation—of which Edison was particularly guilty—and replete with publicity stunts, one of which, the first electrocution of a murder convict, went horrifically awry. The public relations and media battle came to a climax in Chicago when President Grover Cleveland threw a switch that lit up the fairgrounds with 100,000 incandescent lightbulbs powered by Westinghouse’s generators that used Tesla’s AC design.⁷

The die was cast that evening, and despite Edison’s continuing vitriolic attack, Tesla’s technology eventually came to dominate America’s electricity markets. General Electric, which had been a prime promoter of Edison’s DC design, capitulated shortly after the Columbian Exposition and joined Westinghouse in the AC corner. The Exposition might have marked the beginning of the end of the War of the Currents, but the battle itself had highlighted the pressing need for electricity standards.

When Henry S. Pritchett took over the helm of the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1897, he realized that the head of the Office of Weights and Measures had to have technical qualifications that were commensurate with the demands of the new technologies.⁸ Samuel Wesley Stratton, a University of Chicago physicist, was his choice, and Pritchett authorized him to develop plans immediately for expanding the office along the lines of equivalent German and British institutions. Stratton proceeded cautiously, and when he presented them with Treasury Secretary Lyman J. Gage’s blessing, Congress readily accepted his call for a new National Bureau of Standards.⁹ The enabling legislation, which passed on March 3, 1901,¹⁰ established the bureau with the mandate of setting standards for weights and measures. That much was to be expected. But the legislation went even further by declaring the National Bureau of Standards a national physical laboratory after the German and British models Stratton had found so appealing. It is a role the institution continues to play today but under a more appropriate name, The National Institute of Standards and Technology.

President William McKinley, who won reelection as president in 1900, signed the legislation, and the Bureau, or NBS, as it became known, drew its first breath on July 1, 1901 with Stratton at the helm. Administratively NBS was lodged in the Treasury Department, which had been home to the Coast and Geodetic Survey for decades. But in 1903, with Theodore Roosevelt in the White House,¹¹ Congress (almost as an afterthought) transferred NBS to the newly created Department of Commerce. That same year NBS moved to its new campus in then bucolic northwest Washington, where it would remain for more than half a century.

In 1901, the birth year of NBS, the American science and technology landscape was very fragmented. Practical research, especially in agriculture and mining, was the essential domain of the Land Grant colleges. Basic research—inspired simply by the quest for knowledge—was the province of private universities, learned societies, and philanthropies. And applied research and development thrived on the burgeoning industrial terrain.

The federal government was a relatively minor player, and in many quarters, it was viewed with suspicion. Academic scientists, who treasured the freedom to pursue their own goals, eschewed it. Land Grant colleges were under the control of the states. And industry did not want interference from Washington. In retrospect, it is remarkable that the National Bureau of Standards generated sufficient political support to surmount those obstacles.

While NBS’s establishment was groundbreaking in the research arena, it was of little consequence in the policy arena. Congress had charged it with setting standards, testing materials, evaluating processes, and conducting physical research. But neither it nor any other federal body had the authority to develop governmental science and technology strategies based on sound research. The story of the War of the Currents illustrates the extent of the policy vacuum.

By the last decade of the 19th century, it was abundantly clear that electricity was going to revolutionize the nation in ways that few previous technological advances had. To the cognoscenti—meaning anyone with a modicum of physics knowledge—it was clear that AC power held the all the high cards. High voltage transmission lines would be needed to minimize energy losses; lower voltages would be needed in homes and workplaces to minimize danger; and transformers,¹² which could only operate with AC, would be required to move the voltages up and down. Had a federal science and technology policy structure existed, the battle between AC and DC might have been over before it started.

But no such body existed, and the National Academy, which might have played a significant role, carried the stigma of blemished past policy performances. As a result, Westinghouse and General Electric and their intellectual progenitors, Tesla and Edison, were left to spar with each other in the arena of public opinion. Although the flashy success of AC power at the Chicago event succeeded in settling the debate, many decades passed before legislators saw the wisdom of establishing effective science and technology policymaking as a central feature of the federal government.

The rapidly changing industrial terrain, which triggered the creation of the National Bureau of Standards in 1901, would soon motivate lawmakers to expand the federal science bureaucracy further. In 1910, responding to the proliferation of mining and the increasing number of catastrophic mining accidents, Congress established the Bureau of Mines under the purview of the Department of the Interior. Joseph A. Holmes, a geologist from North Carolina, a conservationist who had been active in the Geological Survey, assumed the leadership reins.

The phrasing of the 1910 legislation¹³ is highly significant for what it both prescribed and proscribed:

A cursory reading shows that the Bureau of Mines had far-reaching authority to conduct research—although not yet in the health arena—but it had no power at all to examine or regulate the conduct of mining companies. Those responsibilities, to the extent they were exercised, remained in the province of the individual states. The mining act reflected growing congressional interest in scientific and technological research, but lingering reluctance to allow scientists or scientific administrators to promote policies or regulations based on the research.

But just 3 years later, Congress expanded the bureau’s authority substantially,¹⁴ describing its mission in very broad terms: “mining, metallurgy, and mineral technology.” More significantly, Congress charged it with “improving health conditions, and increasing safety, efficiency, economic development, and conserving resources through the prevention of waste in the mining, quarrying, metallurgical, and other mineral industries…” The trajectory of a more expansive federal role in science and technology policy was starting to take shape. It would come into much sharper focus in the coming decades, as the United States found itself—albeit reluctantly at first—playing a crucial role in two world conflicts, both ultimately settled on the basis of technological superiority.

Before we leave the Bureau of Mines, it’s worth scrolling forward a dozen years to March 3, 1925. On that date, Congress passed the Helium Act of 1925,¹⁵ authorizing the bureau “to maintain and operate helium production and repurification plants, together with facilities and accessories thereto; to store and care for helium; to conduct exploration for and production of helium on and from lands acquired or set aside under this Act; to conduct experimentation and research for the purpose of discovering helium supplies and improving processes and methods of helium production, repurification, storage, and utilization.” As we’ll see in Chapter 12, the 1925 act, although never anticipated by the drafters, sowed the seeds of hotly debated helium policies of the 21st century.

The story behind the helium legislation began 10 years earlier during the First World War in the skies over Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn on England’s east coast. As the BBC describes the scene, residents reported “an eerie throbbing sound above them, followed shortly afterward by the sound of explosions in the street.”¹⁶ What they heard and experienced was a German bombing attack carried out by a lighter than air zeppelin capable of traveling 85 miles per hour and carrying several thousand pounds of explosives. Although dirigibles never proved to be terribly effective in carrying out bombing missions, military planners considered them useful for aerial surveillance, and by 1925, the U.S. Army and Navy had developed an abiding interest in developing them. Their connection to helium is easy to understand.

Dirigibles are essentially big balloons to which a heavier-than-air payload is attached. Helium is a very light, inert, and nonflammable gas—the stuff in party balloons—and is ideal for inflating dirigibles. But helium is so light that once freed from any confine, it can escape the pull of Earth’s gravity and leave the atmosphere. Obtaining it requires capturing it as it emerges from deep underground rock formations, where, as the product of radioactive decay of uranium, it is sometimes trapped along with natural gas or oil.

In 1914, the Bureau of Mines had established a Petroleum Division, so it was well positioned in 1925 to take on an associated helium mission. The driving force in Congress was military in nature, but the helium legislation also gave the bureau the authority to “lease” any surplus gas to “American citizens or American corporations.” The language is significant because it reflected a willingness of the federal government to engage with the general public and private business in ways that might have been anathema just a few decades earlier.

The guns of war had been blazing in Europe, in the Middle East, and on the high seas of the Atlantic for almost 3 years before the United States entered the world conflict on April 6, 1917. America’s noninterventionist World War I stance belied its muscular ventures into the global arena during the preceding decades. Two foreign exploits stand out: the Spanish American War in 1898, which gave the United States control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903, which gave the United States perpetual control of the planned Panama Canal for a purchase price of $10 million and an annual payment of $250 thousand.

The successful prosecution of the two ventures presaged America’s eventual transformation into the global power that both McKinley and Roosevelt had envisioned. They also cast a spotlight on the importance of science and technology. Military engagements required development of the instruments of war, and the Panama Canal¹⁷ project—one of the largest and most daunting endeavors ever undertaken—required development of civil engineering capabilities almost unimaginable. Both propelled American science and technology policies of the early 20th century and laid the foundation of America’s rise to global science and engineering preeminence in the latter part of the century.

Theodore Roosevelt was passionate about establishing the United States as a world power. He was equally passionate about preserving the environment, and during his charismatic presidency, he set aside more than 200 million acres for public use, more than 150 million of them as national forests. Management of forested lands had been a thorny policy problem for decades, and finally in 1905, Congress decided to act, creating the U.S. Forest Service¹⁸ to administer them.

It was a heady era not only for environmental preservationists, but also for progressive conservationists of another stripe. John Wesley Powell had made irrigation and land management a cause célèbre in the 1880s, one that cost him dearly when he lost congressional funding for his survey work in 1892. Now, two decades later, it wasn’t commercial interests that were lining up against the environmental dicta, but rather socioeconomic progressives devoted to public ownership of utilities, including water and electricity.

The bitter clash occurred again in the West, this time in California. The battlefield was the watershed of Yosemite National Park, a public treasure Congress had created in 1890 at the behest of the famed naturalist John Muir.¹⁹ The issue was the construction of a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley to address San Francisco’s growing need for water, which the catastrophic 1906 earthquake fires had brought into sharp relief.

The debate attracted national attention, with Muir and his preservationist allies from the Sierra Club—the environmental organization he had founded in 1892—leading the charge against the project. Their mantra was “safeguard nature at all costs.” On the other side were the San Francisco dam promoters, who predicated their advocacy on the proposition that nature should be conserved, but in ways most beneficial to society.²⁰

After the dust had settled, Congress came down on the side of San Francisco, and passed the “Raker Act” in 1913, authorizing construction of the dam.²¹ Muir died the following year, never witnessing the flooding of the valley he held so dear.

The construction of the O’Shaughnessy dam finally began on August 1, 1919, and by the time it was completed in 1923, 1200 acres of Yosemite National Park had fallen victim to the vast Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. It would take another decade to fill the entire valley.

Setting aside the efficacy of the outcome, the contentious debate highlighted a glaring deficiency: No federal policymaking apparatus existed to regulate the use of national park acreage. Three years after passing the “Raker Act,” Congress remedied the shortcoming by establishing the National Park Service as an Interior Department bureau in 1916,²² granting it broad authority to manage the system, which had grown to 14 parks and 21 national monuments by that time.

If we were to pin a policy label on the early 20th century, it would probably be bureau building. That is particularly true in the science and technology arena. Electricity, mining, oil, forests, land management, and water resources all called attention to the policy vacuum. The National Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Mines, the Forestry Service, and the National Park Service were federal bodies established to fill the voids. But that was only the beginning.

In 1902, Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act,²³ creating a “reclamation fund” to support the development of irrigation projects in arid lands. The Reclamation Service administered the program as part of the U.S. Geological Survey until 1906, when the Department of the Interior granted it status as the Bureau of Reclamation. Originally hailed as a major breakthrough in land and water management, the 1902 Act was the target of environmentalists almost from the outset. They criticized it as a commercial boondoggle, which, they claimed with some validity, lined the pockets of developers and despoiled millions of acres of land.

Criticism aside, the Act was, without question, a prime enabler of western development, much as John Wesley Powell had envisioned in 1878.²⁴ He might well have regarded it as the capstone of his career had he been alive to see its implementation. But whether the enduring consequences of dam construction on most of the major rivers in the West would have troubled him is hard to know. He died in 1902, three months after Congress passed the Newlands Act, long before the evidence was in.

America’s population migrated westward, but it also migrated from farms to cities. And it grew dramatically in size, from about 50 million in 1880 to more than 90 million just 30 years later. Driven by waves of immigrants, the demographic complexion was changing dramatically, as well. For lawmakers and policymakers, population data was invaluable.

The Constitution recognized the importance of the size of the population and how it was distributed among the states for determining the composition of the House of Representatives and for levying taxes, but nothing more. In the words of Article I, Section 2,

As the population grew in size and diversity, conducting a census and analyzing the data every 10th year was becoming a daunting, if not impossible, task. To remedy the logistical problem and provide a more reliable assessment of the data, Congress established a permanent Census Office in 1902.²⁵ It acquired the name Bureau of the Census a year later when it moved from the Department of the Interior to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor.²⁶

One of the most popular sites along the Mall in Washington is the National Air and Space Museum.²⁷ Established in 1946 as the National Air Museum, it houses the largest collection of historic airplanes and space craft in the world. The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution, and it is the rare guide who would be able to recount the unsung role the Smithsonian played in the history of aeronautics and aviation.

The story begins in 1887, the year Samuel Pierpont Langley,²⁸ an astronomer and a physicist, became secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. By that time, the institution had begun to extend its reach from curation to research, and in 1890, at Langley’s urging, it established the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Washington.²⁹ In addition to his scientific passions, Langley was consumed with aviation and the possibility of developing a piloted aircraft that was heavier than air. He received support from the War Department and achieved an initial success with an unpiloted model in 1896. But he struggled to realize his original goal, and finally conceded defeat after two piloted airplanes crashed. The second and final failure occurred on December 8, 1903, just nine days before the Wright Brothers accomplished the feat in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, without any federal support.

Langley’s failure to deliver the goods he had promised the War Department put the government’s interest in aviation on ice. But the hold would prove temporary. After Langley died in 1906, Charles Doolittle Wolcott,³⁰ who had drawn Theodore Roosevelt’s attention during his tenure as director of the Geological Survey, became secretary of the Smithsonian. In that capacity, and with his government bona fides, Wolcott donned the mantle of federal scientific guru, keeping the Smithsonian’s interest in aviation alive in the process.

By 1912, federal interest in aviation had grown, and President William Howard Taft, who had been elected 4 years earlier, was persuaded that the time was ripe for addressing the opportunities and challenges of the new technological arena. He appointed a commission,³¹ chaired by the president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Robert S. Woodward, specifically charging it with reporting on the need for an aviation research laboratory. Wolcott, as a member of the commission, was poised to make the case for Smithsonian leadership.

In shades of John Wesley Powell’s 1884 testimony before the Allison Commission when he was the director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and had argued for consolidation of all federal science programs under the Smithsonian’s aegis, Wolcott overreached, as well. He pressed for a Smithsonian aviation laboratory funded by the federal government, and not surprisingly, Wolcott met with the same stony silence as Powell had before. Congress was not disposed to hand over the research purse strings to a private entity. Undeterred, the Smithsonian proposed what in hindsight seems like an even more ambitious plan: coordinating aeronautical research across all federal agencies.³² The plan to establish a new advisory committee for that purpose was stillborn when the comptroller of the treasury determined that it was illegal for any federal employee to serve on such a body that was not sanctioned by Congress.³³

The year was now 1914, and hostilities had broken out in Europe. Woodrow Wilson was president, and the American posture was one of nonintervention. Nonetheless, military planners in the War Department became concerned about America's weak air capability. On July 28, 2014, the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the United States military had just 23 airplanes. Elsewhere, the numbers stacked up this way:³⁴ France, 1400; Germany, 1000; Russia, 800; and the United Kingdom, 400. But the War Department's concerns did not resonate well with isolationists in Congress and a president who had pledged to keep the nation out of war.

Wolcott took another page out of Powell’s playbook, and with the support of Acting Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, he persuaded congressional aeronautic proponents to add a rider to the fiscal year 1916 Navy appropriations bill. The legislation, which passed on March 3, 1915, established the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.³⁵ The groundbreaking legislation set the course for American aeronautics and aerospace policy for the century that followed. The two short paragraphs of 1915 are as vital to modern American science and technology policy as any that have ever appeared in the Congressional Record and are worth quoting in full:

The key words appear near the end of the first paragraph: “That it shall be the duty of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view to their practical solution, and to determine the problems which should be experimentally attacked and to discuss their solution and their application to practical questions. In the event of a laboratory or laboratories, either in whole or in part, being placed under the direction of the committee, the committee may direct and conduct research and experiment in aeronautics in such laboratory or laboratories…” Wolcott failed in his ill-conceived attempt to consolidate aeronautics under the Smithsonian, but after licking his wounds, he paved the way for legislation that set the stage for NASA’s establishment in 1958 half a century later³⁶ and some of the most awe-inspiring exhibits in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

The Air and Space Museum occupies a striking building six blocks from the Capitol, and although NASA’s headquarters is just a few blocks away, the nuts and bolts of the space agency are flung far across the country. That is not true for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which occupies a 300-acre campus with more than 75 buildings³⁷ in Bethesda, Md. just inside the Capital Beltway, across the way from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center³⁸ and ten miles from the White House. But the path that took NIH from a Washington vision to a Bethesda reality in the 20th century was a long and tortuous one. It required, as is often the case with a grand idea, a combination of policy imperatives, political expediency, personal devotion, and a soupçon of serendipity.

The story begins with several events prior to 1900 that bear repeating. Internecine battles within the embryonic federal bureaucracy during the last two decades of the 19th century had led to the demise the National Board of Health after only 4 years of existence. Its failure reflected, in part, the public policy weakness of the National Academy of Sciences, which had been instrumental in establishing the agency. And when Congress elected not to reauthorize the board’s budget in 1883, the Marine Hospital Service, which had led the fight against it, and the Army Medical Corps found themselves the primary beneficiaries. The Marines regained control of quarantine matters, and the Army assumed much of the board’s research mandate.

The division of responsibility might have remained that way if hadn’t been for Joseph Kinyoun, a name often forgotten in the annals of science policy. Kinyoun³⁹ was born to a slave-owning family in Dan’l Boone country just before the Civil War began. East Bend, a remote town of about 11,000 residents in Yadkin County, North Carolina, where the Kinyouns lived, was probably best known in 1860 for its two dozen or so liquor stores. In today’s political parlance, it was a swing county, split between Unionists and Confederates. Kinyoun’s father, a lawyer and surgeon who had trained at University Medical College of New York (now New York University School of Medicine),⁴⁰ was one of the latter. He joined the Confederate Army as a captain when the war began. Four years later, like many of the lucky ones who had fought for the Confederacy and survived the horrors of the battlefield, he found his East Bend home in ashes and his possessions gone.

With little to keep them in the war-ravaged hill country, the Kinyouns left North Carolina, eventually settling in rural Missouri, where they began their lives anew. There, Joseph excelled in his studies and, despite the family’s now modest circumstances, decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and enroll in a New York medical school. The year was 1881, and medicine had been undergoing a steady transformation since the elder Kinyoun had received his degree 22 years earlier. Research was in the ascendancy: understanding the scientific cause of a disease was slowly being recognized as central to developing treatments for it.

During his 2-year stint at Bellevue Hospital Medical College⁴¹—which ironically would merge with his father’s alma mater, University Medical College of New York in 1898—Kinyoun encountered firsthand the excitement of the new spotlight on medical research, especially through what would soon become known as the fields of microbiology, bacteriology, and infectious diseases. So, it was not surprising that his return to Missouri in 1882 as a physician in sole practice would be short lived.

Kinyoun’s fortunes soon became intertwined with Andrew Carnegie’s fortune, after the preeminent Scottish-American industrialist turned his attention from accumulating wealth to philanthropic giving.⁴² The Bellevue laboratory for pathology and bacteriology research was one of his first beneficiaries, and 1885 found Kinyoun back at his old stomping grounds, becoming the new Carnegie Laboratory’s first student of bacteriology. His specialty was to be cholera.

A year later, led by its surgeon general, John Hamilton, the Marine Hospital Service, perhaps smarting from the loss of its research mandate first to the National Board of Health and then to the Army Medical Corps, decided to establish a small research program of its own. And small it was—a one-room “Hygienic Laboratory”⁴³ in the attic of the Hospital Service’s quarantine facility on Staten Island, New York. The laboratory’s first priority was to be cholera.

The synchronicity could not have been more apparent. Yet it was—Hamilton’s trusted assistant and facilitator was Preston Heath Bailhache, Kinyoun’s uncle.⁴⁴ Whether or not Bailhache served as Kinyoun’s facilitator, as well, is not clear, but in October 1886 the Marine Hospital Service offered Joe Kinyoun a position, and shortly thereafter named him director of the new Hygienic Laboratory.

When the Marine Health Service moved to Washington in 1891, Kinyoun found himself in the lap of luxury: his laboratory occupied the entire top floor of the four-story Butler Mansion at the corner of B Street (now known as Independence Avenue) and 3rd Street, SE, three blocks from the grounds of the Capitol on a site now occupied by the John Adams Building of the Library of Congress. In the succeeding years, he created a research capability that would serve as a model for the National Institutes of Health decades later. Kinyoun’s efforts were heroic for his time, but he could not have imagined how they would eventually evolve. There were still many twists and turns to be navigated along the road to NIH’s creation and its remarkable Bethesda campus.

Two years after the Health Service’s move, the Army, not to be upstaged, established a medical school in Washington,⁴⁵ also on B Street, a block away from the Smithsonian Castle. It was there, incidentally, that Walter Reed began his distinguished bacteriology research career. As the 19th century was drawing to a close, the Marine Health Service and the Army Medical Corps had both staked out prime real estate in the nation’s capital and were positioning themselves to lead an effort in medical research. But it would take a few more years before any effort crystalized.

Just as the 1878 Mississippi Valley yellow fever scourge had spurred the creation of the National Board of Health—albeit short-lived—the dire consequences of the Spanish American War of 1898 thrust medicine into the national spotlight. It was not battle-related deaths that created the impetus, but rather what American troops encountered in the tropics of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The war, which lasted six months, took the lives of only 332 fighters,⁴⁶ but tropical diseases the Navy and Marines encountered produced an additional 2597 fatalities.⁴⁷

That disparity set the stage for a new national agenda focused on research into diseases. What had been strictly a public health issue in 1878 now became a national security issue. Quarantine was not a viable solution on the battlefield; finding the causes of disease and their cures was a necessity as the United States expanded its global reach in the aftermath of the Spanish American War, and especially during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. The impetus was just what the Marine Health Service’s Hygienic Laboratory and the Army’s Medical School had been waiting for.

The Hygienic Laboratory walked off with the prize, in large part due to Kinyoun’s visionary efforts. Although he left his director’s post in 1899, he had provided the intellectual heft, policy rationale, and organizational plan that led Congress to adopt the following legislative language in 1901:⁴⁸

Congress also changed the name of the laboratory’s parent agency a year later to the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service. And under its broadened public health mandate, the Hygienic Laboratory established a Division of Scientific Research comprising bacteriology, chemistry, pathology, pharmacology, and zoology.⁴⁹ The course for a new, greatly expanded medical research enterprise was being charted.

In 1906, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) responded to a proposal of one of its members, Yale economist J.P. Norton, and created the Committee of One Hundred on National Health.⁵⁰ Its primary objective was to make the case for a national department of health, which among its prime mandates, would be promoting research in preventive medicine and public hygiene. The committee, chaired by Irving Fisher, another Yale economist, aimed high, arguing for consolidation of all federal health and medicine programs into a Cabinet level department.

The AAAS campaign lasted half a dozen years, but in the end, its bold plan proved to be too big a lift for the committee’s Washington allies. In 1912, Congress simply passed legislation that codified the work of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service. The bill shortened its name to the Public Health Service, and with a single phrase, broadened the mandate of the Hygienic Laboratory’s research programs,⁵¹ another milestone on the road to Bethesda. The relevant language reads, “The Public Health Service may study and investigate the diseases of man and conditions influencing the propagation and spread thereof…” Brevity is not only the soul of wit,⁵² it is often the essence of the most effective public policy.

Epidemics and wars shake the political establishment in ways that no other events can. Between 1912 and 1930, there were three significant tremors that spurred policymakers to ramp up America’s medical research capabilities. World War I, which had provided an impetus for creating the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA, was one. Weaponizing chemicals and biological agents—which had yet to be banned⁵³—was a military matter. But understanding how to combat them was an issue for public health officials, as well as the War Department. Before 1917, the policy imperative might have been theoretical, but when America entered the world conflict on April 7, the new technological threats to human health and life created a sense of urgency.

A year later, an influenza pandemic struck continents around the globe.⁵⁴ With the cause of the disease poorly understood and no effective treatment available, 50 million people, or about 5% of the world’s population, succumbed. The American death toll ran as high as 675,000. In the nation’s capital, especially, the impacts were profound: public schools, universities, churches, and libraries were closed, and indoor public gatherings were banned. Yet, despite such precautions, the disease persisted there largely unabated for months. From October 1, 1918 to February 1, 1919, the height of the contagion, Washington, then a city of 418,000 residents, reported almost 38,000 cases and nearly 3,000 fatalities.

For elected officials, who witnessed the scourge first hand, it should have been a wakeup call, but it wasn’t. A serious legislative initiative would have to wait until another significant influenza outbreak in the winter of 1928–29.⁵⁵ Although the incidence and death rates were much lower than they had been 10 years before, health professionals were alarmed that so little progress had been made in controlling and treating the disease. Two years later, Congress finally decided to make medical research a priority.

The Ransdell Act⁵⁶ of 1930 changed the name of the Hygienic Laboratory to the National Institute of Health,⁵⁷ providing money to build new scientific facilities and establishing a system of research fellowships. The sweeping legislation was a landmark in the history of NIH, and it established the principles for future federal science agencies. For those reasons, its wording is worth repeating verbatim.

The language in Sections 3 and 5 established the operating principles of the modern National Institutes of Health: extramural grants, fellowships, and intramural research facilities in Bethesda and elsewhere around the country.

Without question, influenza provided the political lubricant that finally led lawmakers to establish NIH in 1930. But momentum had been building ever since American soldiers had confronted the horrors of chemical and biological weapons on the European killing fields of World War I. The war had also focused congressional interest airpower, leading to the creation of NASA’s precursor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Yet, for the United States military, the conflict’s most significant technological impact might have been on the open seas.

Even though U.S. entry into the war would not come until 1917, Naval concerns about Germany’s use of submarine warfare were already palpable in 1915. That year, Navy Secretary Joseph Daniels created the Naval Consulting Board, appointing Thomas Edison as its chairman and filling out seats at the table with some of the most eminent American engineers, technologists, and inventors.⁵⁸ Conspicuously missing were any members of the National Academy of Sciences. That should not have been surprising, given the institution’s pitiable advisory track record during the Civil War and the Spanish American War, and Edison’s bona fides as an inventor.

As the War of the Currents illustrated, Edison was certainly not shy about making his case for DC electricity, even to the point of distortion of the essential science and defamation of the character of his principal adversary, Nikolai Tesla. In the end, his scorched earth campaign did not help him win his cause. As chairman of the Naval Consulting Board, he had a perfect opportunity to recapture any influence he might have lost in his previous battle. He boldly moved to expand the board’s purview to every facet of military technology—not just naval—in the process, embracing virtually all scientific and engineering disciplines. But the board, even if it boasted some of the most creative minds in the country, could not carry out a comprehensive mission of examining, evaluating, and developing military technologies unless it had the requisite facilities. In 1916, led by Edison, the Naval Consulting Board made its case to the House Naval Affairs Committee, chaired by Lemuel Padgett, a Tennessee attorney, well respected for his knowledge of all matters naval.

The committee found the Consulting Board’s case compelling and authorized $1 million for a new military research laboratory. But the board members fell victim to infighting over where to site the laboratory, and by 1917, when America entered World War I, the opportunity for building the new research facility had passed. It would not be the last time scientists or engineers forfeited a grand project opportunity because of siting deliberations. What happened to the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)⁵⁹ project in 1993 is an excellent example, and worth a brief digression.

The particle physics—sometimes called high-energy physics—community and its Department of Energy allies had agonized for more than 2 years over where to build the massively expensive SSC facility, dangling one possibility after another in front of salivating members of Congress, who craved the construction money, scientific infrastructure, and jobs that would flow to their district and state. Eventually, legislators whose home bases had lost out in the site selection competition lost their enthusiasm for the $11-billion project—which, to be fair, suffered from escalating costs, management missteps, technical problems, and the consequences of the end of the Cold War—and sank it in 1993.

The sad saga of the SSC and its object policy lessons bear further narrative. But peeling back the curtain on one of America’s biggest science stumbles will have to wait until we complete the account of how two world wars enabled the United States to become the international leader in science and technology and the dominant economic and military power globally. So now, back to business.

World War I placed a hold on the Naval Consulting Board’s plan for a new military science and technology facility, but as events would prove, the hold was only temporary. At 11:00 a.m. on July 2, 1923, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)⁶⁰ opened its doors in Washington on a site along the east bank of the Potomac River, one of the locations the board had actually considered. In line with Edison’s vision, NRL developed a broad research program, spanning a panoply of disciplines and targeting not only issues of clear military relevance, but also those of fundamental science. Its wide reach echoed the mandate Congress had given the National Bureau of Standards in 1901.

The 7-year interregnum between NRL’s 1916 congressional authorization and its 1923 ribbon cutting opened a door for the National Academy of Sciences, which was still seeking ways to be relevant in Washington’s corridors of power. The story^61,62 of how it began to rehabilitate its image and reinsert itself into policymaking highlights the nexus between policy and politics, and the role of personal relationships in both arenas.

Five actors played principal roles during the war years of 1914 through 1918: George Hale, an astronomer who was director of the Mount Wilson Observatory; Robert Millikan, a physicist who was a member of the University of Chicago faculty; Elihu Root, a former Secretary of both War and State under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, who was president of the Carnegie Corporation; Major General George Squier, a graduate of West Point with a Ph.D. in electrochemistry from Johns Hopkins, who was the Army Signal Corps chief officer; and William Welch, a physician and pathologist, who was president of the National Academy of Sciences. Of the five, only Root lacked a background in science or engineering. But his position at Carnegie and his political experience would prove useful, if not vital, in pumping new life into the Academy’s moribund ability to engage in federal science and technology matters.

Hale got the ball rolling shortly after fighting broke out in Europe, a conflict President Woodrow Wilson considered strictly a European matter. Roosevelt, who had opposed Wilson in the 1912 election as nominee of the “Bull Moose” Progressive Party, and Root, who had been a member of Roosevelt’s Cabinet from 1901 through 1908, saw things quite differently. Germany, in their eyes, was a threat to American ideals and needed to be countered. Although Roosevelt’s unconventional, disruptive, and ultimately unsuccessful presidential run in 1912 had left him with few friends in either major party, Elihu Root’s stellar reputation remained intact. He had not been involved in the 1912 election, and from his perch at Carnegie, he was well positioned to assist Hale and the National Academy.

Hale was both an internationalist and admirer of the august science societies in France and Britain, which he viewed as models for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He also regarded World War I as a technology war. Whoever had the better science had the better chance of winning.

Driven by his twin desires of revitalizing the Academy and assisting the Allies in Europe, Hale pressed Welch to offer the Academy’s services to Wilson, if and when America joined the conflict. Welch, a pragmatist, saw little chance of sparking any White House interest, and set Hale’s proposition aside. But in 1916, with German submarine activity ratcheting up in the North Atlantic, Hale requested that his proposal be brought to a vote of the Academy membership. And at the annual meeting that April it passed unanimously. The resolution read in full,⁶³ “Resolved, That the President of the Academy be requested to inform the President of the United States that in the event of a break in diplomatic relations with any other country the academy desires to place itself at the disposal of the Government for any service within its scope.”

Perhaps even more significantly, the Academy membership empowered its Council “to organize the Academy for the purpose of carrying out the resolution most effectively.” That language sent a clear signal that the Council was free to break new ground. Despite Welch’s fears, Wilson readily accepted the offer of assistance, perhaps recognizing the inevitability of American entry into the war in the near future.

It was now up to the Academy to avoid embarrassing itself as it had twice before. To set a new course, Hale immediately formed an organizing committee, which in short order recommended establishing a National Research Council⁶⁴ under the Academy’s auspices. Providing the breadth and depth of the needed expertise, the committee decided, would require more than the Academy membership could deliver. Accordingly, the committee stipulated that NRC participants did not have to be members of the Academy, but they should reflect all relevant institutional players: universities, industry, government, and foundations.

To make the sale and generate the revenues the NRC would need, Hale brought on board University of Chicago physicist Robert A. Millikan, a renowned scientist with an exceptional research pedigree who would eventually win a Nobel Prize in physics. But it was Millikan’s other attributes that captured Hale’s attention. He was, according to National Academy records,⁶⁵ “a likable and energetic physicist and … a consultant and a supplier of trained physicists to Western Electric and AT&T.” He was ideally suited to the role in which Hale cast him, straddling “the worlds of academia and high-tech industry” and “effective at working with officers in the military’s technical bureaus.”

Millikan certainly had the contacts and charisma to attract top-flight researchers to the NRC, which he did successfully. But neither he, nor anyone else in the Academy, had the deep pockets needed to sustain its work. They needed help, and Hale knew where to get it. His relationship with Elihu Root—which stemmed from Carnegie’s support of big astronomical instruments—and their shared antipathy toward Wilson’s noninterventionist posture, opened the door to the philanthropy’s coffers.⁶⁶ And by May 1918, the Carnegie Corporation had bankrolled the NRC to the tune of $150,000. Other foundations added to the sum, as did the federal government eventually, but Root’s timely support was vital to the NRC’s ability to survive in more than name only.

Money is essential, but so, too, is a mandate to do something. And in that respect, the NRC was fortunate. In early 1917, a few months before the United States entered the war, the Council of National Defense, which Wilson had established a year earlier to coordinate national security resources, requested the NRC to serve as its research arm. And in mid-summer, a few months after America’s entry into the world conflict, the NRC received an extraordinary request. It came from George Squier, the tenacious head of the Army Signal Corps, who had both a personal passion for science and technology and a grand vision for American research, especially, but not exclusively, in support of the military.

Squier asked the NRC to be the research arm of the Signal Corps and requested Millikan to place himself under direct military command by enlisting as a major in the Officer’s Reserve Corps. Today, that would seem like a strange request, but in 1917, no federal instrument existed for transferring funds from a military service to a civilian organization, such as the NRC. Of course, by acceding to Squier’s request, Millikan also placed himself under Squier’s direct control, which could not have gone unnoticed by either of them.

Their relationship evokes a World War II parallel involving Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, who was responsible for the Manhattan Project—as the top-secret atomic bomb effort was called—and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical nuclear physicist whom Groves chose to lead the team building the plutonium “Gadget” and its uranium counterpart at Los Alamos, a desolate area atop a high mesa in New Mexico.⁶⁷ But there are significant differences.

Unlike Squier, Groves, who was an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, had no background in science, and didn’t hide his dislike and mistrust of physicists. Unlike Millikan, Oppenheimer had shown little prior evidence of having any executive flair and, although not a Communist, his association with Communist sympathizers had led the FBI to question his allegiance to the United States. Oppenheimer, even if he had been asked to trade in his civvies for a uniform, is unlikely to have done so.

But like Millikan, Oppenheimer grew into his management responsibilities quickly. And just as Squier had developed an easy rapport with Millikan, Groves eventually came to respect Oppenheimer, and even regard him as indispensable to the Manhattan Project. Both wartime episodes illustrated the growing bond between the civilian science community and the military that continued through much of the 20th century. For supporters of scientific research, that bond would prove to be indispensable during the Cold War era, which lasted roughly from the end of World War II in 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

George Hale’s assessment of World War I as a technology war would prove to be true on many counts: on the battlefield, in the air, and on the sea. It would also be borne out in university and industrial laboratories, corporate and philanthropic board rooms, government agencies, the White House, and congressional offices. For the duration of those years, the National Research Council, although not a government agency, became a de facto national scientific clearinghouse and research coordinator. It carried out those tasks in spite of having a skeleton administrative staff and little financial support from the federal government. Even with those disadvantages, it animated the vision the Lazzaronis had for the National Academy of Sciences when they established it half a century earlier.

The impact of the war experience extended well beyond the Academy and its newly formed operational branch, the National Research Council. It gave the public a foretaste of the growing importance of science and technology in American life. And perhaps even more significantly, it reinforced a growing awareness among policymakers that the federal government had a huge stake in fostering a healthy research enterprise.

There remained one science problem the war’s impact failed to resolve. It did little to spur the development of policies that captured the importance of fundamental research—the exploration of nature for knowledge’s sake—in nourishing technological progress. It failed to do so, even though the connection was more than implicit in Woodrow Wilson’s executive order of May 11, 1918, which requested the Academy “to perpetuate the National Research Council.” In Executive Order 2859, Wilson enumerated the NRC’s functions as follows:^68,69

The nexus between the fundamental and the practical is quite clear, but Wilson’s 1918 message had little impact on how lawmakers and policymakers actually saw things during the next three decades. It would take another war and the efforts of Vannevar Bush, an engineer and administrator extraordinaire with political savvy and connections, to make the case compellingly.⁷⁰ We’ll get to Bush’s World War II story and the foundation he laid for modern American science and technology policy in due course. But, we have a few more threads to weave into the 20th century fabric before we get there.

Policies can promote technological change, but frequently it’s the other way around. The history of the American highway system⁷² during the early part of the 20th century is a good example. The episode also shows how competing interest groups can impede effective policymaking to the detriment of everyone involved. It also demonstrates that the most politically achievable outcome is not necessarily the best one. With that teaser, let’s get on with the story.

At the close of the 19th century there were about 8000 automobiles in the entire country, primarily owned by the wealthy. Trains, river boats, horses, stage coaches, and horse-drawn carriages accounted for almost all intercity travel. And existing roads reflected the state of the nonmechanized technology. They were mostly improved dirt or gravel wagon trails and were a hodgepodge across state lines.

In 1908, a technological revolution occurred that would change the American landscape forever. It was the year Henry Ford unveiled the Model T, the first automobile made of interchangeable parts. His goal was manufacturing “a car for the great multitude.”⁷¹ Interchangeability got him part way to his goal, but not far enough. Five years later, though, he achieved his objective when the first moving assembly line opened in Highland Park, Michigan. American life would never be the same. By 1927, the last year of its production, 15 million Model Ts had rolled off the line. At the time, just over 119 million people lived in the United States, constituting 26 million households.⁷³ Henry Ford’s Model T had become ubiquitous on the American landscape.

The two technological advances—interchangeability and assembly line production—changed the face of personal travel, as well as manufacturing more generally. They also made interstate journeys more commonplace, and existing American roads antiquated. Highways had to be either upgraded or constructed, and just as important, routes had to be harmonized across state boundaries.

Until the turn of the century, road management had been the sole responsibility of states and localities. If they neglected maintenance, so be it. If local citizens didn’t care about road conditions, it was their business. But Henry Ford’s ability to give the multitudes a car at a price they could afford and to afford them the ability to travel longer distances in shorter times was poised to alter attitudes dramatically.

The pace of the technological change caught policymakers off guard. Prior to 1900, the only federal highway program—if indeed it merited the label “program”—was the Office of Road Inquiry, which was authorized in 1893 for the purpose of advising states and localities on how they might best improve their roads. A 1902 bill that would have created a Bureau of Public Roads and authorized $20 million in federal matching grants to local jurisdictions for improving their roads failed almost at the outset.

Most members of Congress did not believe the legislation passed constitutional muster, because highway concerns were not among the federal powers enumerated in Article I, Section 8. Accordingly, based on the Tenth Amendment,⁷⁴ they argued, such matters fell strictly under the jurisdiction of the states. It took 5 years, but the Supreme Court eventually dispensed with the states’ rights argument in 1907, holding in Wilson v. Shaw⁷⁵ that the “Commerce Clause”⁷⁶ of the Constitution gave the federal government the authority to fund and regulate interstate highways. The ruling cleared the way for new federal legislation.

But, the policy dithering and political bickering continued until well after the Model T had made its appearance on the scene in 1908. Special-interest arguments about priorities poisoned the well repeatedly. Motorist organizations, such as the American Automobile Association (AAA), founded in Chicago in 1902, pushed for investments in long-distance paved highways. Farmers argued for a focus on the local roads they used for transporting their produce.

In 1912, Congress finally did more than simply slog through the murky highway mud. In August of that year, after failing to pass a $25 million highway “rental” plan for postal service use, it appropriated $500,000 for a trial program to improve roads used by the service. States and counties would be on the hook for two thirds of the cost of any project—still a pretty good deal—but they would have to abide by federal labor rules. That proved to be too much of a lift for many states, although the program continued to muddle along for 3 years, until 1915 when the Justice Department, siding with the states and counties, declared the federal regulations an overreach. In fairly short order, the program collapsed.

A year later, Congress took another run at the issue. The House overwhelmingly passed legislation providing $25 million to improve post roads with the federal government assuming 30%–50% of the cost, depending on the project. The money would be split among the states according to a formula that gave equal weight to population size and post road miles, thereby striking a balance between interstate and local rural travel.

Unlike the 1912 legislation, the 1916 House bill would have allowed states to choose the projects (subject to federal review) and manage them without further federal oversight. In addition to the funding provisions, the bill, more significantly, would have required participating states to have a state highway agency up and running by 1920. It seemed as though a federal highway program—limited though it might be—was back on track.

But before the Senate could act, opposition began to build: the apportionment formula did not provide funding where it was most needed, the bill’s foes argued; preparing for war was more important than building roads, they said; projects would simply reward political supporters, they contended. At this point, the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO)—which had only been in existence for a little over a year—jumped in.

The AASHO proposed that the federal government triple the commitment to $75 million over 5 years, split among the states according a three-part formula with population, mileage, and total area given equal weights. As is often true with legislative language, it is important to read the words carefully to see who benefits most. By including “total area” in the formula, the AASHO tilted its proposal heavily toward the farmer and the local rural roads at the expense of advocates of long-distance highways, a bias that would continue for a number of years.

Its plan upped the federal share to half the cost of each project, but capped spending at $10,000 per mile. Although it required the Secretary of Agriculture to sign off on every project, it followed the lead of the stalled House bill, granting states full responsibility for each one, and requiring them to establish a state highway agency for that purpose.

On June 27, 1916, the House and Senate accepted the AASHO language almost verbatim and passed the Federal Road Act of 1916. Although the legislation established the principle of federal-state highway cooperation, it failed to address the interstate needs of an automotive revolution that was already visible on the horizon. Technological change was happening so fast that federal policymakers didn’t even appreciate how inappropriate the existing state-by-state patchwork of road names was for the new era. It would be private automobile clubs, such as the AAA, and the American Association of State Highway Officials that would ultimately provide the impetus for assigning uniform numbers to routes that stretched across the nation. But that wouldn’t happen until 9 years later.

The early history of American highways demonstrates that disruptive technological change can easily outpace the formulation of policies needed to manage it, partly because policymakers can be slow to recognize the exigency, and partly because disagreements among interest groups can retard the process. As we have seen, it took Congress more than a decade to enact the skeletal 1916 road bill. It would take almost five decades more for the House and Senate to pass the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act⁷⁷ and bring the nation’s infrastructure up to par with automotive technology.